HCSHR 3:6 — Pravat Kumar Padhy, Cosmic Symphony

HCSHR 3:6 — Pravat Kumar Padhy, Cosmic Symphony. India: Cyberwit.net, 2019. ISBN: 978-9389074321. 61 pages; $15 US. amazon.com

                                                                       reviewed by Sandra Stephenson

One wonders why the on-line PDF is laid out the way it is. The haiku are arranged blockishly, left-justified, with a line of asterisks between them. Why not sprinkle them on the page like stars in the night sky (stars in the day sky too, let’s not forget!), and if the asterisks are thought to add something, sprinkle them around too. There’s no attempt at constellations or any conscious arrangement of the visual presentation of the poems, which is a missed opportunity for this manuscript.

Let’s talk about acknowledgements. The list at the beginning of this collection scrolls like film credits, populous as the night sky. When did this become de rigueur? I understand it of course, as an academic, and as anyone who has worked tirelessly in the back stages and green rooms of poetry unnoticed, but where to include it, and where to draw the line? Most include acknowledgements at the end – or, if the text is offered on-line, could it be an attachment? Pravat Kumar Padhy puts it at the beginning like Indian ceremony. Always, I learned in my yoga teacher training, any gathering of significance with more than two people must begin with Gajaananam, which is essentially an invocation for common-ground understanding, invoking the teachers and lineage that once made and still make the passing of insight possible. I’m guessing the exhaustive and exhausting acknowledgements on pages 21- 23 of Padhy’s text, before the text begins, are offered in that spirit. True to form, the collection also ends (as Hindu gatherings will end with the Maha Mrityunjaya Sloka for safe passage, removal of sorrow and suffering), with a long list of those who believed in Padhy and confirmed his work with awards. That section is a stotra, a song of praise.[1] To my mind, these aspects of the whole text are clues that the poems sandwiched between acknowledgments should be read as sutras: verses, and sacred verses at that. The book is a ceremony. So . . .

I found the collection has to be read, back to front or front to back, in sequence in big chunks in order to get a sense of spirit or subtlety in the poems. Though they speak of sky and dawn and the unspoken, they do not appear exceptionally subtle. In several the last line looks to be thrown away. But:

early dawn-/ between the sun and me/ muse of tender breeze

How can I help but think of Brahmamuhurta, the time between night and sunrise most propitious for meditation? A lot of the poems have an aura of between-ness.  Between milk and basalt, between moonlight and colour – “an art of shadow” as Padhy puts it. Because of:

zen feeling
both sun and moon
in the sky

Padhy’s “zen” led me to thoughts about analogous referents in his rich Indian culture, in particular, “hatha” – sun and moon united - which in the West has taken the meaning of physical asana practice in yoga. Returning to thoughts about haiku, I realized that most or all written cultures have short form poetry somewhere in their history, and haiku has been in the west for over a hundred years. It is now an international structure for poetry, taken loosely or strictly depending on the poet’s need, just as a sestina or villanelle might be. Still, the intellectual and devotional (in Sanskrit, jnana and bhakti, respectively ) inclinations to acknowledge lineage are seminal, and many haiku poets include some metaphorical bow to the Japanese tradition (Ninshiki in Japanese). Maxianne Berger (Haiku Canada’s book reviews coordinator) discovered an interesting detail: the origin of zen is in the Sanskrit word dhyana. Lightbulbs went on. Of course! Buddhism is a derivative of ancient yoga, based on texts that predate the Egyptian pyramids. A yogi named Padma Sambhava, whom you may know of from the highly relevant Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodal), took yogic philosophies over the Himalayas into Asia at a time when Hinduism and Buddhism were developing side by side and their practitioners actively debated each other as part of their jnana practice, in order to gain better apprehension of liberation. I practically jumped up and down. How could such simple haiku manage to elicit such an important understanding about the migration and internationalization of knowledge? How indeed could haiku, uniquely focussed on that which we hold in common – the skies, where no weather causes regional differences – lead to the connection between a contemporary Indian poet writing in English, and Japanese haiku in its essence? There is nothing whatsoever in the poems themselves that would lead one to think, “ah, herein lies a clue to enduring knowledge and wisdom.” But there it is. And what is the science behind these molecular structures of knowing? Could it be ancient astrology, distilled somehow into a columnar collection of poems?

In some poems I do not understand the referent. A Valentine’s poem places thin moonlight between two people, and I don’t know what that means. I looked for how the moonlight is thin because it has no meaning, but found that to be a stretch. Is it an absence or a presence the poet describes? In places it looks as if Padhy set himself a project of recording all things moon and stars that he notices, and in so doing he notices it more, then includes all of the poems he wrote about it without too much cutting back. Who wipes out the stars in the sky because there are too many? Again, reading the sequence, the reader gets the sense that the poet is drawing down the skies to the level of the person, linking heaven and earth, cosmos and the inner cosmos of the individual, linking poet with reader:

dark moon sky/ so many twinkles/ between breaths

The structure of the verses appears to be rhythmic rather than built around line breaks’ contributions to meaning. In this way they read like slokas, to be learned by heart and chanted in metres, possibly with tabla and sitar and responsorial repetition of each verse. For example, notice the systematic searching music in:

black tea-
I search in vain
the milky way

In this next one, a tripping waltz, dancing like water.

