Reviews, Vol. I, Issue I
Man in the Botanical Garden:
The Fallen, the
Forbidden, the Golden, the Heaven-Going Tree versus the Tree Turned Upside Down
In the beginning man
was hermaphrodite, a man-tree carrying both fruit and seed in the wake of it. But
in a masterstroke of evolution the tree fell, its fruits fell off and the seeds
spilled. From the seeds came two separate entities, sex-wise, male and female,
and gender-wise, man and woman. They were so different in body and mind that
without looking at each other, soon went in opposite ways in desperation. But
both soon suffered the desperation of a yearning to seek out the other. This
was love. Out of this desperation they sought fulfillment in the other. But out
of the same desperation they were in perpetual flight, perpetually withdrawing
from each other, in perpetual disagreement. Man never experienced such an
aggravated sense of Eros and Thanatos as in this twin manifestation.
Or in the Garden of
Eden man was alone and lonely, so God created woman from man’s rib bone to be
his partner; a partner in life and a partner in death; a partner in his rise
and in his fall; a partner in his glory and in his shame. It was a divine bond
beyond and at the same time around the Forbidden Tree of consciousness, the
consciousness of good and evil. When the forbidden tree bore fruit it was woman
who ate the fruit first, so she also became capable of bearing fruit and she
gave the seeds to man to eat.
Or in the sacred
grove of Nemi in ancient Rome there had been a golden tree. Anybody breaking a
branch of this tree would have become a priest-king. So the reigning
priest-king had to defend the tree from any challenger aspiring to break a
branch, by remaining on guard all the time and by maintaining a round the clock
vigil. The power struggle or the blood conflict eventually got transformed into
a psychological conflict of ego and around the golden tree man and woman were
seen lurking in ambush.
Or in the Old Norse
mythology there is yggdrasil or the heaven-going tree that acts like a stairway
to heaven. Is this tree a woman, capable of redeeming the fallen man?
Perhaps all these
trees get connected in the surreal tree that Kiriti Sengupta presents us in his
latest book The Reverse Tree which he
describes as a crisis-management autobiographical philosophy. The man-woman
problematic leads him to reverse the fallen man-tree towards the original
androgynous ardhanariswar position
but he turns it upside down keeping in view the contemporary gender issues to
show his reverse tree caught in a time warp. He seems to probe into this
seemingly unending sex-dilemma which is all too human to humanly decipher by
changing the metaphor in each chapter. The hypothetical, the comic, the poetic,
the physical, the voyeuristic and the spiritual sides of the same quest are
recorded with a human cry for compassion and a human will to divine grace. One
can understand his anxiety in the question, “would you still like to consider
men as trees?” I once heard an educated lady saying that man was a tree, the
more stout the tree was the more bliss your golden deer(read ‘woman’) would get
by rubbing onto it. If your tree is stout, as he claims in the prologue, why
all this bother is not well understood. Here is his prologue:-
“ my tree is
stout,
well-developed
it refutes the gravitational
pull
not always, you know…
my roots run
against the
sap!”
However an
uncertainty and a question of ‘life in death’ and ‘death in life’ are indicated
as well in the prologue. A non-stout tree is unsuitable for the golden deer of
magical forests and a man is helpless except he turns into a poet dreaming and
churning out ‘poetree’ in his incapacity. Is a poet masculine or masculine
enough to have a smooth sailing? I have doubts. The poet is a crucifix standing
in wilderness of life awaiting the arrival of meanings to purify his soul so
that he remains a spiritual martyr. Then why this concern to keep the soul
immaculate in the process of its ‘translation’ through life? The body must die
for its sins. So the soul must live by its own virtue. The body is the bound of
experience but it is transcended to keep the soul intact. Is not the body as
divine as the ‘sap’ through which your ‘roots’ penetrate? Then why only the
body is transgressed and violated just because you have a false sense of
identity? Then what is an identity? There is nothing truer than your true being
even when that gets deluded by the golden deer of ‘becoming’. Then why fear the
false prophets, the ‘editors’ of falsity and artificiality? The body is
immediate and contingent, the soul distant but urgent. Body is pain, blood,
sweat, tears, guts (Clara); the soul is an untouchable (the narrator). The poet
is a body, a failed body, a spurned and violated body, a body reserved for postmortem (like the inspection of Clara’s suture) but it is a body that redeems
others, enables others to have a soul. The poet is the totemic ‘I’ without
which life is meaningless.
I am sure that The Reverse Tree will mark a turning
point in the writer’s life and art as evident from his serious and engaging
questions about the areas of life not so well-lighted or clearly defined. Hope
he will continue his philosophical quest towards enlightenment.
About the Book
The Reverse Tree, Kiriti Sengupta,
Moments Publication,
Ahmedabad, 2014, pp
xi+48
ISBN:
978-93-84180-78-2 (Paperback)
Reviewed by Bishnupada Ray
Associate Professor of English at the University of North Bengal, India.
He is an Indian English poet and won a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2009
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