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Making of a Poem: Eugene Ostashevsky on “Falling Sonnet XI”

The second draft of “Falling Sonnet XI.”

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Eugene Ostashevsky’s “Falling Sonnet XI” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 252.

How did you come up with the title for this poem?

This is the eleventh poem in a series called Falling Sonnets. They are “sonnets” in the sense that each has fourteen lines with a Petrarchan logical structure, although without meter or rhyme. Right now, there are twelve, although I would prefer to have fourteen. The series reacts to one of the wars currently being fought. I’d prefer not to name which one—as soon as you do, the poem’s reception depends on how readers feel about the war rather than on anything having to do with the poem. Four other poems from the series have recently appeared in n+1.

My most recent book is called The Feeling Sonnets, and sections in it are called “Fooling Sonnets,” “Feeding Sonnets,” and even “Leafing Sonnets.” When I finished, I wanted to stop writing these sonnets, which aren’t real sonnets, anyway. But I was too busy to lay aside enough time to develop a new form for a new book, so I kept writing them, much to my chagrin. This is why I call my new sonnet book “The Failing Sonnets,” and a part of it is a cycle called “The Falling Sonnets,” because it reacts to a war that feels as if it had my name on it and that destabilizes my sense of self in unpleasant ways.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

I usually generate ideas by playing with words. The first draft (below) shows me coming up with the first terms of “Falling Sonnet XI” while writing another poem. In this poem, the main term was alien. Although I was thinking of it in the sense of “a person from elsewhere,” I also split alien up into a lien and looked up the financial sense of the word alienation, which yielded “disposal of property.” Disposal of property gave the association of “tote bag,” and then the disposal of bodies, because tot in German is “dead.” This link became the seed of a new poem. (The final draft of the “alien” poem was published here.)

The second draft (see image at top of post) shows me working on “Falling Sonnet XI.” Tote gave me carry and carried away, with its two meanings, the physical and the emotional, and then borne / born, bear away / bear with, bear a child / pallbearer, and the like. Translate enters the same line of synonyms of carry because it means “to bear across.” Translation may refer to reburial of remains, especially royal remains, like when the bodies of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were translated to Saint-Denis in 1815. I also think of translate as transform, such as Bottom’s acquiring an ass’s head in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As another character comments, “Bottom, thou art translated.”

In this way, “Falling Sonnet XI” became a poem about the reburial of body parts pulled out from the remains of buildings that were collapsed by bombing or missile strikes.

Were you thinking of any other poems or works of art while you wrote it?

The second draft shows explicit literary associations that got ironed out of the final version, although the thoughts they enabled remained. There appears the name of Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher who argued that things change into their opposites. I was thinking of fragment 27 in Guy Davenport’s great translation—“In death men will come upon things they do not expect, things utterly unknown to the living.” The second draft also recalls fragment 53, which declares war the king of all, and another fragment, which says the same of lightning. But I was equally remembering the theophany of Zeus and Semele. He shows himself to her in his real state, as lightning, and it kills her. The final version of my poem has the opposition between sleep and death as that between oral interpreting and written translating. I remember that I was thinking of the Euphronios Krater that used to be at the Met, on which Hermes directs Sleep and Death to carry Sarpedon away. And the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, because they appear in the eighteenth sura of the Quran, which I was teaching that month.

These associations for me are shorthand, and I try to get rid of them as I work on the text. Literary associations are often not art but the products of erudition. They are an imperfection inasmuch as they are too forbidding to many readers. Unfortunately, my poetry retains many literary associations, and these can be crucial to understanding the poem, but I am not happy about it and would prefer merely to connect words. For me, art lies in verbal connections. These can consist of using the same word with different meanings or else rethinking its meaning through true etymology or else bringing the word into contact with words that resemble it formally, in sound or shape. For me, poetry is thinking in words, by which I mean following the different meanings that come together in the same word or in similar word forms.

