Thought, I love Thought. But not the jiggling and twisting of already existent ideas.

I despise that self-important game. Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness. Thought is the testing of statements on the touchstone of the conscience. To begin, this stanza, which belongs to a poem called Thought by Emily Dickinson, highlights much of the same idea Kamla Das has embedded within The Old Playhouse, a title poem from one of her collections. For the sake of understanding, one must primarily provide some information with regard to certain features that Das bore in her personality, which defined the woman she was, is, and the woman she perhaps would have liked to become. Kamla Das, who may very well have one of the strongest female voices in the sub-continent, carries the essence of a womans composition in her words. She has written mostly about love, its disloyalty and the pain and agony associated with unrequited love. She has not regarded sexuality as something outside the character of a normal human being. Rather, she has accepted sexuality for what it means to her and so, she explores herself through the themes her writings portray. She confesses to be herself and her claim can not be questioned. Her originality is uncompromised and her approach is honest. She presents the hidden aspects of womanhood and love and describes them as collective experiences of womanhood. To return to the concerned topic, one discovers about Das that a lonely heart seeking inspiration is a frequently occurring theme in her poetry. The heart wishes to be returned the love it has given out and its emptiness can only be truly filled if offered unconditional love and undying passion in return for absolute surrender of self. One realizes the irony as there should be no price tag on love, no tool to measure it. It is not a business and yet, that is how it is generally treated. Lovers today do not bear many, if any at all, similarities to the lovers of the past. So, the evolution of love is not a positive one. Or perhaps love has not changed but the idea of it certainly has. This makes one wonder what connection or ties love and natural desires bear with thoughts that belong to the mind and the rationale, regarding The Old Playhouse in comparison to Thought. See, in The Old Playhouse, Das believes that when unfulfilled desires, longings and frustrations refuse to stop plaguing ones life, ultimately the effect on the mind will be an understandably destructive one and the mind will become an old playhouse with all its lights put out. So, the heart and its yearning bears a direct connection with the state of the mind.

In a way, passion triumphs over reason as Das projects reasons dependence on passion. The mind will not be receptive to enlightenment until the heart is willing to welcome it; the mind will therefore cease to be. Now, with regard to what Dickinson says of thoughts and their significance, her poem also depicts the relationship of the heart with the mind and of the different dimensions of self a person has to explore; that is where originality resides. It is evident that Dickinson also believes that until and unless a person is in touch with his inner self and allows his heart to play part in his life, his mind will not produce genuine thoughts. Thoughts are made up of observation, consciousness, sub-consciousness, perception, associations, personal opinion, experiences and nearly everything that has anything to do with something. Each component includes an emotional quality, a feeling that indicates the natural response of a person to a social, emotional, spiritual or intellectual stimulus. So, Das begins by saying that she feels like a bird that has been taught to fly and yet, before it can even spread its wings to take its first flight, it is caged. Freedom has been lost forever and this bird, in whose nature resides a strong natural urge to fly, can do nothing about it. For Das on a metaphorical level, this means that perhaps too much fruitless struggle makes a person forget about his own true nature as a human being. Social and even personal cages slow down the growth of a person and keep one from getting to know oneself. While on one hand, one may feel socially obligated to perform a certain task in a certain way, on the other hand, one may have gotten caught in ones own trap of moral obligations, which are actually hollow and meaningless. There is no use of morality without humanity and this is the very concern that people are consistently losing as they move ahead in time and space. She now describes the man she was supposed to grow with and instead, ended up like a dwarf, a consequence of retarded growth. Every lesson you gave was about yourself, she says of him. Since he imposed himself on her, she lost her own self somewhere in the middle of his control and his demands. This mans nature would appear to be highly self-obsessed as he conditions her according to his needs and is proud of the object he has made of her, an actual person. To be so in control of how a person thinks, acts and feels empowers this man and he relishes it. Now, one must take a look into the methods through which this man turned his companion into a mechanical being, lacking mind, heart and soul.

