COMMENTARIES IV: The Ball Poem

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 to the gaming of desire of loss. Actually it is this desire of loss creates the lost object. Not vice versa.  

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