The Doubter And The Doubt Poem by Ananta Madhavan

"I am the doubter and the doubt."
Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem, ‘Brahma' (1856)
- - - - - -
1.

The woman bends low to decorate
Her dooryard with an early morning 'kolam'.
She has the pattern in her mind
And in her hand a bowl of powdered rice;
Her rapid fingers inscribe the dampened ground
With pre-determined dots in rows,
Between which white flour will run assured
In patterns reborn from age-old skills.

She plans no symbols of abstract art
To chart a life of endless drudgery;
The kolams Mother trained her in suffice
To make her home auspicious for the day.

2.

There is no pattern, no design that I can see,
Of grandiose evolution to
A Superhuman destiny.
We are not dots and lines or loops
In a transcendent imagination.
Our agendas will clash or cohere
In parts and veer away into a void.
Look up Freud.

3.

Is Time a fiction? Are we hand-cuffed by the wrist-watch,
Trapped by the calendar,
Reckoning our Time by globes in orbit and galaxies?
Let me not cipher what is random,
Except for Reason's sake.

I hope someone will find
Equations lost to Einstein,
Words and numbers in series and sequence,
Making astounding sense
To some genius or robotic array of knobs and screens.


Enough that my ears respond
To euphony and music.
Design may be a myth,
But at least it can console
The existential Sceptic.
The blank of Self
Doubting itself.

- - - - - - - November,2014

‘Kolam' and ‘Rangoli' are patterns traditionally used to
to decorate homes or temples and public squares
in India for festivals occasions or also as
auspicious welcome signs at the doorstep of homes.