She says he treats her like a traditional wife, which is to say he thinks she is a robot, programmed to serve his every whim and wish. She has become so conditioned now that she has lost her will and reason, her intrinsic nature and individuality. She could have fought against it but maybe, she did not even realize what was being done to her and what she was doing to herself before it was too late to pull herself out of an inevitable state of doom. She does not understand herself anymore and on a larger level, that is what the ignorant still want of women. Still, in some parts of the world, women are not allowed to learn because there is a fear amongst men that they will be enlightened in a manner that is so utterly beyond the rational wall of a mans capacity. So, Das comments on society as well. In addition to that, it is important to pay attention to the artificial lights that always light his room. These lights are symbolically representative of superficiality, materialism and the absence of the warmth natural fire has to offer. The artificial lights stand for the shallow, hollow feelings of this mans heart and also for the conveniences of the physical world, while the fire of passion within the heart and soul is missing. She says he does not let her permeate through his ego and the windows, which represent the doors to his heart, are always shut. There is a sense of suffocation, shortage of oxygen, as there is no freedom of expression, implied by the line: There is no more singing, no more dance, my mind is an old playhouse with all its lights put out. Here, the singing and the dances are forms of expression whereas the playhouse indicates her inability to probe through her self, to explore herself. This is not because she is incapable of it but because her conditioning has substituted this intrinsic desire with the desires of her companion. To compare, in Thought, Dickinson states that she loathes those who cannot come up with their own ideas and would rather pass off the ideas of others as their own. Those who do so are only trying to entertain themselves and elevate their position in society but they do not realize that they lack the substance it takes to produce a thought that is entirely ones own. She believes that this is a degradation of self and of the faculty of thought each individual has been granted with, but few choose to utilize. Thoughts that are not genuine are appalling and rather unnecessary. In this manner, Dickinson presents these fake people as members of the same society that lives in rooms with artificial lights and have put out the fire they once had burning inside of them. They have no freedom of expression either because no one but they, themselves, have limited their minds to the ideas of others. They cannot explore themselves because they do not even see the world through their own eyes. Rather, they view everything from the point of view of worldly renowned wise men of science, math, art and

literature because they believe that will be the only acceptable perspective in a society. Also, Dickinson believes that thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness, which means that true thought is the merger of the subconscious realm with the conscious realm. When mans internal and external self are in harmony with each other, then true enlightenment can take place and give rise to the birth of new knowledge each day. There are so many dimensions a person can explore of himself, of the world, of others. There are countless worlds within each person and these worlds are waiting to be discovered and explored. As Maulana Rumi has stated, What you see of me is what you know of yourself. One must truly and completely know oneself before one can even start to look at another person in a particular way. Similarly, in The Old Playhouse, Das presents the inner turmoil, the conflict which keeps her from getting to know herself. Her internal world has gone to sleep and can therefore not merge with her external world. Her conscious reality is for now, her only reality and that is the dilemma of the modern man as well. Whatever is beyond the physical observation is immediately taken out of account and rarely offered due attention. The transcendental realm is a distant realm. Furthermore, next, she moves towards the end of the poem and adds a mystical touch. She says: The strong mans technique is always the same. He serves his love in lethal doses for love is Narcissus at the waters edge haunted by its lonely face, and, yet it must seek at last an end, a pure, total freedom, it must will the mirrors to shatter and the kind night to erase the water. These final lines of the poem have been most exquisitely expressed and she remains abstract at conclusion. One discovers that she wishes for the true love inside the poetess and the struggle for freedom to take form one day. Though he bears narcissist qualities and may be reflective of the arrogant and irrevocably self-obsessed self, ultimately true love will conquer. She will serve as the mirror in which his masculine ego is reflected. At last, the mirror will break her free as her determination to surface once again as her true self will triumph and the night will release her. She will find a way to reach her destination, which is to regain self-knowledge and consequently self-worth. Conclusively, this is the way in which Kamla Das has presented the dilemma of human existence through The Old Playhouse, that is

the conflict within a person and the conflicts outside of a person. The mind has lost its will to speak and the overwhelming concerns of the material world have consumed both heart and soul. There is a sense of despair that hangs about the poem but it ends on a note of hope as the poetess breaks free of the strings that move her every limb and control her every action just like a puppet, according to the will of the hands that hold them. Ultimately, she realizes that she is the only one who has the right of control over herself. She rises above her circumstances and leaves behind the half a life she had been living, thinking it was the way things were meant to be. Perhaps in this case, the unrequited love and the intense insensitive attitude of her companion was much needed for her to emerge from her stupor. Her deep desire to set herself free from the complications of life and of the sphere of male domination in search for a life of hope, liberation and meaning finally allows and compels her to break her chains and walk out into the night. Das lays her emotions and fears bare before the reader in a most creative and effective manner. Word Count: 2,102