The Sacred & Profane At Cross Roads

By Sarath de Alwis –August 24, 2016

Sarath de Alwis

“The church and the whorehouse arrived in the far west simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.” ~ John Steinbeck in East of Eden 1952

Listening to President Maithripala Sirisena at the Matara rally threating to reveal secrets of the joint opposition, instinctively I recalled this exquisitely emblematic confluence of the benign and the bawdy that Steinbeck describes in his novel East of Eden. It was Steinbeck’s greatest work in which he explores the good and evil in the human condition.

Steinbeck saw the confused world as a poem, a habit or dream. Sen though a peep hole its inhabitants were “whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,” by which he meant everybody. Seen through a different peep hole they could be “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men.” Since it is the same eyes seeing through different peepholes they were ‘the same thing’

The Presidents exhortations at Matara on corruption committed and corruption that is likely to be happening presented me- and my fellow citizens the same conundrum seen through Steinbeck’s two different peep holes.

The Matara display of popular support was to mark the first year anniversary of aimless meandering interspersed with some positives by the UNP –SLFP parliamentary coalition. Their first year balance sheet is short of positive gains but registers some amelioration of earlier mayhem, tyranny and fleece.

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