Malinda Words: Love is...

['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 202nd article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

'Love is…’ is a syndicated cartoon written and drawn by Bill Asprey since 1970. It began much earlier when Kim Grove drew these enchanting doodles to express her love for her husband-to-be, Robert Casali. The couple eventually picked Asprey to take over the task of writing and drawing the daily panels for her.

Love is…obviously, many things. The fact that Kim and later Bill have produced literally thousands of, say, ‘definitions,’ testifies to the indefinability of love. Robert passed away in 1976 and Kim in 1997. Love came long before either of them were born and have and will survive their passing. That’s how it is. And yet, ‘Love is…’ has been a daily reminder of the little things that make people smile simply because they make you think, ‘ah, yes…this is so.’

Simple things. The first to be published by the Los Angeles Times is one of those innumerable everyday things associated with love but which don’t make it to the pedantic elaborations on the subject: ‘Love is…not picking the most expensive dish on the menu.’

Poets and philosophers have spoken on love and the sum total of the outcome of their deliberations, to my mind, have been best captured by my late friend Sujeewa Wickramasekera: ‘Love is…impossible to defined; we can only feel it by the unutterable bliss and the unbearable sorrow it gives.’

This doesn’t mean that ‘definitions’ cannot be ventured and duly appreciated. Krishan Jayachandra, a school friend I hadn’t seen in almost 40 years, told me about an early-life story, a love-definition he had come up with.

‘She (the teacher) heard me talking to the guy next to me and demanded that I tell her what I had said.’

Maybe the teacher, who passed away in 2009 and therefore cannot be asked, heard what was said. Krishan lied, ‘I didn’t say anything, madam.’ She insisted. He insisted too. Finally he relented, ‘It’s something I can’t say, madam.’ She insisted. He relented.

‘Love is a train going over your …..’

‘Wrong,’ she said. ‘Say “love is a train going over your testicles.”’

Krishan is now a grandfather. The train had arrived quite early in his life, I observed. He laughed. He’s now in Los Angeles, ‘livin’ da vida loca,’ or ‘living the crazy life’ he says. Crazy. That’s a word for undefinable, I feel. Like love.

Love is...a poet's reverie. Lahiru Karunaratne's, for example.

An ocean, a reservoir and a handful of seashells

A handful of seashells
picked from a long ago
I keep safe

There was a beach
frequently visited
in those days
I would a seashell bring home

One day the ocean ran dry
the waves that receded
never again returned
carrying seashells

Life now is a reservoir
where waves never rise

At sunset
I toss stones into the water
thinking that perhaps
an old wave may arrive
at some moment

Thereafter I silence all sounds
and to an ancient ocean’s ho-ho cry
give ear.

Lahiru Karunaratne is not exactly talking about love in the above poem which reads much better in its original Sinhala. It is nevertheless about absence and presence and of course their interchangeability and ‘synonymity’ with regard to the sensations associated with love. The overpowering feeling does not always crash through like a train.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz has written about this in a different way:

Today she forgot herself her usual ways
Her face broke as if by chance into a smile
Don’t ask what happened to the defeated heart
Oh Faiz how it broke once again into hopeless longing.

What if a wave arose unexpectedly? What if it delivered to Lahiru’s heart-sands a shell? Love is...patient. Love is…forgiving. Love is…two figures floating out of a syndicated cartoon. Love is…a friend who remembered an observation, a teacher who heard, ignored boyish crudeness, offered a correction and forever imprinted tenderness in a heart that never lost its boyishness.

Love is…waiting for seashells that contain an ocean and as such can never be ‘nutshelled.’ Krishan would love that, I'm sure, as would his teacher, Indrani Seneviratne, my late mother.

22 August 2023

Love is...

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