Dance and Dissonance: The Disjuncture of Thought in Urdu Poetry

by Aziz Ali Dad^*

*The writer is a researcher with a background in philosophy and social sciences. He is interested in the history of ideas. Email: [email protected]

Creativity is one of the most fascinating facets of humans that has fascinated thinking minds since the dawn of civilisation. Because of the mysterious nature and mystical aura surrounding creativity, it has elicited attention of the thinkers and sages in different societies and cultures for more than the last four millennia. In pre-Socratic Greece, creativity is attributed to the goddess Muse who presided over the arts and science. In Egypt and Levant priests weaved grand stories around the creation of the universe and its entities. Spiritual and fiery beings called jinn inspired Arab poets in the pre-Islamic period. They carry the meaning of invisible, hidden and mysterious.¹ Aristotle in his book, ‘Poetics,’² tried to explain the origin and development of poetry and its different kinds. There is a long list of poets, thinkers, sages, priests and philosophers who have attempted to explicate creative élan that transforms the ordinary and transient experience into an infinite metaphor and infuses meaning into a work of art.

Art encompasses different creative fields, including literature. Among different genres of literature, poetry precedes other genres. In the context of Urdu literature, traditionally two concepts remained dominant regarding sources of creativity. The first is amad (spontaneity) and the second awrad (contrived). A majority of Urdu literati, and the socio- cultural aspects of Urdu ethos tilted more towards the amad (intuitional) theory. Mirza Ghalib himself was a follower the theory of spontaneity for he considered the whispering of his pen as the voice of an angel who sends thoughts from mysterious realms. Ghalib attributes his poetry to a divine whisper: aatay hain gaib say yay mazameen khayal may; Ghalib sareer khama nawayay saroosh hay³ (It is not the scratching sound of my reed pen, But the swish of the wings of angels). These were ideas regarding creativity in Urdu in pre-modern period, however, they were not conceptualised till Moulana Muhammad Hussain Azad, Moulana Altaf Hussain Hali and Moulana Shibli Nomani. They inaugurated modern literary criticism in Urdu literature. So, poetics of creativity in Urdu can be categorised as a modern phenomenon.

The aforementioned preamble historically illustrates attempts by literati and scholars to explain nuances, factors, approaches, processes, subjectivities, objective conditions, idiosyncrasies, and personalities that contribute to the creative process. Nevertheless, when it comes to the general concept and perception about creative vocations in Pakistan, most of the artists, poets and literati tend to have obverse and misplaced notions. Instead of channelling subjective experiences in objective settings for creativity, they tend to imitate outward signs. That is why the work of art in our country contains imitation sans thought. It is against the Aristotelian concept of imitation wherein an artist internalises the process of imitation to conceive an idea within the mind and then creates a work of art by employing his/her imagination. There is no doubt that feelings and emotions play an important role in poetry, but they remain chaotic unless they are brought within a creative frame. By doing so emotions are transformed into sensibilities. Otherwise, emotions without the order of sensibility remain meaninglessly chaotic.

There is no denying the fact that the artist needs personal space and freedom to express his/her ideas, but the problem emerges when this trend becomes a reason for lassitude. Consequently, thought disappears from art and literature. When an outlook is adopted as the identity of an artist, then it functions as a mask. Gradually, the mask makes inroads into the self, and captures the inner self. Masquerades do not have anything substantial and meaningful to hide except emptiness. The more dominant the masquerade in art, the more it is empty of substance and meaning. No doubt, art contains unlimited potential of meaning and timeless aspects. That is why it is important to save art from the artist.

Part of the problem arises from the institutional practices, intellectual ambience and cultural ethos that the artist internalises. As  a part of the social milieu, the artist embraces prevalent practices of art and literature. There is a general perception in our society that a person ought to be deranged to rethink thinking and disrupt social patterns. For instance, being a poet or artist means one needs to be heartbroken, feed on sadness, look shabby, mad and bohemian in lifestyle. All the cultural and intellectual paraphernalia for making an artist or writer is based on myths created by a lethargic mind and depressed heart, which avoid the excruciating process entailed in novelty and thinking. Hence, they are absolved of any rules or organised learning.

