Love and The Turning Seasons
Page 10
a black lotus headdress and breasts
traced with musk-leaf—
In every thicket, friend,
Night’s precious cloak wraps a girl’s limbs.
The veiled affairs
the racing heart—
Eager, fearful, ecstatic—
darting her eyes across Govinda she
enters the thicket.
Ankles ringing with silver.
Her friends have slipped off.
Her lower lip’s moist
wistful, chaste, swollen, trembling, deep.
He sees her raw heart
sees her eyes rest on the couch of
fresh flowering twigs
and speaks.
Sung to Rāga Vibhāsa
Come, Radha, come. Krishna follows your
every desire.
“Soil my bed with indigo footprints, Kaminī,
lay waste the grove
savage it with your petal-soft feet.
“I take your feet in lotus hands, Kaminī,
you have come far.
Lay these gold flaring anklets across my bed.
“Let yes yes flow from your mouth like amṛta.
From your breasts, Kaminī,
I draw off the dukūla-cloth. We are no longer separate.”
Sung to Rāga Rāmakarī
She sings while Krishna plays, her heart drawn
into ecstasy—
“On my breast, your hand Krishna
cool as sandalwood. Draw a leaf wet with deer musk here,
it is Love’s sacramental jar.
“Drape my loins with jeweled belts, fabric and gemstones.
My mons venus is brimming with nectar,
a cave mouth for thrusts of Desire.”
Reckless, inflamed, she presses forth
to the urgent campaign
of sexual love,
flips over and mounts him,
savors the way
he gives in . . .
. . . later, eyes lidded,
loins cool and no longer rippling,
her arms trail like vines.
Only her chest continues to heave.
Is climbing on top
what brought her victory?
Reader, open your heart
to Jayadeva’s well-
crafted poem. Through it
Krishna’s deeds have entered your own memory-stream—
amṛta to cure
Kali Yuga’s contagion.
Coda
On my breast draw a leaf
paint my cheeks
lay a silk scarf across these dark loins.
Wind into my heavy black braid
white petals,
fit gemstones onto my wrists,
anklets over my feet.
Each affection she asked for
her saffron robed lover
fulfilled.
:AS
Jayadeva
The twelfth-century Gīta-govinda of Jayadeva has a reputation as the last great poem in the Sanskrit language. It holds two other distinctions. First, it appears to be the first full account in poetry of Radha as Krishna’s favorite among the gopis or cowgirls of Vrindavana. Secondly, it seems to be the first historical instance of poetry written with specified ragas or musical modes assigned to its lyrics. The poem-cycle occurs in twelve cantos with twenty-four songs distributed among them, about 280 stanzas in total. It presents the love affair of Krishna and Radha as an acutely human love affair, from initial “secret desires” and urgent lovemaking to separation—nights of betrayal, mistrust, longing, feverish anguish, strange imaginings—and finally to a consummation as spiritual as it is carnal.
Jayadeva’s birthplace is uncertain—some think Orissa, some Mithila, some Bengal. Accounts make it clear he had carefully trained himself as a poet in the Sanskrit tradition, learnéd and in command of classical metrics, when he took a vow to wander as a homeless mendicant, to sleep no more than one night under any tree. On this endless pilgrimage he passed through the coastal city of Puri in Orissa State, one of India’s cardinal pilgrim destinations and home to the huge Jagannath Temple. There in Puri, the chief priest and administrator of the Jagannath Temple had a vision. In it Krishna told him that Jayadeva should marry his daughter Padmāvatī, a dancer dedicated to the temple, settle down, and compose a devotional poem of unprecedented beauty to Krishna. The result was the Gīta-govinda.
At one point while composing his poem, overwhelmed that he had to write words that belonged to Krishna, Jayadeva, unable to continue, put down his stylus and went to the river to bathe. When he returned he asked for his meal. Padmāvatī exclaimed that she had already fed him. Confused, Jayadeva looked at his manuscript; the words he had felt unable to compose sat inked onto the palm-leaf page. Krishna had visited in Jayadeva’s absence and taken a hand in his own poem—then, mischievously disguised as the poet, stayed on to eat Jayadeva’s lunch.
Meeting Padmāvatī wakened in Jayadeva the bedrock emotion, the rasa, of love. What had been distant accounts of spiritual grace, a familiar theme for poetry, or even a set of metaphysical abstractions, came alive in his own body: the merging of spiritual and erotic ecstasy. Under Padmāvatī’s hands Jayadeva learnt that the old tales, the yogic teachings, and the cycles of loss and longing were no far-off vision. They are tasted through one’s senses.
