I will spend my entire life listening for two melodies: the melody that has never stopped playing, and the melody that has never yet been played.
I do not know where or how this thought first came to my mind, but the truth within it seems clear. A ‘spiritual intellectual’ cannot be created by any university. It is not something that can be achieved by earning a PhD. It is entirely a spiritual quality, something a person receives as a gift from birth. Through practice or by being in the company of a teacher, it may be refined and sharpened, but its essential nature must already exist within the person.
When someone asks me, “How did you paint this picture?” I simply say, “I do not know.” I feel that a painting has its own process of birth. I merely keep moving the brush; how the picture eventually takes its complete form remains unknown to me. Only the one who guides the process knows.
When I think about Picasso’s famous painting Guernica, I am filled with admiration. Guernica is the name of a town in Spain’s Basque region. When Hitler’s forces carried out a bombing raid there, killing many people, the Spanish Communist Party asked Picasso to create a painting based on the tragedy.
At that time, an industrial fair was being held in Paris. It was not an art fair, but an exhibition devoted to technology and machinery. The Communist Party had taken a stand there. The financially struggling political organisation could not offer Picasso any payment, and he did not demand any. Yet, based on that single tragic event, he created the enormous and timeless painting that would become Guernica.
If you visit a museum in Spain, you can see that several rooms beside the original Guernica are devoted to preserving its preliminary layouts and studies. Picasso did not simply make pencil sketches and stop there. He prepared each layout through etching and lithography as well. When one considers the long and complex process of etching, in which metal plates are treated with acid, the depth of his dedication and honesty towards his art becomes clear.
There is a striking lack of such tireless practitioners in the present day. Yet our past traditions and intellectual landscape were very different.
Take Lalon Fakir, for instance. He was not merely a Baul singer or a spiritual seeker; he also became involved in direct struggles against injustice. When anti-British and anti-oppression posters were being printed at a printing press in Kushtia and the British came to destroy them, Lalon reportedly confronted them with a group of lathials and took part in the resistance. He was also vocal in calling for an end to the practice of sati.
Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nazrul Islam and Sukanta Bhattacharya wrote about such struggles through their enduring literary works. Yet examples of someone like Lalon becoming directly involved in resistance and physically taking part in such struggles remain rare.
One line from Lalon’s songs particularly makes me think. In one of his songs, he said: “The thinker is one who knows the soil; the one who knows the soil is the true thinker.”
In other words, without understanding the soil, one can never become a truly thoughtful or knowledgeable person, because the ultimate source of all knowledge is the earth itself.
A person may have shortcomings in formal education, but that does not mean they are incapable of acquiring wisdom. Throughout life, profound lessons can be learnt from the company of knowledgeable people, from nature and from the world around us.
Some of life’s deepest meanings are not found in books or classrooms. They must be discovered through living, observing and listening.
And perhaps that is why I will continue to listen throughout my life—for the melody that still plays, and for the melody that has not yet been heard.