Immanuel Kant had disdain for ranting and ranting poets who deem themselves beyond rules. For him they are the ones who wallow in their private sense.⁴ Kant admits that the genius may begin with natural talent but it is one that must be bound by taste, discipline and a general communicability. ⁵ Here is the point where divergence between art and thought occurs. Later that gap grows into a yawning abyss. It is in this space/gap wherein myths and fallacies about creativity flourish. When the subjective whim and unconscious delirium reaches to an extreme level, the artist loses his faculty to distinguish between intuition, fancy, fantasy, illusion, delusion, ecstasy, fallacy, imagination, hallucination, etc. As a result, religious experience merges with romance, fantasy with imagination, and hallucination with reality. At a social level, it manifests in the shape of cults and delusionary views about time and space. Mumtaz Mufti, Bano Qudsia, Qudrat Ullah Shahab, Ashfaq Ahmed and their ilk are manifestations of delusionary visions couched in mystic language.

The unrestrained indulgence in feelings provides the required fervour, flavour and colours to the artists and poets to daub their vision of the world accordingly. This luxury is not available to a social theorist and scientist because unlike the poet’s exploration of subjective states, they explore issues pertaining to individual, society and the world in a systematic way. Their purpose is to understand not to feel, though there can be empathetic understanding (Verstehen) in the social theorist. A poet or artist can cover an objective reality in her/his hues, but a thinker or theorist deals with an ever-changing phenomenon in society that always eludes his/her theoretical grasp. This is not to suggest that artistic work or poetry is bereft of thought. They intuitively hint at things even before the thinker, but they cannot explain it within a conceptual scheme.

While exploring the unconscious terrain of the mind, Sigmund Freud famously pronounced, “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.”⁶ What he meant was that when he reached the inner recesses of the heart and mind, he found a poet already present there before him. Nevertheless, the problem is that the poet/artist himself is not aware of his insight of a phenomenon. That is why a poet cannot reach that all-encompassing vision called theory. Though they were the discoverers of the unconsciousness, the difference is that Freud, in his own words, discovered “the scientific method by which unconscious can be studied.” ⁷ So it can be said that disjuncture between thought and art is basically a result of different functioning and processing of intuition and reason over content or entities.

Friedrich Nietzsche in his book “Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music”⁸ explains creativity in terms of two approaches towards life – Dionysian and Apollonian. Nietzsche is of the view that the tragic poetry of ancient Greece was born out of a rare cooperation between the “Dionysian” spirit of ecstatic intoxication, which imbues the work with vitality and passion, and the “Apollonian” spirit which is the form- giving force that creates harmony and measures beauty in arts. He held the Romans, Arabs, etc. in high esteem because they exhibited pure Dionysian spirit. The fusing of the ecstatic with the ordering elements gives birth to the highest form of art.

Following Nietzsche, Dr. Muhammed Iqbal tried to harness the enormous emotional energy released by ecstatic intoxication for his poetry. Dr. Khalifa Abdul Hakeem in his book ‘Fikar-e-Iqbal’⁹ seems to suggest that Iqbal’s poetry is inspired more by Dionysian zeal than his Apollonian spirit. Hakeem contextualises Nietzsche’s idea of Dionysian ecstatic intoxication in the Muslim context by endorsing Moulana Shibli Nomani’s favour of Arab poets who through their poems inspired warriors to fight fearlessly with typical Dionysian passion. Here we can clearly see split in the thought and poetry of Iqbal.

Both poetic and philosophic thoughts explain the same experiences with the same medium but with a different teleology. Poetry deals with sense and sensibilities created in a subjective domain and expands it  to encompass the outside world in a mystical mode, whereas logical thought operates in the realm of the concepts to attune self, society and the world together in a holistic world view. In the Islamic worldview, the mystical mode has remained dominant over cognitive domain. There has been debates about modes of knowing. Among these is the conversation between Abu Saeed Abul Khair and Ibn-e-Sina. After a weeklong discussion they were asked about each other. Ibn-e -Sina replied that whatever I know Abul Khair beholds, Abul Khair said about Ibn-e- Sina that whatever he sees Ibn-e-Sine knows. ¹⁰

Our approach and confusion about Allama Muhammed Iqbal stems from our propensity to prefer mystical over intellectual. Because of  this we  tend to  see where we  need to  think. Instead  of thinking and understanding, seeing and believing has been our mindset. Now the question arises here is whether seeing is more important than understanding and vice versa. There is a popular truism that says, ‘seeing is believing’. But the philosopher deems seeing without an idea or theory as blind activity. For instance, a native from the rain forest in Brazil cannot make sense of robots working in an assembly line of an automobile factory. Since the mystical way of perceiving entities is a part of our cultural ethos, cognitive apparatus and epistemic structure, we seek thought from poetry and extract feelings from thought. Hence, we accept those ideas that feed our feelings. There must be exchange between thoughts and feelings. We imbue external realities in mystical colours and remain confused between subjective reality and objective fact.

