Interrogations at Midnight

When I woke up a few hours ago, I had an idea. Here's how it goes, roughly:

Believe it or not, when an Arab poet recites his (or, occasionally now, her) work in public, they often fill auditoriums with an audience. They actually have to sell tickets, and these tickets regularly sell out. For a rough equivalent in the west, you'd have to think of Metallica or Radiohead concerts.

Nor is the popular appreciation of poetry a phenomenon unique to the Arab world. It's also true (albeit to a lesser degree) of the former Soviet Union and many of the old Warsaw pact countries. I'll never forget walking down a street on the north side of Moscow, and hearing an old drunk guy singing a song whose lyrics happened to be The Talisman, one of Pushkin's most famous (albeit slightly racist) poems. Because I, too, was fairly sloshed I stopped and asked him if he knew what he was singing. He got incredibly indignant and said "Of course!" and then proceeded to (I shit you not) offer me an extemporaneous literary assessment of Pushkin's literary merit.

Western critics have, for the past 70 years or so, lamented the fact that the idea of either of the above being possible in America is not only unthinkable today but slightly absurd.

Embarrassed as I am to be living in a country where poets as unbearably artless as Maya Angelou and Elizabeth Alexander could be chosen to read presidential inaugural poems, I do believe that the problem of apathy to poetry is not endemic to America or the West. A country which once had a public holiday dedicated to one of its poets (Longfellow) is not incapable of appreciating poetry. In fact, I'm of the opinion that this problem has been of Western poets' own making as much as of Western society. Contrary to preponderating belief, Western culture is not irremediably averse to poetry or any of those other snooty things like opera, theater or modern classical music.

In the early days of modernism, poets in the West as well as in the Soviet sphere (and, decades later, in the Arab world as well) faced similar problems and challenges: technical liberation of verse from ancient (or almost ancient) metrical patterns, an entirely new way of conceiving the world, a new understanding of what it fundamentally meant to be human.

However, it is the different uses made of this liberation and kaleidoscopic re-imagination of the world that lead to a crucial split. Symbolism, imagism, surrealism and other -isms were available to any and all who wanted them. But what Nizar Qabbani, Blok, Mayakovsky, Adonis, Neruda, Pasternak and others did with this novelty offers us something that we don't learn from our Stevens, MacNeice, Montale, Pound, Yeats or Eliot.

What they offer is a lesson about why literature (and, in particular, poetry) even exists. Literature, and literary innovation, are not a good in and of themselves. The peculiarly European notion of art for art's sake, though certainly a useful way to keep oneself from being mired in didacticism and sentimentalism, has slowly turned into art for the sake of art and absolutely nothing else and, in so doing, obscured the fact that literature can (and ideally should) serve the ends of life as well as the ends of art.

This is something more than just being a good artist, something more than Pound's belief in "maintaining the cleanliness of the tools." Clean tools aren't there just to lie there and stay shiny. They're tools after all, and you need to know how to use them well in order not to hurt yourself. Later, when Pound said that "it doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful or the bad writer wants to do harm" he was, ironically, disproving his own point by being a good writer who, in his own way, did a vast amount of harm.

Pasternak once said that "stylistic experimentation" was insufficient on its own, that "the most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overcome with what he has to say, at which point he makes urgent use of the old language, and it is transformed from within." Though I don't wholly agree with Pasternak, it seems that the West could use a little more of his sort of thinking.

The West (with some obvious and rare exceptions like Israel) some time between the two world wars, seemed to decide that the twentieth-century ramifications of this fact was simply beyond our power. As a result, we devoted ourselves to producing art of high quality that was interesting and had something new to say without considering whether anyone would be interested in listening. Under the ægis of modern criticism, we created for ourselves impressive but unnecessary constructs which, though meaningful to their own adherents and within their own boundaries, grew increasingly irrelevant in relation to life itself, and anyone who didn't share their mental presumptions.

Individualism, and an insistence on the personal vision over the collective consciousness, is a wondrous thing, and one of the best things Western thought has to offer. But Westerners' reluctance to see themselves as part of something larger in the face of the events of the twentieth century has made it hard for Western (and, in particular, American) poets to write for others.

Yehuda Amichai, an Israeli, wrote a wondrous poem that illustrates another way of writing and reading:

עין יהב

נסיעה לילית לעין יהב בערבה
נסיעה בגשם. כן בגשם.
שם פגשתי אנשים שמגדלים תמרים.
שם ראיתי עצי אשל ועצי אשליה.
שם ראיתי תקוה דוכרנית כמו תיל דוקרני
ואמרתי בלבי: אמת, התקוה צריכה להיות
כמו תיל כדי להגן עלינו מן היאוש. התקוה צריכה להיות
שדה מוקשים.

Ein Yahav

A night drive to Ein Yahav in the Arabah.
A drive in the rain. Yes, in the rain.
There, I met folk who grow date palms.
There, I saw tamarisk trees and trees of illusion.
There, I saw hope barbed like barbed wire
And I said to myself: It's true. Hope must be
Like wire, barbed up against despair. Hope must be
A minefield.

For reasons that will become apparent, this poem, in translation, requires some explication, so here we go:

Ein Yahav is a moshav (farming community) whose name literally translates to "Wellspring of Hope" situated in the Arabah, a desert that straddles part of the Israeli-Jordanian border. The Arabah is extremely hot and dry, thereby making the rain of the second line seem rather surreal. The poet insists that, yes, it is indeed raining in the desert. The poet's description of the people he encounters is intentionally vague, and could refer to the Jewish farmers in Ein Yahav, or the Arab farmers elsewhere nearby in the Arabah.

