When, why and how do we feel bewildered? What are the forces that conspire wonder? The idea of strangeness and its perpetuating essence in our lives is something that kickstarted my writing journey few years back and continues to be a cornerstone for any earnest endeavors in my poetry. On a bus ride in Bangalore after years, I hear someone seated behind me remarking with a sigh, what a lazy laptop, it gets stuck all the time. For a moment, it is hilarious (like what!), and then turns fascinating immediately when I recollect that phrase in solitude. A lazy laptop — personification in casual speech, in broad daylight, on public transport, out of nowhere! Of course all our laptops and phones turn whimsical after wear and tear through the course of their electronic lives, so why shouldn’t they feel lazy once in a while? And this is where strange images jolt us into life. They de-familiarize what had become ordinary to our tired eyes, in the process rejuvenating our vision itself. Not to mention the close association of wonder to humility. Because of the possibilities they open up, two words arbitrarily coming together create a fusion of sorts, making a new world where none existed before. Like when a friend calls a few days after a party and says — “Dude, I don’t know where I fell that night, but now I have such an angry wound on my knee, it’s not healing fast at all.” At first, such a statement is met with the silence of recognition, even confoundedness. And what happens then? Conversation, confluence, catalysis? 

Perhaps.

As an example, in Robert Hass’s deeply memorable poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas”, I’m struck by a dissolving philosophy of images, and how they critically transfer intensities of time to the reader, these instruments of the ineffable enabling the experience of desire and longing. A central image used is that of a blackberry. I find this image inexplicably binds me to the pleasure I receive while reading this poem (even appearing in one of my dreams once!). Or consider Chen Chen’s first two lines in “Self Portrait as So Much Potential”: “Dreaming of one day being as fearless as a mango. /As friendly as a tomato.” Reading the poem, I think about fruits in a parallel universe living their lives beyond our devouring of them, evolving their own textures in the wilderness of flavor and ripening to eventually become full-bodied characters. 

Some of these ideas of the image as a vehicle for accelerating the vulnerable in us while rooting our hearts to the uncertainty of the world acted as an inspiration for the following poems. Time on the earth is made of minutes and seconds, years and months. But the limited time of our lives here, the writing of this work seem to convey to me in retrospection, is animated with what shapes the infinitude of memory and feeling — the exceptionality of images.