The philosophers have been categorized into lumpers, splitters and crunchers. The lumpers pile up the slabs into mounds, the splitters juxtapose the elements, thus highÂlighting binary oppositions and the crunchers or the microÂresearchers enter the serpentine depth of consciousness to ‘sit in the center of a layered dome’ as Muzaffar A. Ghaffaar has aptly remarked. In poetry, however, no such division exists because poetry has the tendency to weave the multi-coloured strands into a fine fabric. The poet with his cosmic vision engulfs existence in one swoop, tears it apart with his sharp talons, and then entering the blood vessels, arrives at the edge of a precipice. In fact, it is the edge of a gaping wound (or womb) which sucks in the intruder, then implodes, creating a riot of colours, almost an ‘inverted crescendo’, disturbing the slices of experiences which have been accumulating within the system SInce etermty.
Eventually, however, there develops a holocaust. The disturbed fragments of experiences start colliding; mingling, imploding, then coalescing into myriad forms and yet they still remain the looped strings or the crumbs of images. It is the creative act that employs molecules of phonemes called ‘words’ to turn the felt images into visual icons. But it is not merely a transference, because the poet, in the very act of writing, creates aesthetic monads out of the holocaust. This creative act does not copy what already exists but brings into being, as if with a magic wand, a new entity of unsurpassed beauty. Of course, the umbilical chord remains in tact because it is the lifeline, but the resultant ‘blinding blaze’ is absolutely different. It is such a delicate process that the displacement of just one word or phrase changes the profile of the previous image, so that a new image is born. Hence the time-old concept of the Inner Self, acting as a medium to transfer what already exists no longer holds good. Now we have recognized
the Inner Self as a replicator forever replicating itself into myriads of new entities. That is the  quintessence of Creativity.
In Muzaffar A. Ghaffaar’s poems the ‘deep cavern with a gaping mouth’ is at once the destroyer and the creator. As a Devouring Mother it suckles the intruder, thus demolishing its stamped identity, then recreates it by gluing its components into a new texture. However, the gluon applied is not just saliva. It is, in fact, the nector extracted from the flowers of knowledge as well as gathered, pollen – like, from the slices of experiences locked within the human psyche. Muzaffar A. Ghaffaar is a keen observer and a voracious reader and has a kaleidoscopic view of the changing pattern of things. He well-understands the phenomenon of gene-culture co-evolution, which has ushered in a scenario of cooperation between the gene as a biological replicator and the me me as the cultural replicator, thus obliterating the protruding line between determinism and free will. A new world appears to be on the anvil, fast emerging not as a shattered mirror but as a synthetic whole in which the gene will not hold culture on a leash, where both replicators will go hand in hand.
Muzaffar A. Ghaffaar has enriched his poems with this new perspective, which appears to have a horizontal as well as a vertical slant. On the horizontal plane he has captured the phenomenon of ever-receding horizons of time and space while on the vertical plane he has experienced the inner tides smashing against the primordial rocks, splashing a form-like mist that is the core of Reality. The new “M” theory of physics has envisaged this mist as MURKY, MATRIX, MAGIC and MYSTERY though, to my mind, two more M’s, one of MOULD, the other of MIND should be added to it. Confronting this mist Muzaffar A. Ghaffaar has seen the great spectacle of Creation, that of the mould (womb) and the child getting separated like the strands of DNA, finally appearing asÂ
