The Morning Inspection
Meditations on letters dropped in scrambling of worlds
I posed a question. ‘Is it when I run out of unanswerable questions
that death arrives? Or is then that life begins?’ That’s two questions,
I know, but I asked them as one in Sinhala.
‘පිළිතුරු නොමැති ප්රශ්න තව දුරටත් නොමැති වූවිට ද මරණය පැමිණෙන්නේ......
නැතහොත් එවිටද ජිවිතය ඇරඹෙන්නේ?’
A friend responded thus: පිළිතුරු නැති
ප්රශ්න නැත, ප්රශ්න නැති පිළිතුරු නැත, මරණය නැති ජීවිත නැත, ජීවය නැති
මරණ නැත.
(there are no questions without answers and no answers that don’t
refer to questions; there is no life that will not know death and no
death devoid of life)’. He inserted a qualification:
‘ප්රශ්නයට - පිළිතුර, ජීවිතයට - මරණය, කරුමයට -
ඉපදීම..... නැවතුම නිවනය
(an answer to a question, death for life, birth for karma and it all
ends with nirvana)’. The aversion to stark binaries embedded in my
initial though persuaded me to respond in the following manner to my
friend: ‘ප්රශ්නයමද පිළිතුර, ජීවිතයමද මරණය,
වැළඳගැනීමමද විරහාව, මන්චීමද, මැලිබන්
(Is answer in fact the query, is death life and life alone, is
separation synonymous with embrace, is Munchee actually Maliban?)’
It’s all word play of course and unabashed philosophical pretension.
This morning, however, just after that light and smile-giving/taking
exchange I opened a book I’ve been waiting to read for a long time,
‘Labyrinths’ by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges was an Argentine writer,
essayist and poet, whose work is said to embrace the ‘character of
unreality in all literatures’.
Intellectual reaction
His fascination with themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries,
religion, god and fictional writers have persuaded some to describe him
as one of the earlier proponents of the genre ‘Magical Realism’.
I was on the first page of the introduction when a misread word
stopped me. James E Irby, one of the co-editors of the collection claims
that one of the most striking characteristics of Borges’ work is ‘their
extreme intellectual reaction against all the disorder and contingency
of immediate reality, their radical insistence on breaking with the
given world and postulating another’. I read ‘world’ and ‘word’. I
immediately reverted to the ‘Munchee-Maliban exchange’ referred to
above.
If everything is contained in everything else (following William
Blake, my Uncle Issy tell me, viz ‘seeing the world in a grain of sand’,
a reformulation of a more ancient articulation by Siddhartha Gauthama in
the Satipattana Sutra), then theoretically we can switch things around
and not get anything different. We don’t because there is this
inconvenient and limiting thing called ‘convention’ and a ridiculous
‘need’ to be coherent and comprehensible. I think we don’t give enough
credit to the intellect of the recipients of our articulations and
forget that given the enormity of our ignorance we don’t say a lot even
when we think we are being profound and philosophical.
Facebook exchange
What’s the difference between ‘world’ and ‘word’? Just the insertion
of the letter ‘l’ in one and its absence in the other. Word is world,
though, isn’t it? It is all containing. At some level both are
meaningless and acquire relevance only in strictly defined contexts. It
is all true and at the same time such a lie.
And so I went from question-answer to embrace-departure to
Munchee-Maliban and life-death. I went from a facebook exchange to a
dead Argentine whose live words I misread (or perhaps read more
accurately, who can tell?), to a labyrinth called freedom and a prison
called democracy and in this random rush of crazy juxtapositions I went
to a day in May 2000 in a place called Dupont Circle in Washington DC
where a Turkish girl sang a Turkish song (by Fikrit Kizilok) and
translated it all for me thus:
It is a lie, always a lie
the nights are always a lie
two flowers of fear flourish in my eyes
but why is your gaze a lie?
Day turns into night, I am filled with sorrow
drop-by-drop, smoke by smoke
you become the blossom upon my leaf
if I extend my hand to you, that is also a lie
The night is a cover over me
they don’t understand my ways
I become suspicious of my own pillow
that is also a lie, also a lie
Like a thief in my dreams
I fall in love secretly (in hiding)
I hold on to myself.. that is also a lie, also a lie
The only thing I know...is who I love, still
a rooster sings, my heart becomes silent
It is the morning at your place and midnight at mine
The only thing I know, is who I love, still
it is a lie..that I have forgotten
only you and I can know
if I tell others, that is also a lie
In this vacant morning made of world and word, strange biscuits and
conversation slips, caught in the swirl of shredded pages that gather in
wondrous and tragic ways, only to come apart, dissolve and drip all over
me the old ink of lost days and unwritten poetry, I went back to
September 21, 2007 and to reflections penned on the above lyrics which
came along with those of another Turkish song ‘This morning it is
raining in Istanbul’ (ending with ‘Thinking of you in songs, does not
bring you back to me, does not bring you back to me, does not bring you
back’).
I wrote then:
Mid-morning heat in late September,
desktop artifacts stare,
the in-tray and out-tray of my mind
play hide and seek,
ink flies from paper, from memory and forgetting,
staplers go mad
trying to pin together the untenable.
It is mid-morning here
late evening for you,
and I am whipped by the lies of time
of location and remembrance.
I am told there’s bright sunshine
rising in a stupor from the road
but it is raining here
and drenched in a time-squeeze
I cannot but weep;
so tell me
wisp of dream that scented time,
tell me,
is it all a lie
when you come to me
again and again
through nighttime
and daybreak and dew-laden fields?
And I write today: ‘I have no idea what’s ‘lie’ and what’s not, nor
who or what I am looking for, nor who will return or why’. I might take
a bite of a biscuit. It could be Munchee or Maliban. It could also be a
forgotten letter ‘l’ dropped by a hurrying finger from worlds I might
never encounter. It doesn’t matter, does it? ‘L’ after all could be for
‘love’. Or ‘lunacy’. Interchangeable. Eminently.
[email protected]
|