Fire, too, is purifying grandeur, fire is warmth of life, it symbolizes human passion, it is revolutionary vigor. But the poem takes darkness and fire as the elements of human decadence. This is the irony of the situation for my understanding of the fusion poetry of the three contemporary poets.
The very fact that the poets have to envision these two sublime elements in the context of loss and pain draws the background for the tale of suffering:
“Everywhere, darkness chants the ragas of catastrophe and celebrates [the] end game” (5) and “Water, there in the deep catches fire and then water burns all of us” (49). Darkness fuses with dreams of dead village, dead city, society and civilization. It penetrates into the eye and reddens it and penetrates into the heart and aspires to rule a rotten state (4).
There is an irony associated with fusion. Nothing fuses but remains together side by side, writes Abhi Subedi in the book’s introduction. The constant presence of all the images, metaphors, and other formal elements living together in the poem create a world of both fusion and separation of darkness, fire, the Buddha, and death. The ideas of the poets are fused together and yet the world of images and symbols in the poem emerge distinctly in the lines. The strong element of irony creates a world of tension and complexity in the poem. Thus, fusion and separation live together, leaving the readers stranded in the midst of utter confusion. Such is the language of the poem which in fact is its strength.
With darkness looming over everything, the poem begins and precipitates and faints by fire. And in between, there is no respite from the beginning to the end, it seems. There still are relief if one forcibly, though, seeks some here and there: “from the composition of darkness, a black plant is taking life upwards (18)” – at least something grows in the fallen world around. And again, Prometheus steals fire from god [Olympus/Zeus] (23). There is a hope: darkness, after all, cannot annihilate fire (33). Suddenly, in these lines, fire evolves as life in the midst of the bizarre world around – darkness fails – they are not similar images of death and destruction, the fire is not in these lines.
There are constant images of a gruesome world in the entire composition. The images disturb the readers, and hence sustained reading weakens the readerly confidence. Art moves into facts of loss and death: the subject matters overpower poetry, which probably is the intention of the poets. The poem is terrifying because the world the poets see is fearsome. The composition thus achieves its end. The speaker(s) are lonely and angry and look/s at the world from an objective distance. They see the world with clarity and see through it because they are not the participants but stand at a distance.
The poem leads the reader to a constant visual experience. The reading speed has to be rapid and restless. One cannot stand at any point of time. Images come one after another, and at the end, everything ends in ashes. The resultant remains are death rather than fainting. The fire turns into ash and the poem ends.
There are multiple juxtapositions which create a number of suggestiveness in terms with the description and meaning of the poem: darkness and smell, reversed roles of epical characters, and the movement of many abstract objects for nothing and for no use. Due to the voices and words of the three poets, such multiplicity has been possible. One of the most striking things in the poem is that all the voices merging into a poet persona has unbearable anger, and that is why perhaps, at times, the language of poetry turns into mere metaphors of anger. Anger is pervasive throughout the poem, which at times loses the effectiveness of the art of poetry. Many of the images are bizarre, and perhaps due to the bizarre context of the nation, it reels into the phases of ugliness in thought and action. The conditions of the nation appropriate the imagery and symbolism in the poem.
The major imagery are darkness and fire, but they are constantly overpowered by human monstrosity. Man is the most powerful element of destruction and rises higher than fire and darkness. He defeats all, from history to the gods of the epic, from the fire in purgatory to the darkness that is soothing.
Nepali poetry of the contemporary times is overwhelmed by the language of metaphors, and the three poets are not exceptions despite their alternative modes of writing poetry. From extended metaphors to far reaching metonymy, Nepali poetic tradition is a grand narrative. Imagination does not stoop to thinking about the ordinary things of lives around us. It may be that pain and suffering are too pervasive around us, and consequently, the language of realism does not work to express the wretched conditions of life. Life has to be seen in the overarching language of metaphors.
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