And I will carry them all my life, shut up inside me. The plasma parasites. The risk of a relapse, and the terrors.
And anything may break out. And especially poetry.
Martin Enckell recites his poems with no flourish. Instead the words tumble out in soft moans, one chained to the other, like murmuring water in a low burbling brook. In the silence of the room his words “hit inwards”, a phrase he uses to describe the power they have on him. He concludes sotto voce.
The vivid words, strung elegantly, recited peacefully have the strongest impact. Visions rise and apparitions come alive and the heart swells with an ache.
The listeners are numbed by the meditative rendition, there are no reactions for some time, only reflections, before the shower of applause and appreciation.
The Finnish poet was in Kochi to write poetry in relaxed environs, he says and the place where he strangely, met the ghost of his dead father.
Enckell’s tryst with India is not new but one that has been particularly intense. His well known poem, Electric Verses-Kali , on the Hindu Goddess, received literary acclaim. Written after he had given up religion and turned completely secular, it is about his life-changing experience in Kolkata. He took to the city as he had taken to Leningrad, a city he visited often with his mother as a young boy, with inexplicable fondness. He found many similarities between the two. As Kolkata grew on him and he built a network of friends - poet Aroop Mitra, film maker Rajat Ghosh, painter Prabhat Basu - whom he met at Classic Book Stores, a favourite haunt of artistes, Enckell began exploring its innards. The obvious poverty and pestilence that existed all around overwhelmed him till he fell victim to a virulent form of malaria. Enckell lay alone in bed ravaged of strength and a mind muddled in the passage of time and place, except remembering the fervent appeal of a diligent doctor asking him to pray even if he was a non-believer. “I had to pray,” says Enckell adding that as he recovered from the disease that took him to the doorstep of death, with the kind doctor carting him around to see the Goddess worshipped during the colourful Durga Puja festival.
Back in his hospital room, the television channel played out the Life of Christ continuously. Between the two overarching spiritual experiences Enckell got his confidence back. He wrote Kali.
and I know that I'm close,
when finally, when
at last I can call
Christ a mother .
“My poetry deals with dark topics, death and other life forces. I fight my own demons through my words,” says Enckell enjoying the salubrious quietness of Kochi.
He began writing poetry as a teenager inspired by his family of poets and intellectuals. His father, a journalist and poet, his grandfather a poet too, the art of creating with words came easily to him. He took it as a full time career, working in between in libraries, with handicapped children and in schools.
“The red thread in my life has been writing,” he says. He has published six books - short stories, poetry and prose books with more poetry.
His Kolkata writings began in a naturalistic way, altering to the devotional, spiritual and more mystical after his experience which he loves to narrate.
“The whole experience in Kolkata was a powerful one. I felt I had offended God in my verse, using subjects that were not mine. I felt I should not use religion in my poetry, a Goddess I don’t know enough.”
But the near death experience changed Enckell forever. He began seeing the city and life in a different way. “Kolkata, like Leningrad, was the city of survival, the imperial city that gave up its crown to another, a city where the Goddess is worshipped, like the Mother in the Greek orthodoxy order in Russia.”
The commonality brought in life long closeness. When he returned to Kolkata five years after his seminal experience he had a clearer vision, he reconnected with old friends.
Three years ago, friends advised him to go to Kerala, to write. Ï have found this place very suitable for writing. You can relax here in a way that’s quite rare. My associations with places is a kind of a love story,” he says.
But Kochi has been special. In the quiet lanes of Fort Kochi, in streets lined with monuments and edifices that are hundreds of years old, some crumbling, some with fresh lease of life, amid these Enckell in his poetry meets the ghost of his dead father.
And the contrast between India and Finland, the two countries that connect his poetic world?
Here there is an intensity that life is multiplying itself, back home the intensity is from minimalism. This is a big contrast,” he says drawing from the differences and the similarities.