The mention of Tamarisk trees alludes to Genesis 21:33 "And Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beersheba, and called there on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God." Planting a tamarisk was a sign of Abraham's covenant with Abimelech, granting him permission to live in the land of the Philistines, and is an implicit metaphor for a possibility of the Jewish state making peace with the Arab states surrounding it. The "trees of illusion" represent the chance that this is impossible. The two are linked together by a Hebrew pun. The word for "tamarisk" (eshel) shares a semitic root ('-sh-l) with the word for "illusion" (ashlayá). The juxtaposition of these two possibilities of success and failure, and their being bound together by language, also reminds the reader of the ets da'át tov verá, the tree of knowledge of good and evil from which Adam tasted the forbidden apple.

The Hebrew word here used for "hope" (hatikva, in the absolutive-definite) is also the title of the Israeli national anthem whose lyrics describe the longing of the Jewish people to live once again in their ancestral land. The martial imagery (a minefield, barbed wire) used to describe hope creates a paradoxical association between war and peace that mirrors the link created earlier by the associative pun between "illusion" and "tamarisk." Good and evil, war and peace, past and present, reality and illusion are all hopelessly commingled by all the poem's allusions, imagery and wordplay, with hope still paradoxically resonating throughout it all, from the yahav (hope) of the beginning, to tikva (hope) of the end.

This poem functions not by trying to be timeless and universal (though war and peace are certainly universal to the human condition,) but by engaging its own time and the mental universe of its own intended audience, by creating a personal sense of history and an awareness of the individual's place within that history.

The accessibility of the later work of even "difficult" poets like Pasternak, Neruda and Amichai in their own countries owes much to the need that such poets felt to meet the exigencies of the time they lived in, a demand for poetry that could be grasped and, yes, used by their contemporaries and compatriots. Pasternak had to yank himself away from the complex, cryptic verse of his early years, just as Neruda had to temper his surrealism and Amichai had to learn to stop playing around with biblical and cultural detritus and actually make something out of them.

The point is that they did this, and the poetry that resulted was of a flavor unlike anything available from the modern English-speaking canon until recently, except perhaps some of the work of the more important American Beat writers, and some of the work of Australia's Judith Wright, South Africa's Roy Campbell, Scotland's Edwin Morgan and perhaps the Franco-American ex-pat James Emmanuel. (Note, however, that these last four are virtually unknown in America.)

Mind you, Americans and Westerners do look for this...but mainly in novels and songs. Human beings (I believe, but cannot prove this) are naturally given to poetry, and when they find that what people call "poetry" in their society does not suit them, they will do other things to find it, such as sniffing around for it in places like Atwood novels or Beatles lyrics, things which are still somewhat audience-targeted. Something similar happened in early medieval Europe when the Latin literary tradition had grown inaccessible, and popular (or "vulgar") songs in the vernacular became more prominent.

I do hope this changes.

There are already signs that this is changing. Things like Dana Gioia's California Requiem and Ted Kooser's better short work show more of a willingness on the part of the poet to take their audience into account. I'm hoping that this will gain traction and prove to be an actual trend, rather than a fluke.

However the key will be hitting the proper nerve. An intertextual art like poetry has its work cut out for itself if it hopes to survive in a society as fractiously diverse as modern America, where people have so few common points of reference. We don't all know large chunks of the Old Testament and the Talmud by heart the way educated Israelis do. We don't have a sense of solidarity with our fellow citizens and a resulting collective experience the way Soviet writers did. We don't read the same books or partake of the same forms of entertainment. Even song lyrics, the closest thing we have to usable poetry, are problematic since they offer little help in an art that (since the end of the middle ages, anyway) does not normally come with musical accompaniment, and most lyrics fail as poetry anyway.

This problem of how to speak to a society as peculiar and unprecedented as that of contemporary, hypertextual America is one that remains unsolved, one that should have been considered and solved half a century ago but has instead gotten harder over time as the critical establishment and literary circles simply refused to call it a problem. Robert Bly failed at it in the 60s and 70s because he lacked the gumption and talent to sustain his ambitions, and instead made the problem worse by setting a lower standard. Dan Schneider, whose literary and critical website attempts a similar project, has infinitely more talent than Bly, but seems not to understand the value of poetry being enjoyable apart from being merely good. Also, Schneider seems to spend more time griping about the problem than trying to find ways to fix it.

I do hope someone, or some group of people, can make it happen, though. Among other things, poetry is an art that requires using words charged with meaning. A society whose leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate and see through the power of language will be at the mercy of those who retain it—be they politicians, journalists or preachers.

When speaking French, I very often get complimented on my accent. I'm often told I "don't sound foreign" or something to that effect. However, when I ask if that means I sound French, the answer is usually in the negative.

When I then ask what I sound like, I get told some variant of the following: you sound French in certain words and certain sentences you say sound completely Parisian. But sometimes you sound different. Not foreign, just different.

Anyway, I complained about this to a Francophone fellow phonology geek yesterday who thought it would be fun to try and analyze my utterances. So she prepared a French paragraph for me to read aloud into a microphone.

According to her, I'm weird. I display the following regionalisms:

Jeune-jeûne merger:

For me, the sounds [ø] and [œ] seem to have merged. I recognize jeune and jeûne as separate lexical items, but both of them seem to have become a front mid vowel [ø̞] for me.

This is characteristic of many southern varieties of French in regions that used to speak Occitan dialects.

