Bearings
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About this ebook
In the words of the poet herself, 'Bearings began as the only tangible signs of an attempt to stay connected to a language that felt most intimately my own, and yet did not figure in my landscape any more.' Through its three sections, Virga, Damaged Goods and Terra Infirma, Karthika Nair meditates on the intertwined themes of directions, moorings and disclosures, with the multiple meanings and connections inherent in the title itself. Bereavement and absences, the loss of memory and love, concerns about home and identity, find eloquent expression in these evocative poems which the poet likens to a logbook of journeys without any particular destination in mind, with language as shape-shifting map, and the desire to express, to share as the sole, somewhat unreliable, compass. This is Karthika Nair's debut collection.
Karthika Nair
Karthika Nair is the author of several books, Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, which won the 2015 Tata Literature Live! Award for Book of the Year (Fiction), and was highly commended at the 2016 Forward Prizes (UK). She has helmed the scripts of several dance productions, such as the multiple-award-winning DESH (2011), Akram Khan's dance solo.
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Bearings - Karthika Nair
VIRGA
There are words that come into our lives like predestined lovers, the shock, the delight of that first meeting lingering—the knowledge that they exist seems to transform the world, at least for a few dizzying moments. Meeting virga reaffirmed my faith in language, in its ability to capture what one thought so intensely personal that nobody else would mull over it. The word seemed to describe much more than a precise geological phenomenon; it held shades of the reaction—indefinable, thought-altering, inevitably ephemeral—when faced with a performance. When the body becomes sculptor, clay, plinth, model and work. Constantly dissolved and recomposed.
The attempt to capture the kinetic in words is somewhat like freezing a raindrop in mid-air. Before it changes shape. Before it merges with the earth. Often futile. And at best partial, the change of location from memory’s degradable case to a more durable, if just as subjective, one.
These poems are also a memo to the self for insane days. Days that are a raucous bazaar where budgets and figures run headlong into contracts and royalty negotiations, where visa applications and red-taped-tangles with a dozen countries play truant with malfunctioning sets and lost props, and general foul-temperedness (one’s own, more often than not) breeds like rodents. A reminder that all this leads somewhere—sometimes, not where it was meant to; to some rather odd places, from time to time. But that it never stays still. Movement, in a word. Or life.
Zero Degrees: Between Boundaries
I met them first in a land where borders
get blurred; where day rises before night’s end
and water morphs into high, brumal walls.
A warrior and a monk, two beings—
flanked by shadows that grow and roam at will—
cross-legged in thought, carving with four hands
arabesques on force, loss, fear—close at hand
—and some big runes—selfhood, death—that border
waking hours, and shape dreams against my will.
Their words whirl in unison to the ends
of still skies, etch a tale of life being
pruned to papers; of puny men who wall
up futures, then watch unmoved as the walls
and roofs of egos tumble: sleight of hand;
nuke name, nation, calling—the very being
—then revel, leave the body on the border
of reality… the words trail jerk/ end/
lost in this past, unsure of where they will
be sent next. The shadows step in, strong-willed,
free; spin stretch swallow space and bounce off walls.
Warrior and Monk rise and mirror, end
to end, their shadows who recede and hand
the stage over; drift to the near border
and then vanish like mythical beings.
I leave thoughts on belonging, on being
and the zeroth law that I wilfully
signed, and watch them—one compact, bordering
short; the other pale and spare—vault streaked walls
of culture and kinetic codes. Lock hands
embrace dodge thrust. The duet/duel ends
before I read which is which, if one’s end
spells start elsewhere. Threat and trust were being
swirled in synchronized moves till just a hand
was seen, a smudge. Then Warrior’s great will
and body juddered to a sudden crash; walled
by a stillness that steals through any border.
Monk departs, a worn being in his hands,
crooning of a day when borders and walls
will cease; midst white shells of spent words, I end.
These experiments in ekphrasis started with Zero Degrees, the 2005 duet choreographed and performed by Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. It seemed right that the series ‘Virga’ should begin and end with the same. This opening piece, a sestina, took its underlying themes and the visual lexicon—woven in through