A River Dies of Thirst Page 7
No war there, and no peace, and the sky
is clean and light above the place
He said to me, tucking under his arm the notebook in which he wrote his poems:
‘This, stranger, is my identity’
Meddling in the alphabet. Every letter is a hill
and a garden. He, not I, when it comes to letters
is his own master. He chooses his imaginary world
away from nature. Perhaps I have corrected
mistakes on the map. Perhaps I have alleviated the ravages
of life’s slow poison on my brothers.
And he says to me: ‘I am present in all things
absent from all things, between yesterday
and my present is a willow tree
a willow tree where two times intersect’
I say: ‘So who are you?’
He says to me, tucking his notebook under his arm
entangled in his poetic way of talking:
‘This is all that’s left of the wreckage of my identity.’
Right of return to paradise
If God has punished Adam by driving him out of eternal life into time, then the earth is exile and history a tragedy. It began with a family quarrel between Cain and Abel, then developed into civil wars, regional wars and global wars, which are continuing until history’s descendants have wiped out history. So what’s next? What comes after history? It seems that the right of return to paradise is encompassed by nothingness and divine mysteries. The only smooth road is the road to the abyss, until further notice . . . until the issuing of a divine pardon.
If it were not for sin
It is not as Adam thought!
If it were not for sin
if it were not for the descent to earth
the discovery of misery
and the temptation of Eve
if it were not for the longing for a lost paradise
there would be no poetry
nor memory
and eternity would be no consolation.
Italian autumn
A song which needs Italian words. What an autumn . . . what an autumn. The sky is not blue or white or grey, because the colours are points of view agreeing and disagreeing. The small clouds are towels drying the drizzle off the mountain tops, and the mountains grow higher as the sky comes to meet them. The trees are females, who have just come out of a bath of clouds to dress in birds that are not emigrating today, because autumn does not signal a faded, sad time, but is a festive fashion show put on to derive colour from no colour. It excites a longing for what is beyond description and precedes the frenzied rattle of amber in lovers’ beds. Autumn is the smooth whiteness of marble when the senses are awakened to the call of honeyed juices. I am here on the outskirts of L’Aquila in Italy, sitting on a wide glass-fronted balcony that looks on to a scene of welcome calm: in the valley eternity gives a passing nod to its visitors, who are climbing to the lower slopes of mountains where history has carved out fortresses as a protection against barbarians, then descended to the valley, wrinkled, head bowed. Nothing frightens the deer and rabbits, and I wish for nothing as I follow the leaves descending gradually from a tree to the ground, like a woman slowly undressing in her lover’s imagination. Here I am a leaf, being carried by the breeze to a wintry sleep from which I will awake in blossom. Here, beside this genial eternity that is indifferent to the history of the mountain forts, a visitor like me can discover one of the meanings of clouds and say: ‘Thanks be to lightness!’
Two travellers to a river
I see love five metres away, sitting in the departure lounge full of passengers travelling to permanent addresses. The airport is crowded. The French boy and the Japanese girl are detached from the crowd. Wrapped up, it appears to me, in a single blue cloud. They doze fitfully and pay no attention to their surroundings. He puts his head on her shoulder and she looks at him with a glance as soft as silk, which she is careful not to make too direct, as if she doesn’t want him to see her seeing him, as if they are at the beginning of love and she is shy of him knowing how much she is going to love him. Then the shyness switches from her to him. He looks at her when she puts her head on his shoulder with the look of someone who is afraid of breaking a fragile crystal ornament, and when their eyes meet, passionately and transparently, the girl gets up to buy a bottle of water. The girl feeds the water to the boy as if she were suckling him, and he feeds it to her as if he were kissing her. I close the novel I was reading on the journey to watch this image of love from a distance. I tremble, invigorated by an indefinable perfume drifting over me from a Japanese girl and a French boy as delicate together as male and female gazelles. He says nothing to her, and she says nothing to him. They are content with interludes of silence, like in Japanese music. Perhaps they are not old enough to talk about how they are no longer two separate beings. Had she said something to him, it would have been: ‘The river we are going to cross at the end of this journey passes close to our home.’ And had he said something to her, it would have been: ‘The river we are going to cross at the end of this journey is our home!’
A killer and innocent
It is love, like a wave
Recurrence of our bliss, old, new
quick, slow
innocent as a gazelle racing a bicycle
and obscene, like a rooster
Reckless like someone in need
moody and vicious
calm as imagination arranging its phrases
Dark, gloomy, and bursting into light
Empty and full of its contradictions
It is animal/angel
with the power of a thousand horses, and the lightness of a ghost
equivocal, petulant, peaceable
Whenever it flees, it returns
It treats us well, and badly
it takes us by surprise when we forget our emotions
and arrives without warning
It’s an anarchist/an egoist/
master/one and only/multiple
We believe sometimes, and sometimes have no faith
but it is indifferent to us
When it hunts us down one by one
then slays us with a cool hand
It is a killer, and innocent.
