Distillations from the Unknown: A Review of Tamali Neogi’s Ripples in Silence

Abstract

In Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry, Chinese literary scholar David
Hinton highlights how ancient Chinese poets explored language as a relationship with the
cosmos, “[…] poetry pares language down to a bare minimum, thereby opening it to silence.
And it is there in the margins of silence that poetry finds its deepest possibilities — for there
it can render dimensions of consciousness that are much more expansive than that identitycenter, primal dimensions of consciousness as the Cosmos awakened to itself.” Hinton’s view
is derived from his studies of classical Chinese poets such as Tu Fu who lived in an era of
nihilistic violence yet maintained balance through contemplation and spiritual seeking. Poetry
in today’s literary landscape maintains this rigor of silence and path of language as openness
to the cosmos. It may seem odd that language should be taken as a medium of silence or that
poetry emerges from the languishing depths of poverty. The poet is the rare class of seer, and
the nature of the vision depends on the faculty of imagination. In his A Defense of Poetry,
Percy Shelley defines the imaginative capacity in contrast to reason as “[…] mind acting
upon those thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them, as
from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own
integrity.” While our modern ambitions are unseated in restlessness and cultural history takes
a back seat for pursuits aimed at industrial betterment, the quality of poetry and the
humanities diminishes like a fog over the mind.