Let us be ready to rewrite encyclopaedias

 

‘The Name of the Rose,’ is a country that I visit every few years. I’ve quoted the following, which comes at the beginning of the book, many times:

‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. This was the beginning with God and the duty of every faithful monk would be to repeat every day with chanting humility the one never changing event whose incontrovertible truth can be asserted. But we see now through a glass darkly, and the truth, before it is revealed to all, face to face, we see in fragments (alas, how illegible) in the error of the world, so we must spell out its faithful signals even when they seem obscure to us and as if amalgamated with a will wholly bent on evil.’

Umberto Eco, the author, seems to have been fascinated with good and evil and their various manifestations, sometimes with one disguised as the other. And so too, the complexities of ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood.’

A few days ago, I revisited Eco’s ‘Serendipities: Language and Lunacy,’ where he explores, as blurbed, ‘[the ways in which] myths and lunacies can produce historical developments of no small significance.’

Now it’s not hard to understand that the best of intentions can produce unimaginable and horrific tragedies (think of Marxist movements, free markets, democracy [yes!] and the crusades). Sometimes of course lovely words and avowed adherences to the sacred are used to justify and cover up all manner of atrocities (think ‘empire’ and ‘colonialism,’ then and now). Purely academic pursuits such as those which led to Einstein developing the theory of relativity being applied to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. We also have unabashed villainy or at least primarily military interests leading to technological advancement that are of considerable benefit to humankind.

If the worth of doctrines, plans, strategies, philosophies, military logic, economic interests, the drive to improve life chances of self, the individual in general or a collective, whether rooted in selfishness or altruism, is measured years, decades, centuries or even millennia later, it is quite likely they would be dismissed as erroneous and detrimental even as they would be equally applauded for being visionary and beneficial.    

Eco, in the first chapter of this book, titled ‘The force of falsity,’ begins by alluding to Thomas’ Aquinas’ observations on the relative power of the king (ruler), wine, charms of a woman and truth, in terms of which is more constructive. Then, drawing from a wide range of historical moments with regard to various subjects, Eco offers that falsehood has been as compelling as truth in impacting events that have been crucial to monumental changes.  

Today, we live in a world where it has become hard to distinguish fake from authentic, truth from falsehood, good from evil. When Noam Chomsky published ‘Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media’ in 1988 it made news and yes I am being tongue-in-cheek here. Today, we know that manufacturing is almost like the bedrock of the overall media industry in general. It seems at times that everyone is a manufacturer, be it a news agency, media house, a president, a low-ranking politician and even those who are avowedly against the distortions, violence and worse perpetrated by such individuals and institutions.  

We have promises that the promise-makers never intend to fulfil. We have criticism based on half truths, downright lies and rank ignorance but nevertheless flagged as constructive and sober, and dressed up as righteous — for, by and with the people and such. We have alibis galore for all kinds of crimes against humanity, each and everyone of them uttered by foul-mouthed, half-witted, imbecilic and ill-willed politicians, their minions and approvers, but in tones of a penitent and virtuous devotee of god or all things sacred. We have entire nations being starved (when they are not being deliberately bombed and poisoned) in the name of countering non-existent existential threats. We have terrorists being called liberation fighters and protectors of citizens and nations vilified as criminals against humanity.

Such falsehoods abound. They aren’t new. We have had people and indeed religious orders which even until a few centuries ago fervently believed that the earth was flat and therefore declared and waged war on those who thought otherwise. We have seen Jesus of Nazareth, a black Semite, being transformed into a blond-haired, blue-eyed, Caucasian god. We have had appropriations which the appropriators have sold back to the appropriated as new, modern and revolutionary.

Time sets things right. Eco offers:

‘At a certain historical moment, some people found suspicion that the sun did not revolve around the earth just as crazy and deplorable as the suspicion that the universe does not exist. So we would be wise to keep an open, fresh mind against the moment when the community of scientists decrees that the idea of the universe has been an illusion just like the flat earth and the Rosicrucians. After all, the cultivated person’s first duty is to always be prepared to rewrite the encyclopaedia.’

That kind of preparation requires a certain mind-set, a particular kind of discipline. I can think of no better guideline than the Buddha’s Charter of Free Inquiry articulated by Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, or the ‘Kalama Sutra’ the essence of which is captured in the following invitation:

'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.'

 

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

Read more

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]

malindadocs@gmail.com

Other articles in this series: 

Merit, integrity and seniority in the superior courts

Hunters and 'victims' of immemorial light

The unbearable lightness of pause

Magic carpet to Dutuwewa

Gauze, blood-stained and torn

Seasons bookeneded by leaves on park benches

Writers' blocs and dead lines  

Stop Press!