However

This [ø̞] has a more open allophone [œ̞] occurring before /r/, which is more common in Quebec and other non-continental pronunciations such as Acadian.

Brun-brin merger

The two nasal phonemes /ɛ̃/ and /œ̃/ have merged in the direction of the former. This merger is active in many urban areas such as Nantes and Paris.

Trilled uvular /r/

In certain environments, I'm apparently prone to realize /r/ as a uvular trill, rather than as a uvular fricative or approximant.

This is characteristic of certain Belgian pronunciations, as well as the elderly in rural southern France, though it is common practice when singing.

This, I have been told, is weird not just because these four phenomena don't all occur in the same region among the same social class or age group. It's also weird because I don't have any of the many other mergers which one would expect among speakers that do display the three mentioned above: Mettre-maître, pâte-patte, côte-cotte, enfouir-enfuir, loua-loi etc. At least one of these should also occur in the speech of anyone who's likely to display any of the four peculiarities I do.

In short, I'm weird in French.

These are quoted verbatim from an online argument.

I originally thought that their author was just a parodist having fun, but then I realized that, not only does he mean these statements seriously, but he's actually a linguistics grad student at Baltimore University.

It is a little scary and very sad that someone could get through so many linguistics courses (to say nothing of sosc and bio) and still hold views like this which read like a parody of badly digested Marxism, vomited into a receptacle containing throwaway PoMo


If English eats up a thousand languages, Russian razes a thousand, etc., it should seem obvious that the loss of languages is a political problem and has to do with the systematic subjugation of people's to empire cultures. But why is translation an antidote, when its ends are the obsolescence of the original text for an ersatz?
There is something unsavory in translation, in that it forces acknowledgement of the other where ignorance is the hegemonic force in play (which is why empires care so little about it except on the fringes), while on the other hand taking a knife to the other's head at the same time, so it can be served on a platter or shoved into a mailbox (which is why institutes are so covetous of it).

*********

It should be added that a word is not a way of expressing an idea, but a means of making thought, and that expression is a mode of thought.
Language is economy of culture, which is why Esperanto isn't a language, but an invention of global hegemony as much as Latin, and why it signals something more sinister--that is, resistance, or cultural dispersion. It is the stuff of hegemonic advertisement (or, actually, Latin is hegemonic adverstisement, Esperanto is a curiosity attempting the status of hegemony). The Latin we need to formulate and project thought is already deeply embedded w/in living languages.

*********

We are cowed and harrassed by the language we speak every day.

*********


........advanced cultures advanced through language.... the possibility of sustaining greater complication, intellectually, while preserving intellectual energy, may have made us smarter and wiser, but it has also made us less thoughtful in kind......Our cranial capacity has been in slow degradation since we became human enough to use our hands and tongues as makers. Primitive (that is, thoughtful) man grunted.



I'd make jokes now. But nothing I say could top this.

Bartender! Vodka straight and vodka sour!
One for the dead fag. One to drown the hour.
Answer me now: is it not true that love
Before the murder had gone far enough?

Bartender, is it God that tells the judge
When to be just, be jaded, or hold a grudge?
When Christ died on the cross, he gave Saint Paul
Leviticus enough for one and all.

Who blindfolds justice on the witness stand
While juries clap for lawyers' sleight of hand?
To earn my wife's trust back, it fell to me
To axe that faggot's body like a tree.

Bartender! How much vodka is enough
To mourn my murder of the man I love?

Think of American Endymion:
A lanky lad astray from home, star-eyed,
Confused with puberty, tired in the sun,
Lay down by the seductive stranger's side

And, when she'd gone, lay mute on the slick sheet,
Knowing himself betrayed into a man
In sweet sweat of the motel summer heat,
In a world ending where her word began.

A decade dimmed. Encountering her again
His body listened for the old, dark tune
She could not sing for twenty-something men
Who were no longer nubile by her moon.

So, glory of a goddess, he became
A daylong sleeper, the cold wives' old flame.

This morning I was pondering the problem of writing rhymed poetry in English, and eventually came up with a possible solution. There are three things about English that make it relatively difficult to find useful rhymes.

1) A high tolerance for consonant clusters and a large vowel inventory.

Consonant clusters of the type CCCVCCCC can occur in English, as in the word strengths. Most versions of English have around 100 syllable codas. In terms of vowels, English has anywhere from 12 to 23 vowels (depending on the dialect. On the other hand, the cross-linguistic average is 5.

The plethora of vowel sounds and syllable codas (even allowing for unstressed vowel reduction) yields something like 1,500 plausible monosyllabic rhyme-sounds for any given syllable. That's 1,500 ways for syllables not to rhyme with one another. The result is that you have words like death for which the only common rhyme-word is breath (to find other rhyme-words, you'd have to go a-hunting for uncommon things like Meth, Elizabeth, Shibboleth, Nazareth and perhaps archaic morphological derivations like wondereth.) Many other words like love don't give you more than 4 or 5 (glove, shove, above, of.)

2) Stress-pattern

Unlike in Persian, French, Hebrew and many other languages, most words are not stressed on their final syllable. This prevents words like reason, blazon and horizon from rhyming (as raison, blazon and horizon do in French.)

To compensate for this, English rhyme conventions allow a rhyme-syllable to bear secondary stress, thus making ability a rhyme for sea and executioner a rhyme for her. This is made problematic by English vowel reduction, however. English vowel reduction changes the quality of vowels in unstressed syllables, so that words like star and car can only rhyme with end-stressed or monosyllabic words, because the final syllable of words like particular and calendar no longer rhymes with them.

