Let’s lie a little between ‘absence’ and ‘present’
One of my earliest memories is of register-marking. Grade One. Mrs
Rajapaksa. ‘Subash’? She would call out and Subash Fernando would
respond innava or ‘present’. ‘Malinda’? she would call out next and get
my innava miss (present, madam). ‘Rohantha (Abeysuriya)?’ was next. It
was the same until Grade Five, when the classes were mixed up and the
roster changed.
Years passed and I find that life can be looked at and understood in
terms of ‘present’ and ‘absent’, things that are apparent and those that
are not, some because it is in character to be effusive and some because
they are deliberately printed into the background. It is about people
who stand out and those who stand in, things we notice, things we take
for granted, things we trivialize and things that are invisible to us.
Paintings
History is fascinating not because of what it tells us but what it
does not. Archaeology is interesting because it unearths and also leaves
earthed things that are reluctant to come out shouting.
Take a face, the first face you see after reading this. Look at the
eyes. That’s the mirror of the soul, we are told. Try figuring out the
number of libraries resident within those twin circles. Try imagining
the paintings that could be generated by all the colours those eyes have
acquired over the years. Now try and excavate the unsaid, the
will-not-be-painted, and the lines that are smudged so the acreage of
hurt and hurting cannot be ascertained. Multiply the tortured and
twisted narratives in these eyes by the number of eyes that you
encounter in a day. Now sit and figure out what kind of story the
intersection of these threads could weave.
You can have much fun with this. You can pick and choose which
threads to use, which colours to privileges. You can pick and choose
notes from all the songs that must play inside those heart-eyes to churn
out a music score. You can make a million melodies. You can rap it, jazz
it, be classical about it, scream it out or do a lullaby. Now imagine
thought as instrument. You are going to get an orchestra. What
instruments would you privilege?
History
There’s something else you can do. You can flip the script. You can
use heavy paint on thin canvas and see what’s happened to the reverse.
You can view reverse from two inches away or two miles away. You can let
the painted side play with its poor cousin Embroidery Reverse.
Would you rather give more voice to silence, I wonder. How would you
read the things unsaid, those poignant tales that never get written
simply because sentiment cannot find words, words cannot buy voice and
voice is an incompetent transliterator? What is archaeology and history
then if not a collage of carefully picked ‘presents’ and deliberately
left out ‘absences’ blushed with the invariable trespasser and un-coloured
by the exits of the willing exile? What is any history, any nation, any
community or story if not a mix of these two elements in varying
proportions? Don’t we pick and choose what part of ourselves to
‘present’ and what to ‘absent’ all the time, depending on audience,
context, objective and so on?
Classroom
Things were simple in Grade One. Mrs Rajapaksa called out a name and
we answered ‘present’ or, if absent, someone would say ‘absent, madam’.
Now it is complicated.
We try to design our preferred present-absent mix and others spice it
up or rob it of flavour. I would like the world to shut up and I would
too, except for the fact that there’s nothing more infuriating at times
than the cacophony of silence, the deafening presence of absence.
It is good therefore to revisit that classroom with its short tables
and chairs and walls lined with an absent-present mix of information
just to hear myself breathe, just to let the incomparable music of
silence wrap heart and mind in that moment sandwiched between two
screams and clothed in teardrop and soured love. We need to breathe now
and then, I feel and the only place this is possible sometimes is the
space that the intersection of present and absent yield made up of both
and neither.
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