The aforementioned analysis has two purposes. Firstly, it intends to identify where disjuncture between poetry and thought takes place. Secondly, it aims at finding a common ground for both the mystical and rational faculties to form a holistic being in the age of great disjuncture and ruptures. Human beings are subjective beings in an objective world. Therefore, they struggle to harmonise their subjective existence with the facticity of world and time. When a poet speaks or writes about his experience, his imagination enables him to transcend objective time, and transform a lived experience into a timeless metaphor.

In literature, the technique of stream of consciousness enables the writer to move back and forth between past, present and future. This becomes possible because the artist develops the sensibility to capture moments of epiphany and sustains it for a lifetime. It is this operation of imagination on epiphany that makes an artist, philosopher, reformer, poet, charismatic leader and innovator different from common people who fail to seize the dream/epiphany and turn it into a wellspring of creativity and source of self. The state of de javu and dream like situation is visible in the poetry of John Keats. Keats’ entries in his journal and correspondence clearly show that he seized the moment of dream/epiphany and transformed it into a poem ‘On a Dream’ and a beautiful ballad in English – ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci (The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy)’.¹¹

 

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,

Alone and palely loitering;

The sedge is wither’d from the lake,

And no birds sing.

 

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,

So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel’s granary is full,

And the harvest’s done.

 

I see a lily on thy brow,

With anguish moist and fever-dew;

And on thy cheeks a fading rose

Fast withereth too.

 

I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful—a faery’s child;

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild.

 

I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long;

For sidelong would she bend, and sing

A faery’s song.

 

I made a garland for her head,

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

She look’d at me as she did love,

And made sweet moan.

 

She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild, and manna dew;

And sure in language strange she said –

‘I love thee true’.

 

She took me to her Elfin grot,

And there she gaz’d and sighed deep,

And there I shut her wild sad eyes –

So kiss’d to sleep.

 

And there she slumber’d on the moss,

And there I dream’d, ah woe betide,

The latest dream I ever dream’t

On the cold hill side.

 

I saw pale kings, and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried — “La Belle Dame sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall!”

 

I saw their starv’d lips in the glaom,

With horrid warning gaped wide,

And I awoke and found me here,

On the cold hill side.

 

And this is why I sojourn here,

Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,

And no birds sing.

Among the English poets of romantic period, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was steeped in German philosophy, especially of Kant and Schelling. His idea about poetry and philosophy, deviated from the mainstream romantic tradition in English literature. He repudiated Wordsworth’s idea of rustic language unfavourable to the formation of a human diction. Coleridge asserted that “the best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from reflections on the  acts of the mind itself.”¹² In other words, the best parts of language are the products of philosophers. Wordsworth gave importance to feelings over thought in poetry. Coleridge, in an arrogant vein, rejected this view because he was of the view that rustic vocabulary is conceptually weak for it is not mediated through reflection on the object. Therefore, it remains at the level of ordinary, whereas the vocation of the poet is to represent an ordinary experience in an extraordinary way. Ordinariness and common sense are enemies of both philosophy and poetry.

Unlike English romantic tradition that tends to ignore thoughts in poetry, German Romanticism tried to overcome the duality by synthesising philosophy and poetry to form new aesthetics. German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer provided a yardstick for poetry and philosophy by deriving standards from the dialectics within both vocations. He claimed that both poetic and philosophical types of speech share a common feature: they cannot be “false”. According to Gadamer, “They represent unique kind of risk, for they can fail to live up to themselves.” They fail not by failing to correspond to the facts, “but because their word proves” to be “empty.” Explaining cases of the failures of both, he writes, “In the case of poetry, this occurs when, instead of sounding right, it merely sounds like other poetry or like the rhetoric of everyday life. In the case of philosophy, this occurs when philosophical language gets caught up in purely formal argumentation or degenerates into empty sophistry.”¹³ After examining the proximity between philosophy and poetry, Gadamer concluded his essay, “Philosophy and Poetry,” with the reflection that “In both these inferior form of language…the word breaks. Where the words fulfil itself and becomes language, we must take it as its word.”¹⁴