You could say that all the metaphysics and yoga practices of India—heady, magnificent, intricate, contradictory—return in the end to a single imperative: love. I think it the genius of Radha-Krishna poetry to take the hair-splitting metaphysics of India, lift them from our easily bewildered minds, and relocate them in the glands of the human body. Krishna devotees say that in our current dark era, the Kali Yuga, not everyone can practice meditation; few can wrap their minds around subtle doctrine or follow the eight stages of yoga. Everyone can taste the desolations and ecstasies of love, though; this is where one finds Krishna.
Some centuries after Jayadeva’s death, the Jagannatha Temple instituted the Gīta-govinda as its sole liturgy, with Padmāvatī’s dances performed in the sanctuary. All day and into the evening loudspeakers mounted on poles around the temple send the poem in loud song across courtyard and rooftop, out to the cashew groves and semi-arid scrublands threaded by jackal and cobras.
: VIDYĀPATI
(1352—1448?)
The girl and the woman
bound in one being:
the girl puts up her hair,
the woman lets it
fall to cover her breasts;
the girl reveals her arms,
her long legs, innocently bold;
the woman wraps her shawl modestly about her,
her open glance a little veiled.
Restless feet, a blush on the young breasts,
hint at her heart’s disquiet:
behind her closed eyes
Kāma awakes, born in imagination, the god.
Vidyāpati says, O Krishna, bridegroom,
be patient, she will be brought to you.
:DL & ECD
My friend, I cannot answer when you ask me to
explain
what has befallen me.
Love is transformed, renewed,
each moment.
He has dwelt in my eyes all the days of my life,
yet I am not sated with seeing.
My ears have heard his sweet voice in eternity,
and yet it is always new to them.
How many honeyed nights have I passed with him
in love’s bliss, yet my body
wonders at his.
Through all the ages
he has been clasped to my breast,
yet my desire
never abates.
I have seen subtle people sunk in passion
but none came so close to the heart of the fire.
Who shall be found to cool yo
ur heart,
says Vidyāpati.
:DL & ECD
With the last of my garments
shame dropped from me, fluttered
to earth and lay discarded at my feet.
My lover’s body became
the only covering I needed.
With bent head he gazed at the lamp
like a bee who desires the honey of a closed lotus.
The Mind-stealing One, like the chātaka bird,
is wanton, he misses no chance
to gratify his thirst; I was to him
a pool of raindrops.
Now shame returns
as I remember. My heart trembles,
recalling his treachery.
So Vidyāpati says.
:DL & ECD
May none other be born to this world. But if it must
be,
let it not be a girl that is born.
But if a girl must be born, let her not know
the agony that is called ‘love.’
But if she must know it, let her not be
a girl of gentle breeding.
Wretched women pray for one thing: God,
let me know peace at last. Let me unite
with a husband wise and skilled, a fountain of love,
and let his love not fall into the power of another.
But if it does, may he be considerate,
for a woman is not wholly lost if she is treated with
kindness.
Vidyāpati says: There is a way.
By your own life you can gain the far shore of this
sea of conflict.
:DL & ECD
I who body and soul
am at your beck and call,
was a girl of noble family.
I took no thought of what would be said of me,
I abandoned everything:
now I am part of you,
your will is my will.
O Mādhava, never let our love
seem to grow stale—
I beg you, let the dew
not dry on our flowers,
that my honor not be destroyed.
When he heard these words from her beautiful
mouth, Mādhava
bowed his head. He knew he held
the flower of her life in his keeping.
:DL & ECD
Her friend speaks:
Her cloud of hair eclipses the luster of her face,
like Rāhu greedy for the moon;
the garland glitters in her unbound hair, a wave of
the Ganges in the waters of the Yamunā.
How beautiful the deliberate, sensuous union of the
two; the girl playing this time the active role,
riding her lover’s outstretched body in delight;
her smiling lips shine with drops of sweat; the god
of love offering pearls to the moon.
She of beautiful face hotly kisses the mouth of her
beloved; the moon, with face bent down,
drinks of the lotus.
The garland hanging on her heavy breast seems like
a stream of milk from golden jars.
The tinkling bells which decorate her hips sound the
triumphal music of the god of love.
:DL & ECD
O my friend, my sorrow is unending.
It is the rainy season, my house is empty,
the sky is filled with seething clouds,
the earth sodden with rain,
and my love far away.
Cruel Kāma pierces me with his arrows:
the lightning flashes, the peacocks dance,
frogs and waterbirds, drunk with delight,
call incessantly—and my heart is heavy.
Darkness on earth,
the sky intermittently lit with a sullen glare . . .
Vidyāpati says,
How will you pass this night without your lord?
:DL & ECD
When my beloved returns to my house
I shall make my body a temple of gladness,
I shall make my body the altar of joy
and let down my hair to sweep it.