Furthermore, English vowel reduction reduces most unstressed syllables in the same direction, meaning that words like calendar can only rhyme with other words whose final syllable bears secondary stress: calendar/coroner/ligature/warrior.

Rhyming on secondary stress is much easier than rhyming on primary stress because the leveling nature of English vowel reduction allows for fewer possible contrasts to occur in secondary stress position, causing calendar/coroner/ligature/warrior to all end in the same sound. However, a poem rhyming on too many secondary stresses tends to sound a little monotonous, making this of limited use.

3) Heterogeneous etymologies.

Since most English words are borrowed from other languages, many of the more prevalent derivational morphemes in modern English (such as -ation, -usive, -orious, -onomy, -osis) are of Greek, Latin or French origin and are found on specific types of nouns corresponding to the language of borrowing. For example, you are unlikely to find many words denoting concrete things or people ending in -ation. Most -ation words such as creation, nation, inflation, defenestration, automation, masturbation refer either to actions or abstract concepts. Likewise, greek-derived words ending in -osis or -phobia are fairly limited in the types of things they describe: apotheosis, necrosis, neurosis or homophobia, arachnophobia etc.

This would not be much of a problem if English were simply end-stressed like French (in which création can rhyme addition) or if only part of the morpheme were necessary to create a rhyme (as in Spanish where victorioso can rhyme with pedregoso.)


What to do about it

As a way around these obstacles, English poets have often employed several tactics. Rhyming on secondary stress is one. Here are a few more

Historical rhyme: rhyming on words that shared a nuclear vowel at some earlier point in the history of English, but no longer do. Examples include breath/sheath, love/prove/drove, word/sword, blood/food/hood, alone/one etc.

Near-rhyme: rhyming with a similar, but different vowel. This has become especially common in the twentieth century. Examples include lend/wind, gone/down, wide/toyed, seen/pain

Consonance: pretending that the vowels don't matter. Examples include smother/neither, wide/nude, kindred/sun-dried etc.

Assonance: rhyming on the vowel sound alone as in old/blow, crumble/hundred etc.

but

All of the above options seem somehow unsatisfying to me. Compromising on vowel-quality in any way seems to be the wrong way to go since vowels occupy the highest point on the sonority scales of most languages including English. In other words, they are louder and more prominent. This means that wake shares more prominent features with the word wait than it does with the word walk. However, simply disregarding the consonants seems unsatisfying as well, since, in English, the nature of surrounding consonants often influences what a syllable's vowel sounds like. For example, the vowel of the word cold actually has a longer duration than that of the word colt. Moreover, a rhyme of go/goad seems to ignore English moraic division.

I sat down and tried to devise a rhyme-system that would allow more syllables to rhyme with each other than a system requiring full rhymes, but maximizing sound similarity as far as English phonotactics would permit.

The result was what I like to call a system of "featural rhyme" where rhyme sounds are distinguished by coda-length and manner of articulation, causing maximal homophony without being as crippled as full rhyme.

Thus, in this system, speak, wheat and sleep would rhyme with one another (since they all end in a single voiceless plosive) and lips, kicks and snitch would rhyme with one another (since they all end with a plosive and a voiceless fricative or a voiceless affricate.)

Given what I know about English phonology and phonotactics, this system should work with a few adjustments. Not all syllable codas occur with the same frequency with all syllable nuclei, so perhaps certain deviations would make sense, particularly for R-colored nuclei and nasals.


An attempt to work this system out in practice:

Orpheus to Eurydice

I wept so much the first time that you died.
We'd had our share of time, our gladed house,
The tune of sunlight singing us alive,
The taste of berries from another's mouth,

And all our pleasures had a sudden worth
For being gone. Now with you dead anew,
Where shall I find my grief with no new words?
No tears that will not cheapen what was you.

Nor can I go now, changeling, where you sleep
But I can sing you: flower, bush and bird-
My blossom bending where the waters swerve,

My nightingale awake among the thorns,
My laurel tree that speaks a god's defeat.
Without you, I go lost among your forms.

It's time to live and let love, Lesbia,
Knowing that rumors of the scandalized
Gray-headed men aren't worth a single penny!
The sun gone down can rise again to day:
but when our short and final light is done
we will go down to slumber with no dawn.
So give a thousand kisses up to me.
A hundred and a thousand and a hundred.
Don't you dare stop. Another thousand. Hundreds.
Until we glory in so many millions
That we can't count ourselves. So let's not count
But let our heap of numbers flummox those
Whose envy tries to tally all our kisses.

The Original:

Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis!
soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus inuidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

I have an obsession. Well, actually, I have multiple obsessions including sex, drugs alcohol, poetry and literary translation.

But I also have another obsession which is what first got me into historical linguistics when I was 11 or so: the reconstruction of dead languages. More specifically, the reconstruction of dead languages' phonologies. I spend hours wondering whether the sound ض (which, by the way, is a weirdly-pronounced Arabic d that you see in the word Ramadan) sounded more like an L in the time of the Prophet Muhammad, whether the -m at the end of words in classical Latin had its own slight consonantal value or if it merely nasalized the preceding vowel, whether Old English hl was a consonant cluster or if it was merely a voiceless lateral, whether the Etruscans really had gigantic consonant clusters or if they inserted epenthetic vowels.

You get the idea. Lots of questions whose answers are irretrievable and, moreover, don't matter to anybody.

Whenever I'm asked about why I obsess over this, the answer seems just as elusive. I couldn't quite put my finger on it till today.

