The Lake, The Fisherman, and The Poet

A writer, who was also a philosopher, had to cross a big lake in order to get to his destination.

As he waited for the ferryman, he read his notes from his lecture from the day before.

During the lecture, a young man stood up and asserted firmly: “The poetry I know are verses and rimes from other times. We have been forced to read and learn them by heart, as the standards of literary good taste in style. Personally, I don’t see any interest in poetry!”

His tone of voice was so convincing that Tagore felt that many of his listeners agreed with the young man.

There was little time to think of a good retort. Our lecturer recited one of his own poems, stressing very expressively certain words in order to fully regain the attention of his listeners:

“With a lute, the beggar’s song for you and me

Out of tune, gray, high winds playing eons

Sowing pauses and sighs

His melody adheres as to absorb your soul and mine

We may have borrowed one image or two from other childhoods

That is why you called a mysterious sound

A beggar’s song.”

He explained quickly: “I wrote that poem a very long time ago. I remember what had inspired it. I was visiting a certain city in the North. I met a young man who came from very far away. He lived in the streets, as he came to India to encounter a guru or some type of exotic wisdom. When I saw him, he did not have much left. He would sing for food in his native language. It looked as if the sun had taken hold of his mind (or was it some deity?)

One day, he traveled by foot to the suburbs; it was a day of great storms. He was singing as if the weather was sunny and dry, hardly noticing that the streets were empty of passersby.

Twelve years after I wrote that poem, a woman came to see me. She knew that “Beggar’s Song Poem” by heart.

She commented enthusiastically: “From the first time I heard it, your poem moved me deeply. It touched me to the chore. I could have written it, to express so vividly how a simple, nostalgic image or sound is connected to a mysterious source springing from deep inside. It is Shiva’s Dance, but seen in our human, pathetic scale. You were truly painting Shiva’s Dance, weren’t you?”

I stuttered vaguely an answer. Actually, she was so enthralled by her own interpretation, that she hardly heard me.

Let’s think of what had happened. Her interpretation of my poem was somewhat different from the emotion that inspired me, initially. In a sense, hers was less literal, more spiritual. It was altogether a new version of my poem, as if she had taken words and images, reassembling them to make a new poem. That lady had in a sense re-created a poem.

To answer your question, a poem is not a fixed structure. A reader is not a passive element in the poetical process. He reinvents in himself an emotion.      At times, it happens to be exactly the one that the poet had in mind, in the first place.              At times, as in the case I just related, it is altogether a different work.”

The lecturer looked at the young man. In spite of his eloquent example (so he thought), he had not succeeded to convince him.

As our poet and philosopher was thinking of that evening with mixed feelings, the ferryman arrived. He was a talkative fisherman who had an old boat to carry passengers now and then.

“What is your occupation?”

Our hero answered: “I teach comparative literature and I write.”

“What do you write about?”

“Let’s see. Once, I wrote a love poem. But I wanted the reader not to know whether I am talking about two lovers or about a soul searching for the Lord. I give lectures on poetry and mysticism.”

“Ah?”

The man did not ask to hear an example of his poetry. He preferred to speak of his own position in his village…

While unloading some boxes, the sailor said to the author with a shrug: “Mysticism, uh? I have my opinion about it. It is a waste of time. Reality is what we have, pal. Look!”

The man had a gesture, maybe toward the dry hills at the horizon, the muddy, dirty banks of the lake, the scorching air buzzing with insects...

“There is nothing else. We respect the seasons, do the best we can to survive. Away from the cities, we know that. No need to write about it.”

The scholar could not talk about what usually inspired him: beauty and ideas, intuitions about our grand human nature.

The day was really uncomfortably hot, and the man was struggling to finish loading his boat.

Not only explaining concepts somewhat abstract to this man did not seem very timely, but his skeptical arguments resonated like an echo of the criticism of the student, the day before.

Our intellectual felt suddenly very tired.

He sighed to himself: “How can we ever share our vision of poetry and beauty?”

At that point, he may have felt at a loss, perhaps even slightly doubtful, not only about his goal (communicating a wondrous vision of the world) but about his own past feeling of wonderment.

His guide had started his engine. He was not only of the talkative type, he also loved to complain - about the hot season, the world economy as he saw it, the fear of a certain disease and the bad manners of the youth.

His passenger just grunted now and then to show he was listening. He looked around: the water and the sky seemed made of sterile blue lava. He shook his head: that was not an image to be woven later in a poem, but the stifling feeling that overwhelmed him. 

And then, suddenly, from the depth of the lake a humongous fish jumped high in the air.

Both men looked up, and the rays of the sun met the colorful scales of the fish. The reflection seemed like an explosion, a firework of blinding colors. The instant before, everything was metallic blue. The creature from the lake triggered a symphony of yellow and green, and red, and purple.

It splashed a few refreshing crystalline drops to the boat while disappearing.

All the doubts that had accumulated in our poet’s heart were erased at once by this divine vision, a message from all of nature to a confused soul.

He shouted with excitement and joy: “Have you seen it, my brother?”

“You bet! I am so bummed out!”

“Why?”

“If I only had my fishing net ready, I would have had the best dinner of the month!”

The moral of the story seems to be that we are all fishermen, indeed: we need to work and feed ourselves and others…

But let us also be the poet and the philosopher who interrogates the world, for the world to be able to answer.