We may claim that the poet gives words to ineffable experiences. Nevertheless, the processes followed by poets are different from philosophers, for the former need free vent to her/his creative energies, whereas the latter has to organise his mind to explore intractable issues that are not amenable to explications through dogma and conventional frameworks of thinking. Immanuel Kant rejected those who reject rules as impostors. He was of the view that, “For the thought of some thing an end must be present, or else its product would not be ascribed to an art at all but would be a mere product of chance. But the realization of an end necessitates determinate rules which we cannot venture to dispense with.” He further stated, “Now, seeing that originality of talent is one (though not the sole) essential factor that goes to make up the character of genius, shallow minds fancy that the best evidence they can give of their being full-blown geniuses is by emancipating themselves from all academic constraint of rules, in the belief that one cuts a finer figure on the back of an ill-tempered than of a trained horse.”¹⁵

Karl Marx considered poets as strange creatures because they are not restrained by logical rules and formulations. Marx himself regimented his mind to produce magisterial books related to the dialectics of human history, economy and society. He, nonetheless, favoured extending liberties to the poets that were not permitted to be philosophers and scientists. In our culture free thinking of thinkers is detested, but emotional outpouring in poetry is allowed. As a corollary, we have more emotions and less thought. Despite his dry rational approach and analysis, Marx understood the subjective nature of truth in art, and its relevance to the subjective dimensions of human life. His flair for poetry is visible in his exquisite prose, full of historical allusions and poetic metaphors. Karl Marx dabbled in poetry, yet he decided to quit the romantic and idealist world of poetry for philosophy. In an exquisitely poetic language, he described the change of his heart in a letter to his father. Marx wrote, “in my state o mind at that time, lyrical poetry inevitably had to be my first concern, at nay rate the most agreeable and most obvious; but, in accord with my position and whole previous development, it was purely idealistic.” Mentioning his poetic outpourings and sharing poetry with Jenny, he wrote, “The whole horizon of a longing which sees no frontiers assumed many forms and frustrated my efforts to write with poetic conciseness. But poetry could only be, should only be, a companion. I had to study jurisprudence, and above all I felt an urge to wrestle with philosophy.”¹⁶

Owing to the subjective nature of creative activity, the poet enjoys a license to break epistemic rules and literary practices. Poetic licence is one among such licences to transgress established canons. This licence sans responsibilities sometimes takes the artist to the land that becomes an asylum into which his irrational and mad self has been banished. It is a precarious position to maintain balance. Friedrich Hölderlin¹⁷, Van Gogh¹⁸, Salvador Dali, ¹⁹ Sylvia Path, Shakeeb Jalali²⁰, Mir Taqi Mir²¹ and Jaun Elia are among the artists who inhabited in the boundary between sanity and insanity, and from that threshold they created a conduit to interface between the banished half living in this uncanny land and the sane world of reason.

Persian and Urdu literary tradition see the symbol of a wound in the heart (khoonay jigar, daagay jigar etc) as a source of creativity and sign of genuine feeling. John Elia’s wounds are not those of tradition. They are the ones inflicted by the experience of the metaphysical pathos of modernity that disenchanted him from tradition, but failed to give him alternate solace. With Jaun Elia, blood and blood spitting appeared frequently on the pages of his poetry. Psychologically, it is a symptom of the sanguinary world created by the banished half in the inner world. This inner strife between the sane and deranged selves tore Elia into two. His was the scream of that a figure who, in the words of Michel Foucault, was banished from rationalised society and relegated to carceral space where the mad, sick and criminal lives. That banished self is wounded, and his blood is oozing out from the weak pours of his sane self. Hence, blood is the symbol of death. Elia wrote:

Band meri zaat kaa dar hay mujh may,

May nahi khud may, yay ik aam khabar hy mujh may,

Zakham ha zakham hoon or koyi nahi khoon ka nishaan,

Kon hay jo meray khoon may tar hay mujh may. ²²

[Translation: The gate within me is locked for me from outside/I do not inhabit in me that is news within me/Although bruised by umpteen wounds, there is no trace of blood/Who is that who is drained in the blood of my sanguinary self.]

 

Mixa khooneen tou chahra zard nikla

Di les kartab may apnay fard nikla. ²³

 

[Translation: My eyelashes are blood-spattered, and the face came out to be pale/The heart has proved to be unique self in this trick.]