The world shall not be emptied of poetry

Reclaiming the everyday with solidarities of tender fury

An Aussie broke a SLan heart in Ind for Afg

Writing magical pieces about something beautiful when time permits

The scattered archives of art and protest

Friendship that keep friends permanently at 16

Amherst: silent, rural, poetic and serendipitous 

The virtues of unemployability

A breathless hush at the close

Ahmed Issa, fearless and audacious in Gaza

Let us take a deep breath now...

How Grolier Poetry writes 'Harvard Square'

Let us write beautiful poetry

Following children and their smiles

Let's plant words in cracks and craters

Re-weaving lives and love

When the earth closes upon us...

Let us now march to the battleground of words

The most pernicious human shield

Who bombed Frankfurter Buchmesse

The truly besieged 

Love's austere and lonely offices

The mysteriously enjoined in the middle of nowhere

Serendipity now!

Reflections on the unimaginable 

Jackson Anthony is a book and will be read 

A village called Narberth Bookshop

Gateway drugs to A-B-C

'Irvin' and other one-word poems

Earth pieces Kerala and Sri Lanka

Obligation as bomb and ocean

In the land of insomnial poets

In and out of shadows

Over to Eve

When you don't need an invitation, it's home

When the Canadian House of Commons applauded a Nazi...

Touching the touch-me-nots

The importance of not skipping steps

No free passes to the Land of Integrity

Hector Kobbekaduwa is not a building, statue, street or stamp

Rajagala and the Parable of the Panner

Let's show love to Starbucks employees!

You've got mail?

Octavio Paz and Arthur C Clarke in the stratosphere 

Enduring solidarities 

Coco 'Quotes' Gauff!

9/11 and the calm metal instrument of Salvador Allende's voice 

What a memory-keeper foregoes 

Whitman, Neruda and things that wait in all things

Thilina Kaluthotage's eyes keep watch

Those made of love will fly

Profit: the peragamankaru of major wars

Helplessness and innocence

The parameters of entirety

In loving memory of Carrie Lee (1956-2020)

Mobsters on and off the screen

Transfixing and freeing dawns

We're here because we're here because we're here

Life signatures

Sha'Carri Richardson versus and with Sha'Carri Richardson  

A canvas for a mind-brush

Sybil Wettasinghe's shoes

Love is...

A stroll with Pragg and Arjun along a boulevard in Baku

Meditation on tree-art

Daya Sahabandu ran out of partners but must have smiled to the end

Gentle intrusions 

Sleeping well

The unleashing of inspiration

Write, for Pete's sake

Autumn Leaves Safeness

 Sapan and voices that erase borders

Problem elephants and problem humans

Songs from the vaekanda

The 'inhuman' elephant in a human zoo

Ivan Art: Ivanthi Fernando's efforts to align meaning

Arwa Turra, heart-stitcher

Let's help Jagana Krishnakumar rebuild our ancestral home

True national anthems

Do you have a friend in Pennsylvania (or anywhere?)

A gateway to illumination in West Virginia

Through strange fissures into magical orchards

There's sea glass love few will see 

Re-residencing Lakdasa Wikkramasinha

Poisoning poets and shredding books of verse

The responsible will not be broken

Home worlds

Ownership and tenuriality of the Wissahickon

Did you notice the 'tiny, tiny wayside flowers'?

Gifts, gifting and their rubbishing

History is new(s)

Journalism inadvertently learned

Reflections on the young poetic heart

Wordaholic, trynasty and other portmanteaus

The 'Loku Aiya' of all 'Paththara Mallis'

Subverting the indecency of the mind

Character theft and the perennial question 'who am I?'

Innocence

A degree in people

Faces dripping with time

Saji Coomaraswamy and rewards that matter

Revolutionary unburdening

Seeing, unseeing and seeing again

Alex Carey and the (small) matter of legacy

The Edelweiss of Mirissa 

The insomnial dreams of Kapila Kumara Kalinga 

The clothes we wear and the clothes that wear us (down) 

Every mountain, every rock, is sacred 

Manufacturing passivity and obedience 

Precept and practice 

Sanjeew Lonliyes: rawness unplugged, unlimited 

In praise of courage, determination and insanity 

The relative values of life and death 

Feet that walk 

Sarinda's eyes 

Poetry and poets will not be buried 

Sunny Dayananda 

Reunion Peradeniya (1980-1990) 

What makes Oxygen breathable?  

Sorrowing and delighting the world 

The greatest fallacy  

Encounters with Liyanage Amarakeerthi 

Beyond praise and blame 

Letters that cut and heal the heart 

Vanished and vanishing trails 

Blue-blueness 

A forgotten dawn song from Embilipitiya 

The soft rain of neighbourliness  

The Gold Medals of being 

Jaya Sri Ratna Sri 

All those we've loved before 

Reflections on waves and markings 

A chorus of National Anthems 

Saying what and how 

'Say when' 

Respond to insults in line with the Akkosa Sutra 

The loves of our lives 

The right time, the right person 

The silent equivalent of a thousand words 

Crazy cousins are besties for life 

Unities, free and endearing 

Free verse and the return key

"Sorry, Earth!" 

