Now & Then, page 8
These words were said to me in a language not Arabic.
Ancestors, you’ve left me a plot in the family graveyard—
Why must I look, in your eyes, for prayers in Arabic?
Majnoon, his clothes ripped, still weeps for Laila.
O, this is the madness of the desert, his crazy Arabic.
Who listens to Ishmael? Even now he cries out:
Abraham, throw away your knives, recite a psalm in Arabic.
From exile Mahmoud Darwish writes to the world:
You’ll all pass between the fleeting words of Arabic.
The sky is stunned, it’s become a ceiling of stone.
I tell you it must weep. So kneel, pray for rain in Arabic.
At an exhibition of miniatures, such delicate calligraphy:
Kashmiri paisleys tied into the golden hair of Arabic!
The Koran prophesied a fire of men and stones.
Well, it’s all now come true, as it was said in the Arabic.
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When Lorca died, they left the balconies open and saw:
his qasidas braided, on the horizon, into knots of Arabic.
Memory is no longer confused, it has a homeland—
Says Shammas: Territorialize each confusion in a graceful Arabic.
Where there were homes in Deir Yassein, you’ll see dense forests—
That village was razed. There’s no sign of Arabic.
I too, O Amichai, saw the dresses of beautiful women.
And everything else, just like you, in Death, Hebrew, and Arabic.
They ask me to tell them what Shahid means—
Listen: It means “The Beloved” in Persian, “witness” in Arabic.
This requires a gloss. But in a way the point is what Western read-
ers don’t know about the Arabic tradition. So here is a partial gloss. The
ghazal, which originated in Persian and was written in Arabic all over the
Muslim world, is the Islamic equivalent of the sonnet. Majnoon and Laila
are—reader, look them up. Ishmael, in Muslim traditions, not Isaac, was
the son God demanded of Abraham as a sacrifice. Mahmoud Darwish is a
Palestinian poet. Federico García Lorca, the great Spanish poet executed
by Franco’s fascists, wrote qasidas, old Spanish song forms derived from
Islam. Anton Shammas is a contemporary Palestinian novelist. Deir Yessein
is—reader, look it up. Yehuda Amichai is a contemporary Israeli poet.
This book is full of epigrams as haunting as the poems, especially now
when our country has undertaken, selectively, to be the world’s peace-
keeper. One epigram comes from something a British chieftain said
about the Roman empire. It’s quoted in Tacitus: “They make a desert and
they call it peace.” Another comes from the Serbian-born American poet
Charles Simic: “No human being or group of people has the right to pass
a death sentence on a city.”
Note: Agha Shahid Ali died of brain cancer in December 2001 at the age of fifty-
two. He was a charming man, witty, sociable, a wonderful cook, and much loved
by his friends, one of whom reported on his state of mind when he was undergoing
chemotherapy. “Darling,” he told her on the phone, “I’ve lost all my hair. If I say
so myself, I look very sexy.” His last book was Rooms Are Never Finished
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(Norton, 2002). Readers will also want to look at Ravishing Disunities (Gibbs
M. Smith), a book he edited of ghazals in English, and at The Rebel’s Sil-
houette (University of Massachusetts Press), his translations from Urdu of the
twentieth-century Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
may 24
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood is best known, of course, as a novelist. But she brings
to her poetry the same sharp eye and stinging, ironic wit. Here’s a poem
from her new book, Morning in the Burned House (Houghton Mifflin).
The book contains a moving sequence of elegies for her father, but this
poem belongs to her satiric vein. It’s for the boys, and the women who
love them:
Romantic
Men and their mournful romanticisms
that can’t get the dishes done—
that’s freedom, that broken wineglass
in the cold fireplace.
When women wash underpants, it’s a chore.
When men do it, an intriguing affliction.
How plangent, the damp socks flapping on the line,
how lost and single in the orphaning air . . .
She cherishes that sadness,
tells him to lie down on the grass,
closes each of his eyes with a finger,
applies her body like a poultice.
