All those we’ve loved before ~ Malinda Words

Kahlil Gibran once urged someone, presumably someone he loved, to ‘feed the lamp with oil and let it not dim.’ He explained, ‘so I can read with tears what your life with me has written upon your face.’ This is a verse from the poem ‘The life of love,’ in his collection, ‘A tear and a smile.’

The poem has been a companion of sorts. Lamp, flame, light and face are metaphors. They can also be taken literally. We can peer into faces, not just of those we love, and see what we’ve written on them and, if we have not, reflect on what life and others have.

In the case of total strangers it would be speculation, nothing more. Some may say it’s a waste of time but others might very well delight in imagining what or who carved worry lines or etched a line or two at the corner of the mouth. That’s just the traces on the countenance. Life marks tone of voice, the movement of eyes and so much more.

It is different with those who are familiar, but with those who have loved or have been loved, the traceability is less contaminated by speculation. We can retrace steps less erroneously.

But why? That’s a legitimate question. The simple and perhaps simplistic answer is that human beings are curious creatures. We wonder. We imagine. And we travel on magic carpets to alternative universes with exotic names such as What-If and If-Only.

We are also rational. We hike into the hills of nostalgia, allow the winds of recollection to play with heart-hair and after sampling the many flavours of those other planetary configurations, which by the way could take hours or a few seconds, we return to the here and now. We put aside what might have been and think about what has been and perhaps what will be.

And so there’s a lamp ready to be lit and it can be brought close to the face of the beloved. It is a magic lamp; one that illuminated pathways to the long ago, and indeed the longest ago if you will, to the point of first encounter. And there we find the beloved in the infancy of companionship or wanting.

There are two directions we can take. We can start from the love of the first moment and move to the loves that came thereafter, for both individuals grow and in growing their love is transformed, in any number of directions. We can meet each and every beloved of each and every moment, exhilarating and painful, until we come to the beloved of the parting. We can trace beloved and loving backwards too, from ultimate departure to all the arrivals and departures that came before until that first unforgettable encounter.

This is perhaps the beauty of love, the multiplicity of beloveds, all having the same name, same body, roughly the same features and wavelengths. They are not cast in stone, though. Their lives are carved upon and they carve themselves on other lives. Just as the recipients of their love or those who adore them beyond belief.

We don’t do this all the time, but then there comes a day or a moment when lyrics you’ve never heard before make their way through conversations and concerns: ‘Can you wait a little longer until I come?’

So we wait, even if the beloved never arrives. Arrival makes a difference of course, but nether presence or absence could stop someone who has decided he will walk through walls, cross streets without sparing one fraction of a second to consider the traffic and enter the gardens of magical oblivion and assertion, where nothing that does not carry the name of the beloved can exist.

And all the loves that etched a song, all the tears of all the moments, they come alive, they light all the lamps of the heart, one by one, until there’s nothing left to do but fall on one’s knees and murmur the immemorial prayer of love: stay blessed beloved, always, wherever you are and with whoever you may be with.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below]

04 June 2023

All those we’ve loved before

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