While I was spending my lunch pondering ways in which Greek prosody might have influenced the phonotactics of upper-class Latin speakers in ancient Rome, I suddenly realized what fascinated me about reconstructing ancient pronunciations: they aren't here anymore.

Yeah, that's right. My obsession with reconstructing dead phonologies is nothing more or less than wanting what I can't have. The idea, the desire, the yearning to somehow summon into the living air the voice, accent, intonation and vocabulary of someone who lived a thousand years ago...has little to distinguish it from a spoiled rich boy who's just had a woman say no to him.

Wonderful.

Cause I'm bored and sleepless at 4 AM

Wardrobe malfunction
Casus togæ.

The Russians are coming!
Gothi ad portas!

WMD
Arma copiosæ vastitatis

Holy heart failure, Batman!
Sanctos infarctos cordis, Vivespertilio!

Drill, baby, drill!
Terebra cara terebra!

It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.
Id pendet ab eo quid significatio verbi "est" est.

One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind
Passus parvus hominis, saltus magnus hominum. (I like this one better in Latin. Rather proud of it, actually.)

Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Annus iam octavus et octogesimus est quum majores nostri in hac continentem novam rem publicam pepererunt, conceptam in condicione libertatis dedicatamque rationi qua omnes homines natura æquales creantur.

He Shows How All Things Warn of Death
Tr. Yours Truly

I gazed upon the walls of my old land,
Strong long ago, now moldering away,
Tired by march of time that, day by day,
Had now eroded all their will to stand.

I strode through fields and saw the sun that made
A drink of every stream the ice untied,
And cattle moaning at the mountainside
For stealing their due daylight with its shade.

I stepped into my house, and saw the crude
And pillaged ruins of an ancient room,
My staff gone weak and crooked in the grime.

I felt my sword surrendering to time
And nothing of the many things I viewed
Reminded me of anything but doom.



The Original:

Enseña Cómo Todas Las Cosas Avisan de la Muerte

Miré los muros de la patria mía,
si un tiempo fuertes, ya desmoronados,
de la carrera de la edad cansados,
por quien caduca ya su valentía.

Salíme al campo; vi que el sol bebía
los arroyos del hielo desatados,
y del monte quejosos los ganados,
que con sombras hurtó su luz al día.

Entré en mi casa; vi que, amancillada,
de anciana habitación era despojos;
mi báculo, más corvo y menos fuerte.

Vencida de la edad sentí mi espada,
y no hallé cosa en que poner los ojos
que no fuese recuerdo de la muerte.

My yesterday was dreams and things undone
Which shall be done tomorrow. My today
Fires torpid goals out of a Gatling-gun
Into an hour that laughs and walks away.

I am a skirmish in a futile war.
I am the defect in my own front line.
I am hewn down by my own scimitar.
I am the spy that maunders in my mind.

Today kicks down the door to yesterday.
What needed doing now does me away.
My dutiful tomorrow and my sleep

Have been extorted by the brain I paid
To sharpen every minute like a spade
And dig me one more grave, fourteen lines deep.

Type "faking a" into Google (without clicking the search button) and watch what guesses it makes as to what you're going to type:

Faking a pregnancy test
Faking a drug test
Faking a back injury
Faking a doctor's note
Faking adhd
Faking a miscarriage
Faking a mental illness

God I love humanity.

This is easily one of Hafiz' best and most widely-known poems. It's also curiously hard to translate justly, since its allusions are quite unintelligible to western ears, whence the footnotes.

A recording of me reading the original Persian:


My translation:

For years my questing heart inquired of me
where on earth Jamshid's all-seeing cup could be.¹

In search of something it already had,
it supplicated strangers desperately.

It sought a pearl that slipped the temporal shell
from wayward ones that maunder by the sea.

The heart was out for God, and God was there.
It called His name because it could not see.

Only the Elder of the cult of fire²
Has mastery of every mystery.

Last night I took my quandary to his tavern
To solve it by his potent scrutiny.

I saw him grinning, gazing in a cup
From which a hundred visions answered me.

I asked him: "When did God grant you this grail
That is the mirror of reality?"

He said: "The day His thought unlocked the vault
Of heaven lined with lapis lazuli.

Recall Halláj ³ who cried that he was God
And took the Lord's name in vain ecstasy?

His body gave its glory to the gallows
That held him at the height of blasphemy.

His sin was yelling mysteries to a mob
Meant to be thought upon in privacy.

His heart held truth as soil conceals a seed.
His mind put out glossed leaflets like a tree.

Moses' right hand could quash his sleights of hand
As once it foiled a Pharaoh's sorcery.

But should the Holy Ghost flow forth again
More men like Christ could make more blind men see."

I asked: "Why am I rapt in beauty's locks?"
He said: "Hafiz! Your vexed heart vexes me."⁴

Footnotes:

1: Jam (or, as he is often called, Jamshid) is a mythical Persian king from the poet Ferdowsi's Shahname (Book of Kings.) According to legend, he was the greatest monarch the world ever knew, was responsible for a number of technological and cultural innovations (such as sailing, perfume-making and even the celebration of the Persian New Year.) He was said to have a seven-ringed cup which contained the elixir of immortality and which, when he looked into it, revealed the entire universe to him. It was also said to reveal deeper mystical truths when used for divination. Westerners occasionally associate Jamshid with King Arthur, and his cup with the Holy Grail. In this particular poem, Jamshid's cup is identified with the source of mystical truth and wisdom. The second couplet suggests that the poet is looking outward for this knowledge, when he in fact already possesses it.

