Speak to me

VIJAY NAMBISAN

AFTER many years of waiting for the right lender I've at last borrowed C.L.R. James's book Beyond a Boundary, and in the last few days I've given it the first of what will be several readings. It is a book on much more than cricket. Towards the end James quotes an open letter he wrote in 1960 to the Queen's Park Club in Trinidad at a time of crisis in West Indies cricket, and mentions the overwhelming response he got. He adds:

All art, science, philosophy, are modes of apprehending the world, history and society. As one of these, cricket in the West Indies at least could hold its own. A professor of political science publicly bewailed that a man of my known political interests should believe that cricket had ethical and social values. I had no wish to answer. I was just sorry for the guy.

That professor has his counterpart, in literary theory, among the critics and academics who cannot be brought to understand that the popular has its place in poetry. Poetry suffers from the tag of 'highbrow'. But poetry's purpose is to communicate, not necessarily to edify or elevate; and popular songs do that very well - sometimes. The old English and Scots ballads ("O where have you been, Lord Randal my son?") now firmly enshrined in the canon were the rock music of late medieval Britain, and minstrels certainly had their fan followings.

In both classical and popular music that is not entirely instrumental, the words of the song are important. Thyagaraja's music is divine, but his verses are full of his soul's earnest communion with itself. Acknowledged poets have written the lyrics of many classic Hindi, and Tamil, film songs. And if you read the words alone of rock songs by Ian Anderson, or Roger Waters - or Paul Simon - you can be quite sure you are reading poetry.

Many of my readers surely know more about Simon than I do. Even so: born in 1941 in New York State (where his future partner Art Garfunkel was his childhood friend) he studied at Queens College and Brooklyn Law School before he went to England to perform as a folksinger. 'Simon and Garfunkel' soon became as well known as, and far more popular than, Nixon and Agnew; as much for their lyrics as their beautiful harmonies. Both words and music were mostly Simon's.

After the band split Simon continued his own musical voyage. He was a pioneer; among the first to use reggae and Latin rhythms, he later innovated with African beats in the haunting "Graceland "(1986). He has also acted in films; I particularly remember him as a California millionaire in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall". He is a very intelligent man.

"The Sound of Silence" was released in 1965 and was the theme song of the 1967 film "The Graduate", whose score Simon and Garfunkel wrote. The song is about lack of communication, and that is the film's backdrop: it opens with Dustin Hoffman encased in an aqualung at the bottom of a swimming pool while his parents and neighbours call down to him from its edge. He cannot hear them and doesn't want to.

Forget the song, read it as a poem. (But I have trouble doing so, the words always sound to music.) The opening greeting to darkness; the drama of the scene in the "naked light"; the prophet's impassioned cry to the unhearing masses; and the quiet, tragic finale - all these, for allegory and imagery, surely make one of the finest poems Blake never wrote. "People talking without speaking, / People hearing without listening, / People writing songs that voices never share" - this must strike a chord in many of us who turn to poetry as catharsis.

For though our era is touted as an Information Age, and e-mail and so on have enormously facilitated communication of a sort, how much real connecting is actually done?

Rhyme & Reason this month has wandered on to the territory of two neighbouring columns. Which shows - entirely apart from the subject of the piece - that there's poetry in everything.