As if she is a song
As if I had a dream: I saw you fair, dark
golden brown, your own definition of colour
You sit on my knee, as if you are you. As if I
am I. And we have the night ahead of us
to stroll in lilac-scented gardens. Everything there
is here. It is all ours. You are mine, I am yours
and the shadow, your shadow, laughs like an orange. The dream
did its job and, like a postman, hurried on
to someone else. So we have to be
worthy, this evening, of ourselves, and of a river
that runs along beside us, and that we flow into as it flows into us.
My poet/my other
The poem is born at night from the water’s womb
It weeps, crawls, walks, and runs in the dream
blue white green. Then it grows up and makes its escape
at dawn
This happens while the poet is asleep, unaware of his poem
and his surroundings. He does not see it taking its chance and flying off
to someone else
In the morning he says: ‘It’s as if I dreamt of it,
of the poem. Where is it now?’
He drinks his coffee distractedly, envious of someone else
then in the end he says: ‘Good health to him, my poet/my other!’
A clear sky and a green garden
A clear sky is a thought without an idea, like a garden that is completely green. A poem whose only fault is its excessive clarity. The sky lacks even a passing cloud to arouse the imagination from the stupor of blue, and the green garden lacks a different colour, red or yellow or lilac, and jackals, to create some inner confusion. For the r
eady-made is the enemy of initiative. A poem needs some kind of cunning flaw so that we believe the poet when he lies and writes about the spiritual confusion provoked by a clear sky and a green garden. For why do we need poetry if the poet says the sky is clear and the garden is green?
A single word
The whisper of a word in the unseen is the music of meaning made new in a poem whose reader thinks, because it is so private, that he wrote it.
One word only, shining like a diamond or a firefly in the night of many species, is what makes prose into poetry.
An ordinary word that one person says casually to another, at the corner of the street or in the shops, is what makes a poem possible.
A sentence of prose, without metre or rhythm, if the poet accommodates it skilfully in the right context, helps him determine the rhythm, and lights the way to meaning through the murkiness of words.
The essence of the poem
The thing missing from the poem – and I don’t know what it is – is its glowing secret, what I call the essence of the poem.
·
When the poem is clear in the poet’s mind before he writes it, from the first line to the last, he becomes a postman, and the imagination a bicycle!
·
The road to meaning, however long and branching, is the poet’s journey. When the shadows lead him astray, he finds his way back.
·
What is meaning? I don’t know, but I may know what its opposite is: thinking that nothingness is easy to bear.
·
Suffering is not a talent. It is a test of talent, and it either defeats talent or is defeated by it.
·
All beautiful poetry is an act of resistance.
·
A living heritage is what is written today, and tomorrow.
·
A great poet is one who makes me small when I write, and great when I read.
·
I walk among the verses of Homer, al-Mutanabbi and Shakespeare, and stumble like a trainee waiter at a royal feast.
·
A cloud in a poet’s imagination is an idea.
·
Poetry – what is it? It is the words we say when we hear it or read it. This is poetry! We don’t need any proof.
Satire
The only proper way to eulogise a sultan’s wife is in a poem of two hemistichs throughout: the first one devoted to her breasts and the second to her bottom.
The sultan’s elegy is a eulogy delayed for reasons of protocol: the gatekeeper would not allow the poet to enter the palace and carry out his job, but he allowed him to visit the grave.
I do not hate a poet who hates me, but apologise for the pain I have caused him.
