Introduction of the Poem:
In this dramatic monologue a Buddhist addresses someone in Chicago a person who is sympathetic to Buddhism. Ramanujan lived most of his life in Chicago, though he was born in Mysore.
Critical Summary:
The speaker here has some practical advice to give to his listener. He urges the man in Chicago to sweep his house, particularly the living room, to keep it clean, and not to forget to name his children. The listener should be careful while walking on the pavements of Chicago, especially at traffic lights while crossing the street. Otherwise, lost in one's thoughts, one is likely to become a victim of the forest fires or enter an icy - cold river in the Himalayas and drown in the rapidly flowing, “silent – river”. As the evening crawls on the 14th floor of his apartment, Lake Michigan is visible from his window, one is drawn towards the sights and sounds of the Indies on the other end of the globe and reach the Monkey - temple (of Lord Hanuman) though one is perfectly sane. There are certain places which cannot be reached by an aeroplane or by a boat, and that the slim circus girls walk on a tight rope, one end of which is tied to a tree and the other end to another tree at a distance. The circus girls hold white - coloured sun - shades in their hands while walking the tight rope in order to maintain their balance.
The places inaccessible by an aeroplane or a boat cannot be reached even by transmigration with no passport at all. Those places can be reached only by telephone, i.e., telephone is the only means of communication with people in those places. Finally, the speaker urges the listener particularly to watch his step when he is about to enter a house and has to climb up a flight of stairs
and watch
for the last
step that's never there.
The poet, here a Buddhist, warns his listener— and his readers — to be careful and guard against the dangers and pitfalls of life in this seemingly meaningless poem. These dangers may not be momentous but are ordinary and trivial ones like crossing a street or climbing a staircase, or tidying his house or naming his children.
Chicago Zen gives the impression of being a non - serious poem. The objects and occurrences visualised here are by no means exciting or sensational. The picture of a man's thumbnail, crushing a louse on the window pane, the louse having come from his daughter's hair; the picture of Lake Michigan crawling through the window, the man visualizing himself as getting drowned in it and being carried towards the West Indies are noteworthy.
According to Chintan Kulshreshtha, the self is very important in Ramanujan's poetry, and passivity is an essential condition for suggesting the inexhaustible potential of the self. Passivity is a positive state of being which allows the self the necessary freedom and transparency to manipulate subjective and linear time, use personal, bring equations of one's relationship into a vivid focus, and even to observe itself as an object. As a poetic device it helps to design the framework or the “theatre” within which identities of the self may be presented in their entirety of feeling and complexity. An important characteristic of this “theatre” is the presence of in it of all time: events, recalled and juxtaposed through the method of association, are constantly viewed against shifts in perceptions and tone till a particular attitude of the self towards experience begins to crystallize.
Kulshreshtha says, “In Chicago Zen the magnification of ordinary experience into surreal proportions (the orange traffic light inspires at once the mutually contradictory images of forest fires; and a frothing Himalayan river) is achieved within the negotiable frames of a mental space by dispensing with the formal connections of time and space. The logical ‘stumble’—Ramanujan's one word in the poem for the actual process—entails the recognition that the soul's ‘country cannot be reached’ either through geographical migration or a posthumous transmigration: what is required is an acceptance of life's ordinariness and of the karma of one's nature:
only be answering ordinary
black telephone questions
walls and small children ask.
and answering all calls
of nature.
Another aspect of Ramanujan's poetry is his occasional use of the narrative mode to render the nuances of practical experiences, adds Kulshreshtha. This strategy helps to depersonalize poetry and turn it into a kind of second language.
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