2: The pír-e moghán (Elder Magus or Old Man of the Magi) is a Zoroastrian elder of great wisdom who owns a wine tavern (only Zoroastrians owned taverns since wine was forbidden to Muslims) and is an ecumenical spiritual guide of sorts.

3: Mansúr al-Halláj, the famous Sufi mystic. Many Sufi masters felt that it was inappropriate to share mystic secrets with the masses, yet al-Hallaj did so openly. He would occasionally fall into trances which he attributed to being in the presence of God. During one of these trances, he uttered the Arabic words: أنا الحق‎ Anā l-Ḥaqq "I am The Truth." This was taken to mean that he was claiming to be God, since al-Ḥaqq "the Truth" is one of the names of God. For this, he was imprisoned and ultimately hanged. Later Sufis took his death as a warning that mystical truths are meant to remain secret.

4: Hafez is asking this last question not out of a desire for knowledge, but with his "vexed heart" (del-e sheydá.) For this reason the master Magus refuses to answer it.

Emergency! Emergency! Barry Scott has got his dick stuck in a vacuum and it's broken. Dr. Isis Love to the rescue! With the risk of Barry's dick never being able to be the same again, Isis attempts a last resort procedure. She needs to fuck his cock back to life.

No, seriously. That's what it says.

Someone should compile a book of these.

The Palestinian village of Iqrit was forcibly evacuated by the Israeli army in 1948 and subsequently demolished. In the following decades, the village's former residents have made repeated legal attempts to get their land back. Israeli courts have denied their claims citing the need for security and the fear of setting a dangerous precedent. Today, only the church remains standing.

Alone atop the hill, a church
Stands in a town's debris.
I see an old man praying outside
With nowhere else to be.

No majesty distracts him here.
Only the olive trees
Bend as he bends in the cemetery
In silence on one knee.

Much ancient Arabic verse laments
The ruins of what they loved,
And triteness was mere truth for clans
Forever on the move

When lovers mourned deserted sand
As life forced them to roam.
Now here an Arab mourns his land
At home without a home.

I tried to preserve the monorhyme ghazal form, but failed. So I translated this one as couplets:

Speak of our union! Let me hear it
And rise from life that locks my spirit.
I am a bird of paradise
And, from earth's net, I will arise.

I swear upon your love: if you
Call me into your retinue,
From bonds of what and where and when
I am, I will arise again.

Lord, let the cloud of guidance pour
Its rains on me in life before
There comes a moment when I must
Rise out of what I am as dust.

Come to my grave, sit with a fine
Singer and sip your finest wine,
Then see me, stirred by scent and sound,
Come dancing out from underground.

Arise and shine and let me love
Your lordly grace, the way you move
And out of this world girdling me
I will arise in revelry.

For one more night, I beg you, hold
Me in your arms, though I am old
Until with dawnlight on my face
I rise in youth from your embrace.

In that brief breath of time when I
Must die, let me see you on high,
And I as Hafiz will arise
From earth and life and all that dies.

The Original:

مژده وصل تو کو کز سر جان برخيزم
طاير قدسم و از دام جهان برخيزم

به ولای تو که گر بنده خويشم خوانی
از سر خواجگی کون و مکان برخيزم

يا رب از ابر هدايت برسان بارانی
پيشتر زان که چو گردی ز ميان برخيزم

بر سر تربت من با می و مطرب بنشين
تا به بويت ز لحد رقص کنان برخيزم

خيز و بالا بنما ای بت شيرين حرکات
کز سر جان و جهان دست فشان برخيزم

گر چه پيرم تو شبی تنگ در آغوشم کش
تا سحرگه ز کنار تو جوان برخيزم

روز مرگم نفسی مهلت ديدار بده
تا چو حافظ ز سر جان و جهان برخيزم

Away from piers the water pities,
Away from mobs that maul the street
The last of the police retreat.
The prisons empty into cities.

While centenarian generals send
Pubescent soldiery to war,
While the professor keeps a whore
Like an imaginary friend,

While clerics hang by their white collars
For every clerical mistake,
While hangmen feel the markets shake
The value from a dead clerk's dollars,

The city's final stripper will
Hawk out her ass for bread and booze
From hands that listlessly peruse
A war-map of the Bronx until

The stone-old torch called liberty
Cracks from the statue's infirm grip
And the millennial waters rip
The rotten pier right out to sea.

I just had a funny realization about California English. It's beginning a chain shift (that's where many of the vowels shift around in a predictable manner rather like musical chairs across a vowel chart.)

Before /ŋ/, /ɪ/ is raised to [i]. /æ/ is raised to [eə] or [ɪə] before nasals. Elsewhere /æ/ is lowered in the direction of [a]. /ʊ/ is moving towards [ʌ], /ʌ/ towards [ɛ], /ɛ/ toward [æ], /ɑ/ toward [ɔ], /u/ toward [iʊ] (and eventually [Y]) and /oʊ/ toward [eʊ].

This shift, however, is in its early stages and is barely perceptible except for the occasionally fronted /u/ of a word like "dude" in the speech of a stereotypical surfer-dude.

So what'll California English sound like when the whole chain-shift has run amok with the vowel inventory?

I have a guess. Here's a recording:
It contains one passage spoken once in General American, once in a slight extrapolation of the aforementioned chain-shift, and once with my idea of what Californians will sound like once the shift is completed.

God I'm out of it

The soldier's and the scholar's camels strode to Samarkand.
Dawn was appalled on armor as they rode to Samarkand.

