Poetry and forms of thinking

Three days ago, friends, and relatives and well-wishers celebrated Gunadasa Amarasekera's eightieth birthday. There was a 'bodhi puja' at the Vajirarama temple. Over the past twelve months, there has been a continuous re-evaluation of Amarasekera's works, creative and critical, organised by the Amarasekara Pratyavalokanaya (Retrospect). I myself gave a number of lectures, and crafted some essays on his poetry, short stories and literary criticism. Today, I wish to focus on a topic that is scarcely discussed the intersection of poetry and thinking that animates Gunadasa Amaraekera's verse.

During the past few years, Gunadasa Amarasekera has frequently made the observation that one central deficiency in modern Sinhala poetry is the production of pseudo-philosophical poetry which is mistaken by critics for the genuine article. I agree with his judgment.

Writing philosophical poetry is extremely demanding; one cannot write moving and persuasive philosophical poetry if the thought behind the poem is trite and banal; it is neither philosophy nor poetry. It is only a poet like the German Friedrich Holderlin, Heidegger's privileged poet, who could successfully pull it off. However, although he displays no overt desire to write on philosophical themes, Amarasekera's own poetry illustrates very cogently how thinking and poetry could be productively combined to yield satisfying and consequential results.

Clearly, there is a difference between the way a philosopher goes about his business and the preferred pathway of a poet. Philosophers are the quintessential thinkers; they arrive at propositional statements through a chain of arguments, logical inductions and deductions.

The thinking associated with philosophical argumentation combines hypotheses, marshalling of evidence and assertion of rational conclusions. Many seem to think that other modes of apprehension such as intuition, rumination, beliefs do not rise to the level of thinking.

Sometimes, poets themselves have contributed to the de-valuing of thinking intrinsic to poetry. For example, W.B. Yeats, who has written some exemplary philosophical poems, downplayed the longevity of thought in poetry. He said that, things thought too long can be no longer thought.

Clearly, certain forms of thinking enter into poetry; the creative intelligence associated with poetry demands that we re-define thinking, make it a more elastic term, so as to include such mental processes such as intuition, meditation, ordering of symbols, generalizing from tropes and so on.

Even in successful poems that appear to be unforced and spontaneous, one discerns a certain play of thought. Literary critics, by and large, prefer to focus on the intuitive and expressive aspects of poetry at the cost of downplaying thinking. However, critics such as I.A. Richards, Northrop Frye, and William Empson have adopted strategies that go counter to this general trend.

It is in this connection that Gunadasa Amarasekera's poetry merits close study. There is an intense creative thinking animating his verse which at times shades into philosophical issues. For example, in 'Asakda Kava', the construction of the narrative discourse reflects a philosophical cast of mind. The idea of naming and proper names is central to the propulsion of the narrative. This is indeed a philosophical issue that has engaged the energies of thinkers from Plato to Saul Kripke. This is an issue vitally connected to topics such as reference, natural kinds, necessity and identity. Reacting against the old theory of reference, Kripke and others argue that ordinary proper names are rigid designators and not clusters of descriptions.

The way thinking that operates in Amarasekera's poetry can be productively understood by examining poems such as 'Mal Yahanavata Vadinna', 'Miyayana Mala' and 'Nijabima Avarajana'.

These are three of the finest poems written in modern times. In 'Mal Yahanavata Vadinna', one observes the process of thinking through symbols. The Buddhist symbol of the lotus dramatizes in the poem the conflict between carnal desire and transcendental purity. Without that conjunction of symbol and cognition, the poem would lose its creative power.

In 'Miyayana Mala', the poet ruminates on the mystery of the birth of love and the inevitability of its fading. There is a philosophical speculation on desire and time and futility that could be usefully extracted from the poem. In 'Nijabima Avarjana', we note how the poet has sought to think in images and think with images. The poem which begins with a concrete human situation in a class room develops into a meditation on the consequentiality of literary imagination.

In addition, many of Amarasekera's poems can be described as reprises in the sense that he re-visits the original situation or structure of emotion in an impulse for self-revision. The constant repetitions in his poetry are acts of re-thinking and re-contextualizing. Hence, any serious study of Amarasekera's poetry has to engage the thinking process that activates his imagination and underlines its verbal texture and organisation.

The way he turns thoughts into analogies and allegories, constructs juxtapositions, and identifies patterns in scattered sense impressions, explicates the visible by the hidden, searches out the nexus between the strange and the rational, in my judgment, rises to the level of thinking.

Part of Amarasekera's poetic thinking is reflected in his quest for order. He can tolerate uncertainty, but not disorder.