Runa Bandyopadhyay: The Bernsteinian paradox

I very much appreciate Runa Bandyopadhyay's response to Near/Miss together with her translation and commentary on "Thank You for Saying Thank You" and "Thank you for Saying Your're Welcome," in Aparjan.com (Kolkata, W. Bengal). I initially posted a rough Google translation of the Bengali essay, which prompted  Bandyopadhyay to do her own quick translation. She writes:

The word Nirvana in the google translation triggers me to translate my Bengali commentaries into English because I feel the word Nirvana doesn’t go along with a poet. A poet always longing to reborn like a Bodhisattva, whose longing was not only for him but also for others, his desire of salvation along with all distressed creatures of the world on his way of enlightenment. A poet’s expansive consciousness puts him from certainty to uncertainty, from comfort to discomfort, from insanity to sanity and only he could see how the actual world revolves. A poet thinks that the interior of the boundary is the exterior and the exterior is the interior - I am free and you are imprisoned and so he always try to give a hand to distressed.

The Bernsteinian paradox

 Who writes –– poet or poem? Whose boldness makes uncertainty to jump from the imaginary mountain for a free fall –– poem or reader? Whose mourning elegy carries impossible possibilities –– reader or poet? The words spread on white pages seems to be so difficult so irresistible utterance, yet in fact they are sensitive fertilized embryos, silent hints, leaves non-illusive marks on the surface of the morning star. As if, knowing its aqueous nature, the hypnotic words near water propose to reduce the distance between poem and reader. All lines have been translated into water-language –– some excitements, some egotisms, burn themselves to keep the eternal love in promise. This is the riverine relation from poet to poem; the distance is not as far as you think of. Yet Near/Miss, so close, so near with their fingers entangled together -- still missing. Poem and reader both are touching the barricade of words –– inexistence within existence, absence within presence, which is embroidering an endless sound of paradoxical music to invite readers to respond with their own experience, own imagination, own perception and to provoke them to start their own journey towards imaginary possibilities, where every poem makes a model of a possible world into reader’s mind with active reading. Charles’s mantra of poetics has revealed in these poems. When we read the two poems side by side, the Bernsteinian paradox, a different way of representation could be visible. The process of this poem gets absorbed in the adventure of innovative creation with an endless fuzzy logic, where only vibrations of trajectory of motion of everyday, moments of experiences and their resonances remain by wiping out their actions and reactions, by losing their truth and reality.

 As in the earlier poem [“Thank You for Saying Thank You], the desires of the so-called traditional readers have been expressed, the second poem [“Thank You for Saying You’re Welcome’] is the opposite of that to establish the poet's desire from a reader or from a poem. The poet has to face the world in every moment with constant uncertainty and contradiction of life, which gets reflected from poet’s consciousness to make a passionate abstract outburst, which carries all the social and political essence, which carries the narrowed down mutual ardor of love and moonlight in the world of modern civilization and culture. Every moment of this world is filled with both poison and drug, in a sense of Jacques Derrida’s pharmakon, and the poet records that with a naked unornamented language and sound, with an elusive hint of words, with a different way of application of language to sharpen the face of the poem with an oblique yet transparent vision of life, to make an intense association of perception and perceptibility. In fact, accessibility of a poem doesn’t make any sense to a poet, rather it’s a repression of aesthetic ideology. Perception of a poet is the charged particle created in his mind, and the poet always tries to convert their words into quarks, which becomes the spark to create resonance in reader’s mind. Every emotion in a poet’s mind gets marinated with the human interaction with ever changing human relationship. Experiences acquired on both shores of [the] life-river, their wonders and deep ambivalence make their nest in human’s mind. Keeping the door between emotions and perceptions wide open, the poet starts measuring between life and its decoration, and moves on with his perception towards the wonders, towards the mystification in [the] formless magic of Aladdin. There is some inherent effortless security in old practice, which makes the reader afraid of being overthrown by the new and so the poet wants to pull the source-point of a reader’s own experiences to challenge all conventional, traditional actions, reactions by standing in his own poetic courtyard. All the approaching hesitations of values become static beside the unhesitating process of poetry. The inevitable vision of calamitous time wakes up inside void. For self-preservation, the poet creates a self-made shield around himself, called inaccessibility. The poet doesn’t believe in static frequency of vibrations, rather the motion of his thought is always uncertain and intolerable. These uncertain thoughts can’t be expressed by previously ascertained tune, form or structures of a poem. So the poet desires for a quantum leap beyond this rigidity and certainty…