ON THE DEATH OF MY POETRY PROFESSOR
IN MEMORIAM TO A MUSIC THAT FLED
Vignette: The evening hue of the Lawrence Garden slips on his image as he sits, inside the frame, slightly hunched to the left in an uneasy chair. He’s dressed in his jeans and a grey warm upper, holding a thick hallowed volume of the Complete Works of Shakespeare. A cigarette, almost cursing mortality, dangles from his fingers. He looks with an interested ease on the page — I’m tempted to think it’s the Sonnets he’s reading. Because he suddenly says it has been his wish to teach Shakespeare before he dies.
Professor Anjum Nisar, my professor extraordinaire, had reached a point in his sagacious life where he must have thought, taking Dylan Thomas’s words as my guide, that our words fork no more lightening in our world. And in a Yeatsian predicament countries close around old men compelling them to set sail for Byzantium — I’m certain the professor has reached his at last. Perhaps that was why his feelings bled into its recitals when he taught us poetry. His conviction to life that reflected in his connection to literature–sometimes bordered on cynicism –was his rage against the dying of his light.
As I write these lines, I’m gripped by a feeling of transience shared strongly too by Rainer Maria Rilke when he promenaded with the great Sigmund Freud on a summer walk in a Viennese countryside. Freud would later reminisce, as I do now, on why one desires more of life (and pledges sadness as a response to death) in certain episodes in intimacy. But Freud never understood Rilke’s pain. Maybe I too will never know, but could only feel what the poet was feeling. In all my rendezvouses with the professor I felt the same unbearable burden of transience for him. Perhaps unsure to take life as a chance encounter with mortality, I always captured his photos, recorded his voice, his life, harkening to the Keatsian dictum to life of ‘permanence in art’ as an antidote to the time escaping in conversation with mortality. I wonder Keats’ heart must have throbbed in his majestic Ode when he celebrated the otherwise temporal lovers meeting under the shade of a tree. Only immortalized when sketched on the urn because their evolution into art, into stillness, into permanence, could save their transient intimacy — and our fleeting intimacy with the professor too in our memories, for days immortal.
I reminisce my 2018 midwinters when the professor came to teach us John Donne and rescued my broken heart –a result of unromantic tryst with life –with his poetic wizardry. His words, fermented like old wine, on years of ‘more life’, as Harold Bloom reflects on literature’s essence, were not unequal to what Keats call as flying on the ‘viewless wings of poesy’. His insights, his cross-civilizational allusions sometimes to Waris Shah’s Heer and Homer’s Odyssey — a synthesis of the Orient and Occident traditions ‘fillest me with fresh life,’ from Tagore’s Gitanjali. Sometimes now when I set out to teach a new semester, I feel compelled to think that the professor was a person of double life. He sought in his disciples a heart and passion to feel what the world could not, and he felt it with us with renewed ecstacy: a parting of Heer with Ranjha or the Odysseus’s ordeals to reach in the arms of his beloved Penelope.
As I’m reading Harold Bloom’s memoir called Possessed by Memory these days, I keep meditating on the company of literature in old age. Bloom’s book is a treatise to his romances with literature at the close of his life. He recalls reading Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley and more to seek refuge in them from sleepless nights and easy heartbreaks. I’m instantly drawn to a discussion we once had with the professor. It was customary for my two good friends Zeeshan and Safdar and I to visit the professor almost every change of season. Once on an autumn evening, at his place, as he sat carefree and attentive like a sage, Zeeshan asked him to tell us about his latest romances with literature in his grey years. He laughed. O how he laughed! His cough-stricken, uneasy laughter. Weighing the words midair he said: “Oye Chaddo [in Punjabi], my tongue remains dry these days.” He said, “I don’t read literature much. But I read only to wet my tongue.” Our response, as always, was a big “Wah!” to whatever he said, shared by a deep contemplation because it took us weeks to digest his sentences that he said with such prophetic ease. Perhaps his responses were his offering to Eliot who regarded poetry to instruct before revealing its true meaning. Listening to this, my naivete pressed me hard to turn grey instantly, just to be like him.
His departure has made me revisit the lecture notes from his poetry lessons. I have a leather-bound diary from my undergraduate years when he taught us. I’ve saved that for life. And why not? I open it now before me. Something in me trembles. I’m unable to reconcile memory with wakefulness. I leaf through the yellow-turned pages with nostalgic unease and there he is! His heavy voice spreads through the room. The poet being discussed is John Keats, his most favourite next to Yeats and Frost. The poem: Ode to Nightingale. I remember I jotted down the following lines in a fit of religious reverence not knowing how soon I will need them more than ever. The professor said these lines with a touch of the tragic in his voice:
Song is of permanent value. Nightingale will die, but the song will remain. How you leave the world is important. You leave with memories that continue to grant life to others.
After that storm, there is a quiet silence, which prevails everywhere.
Among the two generations of his disciples — including many of my teachers, and us — would have to contemplate on a question the professor has left us with. Like Keats, towards the end of his prophecy-poem, as he remained spellbound to fathom the vitality of the nightingale’s song, we too share the bard’s eternal anguish with our beloved professor: In his matchless words I end:
“Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: — Do I wake or sleep?”
