“The poet who is not a realist is dead. And the poet who is only a realist is also dead. The poet who is only irrational will only be understood by himself and his beloved, and this is very sad. The poet who is all reason will even be understood by jackasses, and this is also terribly sad…” said Pablo Neruda, in his Memoirs.
48 issues plus one bitter black humour special later, one knows, the only way out from dark dungeons, is perhaps to be a little more expansive – in thought, ideas, dreams and hopes, even challenging reason and rationality at times to etch new possibilities.
To be able to hold on to irrational hope, and to have unreasonable resilience in the face of despair, it is perhaps not enough to only critically reflect on the times. It requires imagination to look beyond the debris and the chaos towards a place of beauty and peace, ideas to reach there, and a new set of dialectics to build the roads and bridges.
Scientific research and philosophical quests have always opened new doors for us. New theories and ideas have sprung up like yellow spring on purple mountains, changing entire landscapes, heralding entire new seasons. Soaring imagination, rigorous experimentation, and painstaking research have established seemingly impossible ideas, have fulfilled improbable dreams. This very year, we travelled previously unimagined distances. We reached the depths of our inner cosmos through miniscule particles inside the Large Hadron Collider and as Curiosity travels on Mars, we are that much closer to the elusive secrets of life.
Just as poets and scientists bring us new songs and stars from untouched aspects of the earth and the sky every day, just as scientific methods and poetic imaginations have rescued and redeemed us time and again, and just as a new world is always being created underneath the cool, dark depths of the earth, it should also be our prerogative to transform everything into the language of hope.
And henceforth, ideas, imagination and dialectics will be our new tools to devise a magazine that endures the depths of despair, the shackles of reason, the chaos of reality and the test of time.
There is this little ‘Book of questions’ which lies unpublished in a neat little stack on my desk. Here’s a thought from the book, as we publish our 50th issue…
Why do the same seasons keep inviting each other?
Why don’t they make new friends to call over sometimes?
A new season that rains sunflowers
And has pink clouds?
Or another season, with some temperature
Between warm and cool
When leaves would turn lavender
And the hills would be covered with blue snow
And it would always smell of cinnamon?
