Entering the Labyrinth: An Introduction to "Fables of the Third Eye" (Drawings and Sculptures of K.Shyamkumar, Poems of M.D.Muthukumaraswamy )
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M.D.Muthukumaraswamy
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These poems, gathered under the title Fables of the Third Eye, did not arrive as neat pronouncements or carefully charted maps. They surfaced, instead, like objects found wedged between roots after a flood – strange, silt-covered, humming with residual energies. They are less declarations than they are echoes, the residue of journeys taken inward, through landscapes where the familiar dissolves and the self becomes a shifting architecture of paradox and perception. To call them 'fables' is to acknowledge their kinship with the oldest forms of storytelling, the ones that use the fantastic not to escape reality, but to probe its deeper, often unsettling, truths. And the 'Third Eye'? It signifies that other way of seeing, the inner vision – not necessarily clear or divine, but often fractured, intuitive, glimpsed in moments when the usual coordinates fail. It is the eye that opens when the physical eyes, or the eyes of reason, admit defeat, the eye that learns to read the “braille of his pulse” or perceives the world not as solid fact but as a “lexicon of ephemera stitching the void / into temporary nouns”.
This collection, then, is a threshold. It invites you into spaces where light might be “a bell that never stops ringing” yet remains unheard, or where the “wound is the lantern”, illuminating from within the raw, aching core of existence. It’s a journey into landscapes mirrored and magnified by the uncanny, potent sculptures and drawings of K. Shyamkumar, whose visual language resonates so deeply with the poetic explorations herein. His forms – part-architectural, part-biological, emerging from textured darkness like ancient myths or psychic structures [Image 1, Image 2, Image 9] – create not just illustrations, but parallel worlds that amplify the poems' mood, providing a fantastic, unsettling, and profoundly internal setting for these fables to unfold.
Fables of Inner Sight
Why Fables of the Third Eye? Because these poems often operate in the realm of myth, parable, and allegory, using narrative frameworks – however fractured – to explore the landscape of inner perception. They are fables not in the sense of simple morals neatly packaged, but as explorations of archetypal situations pushed into surreal or symbolic territories. The "Third Eye" is the lens through which these fables are viewed or generated – a perspective that transcends the literal, embraces paradox, and acknowledges the limits of ordinary sight.
Consider "The Blind Sage and the Hidden Light". In one version, blindness is “not blindness, but a second sight brewed in the cauldron / of his ribs”. The sage sees beyond the physical plague to the "knot in the collective retina", the inability of the villagers to perceive beyond their immediate fear, seeing "only the teeth of the wolf, never the moon / that silvers its fur". His cure involves teaching them to "unhinge their skulls, / to pour the night out like spoiled milk", an act of radical perspective shift, a forced opening of inner vision. The fable’s moral is elusive, “etched into the air, then promptly erased”, suggesting that insight is ephemeral, casting shadows as much as it illuminates: “To hold a torch is to cast two shadows: / one where you’ve been, one where you’ll bleed”. In the second version, the sage’s inner light is explicitly linked to suffering: “The light isn’t kind. It gnaws”, and insight comes from acknowledging the wound: “Look here— / the wound that outlives the knife”. Here, the third eye is not a serene portal but a source of painful awareness, a “blister” rather than the fire itself. Both versions are fables of perception, using the figure of the sage to explore how we see, or fail to see, the deeper currents beneath the surface of reality.
This theme echoes throughout. "The Mountain That Breathes" charts a literal ascent that becomes an internal one, culminating not in a summit conquered, but in an inner realisation: “Third eye, not vision, but knowing ripened, / in mountain’s breath, in mountain’s stillness, / revealing self as landscape, landscape as self”. The external world becomes an “echo of the inner ground”. The fable here is about the journey inward, where the ultimate discovery is the dissolution of the boundary between observer and observed. Similarly, "The Moon-Kissed Mind" presents the struggle for enlightenment not as a serene unfolding but a wrestling match within a “frantic marketplace” of the mind. The eventual realisation is subtle, a “quiet unfolding” where the moon, symbol of illumination, is found not outside but within, reflected in the flawed, “bruised” lily of the self [cite: 64, 82-83]. The fable lies in the acceptance of imperfection as the path.
These are fables populated by clockwork oracles, shadowless villages, fountains that whisper truths only silence understands, bells that ring time backward, and bridges made of smoke. Each scenario acts as a crucible, testing the limits of perception, challenging assumptions about reality, time, and selfhood. They are stories born from that space the third eye perceives – a space where logic frays, and metaphor becomes the most reliable vehicle for truth. The coherence lies in this consistent turning inward, this use of the fantastical or surreal not for its own sake, but as a lens to examine the often-invisible mechanisms of consciousness, suffering, and the elusive nature of knowing.
