What do you do when ‘fog’ takes over you pedagogically? You start thinking through it.
As a teacher of literature, I could not help thinking of the connection among fog, what I teach, and what I had read to make sense of the process of knowing. Here, I share some illuminating encounters with ‘fog’.
Driving through the dense morning fog on my way to the Academy one day, I was struck by a strange coincidence. Strange because in another hour or so, I would be discussing a chapter, "Fog", in Han Kang’s grief narrative, The White Book, with my students. What fog revealed to me was the power of visual obscurity; its beauty haunted me due to the sense of the unknown.
The lesson started. I gave my students ‘thinking time’ to absorb the all-pervading whiteness in the passage as they began to navigate 'fog' in that wonderful literary work. As they started annotating the passage, I drifted into my memory. I was reminded of another literary work where ‘white’ stands out — metaphorically. The poem, "As She Passes", by Fernando Pessoa is very similar to Kang’s "Fog" in its visual appeal and in creating a feeling of being trapped in a situation where sensory perceptions nudge one to realise a lot: the inevitability of time, the pull between commitment and withdrawal, the silence of the evocative present, the sober reconciliation with sadness and suffering.
"Fog" also reminded me of the work, Khwabnama (The Saga of Dreams), by the Bangladeshi writer, Akhteruzzaman Elias, which delineates the socio-political situation in rural, pre-Partition Bangladesh. The writer uses fog in his work in different contexts. The multiple descriptions of fog — "fog of sleep like a sharp rebuke"; "a powdery fog of puffed rice"; "a fog of grief"; "thick translucent fog, as viscous as mud"; "domes sculpted out of stone in the turbid fog" — in that work left me transfixed. On a different note, Amitava Kumar’s Passport Photos offers a trenchant dimension of a horrific reality through the metaphor of white, the colour of fog: "A man on fire gets up, falls, runs for his life, falls, gets up, runs. It is horror. Oil drips from his body, his eyes become huge, huge, the white shows, white, white ..."
Talking of fog, how could I not recall Nirmal Verma’s Dhundh Se Uthati Dhun (Tunes Rising from the Fog). The music is all-encompassing as the ‘fog’ lifts its sensuous spell languorously. I am also reminded of Verma’s story, "Amalya" in The Crows of Deliverance where fog is oppressive in its stagnancy: "Fog was pressing against naked leafless trees, and a thin mist spread about us. The houses were very still, but if you looked at them steadily, they seemed to be floating like little paper boats." Talking of musical cadence, what a contrast to Verma's fog is the "perfumed-fog, shot through with lightning" in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (Vol 2).
Sometimes the convergence that emerges, thematically and technically, provokes us to look beyond what we teach. Stranded in a fog, one steps into its nature and its nuances and feels its heavy breath intimately. Thick fog can, indeed, be revelatory, offering insights that enrich the domain of possibilities.
I thus wait for the next ‘fog’ with an air of expectancy. I await narratives to unfold that would reveal truths about the human condition. For 'fog' is a catalyst for epistemology — what and how we know! Interesting, isn’t it? As the veil of perception lifts, intertextual references come to the surface and meaning-making is rendered open-ended, lending readers/learners/ teachers the joys of knowing.