My twisting necklace of pearls shall be the intricate
sprinkled design on the altar,
my full breasts the water jars,
my curved hips the plantain trees,
the tinkling bells at my waist the young shoots of the
mango.
I shall use the arcane arts of fair women in all lands
to make my beauty outshine a thousand moons.
Soon your hopes, O Rādhā, says Vidyāpati,
will be fulfilled, and he will be at your side.
:DL & ECD
The moon has shone upon me,
the face of my beloved.
O night of joy!
Joy permeates all things.
My life: joy,
my youth: fulfillment.
Today my house is again
home,
today my body is
my body.
The god
of destiny smiled on me.
No more doubt.
Let the nightingales sing, then,
let there be myriad
rising moons, let Kāma’s
five arrows become five thousand
and the south wind
softly, softly blow:
for now my body has meaning
in the presence of my beloved.
Vidyāpati says, Your luck is great;
may this return of love be blessed.
:DL & ECD
Children, wife, friend—
drops of water on heated sand.
I spent myself on them, forgetting you.
What are they to me now,
O Mādhava, now that I am old and without hope,
apart from you. But you are the savior of the world
and full of mercy.
Half my life I passed in sleep—
my youth, now my old age,
how much time.
I spent my youth in lust and dissipation.
I had no time to worship you.
Ageless gods
have come and passed away.
Born from you, they enter you again
like waves into the sea.
For you have no beginning, and no end.
Now
at the end, I fear
the messengers of Death.
Apart from you, there is no way.
I call you Lord,
the infinite and finite,
my salvation.
:DL & ECD
Vidyāpati
V IDYĀPATI WROTE two hundred years after Jayadeva composed his Gīta-govinda, picking up Jayadeva’s theme. However, the story cycle was well-known by the late fourteenth century, and rather than retelling the story or outlining a dramatic cycle in verse, he devised songs in his own language, Maithili, that could be situated within the story. Following the convention of devotional poetry, he inserted himself by name at the close of each poem, stepping in to address the lovers, now and then with a light mocking humor. This “signature line” is called a bhānita.
Vidyāpati was a court poet in the region of Mithila, trained in the twin arts of poetry and erotic love. His solitary theme—with the exception of a few heartbroken songs like “Children, wife, friend,” above—was the eros of Krishna and Radha. Given the acute passion of his poems, it is reasonable to think he regarded the lovemaking of the dark god and his favorite gopi, or cowherding girl, not as metaphor, but as the self’s actual union with god.
For the first portion of his adult life Vidyāpati served as the favorite poet and confidant of the warlord Śivasimha. It is possible the poet was celebrating his patron in these songs, praising Śivasimha’s virility and charm, and the poems are thinly disg
uised panegyrics or praise poems to a king. Whatever his motive for writing them, Vidyāpati must have seen sexual love as the deepest need and profoundest experience a human can undergo. Simply to experience longing, heartwrenching desire, sexual rapture, stabs of jealousy, or romantic anguish, draws one into the sphere of Krishna. Theology of his day would have affirmed this. In his poems even anguish, grief, or hopeless ardent passion become pure emotions—rasas—transporting the lovers into Krishna’s presence. Śivasimha assigned a singer named Jayata to set each of Vidyāpati’s poems to a particular raga or musical mode. The lyrics went to dancing girls at the court who choreographed them. As song and dance they spread across Mithila and into the adjacent districts of Bengal.
Vidyāpati composed his Krishna-Radha poems from about 1380 until 1406, the year his patron Śivasimha vanished after a military defeat at Muslim hands. At that point he took up composing dry philosophical works in Sanskrit, and seems never to have revisited poems of the prem bhakti marg, the path of love and devotion. He lived forty years beyond his patron’s presumed death, composing work that seems comparatively joyless. When exactly he died is uncertain.
: CHANDIDĀSA
(BORN 1408?)
My mind is not on housework.
Now I weep, now I laugh at the world’s
censure.
He draws me—to become
an outcast, a hermit woman in the woods!
He has bereft me of parents, brothers, sisters,
my good name. His flute
took my heart—
his flute, a thin bamboo trap enclosing me—
a cheap bamboo flute was Rādhā’s ruin.
That hollow, simple stick—
fed nectar by his lips, but issuing
poison . . .
If you should find
a clump of jointed reeds,
pull off their branches!
Tear them up by the roots!
Throw them
into the sea.
Dvija Chandidāsa says, Why the bamboo?
Not it but Krishna enthralls you: him you cannot
uproot.
:DL & ECD
This dark cloudy night
he’ll not come to me . . .
But yes, he is here!
He stands dripping with rain
in the courtyard. O my heart!