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']

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Horton Plains in abundant illumination

 

Long before I learned thanks to social media that our country is far more beautiful than we thought it was and at a time when I hadn’t lived enough and hadn’t the means to travel as much as I have since, Maha Eliya or Horton Plains, was my preferred travel destination. This was in the eighties.

So my friends and I would take the night mail train to Ohiya. It would reach Ohiya at dawn. We opted for the trail that went through the tropical montane forest which was prettier and more interesting than the tarred road to the plains. And shorter.

Thereafter we would spend a few days, usually two to four but once seven, ‘up there’ where we did not belong but were indulged by the forces and (other) creatures of nature. We were duly enchanted by the silence, low temperatures, mists, birdsong, vast open spaces, starry nights, grazing sambur, the occasional wild boar, leopard droppings, mountains, streams, waterfalls, wayside flowers and berries. And the silence.  

That immensity is humbling. And it hit me particularly hard on at least two occasions. The first was at World’s End. It was early morning and there was no mist. We could see the lay of our land all the way to the Southern coast. I remembered the map of Sri Lanka. I realised what a tiny island we live on. And yet that tiny island seemed enormous to me that morning. And I realised how small I am.

Then there was a particularly clear night in December. The skies were so clear that we could see shooting stars and satellites. The universe, I knew, was larger than our planet and I already knew how small our island is.  

Decades later a friend added perspective: ‘we are on a pas-guliya (clod of soil) that goes around the sun. That too was humbling.

But the plains!

I knew even then that although it is but a tiny spot on the map of Sri Lanka, Maha Eliya was too enormous to be explored exhaustively. I know what I saw. I remember. I knew that others who visited this fascinating Maha Eliya would have seen things I hadn’t seen. I didn’t know that they could see differently what had caught my eye.

I’ve seen sunlight on the plains. I’ve seen it rain. I’ve seen dusk yielding to night. I hadn’t seen heaven descending on heaven. Kasun De Silva did. He captured four distinct layers. In the foreground, the plains. At its end, the trees. Above, a dull-blue sky and above it a thick and ominous layer of rain clouds.

Heaven to heaven. How so?

There were two distinct streams of light, angling, connecting the earthly layer and the rectangular block of storm-clouds captured in the composition. Heaven, first as metaphor for territories above, and secondly as descriptive of the land we are privileged to inhabit, a land that can make us feel divine or at least divinely endowed. 

Kasun had a companion capture. He had taken it about thirty minutes earlier from the opposite side. This I responded to as follows:

Night is imminent, says the sky
and adds, ‘I am pregnant with rain.’
But now,
through cloud-gap
or mountain pass
but as though deliberate
and not atmospheric accident
nor geographic architecture
light streamed in,
unexpected and soft.
The plains are painted.
Indelibly.

He said, ‘lovely, ayya!’

And I informed him: ‘Your photo reminded me of a chance encounter with a beautiful girl. Wrote it for her actually.  The unintended consequences of your photography!’

He asked: ’Bitter sweet memories?’

‘Still in the sweet phase,’ I was smiling when I wrote this. I did tell him, ‘so read it as a love poem, it would read very differently.’ He already had: ‘…as soon as you said it. The meaning totally changed. Awesome with both cases. And beautiful with both as well.’

And so we continued.

‘Poetry, like all art including photography, belongs to the “reader.”’

All of the above, for most readers, would be incidental and quite irrelevant, but not his final observation:

‘I believe every landscape has its own mood and own feeling.  Every landscape has a story and an emotion as well as a character. So, to me capturing a landscape is as similar as photographing a human.’

And so I revisited Horton Plains, convinced that ‘Maha Eliya’ which literally means ‘Great Light’ but has connotations of open space as well, is a name far more rational and for many reasons too than the dull and troubling description of a geographical element to which the name of a colonial thug was tagged. 

I revisited Maha Eliya, feeling blessed that I had witnessed emotions and character. I may or may not see the ‘maha eliya’ descending on our heaven, but I told myself that even if I cannot capture landscape-people the way Kasun does, I can still revisit and hopefully see, notice and remember them. I could be delighted all over again. And feel blessed to inhabit a heaven-lit paradise, right here on earth. 

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

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