None the verse for all that violence?
View(s):By the time you read this, a lot of ink (to say nothing of blood, sweat, and tears) would have been spilled on the subject of the recent sectarian violence in our blessed isle’s southwest quarter. So I’ll spare you the platitudes and clichés of a plethora of well-meaning commentators elsewhere, who have been at it for a week now. There’s nothing new in paradise that hasn’t been said better, before.
(Could I, however, crave your indulgence on a personal note? Should the prospect please, do by all means remain and read it to the end. If not, fain leave and forego learning that poetry – like philosophy – has its uses in the kind of adversity we are facing today. Leave off, and let go an opportunity to be challenged and stimulated by the ethos of souls as sensitive as our poetic trio below. This triad saw, in advance, the moon-maddened belligerence of Beruwela, as much as they foresaw the Blitz and the Blitzkrieg. And the monkish havoc of a local Hiroshima, on a small but menacing scale.)
In the immediate aftermath of the events of last Sunday, three poems – or parts thereof – sprang unbidden to my mind. It was that kind of practically explosive and potentially holocaustic happening which had occurred. And the poetry I mention below may have been custom-made to circumscribe three salient aspects of the violence that burst out over a square area of our island’s southwest end last weekend.
The three works of art (I dare say they are masterpieces of our modern age, and sufficient to capture the essence of contemporary civilization – or lack of it – or, at worst, its most egregious excesses.) are these: W. H. Auden’s September 1, 1939; Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach; and W. B. Yeats’ The Second Coming. You might agree with my ruminations after some reflection.
The first set is a culling and a collation from Auden’s September 1, 1939 (the day Germany invaded Poland, thereby formally inaugurating the Second World War). They remind me that as far as decency in democracy goes, and the right of minorities to dissent – if not just be different – or simply be – we live in a “low dishonest decade”. And that “as the clever hopes expire” of our ever finding peace with justice for all, we must every one of us be “uncertain and afraid”. Those lines which are perhaps most apposite are these ones below:
I sit …
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
(Substitute a Sunday night in June, gentle reader, and we are good to go a step farther.)
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
…
That has driven a culture mad,
…
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god?
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn:
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
And because I am very much afraid that it will all happen again (1915, 1956, 1983, 1987-89), Auden’s grim prophecy as follows troubles my dark noontide hour and midnight’s repose. And yours, too, I hope… For your sake as much as mine…
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
It is not the grim spectre of the 13th of July 1983 or the resurrected shades of the 18th of May 2009, though, that concern me so much today; but rather, it is the 15th of June 2014. It was the day that we, perhaps most regrettably, realized that the kind of demagoguery we heard, on the subject of goings-on in and around Dharga Town, can well be the beginning of the end of the shaky peace or conflictless interlude that passed for peace, which we thought we enjoyed. As Auden would have it:
The windiest militant trash
Important persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish…
Yeats recognized the spirit of the loudmouthed, longwinded, bully when he observed in The Second Coming that…
The best lack all conviction,
While the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Have we not seen it in the brazen ravings of our very own incendiary version of the Saffron Brigade? Did we not all fail to hear from the voices of Moderation and Reason – elected and appointed – ascribed and achieved authority – who could have quelled the rioting with an early stern warning and disclaimer, but chose to be damned with his initial distant mutterings and late, vague, disapprobation? Is it any wonder, then, that…
Things fall apart,
The centre cannot hold,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
When the blood-dimm’d tide was loosed, the impartial observer (you and I, dear, in our ivory tower and faraway citadel) could discern that everywhere the ceremony of innocence was drowned. Then, suddenly, Arnold’s outing on Dover Beach made much more sense. Like that worthy, in the mêlée and mayhem in Mathugama and environs, all the nation could see was that…
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Which reminded us that vested interests and hidden agendas work best for unseen hands and conniving plotters when there is little but misinformation, disinformation, or simply lack of information. While praising the media and independent monitors who braved the angry (to say nothing of violent and vulgar) mobs, let us deplore and condemn the embargo on reporting that kept much of the nation in the dark in the darkest hours of Aluthgama’s conflagration.
When militant rabble-rousers have our equivalent of the national guard to corral, shepherd, indoctrinate captive sheep-like audiences and compel them to act on impulse and in hysteria; When activists and hacktivists have all the pusillanimous freedom of social media to vent their frustration and expiate some guilt and/or shame while preaching to the choir; Then let’s draw the battle lines a little closer to the real enemy, mes enfants de la patrie: To the barricades! protests! marches! sit-ins! ideological arena! where the war for Sri Lanka’s mindscape is on! It might be more like the need of the hour than cathartic comments (this one included).
When all has been said and done, however, the civic-minded philosopher and poet’s prayer and hope is that these poetic and descriptive warnings (Auden: “won’t happen again if you take care this time”), prescriptive laments (Arnold: “don’t try to make sense or meaning of it, simply mourn what has come to pass”), and proscriptive cautions (Yeats: “can’t afford to let it recur”) will not circumscribe our own unfolding tragedy.
Wonder if I’ll be accused of Western irrelevance or arrogance for quoting Auden and Arnold? Well, I’m gratified to hear the venerable chief priest of the Amarapura chapter agrees in spirit that moderation is the desirable zeitgeist. That other learned monk who absolved himself from the ranks of the militants might well nod to Yeats. Now if only the agitated Wahhabi imams of the island’s east and the anxious Sufi mullahs of the nation’s unseen nooks and crannies would take to quoting Omar Khayyam of Rubaiyyat fame as their model rather than the late Osama bin Laden, there would be real cause for celebration.
Not that poetry or philosophy are the panacea to soothe such savage breasts as uttered breath in the call to rally round the standard of a Sinhalese-Buddhist state, replete with its nationalistic security and police forces. But it beats reading the Tripitaka. That, no one seems to bother with much these days for all its vinaya.