How Shall We Sing Spring?

AS THE OVERCAST blues of winter yield to the golden yellows of an early summer in much of the northern hemisphere, there remains the question of what happened to spring, that most mysterious of lifegiving months which Aurobindo described as the ‘royal season of the Indian year’. It seems to have vanished or, perhaps more accurately, we have failed to notice it during our mental and physical quarantines. What was traditionally a season of bringing forth new life and reviving old pleasures has been replaced by news of deaths, dread and despair. The more one thinks about this forgetfulness historically, the stranger our predicaments appear. For Kalidasa in the Ritusamhara (A Pageant of Seasons)—a concatenation of verses divided across six seasons—spring is the last one which he describes, for implicit in its poetic structure was the belief that ‘one should end a [sumptuous] meal [of poetry] with a sweet’. Thousands of kilometers away, and centuries later, the poet Emily Dickinson described pastoral heavens of a New England spring—‘Come Slowly, Eden’—where she invited us to imagine bees entering the bashful lips of flowers.

By our times however—an age of industrialised slaughter unlike any—poets of a particular generation, the ones who saw both the World Wars and a Depression had a more complicated relationship with spring. It became a season of scarring and wounds, of times when men and brothers were torn in sustained assaults like the Kaiserschlacht (Kaiser’s War), perpetrated as last-ditch efforts to salvage the fading reputations of men who lived in palaces. Wallace Stevens, that builder of word cathedrals, who saw and read about the massacres and melee, wrote to his fellow poet, William Carlos Williams, elsewhere, ‘I spare you the whole-souled burblings in the park, the leaves, lilacs, tulips, and so on. Such things are unmanly and non-Prussian and, of course, a fellow must pooh-pooh something, even if it happens to be something he rather fancies, you know.’ How to reconcile the beauties of spring with the bloody mindedness of history remained an open question, especially for poets and storytellers. Post-1945, as memories of mass deaths abated, once more the sense of life and post-war prosperities began to trickle in. By the last decades of the 20th century—a century of holocausts, genocides, atomic bombs, pandemics, killing fields and World Wars—all that was forgotten. America’s much beloved Billy Collins’ single-line poem (‘Today’) began with ‘If ever there were a spring day so perfect, so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze…’ and then, after much meanderings and musings, he concluded with a satisfying conclusion, ‘… well, today is just that kind of day’.

But now, as each of us watches with horror and disbelief the news of thousands dead worldwide, what are we to make of this spring? But what sort of stories will we tell of our spring of despairs? Inevitably vast, complex and interlocking set of events will be reduced to something we can cognitively reconcile and manage. The stories we carry within ourselves—like a blackbird seated on the branch of consciousness, ever distracted, ever longing for stillness—about this experience is rife with inflections and innuendoes, as Wallace Stevens wrote in his famous poem called ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. Perhaps somebody will write a great epic about the immensity of this human immiseration. But for most of us, it may very well be 13 stories in which we are both—like Vyasa in the Mahabharata—both participants and narrators. These may very well be stories of the following:

1) Individuals: From Li Wenliang, the doctor who gave up his life to warn Wuhan, and China, and possibly the rest of the world, about an unknown pneumonia-like disease, to the stories of nurses and doctors, orderlies and ambulance drivers, we return to that oldest motif: sacrifice. But in this telling, God has been replaced by civic commitments.

2) Sentiments: Awash in each home, however mighty and humble, are feelings that can only inadequately be approximated by words. The poor are pushed into perils as always. But now, even the well-to-do and the rich must surrender to fear, dread and anxiety about the outside world as much as they battle ennui, tedium and frustrated loves on the inside.

3) Biologies: The virus has burrowed into our language, just as it has into our lives. Along with death and sickness, it has also offered up new vocabularies of the macabre—projectile sneezes, ACE2 receptors and co-morbidities. What are we to do with these words, except repeat? Like mantras whose meanings are known only to the initiates.

4) Models: From programmers with Python codes to epidemiologists with paper and pen, we attempt to explain and predict the spread of a pathogen with its own obscure rules of travel and transmission amidst humans who follow no rule but their own. We resemble medieval astronomers deciphering the path of planets without the knowledge of ellipses.

5) Realpolitik: The physical body of its citizenry—throbbing with life, decaying in death—is the state’s first and final frontier. All else is detail filled in by bureaucrats and institutions. The rot of Great Powers—China and America, communist and capitalist utopias, a chimera if there was one—revealed that old suspicion. One is brutal and secretive, the other is witless and uncaring.

6) Typologies: That death arrives for all is the great but trite truth of life. But now it brings along loneliness, as the sick threaten to contaminate their beloveds. It arrives as a ticket inspector to allow you a berth in a mass grave. It offers itself up to doctors as an impossible calculus where they must decide who gets a ventilator and who must be let go.

7) Uncoverings: Truth, the Greeks and later Heidegger wrote, was aletheia, or the uncovering of being. With traditional media worn down by its own metastasising relationship to corporate profits, we rely on unofficial truths of the hour through social media, gossip and non-peer-reviewed research. The question remains unsolved: how are we to uncover truths—small and universal?

8) Nature: At some point, 970 million Chinese and over a billion Indians went into lockdowns. Even cities like New York, addicted to movement and money, decided to ‘pause’. The result was human suffering; but nature breathed in long. Air quality improved and, for once, we got a glimpse into a future without humans as rhinos and elephants, civets and mountain goats entered piazzas and promenades.

9) Finance: How to save the world or, more accurately, how to save institutions that rely on debt? Ideologues, who for two decades advised poorer countries to adopt ‘structural adjustment programmes’, were committed to ‘whatever it takes’ to prop up the economy. The name of the game was liquidity which brings to mind, especially as banks refuse to lend, ‘Water, water everywhere/ Nor any drop to drink.’

10) Inequalities: That the rich are different from us is an old truth; but other inequalities too have been revealed. Men versus women sequestered in the same household, entire countries with fewer ventilators than single hospitals in European or American cities. The virus revealed the true co-morbidity of our body politic: an obesity born out of excesses.

11) Cultures: Guntoting men in America’s Midwest entered legislatures, as is their constitutional right, to demand that their towns be opened up irrespective of the virus. In Asia, citizens willingly allowed the state to slap ankle bracelets and install monitoring apps on their phones. Foolishness and arrogance was met with docility and conformism.

12) Future: Suddenly, the future is up for grabs. Or so the radicals on all sides insist. The right wing everywhere wants to close borders, restore cultural homogeneity. The left insists on universal healthcare and redistribution of income. Both insist that the middle cannot hold. There is no one left to answer for the middle?

13) Our selves: Every passing day doing something you dislike, as a salaried employee or in a relationship, suddenly seems like an onerous way to live. Those who have the luxury to opt out will do so. But billions will continue to live and work in ways they did before this pandemic. In this lack of freedom to pursue what one truly seeks lies the stability of society. In stability also lies the servitude of our selves.

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