"Where are the golden lanterns and the prince's golden band?"
"I hear hot wind compose a golden Ode to Samarkand."

"What of the whirling saint? The tale-tall poets of the sand?"
"We were the ones that poured the wine that flowed to Samarkand."

"Will that Shirazi Turkish girl come take my heart in hand?"
"First we must pay the debt our fathers owed to Samarkand."

"Is this the new Jerusalem? I am at your command."
"Captain, you don't deserve to ride this road to Samarkand."

من يصنع المعروف في غير أهله يكن حمده ذماً عليه
If a man shows kindness to one who does not deserve it, it will be his praise that censures him.
-Zuhair Bin Abu Sulma Al-Muzani

ترحم بر پلنگ تيز دندان ستمگارى بود بر گوسفندان
Leniency shown to the sharp-toothed leopard may be oppression to the sheep
-Sa'adi

The late Edward Said is a guy I want to like. I really do. I support most of the causes he supports, I admire his desire when he was alive, as a Palestinian in a heavily Zionist university, to speak truth to power. Unfortunately, the more I read his work, the more convinced I become that he's writing in bad faith, that he cares more about glossy quotes and phrase-making than about scholarship, that he is astoundingly ignorant of history and that he often cannot be bothered to even read the works of individuals he criticizes.

So I can't like him, or praise him, no matter how much I want to.

The Question of Palestine, like Orientalism displays all of these flaws in their ugliness.

I'll say this about the book, though: I'm glad it was written. Having an account of the Palestinian condition serve(d/s) the interests of scholarship. The book makes several good points. 1) Unlike many other Arabs writing similar books, Said is relatively moderate. 2) Said makes the argument that recognition of the Palestinian condition among Westerners is much more limited than their knowledge of the Israeli and Zionist narrative. 3) He's even willing to understand the hatred Jews have faced throughout their history. 4) He admirably, sincerely and effectively communicates the Palestinian need for self-determination.

Still, the book displays the ways in which he, like many other Arab intellectuals, attempts to see Zionism in a way that would fit his desires and preconceptions, rather than attempt to understand historical reality. Once one moves beyond Said's epithets and actually scrutinizes the writings of major Zionist intellectuals, it becomes disturbingly clear that his generalizations are poor.

In addition, his view of violence and dehumanization is lopsided and often hypocritical. When, for example, he states (truthfully) that "senior Israeli politicians...diplomats, and intellectuals" employ "dehumanizing rhetoric...to characterize Palestinians as non-human" it seems he would have the reader believe that Palestinians never dehumanize Israelis. Either that, or he simply does not think it important/relevant, which it most definitely is.

Likewise, when he described "the planting of bombs in Israel or the West Bank and Gaza" only to say that they "must be understood in the context of day-to-day coercion and the brutality of a long military occupation," he is attempting to lead the reader to the largely correct conclusion that Palestinian violence is contextual. This is a truism, though. Isn't almost all violence contextual in some way or another? How many large groups of people are ever violent for the sheer joy of it? Moreover, in contrast to this nuanced view of Palestinian violence, as depicted in QP, Jewish violence always seems to occur in a contextual and moral vacuum, at least as Said would have it. When he discusses Palestinian violence, he contextualizes it." When condemning Israeli reprisals, it seems like he just wants people to be outraged at the barbarous carnage.

Said really shoots himself in the foot when he lets his rhetoric get ahead of him. For example, accusing Israel of actively participating in, and sponsoring "naked genocidal wars" and claiming that "Until 1966, the Arab citizens of Israel were ruled by a government exclusively in existence to control, bend, manipulate, terrorize and tamper with every facet of Arab life from birth virtually until death" really does bespeak a severe, untreated allergy to detail and nuance. Few would, and none should, claim that the military government before '66 was a paragon of righteous governance. With its selectively enforced curfews, bigoted laws and total lack of provisions for free speech or protection of privacy, it was a taxing and immensely oppressive regime for an Arab (or anybody, for that matter) to live under. Nonetheless, screwing with Palestinians was hardly that government's primary purpose, function or objective. Said here, and elsewhere, seems to fall prey to the bizarre belief that Israelis as a group and nation enjoy watching Palestinians suffer. While there certainly are a great many individual Israelis (some of whom I've met) who do take a disturbing amount of sadistic pleasure in Palestinian pain, this is not true of the majority of Israelis and has never been (nor can it be) a goal of national policy in Israel.

My biggest beef with QP, though, is that some of its assertions are, like those in Said's "Orientalism" simply untrue contortions of the historical record.

One of the most shockingly damnable portions of the book is Said's treatment of Jewish history. When, for example, he claims that "the entire historical duration of a Jewish state in Palestine before 1948 was a sixty-year period two millenia ago," I am confused. It makes me feel like Neo after he's been unplugged from the Matrix. It's like watching someone else swallow the blue pill of fiction and illusion and call it reality.

The way Said manages to justify this outlandish assertion is by ignoring the fact that the divided kingdoms of Judea and Israel constituted not one, but two independent Jewish regimes in Palestine for centuries on end.

When Said claims that "In joining the general Western enthusiasm for overseas territorial acquisition, Zionism never spoke of itself as a Jewish liberation movement, but rather as a Jewish movement for colonial settlement in the orient," one is at a loss for where he gets this idea, especially since in a previous chapter Said himself writes the opposite: "As Herzl first conceived of it in the nineties, Zionism was a movement to free Jews and solve the problem of anti-Semitism in the west." This book, like Orientalism, has the feeling of being written in a hurry.

