വാക്കുകള്‍

എം. കെ. ഹരികുമാർ

ഗാനവീഥിയിലെന്നും
എന്നതിനു പകരം
ഗാനമില്ലാത്ത
വീഥിയില്ലാത്ത പാട്ടുകാരനെന്ന്
എഴുതിനോക്കി.
ഗാനത്തിനു വീഥിയോട്‌
ഇനി ചേരാന്‍ താല്‍പര്യമില്ല.
വീഥിയാണെങ്കില്‍ എല്ലാറ്റിനെയും
ഉപേക്ഷിച്ച മട്ടാണ്‌.
നിത്യ ഹരിതമെന്ന്
എഴുതിയെങ്കിലും വെട്ടി.
നിത്യതയ്‌ക്ക്‌
ഒരു ഹരിതമില്ലിപ്പോള്‍.
ഹരിതമാകട്ടെ നിത്യതയിലൊന്നും
വിശ്വസിക്കുന്നുമില്ല.
മുലപ്പാലെന്ന് പ്രയോഗിച്ചതും
തിരുത്തേണ്ടിവന്നു.
മുലയില്‍ പാലില്ലത്രേ .
പാലിന്‌ മുലയും വേണ്ട.
ഈശ്വരാരാധനയും പാളി.
ഈശരന്‌ ഒരുത്തന്റെയും
ആരാധന വേണ്ട.
ആരാധനയ്‌ക്കാകട്ടെ
ഈശ്വരന്‍ വേണ്ട.
പണമോ പൊങ്ങച്ചമോ മതി.
വാക്കുകളുടെ ഏകാന്തതയാണ്‌
ഇന്നത്തെ ഏറ്റവും
വലിയ സമസ്യ.
വാക്കുകള്‍ അവയുടെ
സ്വയം പര്യാപ്തത തേടുന്നു.
ഒന്ന് ഒന്നിനോട്‌ ചേരാതെ.

വാക്കുകള്‍

എം. കെ. ഹരികുമാർ

ഗാനവീഥിയിലെന്നും
എന്നതിനു പകരം
ഗാനമില്ലാത്ത
വീഥിയില്ലാത്ത പാട്ടുകാരനെന്ന്
എഴുതിനോക്കി.
ഗാനത്തിനു വീഥിയോട്‌
ഇനി ചേരാന്‍ താല്‍പര്യമില്ല.
വീഥിയാണെങ്കില്‍ എല്ലാറ്റിനെയും
ഉപേക്ഷിച്ച മട്ടാണ്‌.
നിത്യ ഹരിതമെന്ന്
എഴുതിയെങ്കിലും വെട്ടി.
നിത്യതയ്‌ക്ക്‌
ഒരു ഹരിതമില്ലിപ്പോള്‍.
ഹരിതമാകട്ടെ നിത്യതയിലൊന്നും
വിശ്വസിക്കുന്നുമില്ല.
മുലപ്പാലെന്ന് പ്രയോഗിച്ചതും
തിരുത്തേണ്ടിവന്നു.
മുലയില്‍ പാലില്ലത്രേ .
പാലിന്‌ മുലയും വേണ്ട.
ഈശ്വരാരാധനയും പാളി.
ഈശരന്‌ ഒരുത്തന്റെയും
ആരാധന വേണ്ട.
ആരാധനയ്‌ക്കാകട്ടെ
ഈശ്വരന്‍ വേണ്ട.
പണമോ പൊങ്ങച്ചമോ മതി.
വാക്കുകളുടെ ഏകാന്തതയാണ്‌
ഇന്നത്തെ ഏറ്റവും
വലിയ സമസ്യ.
വാക്കുകള്‍ അവയുടെ
സ്വയം പര്യാപ്തത തേടുന്നു.
ഒന്ന് ഒന്നിനോട്‌ ചേരാതെ.

interview with Raoul Eshelman

Performatist works take
authoriality to an extreme -
says Prof. Dr. Raoul Eshelman

1] In performance level, how performatism differs from magical realism and fantasy