 

Sigmund Freud thought that the reader enjoyed poetry because poets became an agent of unconscious through a flight of fancy from reality. Freud was of the view that the poet is saved from neurosis because he is able to give expression to the tension between reality and the unconscious through the work of art. Poetry remains at the threshold of proverbial state of intuition, and the poet gives words to the ineffable experience. Poetic and artistic medium open up possibilities for intuitional truth.

S. T Coleridge differentiated between poetry and prose on the basis of what they seek to do. The immediate aim of poetry is to give pleasure, while that of prose or more precisely philosophy is that of the truth. Robert Frost said that a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. ²⁴ Wisdom in its ultimate form encompasses all dimensions of existence to cultivate a unified sensibility. In the absence of a unified sensibility, the outlook of life remains trapped in fragments. Wisdom comes through cultivation of the unified sensibility  and  unified  view. Germany is a typical example  where  collaboration  of  ideas and literature remained very close. Germans are noted for producing brilliant philosophers who broke fresh grounds in modern philosophy. Ideas are part and parcel of German literature, and it is reflected in writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Holderlin, Christian Friedrich Hebbel, Heinrich Wilhelm von Kliest, Gunter Grass, etc. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, in their book, ‘Theory of Literature’ were also of the view that, “In Germany, indeed, the collaboration between philosophy and literature was frequently extremely close…”. They especially mention Shiller’s Kantianism, Goethe’s contacts with Plotinus and Spinoza, Kleist’s with Kant, Hebbel’s with Hegel, and such topics. Similarly, English poets Drydon, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, P.B. Shelly and T. S. Eliot were steeped in ideas of philosophy. As a result of a great system of ideas, literature imbibes philosophical ideas in its content, and thus adding flesh to form by infusing thought.

Poetry sans ideas provides pleasure without wisdom. Wallowing in emotions all the time turns the mind into barren land where no thought can grow. However, poetry is not to blame solely for this lack of ideas. It reflects the general intellectual condition of society. When we take stock of the pre-modern period of Urdu literature, we see darbars (courts) of kings and nawabs with legions of poets competing with each other by playing with words and composing poetry sans thought. In the court of Mughal king, Bahadur Shah Zafar, poets indulged in typical jealousies, and scheming to win his favour through poetry. But we cannot find any instance where thinkers are debating over the ideas related to humanities, science, philosophy and other fields of knowledge. Hence, overall, there remained a poverty of thought in Urdu poetry towards the end of the Mughal empire. It is only after the dusk we see the owl of Minerva struggling to spread its wings in the void of ideas.

When Moulana Muhammed Hussain Azad and Moulana Muhammed Hussain Hali started their project of literary modernism, they wanted to infuse new ideas into poetry by introducing new themes and modern literary canon. In his speech of 1874²⁵ at Anjuman-e- Punjab, Muhammad Hussain Azad criticised the undue indulgence in the use of farfetched metaphors and dark allegories and made a case for poetry of ideas by suggesting themes related to natural poetry. Azad stated, “instead of carefully selecting such words as might best among their ideas and give a colouring to the different shades of thought all that they care for is stringing together a number of synonymous high- sounding words instead of allowing the parent idea to shoot forth into leaves and branches to bud bloom and blossom.” ²⁶ Thereafter, in the modern period, Urdu literature witnessed an efflorescence of poetry that synthesised breadth of thought and profundity of feelings.

During the mid-twentieth century, Urdu poetry enriched the poetic works of Urdu literature by investing itself with thoughts that addressed sense and sensibilities created by disenchanted world of modernity. Now that wave has waned into the peripheries, and the contemporary literary landscape of Urdu presents a scene of wasteland. Three factors have contributed to the current scenario.

