Anjolie Ela Menon/Window/Oil on Masonite/23”x15”/1988
Riyaz Latif
A Preface
These musings below on red-breasted rosy starlings have no purpose at all. They do not offer a piercing commentary on things, do not become a source that waters our wilted conscience, do not unleash a jagged voice of resistance against the socio-political improprieties of our times. They do not rouse us into taking one position or the other, do not inform, do not inspire…Seated next to a window in an architect friend’s seventh-storey office in Ahmedabad many years ago, when the river Sabarmati still very organically bared its cracked, parched soul to the city, before it was turned into a manicured stream bound by stern concrete promenades under the Albert Speer-like despotic vision of the powers that be, I was agreeably drawn into spotting abundant swarms of rosy starlings, assiduously enacting their aerodynamic antics over the tree-tops. The tiny essay that you are about to read (or not) is nothing more than a reflective artefact of that experience…Maybe, I ought to have written about something more purposeful and pressing: lamented the charred world that we inhabit, decried the coarse leaders of my nation-state who have chauvinistically begun to shove everything – ideas, thought, freedom, dissent, and even state institutions – into a dystopic totalitarian orbit. Maybe, I ought to have called out my fellowmen, most of whom are complicit in sanctioning the increasingly fascist tenor of leaders they have so vehemently raised to the helm of our lives, raised my voice against state-sponsored violence and targeting of an already decimated religious minority, one which ironically bears onerous responsibility in undoing its own self over several decades…The inventory of my angst is substantial. But deep down, I am not wired to write, react and resound in a meaningful impactful manner against the indecencies of my world; I unwittingly take refuge in a seething silence. I take refuge in writing about little things that have stopped mattering to us in this morass of fetid social, religious and political personas that we have so eagerly and unthinkingly donned. And thus, this essay on red-breasted rosy starlings sketching the skies in unison – for this is my escape, and confounding as it may sound, also my retribution.
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T
he red-breasted rosy starlings always arrive in unison. You appropriate a spot contiguous to the window, calibrate your vision to take in the vista that unfurls before you (albeit, framed by the window), and watch them descend onto the tree-tops, underneath your line of sight, below the stratum that you inhabit: the window-frame that borders and delineates your vision offers you a bird’s eye view of these birds.
By all means, the eye is fated to register much more than the cascading arrival of the red breasted rosy starlings. Your cone of vision is insuppressibly indeterminate; it has an appetite to revel in a radiating boundlessness. The window-frame, however, reins you to its sanitized geometry; it makes a subdued overture to contain your retinal vagaries. But from the window frame, if you unfold your vision in a reasonably linear manner, the green tree-tops give way to the dusty river-bed, fragmented, entwined in the rusty leaves of the trees which precede it. If you are enterprising enough to unfold your vision further, the visual linearity stretches to the sun beaten chimera of the hyperreal, the slum settlement on the other bank of the river. In turn, this very real apparition, in the self-same indifferent progression as your vision, rises up to metamorphose into degenerate concrete cuboids perversely masquerading as built forms, ensnares itself into the great receptors of the information-age – disc antennas – and finally surrenders to an ill-conceived horizon. It is an urban dystopia which you are complicit in creating; it is the one that gives visage to the most vulgar distortions of your soul…But such is the fate of vision and the frame: hand in hand, they are unwittingly induced to chisel panoramas of disenchantment.
So now, you gently enact a creative withdrawal; you begin to roll the vision back to the river-bed, a dissonant symphony of circling sands. The sands are a phantasm, occasionally rising up to embrace the circus-tents rooted to their parched shifting configurations. The hues of their reciprocal redundancy complement each other. In the circus on the river-bed, your pathological disinterest in the acrobat’s swirls is directly proportional to the absence of water in the river. An enervated elephant loiters around, its majestic ebony form absorbing the complacency of the river- sands in which it camps. In all its physiological unworldliness, it attempts a communion with the sands of the river. Disparities intertwine: the circus-tent, the elephant, and the sands configure a singular chimeric countenance, and you, the viewer, flee this incongruity by rolling the vision further back into your eye. Only the burning air flapping through washed clothes lined up to dry on the river-edge tries to impart a semblance of sobriety to your flaming vision. Again, this is the fate of the frame: it shapes the hushed, scorching absurdity of the cracked river-bed into languid visual relationships.
