Here Are the Empire Builders!

Introduction and the first poem from S D Anugyan’s poetry book

Introduction

‘Empire Builders’ was written entirely whilst I was in the Swiss communes, in the mid-1980s, and the Ranch for a couple of short periods. If I could highlight any particular visual inspiration, it would be seeing the impressively-high cranes erecting more skyscrapers in Zurich. There was something about the audacity of such an undertaking, the drive, the ambition, behind this vast financial empire; and it was somehow reflecting our own empire-building in the commune.

Yet most of the inspiration was auditory rather than visual: sitting in discourse every evening, listening to Osho, it was ultimately more about silence, supported by an international gathering of seekers. To hear English spoken as the main connecting language was fascinating. I would carry a notebook and write down turns of phrases, accents, tones, I was detecting in conversations that had a freshness no English speaker could invoke. I remember clearly in our bar in Basle, an Italian saying, ‘The trick is…’ It’s a common-enough phrase in English, but the way he said it was new, alive, making me hear it in a way I never had. It was like the international nature of the commune had given me a Zen beginner’s mind with the language I loved so much.

It is probably because of this that, whilst readers have struggled with the meaning behind the poems, some have responded favourably to the feeling and the sound of them. This is what Madhuri said in an email:

‘The poetry hit me very much as music. The imagery was startling and fresh, like notes and riffs; I didn’t understand what each poem was talking about, but if I gave that up and just read and imbibed it, I felt that each line was important and had its place, and that the whole hung together with a decided grace and flow. They were like clouds moving through and across a sky – you don’t quibble with the details of a cloud, you just enjoy it whole.’

This shows me she actually understood it really well! Somebody who bought the book years ago when it was in print, said to me he simply ‘liked the energy’.

I often think of this anecdote: when T S Eliot was asked what ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree’ meant, he responded with, ‘It means: “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree”.’ Poetry is what you, the reader, make of it.

While I am tempted to argue the white leopard defense, too many people have asked me to elucidate more. And so, after four decades I suppose it is time. As well as this general, gentle introduction, I shall ensure each poem has a few lines accompanying it. I can be kind sometimes.

It is fitting that I quote Eliot just now, because I read The Wasteland avidly, over and over, when I was trapped in a soulless job in Aberdeen, in the late seventies. That poem, along with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, encapsulated perfectly the world that I saw around me. It was also the overall structure of the poem that fascinated me. When I came to write Empire Builders, I was in a very different space thanks to Osho, and felt to write a sort of counterpoint to The Wasteland, where there was enlightenment rather than darkness. Numerologists may read something in the fact that while Eliot broke his verse into five parts, here there are six.

To ease into the reading, it helps to note that there are numerous characters scattered throughout in space and time, yet at the centre there is always the Seeker whose identity and gender may vary, but the thirst remains the same.

Devil’s Pancake

The title is from something a French chef told me when I was learning to make crêpes and couldn’t work out why the first one was always a disaster. Apparently there is a phrase ‘la première crêpe appartient au diable’, that the first pancake always belongs to the devil, and the best course of action is just to accept that. I have got better at pancake making over the years, so the devil doesn’t get quite so much of a look in, but there was something about the metaphor that struck me at the time: of necessary destruction (de-structuring) even in the face of extraordinary creativity and enterprise.

So, we open with the Seeker not quite yet a seeker, faced with loss and failure, and a helplessness in the face of seemingly invincible odds. A once-beautiful house is in ruins, an aeroplane has crashed, and a samurai violently oppresses a poet. Yet something is dawning, a distance from all these events. A witnessing.

Disgrace to opportunity
More woman than man,
I have a pancake charred at the edges
Remembrance of houses cursed by a sick sea,
The kitchen’s intensity –
No lord or ghost, only stone sun.
Forest leaves dancing, emerald mirrors
shaking,
Friendly faces smiling
Forever. Destroyed evening walls,
Ivy-suckered staircases
Love-light bathed brick on brick.
Pale arms poised in air-embrace,
Gilted, glittering sea
High-aware among the adored ones,
Aeroplane or love-sick
Bird, all fall.

Samurais came. Stole these poems away.
Am I upset by the cruelty of the sky?
The armour hand thrust deep
Down the neck when the bird song sang,
Sweet fist or surrender. Neither
Stay aware through pain and love and
Drifting of the senses,
Before the scorpion’s time and
The crowd’s carnival storm.
Mingling of the senses,
Old boat unmanned,
Far-out verse cut-torn.
Watching dark seas.

Featured image credit: Xijian on istockphoto.com
Image for poem credit: Kyle Johnson on unsplash.com