murmuring river/ in full moon night/ stars take bath

And here, spinning, landing in the lap of new year

end of year/ celebrating the journey/ around the sun

I almost feel this is how haiku should be performed: chanted, repeated in chorus, next verse same. Or they could be read polyphonically like a motet, shifting like the sky itself…

Nothing Padhy writes implies that he’s thinking of music, though in his introduction he shows an appreciation for different sorts of silence or negative space in a poem. He chose to call his book a Symphony, though. The grandeur of his vision is established, though I think the more humble “songs” or “psalms” better describe his poems. They are no less grand when you think of the songs of Palestrina or antiphonals in Gregorian Chant. Padhy writes:

…I wish all to settle
And flourish as human alone
No caste, no religion

What of the monostich, “the kid counts her finger counts the moon and stars”? Double meaning in the first line is uncharacteristic of Padhy’s aesthetic, though it appears elsewhere:

gravitational waves-/ devotees chant Om/ along the seashore.

Here, he seems to be saying the kid matters (most North Americans would write “child”). Yet few of his other poems can be read as making a prescriptive statement. What does he really mean?

His aspiration is to “poetical elegance (fuga), aesthetic expression in natural simplicity (wabi-sabi) and elusiveness with poetic sincerity (fuga no makota).” (Haiku, a Scientific Art, pp. 10 – 20). And to science. Though the need to justify the science of astronomy barely exists today, there is a colonial urge to defend Eastern sciences to modern audiences. Astrology, he writes in his introduction, is a revered and ancient science in the East. I add that it is the fore-runner of modern astronomy, a respected science world-wide. The preface consolidates the tradition of star-fascination in science and poetry to which the author subscribes. He quotes a century-old American essay reprising the age-old adage: “astronomical and astrological allusions… are but reflections of vital human interests of the times” (p. 6). I wonder what astrologers are saying today, April 8, 2020, about our collective future?

And what of kigo? Padhy quotes Jane Reichhold on celestial kigo or tensoo. There is a chronological and psychological progression in his poems, winding through seasons identified by birthdays, Christmas and special calendar days, much like a personal haiku journal, a spiritual journal. Seasons are identified less by planetary seasonal indicators than in the swing of the sky and moon phases, but (maybe because unschooled in astrology} I don’t sense the navigational tip of the universe in these poems: the ever-moving “revolution of configured stars” (Padhy quoting TS Eliot) and changing interpolation of planets. Rather the sky is a constant and the person wavers and keeps trying nightly to capture the moon. There’s no doubt the author is star-struck: “between me, the twinkling stars/ and candlelight”, he says (p. 45).

The second essay at the beginning of the book includes a history of tanka and Eastern poetry. It showcases Padhy’s accomplishment in the science of poetry. I can’t begin to address the definitions and refinements and reminders about what haiku is, which he offers in this magnum opus. The chapter could be considered his own review of his work. He says in haiku, “Human emotion and aspiration, socio-religious concepts and mythological lineages are assimilated with poetic expression” (p. 18). The section is written in a curiously erudite, lightly faulted, encumbered English as if building rarity upon rarity elevates one’s thought. He quotes himself from a school lecture about the relationship between art and science: “The beauty of a flower is a divine art, the colour is the physics, the aroma is its chemistry” (p. 14). Compare this to Basho’s poem from the Great Shrine at Ise: “The tree from whose flower/ this perfume comes/ is unknowable” (trans. Kenneth Rexroth in his 100 more poems from the Japanese). Defying strictures that Japanese-form poems must be concrete, not abstract and not metaphorical, Padhy writes:

… The universe extends
To the extension of time
And time nowhere ends to itself

I applaud that, because I think images are allowed that go beyond everyday concepts of what is concrete and what is illusory. And I applaud his inclusion of Billy Collins’ analogy between haiku and physics:

Just as matter is composed of atoms, which give off a great energy when accelerated to the point of collision, so time is made up of moments, and when a single moment is perfectly isolated, another kind of cosmic energy is released. I like to think of the haiku as a moment-smashing device out of which arises powerful moments of dazzling awareness
            — Billy Collins, Haiku in English, The First Hundred Years (2013)

Sandra Stephenson
May 2020

Sandra Stephenson taught Sivananda yoga at a Montreal area College for 25 years. As instructed by the Sivananda school, yoga philosophy and other expressions (e.g. the study of Sanskrit, bhakti, karma, raja yogas) are included in the practice of yoga though they are not often part of everyday practice in North America. She recommends the NFB film, the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation in two parts narrated by Leonard Cohen, to anyone interested in examining the process of death and dying: part one: A Way of Life; and especially part two: The Great Liberation.

 

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[1]I recently read a thought attributed to Canadian environmentalist June Callwood, that the only purpose of awards is to give the means to the receiver to do even more and even better. They are meant as inspiration.