The lost lyrics of Premakeerthi de Alwis 

The revolution is the song 

Consolation prizes in competitions no one ever wins 

The day I won a Pulitzer 

Ko? 

Ella Deloria's silences 

Blackness, whiteness and black-whiteness 

Inscriptions: stubborn and erasable  

Thursday! 

Deveni: a priceless one-word koan 

Enlightening geometries 

Let's meet at 'The Commons' 

It all begins with a dot 

Recovering run-on lines and lost punctuation 

'Wetness' is not the preserve of the Dry Zone 

On sweeping close to one's feet 

Kumkum Fernando installs Sri Lanka in Coachella, California

To be an island like the Roberts... 

Debts that can never be repaid in full

An island which no flood can overwhelm 

Who really wrote 'Mother'? 

A melody faint and yet not beyond hearing 

Heart dances that cannot be choreographed 

Remembering to forget and forgetting to remember 

On loving, always 

Authors are assassinated, readers are immortal 

When you turn 80... 

It is good to be conscious of nudities  

Saturday slides in after Monday and Sunday somersaults into Friday  

There's a one in a million and a one in ten 

Gunadasa Kapuge is calling 

Kumkum Fernando installs Sri Lanka in Coachella, California 

Hemantha Gunawardena's signature 

Pathways missed 

Architectures of the demolished 

The exotic lunacy of parting gifts 

Who the heck do you think I am? 

Those fascinating 'Chitra Katha' 

The Mangala Sabhava 

So how are things in Sri Lanka? 

The most beautiful father 

Palmam qui meruit ferat 

The sweetest three-letter poem 

Buddhangala Kamatahan 

An Irish and Sri Lankan Hello 

Teams, team-thinking, team-spirit and leadership 

The songs we could sing in lifeboats when we are shipwrecked 

Pure-Rathna, a class act 

Jekhan Aruliah set a ball rolling in Jaffna 

Awaiting arrivals unlike any other 

Teachers and students sometimes reverse roles 

Matters of honor and dignity 

Yet another Mother's Day 

A cockroach named 'Don't' 

Colombo, Colombo, Colombo and so forth 

The slowest road to Kumarigama, Ampara 

Sweeping the clutter away 

Some play music, others listen 

Completing unfinished texts 

Mind and hearts, loquacious and taciturn 

I am at Jaga Food, where are you? 

On separating the missing from the disappeared 

Moments without tenses 

And intangible republics will save the day (as they always have) 

The world is made of waves 

'Sentinelity' 

The circuitous logic of Tony Muller 

Rohana Kalyanaratne, an unforgettable 'Loku Aiya' 

Mowgli, the Greatest Archaeologist 

Figures and disfigurement, rocks and roses 

Sujith Rathnayake and incarcerations imposed and embraced 

Some stories are written on the covers themselves 

A poetic enclave in the Republic of Literature 

Landcapes of gone-time and going-time  

The best insurance against the loud and repeated lie 

So what if the best flutes will not go to the best flautists? 

There's dust and words awaiting us at crossroads and crosswords 

The books of disquiet 

A song of terraced paddy fields 

Of ants, bridges and possibilities 

From A through Aardvark to Zyzzyva  

World's End 

Words, their potency, appropriation and abuse 

Street corner stories 

Who did not listen, who's not listening still? 

The book of layering 

If you remember Kobe, visit GOAT Mountain 

The world is made for re-colouring 

The gift and yoke of bastardy 

The 'English Smile' 

No 27, Dickman's Road, Colombo 5 

Visual cartographers and cartography 

Ithaca from a long ago and right now 

Lessons written in invisible ink 

The amazing quality of 'equal-kindness' 

A tea-maker story seldom told 

On academic activism 

The interchangeability of light and darkness 

Back to TRADITIONAL rice 

Sisterhood: moments, just moments 

Chess is my life and perhaps your too

Reflections on ownership and belonging 

The integrity of Nadeesha Rajapaksha 

Signatures in the seasons of love

To Maceo Martinet as he flies over rainbows 

Sirith, like pirith, persist 

Fragrances that will not be bottled  

Colours and textures of living heritage 

Countries of the past, present and future 

A degree in creative excuses

Books launched and not-yet-launched 

The sunrise as viewed from sacred mountains 

The ways of the lotus 

Isaiah 58: 12-16 and the true meaning of grace 

The age of Frederick Algernon Trotteville 

Live and tell the tale as you will 

Between struggle and cooperation 

Of love and other intangibles 

Neruda, Sekara and literary dimensions 

The universe of smallness 

Paul Christopher's heart of many chambers 

Calmness gracefully cascades in the Dumbara Hills 

Serendipitous amber rules the world 

Continents of the heart

The allegory of the slow road

 

Read more