by C K Williams
The Jewish people read Torah aloud to God
all year long, a portion a week,
like Scheherazade who told stories to save her life
By the time Simchat Torah rolls around,
God forgets and they can begin again.
Or:
The God of the Christians is a Jew, a bit of a whiner,
and the God of the Muslims is an Arab Jew from the desert, a bit hoarse.
Only the God of the Jews isn’t Jewish.
More often, though, the relationship between Amichai and his God is harsh, painful, a matter for dark and fearsome questioning. “I declare with perfect faith,” be writes (in an old liturgical phrase that becomes a refrain in the poem,)
that prayer preceded God.
Prayer created God,
God created human beings,
human beings created prayers
that create the God that creates human beings.
And, finally, because he is a Jew, because, as he says, he is “not one of the six-million,” he adduces (again with the aid of a phrase from the prayer book) also the God who is both intimate and maddeningly lax.
“Our Father, Our King.” What does a father do
when his children are orphans and he
is still alive? What will a father do
when his children have died and he becomes
a bereaved father for all eternity?
And history. Has any people ever lived so many vagaries of history, in their very flesh, as the Israelis? And has any Israeli lived them more intensely than Amichai? First as a Jew:
After Auschwitz no theology:
From the chimneys of the Vatican, white smoke rises—
a sign the cardinals have chosen themselves a pope.
From the crematoria of Auschwitz, black smoke rises—
a sign the conclave of Gods has not yet chosen
the Chosen people.
Then as a citizen, a soldier—for surely no nation more than Israel has been so caught between history’s many narratives and has so often gone forth in fierce obedience for the great cause of national and religious survival and then been brought up by so many stoppings to think, so many changes of mind:
When I was young I believed with all my heart
the Huleh swamp had to be drained.
Then all the bright-colored birds fled for their lives.
Now half a century later they are filling it with water again
because it was all a mistake. Perhaps my entire life
I’ve been living a mistake.
This is Amichai’s personal experience of what amounted to the national recantation of one of the founding symbols of Israeli statehood, the draining of the swamps near Galilee, which had been nearly as much an article of Zionist pride as the Jewishly blooming deserts. A later generation realized that the reclaiming of the swampland was an ecological disaster, so they were flooded again. And even recent history must be written again, and the relationship to enemies and to friends reconsidered.
Amichai broods on the propensity for communal legends to deceive; but this is not the customary literature of disillusion. He is too much of a realist, he is too experienced in the perversities of history, to be surprised or outraged by the crude discrepancies between political rhetoric and political outcomes. Still, he comes close to disdain when he refers to modes of public remembering, at one point scrutinizing one of the memorials to the War of Independence, a scattered column of burnt-out tanks and armored vehicles along a highway, by adding to them his own mementos about the vagaries of death and destiny:
The skeleton of some other car, charred in a traffic accident on some other road.
And in another context:
Tova’s brother, whom I carried wounded from the battle at Tel Gath,
recovered and was forgotten because he recovered, and died
in a car crash a few years later, and was forgotten
because he died.
And Amichai knows, too, the resigned and sad stoicism of the Israeli, living as the conditional in the psychoses of other nations, as a parent who, in an armed and hating world, must send his children off to military service. In a wrenching simile, he regards his son’s face in the window of the bus taking him away to his army base “like a stamp on an envelope.” Later he must behold his daughter’s face as her bus takes her away and find nothing but the same terrifyingly impersonal figure to employ. Then, the crying out:
Oh, those stamps, those letters sent off into the world,
those letters we send. These names, addresses, numbers,
those colorful stamps, those faces . . .
There are so many stunning metaphors in these pages. Amichai has always had a dexterous and supple metaphorical imagination, and now the force of his feeling, the necessity that he has imposed on himself to come to conclusions, takes him to astonishing lengths. Every perception, experience, reflection, emotion, and tradition presents itself as the potential half of a simile. Sometimes his metaphorical passion seems nearly to rend itself to pieces in trying to do so much labor of transfiguration. In a passage in which he surely has himself in mind, he writes:
The singer of the Song of Songs sought his beloved so long and hard
that he lost his mind and went looking for her with a simile map
and fell in love with the images he himself had imagined.
Everywhere there are figures of wrenching poignancy. In the section called “Evening Promenade on Valley of the Ghouls Street” (which echoes the “They all go into the dark” passage in the “East Coker” section of Eliot’s Quartets, and through there to Dante), he writes of
A few remain standing at the crossroads of empty streets
like windsocks at the airport. But each one
is blown a different way, each in the direction of his flight
by his own wind, his own spirit.
And again, in another passage, about visiting the cemetery of the village in Germany where he was born:
There’s the name of my mother’s
mothers, and a name from the last century. And here’s a name,
and there! And as I was about to brush the moss from a name—
Look! an open hand engraved on the tombstone, the grave of a kohen,
his fingers splayed in a spasm of holiness and blessing,
and here’s a grave concealed by a thicket of berries
that has to be brushed aside like a shock of hair
from the face of a beloved woman.
