This free verse of Demetrios Trifiatis—a ‘friend of wisdom’—penned on 19 January 2021 captures my feelings of desolation and remorse right through the first and second waves of Covid-19.
“Distressful Afflictive Merciless Unbearable solitude, When you are present, Time immobile remains, And Each second an eternity of intolerable Suffering becomes. At such moments, We implore Time to advance, To accelerate its pace, To hurry up For The next second The next minute The next hour The next day to come, So as The pain to decrease, Our agony to lessen, And us to be liberated from distress, From our affliction and from Our ordeal But Time – a sadist- unmoved stays, Mocking us And Instead of picking up speed, it is Dragging its leaden feet, enjoying thus itself With Our perpetual torture, Hence, we, Disappointed by Time's unhurried stance, Absorbed by its immobility, Let ourselves sink deeper and deeper into our hopelessness, Till we reach the deepest point of Our being, A place void of all thoughts, Of absolute silence and of intense Anguish! At that point We wish: To shout To scream To yell To howl But No voice is possible to be heard. No-one is there to listen to our call of distress. And then In the darkest hour of solitude, At the culminating point of desolation, When we thought all is lost, we realize to our surprise that We are not alone, WE WERE NEVER ALONE! A tenant is there with us, A tenant, beyond the limits of ourselves, Of our understanding, Of our awareness, A tenant who looks at us with affection With compassion and most of all With love, Unconditional love, True Love, Yes, it is HIM The only ONE HE who was there before us And Will be here into eternity After we are gone: GOD HIMSELF! We look at His Holy visage, and we discern an Apologetic expression for Having put us through this tribulation to be able to make HIS presence to us, known! He had tried before to approach us on many occasions, During the period of our good fortune, Of our successes and our achievements But We had ignored HIS calls at that time, You see, we didn’t need any help then, For We thought every achievement of ours Was our doing We had the erroneous notion that Everything was under our firm control And that We were INVINCIBLE But Now we know better for He has Revealed to us the truth!”
Desolation poetry like this apart, which, for example, you can savour on the poetrysoup.com, I am also hit by the restless, social-reformist prose of the compulsive walker and poetic wanderer in Charles Dickens of the Victorian Era (times of Queen Victoria’s rule, 1837-1901). Which is as much relevant now as it was to his times. It seems broad-based socio-economic progress is a constant myth and the Dickensian times are eternal on planet earth, more so in the unending, troublesome Covid-context now. Endless Dickensian times reflect how humans continue to lead sequestered, lockdown lives despite the liberating myth of progress, especially infinite economic progress that is drug-peddled by the economists.
A printed epitah circulated at the time of Dickens’ funeral reads thus: “To the memory of Charles Dickens (England’s most popular author) who died at his residence, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England’s greatest writers is lost to the world.”
Charles Dickens was no doubt a genius like Shakespeare. He was the greatest novelist of the Victorian times and he had pioneered the serial publication of gripping and anticipative narrative-fiction. He had the attentiveness to the social conditions with keen field-work based observation, and the ability to emotionally move people by the tragedies, losses and heartbreaks of his characters, and the power to capture the distorted perceptions of people in altered states of mind. And he had dedicated his life to social reform—especially to improve the living and working conditions for the poor including the fallen women—by addressing the themes of poverty, social inequity and free circulation of disease along with the themes of crime, evil, and psychological abnormality. The great Karl Marx had correctly asserted that “Dickens issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists, and moralists put together.”
Admired by his contemporary luminaries such as Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, Dickens was hailed as the influential spokesman of the conscience of his age afflicted with the flaws and excrescences and atrocities of the Victorian aristocratic superstructure and industrialism towards the poor and the disadvantaged including women and children.
His writings had factored in the untold squalor and filth of the city of London of the early 19th century with its pick-pockets, prostitutes, drunks, beggars, and vagabonds of every description, the cholera of mid-19th century and the Great Stink of 1858 (i.e. the stench of the Thames river), the smallpox epidemic and the characters in quarantine due to the threat of a plague pestilence. The inadequate access to public health services in our times is no different from that of his times. He had also conveyed the spread of hysteria (like it is reflected in the recent reactions to Covid-19), with bloodcurdling images of mob-mania. What he had written about the diphtheria crisis of 1856 pointed to how it (the dangerous, contagious and often fatal malignant sore throat) spread in the same way as Covid-19 by direct contact or airborne respiratory droplets, and how only those who were cautious and prudent stood a better chance of survival. Most importantly, he had warned the dangers of sharp divides between the rich and the poor in the context of disease which applies to our Covid times thus: “Nothing good comes from the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, and sometimes a crisis—like the spread of a disease—collapses this dichotomy in ways that highlight the cluelessness of those who think their money can protect them from sickness or death or that they can hoard all the wealth with no negative repercussions.”
Charles Dickens was drawn to prisons from his childhood to adulthood, and in the process could see lockdown everywhere and express it through his characters in his novels with their labyrinth of ideas, images, stories, themes and issues. His depiction of London and its desolate feel was a metaphor for society as a whole, for the country as a whole, and it holds good even now if we could also depict Mumbai or Delhi or any other city in India, like he had done.
That there is lockdown everywhere means that there is imprisonment—literally and figuratively—everywhere. And this imprisonment is not only a stain on society (e.g. utilitarian employers entrapping and squeezing the sweat and blood of their workers as portrayed in the novel, “Hard Times”) but also an aspect of self. Quarantine too is a metaphoric prison. All of us are also prisoners of our personality, and as metaphoric prisoners, we are locked inside our own lives through habit, circumstances, injustice or ever-tightening circuit of obsessions. We have to see our personality as a cage, as Dickens could see and express it so well through his characters and social commentary. How he had also satirized the then educational system as a lockdown applies to our times as well. Its curriculum, the school environment and teachers were deeply influenced by the utilitarian values. Students were taught to follow what the teachers told, but not to think or wonder upon the teaching given by them. Doesn’t this hold good even now?
His description of the London city as an all-encompassing miserable mess (as in the novel “Little Dorrit” or in “Bleak House”) with the word “fog”—that polluting substance that covers the city in the month of November—indeed covered and imprisoned everyone, so to say. He had used it symbolically to refer to the moral pollution and lack of care from the political and legal system and upper classes, as well as to refer literally to the physical unsanitary and polluted conditions of the city.
I have not presented here the criticisms on Dickens’ personality itself as a cage in terms of his personal life of contradictions, secrets, open-secrets and prejudices. Nobody is perfect, after all.
June 9, 2021 marks the 151st death anniversary of Charles Dickens. This posting is a collage- tribute to him on behalf of the English Literary Society of our college, on this celebratory occasion, even as it is also a tribute to the less-known Greek philosopher-poet Demetrios Trifiatis. The prose of the former and the poetry of the latter complement well each other to guide us on how to live, individually as also socially.
By Annavajhula J.C. Bose, PhD
Department of Economics, SRCC
REFERENCES :
John O’Rourke. 2020. Charles Dickens: A Novelist for Our Times. www.bu.edu. BU Today. Boston University. June 9.
Lawrence Scott. 2020. Charles Dickens, the Writer Who Saw Lockdown Everywhere. The New Yorker. December 24.
Mathew Sherril. 2014. The Paris Review. April 30.
Philip Collins. Charles Dickens. www.britannica.com
www.theconversation.com, December 28, 2020.
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