Mother, mother tell me
What is modernism?
Confusion prevails all around
No one truly knows
But still makes lot of sound.
Son, it is difficult to say
Modernism could mean ‘innovation’
Or ‘distinction’ in arts and literature
It could be ‘examination’
Of traditional belief;
A term that provides instant relief
from
Ethics, Ethos and Morality
I think you can be born a ‘modern’
But you cannot become one.
Mother, does it mean
That modern would never become old-fashioned?
Would not linear mechanism
pre-historicize it
And make it obsolete?
I do not know
It appears to be a strange disease
With its sick hurry and divided aims
It is transient, and accidental.
Can we then call Modernism as an attempt to reconstruct the world
In the absence of God!
May be and may be not
For modern art illustrates only the text
It exists as a desire
To wipe out previous context
In hope of arriving at a point
That might be a ‘true present’
And marks a new departure.
Son, modern man horrifies me
His ‘absence of feeling’, ‘narrowness of outlook’, ‘feebleness of thought’
Chiefly distinguish him
Life to him is an accumulation of spectacles
A mere representation.
Mother, mother I think
I have understood
Modernism is a ‘positive rejection’ of the past
A blind cultural belief in the process of change
And progress through ‘time’
It is an ‘ambiguous signpost’ without direction
Center or coherence
It is a ‘confused jumble’ in each one of us
Now here
Then everywhere.
Correct.
-Dr. Anupam Nagar (Gehray)
P.G. People 