I touch my nephew’s forehead from time to time, to check whether his fever’s gone. I say ‘gone’, though in Bangla I use the word for ‘left’ — whether the fever has left him. When it does, both of us know: He longs to get out of the blanket and play; I know because the thermometer tells me. Our knowledge systems are different. Our questions too. Mine is prosaic, almost ready-made, asking whether he’s feeling better. His is investigative, but poetic: “Will it return?” he asks about the fever. I tell him it won’t, though I know it will — it is the nature of fever to return. He probably senses that, and so he requests: “Isn’t it possible to send fever back to where it came from and lock it there?”

This urge of the seven-year-old is not completely unfamiliar. The urge not just to return, but to undo, might be an ancient one, but it is only in our time that we have access to technology that makes some of it possible. It’s in our phones, of course — unfriend, unlike, undo and so on — and, before that, in versions of the ‘rewind’ button on cassette players. All of this seems like a challenge to Shakespeare’s “What is done cannot be undone”, even if in a semi-comic way, but what links all these desires is perhaps the urge to return to the origin, some version of a prelapsarian state.

There is great violence in the urge. Let us imagine a few examples: A fully-grown animal forced to return to the foetal stage, or perhaps to a state of pre-existence; a clay pot crushed for the finished product to return to raw material; a work of art returned to a blank canvas; a city turned into a village; continents rid of settlers, and so on. Even if we let our imagination pursue the thought, we are aware that what we shall have will not be the ‘purity’ of the ‘original’ state but a brutal approximation, a parodic and distorted approximation.

And yet, such an urge is urgent and inevitable given the world we find ourselves in: Will we ever be able to see a blue sky again, breathe better air, drink uncontaminated water, will potatoes and poultry taste the way they did once? We hear the words so frequently that they’ve lost their sting — ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ have neither the elegance of memorable coinages nor the sting of fear. How are we to imagine a world that is the obverse of the one we once thought was permanent and unchanging? The American poet WS Merwin’s philosophy of return was of undoing, and so in his book Unchopping a Tree , he tried to show us how it was possible to put a tree back together from its pieces, and yet how such an assemblage wouldn’t bring it to life.

The Indian poet Adil Jussawalla’s new poem Earthrise asks us to imagine Earth as a new planet — new because it is now almost completely unfamiliar (a changed world in which Kalidasa wouldn’t have been able to write about clouds just as we are unable to say “Open the windows — let fresh air in”). It’s a fantastic — in the original sense of the word ‘fantasy’, too — imagining, of everything being the opposite of what we once knew as constant. And so ‘Earthrise’, to replace ‘sunrise’ or ‘moonrise’ — in this new ‘Eaarth’, to use environmentalist and author Bill McKibben’s term for this ‘altered’ world, everything has been displaced, and their behaviour too.

Water the fish in her mansion of oil.

Air the bird in her palace of sand.

Pull out the seed from under his mountain

to earth him elsewhere; try and save him.

Fire with rage the mighty falls

that led to rivers, their torrents, their caves.

We cannot unturn Earth on her axis

spinning us out of her sight in anger.

Jussawalla’s philosophy of ‘un’, the process of reversing the crimes committed on the Earth, besides being poetic and moving, is interesting also because of how he subverts the ready-made associations of gender: Using the male pronoun for seeds, for instance. The inversions — and displacements — as in the fish in ‘her mansion of oil’ instead of water, the bird in ‘her palace of sand’ instead of air, fire leading to rivers, and so on, reminded me of the topsy-turvy world of Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol except that the comic tone of that world, imagined a little more than a century ago, has been replaced by the tragedy of the world we inhabit today. Jussawalla’s use of ‘mansion’ and ‘palace’ is not innocent — besides being an indictment of the relationship between capitalism and the erosion of the environment, these are reminders of how our attachment to the glamour of materialism has made us indifferent to the life of the Earth. This is the new apocalypse: ‘Earthrise’ is the Earth’s uprising.

Jussawalla asks the most urgent question: Are we prepared to ‘unturn Earth’, to un-criminalise our ways of living, then?

BLINKSUMANA
 

 

Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became A Tree;

Twitter: @SumanaSiliguri

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