Reviewed by Dustin Pickering
The Forest I Know
By Kala Ramesh
Harpers Collins Publishers
Aug 2021, Paperback, ISBN: 978-93-5422-758-5
If philosophy is a language problem as anticipated by Wittgenstein, the poetry of Kala Ramesh is a vehicle for offering solutions. The East and West differ in their logic but this volume of tanka presents a cohesive thought process exploring strains of Eastern and Western philosophy. This form presents the perfect structure for such an exploration. For instance, tanka contains “a pivotal image, which marks the transition from the examination of an image to the examination of the personal response.” Ramesh uses the personal response segment effectively to explore duality and non-duality. However, this collection is not without humor which is both serious and teasing of life’s inordinate development. Language confusion is teased in “Hinglish”. Kala laughs at her inner confusion by representing it through monkeys. The humor is inviting and subtle, making reading the collection an enjoyable and witty experience.
The “forest” of the forest i know is essentially a metaphorical Zen forest where the poet learns life’s trust as well as its tedium. She humorously notes the many gurus along herpath and their lack of utility in her enlightenment. In Zen, a master is not necessary to experience satori, which is a sudden realization into the human experience. In this practice, the master pulls punches and jokes to encourage enlightenment. I read such insights in the “within or without” section:
from class one
to office stepladder
all I knew was graduation
and you talk of a sudden flash
— a satori?
Here modernity is ensconced within Zen philosophy. The guru is mocked but the mockery appears illumined by Ramesh’s journey in life. Her satori is the realization that there is no within or without even when there is within and without. Ramesh writes: “housebound/I draw a circle on paper/space appears/ within/and without”. Space is the grappling point of the poem. What does the boundary of the circle tell the poet? She is confined to her house yet also not. As reflected in the tanka page 93, scenes are “man-made masks.” These personal reflections are not confessional; they are profound experiences. The bottom tanka on page 10 might make the reader reflect on Einstein’s relativity: “on the verge/of recalling childhood/I dip into sleep/trying to make a straight line/curve into a circle”.
The imagery throughout illumines the nature of experience through this Eastern philosophy. The book is structured deliberately yet effortlessly in the manner of Maya, a word meaning “illusion” and signifying the cause of illusion. In Hinduism, Maya is the web of delusion preventing the Mind from experiencing non-duality. Perhaps the forest of the title is such a delusion. How does the author sort out this thread of existence in her poems?Michael McClintock writes in the Afterword, “There are dimensions that can be known only over time or in special circumstances. Kala Ramesh clearly implies they may never be known.”
The opening section is “Maya”, suggesting that the starting point of philosophy is questioning one’s illusions. She writes, “closely behind/an ox, she was once/the wheel/… now a bird/with wings to fly”.Symbolically, flight is taken as the moment the poet liberates her intellect and realizes the universe is a Zen riddle.In the haibun “A Dewdrop World” she concludes, “I am/what I make of dreams/a dewdrop/holds the moon”.This is her satori: the revelation in purity that the illusion is self-made through the intellect.
The tanka themselves pose their riddles characteristically. Literary artifice is essential to veiling essential truths. How does the poet accomplish this? Perhaps she does so through digression (page 74) in “The Rambler” where a discussion of the term with her daughter leads her to reflect on her memories. This is one of many poems that references jasmine, a flower that seems to be of singular importance to this body of work. It appears four times in the collection. Maybe Ramesh plays hide-and-seek with reality as does the Ganges with the Himalayas in the poem on page 73. Ramesh writes:
from glaciers
the melting Ganga
becomes
the waterness in water …
I take the holy dip
In this poem, the “holy dip” is construed as returning to the essence, i.e. waterness. The paralleling of images is superb!
