A poetic memoir connecting the past and present
View(s):“….he watched all his characters hiding in his youth.”
- Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje, now in the later years, has not had the kind of life that can be self-told in factual prosaic mode. His world of wonder and imagination seeps itself naturally into the poetic memoir form which conveys the factual past transformed imaginatively into the present.
For Ondaatje’s wonder and imagination Sri Lanka needs to be given its place. He is not, “was” but “is” Lankan born and bred till the age of eleven. Science shows that children, till the age of 13, innately sense the world with wonder and imagination. Those reconnecting with this childlike perspective of the magic and wonder of life become grown up creative writers experiencing it as the present. At 80, he retains that which began in the island where he was created.
“Memoir” is conventional, the way thought processes lay out previous happenings as being of a “time past”. Ondaatje’s poetic compositions deftly, poetically, move memories to an existence here and now. Ondaatje is showing poetically the theory of contemporary physics, which in Einstein’s words is, “…… the distinction between past, present, and future only has the meaning of an illusion, though a persistent one.” The poems of this collection are called by the poet “a gathering of a life story together”. Yes, it all happens together, no linear time line.
While the past being very much of the present is the immediacy of each poem, the soul of the work is that its motivating urge is speaking to oneself, unlike a novel or rhyming attractive poetry, for casting broad. Ondaatje says to an Australian journalist, “I’m 80 years old, so I guess you could say this is a pretty mortal book,” and “there is an elegiac tone here, I think, for the first time in my writing.”
Ondaatje’s verse can be abstract and ambivalent, even mysterious, some readers have commented. It is because he is talking to himself. Booksellers as intermediaries make you pay for the privilege of legitimate eavesdropping. To get your money’s worth, you must first nibble in no particular order, at the variety of offerings, then taste each one slowly, in the process of absorbing. This is a great work for those who have known contemplation to be their offering “where language refuses to meet a reader”.
In Sri Lanka where skirts are as much worn as cloth or saree, especially by the young, the leg glance is natural. Batting and bowling, with “the almost sultry skill of the leg glance”, is also well practised since British times.
I pick this poem from the collection to search for some of the things I have said.
THE LEG GLANCE
The dangers of the subjunctive mood
when love affairs are still all coal and smoke
and gestures focus on almost stationary details,
a thistle, the moon, an unexpected thrush
In the basic architecture of cricket (apart
from its medieval tone) is the almost sultry
skill of the leg glance, that involves
‘a very short parlay with the head’
as Ranjitsinhji said, misquoting Jane Austen
and not bothering to move
from the path of the dangerous ball
It is how you make a song
out of someone else’s rumour
far beyond the boundary
having reached for what is remote,
covert during a tender alliance
like hidden stairs down into a pond
Almost sinless, with no moral or latitude
as at the outskirts of a particular kind of writing.
I cannot be widely off the mark; there is no mark.
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