About Ceylon: Arthur C. Clarke, Pablo Neruda & Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Jane Russell and Ruth Allaun**  … Foreword to their essay on Leonard Woolf

“When I’m in the Strand or 42^nd Street, or at NASA Headquarters or the Beverley Hills Hotel, my surroundings are liable to give a sudden tremor and I see through the insubstantial fabric to the reality beneath…” These words by Arthur C. Clarke, the sci-fi writer, are quoted at the end of Roloff Beny’s photographic chronicle Island Ceylon. But where does Clark’s reality reside? He writes, “No other place is so convincing as Sri Lanka.” As he spent almost fifty years there, we are tempted to believe him.

Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, also lived in Sri Lanka — then called Ceylon. He served as his country’s Consul in 1929/30, but spent more time writing poetry than attending diplomatic parties. Neruda was equally struck by the convincing quality, the palpability, of Sri Lanka. Many years after he left, he published this poem:

“The light in Ceylon that was life to me

was death to me too – for to live

in a diamond’s intensity is the lonely lyceum of corpses;

a bird made diaphanous

suddenly, a spider webbing the sky, and then gone.

 

Stung by the light of those islands,

I keep circumspect always,

as though a beam of that faraway

honey might turn me to ash in a moment.”

 Pablo Neruda — Pic  inserbia.info

Neruda captures the double-edgedness of Sri Lanka. It is not just the postcard image of palm-ringed sandy beach, an azure wave washing over bleached-bone coral reef, while an outrigger canoe turns to black silhouette against the flattening tropical sun – but also the fear and violence which is the underbelly of Sri Lanka.

 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

In response to this highly-charged environment, the human imagination turns naturally to artistic expression. It was A.K. Coomaraswamy, Sri Lanka’s great art historian, who noted that “an artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist.” The Sri Lankan villager, whose world is full of malevolent spirits and hungry ghosts who live in a parallel universe, organised just like that of the human, meets the challenge of his/her life with the music and dance of sorcery and ritual; with the poetry of Buddhist verse and the ceremonies of the yearly cycle of rain, harvest and drought. The insistent and penetrative drumbeat rules their existence. In this turbulence, death is inseparable from life:

“The mass of flowers, fresh-bred, fragrant and choice,

I offer at the sacred lotus feet of the Noble Sage.

Even as the flowers must fade,

so does my body march to a state of destruction.”   (Buddhist verse)

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** Foreword to http://thuppahis.com/2014/05/28/leonard-woolf-his-political-vision-from-innocent-imperialist-to-pragmatic-internationalist-2/[/embed]