You poor thing, said the Australian woman
while he held our baby—
as if I had forced him to do it,
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as if I had my high heel in his face.
Still, who’s taken in?
Every time?
Us, and our empty hands, the hands
of starving nurses.
It’s bullet holes we want to see in their skin,
scars, and the chance to touch them.
may 31
Memorial Day and Shakespeare
I try to see a few of Shakespeare’s plays every summer and to read or
reread the plays before I see them. Over the years I’ve seen a knockabout
As You Like It in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco—it was foggy at
noon for the first act, and everyone was shivering when the first actor
appeared to say, “If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of
it,” and they had their shirts off in the summer heat by the middle of the
play; a version of The Tempest on a beach in the Sierra Nevada Mountains,
the sun going down and turning the patches of snow on the peaks in the
distance to a pale rose—magic enough for the magic to come; and an
Anthony and Cleopatra—that is a play for grown-ups—in an amphitheater
in a redwood grove. And in the past few years I’ve taken to keeping one
play by my bedside all summer.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I kept reading all of last summer,
is an early play. The critics think it was written around the same time as
Romeo and Juliet, and so the young Shakespeare wrote his tragedy that
ought to have been a comedy (those teenagers should not have had to
die for love) and the comedy that could only be a comedy almost in
the same breath. They are both plays about the magical and delusory
power of sexual longing and romantic love. Midsummer Night celebrates
it, almost purely. And because it’s an early play, it’s written by the young
poet who still loved showing off his gifts. The later Shakespeare cuts to
the chase. The young Shakespeare likes to dazzle at the outset with the
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verbal equivalent of fancy camerawork. The play is contained by the
marriage of two powerful adults, Theseus, Duke of Athens (who knows
what the sixteenth-century English idea of eighth-century b.c. Athens
was?) and Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. They lay out the basic prob-
lem of romantic drama, that it involves a woman and a man who desire
each other. The rest of the play is going to be a wild excursion into what
that means. Theseus and Hippolyta speak about their marriage in the
opening lines, and they are married in the closing lines. Everything in
between is the dream.
A reader who knows the plot opens the play and reads for pure
pleasure:
Theseus:
Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour
Draws on apace. Four happy days bring in
Another moon: but O, methinks how slow
This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires
Like to a step-dame or a dowager,
Long withering out a young man’s revenue.
Hippolyta: Four days will quickly steep themselves in night:
Four nights will quickly dream away the time:
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.
There is the pretty metaphor: “the moon, like to a silver bow new-bent
in heaven.” And the witty metaphor based on a contemporary social sit-
uation: “like to a step-dame.” And there is the gorgeous expression of
Theseus’s impatience: “How slow this old moon wanes! She lingers my
desire,” with its curious and delicious way of using “linger” as a transitive
verb. And then Theseus shakes off his impatience and turns to an atten-
dant lord and tells him to “stir up Athenian youth to merriment,” and in
doing so he describes what is in store for Shakespeare’s audience: “Awake
the pert and nimble spirit of mirth.”
Then comes on stage a father outraged that his young daughter has
fallen in love and refuses to marry the man of his choice. And the play is
under way. The principle is to do a tour of the magic and ridiculousness
of human passions. The young lovers moon over each other blindly. The
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oaf Bottom (maleness, here), through the intervention of fairies, gets bed-
ded down royally by Titania, the Queen of the Fairies, who conceives a
passion for him, also due to the intervention of the fairies, because he has
been given the head of an ass (femaleness, here)—which, thinking he is
beautiful, she curls the hair of. And then there are Pyramis and Thisbe, the
tragic lovers in the play the town bumpkins put on for the Duke. They
are a comic version of tragic lovers, separated by a wall that is given to
philosophical reflections on its wall-ness, and communicating through a
“chink” that seems to be a sexual pun.
Readers of the play remember Theseus’s speech on the madness of love.
It is one of the set pieces of Shakespearean sentence:
Theseus:
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
They also remember Bottom waking from his magical one-night stand.