On second thought, I am not against all literary associations. They can create great emotional depth through a kind of secret language. Some of the most moving moments in literature are intertextual, like when Dante, upon seeing Beatrice in Purgatorio, speaks the words about love and remembrance that Virgil gives Dido. And it is then that Virgil, unobserved, returns to Limbo … That scene is not merely erudition but great art, and it is heartrending. But only when the reader understands not just the similarity but also the difference in the allusion, and the semantic work that the allusion performs, which is almost always that of irony, because irony is when you expect coincidence and get divergence instead. Still, the text should not depend on the allusion. It should make sense even to those who do not notice the allusion, which simply provides it with a double bottom. The problem does not lie with making the allusion but rather with wearing it on your sleeve, as an armband that says, “O reader, attend to the allusion here!” This is why I try to get rid of literary associations in the final drafts, but I often fail.

 

Eugene Ostashevsky is the author of, most recently, The Feeling Sonnets.

An Account of the Catastrophe at the Flower Show

Seven or eight years ago, a friend showed me a tatty packet of odd papers he’d picked up for six pounds at a sale. It looked just like it does in this picture. Most of the papers are an English translation of a sixteenth-century letter written by a French Protestant. I still haven’t read it. What got my attention right away was the remarkably pristine purple invitation to a flower show taking place on July 27, 1891.

My mind filled with soft, sunshiney images of parasols, white dresses, straw hats. The back of the invitation, however, contained something unexpectedly dramatic: someone had copied out another letter in a tiny hand, titling it “Mrs. Jacques’s account of the catastrophe that took place at this flower show.” I read it, and felt the shiver of an idea. My friend gave me the packet to keep, and I knew that one day I would try to make something out of it. I got there eventually, and the result is my story “The Fête,” which appears in the new Summer issue of The Paris Review. The story is almost entirely fictional, since Mrs. Jacques doesn’t really tell us very much, except about the nature of the catastrophe—which is the one detail I always intended to borrow. Perhaps, in order to preserve some suspense, you might like to read my version first.

 

Tom Crewe’s first novel, The New Life, won the Orwell Political Fiction Book Prize. He is a contributing editor of the London Review of Books.

The Language of Stones

“The Large Tortoiseshell and the Chieftan … discuss the mystery of beginnings and ends.” Photograph by D. Stanimirovitch.

“Infinitely far from the world of flowers,” sighs Novalis. What about the world of stones! And where along the way do we pick up the idea that we know what we’re talking about?

Of course, the question only makes sense to those who believe that nothing around them can be in vain, that everything must somehow concern them; that a perception recurring infinitely from the morning to the night of life, like that of the object generically called stone, could not be purely self-contained and remain a dead letter. The learned classifications of mineralogists leave them entirely unsatisfied. Indeed, these scientists are to them only a category of those “eloquent naturalists” who cling to the visible and tangible and of whom Claude de Saint-Martin could say that “they disappoint our expectation by not satisfying in us this ardent and pressing need, which drives us less toward what we see in sensible objects, than toward what we do not see in them.”

Without turning to raw gemstones, the mining of which implies traveling to various latitudes and deploying an entire apparatus, nothing is easier than accessing the sense of the special dignity of certain stones. It’s enough to stroll around the Orangerie or along the banks of the Seine, preferably in the sun after a light shower, and let your eyes to drop occasionally and enter the shimmering of flint that carpets the Paris basin like few others. From there, for those who retain the freshness of youth, it would be but a single step to pick up a particularly striking shard and turn it over in your hand to make the light play on it from every side. Indeed, for a child it is an instinctive gesture.

In this way, stones allow the vast majority of human beings who have reached adulthood to pass them by without holding such people up in the least, but those few whom they manage to retain are as a rule never released. Wherever they are found in abundance, they attract these individuals and delight in making of them something like inverted astrologers. The veil of utter satisfaction that had momentarily held their gaze on the stones has gradually lifted; in its place the necessity of a quest is mysteriously imposed on them and grows more demanding by the day. This growing demand leads them to increasingly value, increasingly exclusively, those kinds of inputs that allow them to transcend ever further the almost meaningless idea the average person has of the world. In other words, this way leads into the realm of clues and signs.

