The Golden Thread

Buddha believed prayers were wasted wishes—there 
was no Beloved listening for a human voice. But if
reality rests on the invisible scaffolding of our senses,
could we too not be all colour? […] 

Amali Gunasekera, a poet and archetypal psychologist raised in Sri Lanka, wrote her latest collection, The Golden Thread, while living in England’s Lake District and nearby Scotland. Like the Romantic poets who wrote this landscape before her, Gunasekera finds sublimity, stillness, strife, and meaning there:

               […] Buttercups as if to say
what shall I place in the centre of this day. Why this 
human need for eternity in one form only? Along
Coniston shores trees are balancing both terror and
wonder, like waiting to die on hospice beds, roots
clutching thin air. […]

Gunasekera also meditates on the ways humans fail to engage the sublime. In the masterful final poem, “Bansai,” she describes a solitary “tree that is / voiceless without // wind”, comparing it to a “man powerless // to climb the miracles / at his feet.” At the same, she’s aware of the sublime as a distraction, a form of impossible desire: “Mother believes I will roam from sorrow to sorrow in the endless tracts of samsara because I refuse to renounce the exquisiteness of this perishable world.”

During a recent reading, Gunasekera spoke of her interest in exploring “psychic energy rising from a primordial force” and “how that energy translates into an utterance.” This attention to the elemental, along with Gunasekera’s gift for melding philosophical, personal, spiritual, and aesthetic concerns into vivid images resonated, for me, with Sheila Heti’s recent novel, Pure Colour. Like Heti, Gunasekera is continuously inspired by (and inspires, in this reader) a sense of awe, even as she acknowledges suffering, death, and precarity, as in this line from “Variation on the Fact of Spring”:

Spring arrives like using the cause of sickness to heal the sickness.

After describing the violence of the seasonal transition, how the “wind rose” and “cherry blossoms ruptured making the grass wince with cargo,” Gunasekera delivers a moment of grace: 

Suddenly the green mind of the tree is visible again.