Performatism is about the possibility of experiencing transcendence aesthetically. It does not necessarily involve magical or fantastic themes. When it does, however, these themes are presented using the specific device I call double framing. This works by connecting the total logic of the work (the outer frame) with scenes within the work (inner frames) in such a way that we cannot help but believe something. A classic example is the movie American Beauty. In the outer frame, the dead hero, Lester Burnham, flies over his home town and says that his trivial life is beautiful. He also says that when we, too, are dead, we will come to share his point of view. His unbelievable statement about the beauty of life is however confirmed in several scenes or inner frames in the movie (most notably in the one with the famous plastic bag dancing in the wind). In the end, we have no choice but to believe the hero. The movie has a self-contained logic that we must either accept or reject as a whole.

Traditional works of fantasy and magical realism work differently. These works have a single instead of a double frame. They simply present us with unbelievable things that can easily dismiss as purely imaginary.

Magical realism is a genre typical of postmodernism. It involves overlapping levels of reality that leave us undecided about what is real and what is not. A work like One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez works in this way. At the end of the novel we don’t know what to believe and what not to believe. A performatist work, by contrast, forces us to believe in something, to take a specific attitude of belief in spite of our skepticism.

2] How do you relate the total performance of a [fictional] world

to the reality of life?

A performatist work imposes itself as a whole on the reader or viewer. Its aim is to affect that person in a fundamental, total way. However, because the performatist work does this using force, it also provokes resistance on the part of the recipient. The performatist work intervenes in the reality of a person’s life. However, it has an ambivalent effect because that person is aware that something is being imposed on him or her. The performatist work can inspire, but also provoke resistance because it challenges us to believe. In this regard it is similar to the challenge posed to us by religious belief. The difference is that unlike religion, no binding social obligations are attached to performatist art. Our attitude of belief is an aesthetic, and not a practical, experience. This aesthetic experience can nonetheless still affect our real lives in positive ways.

3] Is life itself like performatism, and if so, why?
When the artistic devices used in performatism come to dominate art and culture almost entirely, then life itself will seem to be like performatism. This is an illusion that occurs in every epoch, though.

The performatist view of life is what philosophers call constructivist. It suggests that we understand reality by creating constructs that for a time may seem to overlap with that reality. In truth, our present constructs can always be replaced by future ones. However, this is not easy to do. The constructs that make up performatism are slowly replacing the ones that make up postmodernism. This process may take many years, and even decades.

4]How much should a writer/artist deviate from old stereotyped repetitions?
The idea that a radical break with tradition is a virtue in itself is typical of modernism. Modernism took innovation to the most radical extremes, but also exhausted the formal possibilities for creating new styles.

Postmodernism sees innovation ironically, as a mere variant of something old. It tries to confuse the old and the new as much as possible, to make the difference between them undecidable.

Performatism is like postmodernism in the sense that it does not try to create works of art that pretend to be completely new and original. This is why performatism is not a new style. Its innovation consists in making us assume a posture of belief within a double frame.

5} In perfomatism what is the role of the reader or viewer?
Because performatism is imposed on the reader/viewer, it acts upon him or her totally. The reader/viewer has no choice but to accept the work as a whole. However, he or she will as a rule still resist the work’s force. The performatist work motivates the reader/viewer to either believe or not to believe. He or she can either reject or accept the work as a whole. Performatism tries to make the reader take a positive attitude towards wholes of whatever kind.

.6} In this contemporary technological world, can a cultural product be an authorless thing, without past or future?
In ideal terms, yes. Performatist works of art and literature seek to force themselves on us as wholes and make us believe them. Ideally, we would be affected by the work’s performance and by nothing else. In the real world this can happen only for a very short time. All cultural products eventually become historical. They link up with the past and provide guidance for the future. Their authors appear as the personified agents of history and may even become more important to us than the works themselves.

7] In the present philosophy of literature, does memory have any value?
In performatism memory has a value if it refers back to an originary state that we must believe in. The psychoanalyst C.G. Jung’s theory of archetypes is similar to the performatist attitude towards memory. Jung thinks that we all share a common consciousness of archetypes that each person develops in his or her own way. A performatist work might force us to “recall” and believe in a certain archetype or originary situation. In The Life of Pi, for example, the hero recalls an originary situation, in this case a shipwreck in which he alone survived.