On oratory and orators
Oratory, or most oratory these days, is the art of trivialising the skill. A drum confiding with another drum in a public square and filling the echoing space, regardless of its size, with empty noise, an emptiness which the orator seizes on to fill with more insignificance. The voice, not the words, is master, raised high on an echo which applauding hands protect from the danger of stumbling upon the truth. Oratory is not a question of what the orator-clown wants to say, since the voice precedes the absent content, and the speech itself is the object of the exercise, fired by an instinctive desire to destroy the opponent, the thrusts of a gutless picador to delight sadistic spectators at a bullfight. Oratory is the execution of meaning in a public square. The subject comes after the voice has a short break for a mouthful of water, but the deferred predicate is left to a swaggering improvisation, backed up by a Quranic verse taken out of context, or a line of poetry composed in praise of an Umayyad prince, whom the orator thinks was an Abbasid, which earns a round of applause. Applause is what he is aiming for, and in the course of it he retrieves the next lot of non-ideas from the scene before him, and smiles as if rewarding his audience for their faith in their own intelligence, acquired from his excessive intelligence, and makes a silly joke, and they laugh and he laughs. Oratory is the act of inciting discontent against discontent, employing the rhetoric of complaint about the risks posed to the nation by discontent. The orator removes his coat to indicate to the audience the location of his active conscience, puts his hand in his trouser pocket searching for an idea and moves to the right and the left because he is uncertain where the people’s affiliations lie. So whether they are on the right or the left, they will trust him. Then he returns to the middle ground and continues to repeat the phrase: Trust me! Oratory is supremely capable of raising lies to the level of rapturous music. In oratory, truthfulness is a slip of the tongue.
Half and half
You live by halves
You are not you, or
someone else
Where is ‘I’ in the darkness of resemblance?
As if I am a ghost
walking towards a ghost
when all I am is a person who has walked past the ghost
I emerged from my first image
to catch up with the ghost
and it shouted as it disappeared:
‘Watch out, my other self!’
I think
I think
and there is no crime in what I think
and no delusion
that I
with a thread of silk can cut through iron
that I
with a thread of wool
can build tents in remote places
and escape from them
and from me
because I . . . as if I!
The second line
The first line is a gift to talent from the invisible world. But the second line might be poetry or it might be Frost’s disappointment. The second line is the battle of the known and the unknown, when the roads are empty of signs and the possible is full of contradictions, for everything possible is possible, and the second line is the uncertainty of the creature imitating the creator. Does a word guide its speaker or the speaker the word? The second line is not a gift, rather it is constructed by a skilful taming of the unseen, for you see and do not see because the light is so mixed up with the darkness. You are the one to whom inspiration has given the starting signal, and then it abandons you to carry on alone without a compass. You are like someone setting off into a forest without knowing what awaits you: an ambush, a shot, a bolt of lightning, or a woman asking you the time. You say to her: ‘Time has stopped, so you may pass by’ (Pessoa). The possible is a forest, so which tree trunk will you rest your imagination on and which wild beast will you escape from? If you find your way to the second line in the labyrinth of the possible, then you will know the easy route to an appointment with the impossible.
Higher and further
Moist is the sea air
sweet the song of a bird at the window
This was all that remained of the words of the dream
when I woke up at dawn, I said:
‘Perhaps my innocent unconscious favours the rhythm
when it says to me:
“Moist is the sea air
sweet the song of a bird at the window”’
But my consciousness was guiding the meaning towards the rhythm
(or vice versa)
when it said to me:
‘It’s hard to climb the hill, so climb
higher and further.’
The canary
Close to what will be
we listened to the canary’s words
to me and you:
‘Singing in a cage is possible
and so is happiness’
The canary when it sings
brings closer what will be
Tomorrow you will look at today-yesterday
You will say: ‘It was beautiful
and did not last long’
and you will be neither happy nor sad
Tomorrow, we will remember that we left the canary
in a cage, alone
not singing to us
but to passing snip
ers.
On a boat on the Nile
A boat on the Nile. Tuesday. Coffee, tea, cigarette smoke, talk about the world that is all we know, although thoughts of what lies beyond it, like the birds hovering over the eternal river, privately disturb each one of those gathered around Naguib Mahfouz. Meanwhile, he is listening with a selective ear, as the words take their time to reach him, not wanting his disciples to over-interpret his modest pronouncements. He knows enough about being eulogised to counter foolish acclaim with reticence, and doesn’t want anyone gazing at idols or graven images. But we make a pilgrimage to him, not to get to know him, as we have already immersed ourselves in his novels and identified with his characters, but to salute him for what he has written, and salute ourselves as we sit in the presence of a living legend, straight out of a Pharaonic manuscript. I have seen women coming from the most far-flung parts of the Arabic-speaking world to kiss his hand, and he is embarrassed and doesn’t know why, as if he is himself and not himself at the same time. Then he laughs loudly and asks for a cigarette, as it is time for the aura of sanctity, regarded with scepticism by a shrewd man like him, to be dispersed in a cloud of smoke, and it is for other people to interpret his work. He lived to write, and after he was stabbed in the neck he gave up narrating details with ant-like persistence and chose instead to distil honey like a bee. From the day of the attack, we were coming to him to say goodbye, as his life was no longer what it had been and death was tired of waiting, except we tried not to let him know this as we surrounded him on a boat on the Nile on Tuesdays. But now the Tuesday meetings are over.