One of Said's unstated axioms in Orientalism, that colonialism can only come from the west, serves him particularly poorly in QP. When he says that "Palestine became a predominantly Arab and Islamic country at the end of the seventh century," he not only fails to take into account the fact that the modern notion of a "country" did not exist in the seventh century, but also fails to mention that Palestine became Islamic through an imperialist enterprise of conquest that subjugated the entire region. People didn't spontaneously start speaking Arabic or praying 5 times a day, There was an enterprise of geographical and cultural colonialism. Muslims arrived in Jerusalem in 636, and beseiged the local garrisons for 4 months before the local Jews and Christians agreed to live with the Jizya tax under their new rulers and agreed not to challenge Islamic hegemony or proselytize or build new places of worship until, during the Roman wars under Fatimid rule, numerous Christians were put to death for suspicion of being "Roman sympathizers," with numerous churches being burned, culminating in Al-Hakim Bi'amrallah's orders to destroy the Holy Sepulchre, with the intent of deterring further Christian pilgrimage. In fact, Said's total silence on the process of Islamic expansion seem particularly weird when one contrasts it with his hatred of "the absolute wrong of settler-colonialism" and the zeal with which he traces the history of the European colonial endeavor all the way through to the Roman period.

Equally misleading is Said's assertion that "The principal Palestinian cities- Nablus, Jerusalem, Nazareth, Acre, Jaffa, Jericho, Ramlah, Hebron and Haifa- were built in the main by Palestinian Arabs." Said evidently does not know, or chooses to forget, that, except for Ramlah, every one of those cities was built (before the Arabs ever arrived) by Jews, Romans and Byzantines.

Likewise (and here Said does more damage to the Palestinian cause than any Zionist ever could) Said makes the mistake of depicting Zionism as nothing more than a colonial, European decision and "simply the most successful and most protracted of many such European projects since the middle Ages." There are two flaws to this argument. 1) What Said seems to forget is that as he was writing this, most Israeli citizens were not of European descent. It is hard for me, as a reader, to think of a Persian, Yemeni, Indian, Kurdish, Moroccan, Libyan or Tunisian Jew as a European colonist. 2) The European projects of expansion and colonization (such as the crusades) were imperial enterprises and extensions of the power of European nations, never attempts to found a sovereign state for a despised minority. When colonists are overthrown and empires collapse, the colonists have a "mother country" to retreat to. Does Said really think that the Jews who settled in Palestine should have gone back to (or remained in) the DP camps of eastern Europe waiting for travel documents that would never come? Or would he have the oriental Jews lay their fate at the mercy of the Arab countries that expelled them? Israel is not a colony. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. This issue requires a more complex explanation than the one Said seems willing to put forth. Zionism is more than a colonialist enterprise. It is a nationalism of its own, a competing bid for self-determination which, while it has many severe, damning flaws, does not deserve outright vilification, and cannot have its legitimacy so cavalierly dismissed by being denigrated as some sort of medieval mania for conquest. That's simply unintelligent.

Even when Said does refer to Arab and Oriental Jews, he makes them out to be victims, rather than beneficiaries, of Zionism. But oriental Jews were a part of Zionism, and played (and continue to play) a pivotal role in it. Said seems to be stricken by some sort of selective amnesia when he never once mentions that Menachem Begin (whom he villifies throughout the book, often enough for good reasons) was supported by these selfsame Oriental Jews. Said would, as I have said before, do well to recognize that Oriental Jews left their homes for Israel because of oppression (often enough by Muslims) in their home countries. When Said makes the inherently coercive and absurd implication that oppression is something only white people do, it gets me a little mad.

One can go even farther and note Said's blindness in passages such as the following:

Far from the Arab magnitudes signifying an already inhabited land, to the early Zionist colonists these were people to be ignored...This blindness was as true of left-wing ideologues and movements like Ber Borichov...as it was of so-called romantic right-wingers like Vladimir Jabotinsky....The Zionists considered the Arab problem something to be avoided completely or denied (and hence attacked) completely.

It is peculiar that Ber Borochov, whom Said dismisses in the above passage, actually suggested that that Zionists attempt to incorporate the Arab population into Jewish society. The problem was far from ignored. Moreover, even the most zealous Zionists (such as Asher Ginsberg, better known by the pen-name Achad HaAm) were far from blind to the issue. In fact, Ginsberg himself was responsible for a number of polemics which caustically criticized the way Zionist settlers treated the Arabs they came upon. In a letter to Moshe Smilansky, Ginsberg described no less than "a nation there in Palestine which [has] already settled and has no intention of departing."

Even the right-wing lunatics like Vladimir Jabotinsky understood, for reasons of sheer practicality, that the Palestinians were an entity to be taken account of. Jabotinsky himself said of the Palestinians that they felt at least the same instinctive love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico and the Sioux for their rolling prairies. In fact, it is precisely because Jabotinsky knew this about the local Arab population that he believed that they would never be interested in sharing their land with Zionists. Blind? Hardly.

There are many, many other problems underlying Said's writings and worldview, including a somewhat whitewashed view of Islamic history, a severe misunderstanding of Western scholarship and a wholesale, unquestioning adoption of the premises and myths of Arab nationalism. But going into detail on all that would require that this entry be even longer. I'll just finish up by saying that when a professor of literature writes about history and believes that he is allowed the use of literary hyperbole in historiography, it is sadly unsurprising if the result ends up looking, at best, like a flawed narrative and, at worst, something of a hatchet job every bit as damnable as the Orientalism which he decries in another polemic.