The Blood of Ink

by

Maryam Ala Amjadi

Modern Logic, which gnaws on the neck of art and literature today, demands in its self righteous fashion, a thorough definition of every word, every terminology and every statement in order to frame and place, to place and frame all that oozes out of the pen. Definition establishes a kind of ideological safety for the holder of the pen and it blooms like an umbrella under the cold rain of misinterpretation which could make the pen holder feel insecure enough to laugh without a footnote and adequately self-conscious to weep without an index. One may assume that the universal countenance of poetry, as one of the many manifestations of literary art, would easily yield under the indulgent kisses of definition and succumb to the manipulating fingers of Reason. (The unilateral and selective touch of this universality is now destabilized thanks to the ever evolving politics of translation) But such is the beguiling facade of an assumption: it opens doors to notions and closes gates to ideas like the Roman Janus, with two faces that point inwardly in the opposite directions of hope and disappointment. Yet human will, guided by the arrows of celestial curiosity and guarded with the shield of earthly caution, strives in the direction of temptation, one of the many keys that could unlock the bolt to Man's existence.

"To be or not to be
That is not the question
It's the temptation"

From "Hamlet" in "Requiems of Earth", Ahmad Shamlou (1925-2000)

And so, the tip of many a pen has knifed the body of a poem to arrive at its dissected anatomy or rather a regenerative autopsy (in the operating light of Roland Barth). The Iranian poet, Reza Baraheni contemplates that "Perhaps one could say that poetry is the most indefinable thing that ever existed." But a poet kneads the dough of his lexical needs until he/she moulds it into something else, perhaps into a question, a cry, and a silence or even another call. So this is the task of the poet, defined more by what it isn't rather than what it is: A poet should never have a functional disappointment in words. And so Barahani ventures further and darts "A poem is an abrupt event. It emerges out of silence and returns to silence."
The circulating narrative of silence begins to swirl on the axis of an end. A poet knows that there is merely not one silence but silences: the silence in the womb, the silence in the grave, the one that precedes and the one that follows, the one that chases and the one that tempts, the one that corresponds and the one that does not, the silence that stretches long after we have closed the book or stopped listening and the one that brings us home, drifting from the sea of memories to ourselves, the silence of lovers after the rhythm of their breaths has climaxed in a mutual sigh and the silence that deafens when it whistles into the ears of the dark.

The night is replete with souls of silence
the roots are filled with cries
and
dances are sated with weariness.
From Two Silhouettes, Ahmad Shamlou

But there also exist a kind of stillness, a quietness that is repulsive; a silence that is repugnant (The sweetest honey is loathsome in its own deliciousness, Shakespeare) and that is unfair in the face of pain. A true poet hammers the pen to defy this kind of silence without adulterating it, for to write (authorship) is to claim authority, the right to be and the power to speak, not for or against but from and to: from one silence to another there is a cry.

I am not a tale to tell
Nor a song for you to tune
...I am the mutual pain
Cry me ou

From Public Love, Ahmad Shamlou

She'r (equivalent to poetry in Persian) is the invasive Arabic word (the absolute Persian word for poetry is the rather obsolete chaameh) which literally amounts to: a feeling, a sensation and broadly, to feel the general pulse of consciousness with the fingers of sensitivity. The traditional literary magistrate has always crowned the heart with the wreath of feeling and allotted the flower of the intellect's harvest to the mind. But now we are aware that the heart had never divorced the mind and in fact what we feel as an emotion in our heart (love, affection, hate and detest in their most unrefined sense) is ultimately perceived and understood in the mind. The heart feels. The mind comprehends this feeling. Sensation is one of the many levels of perception, perhaps a crude and yet primitively an instinctual one. Similarly, She'r (poetry) and Sho'oor (Persian usage of the Arabic word for common sense via intuition) is that which though initially vibes in the heart, ultimately orgasms in the mind. Therefore, though true poetry is apt to appeal more to the intellect, the aware reader knows that the poem which communicates before it is even understood (T.S. Eliot) has a vein of life running right through its most silent depths. But what kind of life? The life of the poet, the one that is qualitatively enhanced into numerous pages with the "let there be" wand of the pen.