Postmodernism also emphasizes memory, but it treats it ironically, as something that never gets what it seeks to recall from the past. For postmodernism, there is always an unbridgeable gap between the way things were in the past and the way we remember them now. In remembering, we fall into a nostalgia that make it impossible to ever recover the past completely; past and present become hopelessly confused.

8] you said that metaphysical orientation is no longer on death and its proxies, but on fictionally framed states of transcendence... what is the essence of this transcendence or what is the aim of transcendence?

For performatism, transcendence has no particular essence or aim that we could establish beforehand. Or, to put this another way, its essence or aim is aesthetic and not religious. Performatist works allow us to become aware of and/or feel the possibility of transcendence within a work of art or literature. The actual content of this feeling of transcendence can range from an intense, almost religious feeling to a strongly felt experience of change. Performatism may make us feel as if we had a religious experience, but it is not the same as religion or a substitute for religion, because our belief is limited to the artistic performance.

9] Is the author returning?
The author isn’t returning, but authoriality is. The author in humanist thinking is a stable, reliable source of meaning to which we turn to understand a work of narrative fiction. Authoriality is a startling, discomforting effect within the fictional work. It arises when we are confronted by a narrator who imposes himself on us, who seems to know everything, who gives us little or no choice as to how to interpret the story. Performatist works take authoriality to an extreme. They can do this in two ways. They can confront us with first-person narrators who are omniscient or who are always right, or they can present us with simple or stupid characters who have authorial powers, i.e., turn out to be right in the end. Authoriality does not necessarily restore the feeling that there is a stable, reliable author behind the work. Rather, we have the feeling of being manipulated, of having rightness forced on us artificially by an author who is hidden and unknowable. The author (like a god) remains unknowable and may even appear threatening to us.

10]what do you mean by desexualisation in literature?
Postmodern literature and culture emphasize boundary transgression. Applied to sex, this means that sexual excess (obscenity) as well as mixing different kinds of sexual orientation (gender) have the most cultural significance. Performatist works of fiction emphasize the opposite. They place frames around people (of whatever sexual orientation) that tend to restrict their sexuality in some way. Such characters in turn tend to act in a chaste, rather than a promiscuous, way. This kind of chastity has a formal, rather than a moral quality, though. It is the result of a single performance within a double frame and not of following a universal moral code.

11] Are signs, semiotics outdated?
No. But we need to experience signs in terms of their unity with things. Performatism forces us to do this through double framing. The inner frame creates a unity between a thing and a sign. The outer frame confirms this unity again on a higher level. The work in effect becomes a gigantic sign which we must believe in. Our belief however is aesthetic and not practical; it is restricted to the work itself.

12] Is literature a discovery of one man?
If by this is meant that literary creation is first and foremost an individual act, I do not entirely agree. Individual imagination is of the greatest importance to make a work of literature successful and appealing. But individual creation is never entirely original or unique. Even the most brilliant artists and writers share devices, ideas, and styles with others. Concepts like “romanticism,” “postmodernism,” or “performatism” are needed to describe these shared qualities and make sense of them as a whole.

13] You says that language is a massive instrument to service the subject. Is the chain of signifiers an irrelevant distraction?
For performatism, discourse and chains of signifiers are outside distractions that must be shut out as much as possible. Only by cutting itself off from the flow of outside signs can the subject attain a feeling of wholeness and oneness. The problem is that a whole person largely cut off from signs cannot communicate well. Performatist plots are often centered around this paradox. In such a case, the performance would involve communicating successfully with someone else using as few signs and as little discourse as possible. In Life of Pi, for example, the hero invents his own signs to communicate with the tiger to keep from being eaten. At the same time, he also invents the beautiful story about inventing signs for the tiger. His beautiful story is almost certainly not true, but because he experienced these things entirely alone, we have no way of discrediting him completely. Performatism seems to say the attitude of believing is more important than the truth content of discourse itself.

14] In [performatist] writing, is there any relevance to subjectivity?

