Mahmoud Darwish

 

Recently a friend sent me a link to a poem by Mahmound Darwish. I had not previously heard of Darwish, despite the fact that he is considered by many to be the "Palestinian Poet Laureate." I was intrigued by the poem, although I was not sure how much of it I really understood. I did some research into his background, but even with that information, I found "I Didn't Apologize to the Well" a hard poem to pin down. 

Part of that had to do with the translation that was sent to me, which was by Fady Joudah, himself a Palestinian poet. I was able eventually to locate another translation online in a book translated by Omnia Amin and Rick London, which falls much more smoothly on my ear. I felt their phrasings snapped some of the imagery into focus for me as well. I have no idea what images and connotations and connections would be clearer to someone reading the original Arabic.

Part of it is also, I think, actually thematic: the introduction by Amin and London makes note of his strategic deployment of "lyrical instability" as he tries to create a "map of absence." It is, in their reading, a poem of dislocation, and the way Darwish frames it is probably intended to give the reader a parallel experience of dislocation within the poem itself. Here's the translation I like:

I Didn’t Apologize To The Well


I didn’t apologize to the well as I passed by it.
I borrowed a cloud from an ancient pine and squeezed it
like an orange. I waited for a mythical white deer.
I instructed my heart in patience: Be neutral, as though
you were not a part of me. Here, good shepherds
stood on air and invented the flute and enticed
mountain partridges into their traps. Here, I saddled
a horse for flight to my personal planets, and flew.
And here, a fortuneteller told me: Beware of asphalt roads
and automobiles, ride on your sigh. Here, I loosened
my shadow and waited. I selected the smallest stone
and stood wakefully by it. I broke apart a myth
and got broken myself. I circled the well until
I flew out of myself to what I’m not. And a voice
from deep in the well spoke to me: This grave
is not yours. And so I apologized. I read verses
from the wise Qur’an and said to the anonymous presence
in the well: Peace be with you and the day
you were killed in the land of peace and with the day
you’ll rise from the well’s darkness
and live…

                        – Mahmoud Darwish
                        Tr. Omnia Amin and Rick London

It's a poem that had political ramifications when it was written twenty years ago which are now even more relevant and more intense than they were at that time, which means that any attempt to interpret it puts the interpreter under some pressure whether to address that political context or instead to ignore it. There are of course competing interpretive orthodoxies about this dilemma. Biographical Critics argue that you should not and indeed cannot interpret a poem without taking into consideration the circumstances under which it was written, including the lived experience of the author. The New Critics, at least during the era in which they could be said to be "new" argued that all of that supplementary data ought to be irrelevant: the poem must stand on its own; one can only "interpret" based on what you the words that you see in front of you. "Reader response" critics argue that the poem is just a stimulus, a locus of attention, and that the "real" poem, such as it is,  is constructed in the mind of the individual reader. Marxist critics, psychological critics, feminist critics, deconstructionists, each have their own orthodoxies. Suffice it to say that there are lots of lenses to use, individually or sequentially or simultaneously.

That much said, here are a couple of my observations, inferences, and hunches:

"The well" is an inanimate object, so right off the bat Darwish seems to be nudging me to wonder how the speaker could apologize TO the well even if he wanted to. But I can infer that it is an inanimate object with certain defining qualities: it's an oasis, a gathering place, the focus of the community of people who go it for nourishment and, presumably, the company of others.

The speaker, electing to pass all of that by, turns inward: he enters into imagination and myth, music and magic. I love listing of the activities he claims to have engaged in: borrowing the cloud, waiting for the white deer, saddling the flying horse, consulting the fortuneteller. The images, one after another, are surprising and delightful. And of course somewhat cryptic. "I selected the smallest stone and stood wakefully by it. I broke apart a myth and got broken myself... I flew out of myself to what I'm not." I see these, I FEEL these, as compelling emblems of, well, instability and dislocation, among perhaps many other possibilities. Attention and beauty and pleasure among them.

At that point an astonishing thing happens: the well speaks to HIM, saying "This grave is not yours." The implication being that it's "not yours" because it is mine, which is to say it is the grave of the person whose spirit resides within the well. And so THEN the speaker decides to apologize after all, and turning to the Qu'ran, wishes the spirit in the well peace, and suggests the promise—or at least the hope—of resurrection, of a new day arriving when the spirit will "rise from the well's darkness and live."

It would not be a huge interpretive leap to read all of this as a gloss on the tribal conflicts in the middle east. But I'm not really inclined to go there. For one thing, that whole situation is colossally messed up in a million different directions and has been for centuries. It seems to be even worse today than it ever has been. But I have so little lived or learned experience with it that I don't feel entitled or qualified or inclined to speculate on the poem's political and social themes. But I love the poem for other reasons. It seems to  me to be a very eloquent testimony to the power of poetry itself to help us process and cope with the distress and dissonance in the world. We are at the present moment a bewildering array of existential threats, including among others religious and ethnic rivalries, ongoing wars, climate change and its impacts, disinformation via social media, huge economic disparities among and within countries, the failure of our educational and health care systems.

