The Assassin and the Dahlia -2-
Preface
by Gerald Nicosia
There are few poets who can truly make us feel the perplexity of finding ourselves in this strange world of simultaneous beauty and pain - trapped in a flesh that is an inseparable gelatin of suffering and ecstasy. Pradip Choudhuri is such a poet. He is like one of Dostoyevski's or Gogol's "lost souls" - a man with no future whatsoever, nowhere to go, racked by his own desires, tricked by life, as if by a beautiful, naked woman, into endless acts of befuddling creation, with no riches to mine but the ever-vanishing mystery of Now, the ever-dissolving illusion of life in an infinite series of nonexistent moments.
Here is a poet whose richness of language is equal to Rimbaud or Poe - and he is every bit as much a bard as they of the endless night. But his charm is that he is also a hapless clown, a sad Charlie Chaplin, pleading for our love and our help as he tries futilely to disentangle himself from the messy disaster of creation. He is Charlie Chaplin smelling, then offering the beautiful rose to the gorgeous rich woman who walks past him, oblivious. The rich beauty does not notice him, but we, the readers, do. He charms and wins us over because he IS every one of us - he represents all we suffer ourselves, and all we ourselves aspire to be. His honesty is the voice we have been seeking all our lives.
Each time I read a poem by Pradip Choudhuri, I fall into it as into a black hole. There is no true beginning, no true end. It just IS - like life itself. These poems are frightening, because they reveal that death lies just under the surface of life - as life lies just under the surface of death. Blood and semen abound, as at the scene of a violent rape or murder - or perhaps a wedding:
Aye, bloodshed over,
ejaculation over,
beneath the unreal sky
the dear kids of the void
sleep like corpses
under the cover of snow.
The horror would be unbearable - as would the horror of the "real" existence out of which Choudhuri and his poetry come - were it not redeemed by the beauty and grace of his wit and tongue. He is an Indian trickster, a magician of Maya, who makes all the bad things of life vanish with a snap of the wand of his infinitely fertile language. He is never at a loss for words. His mind bounds just ahead of the grasp of every tragedy.
He will die, like all of us, but he will never die alone, for he has offered us his soul to share - and we are so much the richer for it.
Gerald Nicosia, Mill Valley, California, 28 May 2004
