” Waiting for Miracles—The Only Way ” –  By TEJWANT

—From the 1959 Golden literary heritage of a College Magazine 

( A promising student writer TEJWANT who  blossomed to become Prof ( Dr.)Tejwant Singh Gill, an Indian author and professor of English who got a permanent Sahitya Academy Fellowship in 2021. He is contributor of The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies and has written more than 25 books )

According to Pasternak, life is not so simple as to cross a field. There is much truth in this dictum; but the misfortune is that life has not simply become difficult to lead; it has become impossible. This negation of life or the incapability to lead it, is the result of the presence of adverse social and eco-nomic systems, economic difficulties, political harassment, bareness in the relation of individuals, man’s inhumanity towards man and towards his own self because he stuffs his own mind with wrong notions and contradictory and confusing conceptions. The above-mentioned  causes are the product of confusion, lack of insight and vision.

Even in such circumstances, persons like W.H. Auden are,

“Waiting expensively for miracles happen.” Is there any rationality in such hoping? There may be but at first let us study the scope and consequences of these confusions, lack of insight and vision.

These confusions are more vividly discernible in Systems of Thought, in political Relations, in Love and in the concept of Freedom.

Ever since conscious human existence has started, philosophers and thinkers have suggested means and ways to lead life harmoniously and piously. Buddhism, Judaism, Confucianism, the esoteric teaching of Egyptians, the Bahamanic philosophy of Indians and Christianity were founded with the same intention. It is utterly impossible that philosophical suggestions and religions can be correct for all places and times, ‘The Theory of Relativity’ has attacked nothing so vigorously as this concept of the ‘Absolute’, Naturally every religion lacked something which the later people came to grasp. Without eradicating the mistakes of the first one and making it wholesome what the thinkers did was to negate the first one completely and advance their own religions which were later on found similarly full of contradictions. D. H. Lawrence, for example, found this world lacking sexual potency. Without sexual vitality-which to him is a religion-he found the people nothing but corpses. To him hope for this world only lay in resurrection through sex, of Lady Chatterley:

“The life of the body, he (Sir Chifford) said, is just the life of animals.

And that is better than the life of professional corpses. But it is not true! The human body is only just coming to real life. With the Greeks it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle killed it, and Jesus finished it off. But now the body is coming, really rising from tombs. And it will be a lovely, lovely life in the lovely universe, the human body.

What Lawrence failed to under-stand is that Plato, Aristotle and Jesus did advocate some principles which, if properly followed, can raise this life to high exaltations. He, on the other hand, fell a prey to confusion.

T.S. Eliot to whom the world seems nothing but what he writes in “The Waste Land’,

“Unreal City”. Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, 

I had not thought death had undone so many,

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet,”

Thus advocated Roman Catholicism and  Royalism and shows the same mental bankruptcy which Lawrence has shown.

They seem to have embraced thoughts wholly with all the defects. They have replaced one kind of mistake with another. No endeavor has been made to arrive simply at truth. The same abyss of chaotic thoughts remains.

Political relations are not based on any concrete thinking, but are based on opportunism and greed for gain. In the thirties, for example, every government in Europe claimed to fight for freedom. But when the Civil War of Spain-the war between freedom and slavery-arriveed all governments were dictated their actions by opportunism In that шаг according to Pablo Neruda,

“Spain stood Alone,

While Spain tore up the earth with her fingers,

Paris was gay and feckless,

while the life’s blood ebbed from Spain

London trimmed her lawns And tended her swans.”

Such unwise-though claimed to be diplomatic – policies create confusions in the minds of the people. Their ideological concepts and sense of patriotism get bifurcated. Executions and many such things follow and life becomes miserable.

The same lack of insight and confused thinking is visible in our attitudes towards Love. Love is not, what a psychologist may say, innate response, or what a psychoanalyst may say, a “quantity of psychic energy, called libido, as limited and homogeneous as a pound of suet, which is parceled by repressions and inhibitions into various channels, returns on itself, is transferred, cathexed and displayed but is visualized as the same consistent street, but is what Christopher Caudwell says, “man’s name for the emotional element in social relations.” Tenderness exists in the relationship of man and woman when they are in love; and they have intense desire to live together. These are the two factors of deeply true love. Formerly it was always a human relationship though in the days of the Greeks it was Platonic and in the medieval days it was Chivalric. But now it has become the relationship of the being to the commodity. Love has acquired marketability. All the Acts giving men and women equal rights in the possession of property and equal privileges to divorce, have further established this unnatural relation-ship. Their considerations to each other are not to things inherent in them but to their marketable scope. This is entirely due to sense of possession which has possessed our minds. This endorsement of the Caudwellian view may be objected to by saving that in socialist societies, where there is no such sense of possession, the relationship of tenderness does not perfectly exist. The reason for this is quite different. This is due to the authority and interference of the state which hangs like the sword of Damocles over it. So to let the previously existing relationship of tenderness flourish, the sense of possession which is the guiding motive of the present society has to be abolished; and a society has to be established in which state does not command the right of excessive interference in the private affairs of the people.

The wrong conception of Freedom, which the people owe to Rousseau, is the source of much agony and despair. According to Rousseau, “man is borne free but everywhere he is in chains.” In other words what Rousseau meant to say, was that freedom lay in loneliness and detachment; life in an integrated social order was slavery. Rousseau’s dictum was simply an advocacy of the possessive instincts of the bourgeoise class.

To think that freedom lies in loneliness is an illusion. It can be illustrated and its hollowness explored. Suppose a man in loneliness thinks that bis freedom lies; and he becomes quite detached from the society. Suddenly in him desire arises to kiss a girl. There are four ways possible for him he can bite his own skin; he can repress it; he can sublimate it and fulfil his desire by writing a poem; or he can become the member of the society, asks a girl and on her consent fulfil his desire. The first way is quite unnatural and unsatisfactory. The second way is quite harmful and its’ harms Freud has explained with full clarity. In the third and fourth ways he in fact, becomes the member of the society. Communication and social activity are both social functions. Real freedom comes through integrated social action. But this wrong conception of freedom is the source of much distress. All Dr. Zhivago’s suffering towards the end of his life can be attributed to it.

The consequences of these confusions and lack of insight and vision in Love; Freedom and Systems of Thought are – distressing. People endure both qualitative and quantitative sufferings. Illustrative of the former are Rilke, Toller and Pasternak; of the later the starving peasants and laborer of the feudal and the capitalist countries.

The presence of such circumstances lead us to two kinds of decisions: to end  lives or to endure sufferings and hope and act for a better life. The first is no , solution. Its’ non-validity Hamlet in his speech well exposes. To endure sufferings, hope and act for a better life are the only ways.

                                                                                                                                         —   Tejwant

Professor Dr Tejwant Singh Gill has been an alumnus of Government College, Ludhiana in 1959. Now the college is named as Satish Chander Dhawan Government College, He also taught here for many years before he went to Guru Nanak Dev University as Professor Of English.