But at this late date in my sojourn on this planet I feel like I am often hearing the voice that says "This grave is not yours." I'm getting closer to mine every day, that I know. And I do share the wish that those many millions and millions of others, and their descendants and mine, will eventually  rise from the darkness of whatever well they do inhabit, and live. Wishful thinking, yes. But as the old saying goes, "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." So why not go ahead and ride? As Darwish does in this poem, and as I do when I read it.





 

Good Intentions

 

It has been a year and two days since I last posted something to this blog. I had not intended for it to be so long. But in my advancing old age—and in the absence of any of the urgency that while I was still teaching I was more regularly able to muster—it's pretty easy to let my good intentions slide, one day at a time, until I look up and oops, another year gone by. The post below has actually been sitting for some months on my desktop, waiting for me to get around to posting it. It was intended to be the first in a series. It still may be. Or maybe I'll see you next year. We'll have to wait and see.

    As a sophomore in college I took a first-semester course in Chinese philosophy from Dr. Lik Kuen Tong. (I wrote about that course on this blog ten years ago.)
    Dr. Tong was a tremendous teacher, and our class was so taken with him that we asked him if he could teach a followup course the following semester. He said he would have to ask permission from the deans to do so. They gave their permission, we all signed up, and so during the second semester he taught a course that featured the process-based philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, among others. What I remember most clearly about that course was a series of presentations Dr. Tong did on symbolic logic, the essence of which was that certain philosophers had hit upon the idea that given the inherent slipperiness of verbal communication, it might be possible to represent the Truth (or Truths) of the Universe more accurately in mathematical terms.
    On the first day of the unit on symbolic logic, Dr. Tong walked to the blackboard and said something to the effect that we might begin by letting the Greek letters sigma stand for human existence, the letter lambda stand for the universe at large, and see the former as a function of the latter. While doing so, he wrote that equation on the board.
    I should acknowledge here that I am recalling this presentation from a distance of more than fifty years. I don't remember much of what he actually said or wrote down, and I don't know that what I do remember is anywhere near close to accurate. The importance of the lesson for me, both at that time and from the wrong end of the telescope today, is the experience I had as a student of watching as Dr. Tong began fiddling with the equation, saying things like, "Well, having gotten this far we would have to ask ourselves what the equation does not yet include that would be important," and then he would scribble some more on the board, adding factors and including items in parentheses in the denominator and talking his way through his thinking. He would arrive at class the next day and say something like "I was thinking about where we left off yesterday and it occurred to me that we had not considered the quadramoxial factor..." and he'd be off, chalk in hand, talking to us, sort of, but mostly talking to himself as he motored on down the road toward a mathematical representation of the universe that would stand up as being both accurate and adequate.
    I cheerfully admit that I understood only a very small percentage of what he was saying. But what blew me away was the ambition of the project intensity and intelligence and self-discipline with which Dr. Tong pursued it. From a spectator standpoint it was not unlike witnessing YoYo Ma play a cello sonata or Pablo Picasso painting a portrait of Dora Maar. The lasting value of that class, for me, had very little to do with process philosophy in general or symbolic logic in particular. It had to do, rather, with finding myself in the presence of someone who had made a fierce commitment to the deployment of the full resources of his considerable intelligence to a task which was not only ambitious but by any normal standard of judgment clearly impossible. What I have come to understand at this point in my life that I did not understand then is that the impossibility was precisely the point. If it was something anybody could figure out for themselves, there would be no point in attempting it. I'm sure to most of us, most of the time, that sounds counterintuitive, if not completely insane. But I will say this: Dr. Tong demonstrated in class every single day the rewards of the attempt to transcend your perceived limitations. By means of his aspirations be became an inspiration to me.
    I've been fortunate in my life to have had several such inspirational teachers. Some I have know personally, others I have encountered in print. The great British sculptor Henry Moore, for example, had this to say:

The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do.

Much of my working time the last few years—to the extent that as a retiree I can be said to have "working time"—has been devoted to the reading and writing of poetry. And the thing about writing a poem is that it's basically impossible to get it right. The testimony of working poets and writers and artists echoes Moore over and over again. Here, for example, is Dani Shapiro:

When writers who are just starting out ask me when it gets easier, my answer is never. It never gets easier. I don’t want to scare them, so I rarely say more than that, but the truth is that, if anything, it gets harder. The writing life isn’t just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again. That everything we ever write will be flawed. We may have written one book, or many, but all we know — if we know anything at all — is how to write the book we’re writing. All novels are failures. Perfection itself would be a failure. All we can hope is that we will fail better. That we won’t succumb to fear of the unknown. That we will not fall prey to the easy enchantments of repeating what may have worked in the past. I try to remember that the job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it. To be birthed by it. Each time we come to the end of a piece of work, we have failed as we have leapt — spectacularly, brazenly — into the unknown.

So sure, any poem I write, or you write, or anyone else writes, will be at least a partial failure. But as Shapiro suggests, that's maybe the most important reason to attempt it.