To every weary traveller, there is an oasis.
But it is only found when the desert swims
And his eyes are filled with water.
This is an excerpt from an incomplete epic poem, which I long abandoned. About a year back, I wrote a poem spanning several cantos about a man who sets out in the Namibian desert to seek an abandoned tower. At the start of this project, motivation alone helped me write a large chunk of the poem with great speed. I had a strong image in my mind of the character struggling to find something so small in the vast expanse of desert.
After a few writing sessions, however, I realized that motivation alone could not sustain such a long project. I needed to write without scrutinizing; I needed to write without editing, at least till I finished half the poem. It didn’t turn out the way I wanted. It was a huge pile of words struggling to remain true to the man’s experience. I didn’t have enough patience to accept that my writing was weak. I needed to cut a lot of philosophical, grand words that weakened the character’s feelings. Then, motivation died, and my text editor showed red lines under the words. I left the poem unedited and unpublished. The Word file remained untouched for a year.
Yesterday I opened the same Word file titled “canto1.” When I double-clicked it, even though I didn’t get the same feeling you get when you open an old book, dust the covers, and smell the dying pages, the first words I read transported me back to when I felt proud of writing such a long poem.
I read the first two lines, and surprisingly, I wasn’t embarrassed. There was vision in it, for sure; only the writing didn’t support it. Even now, I wish to complete it, maybe alter the story a bit, change a few descriptions here and there, and make the character less “cosmically aware” and more down-to-earth, literally.
In the sixth canto, I stumbled across these lines; I state them again:
To every weary traveller, there is an oasis.
But it is only found when the desert swims.
And his eyes are filled with water.
These three lines were strange enough, even though I knew the context, that I thought, Why not write an article about interpreting what it means? In an hour, when I was taking my evening walk, the idea expanded into a general statement—a personal dictum of sorts.
I should analyse my own poems. Who knows what It would mean now?
“Who knows what it would mean now?” refers not only to the present time, after writing the poem, but also to the state of being, apart from that original feeling that I had towards the work when I first wrote it. I remember it in context but not in feeling. The original feeling has disappeared; perhaps on that day, in the late night, it quietly stepped out of my mind. There is no chance I can recall it after a year, now that I myself have changed. I have become a reader, and so why not analyse my own poems?
Maybe there is a way to retrieve this feeling. At least, according to Marcel Proust, memories in some way could be retrieved. He says:
“And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.”
It would prove futile indeed, with intellect, to recollect the feeling of those three lines. I have no sensory stimulus attached to that moment in time when I wrote them. I have no guiding hands. If there is any material object, it is beyond any sensation. Therefore, until the time comes when, involuntarily, I would encounter that feeling, I should remain a reader. I should analyse my poems, and through that, I should perhaps discover new feelings, even though those feelings are fleeting.
Check out my poetry collection here: Poetry