Tripping along with the sweetest surrender

 

Love. Yes. Back in the day, that’s somewhere in the late nineteen eighties, all I knew about that term was the John Denver song. Catchy tune. I heard someone hum it. I may have heard it being played over the radio. Back then lyrics weren’t as easily accessible. In time I got most of it right, but some of it was dead wrong. Back then, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the following lines:

‘Tomorrow is open and right now it seems to be more than enough to just be here today.'

I sang it (with lyrics all wrong!) on a train to Ohiya along with some friends and again at night somewhere close to Farr Inn at Horton Plains. It was that age, I suppose. Young. Carefree. In the moment. Made sense.

I remember that we got most of the following verse right as well:

‘And I don't know what the future is holdin' in store
I don't know where I'm goin', I'm not sure where I've been
There's a spirit that guides me, a light that shines for me
My life is worth the livin', I don't need to see the end.’

The song returned this morning. Well, the words at least. I was driving to Colombo with my daughter. There are times we talk or rather she listens. Sometimes I feel I am talking to myself, but that’s alright with me. And with her. She simply says, ‘you have an amazing capacity to self-entertain.’  

Entertainment is good.

As always I skipped from one story to another and another. I told her about that trip to Horton Plains and how my friend Nishad Handunpathirana, now Sangeeth Nipun with a doctorate in music from Lucknow, had twisted the words to yield the following, ‘Like a bird in the water, like a fish in the air,’ and how we all laughed and kept repeating the lines at the top of our lungs on the top of the world, no less!

That came later though. I was telling her about Abū 'l-Muġīth al-Ḥusayn ibn Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj, submitting to a sentence to be stoned to death for blasphemy, dancing and chanting ana’l-ḥaqq (I am God). Stones rained on him. He laughed. He laughed because those who stoned him did not know (and I interjected, ‘Father forgive them, for they do not know what they do,’ and added, pointing out that it was parenthetical, that Jesus, on the cross, also said or is said to have said, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani’ or ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’).

That’s just one version of the death-story, but it’s one I like. Anyway, someone threw a rose. His sister, they say. And he stopped. Wept. He knew that someone knew. For me, it meant, ‘if god is omnipresent, then god should be within me; ergo ‘I am god.’  

‘Maybe that’s why they say god is love. Ergo, love is god.’

Said that too. And returned to ‘submission.’ Or surrender.

‘My friend Mahendra Silva once said that love is about placing your neck on a chopping block, handing a sword to the beloved and saying, ‘now behead!”’ Absolute, absolute submission. Like Manṣūr. The deliberate and happy embrace of total vulnerability. Sacred nudity, if you will. Conviction. Like Jesus, on the cross, saying ‘I assure you and most solemnly say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’

No, I didn’t say the last line to my daughter. I just asked if I sounded like someone delivering a treatise. She said gently, ‘you seem to think so.’ And I laughed. ‘Self-entertainment,’ I said. She smiled.

Later, I looked for a poem I wrote about Manṣūr and sent it to her (I titled it ‘There will be a rose’).

Striding down an empty street,
so much like a King;
nothing ahead, nothing behind,
and on either side
the multitude screaming;
Mansur danced the dance of the sublime,
singing the praises of the lord:
“Ana al Haq, Ana al Haq, Ana al Haq....”
So fervent the conviction,
so true the word,
it had to rain and how!
Stone after stone after stone,
making a monument
a blasphemous sepulchre
for Mansur Al Hallaj, Son of God.
Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani?
And yes, there was Veronica
with a rose-petalled kerchief.
and then the tears.
And Mansur
risen from the dead
once again unafraid
walks the streets of love
lined with screams and hand-grenades.
There is a humble song
of love and roses,
of waiting and knowing
and a scattering of body
in the disavowal of divinity.
Listen!

Veronica, I wrote, referred to the widow who gave Jesus her veil so he could wipe her forehead. Made sense to me, considering the context of divinity, faith, compassion and human frailty in the Manṣūr story. At least it did when I wrote it decades ago. I think I should delete the last line, 'listen!' with 'It must be Mansur.'

Later, when wondering what I should write, I thought of sweet or rather the sweetest surrender. I checked the lyrics of that song. The engine directed me to Sarah McLachlan’s song by the same title.

‘Sweet surrender is all that I have to give.’

Love. Yes. That’s surrender. The sweetest there can be. 

[This article was published in the Daily News under the weekly column title 'The Recurrent Thursday']