Malinda Words: A canvas for a mind-brush

['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:

එක්තරා නිම්නයක....

ගඟ දෙපැත්තේ
බොහෝ කල් සිට
ප්‍රේමයෙන් බැඳි
කඳු දෙකක් ඇත

උනුන් වත දෙස
බලා ඉනු මිස
මෙතෙක් කල් වෙන
වුනු දෙයක් නැත

නමුත් ඉඳ හිට
කඳු ඇසින් වට
කඳුළු කැට කැට
ගලා පහළට

සිහින් ඇළ දොළ
ලෙසින් පැන නැග
ගඟට එක්වෙනු
දකින්නට හැක ...

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.

26 August 2023

A canvas for a mind-brush

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