Deeper in Transit with
Arundhathi Subramaniam's masterpieces!
Hi,
I am definitely “Deeper in Transit" with Arundhathi Subramaniam's masterpieces this year. Her writing is special to me because I started my poetry journey with her distinctive works. Further, when I think about her poems, I only remember -
"“Just that
Nothing else will do.”
The poems of Arundhathi Subramaniam's Love Without a Story celebrate an expanding kinship of passion and friendship, mythic quest and modern-day longing, in a world animated by dialogue and dissent, delirium and silence. Circling themes of intimacy and time, they return to the urgency of conversation: that fragile bridge across the frozen attitudes that divide our world.
I purchased “Devi Bhagavata Purana (देवीभागवत पुराण)” in January this year, and I’ve read almost 12 chapters from its first section. Here is an excerpt from Arundhati Subramaniam’s book “Excerpt from Wild Women”. And, perhaps my reading pattern and choices could be forever searching for a moist concavity to contain everything beyond my reach, and that’s how I like it, most importantly, discover sacred joy in.
“As long as we are seduced by polarities, existence is happy to oblige us with our own smorgasbord of horrors. This is the reminder that the Goddess' dark face represents. But implicit in those horrors is an invitation. An invitation to venture into those closets in our psyche, ruled by guilt and fear and ancestral conditioning, and allow the sunlight to enter. She summons us to the alchemical process that she is capable of transforming matter into moksha through the sheer furnace of her gaze.
This is her ultimate promise.
And if she is sometimes breathtakingly casual in the way she treats her creations, it is because she has fashioned them from her own cauldron of wholeness. Time and space are ingredients she plays with in her cosmic kitchen-chopping, slicing and sautéeing in a fever of creativity. She does not stand for some dismal creed of transience. She stands for the ecstasy of shape-shifting. Nothing is terminated in her fantastic workshop. It is merely transmuted.
Her repulsive face is the last myth of terror falls away, we are hers once more separateness. When that last restored to her body as one of her many limbs, reinstated to her tree of life as one of its many singing branches.
It is also why the human imagination can never erase her, even if it sometimes forgets her. For wherever we end up, battered and shipwrecked, the Goddess' mudra of fearlessness assures us that there is no zip code that is ever outside the dark hospitality of her womb.
And her language is (and how could it be otherwise?)”
I would sign off on this quarter’s update by reversing to earlier publications of my work.
Literary atavism 👉🏻”Longing” | Writing Center at Washtenaw Community College (WCC), in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
In January 2022, the editor of Xavier Review Press, Ralph Adamo accepted my poems “The Goddess Incarnates” & “Emancipation” for publication in the magazine. His investment in my work and dedication to achieving perfection while mentoring me throughout the process was refreshing as well as heartening. We seldom meet editors like Professor Ralph in the literary ecosystem who parent the budding talents almost in a way that you don't feel abandoned at all.
This one is to the Goddess, now and forever.
See you in April, folks!
Take care,
Love! Na