The first is the shrinking of the imagination. The second is the absence of philosophical thinking. For poetry, the poet relies on imagination and feeds from existing knowledge that provides new metaphors and meaning. The shrinking of the imagination means the diminishing of the repository of knowledge in a poet. When a poet ceases to absorb new streams of knowledge, his imaginative horizons also shrink. Consequently, his poetry becomes empty. Moulana Abdul Rahman, in his book “Ma’rrat ul Shair”, encapsulated the process of the shrinking of the imagination and the resultant poverty of poetry. He thought that if a poet’s knowledge is vast, then he would find an abundance of meaning and metaphors. Otherwise, mental horizons shrink, and, as such, a poet takes refuge in imagination so that he can hide his lack of thoughts. Abdul Rahman provided an astute observation about the relationship between knowledge and poetry. He wrote, “It is obvious that thought’s treasure of knowledge lies in the book of memory. If that is profound and the knowledge of poet is vast, then he/she easily finds array of meanings and metaphors for his/her use. Otherwise his scope become too narrow, and sooner he/she has to take refuge in the realm of imagination so  that he/she can don nakedness of poverty of knowledge. Since the very edifice of imagination itself rests upon the foundation of thoughts, scant knowledge of such poet cannot be hidden from the wise people. That is why you can find difference poetry with thoughts and thoughtless poetry as you will always find a wide spectrum of thoughts in the former, and narrowness and paucity of thoughts in the latter. A poet with the wide ideas will repeat the same thought hundred times but expresses it in a novel way with new meaning. On the other side, the one with narrow spectrum of ideas will fail to do so.”²⁷

Thirdly, words have taken precedence over meaning in Urdu poetry and, as a result, the quality of poetry has degenerated. A divorce between thought and poetry comes into being when poetry becomes the sole focus of poetry. This is not to advocate the complete submission of poetry to thought, but to keep a modicum of thought in poetry instead of a complete erasure of thought in poetic verse. Gurrey was of the view that, “The poet’s actual words give distinction and vitality to the thought, and therefore, they are of the greatest importance, but there should be no emphasis on the words, on their novelty, felicity, or exquisiteness, at the expense of the thought [sic], and above all no divorce of words and thought.” ²⁸ The ultimate example of marriage between thought and poetry is Moulana Jalaluddin Rumi. His title Moulana means scholar. In the euphoria of their love of Moulana Rumi, his modern readers tend to forget that he was well acquainted with thoughts of different cultures. Mirza Iqbal rightly points out that “While portraying cultural traditions of Muslims in all their manifold aspects, it also reflects the wisdom of Hellenistic epistemology, the richness of Babylonian, Indian, and Egyptian cultures, the dualism of good and evil of Zoroastrianism, the deliberations of Judaism, and the formal ceremonial manners of Christianity.” ²⁹ Because of this, Moulana Rumi shows an amazing range of diverse ideas. His verses are peppered with philosophical reflection and allusions to seminal figures of Hellenistic philosophy. Rumi writes:

Shaad Bash ay ishq-e-khush sodayay maa,

Aay tabeeb jumla ilat haey maa,

Aay dawaey nakhwat wa naamoos-e-maa,

Aay tu aflaatoon wa jaleenoos-e-maa.

 

Translation: “Hail! O Love that brings us good gain –

you that are the physician of all our ills,

The remedy of our pride and vainglory –

O Love, you’re our Plato, you’re our Galen.” ³⁰

In Pakistan, poetry remains empty because the fountains of philosophy have almost dried up. In Pakistan poetry thrives but its words remain empty of thought because poets have stopped feeding on thoughts and ideas. Without thought poetry is just chatter. In Pakistan, philosophy is already in a dilapidated condition. Therefore, no thoughts are visible in the firmament of ideas in Pakistan. Consequently, we have failed to synthesise different modes of realities into holistic aesthetics. Hence, any idea outside poetry is deemed inimical to pure feelings, a philosophical idea detrimental to settled habit of thinking, novelty of thought a threat to religion.

Poetry can be termed as a subjective voice transcending into the objective world. Philosophy is a fusion of thinking with the objective world. It can be said that poetry is an escape from the real to surreal, whereas philosophy is an activity of thought that attempts to smash the idols and ideals to clear the way for new thoughts and reveal reality. In other words, the philosophical activity in ideas is an attempt to escape from everyday perceptions and languages that infiltrate our concept and cognition and make us attune to the world through ideas.

The deserted departments of philosophy in universities on the one hand, and an abundance of mushahiras on the other clearly shows an antipathy of our society towards thinking and an appetite for feelings. Such is the situation today that our hearts are saturated with emotions, and minds are bereft of any philosophic thought. A society with empty minds and passionate hearts remains blind and develops a dystonic personality.  We  need a reconciliation between thought and feeling   by creating a new romanticism in which both poetry and philosophy become dance and the dancer – in the words of William Butler Yeats, ‘cannot know the dancer from the dance’.³¹ Such a fusion will enable us to create aesthetics that absorb discordant chords in a harmonious whole. Exclusion of any kind is antithetical to the very essence of aesthetics. The macabre dance of death and destruction in our country is a result of a dissonance of our feelings with thoughts, sanity with society, intellect with religion and mind with time.

