Dreams That Spell the Light Review

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Dreams That Spell the Light ReviewThe poems in Shanta Acharya's most recent, deeply probing book, Dreams That Spell The Light, delayed in publication, largely precede her masterful Shringara and show the development of her wrestling with issues of responsibility, meaning, divinity and spiritual exploration which culminate in that work.
In the poem Somewhere, Something, she wonders "Surely there is somewhere, something/that justifies our coming and going?"
The question puts her in the middle of the argument we have been having with ourselves since Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God. Some affirm his presence, others that without him anything goes. Central to both approaches is the idea that any meaning and value system must be tied to some transcendental reality, or fail. Acharya offers a fresh way to affirm value and meaning without the usual supports.
Acharya possesses a naturalness and ease of voice that cloaks her sophistication, and in part the depth of her project. Unconstrained by the narrow constraints of modernism, or its after-effects that like a hangover still afflict much contemporary verse, she can sound at times discursive, and startle with the freedom with which she speaks her mind. The poems frequently display striking imagery as well, whether a woman on the Underground in Easter Message "...embracing large bundles of carrier/bags like dead infants in her arms", or natural imagery like "The sycamores with their manicured branches/reach for the sky like a drowning man's hands" in The Trees of Nanjing. Her rare ability to write a humorous poem should not be overlooked either, as she skewers an online dating experience in [...].
The initial part of Dreams That Spell The Light casts a cool eye on traditional approaches to faith, as Acharya struggles to find a sense of the divine in an opulent Renaissance church in Rome (Italian Prayer), has better luck in the Mosque of Wazir Khan (in Lahore, Pakistan) though is struck by its modern neglect, finds only surfaces in The Trees of Nanjin, or in the spectacle of the Grand Canal, that evokes the "foetal deaths of daughters". The Great Wall of China hides the sufferings of those who built it under the throngs of tourists, any divine presence notable only by its indifference: "Time sits on its haunches, Laughing Buddha;/indifferent the lofty ranges of soul mountains."
Little solace is found in Kandy Perahera: Ceylon leaves the impression of "...young men hanged in a land festering like gangrene," while the sights in Postcard From St. Petersburg evoke the sense of a "...paradise built on bones and spilled blood." We only dream of ourselves as "...elegant black swans, in full flight" (Black Swans).
However, unlike the anguished writing of Unamuno, or in Britain of RS Thomas, Acharya draws on other approaches to deal with our Western sense of missing divinity and meaning. Dreams That Spell The Light often has an unexpected celebratory feel as a consequence. In Aspects of Westonbirt Arboretum the ability not to identify with but wholly attend to Nature allows one to "...be one with the universe, free." In A Place For All Seasons, a moment of natural transcendence lets Acharya feel "I flow with the light as it curves around the globe." Brilliantly in Highgate Woods she reshapes Descartes "cogito, ergo sum" into "est, ergo cogito": It is (whatever it is), therefore I think: we are roused by the fact of being, dangerous or beautiful. Nor are we the isolated and unique `selves' we so often think: instead "We are what others make of us--/ pearls in a necklace, resplendent in company (author's italics). Being not only is, it shapes.
The sheer beauty of being is there, if we have eyes to see it, and redemptive, despite all the ugliness, menace, and loss that can afflict us. In fact, in Communion she imagines God lamenting that we can't get his messages, his "his infinite ways of reaching out to you daily/through innumerable acts of kindness." He adds
Do you not notice miracles in the seasons,
in the sun and the moon moving in their circles,
in every blade of grass shuddering in the wind;
can you not feel my love for all creation?
It, a late addition to the collection more recent than anything in Shringara, tries to evoke a sense of this broader, basic reality, which finds, however indefinable, the "earth a mirror for what cannot be seen".
It is no accident Acharya, familiar with Hindu philosophy, wrote a book on Emerson who saw God through the world. Theirs is not a perception of nature as something to be worshipped, but as the outward sign of a greater power, whatever it is, however amoral by our standards, that can only be known through its effects. How then, perceiving this, should we live?
The Sundarbans, referring to an area of fertile islands in a mangrove forest spilling over an immense area in the holy Ganges delta into part of Bangladesh, offers a utopian answer. It is not a place Acharya has visited, unlike many of the other places in this book that provide the stepping stones of her spiritual quest, so her imagination is unconstrained.
She imagines it a land of dream and sandbar, tiger, and dispossessed men, a place where the sea and land meet without canceling each other out-- in short, the edge of mystery (Part I); in Part II, she imagines settlers who "race ahead unafraid of their destiny" though "All migrations leave scars." In Part III a sated tiger watches children play in the mangroves, "...swinging like strange fruit". Killing is not forsworn but withheld for one, Edenic night. In Part IV the monsoons transform the fields that fill with wildlife, and men "...follow the fabulous otters flushing/out shoals of fish", an activity not for the "faint-hearted", but hungry. Finally, in Part V the "womb of the Ganges lies dry and empty" and life, in response, takes on other burdens, and other festivities. Should the natural cycle of balance, courage, life, death, fail "no man will be fit to take the measure of another."
The Sundarbans are our mirror image: our loss of meaning and sense of divinity flow from our loss of natural rhythm, balance, and mystery. But there is no escaping our ever-accelerating, disruptive, disorienting industrial-technological revolution. What are we to do then here, now? "Placed as I am," Acharya writes in Transit of Venus, and speaking through Venus' mask,
...there is no option
no choice to figure out what goes on
in the universe except what I have been
chosen to bring to the party--
laughter, music, dance, pleasure, poetry...
This anticipates Shringara, a book I recommend the reader explore to follow the further development of these themes by this fine poet.Dreams That Spell the Light Overview

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