Vanishing Love Letters

                                                                 

                                                                 
                                                                                                                                                                                                     


Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Letters and particularly love letters are now a vanishing form of personal expression. I am not thinking of the official and corporate letters which have nothing to do with the self and soul of an individual. People today have no time to write love letters because the other forms of communication with your lady love are now available. But at the same time, love is no more a soulful commitment between man and woman. In truth, love is more a verb than a noun for the modern generations. A video call, a mail or a dinner date in a hotel with soft music playing to match the flowing champagne is all that love means to people who are always busy. Love is a life time ‘occupation’ where reality and dream are so interwoven to form a scenic tapestry  around your personal Eden that you perceive the truth, beauty and divinity of a person- man or woman- through whom you experience the whole of creation like the Vishwarupa in the Gita. Love is the most poetic experience a person can ever have and it has a beginning without an end.

People who are separated from their beloved they normally write letters. Imagine a woman receiving a letter on lotus leaf written with a stylus or just with nails, which comes hidden in a lotus floating in an aquaduct! The very romance of such experiences elevates love to superhuman heights. Kalidas’s hero, the Yaksa could not write to his beloved so he sends his intense message through the clouds. Such messengers are noticed in classical poetry. In English poetry we have poets like John Donne writing two love letters every day. How many can say: “For God’s sake, hold your tongue and let me love”? If you read the love letters of Shelley and Keats you will experience the joy and pain of love in lyrical measures. Love letter is an extra poetic expression of the lovesick soul longing for a dream union in a celestial atmosphere. It lifts up the lovers to heights and depths immeasurable by the instruments available to man. It purifies and ennobles the soul. It is not ‘time’s fool’ as Shakespeare would have it. Love transcends time and space and deifies the lovers. The most profane becomes the most divine by the power of love. This is not a mere passion or a release of libidinous energy; It is a sacrificial reaching out of a person who identifies his/ her lover with God’s many splenderoured truth. Love’s real measure is the intensity of separation.

The twenty first century lover, however, does not believe in the mirrored levels of love’s truth. Even the foreplay, the caressing words are gradually vanishing. The fate of love letters is no different. Who has the time to look at midnight moon for hours and write woeful ballads to his mistress’ eyebrow? they will ask. Love is an amorous affair, the short-lived it is the better, for, man must do the million things that call for our attention in the present world of opportunities. I think Hindi films have shown the way, rather the transition from long languorous biraha to short cuts to bedrooms. One song in Saraswatichandra admonished the lover not to waste a life for love: There are other manly things to do.

Writing love letters now is a dying art. The poetic heart that poured honeyed or agonized words for the beloved are now non flowing. All over the world it is now the pounding of fingers on keyboards that keeps all communications alive. Three letters now speak volumes which the beloved wants to hear or read: I.L.U. And that comes in ample measure.

No tears over this dying art. No attempt to revive it will succeed. I.L.U. is enough to spur a dreamy walk to the nearest rendezvous. But there are still lovers who burn the LED nights copying out letters and poetic lines from old masters to create impression: Cheers!