Performatist writing tries to create a free space in which subjectivity can develop. Because we are saturated with outside influences (discourse, signs etc.) this is very difficult. The subject is always dependent on something else that diminishes its subjectivity and tears it apart. A whole subject is however completely isolated. Performatism tries to create minimal conditions under which subjectivity could develop. However this is very difficult and not always assured of success.

R.E. (b. 1956) is presently Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and Director of the East European Honours Programme there. He received his Ph.D. in Slavic Literature from the University of Konstanz in 1988 and his Habilitation from the University of Hamburg in 1995. His most recent book is Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism (Aurora, Colorado 2007). He is married and has two children.

R eshelman links

interview with Raoul Eshelman

Performatist works take
authoriality to an extreme -
says Prof. Dr. Raoul Eshelman

1] In performance level, how performatism differs from magical realism and fantasy

Performatism is about the possibility of experiencing transcendence aesthetically. It does not necessarily involve magical or fantastic themes. When it does, however, these themes are presented using the specific device I call double framing. This works by connecting the total logic of the work (the outer frame) with scenes within the work (inner frames) in such a way that we cannot help but believe something. A classic example is the movie American Beauty. In the outer frame, the dead hero, Lester Burnham, flies over his home town and says that his trivial life is beautiful. He also says that when we, too, are dead, we will come to share his point of view. His unbelievable statement about the beauty of life is however confirmed in several scenes or inner frames in the movie (most notably in the one with the famous plastic bag dancing in the wind). In the end, we have no choice but to believe the hero. The movie has a self-contained logic that we must either accept or reject as a whole.

Traditional works of fantasy and magical realism work differently. These works have a single instead of a double frame. They simply present us with unbelievable things that can easily dismiss as purely imaginary.

Magical realism is a genre typical of postmodernism. It involves overlapping levels of reality that leave us undecided about what is real and what is not. A work like One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez works in this way. At the end of the novel we don’t know what to believe and what not to believe. A performatist work, by contrast, forces us to believe in something, to take a specific attitude of belief in spite of our skepticism.

2] How do you relate the total performance of a [fictional] world

to the reality of life?

A performatist work imposes itself as a whole on the reader or viewer. Its aim is to affect that person in a fundamental, total way. However, because the performatist work does this using force, it also provokes resistance on the part of the recipient. The performatist work intervenes in the reality of a person’s life. However, it has an ambivalent effect because that person is aware that something is being imposed on him or her. The performatist work can inspire, but also provoke resistance because it challenges us to believe. In this regard it is similar to the challenge posed to us by religious belief. The difference is that unlike religion, no binding social obligations are attached to performatist art. Our attitude of belief is an aesthetic, and not a practical, experience. This aesthetic experience can nonetheless still affect our real lives in positive ways.

3] Is life itself like performatism, and if so, why?
When the artistic devices used in performatism come to dominate art and culture almost entirely, then life itself will seem to be like performatism. This is an illusion that occurs in every epoch, though.

The performatist view of life is what philosophers call constructivist. It suggests that we understand reality by creating constructs that for a time may seem to overlap with that reality. In truth, our present constructs can always be replaced by future ones. However, this is not easy to do. The constructs that make up performatism are slowly replacing the ones that make up postmodernism. This process may take many years, and even decades.

4]How much should a writer/artist deviate from old stereotyped repetitions?
The idea that a radical break with tradition is a virtue in itself is typical of modernism. Modernism took innovation to the most radical extremes, but also exhausted the formal possibilities for creating new styles.

Postmodernism sees innovation ironically, as a mere variant of something old. It tries to confuse the old and the new as much as possible, to make the difference between them undecidable.

Performatism is like postmodernism in the sense that it does not try to create works of art that pretend to be completely new and original. This is why performatism is not a new style. Its innovation consists in making us assume a posture of belief within a double frame.

5} In perfomatism what is the role of the reader or viewer?
Because performatism is imposed on the reader/viewer, it acts upon him or her totally. The reader/viewer has no choice but to accept the work as a whole. However, he or she will as a rule still resist the work’s force. The performatist work motivates the reader/viewer to either believe or not to believe. He or she can either reject or accept the work as a whole. Performatism tries to make the reader take a positive attitude towards wholes of whatever kind.