Reference

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2. Aristotle. Poetics, trans. Anthony Kenny. Oxford University Press. 2013.
3. Ghalib. Diwan-e-Ghalib. Lahore: Al-Hamd Publications. p 142.
4. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Maredith. New York: Oxford Uviersity Press. 207. p 139.
5. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Maredith. New York: Oxford Uviersity Press. 207. pp 136-158.
6. Nin, In factor of the sensitive man, and other essays. New York: Harvest/ HBJ (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 1976. p 14.
7. Quoted in Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Soceity. New York: Achor Books. 1953. p 32.
8. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, trans. Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin Books. 2003.
9. Hakeem, Khalifa Fikr-e-Iqbal. Lahore: Majilis Taraqi Adab. 1988. p 719.
10. Naqvi, Syed Lafz sufi ki tehqeeq in Lisaani Maqalaat (Volume I). 95. Islamabad: Muqtadira Qoumi Zaban. 1998. p 95.
11. Keats, The Poetical Works of John Keats, eds. H. Buxton Forman. London: Oxford University Press.1953. pp 354-356.
12. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria: Or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. London: Dent. 1977. p 199.
13. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. The Revelance of the Beautiful and other Essays, Robert Bernasconi. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1995. p 139.
14. Ibid.
15. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Maredith. New York: Oxford Uviersity Press. 207. p 139.
16. Marx, Karl. Letter to his father: On a turning-point in life (1937) in Writing of the young Marx on Philosophy and Society, eds and trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat. New York: Anchor Books. 1967. pp 41-42.
17. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Hymns and Fragments, trans. Richard Sieburth. Princeton – New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1984. pp 3-43.
18. Gogh, Vincent. Vincent by Himself: A selection of his paintings and drawings together with extracts from his letters, Bruce Bernard. London: Time Warner Books. 2002.
19. Schiebler, Dali: Genius, Obsession and Lust. Munich – New York: Prestel. 1996.
20. Ahmed, Shahzad. Shakeeb Jalali in Doosra Rukh. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications. 2012. pp 48-61.
21. Mir, Taqi Mir. Zikr-e-Mir, ed and trans. Dr Nisar Ahmed Farouqi. Lahore: Majlis-e-Taraqi Adab. 2016. pp 232-234.
22. Elia, John. Yaa’ni. Lahore: Al-Hamd Publications. 2014. pp 45.
23. Elia, John. Yaa’ni. Lahore: Al-Hamd Publications. 2014. pp 43.
24. Actually, the speech was written by Colonel R.M. Holroyd, Abraham Richard Fuller’s successsor a DPI (Punjab) for Muhammed Hussain Azad. Azad delivered this speech in Urdu. For speech see: First Symposium on “Natural” Poetry in Muhammad Hussain Azad: Life Works and Influence, eds. M. Ikram Chughatai. Lahore: Pakistan Writer’s Cooperative Society. 2011. pp 256-265.
25. Frost, Robert. Collected Poems of Robert Frost. New York: Halcyon House. 1942.
26. First Symposium on “Natural” Poetry in Muhammad Hussain Azad: Life Works and Influence, eds. M. Ikram Chughatai. Lahore: Pakistan Writer’s Cooperative Society. 2011. pp 258-259.
27. Abdul, Rahman Moulvi Shams-ul-Ulema. Mar-aatul-Shair: Aiena-e-Shair wa Shairi. Edit and research. Dr. Zahoor Ahmed Azhar. Lahore: Majlis-e-Taraqi-e- Adab. pp 172.
28. Mojaddedi, Rumi: The Masnavi, Book One: New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. p 24.
29. Ashraf, Mirza Iqbal. Rumi’s Holistic Humanism: The Timeless Appeal of the Great Mystic Poet. Codhill Press. 2012. p 32.
30. Ashraf, Mirza Iqbal. Rumi’s Holistic Humanism: The Timeless Appeal of the Great Mystic Poet. Codhill Press. 2012. p 32.
31. Yeats, W.B. Among School Children in The Works of W.B. Yeats. The Wordsworth Poetry Library. 1994. pp183-185.