Shakespeare gives us this in prose:
Bottom:
I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—
past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man
is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream.
Methought I was—there is no man can tell—what.
Methought I was, and methought I had . . . but man
is but a patched fool if he can offer to say what
methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard,
the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not
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able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to
report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince
to write a ballad of this dream: It shall be called
Bottom’s Dream because it hath no bottom . . .
And no end of other silliness.
In Shakespeare’s comedy, as generations of critics and scholars have
observed, magic wins and youth wins, and they are brought back into
the round of social life through marriage. Reading Midsummer in bits, I
noticed for the first time the strangeness in this play of the blessing at the
end. After all the confusion, “every Jack shall have Jill, naught shall go ill,”
as Robin Goodfellow puts it, but once all the weddings are over and the
lovers retired to their apartments, this is the final blessing that Oberon,
King of the Fairies, confers:
Oberon:
Now until the break of day
Through this house each fairy stray.
To the best bride-bed will we:
Which by us will bless-ed be:
And the issue, there create,
Ever shall be fortunate:
So shall all the couples three
Ever true in loving be:
And the blots of Nature’s hand
Shall not in their issue stand.
Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar,
Nor mark prodigious, such as are
Despis-ed in nativity,
Shall upon their children be.
With this field-dew consecrate,
Every fairy take his gait,
And each several chamber bless,
Through this palace, with sweet peace . . .
That list of birth defects delivered into the consciousness of the audience
just as the play ends is very odd indeed. And, I think, pure Shakespeare: if
we are going to celebrate natural magic, let’s have a glimpse of the other
kind of dream, of the horror of nature gone wrong.
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Anyway, all this is by way of saying that summer is coming. There are
plays in the park and quiet reading in late sunsets after dinner. Natural
magic enough.
june 7
Summer and Baseball: Linda Gregerson
Here’s a piece for baseball season. It comes from Linda Gregerson’s The
Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (Houghton Mifflin). This is Gregerson’s
second book; she lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her subject this time is
“the body in health, the body in sickness, / inscribing / its versatile logic
till the least / of us must, willy-nilly, learn / to read.” So this is for the
versatile logic of the body:
Line Drive Caught by the Grace of God
Half of America doubtless has the whole
of the infield’s peculiar heroics by heart,
this one’s way with a fractured forearm,
that one with women and off-season brawls,
the ones who are down to business while their owner
goes to the press. You know them already, the quaint
tight pants, the heft
and repose and adroitness of men
who are kept for a while while they age
with the game. It’s time
that parses the other fields too,
one time you squander, next time you hoard,
while around the diamond summer runs
its mortal stall, the torso that thickens,
the face that dismantles its uniform.
And sometimes pure felicity, the length
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of a player suspended above the dirt
for a wholly deliberate, perfect catch
for nothing, for New York,
for a million-dollar contract which is nothing now,
for free, for the body
as it plays its deft decline and countless humbling,
deadly jokes, so the body
may once have flattered our purposes.
A man like you or me but for the moment’s
delay and the grace of God. My neighbor
goes hungry when the Yankees lose,
his wife’s too unhappy to cook,
but supper’s a small enough price to pay,
he’d tell you himself, for odds
that make the weeks go by so personal,
so hand in glove.
june 14
Encompassing Nature:
Sappho, Lady Komachi, and an Irish Bard
Hymns to the earth thirty-five-hundred years old, from the beginning of
Aryan culture on the Ganges plain. Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist
from the time of Christ, describing rumors from far to the East of a giant,
striped, man-eating cat, the tiger. A second-century Greek mathematician
and philosopher wondering at the perfect efficiency of the hexagon out of
which bees construct their honeycombs. The medieval astronomer Tycho
Brahe, who firmly believed that the heavens were eternal and unchange-
able, recording his witness of an impossible event, one that would change
western science forever: the birth of a new star. A Renaissance English-
man making a description of the teeming and completely unexpected life
seen through a microscope in a drop of water. Two hundred years later a
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