.6} In this contemporary technological world, can a cultural product be an authorless thing, without past or future?
In ideal terms, yes. Performatist works of art and literature seek to force themselves on us as wholes and make us believe them. Ideally, we would be affected by the work’s performance and by nothing else. In the real world this can happen only for a very short time. All cultural products eventually become historical. They link up with the past and provide guidance for the future. Their authors appear as the personified agents of history and may even become more important to us than the works themselves.

7] In the present philosophy of literature, does memory have any value?
In performatism memory has a value if it refers back to an originary state that we must believe in. The psychoanalyst C.G. Jung’s theory of archetypes is similar to the performatist attitude towards memory. Jung thinks that we all share a common consciousness of archetypes that each person develops in his or her own way. A performatist work might force us to “recall” and believe in a certain archetype or originary situation. In The Life of Pi, for example, the hero recalls an originary situation, in this case a shipwreck in which he alone survived.

Postmodernism also emphasizes memory, but it treats it ironically, as something that never gets what it seeks to recall from the past. For postmodernism, there is always an unbridgeable gap between the way things were in the past and the way we remember them now. In remembering, we fall into a nostalgia that make it impossible to ever recover the past completely; past and present become hopelessly confused.

8] you said that metaphysical orientation is no longer on death and its proxies, but on fictionally framed states of transcendence... what is the essence of this transcendence or what is the aim of transcendence?

For performatism, transcendence has no particular essence or aim that we could establish beforehand. Or, to put this another way, its essence or aim is aesthetic and not religious. Performatist works allow us to become aware of and/or feel the possibility of transcendence within a work of art or literature. The actual content of this feeling of transcendence can range from an intense, almost religious feeling to a strongly felt experience of change. Performatism may make us feel as if we had a religious experience, but it is not the same as religion or a substitute for religion, because our belief is limited to the artistic performance.

9] Is the author returning?
The author isn’t returning, but authoriality is. The author in humanist thinking is a stable, reliable source of meaning to which we turn to understand a work of narrative fiction. Authoriality is a startling, discomforting effect within the fictional work. It arises when we are confronted by a narrator who imposes himself on us, who seems to know everything, who gives us little or no choice as to how to interpret the story. Performatist works take authoriality to an extreme. They can do this in two ways. They can confront us with first-person narrators who are omniscient or who are always right, or they can present us with simple or stupid characters who have authorial powers, i.e., turn out to be right in the end. Authoriality does not necessarily restore the feeling that there is a stable, reliable author behind the work. Rather, we have the feeling of being manipulated, of having rightness forced on us artificially by an author who is hidden and unknowable. The author (like a god) remains unknowable and may even appear threatening to us.

10]what do you mean by desexualisation in literature?
Postmodern literature and culture emphasize boundary transgression. Applied to sex, this means that sexual excess (obscenity) as well as mixing different kinds of sexual orientation (gender) have the most cultural significance. Performatist works of fiction emphasize the opposite. They place frames around people (of whatever sexual orientation) that tend to restrict their sexuality in some way. Such characters in turn tend to act in a chaste, rather than a promiscuous, way. This kind of chastity has a formal, rather than a moral quality, though. It is the result of a single performance within a double frame and not of following a universal moral code.

11] Are signs, semiotics outdated?
No. But we need to experience signs in terms of their unity with things. Performatism forces us to do this through double framing. The inner frame creates a unity between a thing and a sign. The outer frame confirms this unity again on a higher level. The work in effect becomes a gigantic sign which we must believe in. Our belief however is aesthetic and not practical; it is restricted to the work itself.

12] Is literature a discovery of one man?
If by this is meant that literary creation is first and foremost an individual act, I do not entirely agree. Individual imagination is of the greatest importance to make a work of literature successful and appealing. But individual creation is never entirely original or unique. Even the most brilliant artists and writers share devices, ideas, and styles with others. Concepts like “romanticism,” “postmodernism,” or “performatism” are needed to describe these shared qualities and make sense of them as a whole.