Sometimes Amichai’s figurative work can be as charming and as fanciful as his work with the Bible. In “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, why Jerusalem?” he exalts for his beloved city and frets about the way the world obsesses about it, lamenting, “Why, of all places, Jerusalem?” He proposes other possibilities, Babylon, Petersburg, Rome, and finally (of all places) Vancouver:
why not Vancouver with her salmon
that ascend to her from the sea, crawling
on their bellies up the hard mountain slope
like atoning pilgrims, kosher pilgrims of fin and scale . . .
There is so much sheer imaginative force in this book. In a single sequence, about a visit to a museum, Amichai generates enough similes for whole volumes of lesser poets.
A collection of ritual objects . . . : spice boxes
with little flags on top like festive troops
and many fragrant generations of sacrifice,
and the memory of many Sabbath nights that did not end in death.
And happy menorahs and weepy menorahs and oil lamps
with the pouting beaks of chicks like children singing,
their mouths wide open in desire and love . . .
Seder plates that rotate at the speed of time
so it seems they are standing still, and kiddush cups
in a row on the shelf like soccer trophies.
. . . A collection of ritual objects
like the gaudy toys of a baby god, the gift
of an aged nation, like the strange instruments
of a ghost orchestra, like some odd motionless
bottom fish deep in the waters of time.
Perhaps, at this level of transformative power, when consciousness manifests so astonishingly its ability to elevate the particular to the conceptual grandeur of the general, it is only metaphor itself, and the mind as the master metaphor, that can mediate between the irresolvables of self and other, trust and mistrust, reflection and action. And it may be that finally the most decisive element of poetic worth might have to do with the sheer quantity of this transfiguring metaphorical energy. That, and a certain sensual and intellectual assurance that one is capable of dealing with the manifold complexities of existence, and that imagination is capacious enough to contain and to recast all those complexities, without aversion or exclusion. By these measurements, no poet alive has more claim to stature than Amichai.
If there really is such a thing as wisdom, it might well reside in the character that a master such as Amichai can fashion for himself, and so for us. Our connection to anything ultimate, in other words, is more aesthetic than moral, and to understand this is to understand also that this connection is never, in any way, dogmatic. To sojourn with Amichai in the vast, rugged, sympathetic domain of his imagination is to be given leave to linger in one of those privileged moments when we are in a confidential and confident engagement with our own spirits, when we know with certainty that such a process of imaginative self-investigation is proper and just, regardless of the substance or the occasion of our thoughts.
The wisdom of Amichai’s poetry consists of an essential mistrust of any prescriptive thought or act, from any source, from any community or nation, from any constricted notion of self. There is much we cannot know about ourselves, and about the universe, but at the same time this condition must not prevent us from keeping all that disorderly material as a vital part of our consciousness, for it is what enriches and gives resonance to our self-conception. It is a limitation that launches us. Whether the admirable equilibrium that Amichai achieves in Open Closed Open is accessible to us is our own affair; but we have to be grateful at how much he has bestowed of his own harrowing experiment of self-realization, and thankful, too, that the outcomes at which he arrives at for himself are, in the end, so benign and so exalting.
All my life I played chess with myself and with others
and the days of my life were chess pieces, good and bad—I and me,
I and he, war and hope, hope and despair,
black pieces and white. Now they’re all jumbled together,
colorless, and the chessboard has no squares,
it’s a smooth surface blending into night and into day.
The game is calm and has no end, no winners,
no losers, the hollow rules
clang in the wind. I listen. And I am quiet.
In my life and in my death.
Autobiography with Translation
A few years ago, when I gave a reading at a TED conference, one of a series an old friend of mine initiated for people from various fields—scientists, inventors, architects, designers, show-biz folk, and even this time a poet, me—my friend said to the audience after I was finished something about how moved he was to think of all the years I’d spent, had to spend, working by myself, all alone, and, he implied, lonely. I was startled: I’m quite a gregarious person, and sometimes I do become lonely, but it’s something that never happens to me during the hours I’m at work. When I’m at my desk, my room is filled, overflowing with the presence of a vast number of poets I love, and some others I don’t know at all, whose books or poems have recently arrived but who are there waiting for me to become acquainted with and possibly love, too.
Here are some of the poets that are with me on my desk or the table next to it as I write this: two different translations of Osip Mandelstam’s poems; a book of translations of Giacomo Leopardi; a collection of Thomas Wyatt; another of Gerard Manley Hopkins; an anthology entitled New European Poets, which includes poems from every possible nook and cranny of Europe; a book of essays of Eugenio Montale, as well as his last book of poetry, It Depends, the astonishing singularity of which I only recently came to appreciate; a collection of Blake; Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire, in French; a book of translations of early Celtic poetry, with those magical strings of modifiers; a translation by Marilyn Hacker of a contemporary French poet, Guy Goffette, whose work I’m not familiar with, but which I plan to read soon; and several anthologies of English and American poetry.