Language, Form, and Voice
These poems attempt to forge a language capable of navigating these internal, often paradoxical, landscapes. This involves several distinctive features:
Visceral and Synesthetic Imagery:
The language often translates abstract concepts into physical, sometimes jarring, sensations. Doubt stains linen, silence has architecture, light gnaws, grief outlives a clock, shadows have teeth, and absence becomes palpable enough to hold us. We find skies like "cataracts", palms like "cracked lanterns", thoughts like "molten rivers" within the body, and silence vibrating like "unseen energy". This physicality aims to ground the metaphysical, to make the reader feel the shifts in perception.
Embrace of Paradox:
The poems do not resolve contradictions; they inhabit them. Light illuminates but also burns and blinds. Wounds are sources of sight. Silence speaks. Ascent is descent. Wholeness is found in fracture, and absence defines presence. Truth is found in the "swallowed," not the "seeing". This reflects the logic of the third eye, which operates beyond binary oppositions. The final lesson of the Clockwork Oracle is itself a paradox: “To hold me, you must let the wind / carry your watch away. / To know me, you must forget / how to count your own pulse”.
Narrative Instability and Shifting Forms:
The poems often employ narrative voices that are themselves part of the fable – sometimes detached observers, sometimes participants caught in the strange mechanics of the world they describe ("I am writing this with hands that forget / if they were ever fists" ). The inclusion of two versions of "The Blind Sage"highlights the instability of narrative itself – truth isn't singular but multifaceted, a story that can be told in different keys, emphasising different facets (light as a gift vs. light as a wound). Some poems incorporate fragmented structures, interludes, codas, and even self-referential notes ("Coda 2 exists as firefly larvae in the author’s marrow. / To read them, hold this page to a match" ), breaking the conventional poetic frame and acknowledging the artifice, suggesting that the poem itself is a shifting, unstable entity, much like the reality it explores. "The Mountain That Breathes" uses short, breathless lines to mimic the thinning air and the effort of the climb, making the form enact the content.
Personification and Animated Abstractions:
Concepts and objects are frequently imbued with agency. Time is a lung or a room painted blindfolded. Shadows have desires and histories. A fountain has a voice and swallows echoes. Clocks guard lies or tick in two worlds. Mirrors swallow worlds or hold alternate lives. Even gravity becomes something an artist can paint, influencing time itself. This animistic quality contributes to the fable-like atmosphere, suggesting a world where the boundaries between subject and object, concrete and abstract, are porous.
These features work together to create a poetic texture that is hopefully unique – dense, sometimes disorienting, but aiming for a kind of truth that lies beyond the reach of purely logical or descriptive language. It’s an attempt to find, or forge, the “liquid alphabet” needed to articulate the fables seen by the inner eye.
Recurring Motifs
Certain images and ideas resurface throughout the collection, acting as motifs that thread these disparate fables together, creating echoes and resonances across the poems:
Eyes, Sight, and Blindness:
This is central, given the title. From the "cataract sky" and "second sight" of the Blind Sage to the "collective retina", the "Moon-Kissed Mind" achieving inner vision, the "Eye of Disintegration" woven from fireflies, the "Unseen Gallery" where viewers confront inner truths, and the "third eye flickering, ajar" on the breathing mountain – the act of seeing, its limitations, and its transcendence is a constant preoccupation. Sight is often paradoxical: blindness yields insight, direct gaze fails, inner vision is needed.
Light, Dark, and Shadow:
These are rarely simple opposites. Light can be a destructive currency, a gnawing force, or equated with a wound. Darkness can be scripture, a space for growth, or the necessary contrast that makes sparks legible. Shadows are complex entities: they can be twins warring within, repositories of secrets, vital counterparts whose absence leads to a sterile flatness, or mutations that reclaim their flesh. The poems explore the interplay, the "Path of Half-Light", the twilight zones where meaning often resides.
Mirrors, Reflections, and Doubles:
Mirrors appear as coffins, surfaces to be licked at dusk, deceptive waters, prisons for shadows, portals to self-recognition in mountain pools, tools of denial, things that swallow worlds, or gateways to alternate lives. Reflections reveal not just the self, but its hidden aspects, its potential splits ("his double splits into six" ), or its fundamental connection to the landscape. The motif explores identity, self-awareness, and the porous boundaries of the self.
Wounds, Scars, and Imperfection:
Wounds are often sites of transformation or insight. The sage’s light comes from within his flesh, revealed by parting it like curtains; the wound becomes a lantern. A scar is a reminder of being a bridge. Fireflies script forgiveness "in a cursive only bruises could decode". The Moon-Kissed Mind finds enlightenment through a "bruised" lily. Perfection is sterile, even dangerous, as with the "Sword That Could Not Cut". The poems value the crack, the scar, the imperfection as places where truth or transformation leaks in.