13] You says that language is a massive instrument to service the subject. Is the chain of signifiers an irrelevant distraction?
For performatism, discourse and chains of signifiers are outside distractions that must be shut out as much as possible. Only by cutting itself off from the flow of outside signs can the subject attain a feeling of wholeness and oneness. The problem is that a whole person largely cut off from signs cannot communicate well. Performatist plots are often centered around this paradox. In such a case, the performance would involve communicating successfully with someone else using as few signs and as little discourse as possible. In Life of Pi, for example, the hero invents his own signs to communicate with the tiger to keep from being eaten. At the same time, he also invents the beautiful story about inventing signs for the tiger. His beautiful story is almost certainly not true, but because he experienced these things entirely alone, we have no way of discrediting him completely. Performatism seems to say the attitude of believing is more important than the truth content of discourse itself.

14] In [performatist] writing, is there any relevance to subjectivity?

Performatist writing tries to create a free space in which subjectivity can develop. Because we are saturated with outside influences (discourse, signs etc.) this is very difficult. The subject is always dependent on something else that diminishes its subjectivity and tears it apart. A whole subject is however completely isolated. Performatism tries to create minimal conditions under which subjectivity could develop. However this is very difficult and not always assured of success.

R.E. (b. 1956) is presently Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and Director of the East European Honours Programme there. He received his Ph.D. in Slavic Literature from the University of Konstanz in 1988 and his Habilitation from the University of Hamburg in 1995. His most recent book is Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism (Aurora, Colorado 2007). He is married and has two children.

R eshelman links

POEM BY M K HARIKUMAR

The black hole

The dried almond leaves in the notebook

The tabernacle of dew drops on grass tips
The weak and withering leaves
The fallen flowers
The corridors where we had our lunch
The end of recitals
Tunes already hummed
The discussions about books

I searched for my childhood in
flowers lying on the sidewalks
Never will I get back those youthful days
when daggers stood aloft in
the island of cosmic blues
nor could I trace back the blood red
days of my college life

I attempted to touch the nights
in the barren solitude of broken love
but they eluded me for ever

The yesterdays of passionate love
The chronicles of love drops
The promises secured after long wait
and by telling so many tales
The bond established through kisses
and sexual bliss

All have vanished somewhere;
With my hands I groped all around
Arjun went to the mountains in search of
the warmth of a bygone romance;
I contemplated Shiva in my meditation,
wept calling my mother
took repeated dips in thoughts,

Plucking of jungle fruits,
The moments in forests,
The homosexual passions
Other sexual ecstasies,
And the nights beneath mango trees.



Playhouses, bridges and tents built
in between quarrels and affection;
The momentous blossoms of
pranks, hide and seek games

Her cascading romantic strands of hair
observed only during the twilight
prayers in temples

Then the ambiguous parting ,
As words failed, dead romances
dropped from lips into black holes.

The sharp edges of silence,
The pinpoints of compassion,
All have gone for ever
Looking back there is only
void

Nothing is there in the mind
and in my immobile and ghostly physique;
All the carcasses have vanished
into the abyss of time and thoughts

trans:saj mathews

POEM BY M K HARIKUMAR

The black hole

The dried almond leaves in the notebook

The tabernacle of dew drops on grass tips
The weak and withering leaves
The fallen flowers
The corridors where we had our lunch
The end of recitals
Tunes already hummed
The discussions about books

I searched for my childhood in
flowers lying on the sidewalks
Never will I get back those youthful days
when daggers stood aloft in
the island of cosmic blues
nor could I trace back the blood red
days of my college life

I attempted to touch the nights
in the barren solitude of broken love
but they eluded me for ever

The yesterdays of passionate love
The chronicles of love drops
The promises secured after long wait
and by telling so many tales
The bond established through kisses
and sexual bliss

All have vanished somewhere;
With my hands I groped all around
Arjun went to the mountains in search of
the warmth of a bygone romance;
I contemplated Shiva in my meditation,
wept calling my mother
took repeated dips in thoughts,

Plucking of jungle fruits,
The moments in forests,
The homosexual passions
Other sexual ecstasies,
And the nights beneath mango trees.