What I find striking about this list of the works of poets I’m studying, or restudying, is how many different languages, cultures, and moments of history are represented in it. When I first began to write poems in college, we were offered in our courses no poetry whatsoever in languages other than English, except very rarely as exercises in language classes. Still, somehow the first two poets to whom I found myself intimately attached were the French poet Charles Baudelaire and the German, Rainer Maria Rilke. Furthermore, when I was released from the university (or perhaps I should say paroled, since I’ve ended back in them for my livelihood), I found myself, during the first years of my apprenticeship, which seems never to have really ended, spending almost all my time with poets from languages and cultures other than American and English. To mention just a few, there were Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, García Lorca, and Miguel Hernandez, in Spanish; Baudelaire, again, still, French; and Rilke, German, still as well. Then a little later Rimbaud, Jean Follain, and Francis Ponge; the Polish poets Miłosz, Rosewicz, and Herbert; Montale, Ungaretti, and Pasolini from Italy; the Alexandrian Greek Cavafy; Tomas Tranströmer from Sweden; the Russians Akhmatova, Mayakovsky, and Mandlestam; the classical Chinese, Du Fu and Li Po particularly; as well the centuries of Japanese haiku masters; even quite a lot of poetry from cultures without a written tradition that were being collected and published or republished around then. And this, as I say, is a very partial accounting.
The question that comes to me now is why? English certainly has a great poetic tradition—it might actually be the very greatest—so why was I driven so forcefully to other languages and cultures? And I should add that I certainly wasn’t alone in this: there was a terrific amount of translating and reading of translations of poetry going on at that time. Many literary journals in the early sixties were crowded with translations from every place in the world, and for awhile my impression was that there were as many books of translations being published as poetry in English. Again: why?
I’ve thought sometimes that there were extraliterary reasons for this. Much of this turning outward, this searching for new poetic resources, came during the years of the Cold War when America took on, or had imposed on it by circumstances, an imperial sense of itself, an identity of power from which we have suffered and caused much suffering since. There might be something to this, and something also to the fact that there were such profound social changes underway in race and gender relations in America at that time. But I’m not really sure about how much either of these were the reasons for what was happening in poetry. Perhaps because so much of my attention has been devoted to poetry, learning to write it and learning about it, I’d feel disingenuous if I didn’t limit my reflections to the areas in which I can be less speculative.
It’s one of the miracles of art that no matter how many times we experience a poem or a painting or a piece of music, no matter how much time we spend reveling in it and analyzing it, each time we return to it, it feels utterly spontaneous, seeming to be improvised anew as we experience it. Furthermore, if a work even on a tenth reading or viewing or listening, or a hundredth, doesn’t convey that quality of freshness, of renewal, it will seem moribund, perishing before our eyes like a fish on a beach.
The truth is that the creation of art is laborious, or if that’s not quite the word, it certainly is the case that all art is generated out of the necessities of an aesthetic system, its demands and restrictions, as well as i
ts opportunities, its propulsive energy. Such systems are dauntingly intricate, though fortunately many of the variables of an art form will have been absorbed into what might be called the unconscious of the artist before a creative act is undertaken.
Another characteristic of creative systems, what are usually called styles, is that they have a strong conservative tendency. Styles are always striving to perfect themselves, by which I mean that styles have inherent in them the potential for enactments that no longer depend on anything but the demands of the style itself: neither matter or content nor, in other words, world. Stylistically, art is always moving from the transparent to the opaque, from trying to make encompassing and as comprehensive as possible its relations with reality, to a state in which its formal dexterity comes to be its most essential requirement. When this happens, usually during the late moments of an artistic era, the execution of style becomes an end in itself, the end in itself: art becomes style displaying itself, preening, showing off.
This is when an artistic style becomes decadent. Decadence in itself isn’t intrinsically bad—it’s unavoidable. And some of the very greatest art is created at the end of the innovation-decadence cycle. What happens then, though, is that some subtle line is crossed, and the gloriously decadent becomes offensively empty and sterile, and, with no portion of the quest of the artist’s blundering soul any longer a part of it, produces work that is lifeless, stillborn.
This isn’t any great revelation, surely. We all know that when a contemporary painter paints an impressionist painting, no matter how deftly it may be done, no matter how seductive it might appear, it offends, seems at best kitsch, a trivialization, at worst a painful violation, hardly worth being deplored. And when a contemporary poet generates a Keatsian sonnet that isn’t driven by anything in the spiritual cosmos of his or her time, if there is nothing of our difficult contemporary reality infused in the work, and of the poetic history that informs that reality, then experienced readers will find it inert, without essential energy, not worth the effort of bothering with.
Serious artists or writers or composers are acutely aware of all this. At some point in a style’s cycle, and not even necessarily during the decline to decadence, there is the realization that the assumptions that have been informing the style have become rote and are being executed in accord with formulas that produce nothing but simulacra of the authentic work they once enabled. And, perhaps not surprisingly, this is something that many of the practitioners of an exhausted style experience at almost the same time.
