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| Sunday, 20 February 2005 |
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Letters from Los Angeles When in Rome do as the Romans do by Wilfrid Jayasuriya Even though Krishna Perera lives in a house with 4 upstair bedrooms and a downstairs bedroom with a total square area of 3500 feet, the family of 4:father, mother, 4 year old son and 10 month old daughter- occupy just one bedroom at night. This room also contains a TV, a computer workstation and a large bookshelf. Thus intimacy is restored in a large space though all the time, when the family is at home, some part of the downstairs, the kitchen, the family room with the cable TV, the living room where people can be more formal, the laundry room and the garage, which holds the cars plus the tools are also used. In the garden at the back are the basketball apparatus, the electrically driven jeep for little Nishan, which he drives fiercely in circles dressed like a racing driver, the pond and the waterfall and assorted playthings including a tricycle, a bicycle and a scooter with tiny wheels. Space is the main feature of life style in California. And as you drive down the Villa Real road, from this congeries of dwellings for. The professionals and business types to the highway which carries you to San Francisco or San Jose to work, you look around when it is safe to take your eyes off the road for a moment and see the way the mountains have been tamed by tying them up with roads going up their bodies and round their necks. They lie tamed and motionless as the cars teem the roads, like Lilliputians climbing all over Gulliver's body. It's a winter day again and the Mediterranean weather of 'warm wet winters and cool dry summers' gets defined by the one inch of rain, which falls in the morning. The temperature is about 65 Fahrenheit and the houses sit 'ceremonious like tombs,' after all the inhabitants, except the very old and the very young have departed. Not a soul in sight. Only the TV makes a noise.I sit at the desktop and look out at the dreary scene from upstairs through the curtained window. I am too sluggish to get up from my chair and start moving around. My Peradeniya batchmate who chairs a university department in New Jersey has written a novel of 200 pages about being 'in transit' and I am awaiting the mail to see what it is like. He is a writer like Robert Frost was a poet, combining his vocation and his avocation. He has published 4 books already in his very broad speciality. Everyday in the morning he writes for sometime and some of it he rejects and most of it he fashions into highly readable and intellectually charged content. This novel is a step into fiction which he has undertaken for the first time. As I get up after putting the computer on standby and walk across along the upstair interior balcony, I see an astonishing sight. In little Polly's large play pen, in the middle of the living room, are seated both Polly's grandmothers, on the maternal and paternal side, on the carpeted floor and having a chat. Little Polly joins in the chatter with her baby talk. Such domesticity and sense of being an extended family. In the large play pen the sense of intimacy, which is threatened by the largeness of space in the house, is restored. Blessed are those whose parents come to live with them for they are saved from 'day cares' and all the worries of such institutions. Yesterday was travelling day. I ventured out into the Freeway to visit a workplace and I was nervous because it is 3 years since I drove on the Freeway. But it is essential to be able to drive on the Freeway, as every one knows, if you want to feel what it is to live in America. The impact of four lanes of vehicles driving at 65 miles per hour and the irresistible need to keep pace, however unwilling yourself may be to stand the tension and the strain, is what the 'rat race' signifies in real existence. You are anxious whether you will veer off the lane and side swipe someone and send someone and yourself into smithereens. You are basically a racing driver on the ordinary road, the 'Great American road,' which the most American of poet, eulogised, 'Come join with me compadre and walk down the road, perhaps you will be with me for some time and then you will go somewhere else and I will stop somewhere to do my own thing' or words to that effect. The cult of romantic love, which the Western tradition idealised and which continues to dominate the ideological scene, with its false intensity, is replaced in Whitman's mind by the beauty of companion ship. In his most famous poetry called Leaves of Grass he declares his affection for the humble grass that surrounds everyone representing love. "Perhaps it is a handkerchief dropped by the Lord for you to pick up as a souveneir." (I am paraphrasing and not quoting). Let me try and put into words an insight, which I had when I studied Whitman more than ten years ago. In Leaves of GrassWhitman compares the grass to many things like a handkerchief left by a lover or a flower springing from the grave of a dead young man and in between such comparisons he interposes 'perhaps it is' (perhaps it is this, perhaps it is that). Nothing is quite certain but everything is possible. There is permanent innovation, which may take you on a different track from where you intended. Its always discovery and no certainty. His images are not like Robert Burns' My love is like a red, red rose That blooms in the month of June My love is like a melody That's softly played in tune Where the two succeeding images of rose and melody support each other, as sight and sound complement each other, Whitman's differentiating images of handkerchief and flowers growing from a dead man's breast strike me as symbolic of the continuous innovation that is a major characteristic of American life. The 'reorgrs' that the symbolic American entities, the business firms, perform regularly are not building on the past but coninually breaking up the past to build something new in a continual process of destruction and creation. Like all insights this has its limitations but when I hear the tales of domestic and social tragedy that are enacted in the interest of 'efficency' 'competiveness,' 'being the best' I am reminded of Whitnman's groping for a reality he cannot grasp or communicate adequately. Innovation is all. I asked Mr Perera a US citizen, who lived in Sri Lanka for most of his formative years, what kind of view he had about his aims in life as a US citizen. He is very fond of his Sri Lankan ways and heritage but he is aware that now, having made a choice and settled down with his wife and kids he must choose the American way. Otherwise his children will be misfits in society into which they were born. This sense of knowing what he has to do gives him a feeling of belonging as well as a feeling of having a manageable aim in life. |
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