Playhouses, bridges and tents built
in between quarrels and affection;
The momentous blossoms of
pranks, hide and seek games

Her cascading romantic strands of hair
observed only during the twilight
prayers in temples

Then the ambiguous parting ,
As words failed, dead romances
dropped from lips into black holes.

The sharp edges of silence,
The pinpoints of compassion,
All have gone for ever
Looking back there is only
void

Nothing is there in the mind
and in my immobile and ghostly physique;
All the carcasses have vanished
into the abyss of time and thoughts

trans:saj mathews

poem by m k harikumar

Oh sunset, are you
an art or revolt?

Oh how aged are
the sobs
that you carry within
you?

The chronology
of memoirs
in which human
souls stroll;

The pictures you
painted with
ancient myths;

An anonymous
voice from somewhere
asks “why you are
in chronic grief?”

It spreads like a
shooting pain
from deep within.
You are the sole
witness to all the
lust, passion
and orgasmic
ecstasies;

Life drenched
in dreams
withers on the way side.



As you mutely
chant vedic mantras
they turn into a collage
of true life portraits

A breeze gives wings
to the broken pieces
of the past

The grief of the
sundown turns
into immortal
temptations of
existence
dried up by oceans.

The distressing repetition
of romantic images;

You always flee;
your journey itself
is your doom;

Your entire words are
just statutes of beauty
which helps you to hide
from haunting
alphabets;







Are you putting
out the fire of
our sexual passions?
They were just within
our grasp,
but shattered
during the sky-splitting
festival fireworks

Why are you silent
even to miserable
lovebirds like
the two of us?

The voluminous
glossary
and depressing
color schemes
in your silence;

Are they your
creative self or not?
Why do you
gather strands of darkness
and bring them back always?

What is there
in your eyes?

Are they
monuments
of beauty
demolished
by history?

Are you letting your
silence devour the
agony and ecstasy
of others?

Oh sunset why are
you knitting
the night clouds



Will you lend
your garments
to cover my nudity?

The paddy fields
celebrate your gloom.

Are you packing off those
who lost their
smiles in the streets
blanketed by blood


An axe is heading
towards you;

Are you going to hide
once again in the echoing
spiritual hymns
mounting from within
the temple walls?

Who accompanies you
in the journey across
unknown galaxies?
Birds or bird flights?

trans:saj mathews

poem by m k harikumar

Oh sunset, are you
an art or revolt?

Oh how aged are
the sobs
that you carry within
you?

The chronology
of memoirs
in which human
souls stroll;

The pictures you
painted with
ancient myths;

An anonymous
voice from somewhere
asks “why you are
in chronic grief?”

It spreads like a
shooting pain
from deep within.
You are the sole
witness to all the
lust, passion
and orgasmic
ecstasies;

Life drenched
in dreams
withers on the way side.



As you mutely
chant vedic mantras
they turn into a collage
of true life portraits

A breeze gives wings
to the broken pieces
of the past

The grief of the
sundown turns
into immortal
temptations of
existence
dried up by oceans.

The distressing repetition
of romantic images;

You always flee;
your journey itself
is your doom;

Your entire words are
just statutes of beauty
which helps you to hide
from haunting
alphabets;







Are you putting
out the fire of
our sexual passions?
They were just within
our grasp,
but shattered
during the sky-splitting
festival fireworks

Why are you silent
even to miserable
lovebirds like
the two of us?

The voluminous
glossary
and depressing
color schemes
in your silence;

Are they your
creative self or not?
Why do you
gather strands of darkness
and bring them back always?

What is there
in your eyes?

Are they
monuments
of beauty
demolished
by history?

Are you letting your
silence devour the
agony and ecstasy
of others?

Oh sunset why are
you knitting
the night clouds



Will you lend
your garments
to cover my nudity?

The paddy fields
celebrate your gloom.

Are you packing off those
who lost their
smiles in the streets
blanketed by blood


An axe is heading
towards you;

Are you going to hide
once again in the echoing
spiritual hymns
mounting from within
the temple walls?

