['The
Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News
from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 204th article in the
new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given
below]
Years
ago I made an observation: open wounds are for blood-letting, open
words are for love-letting. Word play, nothing more, one might say, but
probably a victim of the timeless trap of writers falling in love with
their words, I used it as the title of a collection of poetry published
in 2014: ‘Open words are for love-letting…’
Six years ago I named
an album made of photographs taken during a clan trip to Maha Eliya or
Horton Plains, ‘Open words are for love-letting; open spaces a canvas
for a mind-brush.’
Memories are made to pop up in social media
and those images returned wrapped in the coolness of the place and the
warmth of the company. Those landscapes have I, along with good friends,
inhabited off and on many times. We soaked it all in. One particular
night the skies we so clear that we just lay down outside our tent,
identifying constellations and being awed by satellites and shooting
stars.
Maybe it was just one satellite and a single shooting
star. Maybe we were just ignorant, but it was very much like the
following verse in ‘Home on the Range,’ the Kansas state anthem since
1947 composed by violinist Daniel Kelley to lyrics penned by Dr.
Brewster Higley:
How often at night, when the heavens were bright,
With the light of the twinkling stars
Have I stood here amazed, and asked as I gazed,
If their glory exceed that of ours.
The
poet Ruwan Bandujeewa had already known, long before I did, that there
were canvases that anticipated mind-brushes. And this is how he painted
it:
එක්à¶à¶»ා නිම්නයක....
ගඟ දෙපැà¶්à¶ේ
බොà·„ෝ කල් à·ƒිට
ප්රේමයෙන් බැඳි
කඳු දෙකක් ඇà¶
උනුන් වචදෙà·ƒ
බලා ඉනු මිà·ƒ
මෙà¶ෙක් කල් à·€ෙන
à·€ුනු දෙයක් නැà¶
නමුà¶් ඉඳ à·„ිට
කඳු ඇසින් වට
කඳුà·…ු කැට කැට
ගලා පහළට
à·ƒිà·„ින් ඇළ දොà·…
ලෙà·ƒින් පැන නැග
ගඟට එක්à·€ෙනු
දකින්නට à·„ැක ...
I transliterated thus:
On either side of the river
from a long time ago
two mountains rise
bound in love
They cast gaze
on the other’s face
and nothing else
have they done
And yet now and then
from mountain eyes
tear drops roll
down to the river below
They burst out
and as thin streams roll
and gather at the river,
this is apparent.
I
had seen those tears while making my way from ‘World’s End’ to
Belihuloya with my friends one rainy afternoon. Kanishka Goonewardena,
Jayantha Jayman, my brother Arjuna and two AFS students from the USA,
Cameron Shaw and Ethan Shauer and I trudged along the narrow path that
took us to the Nagrak and later Nonpareil estates and eventually to the
Haputale-Colombo road. The rain relented, the mists lifted and we could
see silver streaks rolling down the mountain sides. Only, we didn’t
think ‘tears.’ We didn’t see ‘faces.’ We saw the river into which they
rolled, the Belihul Oya. Now I know what I didn’t know then, thanks to
Ruwan Bandujeewa whose worlds must have got lodged somewhere in the mind
and surfaced quietly to be extrapolated into this line, ‘open spaces
[constitute] a canvas for a mind-brush.’
Come to think of it, all
spaces, open and otherwise, can be painted. Those things that seem
cluttered (in contrast to the faces of mountain ‘streakable’ with tears
for example) can be repainted. The objects, crude though they may be,
can be rearranged. There are no barriers to imagination. We can turn
anything and everything into a canvas. The entire world if we so wish.
Societies. Political economies. Even doctrines can be (and are!)
doctored, after all.
Perhaps the more sensible course of action
is to use the mind-brush to un-clutter simply by sweeping away
imperfection, impurity and defilement.
There’s another way. Simply close your eyes and you can if you so wish call upon all the canvases you need along with a full palette of colours and brushes to paint with. In other words, we can create the spaces we need and manufacture the instruments necessary for (re)colouring.
malindadocs@gmail.com
A stroll with Pragg and Arjun along a boulevard in Baku
Daya Sahabandu ran out of partners but must have smiled to the end
Sapan and voices that erase borders
Problem elephants and problem humans
The 'inhuman' elephant in a human zoo
Ivan Art: Ivanthi Fernando's efforts to align meaning
Let's help Jagana Krishnakumar rebuild our ancestral home
Do you have a friend in Pennsylvania (or anywhere?)
A gateway to illumination in West Virginia
Through strange fissures into magical orchards
There's sea glass love few will see
Re-residencing Lakdasa Wikkramasinha
Poisoning poets and shredding books of verse
The responsible will not be broken
Ownership and tenuriality of the Wissahickon
Did you notice the 'tiny, tiny wayside flowers'?
Gifts, gifting and their rubbishing
Journalism inadvertently learned
Reflections on the young poetic heart
Wordaholic, trynasty and other portmanteaus
The 'Loku Aiya' of all 'Paththara Mallis'
Subverting the indecency of the mind
Character theft and the perennial question 'who am I?'
Saji Coomaraswamy and rewards that matter
Seeing, unseeing and seeing again
Alex Carey and the (small) matter of legacy
The insomnial dreams of Kapila Kumara Kalinga
The clothes we wear and the clothes that wear us (down)
Every mountain, every rock, is sacred
Manufacturing passivity and obedience
Sanjeew Lonliyes: rawness unplugged, unlimited
In praise of courage, determination and insanity
The relative values of life and death
Poetry and poets will not be buried
Reunion Peradeniya (1980-1990)
Sorrowing and delighting the world
Encounters with Liyanage Amarakeerthi
Letters that cut and heal the heart
A forgotten dawn song from Embilipitiya
The soft rain of neighbourliness
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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