Hesse, of course, was trying to say that Enlightenment would never be Enlightenment without people who would take responsibility for their own actions.
He insisted not on the moral vision of the collective but a spiritual awakening of the self; a movement towards self-revelation (an idea of selfhood in that time of Enlightenment which denied the possibility of self) - his writings perhaps prophesised the New Age, but they did not stop the horror of the Holocaust. Nor could they. Canneti has pointed out that it would be a monstrous conceit for any single writer to think that they had the influence to prevent a war, but if enough people shared this responsibility ...
Subhash Jaireth's Yashodhara: Six Seasons Without You shares a similar need to that of Hesse's Siddhartha. It appears at a time when fascism in the guise of capitalism is violently sweeping the globe with its painful rhetoric of democratic freedom - and while his poetry evokes a will to peace, the people within his story clamour for a miracle, unable to learn from the Buddha's paradoxical quest for self-enlightenment. Behind this quest is another: the 'untold' story of Yashodhara, the wife of the would-be Buddha, who is deserted by her famous husband and left to raise a child on her own. The story of Yashodhara is brought into being by the fact of the Buddha's tale which, as far as I know, has failed to address the fact of the wife's isolation and grief.
This re-telling of the Buddha's journey beside the (previously) untold story of the betrayed wife shares a resemblance to the midrashim in Jewish writing. A midrash, as Kevin Hart has recently suggested, is a rewriting of Holy Scripture (in Jaireth's case, the sutras and ragas) which takes care of the over-embellished, or the omissions, the gaps, those things in a story that have been left unsaid. Jaireth's story questions the embellishment of the Buddha's story whilst including those things about the wife's story that have been buried by historical and theological narrative.
Jaireth has written a series of poems, each using the seasons as their starting point, a temporal awareness which adds to the longevity of Yashodhara's abandonment. Jaireth tells us that the poems are modelled on traditional Romantic Indian verse structures which are devoted to daily life beside variations in time and seasons. The season poems are written as non-rhyming couplets in the voice of Yashodhara. These poems are separated by longer narrative poems which discuss the life of Buddha and are written in the voice of a contemporary narrator. Further information on Jaireth's method can be found in the more detailed preface to the book, 'A Few Words To Begin With'.
There is a tremendous humility in Jaireth's writing, especially in the Yashodhara sequences and a tonality which I find so comforting it distresses me. This tonality, as a passive device for containing the life of the confined wife, is assured and sensitive. The absolute longing captured in the thoughts of Yashodhara romanticises the wife's tragic story. To romanticise the wife's lot is not an intention of the book, though it does constitute the way in which the wife's story has been portrayed in literature, further adding to her confinement. And this is essentially what Yashodhara is about, the overlooking of the wife's story by literature and theosophy.
The narrated sections create a deliberate shift in pace and thought, though their emphasis is on the life of Buddha, not upon the wife. This relocating of emphases allows the reader to question the sometimes conflicting message of the Buddha's life beside his philosophy of 'letting go' ('the endless cycle of coming and going'), as if 'letting go' were a justification for the abandonment of family, allowing Yashodhara to implore, 'Is remembering nothing but a torrid journey to forgetting?' And, having been 'let go', one wonders at the wife's devotion to his reputation in his absence.
Unlike Penelope waiting for Ullysses, her suitors come to her through the open window of the seasons themselves, sensuous manifestations of her desire for the would-be Buddha, the 'callous' husband who cannot share her life: in this sense, I feel that Jaireth has implicated the wife in her own captivity, questioning her will for peace beside her need for (sexual) release. But there are so many insidious forms of control in Yashodhara's life that it becomes almost impossible for her to find space for herself. For instance, in what appears to be the final years of her life, she discovers that she has never seen the sea. She is told that a visit to the sea will offer some release from the restraint she has placed on herself, but she does not go. There is a sense here that the wife overlooks herself.
The final narrated section, focussing now on Ananda, the Buddha's devoted man-servant, reveals the most significant overlooking of the deserted wife. Readers will be mildly surprised to realise that the catalyst for this section has nothing to do with Ananda's usurpation of the wife's traditional role (this is not even mentioned) but embraces the giving of status to a man based entirely upon his intimate knowledge of the Buddha - one must ask, if the Buddha required assistance during his journey and also someone with whom he might share his life, why was the wife left at home at all? The answer can be summed up in Yashodhara's observation that she would have preferred for the servant to not have been mentioned at all.
Some stories insist upon their re-telling. Jaireth writes with a beautiful simplicity about complex things. The poems are sensuous, vibrant, and discursive. And, fortuitously, the poetry does not gravitate towards self-enlightenment - Jaireth's focus on contemporary paradox is unsettling and oddly refreshing.
(Reviewed by Richard Hillman, September 2004)
