Malinda Words: Residents and residency of heart and mind

Liyanage Amarakeerthi in Nava Kavi Salakuna, a theoretical survey of contemporary poetry, mentions that the poem is not anyone’s birthright but a territory visited by all kinds of people, some of whom take up residence and remain if they had to pay with their lives.

I haven’t read the book. I have, however, listened to Amarakeerthi speak at book launches and other literary forums. His observations are rich with insights that are the inevitable yield of extensive and close reading of literature, poetry in particular. What he has said above is of course now new; he is essentially interjecting an old discussion over the ownership of poetry and indeed all art: does it belong to the poet or the reader?

That academic debate never seems to end; I just think ‘both’ and leave it at that. I am more interested in residency in terms of the dimensions of ownership and the parameters of tenurialty in a broader, in-and-out-of-poetry sense.

The notion of the heart, as metaphor of course, is a site that lends itself to endless contestation over territory. Who owns it and for how long? Who has the title? Can it be leased? Can it be parcelled and leased to many tenants? Are tenants doomed to quarrel, claiming legality and accusing one another of illegal squatting?

It is a place where the ‘owner’ willingly allows occupation. No rent is charged. It is a strange residence and the residency is no less peculiar. For example, residents may not even have the slightest idea of the spaces they occupy. It is a strange place where owners, in the event ‘tenants’ choose not to reciprocate residency, have to pay, often a high price and endlessly too. Month after month and sometimes year after year with only death and the inevitable demise of residence ending this unparalleled servitude. They too pay with their lives, like those who inhabit poetry as described by Amarakeerthi, except that it is for residence yielded and not occupied. Prisoners of poetry they never wrote, ‘poets’ who are resident elsewhere, if at all.

But what of the mind? Is it also a heart-like territory? People and things, ideas wholesome as well as vile take up residence. It is a place where things come without saying and urge us to stack them in a shelf called ‘goes without saying.’ Only, the going is tough. That which enters, can break through defences simply by frequency of bombardment and slip in courtesy innumerable Trojan Horses; advertisements of one kind of another. Not all of it is subliminal. Most, in fact, are in one’s face. Familiarity breeds respect. We can learn to sprinkle the most odious of smells all over ourselves convinced that they are in fact divine fragrances. We’ve been told so, after all. In so many ways.

That’s how ideology works. Its most trustworthy lieutenant is a gnome that resides in our minds, susceptible to all manner of manipulation. Its success is discernible by the fact that we become the articulators of the half-truth or lie, convinced moreover that it was something we ourselves, in our wisdom, formulated. It is not only an idle mind that’s the devil’s workshop. The mind actively functions as the devil’s adjunct.

All of this takes me to the Buddha’s Charter on Free Inquiry as expounded in the Kalama Sutta:

“Come, Kālāmas, do not go by oral tradition, by lineage of teaching, by hearsay, by a collection of scriptures, by logical reasoning, by inferential reasoning, by reasoned cogitation, by the acceptance of a view after pondering it, by the seeming competence of a speaker, or because you think: ‘The ascetic is our guru.’ But when you know for yourselves: ‘These things are wholesome; these things are blameless; these things are praised by the wise; these things, if accepted and undertaken, lead to welfare and happiness,’ then you should live in accordance with them.”

An inquiring mind or a mind that inquires along these lines will not be easily persuaded to think that things which go without saying did not in fact come without saying. Such a mind will understand that trees have roots, rivers have sources. Such a mind will not build walls and sequester itself but instead will have all doors open but will decide who and what deserve welcome.

Residences have doors and therefore reflecting on Amarakeerthi’s observation, I remembered doors that are open and some that are closed and the choices that make sense to me. The title of the poem, written more than 15 years ago, is ‘Doors.’ I’ll share a few lines:

Doors are special to me
because histories and hopes are special
and they have to walk through them.
or choose not to;
doors are special to me
because they are splendid places
to wait and wait and wait.

Splendid conversations await us all. Unbelievable silences too. That’s the way of open spaces. People can come and go. Some will stay. Some will not be allowed to leave. We die for all kinds of things in all kinds of ways and in all kinds of places. A poem is not a bad final resting place, all things considered.

['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 274th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

25 November 2023

Residents and residency of heart and mind

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