Poetry as Ritual Magic: Rajorshi Patranabis’s GOSSIPS OF OUR SURROGATE STORY
Photo: Karan Madhok
Poetry is a prayerful medium to explore complex, living concepts. Just as fruit falls from the bough to decay within earth and feed the tree, Rajorshi Patranabis’s presents the ritual of cyclical love and devotion in his new collection.
James Frazier writes in The Golden Bough: “Magic is the attempt to control nature by the use of supernatural means.” Rajorshi Patranabis’s Gossips of Our Surrogate Story (Hawakal Publishers, 2025) is an example of poetry as ritual magic. In his preface, the author states that what to expect from his writing is, “[…] the integration of the seasons and sometimes include elements of Wiccan rituals”.
Readers may be curious as to what the surrogate story may entail. The title of the collection is taken from one of the untitled prose poems, “Black is my robust absence; blue is your naïve hiding. The sky gossips of our surrogate story.” (14) In the title, ‘gossips’ appears as a noun, but from this poem it becomes a verb. This confounding of verb with object in the same phrase reflects on the book’s premise that Nature is both action, and what acts and is acted upon, such as when Patranabis offers later in the collection: “Let my heart menstruate.” (73) This metaphor carefully couches the feminist aspects of Wicca within its concept of worship.
Nature is both action, and what acts and is acted upon, such as when Patranabis offers later in the collection: “Let my heart menstruate.” (73) This metaphor carefully couches the feminist aspects of Wicca within its concept of worship.
The collection is dedicated to “my Isis”, the Egyptian goddess of healing, the moon, and motherhood. The poet takes the presence of this deity both symbolically and literally. She is the wisdom of Nature, a cyclical process as well as the object of worship. One of Wicca’s principles is living in harmony with Nature and choosing lifestyles that signify that harmony. To the poet, Wicca is philosophical. It determines his stance and outlook.
Nature is a multifaceted process as in the poem on page 58, “She swells to devour; she dwindles to profess.” The phrase suggests the “devouring mother” who is seen as extending her protection beyond moderation in Jungian psychology. She presents urgency as the poet writes, “I plead for mercy.” Mercy is derived etymologically from the Latin misericordia which translates into “a heart for the miserable.” This power dynamic reflects on the human before the deity Nature. The poet asks for mercy from the deity, “I wait for her to spell her magic with syllables of love.” By reflecting on love, healing is induced in the verse as a ritual.
Human helplessness before the divine feminine is presented as cyclical and seasonal. Seasons cycle from birth to rebirth. “Sharp words cut across the silent cold burns that stand as a hot testimony to our deathless births. I am back to where I belong,” the prose poem on page 79 reads. The use of heat and cold reflects seasonal temperatures in the same way that “deathless rebirths” signify eternity. This is what Patranabis means by the “integration of seasons.”
Nature is a process reflected by humanity because we are part of the whole. Patranabis writes on page 15, “The boat is loaded with darkness. The burning cauldron is red hot. Silver celebrates His ceremonial departure. He returns with light in spring. We are Us till then.” Nature, then, is knotted together with humanity and its cyclical, profound seasons. This boat journey is a chase for the “real self” of Isis who is “still the claustrophobic abbreviation of my enhanced resurrection.” Resurrection is an ascent to a formal understanding and unity with Nature’s process.
On page 71 the poet writes, “Love defies immortality.” The eternal is represented as a unity of seasons. Patranabis often entrenches oppositions within one another to describe “our amorphous story.” The poems are ritual and defining of myth. “Let’s fall in love again – time and distances matter no more, muffled voices shout out loudly for a virtue, compulsively laughing at a breathless longing” the prose poem on page 55 declares.
Nature is a compulsive coming-together of its binaries which only seem oppositional. They are like male and female, meant for loving one another. On page 54, the poet writes, “I am her dark winter. She’s my obstinate arrogance.” Like yin and yang, each binary contains the other. To defy immortality, being must exist on two planes: living and death.
One must simultaneously be mortal, capable of death; also, a deity incapable of extinction. So, Nature lives within and through human form as much as outside it. Patranabis writes: “The red gown of the morning burns in desires of this yellow mustard season. Moon smiles as stars blink, luring this soothing anarchy. // You water my molten violet.” (97)
“Red gown” utilizes human language to describe sunrise. That desire is seen in the sunrise reflects Nature’s deification within human action. Desire is energy much the same way it is for Blake, “Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” Nature is impermeable and impenetrable in her purest form. Her secrecy is the same as a god’s. “I open my doors to see some myriad outlines that live without a body. They have not forgotten the custom to seek for my permission, on this day” the poet writes on page 19. As in Blake, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”
Does the emergence of body make something real? Can things exist outside of phenomenon? Is there a liminal space of understanding? Many of these poems resonate with Plath gems such as “Couriers”: A disturbance in mirrors, / The sea shattering its grey one-- // Love, love, my season.” The concept of disturbance as the revelation of reality is present throughout the volume of Patranabis’s poems. Physical, mortal reality is only a portion of Nature. Death and rebirth are united as a system of continual flux with stable elements. For instance, page 59 reads, “A breath of shattered anarchy forces me through amends of broken hopes. In swirls of a winter storm, a smoke of nonchalance revolts.”
Poetry is a prayerful medium to explore such complex, living concepts. Just as fruit falls from the bough to decay within earth and feed the tree, Patranabis’s cyclical love and devotion is ritual in Gossips of Our Surrogate Story.
These ritual understandings continue a dialogue with nature as a process. Nature is a living entity in these prose poems. Magic is a method of conjuring her beauty and complexity, and Patranabis’s Wiccan philosophy describes an inherent poetics through this concept. The magic aids the poet to live harmoniously with the natural world, and poetry is a spell induction to persuade the poet of nature’s harmony and divinity. Through this dialogue with himself, the poet establishes connection and meaning, utilizing myth and human emotion to broaden his understanding—and ours.
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Dustin Pickering is founder of Transcendent Zero Press. He has contributed to Huffington Post, Café Dissensus Everyday, The Statesman (India), Journal of Liberty and International Affairs, The Colorado Review, World Literature Today, Asymptote, and several other publications. He was given the honor Knight of World Peace by the World Institute for Peace in 2022. He is author of the poetry collections Salt and Sorrow, Knows No End, The Alderman, Only and Again, The Nothing Epistle, The Stone and the Square, and several others, as well as the novella Be Not Afraid of What You May Find. His most recent book is Crime of the Extraordinary (Hawakal Publishers, 2024). You can find him on Instagram: @poetpickering and Twitter: @DustinPickerin2.