The sections loosely correspond to stages of life while offering philosophical insight. Memories are inflected throughout butthefocus is maintained in meditations such as that on puberty in “pellets of desire”,and childhood in “backyard well”. This seamless distinction between sections recalls Reality as interconnected threads. The autobiographical Self is obscured within recurring images as if to question the nature of the Self. Curiously enough, the poem “Baggage” draws from Gertrude Stein’s poem “Sacred Emily”, particularly the phrase “Rose is a rose / is a rose is a…” found at the poem’s conclusion. This allusion suggests that the Self is what it is. The “baggage” is metaphorical for autobiography itself—one’s travails carried within the psyche.
What is it that defines the veil of Maya? How do we escape this pattern of delusion?If one considers “web” or “veil” of Maya metaphorically as consisting of knots that are carefully interconnected by strings, the structure of Ramesh’s collection comes to light. Each nostalgic moment is heightened by the similarities it bears to the others. They are referential, point by point, to pivotal moments of life. Art is said to imitate Nature. Ramesh writes on page 38:
how did I ever think
a flowing river would
always remain as one
Life’s never ceasing rhythm likewise remains “as one”.This poem even recalls Heraclitus who said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Life returns cyclically: “millions of eggs/in a female foetus …/the egg/my daughter releases/was made in my womb”. In these lines, rebirth is seen as symbolic and not literal. The bridge between Eastern and Western thought is built. The umbilical cord appears throughout the “Maya” section. This image reflects homecoming. Non-duality involves the perception that all is one in returning: “how old can ancient be …/the run of the umbilical cord”. Western logic puzzles on this point.
Interestingly, “Emptiness” also has a role. On page 56, Ramesh writes:
expecting
walls and rooms
to whisper stories
grandma used to tell
— the emptiness
days go by
when nothing moves
as I wish …
the crows
extra chatty today
These tanka (no plural – tankas) are especially complex. While paralleling the chatting crows with the stories told by her grandma, Ramesh implies “the emptiness”, or Sunyata, is reflected both in Nature and Life. The autobiographical Self is subsumed within stories told by grandma and the crows: the emptiness configures duality and non-duality alike. Thus, the primordial void from which all Nature emerges is both dualistic and non-dualistic! The confines of the law of non-contradiction are revealed! The nature of memory is also like Sunyata, like fingerprints in the tanka on page 108:
fingerprints
all over my poems …
the birds
in the sky leaveno trace
Tankas tell stories but Ramesh uses this form expertly to offer deep meditations. Her revelations are a singular phenomenon. The compact nature of the form makes the poet’s observations especially salient. Observations mesh with reflections which correspond to philosophical content. By the time I have read to the final section “Oneness” I am curious how the riddle is resolved. In “The Little Pawn” she writes, “my sunset years caught in an orb-weaver’s web the silver thread sways a single breath starts and ends from where to where?”
The poem ends with “I simply slip into / my beingness” implying that the riddle ends where it began: with being. Beingness is composed of incomplete being—the part contains the whole, but is not the whole. Indeed, in “The Unlearned” Ramesh writes:
incomplete beings
you and me
complete the city
the forest i know is deceptively simple on the surface but it tells more than stories; it invites readers on a journey of yearning, truth and dream construction.
About the reviewer: Dustin Pickering is founder of Transcendent Zero Press, publisher of the award nominated literary and arts journal Harbinger Asylum and is the author of Salt and Sorrow (Chitrangi Publishers, Kolkata, India), an exploration of Christian humanism in verse. He published A Matter of Degrees (Hawakal Publishers, Kolkata, India), a book on Platonism applied to aesthetics. He self-published The Daunting Ephemeral and The Future of Poetry is NOW: Bones Picking at Death’s Howl. His collection Knows No End (Hawakal Publishers) was briefly an Amazon bestseller. He published Frenetic/No Contest (Alien Buddha Press, USA), a book of ekphrastic poetry based on the art of Red Focks. He inspired the series “spurious conversations” published by Alien Buddha Press that included tribute writings to Charles Manson, Dolores O’Riordan, George Carlin, Stephen Hawkins, Muhammad Ali, and others. His collection The Alderman: spurious conversations with Jim Morrison was published by Alien Buddha Press. He is a critic, reviewer, essayist, visual artist, and a former contributor to Huffington Post.