Scribbler Maverick

The brutal fact of being repeated with/in the representational matrix of truth and reality has been a perennial and constant source of fear and anxiety to most of the philosophers belonging to the lineage of western thought since Plato. However the repetition which has caused difficulties to this tradition of western philosophy has not been either clearly perceived or candidly explicated. Most of the secondary critics working in the area of repetition take it for granted that the concept of repetition that appears in the writings of Plato as a homogeneous and unified notion harbouring only the elements of integrity, singularity and linearity. With the publications of The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition by Gilles Deleuze, the forerunner in the second wave of post-structuralism, the monolithic image of repetition has been redrawn in favour of heterodox, heterogeneous and pluralistic factors that went deep into the making of representation as a conceptual modality. In t...

                         1 Epitaph scratched on the surface of the Water is no less significant to the Earthly tombstone. If you live in times and Homes enclosed even casual coupling of the Shadows may tend to gesture toward casualties: Lores of Rumours would be Generated; Outcastings, exiles, expulsions Deaths. Orchards would bear fruits Bearing the complexion of aborted foetus. Even Romantics tread a midway betwixt Reform and Progress and hence they Do offer ephemeral melanges rather than Carved out rubies of the immemorial. Measure out The delicacies.   If night elopes with light Who took the lead Is an unnecessary question Since all proceedings on the Pavement of the process Nullify all beginnings. The Self-redemptive postures… Being within and among names and homes Does simply mean a by-stander Among the inquisitors. So We may stop here the journey and the Pr...

It is a widely currencied observation that those males who are Macho in their Masculine spirits and looks can never trap a girl but can only bewail the plight of women in particular or general. This is highly significant to Metallica since their heavy metal numbers remind me of something hyper-masculine tinged with the traits of a complete if not perfect Macho. One of their most popularly watched No. “Turn the Page” strengthens the foundational validity of the earlier notion. Here they present the pathetic conditions of a woman as revealed in her lives as a mother, strip dancer and sex worker. The Macho face of Lars Ulrich and the masculine tone of    James Hetfield turn out to be elegiac vignettes looking onto a canvas where the chiaroscuro of cruelty, violence, pathos, affection and helplessness are light/ly unfurled through a series of shades sliced off from the peripheral territories of the so-called “life”. Sometimes she affectionately embraces and smothers her daughter ...

Now I utilise this opportunity to exchange a token of gratitude with the “lost soul” of John Berryman who was introduced to me by Dr. C.B. Mohandas as one of the finest craziest poets who unreasonably quarrelled with Robert Lowell. As per my knowledge, he may be the only poet in those-his times who has sung of the epistemology of loss. He stresses on the irreplaceability or the impossibility of replacement. Once something is lost, it is lost forever. However, the trajectory of loss as being charted out in “The Ball Poem” is rather multi-directional. The lost object may remain with ourselves; for example, the childhood that is lost to us is still there sleeping within us unable to come out of crushing the branches and clutches of the adult. And another way the poem moves is that the desire for a lost object may be accruing from a sense and feeling of loss. When the ball is lost, we don’t feel it as being lost. Instead, we come to know of it as a lost object, only when we get enthralled ...

Salini is a collective of three poetic fragments anthologised in “Spandhikkunna Asthimadam” by Changampuzha Krishna Pillai. The arrangement of these poems itself is quite contrary to the notions of harmony, organic wholeness and chronological cohesion of modern norms of literariness. The date of composition of the first fragment is given as 20/11/1944, while that of the second one is 21-3-1935 and that of the final segment is 09-12-1944. As far as I am concerned the third fragment in the collective really celebrates and reveals the nature and function of a lover’s desire for union with his beloved. Hence, the speaker says that even death is no impediment to make union with his lover. He observes that his body is made of five elemental forces and a day will come when his heart stops beating so as to be put in its grave for the worms to sore or burnt for the watery ashes in the pyre. Even then, he will not cease from seeking out union with the beloved. After the funeral, the elemental...