Silence, Sound, and Whispers:
Sound and its absence are powerful forces. A bell’s ringing can be light or a destructive backward force. Silence can be scripture, a deep vibration, a prerequisite for hearing truth ("a psalm only the deaf can parse" ), or the loudest prophecy. Whispers emanate from fountains, moths, oracles, and the wind, carrying fragmented truths. Voice itself is mutable – it can be lost, fossilised, stolen, or found in unexpected places.
Thresholds, Doors, and Paths:
The poems are full of journeys and transitions. Characters cross thresholds into forests of echoes, approach doors to nowhere or unseen galleries, walk paths of half-light or bridges of smoke, climb mountains that breathe, or navigate maps of forgotten dreams. These journeys are often internal, passages between states of being or perception. The threshold itself – the door, the bridge, the path's edge – is a potent symbol of choice, risk, and transformation.
These motifs intertwine, creating a dense web of associations. A mirror might reflect inner light, a wound might grant passage through a door, silence might reveal a hidden path. They are the recurring elements in the fables, the symbolic language the third eye uses to speak.
Shyamkumar's Images: Mood and Fantastic Setting
The inclusion of K. Shyamkumar’s sculptures and drawings is not incidental; they are integral to the atmosphere and conceptual space of this collection. His works provide a visual counterpoint, a silent, parallel narrative that deepens and complicates the fables told in words.
Shyamkumar’s art creates an immediate sense of entering another order of reality. His forms are often monumental, yet intricate, suggesting ancient structures, forgotten deities, or biological entities from an inner dimension [Image 1, Image 3, Image 9]. The textures are paramount – surfaces meticulously rendered with dots, lines, and cross-hatching that give them a vibrating, almost living quality, much like the porous, breathing quality of the reality depicted in the poems. Look at the figure in Image 1: its vast, enigmatic head contains inner chambers, suggesting the internal landscapes explored in poems like "The Mountain That Breathes" or "The Moon-Kissed Mind." The strange, organic forms flanking it seem simultaneously architectural and natural, blurring boundaries in a way the poems frequently do.
The settings conjured are fantastic and dreamlike. Towers rise in barren landscapes [Image 2], strange creatures swim in tiled pools before imposing, glyph-like buildings [Image 4], and structures float on stems above patterned ground [Image 7]. These are not literal places but psychic spaces, resonant with the poems’ exploration of internal states, memory, and myth. The recurring motifs of doorways, stairs leading into darkness or ambiguous structures [Image 3, Image 4, Image 8], and contained inner spaces [Image 1, Image 13] visually echo the poems' obsession with thresholds, hidden realms, and the complexities of the self. The sculptures, like the mask in Image 13 or the figure in Image 10, often feel like artefacts from these fables – relics imbued with hidden histories and potent silence, much like the Clockwork Oracle or the Mask Maker's creations.
The mood evoked by Shyamkumar's work is one of profound stillness, mystery, and often a quiet melancholy or unease. The predominantly black and white or sepia-toned palette contributes to this sense of otherworldliness, a space removed from the everyday. There's a weight to his forms, a sense of ancient presence, even when depicting seemingly impossible structures or beings [Image 6, Image 11]. This gravitas provides a grounding for the sometimes wild, surreal flights of the poems. His images don't merely illustrate; they inhabit the same conceptual territory, offering a visual language for the 'fables of the third eye'. They create the atmosphere – that slightly tilted, deeply internal, myth-infused space – where a mountain can breathe, a clock can tick in two worlds, and a blind sage can find light brewed in the cauldron of his ribs. They are the silent guardians at the entrance to this labyrinth, their enigmatic forms inviting you into the strange, resonant quiet where these poems live.
Entering this collection is, I hope, like stepping through one of Shyamkumar’s rendered doorways [Image 8] or crossing the bridge of smoke – a passage into a realm where the familiar coordinates dissolve, and perception itself becomes the landscape. These poems are offered not as answers, but as echoes, as fragments collected on inward journeys. They are the fables whispered by the third eye, stories born from the fruitful tension between light and shadow, silence and sound, wound and wholeness. Read them, perhaps, not with the eye that seeks certainty, but with the one that recognises itself in the fractured mirror, the whispering fountain, the path that dissolves as you walk it. For it is often in the places where language fails, where sight blurs, that the most vital truths begin to stir. The rest, as the Blind Sage might say, is “silhouette and guesswork” – or perhaps, the quiet, ongoing work of the third eye, learning to read the darkness and the light.
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