Kahlil Gibran once urged someone, presumably someone he loved, to ‘feed the lamp with oil and let it not dim.’ He explained, ‘so I can read with tears what your life with me has written upon your face.’ This is a verse from the poem ‘The life of love,’ in his collection, ‘A tear and a smile.’
The poem has been a companion of sorts. Lamp, flame, light and face are metaphors. They can also be taken literally. We can peer into faces, not just of those we love, and see what we’ve written on them and, if we have not, reflect on what life and others have.
In the case of total strangers it would be speculation, nothing more. Some may say it’s a waste of time but others might very well delight in imagining what or who carved worry lines or etched a line or two at the corner of the mouth. That’s just the traces on the countenance. Life marks tone of voice, the movement of eyes and so much more.
It is different with those who are familiar, but with those who have loved or have been loved, the traceability is less contaminated by speculation. We can retrace steps less erroneously.
But why? That’s a legitimate question. The simple and perhaps simplistic answer is that human beings are curious creatures. We wonder. We imagine. And we travel on magic carpets to alternative universes with exotic names such as What-If and If-Only.
We are also rational. We hike into the hills of nostalgia, allow the winds of recollection to play with heart-hair and after sampling the many flavours of those other planetary configurations, which by the way could take hours or a few seconds, we return to the here and now. We put aside what might have been and think about what has been and perhaps what will be.
And so there’s a lamp ready to be lit and it can be brought close to the face of the beloved. It is a magic lamp; one that illuminated pathways to the long ago, and indeed the longest ago if you will, to the point of first encounter. And there we find the beloved in the infancy of companionship or wanting.
There are two directions we can take. We can start from the love of the first moment and move to the loves that came thereafter, for both individuals grow and in growing their love is transformed, in any number of directions. We can meet each and every beloved of each and every moment, exhilarating and painful, until we come to the beloved of the parting. We can trace beloved and loving backwards too, from ultimate departure to all the arrivals and departures that came before until that first unforgettable encounter.
This is perhaps the beauty of love, the multiplicity of beloveds, all having the same name, same body, roughly the same features and wavelengths. They are not cast in stone, though. Their lives are carved upon and they carve themselves on other lives. Just as the recipients of their love or those who adore them beyond belief.
We don’t do this all the time, but then there comes a day or a moment when lyrics you’ve never heard before make their way through conversations and concerns: ‘Can you wait a little longer until I come?’
So we wait, even if the beloved never arrives. Arrival makes a difference of course, but nether presence or absence could stop someone who has decided he will walk through walls, cross streets without sparing one fraction of a second to consider the traffic and enter the gardens of magical oblivion and assertion, where nothing that does not carry the name of the beloved can exist.
And all the loves that etched a song, all the tears of all the moments, they come alive, they light all the lamps of the heart, one by one, until there’s nothing left to do but fall on one’s knees and murmur the immemorial prayer of love: stay blessed beloved, always, wherever you are and with whoever you may be with.
Other articles in this series:
Reflections on waves and markings
Respond to insults in line with the Akkosa Sutra
The right time, the right person
The silent equivalent of a thousand words
Crazy cousins are besties for life
The lost lyrics of Premakeerthi de Alwis
Consolation prizes in competitions no one ever wins
Blackness, whiteness and black-whiteness
Inscriptions: stubborn and erasable
Deveni: a priceless one-word koan
Recovering run-on lines and lost punctuation
'Wetness' is not the preserve of the Dry Zone
On sweeping close to one's feet
Kumkum Fernando installs Sri Lanka in Coachella, California
To be an island like the Roberts...
Debts that can never be repaid in full
An island which no flood can overwhelm
A melody faint and yet not beyond hearing
Heart dances that cannot be choreographed
Remembering to forget and forgetting to remember
Authors are assassinated, readers are immortal
It is good to be conscious of nudities
Saturday slides in after Monday and Sunday somersaults into Friday
There's a one in a million and a one in ten
Kumkum Fernando installs Sri Lanka in Coachella, California
Hemantha Gunawardena's signature
Architectures of the demolished
The exotic lunacy of parting gifts
Who the heck do you think I am?
Those fascinating 'Chitra Katha'
So how are things in Sri Lanka?
The sweetest three-letter poem
Teams, team-thinking, team-spirit and leadership
The songs we could sing in lifeboats when we are shipwrecked
Jekhan Aruliah set a ball rolling in Jaffna
Awaiting arrivals unlike any other
Teachers and students sometimes reverse roles
Colombo, Colombo, Colombo and so forth
The slowest road to Kumarigama, Ampara
Some play music, others listen
Mind and hearts, loquacious and taciturn
I am at Jaga Food, where are you?
On separating the missing from the disappeared
And intangible republics will save the day (as they always have)
The circuitous logic of Tony Muller
Rohana Kalyanaratne, an unforgettable 'Loku Aiya'
Mowgli, the Greatest Archaeologist
Figures and disfigurement, rocks and roses
Sujith Rathnayake and incarcerations imposed and embraced
Some stories are written on the covers themselves
A poetic enclave in the Republic of Literature
Landcapes of gone-time and going-time
The best insurance against the loud and repeated lie
So what if the best flutes will not go to the best flautists?
There's dust and words awaiting us at crossroads and crosswords
A song of terraced paddy fields
Of ants, bridges and possibilities
From A through Aardvark to Zyzzyva
Words, their potency, appropriation and abuse
Who did not listen, who's not listening still?
If you remember Kobe, visit GOAT Mountain
The world is made for re-colouring
No 27, Dickman's Road, Colombo 5
Visual cartographers and cartography
Ithaca from a long ago and right now
Lessons written in invisible ink
The amazing quality of 'equal-kindness'
The interchangeability of light and darkness
Sisterhood: moments, just moments
Chess is my life and perhaps your too
Reflections on ownership and belonging
The integrity of Nadeesha Rajapaksha
Signatures in the seasons of love
To Maceo Martinet as he flies over rainbows
Fragrances that will not be bottled
Colours and textures of living heritage
Countries of the past, present and future
Books launched and not-yet-launched
The sunrise as viewed from sacred mountains
Isaiah 58: 12-16 and the true meaning of grace
The age of Frederick Algernon Trotteville
Live and tell the tale as you will
Between struggle and cooperation
Neruda, Sekara and literary dimensions
Paul Christopher's heart of many chambers
Calmness gracefully cascades in the Dumbara Hills
Serendipitous amber rules the world
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