For me the final couplet of the poem represents the most forceful critique of social desire ever written in English language. By social desire, I mean the drive, urge and will to reform and re-mould those who are labelled as damned and subordinated. Hill in the concluding stanza implies that God can have multiple meanings; it may stand for reason, both scientific and rational and at the same time it may connote the quite anti-thesis of reason. I hope his seemingly arrogant tone makes alignment with Gramsci’s rather infamous statement that all men are intellectuals. All people do have their own battery of resources; intellectual, moral, mental, perceptual and physical. Hence, no one needs a master or teacher to motivate those resources into utilitarian channels. Each and every individual whether his/her abode is a hut or a castle is adept in making useful allocation of those resources. All reformist agendas are games and those who have manifestly seen the manifest appearance of Hill’s l...

Most often, the Romantic Era is perceived by its critics and readers as a transition phase. The lines of this transition are usually emplotted somewhat around the in-between realms of feudalism and modernity politically, while in the domain of literary criticism its locale is firmly and fixedly rooted betwixt realism and modernism. Alas! With romanticism we are relieved of the realistic tyrannies of feudalism and feudal tyrannies of realism!!! There is a little bit of truth here. But at the same time this harbours innumerable loaves of ironies too. As far as I am concerned, romanticism is a transformational narrative rather than a transitional mode. That is why a romantic poet like Changampuzha Krishna Pillai harbours heterogeneous forms and contents of non-entity in his romantic vessel. On anchorage it sees and appreciates the beauty and terror of stasis and when it is put to motion in the sea we can never predict its wayward journeys.

Here I am planning to launch a series of notes and drafts towards an understanding of the meanings and processes of desire. By understanding, I simply mean avoiding definitions; definition  by nature is itself antithetical to the nature and function of desire; otherwise borrowing a much quoted phrase from Mayakovsky :"it is the quite antipode of" desire . The format of Malayalee thought-process being mediated via Pukasa   paradigm, it can never outdwell the castles and citadels of progress and reform. For a comprehension of desire one has to move beyond these territories and push oneself into the peripheries of huts and burrows of anti-developmental theories.   Initially I   propose to understand this miraculous zind   -phenomenon called desire through poetry: poems of Ilanko Adikal, Propetius,Catullus, Jalaludeen Rumi,   john clare, ginsberg, eliot, shelley,Ezra Pound...

Slavoj Zizek, the Yugoslav based psycho-analytic thinker is slowly becoming accepted as a sensitive-sensible defender-observer of Third World colonised territories. As a thinker and more as a writer I do have apt and due respect for him. But the common thread of his writing appears to me rather funny and to some extent evokes laughter. This thinker will start with describing the Real Politik forms and contents of the French Revolution with the aid of tools adopted from Kant, Fischte, Hegel and Schelling and in the very next passage he will jump onto the problematics of perspectives embodied in the vision of Strether in Henry James’ The Ambassadors and then he will present an anecdote gleaned from the off-screen peripheries of the battlefield of either First World War or the Second World War which will mostly be the story of sexual jealousy between hubby and his wife and most likely the protagonist will be a Jew!!! The fourth passage will talk about the dynamics of vision involved i...

Despite the Barthesian pronouncement of the ‘death of the author’ and the Foucaultian incision into the whatness of the author and the final dissolution of it into a multitudinous rubric of contingently indeterminate/determined historical elements, the ‘whoness’ or the author as being authorised, personalised and individuated continues to haunt or at least tends to make its re-incarnation through new garbs in the discussions on the nature and function of literature in Kerala. This I, provisionally, attribute to the clubbing of postist psychoanalysis with the moribund dialecticism of Kerala Marxism. However to start with it is to be highlighted that the practice, genre and institution of conceiving, imagining and “writing” literary words and worlds through the medium of aesthetic contemplation and mediation is yet to be acknowledged as a category of both technology and labour and at the same time, the accessibility to these two interrelated but autonomous domains also needs special...