Who accompanies you
in the journey across
unknown galaxies?
Birds or bird flights?

trans:saj mathews

poem by mk harikumar

When Mukundan blew the Konch

Mukundan blew the Konch
releasing a sound bird;
which flew away afar

The he blew again to see whether
the sound bird he blew out
from the Konch
can come back to its source

But this time also the sound bird
flew out from the Konch only to vanish
somewhere

He wondered whether the long
arms and legs of the sound will ever
come back for their original
hideouts in his soul

Even in half sleep
he blew the sound birds;
And the Konch had an infinite
reserve of them

The Konch is either sound
or strength or speed
each time, he wanted
to trace where the sound birds
have glided
away from the konch

In fact konch on its own was devoid of sound;
It only has a human soul behind it

And even the human soul doesn’t possess
the sound;

The sound birds take birth
only when the human soul
and the Konch join together

trans:saj mathews

poem by mk harikumar

When Mukundan blew the Konch

Mukundan blew the Konch
releasing a sound bird;
which flew away afar

The he blew again to see whether
the sound bird he blew out
from the Konch
can come back to its source

But this time also the sound bird
flew out from the Konch only to vanish
somewhere

He wondered whether the long
arms and legs of the sound will ever
come back for their original
hideouts in his soul

Even in half sleep
he blew the sound birds;
And the Konch had an infinite
reserve of them

The Konch is either sound
or strength or speed
each time, he wanted
to trace where the sound birds
have glided
away from the konch

In fact konch on its own was devoid of sound;
It only has a human soul behind it

And even the human soul doesn’t possess
the sound;

The sound birds take birth
only when the human soul
and the Konch join together

trans:saj mathews

m k harikumar poem

Flowers yellow, leaves green

The poets were debating on the sequence of death;
Who died first whether the poet or the poem?
He stood there listening to the wailings
of both the poets and their verses

Inside there were chairs
with swollen belly,
tables that have gone crazy,
sensual shadows
and junk of books,
even as the sales and discussions
went on an on

Then he got scared of death
He was not ready to
become a corpse

Instantly he felt the urgency
of poetic metaphors
to break away from the confines
of the bookshop

In a trance he recalled the days when
snake charmers, poets and teachers
were suffering for want of lovers
It flashed back how the poetic talent
in his molecules began to blow apart
since ages

And how love was orphaned
denied of the right to survival and fortunes
The poet in him was born by chronicling
the erosion of culture and meanness of the past

He tried his best to see that the carcass
of his desires did not turn into poetic imageries

Meanwhile even his corpse
was on the look out for a safe haven
outside the world of verses
to avoid molestation,
and to escape from
the lusty glare of the poets

The trees and insects resorted
to futile rituals to possess
the life of poets
but got back nothing but grief

He couldn’t resist the temptation to
hold on to his moral right for existence
outside the realm of history.

The debate of the poets went on unabated

As the book of night remained wide open
they began unwrapping
the cartons of lust and liquor

trans: saj mathews

m k harikumar poem

Flowers yellow, leaves green

The poets were debating on the sequence of death;
Who died first whether the poet or the poem?
He stood there listening to the wailings
of both the poets and their verses

Inside there were chairs
with swollen belly,
tables that have gone crazy,
sensual shadows
and junk of books,
even as the sales and discussions
went on an on

Then he got scared of death
He was not ready to
become a corpse

Instantly he felt the urgency
of poetic metaphors
to break away from the confines
of the bookshop

In a trance he recalled the days when
snake charmers, poets and teachers
were suffering for want of lovers
It flashed back how the poetic talent
in his molecules began to blow apart
since ages

And how love was orphaned
denied of the right to survival and fortunes
The poet in him was born by chronicling
the erosion of culture and meanness of the past

He tried his best to see that the carcass
of his desires did not turn into poetic imageries

Meanwhile even his corpse
was on the look out for a safe haven
outside the world of verses
to avoid molestation,
and to escape from
the lusty glare of the poets

The trees and insects resorted
to futile rituals to possess
the life of poets
but got back nothing but grief

He couldn’t resist the temptation to
hold on to his moral right for existence
outside the realm of history.

The debate of the poets went on unabated

As the book of night remained wide open
they began unwrapping
the cartons of lust and liquor

trans: saj mathews