Malinda Words: Transfixing and freeing dawns

['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 208th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

Dawn and dusk are thresholds. Markers that define a before and after. Words, really, for both dawn and dusk have tarrying ways. Both are magical. Both can make us stop.

Kasun De Silva has captured both dawn and dusk. He has stilled and framed them for us. Transfixed them. And by way of explanation, he quotes the British-born surrealist painter and novelist Leonora Carrington who lived most of her adult life in Mexico: ‘Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.’

That’s probably as good a differentiation one can find between dawn and dusk. Dawn is a moment before awakening in general whereas dusk is winding-down time. There’s still life and movement. Dawn is coated in slumber. This is why stillness not visible because of darkness can be observed. And captured, as Kasun has.

That hour of silence was once captured from various angles and vantage points years ago by the late Nihal Fernando who has literally traveled the length and breadth of our island, Sri Lanka. The pictures were collected in a book. It was titled ‘With the dawn.’ Initially just a limited first edition of just 1,000 copies, it is a collection that snapshots moments that begin with the dawn and ends, as the caption goes, ‘when the last bird flies home.’

Having trapped them in frames the photographer has stilled them for us. To me the message is, ‘you can stop, you can stop time and things, stop breathing and obtain hours of silence any time of the day when only the light moves.’ That’s a meditation-invite.

The book was actually co-authored: pics by Nihal Fernando, text by Herbert Keuneman. Neville Weeraratne, writing about these two exceptionally gifted men, described them as ‘a tale of two kindred souls.’ Nihal, he says, ‘has seen, heard, experienced and above all understood the land, its people and their life.’ Of Herbert he has this to say: ‘His lifelong residence led to a passionate love for the island. There is (nor was) anyone with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the country in whatever the detail and in whichever the discipline.’

Years ago, i.e. in January 2013, reviewing ‘With the dawn,’ I wrote, ‘there is silence, silently captured and described in whisper.’ Then I added: ‘There is music here too, for Fernando makes us hear the ripple of water, the movement of wind, the call of bird, flapping of wings and thereby teaches us the language of the civilized, our ancestors who had eyes and did not babble incessantly just because they had mouths and tongues.’

So it is not only silence although the only sound we can hear is that produced by the flipping of pages. On the other hand, there is a silencing, a banishing of things that clutter and therefore enabling the ears to hear music that is drowned by the day, the haste, the pursuit of the tangible to satisfy some acquisitive urge.

If ‘dawn’ is a metaphor then any moment would be one where nothing breathes. Any hour would be a time of silence. Anything could be transfixed. Only the light would move. And even the light could be made to stop. And you could throw a switch in your mind and re-start time, make things move and free the world from transfixion.

So there are dawns that are transfixed and dawns that can be freed from transfixion. There are ‘dawns’ at midday and sunset, before and after meals, in the middle of a teeming city and along a nondescript gurupaara, in the faraway hills and right at your feet.

This side of philosophical reflection, though, there are easier and more accessible dawns. Like the ones captured by Kasun De Silva and the ones described by Leonora Carrington. Dawns that can immediately be recognized as moments when nothing breathes, dawns that are describable as ‘hours of silence’ and dawns where everything is transfixed and only the light moves. Magical.

29 August 2023

Transfixing and freeing dawns

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