The Fly in Blake, in Dickinson, in Marmalade
You, too, wanted your body good.
The one cost, the one thread.
That upon so many lips you descend.
Not long your stay, too quick our hand.
Not until I was a freshman at the University of Georgia, Athens did I read a poem in English. Of those poems in English 101 F (“F” for foreigners, though I am U.S. born), seven stayed with me. One was Whitman’s “I Saw in Louisiana a Live Oak Growing.” At first I thought the metaphor of love and friendship was too chatty, but seven years later I moved past that as I moved to Houston for my medical training and encountered the urban live oak sprawl there. The tree became my confidante and spirit guide for life in an imperial city. Almost a quarter of a century in Houston, and I still look in wonder at the live oaks. The bond has surpassed experience and merged into phenomenology. The trees are a sort of mirage, a decoy to their immense subterranean life forces that I let lead me as if I were one with their society. I sense the souls of live oaks, their glorious majesty that a hurricane rarely topples. And it physically pains me when harm befalls one of them, mostly through human hands. The tree’s mosaic bark, puzzle pieces of cathedral skin, their exposition of trunks and branches, a stance rooted in dance, so that my gaze (as servant of my being in the company of these trees) surrenders its certainty about motion. Are they not nerve cells that send their dendrites and endings toward the stars, their roots toward the hearth, their rhizomes as memory sheath? To watch and hear the sea through live oaks when the species of wind blow. To be surrounded by live oaks that return life to the poem and the poem to life.
Another poem was Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” A third was Allen Ginsberg’s supermarket of feelings in California. I liked them both, and liked how the professor read them and became the psychopomp of the dialogue between the two gay poets. He was a good professor even though he was stuck teaching literature for foreigners, and even if it stunned me when I heard him say to a friend of his at a bar across campus that Muslims are incapable of something or another. His air of exasperation was glib, sure of itself, and this did not offend me as much as it clarified to me how distant I understood Muslims to be from whatever it was he was pontificating about.
At a subsequent juncture in class, we discussed the lyric expansion through a Paul Simon song in the curricular anthology. I was ambivalent. I had only recently known who Simon was after someone had blasted “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” from an upper floor in one of the dormitory buildings for everyone in the large courtyard below to hear. I was not convinced that writing songs was poetry or that it can be called lyric since it required so much help from musical instruments to actualize that ancient incident in the cortex. I did, however, come to admire some of the poetry in Tom Waits’ songs, and I wonder now about Ahmad Fuad Najm, the Egyptian songwriter, poet, and backup singer to Sheikh Imam.
We were also assigned Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” which I sometimes mistakenly refer to as “The Tradition” (because no one wanted to upset a ritual that was represented by a black box). The brutal ethics of the story enthralled the elegy within me. I chose “The Lottery” as the subject of the one essay we were required to write that semester.
A fourth assigned poem was Langston Hughes’ “Harlem.” Its transparent song and last line gave me meaning. I identified with it, the likes of it in Arabic, and the poem also taught me the word “fester.” A fifth was the driving trance of Dylan Thomas’ villanelle, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”
Then came William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper.” Here he was a prototype of the Marxist poet before Marx, an artist of the proletariat and the oppressed, a poet against bullshit who does not forget about children. Before that poem, I had no inkling of the barbaric English practices against their own people, and had thought that the English reserved their savagery only to their colonial subjects.
**
Ten years ago I purchased Blake’s complete works. Whenever I visit with Blake now, I encounter how I did not encounter him as a child. I had none of his words committed to memory, but I did, apparently, have him as constituent of my heart. It’s irrelevant who today claims Blake as a commemoration of the sacred narrative of the self. Blake has become diffuse, fully ours, such that even his great red dragon is a neuropsychiatric disintegration in need of a couch and a cable deal. And it seems precarious when Blake is invoked as a senior member of a dead poets society that insists on a tradition whose “coherent wholeness” is no longer possible (as Edward Said discussed in Freud and the Non-European): a tradition that was seen for the last time in the first-half of the 20th century. The world has irreversibly changed since, and will change yet.
Were Blake alive this week, would we call him a poet of witness, a gatekeeper of identity politics, or a custodian of the heart of art and its psychologic truth? Were he alive today, how might he — who resisted the binary of self and other so that he may resist the violence that stems from it — disdain our literary taxonomy? Some of Blake’s work was fiercely anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-slavery. Saree Makdisi’s William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s is a brilliant book that does not reduce Blake’s complexity to the club of single-minded geniuses yet sees him for the forger of radical aesthetics he was. His was a profound spirituality. He did not go gentle on the culture establishment.
In his story “Shakespeare’s memory” J.L. Borges wrote that Blake was more complicated than he was complex. Borges was speaking offhandedly of the mythology in Blake’s work, the likes of Blake’s “Europe,” “America,” “Jerusalem,” and certainly not of Blake’s proverbial virtuosity, his unforgettable “lineaments of gratified desire,” or his “smile of smiles” in so many of his sparser poems and texts. And Blake did invariably turn on the style. What a po-mo precursor his splendid “Proverbs of Hell” was to the sequence poem, for example. What a Dr. Seuss his “Tyger” or “Poison Tree.”
Amjad Nasser, the late Jordanian poet, wrote “Biography of a Caged Tiger,” a long prose poem “in conversation with William Blake.” Nasser’s extended family name is the diminutive word for tiger in Arabic. He dedicated the poem to his grandson: a remarkable mediation in seven pages on nearly every distilled phrase and question in Blake’s poem.
William Blake is an eternal flame free of nation, of language as such. There’s this Arabic saying attributed to Imam Ali, the Prophet’s cousin, and for years I could never conjure a satisfactory English for it, perhaps because I was stuck on how the Arabic saying is an acute sentence in four words: a noun sentence whose predicate is a verb sentence, suffixes and all. I understood Blake better when I found the Arabic saying’s perfect echo in his “Auguries of Innocence”: “A truth that’s told with bad intent / Beats all the lies you can invent.” I love how brazenly and effortlessly Blake, pre-flaneur, pulls off his “poncif” like a sufi concerned only with the illumination before him in a commercial world.
**
The seventh poem was Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for death.” Its opening stanza was the first verse I memorized in English, the first verse in English that instantly commanded me to remember it. But Emily, you, too, have become a national obsession that regulates your DNA transfer to those who can claim you as their ancestor through the pluripotent American self. Emily, our riches and institutions propel us, have filled the amphitheaters of our pockets (and may fill more). They’ve built an audience so huge it gathers in modern scales of distributed wealth spread out against our almost-continent — an optical illusion of anti-super-size-me schools of solitude. Emily, our symbionts may differ, but both you and I are generalist trees in the one forest. And I keep returning to you, in secret stadiums of my Palestinian heart. Your “butterfly’s assumption-gown” and “artist spider” who “has never been employed.” Your time of which you hadn’t enough to hate, to finish enmity, or to perfect affection — still it was your time, your little toil of love (your “sedentary toil”) — large enough for me.