The creative withdrawal continues: you retract your vision to the tree-tops just outside the window-frame. In keeping with this whole emasculated game, all you get is the stillness of the dusty green vegetation awaiting the red- breasted rosy starlings. But if you disinherit the autocracy of seeing with eyes, you manage to break the specter of insipidity; you set the verdant stage for the arrival of the winged legions.
Baring their red breasts, the rosy starlings arrive in unison. You must blur your vision by a fraction to receive this fluttering arrival, a swooping display of masterly synchronism. Only then, a dream might lift you and project you into the fervent space of the winged formation. Constantly changing their collective form, the rosy starlings vanish into the tree-tops. There is a fractional interlude of a breath, and they rise up again, soar into the skies, their flowing cacophonous outlines engraving overlapping red trajectories in your eyes.
Fortunately, the frenzied exuberance of red trajectories does not confound you. Inaugurating their flight as a line, the red-breasted birds extend laterally to become a plane. Deceiving the dictates of its geometry, the plane becomes an organic formation, a spectacle of ever-changing evanescent outlines – a flapping legion making and breaking the skies in their fervent arcs. In a series of ephemeral enactments, the red-breasted rosy starlings emerge, sketch the skies, rearrange themselves, and are summarily absorbed in the leafy spread of the tree-tops. The sweeping arcs of the rosy starlings undulate in your eyes; they are parabolic pathways pregnant with a fluid anarchy of their collective arrivals and departures.
Please recall; you have implanted your eyes into the effervescent motions of the birds who act as one being – a red, diving, arcing, supersonic formation shaped by an ingenious anatomical as well as aerodynamic suppleness. It is the geometry of aviation which has attained social overtones; mechanics of flight which have acquired a long-lost poetic heartbeat. Birds, when they fly in a formation, thrive on the entire organism’s collective energy. Distances are condensed, energy is conserved, and a symbiotic telepathic communication circulates within the flapping organism. The rustling, fragile contours of the red-breasted rosy starlings as a formation signify the visual stratum of a refined telepathic communion. Their arced trajectories and their absorption into the leafy cover of the tree-tops is a primal social gesture, a celebration of symmetry, of symbiotic triumph. So, delimited to the window-frame, you invoke Rilke at this juncture:
Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.
But again, all frames are notoriously indeterminate. Bounded by their own transitory borders, they triangulate futile distances between birds, trees, sands, and the eye to provide you with static latitudes by the window. You move fractionally, and they perish in the almost imperceptible delicacy of the gesture.
So, you must retract your vision fully back into the eye. For this is the fate of the frame: red-breasted rosy starlings, leafy tree-tops, sands, shores, and the dystopic phantasms in concrete that inhabit your visual experience, when stripped of their mythical valence, are nothing but a nexus between your eyelids, cornea, pupil, and retina. And at some juncture, you must relinquish the play of the eyes.
Notes
Rainer Maria Rilke, “The First Duino Elegy,” in Selected Poetry, translated by Stephen Mitchell, Picador Classics,
1987, p. 151.
Riyaz Latif holds a doctoral degree in art history with a primary concentration on premodern Maghrib (North Africa), and the Mediterranean basin. After a postdoctoral fellowship with the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the MIT, he taught at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, USA. After his return to India in the summer of 2017, he has been working as an independent scholar, and will join the faculty of FLAME University near Pune as associate professor of art history.
He emerged as a noteworthy voice in Urdu poetry during the last decade of the twentieth century, and his poems have been published in reputed Urdu literary journals of India & Pakistan. Along with two collections of Urdu poetry, Hindasa Be-Khwaab Raton Ka (2006) and ‘Adam Taraash (2016), as well as a book of translations into Urdu from European poetry, titled Mera Khoya Awazah (2014), he has published a number of articles, and has translated Urdu poetry and prose into English, most of which can be found in the Annual of Urdu Studies. His works in progress – academic essays, personal reflections, poems, translations – center on composite dimensions of literature and culture, as well as art and architectural history. His book manuscript, titled Ornate Visions of Knowledge and Power: the Formation of Marinid Madrasas in Maghrib al-Aqsa, is under review for publication.
Beautiful essay. Lilting prose. Evokes a wonderful mindscape. Thank you, Riyaz.
A terrific essay that leaves us with a renewed appreciation of what really matters. With unhesitating poetic confidence, the Preface clears the space with not this, not this, not this to take the reader towards the window for a real encounter.