The epistemology of Persian poetry does not make a sharp distinction between the functional aspect of a noun and a verb in their existential domain, perhaps this is one of the many reasons as to why Persian readers always demand the life of a poet from the poem. The reader feels abandoned and the curious thirst for life, the one that pulses interlineally is left unquenched, if the life of the poet and that of the poem do not reconcile.

The Persian poetic voice has always resonated with a tone of protest and question in the labyrinths of history. The revolutionary lips of the poet, Farrokhi Yazdi (1887-1939) were sewed together with thread and needle by the order of the governor of Yazd (a city in Iran) and yet, the inhumanity of this act did not stop him from keeping his pen in constant human motion. Those who feared his pen knew of its invading power, for a poet is an invader (the act of comprehension is aggressive if not violent, Heidegger) of the page of existence, he/she claims it in full authority and lovingly peeps in the corners of the reader's sensitivity to tackle and change the composition of reader's blood which becomes manifest in the reader's response and at times reaction to the text. The Iranian mystic Mansour Hallaj (c.858-922) with his invasive claim "I am the truth” that cost him the surrender of his physical existence was a poet in all the lines and layers of his life. Persian Sufi poet, Attar Neyshapuri of the 13th century writes in his book entitled Tazkeratal Awliya the account of Hallaj's death:

When they took him to court, a Sufi asked him: "What is love?" He answered: "You will see it today, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow." They killed him that day, burned him the next day and threw his ashes to the wind the day after that.

This is love, says Attar.

The history of Persian poetry breathes at the cost of the cries and sighs of numerous poetical lips of those who have lived the life of their poetry to core: Malekol shoare Bahar (1884-1951), Mirzadeh Eshghi (1893-1924), Forough Farrokhzad (1935-1967), Ahmad Shamlou (1925-2000) and ...(the significant perpetual three dots that mark the life, the death and the resurrection of an "I don't know' or a marked silence)

The focus of their poetry was not the economical politics of our times or the cheap mottos hyphened on affordable tenement halls but rather the politics of a functional aesthetics that makes the unbearably close (closed) distance between the hand and the tongue less disturbing, the one that hems the rift between the noun and the verb, action and speech, and reconciles our nocturnal dreams with the day-to-day, a political aesthetics that marks the unguarded borders of our identity in the face of the pros and cons of the self within the realm of its authority and authenticity, one that hears the unheard and sees the unseen at the cost of losing the already heard and the already seen.

These were a few poets whose lives stretched ungrammatically, far beyond the margins of the page. You may trace each syllable and find it, not silent, not still but in that constant motion which stirs and climaxes in an ultimate cry within the perceptive silence of the reader. Such is the fate of the faith of a poet, the faith that pacifies the fear at the brink of a blank page and brings forth life out of existence, something out of nothing, courage out of dread's heart from its edges. The poet's ivory tower, if any, is the heart and the tongue of the people and the life of the poems he/she writes does not age by the fear of men who could but haven't lived and loved, nor the physical death of their voice ends its resonance in the reluctance of women who could have yielded to the generous kisses of want but didn't. The life of the poem is human. The ink runs in the veins of its wholeness. The warm kiss of words or the spanking of a sentence on the reader's cheek, reach out to touch, to feel and to hold the forsaken human side in us, the spark that is to be nursed before it is kindled into a fire, one that warms up to both human intellect and emotion. Such is the prospect of a poem, a poem that is life.
 

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Maryam Ala Amjadi (born 1984, Tehran) is an Iranian poet and a free lance translator who has spent her early impressionable years in India. Author of "Me, I and Myself", a collection of verse originally written in English, she was awarded the silver medal in the 14th National Persian Literary Olympiad (2001) and Honorary Fellowship in Creative Writing, International Writers Program (IWP) at University of Iowa (2008). She is currently a graduate student at Department of English, University of Pune.