Gaffarel, librarian of Richelieu and chaplain to Louis XIII, dedicated the name of gamahés (a word, he thought, derived from camaïeu, bastardized from chemaija, which means like the water of God) to stones marked with hieroglyphs, among which he ranks “figured agates” first. Stanislas de Guaïta observes that his theory differs little from that of Oswald Croll who, in his Book of Signatures, argues that such imprints “are the signatures of elemental Forces manifesting in the three lower kingdoms” and that, long before them, Paracelsus had studied gamahés at length, attributing healing powers to them. This opinion prevailed in scholarly circles of the seventeenth century, a fact to which this quote from a Prussian author attests: “Sometimes it just so happens that beams of light fallen from stars (provided they are of the same nature) unite with metals, stones, and minerals, which have fallen from their highest position, penetrate them entirely, and form an amalgam. It is from this union that the gamahés issue: they are permeated with this influence and receive nature’s signature.” Monsieur Jurgis Baltrusaitis, in a beautiful recent work, where one of its three chapters concerns “pictured stones,” recalls that the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher believed he could lay out the nomenclature of the different types of minerals that concern us and discuss the causes of their anomalies, which could only be authorized, of course, by divine “Providence.”

In defense of the observers and researchers of the past, it can rightly be argued that organic fossil forms were not recognized as such until the efforts of Bernard Palissy: that we mistook these for the fortuitous figurations which interest us could only multiply the sources of confusion. Camille Flammarion emphasizes the fact that despite Steno’s declarations in 1669, “Fontenelle, Buffon, Voltaire remain unsure as to the nature of fossils and do not surmise the mode of sedimentary terrain formation.”

Removed from the long and abusive interference of fossils, it is striking that the empire of the gamahés has lost none of its prestige in certain eyes. Indeed, art has never felt the need to graft itself onto fortuity so much as it does today (look no further than “frottage,” “fumage,” “coulage,” “soufflage,” and other modes of chance composition in painting). Deep down, taste has not evolved much since 1628, when Archduke Leopold of Austria awaited a piece of furniture from Tuscany “draped with agates, carnelians, chalcedonies, jaspers with miniature paintings executed in oil” (ars und natura mit ain ander spielen).

It’s quite another thing, I can never stress this enough, to manifest a curiosity for unusual stones, as beautiful as they may be, but about whose discovery we had not an inkling, and to fall prey to the search, bolstered now and then by the finding of such stones, even if those that came before objectively eclipse them. It’s as if our destiny is somehow at stake. We abandon ourselves to desire, to the entreaty thanks only to which the object in question can exalt itself in our eyes. Between it and us, as if by osmosis, a series of mysterious exchanges will rapidly unfold, via analogy.

The old miner, known as the “Treasure Seeker,” whom Heinrich von Ofterdingen meets, speaking of the riches that the mountains of the North have revealed to him, declares that he sometimes believed himself to be in a magic garden. I’ve had the same feeling on a beach in Gaspésie, where the sea tossed out and often reclaimed before one could reach them, ribboned and transparent stones of all colors, which glowed from afar like so many small lamps. Last year, as we approached under a light rain a bed of stones we had yet to explore along the Lot River, the suddenness with which several agates of a beauty unexpected for the region “jumped out at us,” persuaded me that with each step, ever more beautiful ones were soon to reveal themselves, wrapping me for more than a minute in the perfect illusion of treading the ground of heaven on earth. There’s no doubt that the persistence in pursuing glimmers and signs, which the “visionary mineralogy” discusses, acts upon the mind like a narcotic. There are even minds that seem ill-​equipped to resist it, certain “gamahists” whose work gives them every license to live in their own little world. J.-A. Lecompte believes that “fear or violent impressions, religious or political fanaticism, can provoke the spontaneous creation of a gamahé”; J.-V. Monbarlet, after many years of “studies,” takes for granted that in the entire Dordogne valley, there is not a single pebble, a single flint that has not been sculpted, engraved, and painted by man—the Gallic artist, according to him—in such a way as to present both without and within (as a crack occasionally reveals) “mysterious pictures” in countless combinations. These two authors believe they should corroborate their thesis with numerous drawings or photographs which, of course, could do nothing but convince us of their “paranoid” cast of mind.

It’s only from the moment such ambitious systematic constructions are erected that, in my view, the rights of visionary mineralogy are overstepped. Among the alluvial stones of a river like the Lot—to stick to what I know best—I’ve often thought those that, during a group search, assign themselves, by their qualities of substance or structure, to each individual’s attention, are those that offer the maximum affinity to their particular constitution. It seems certain to me that, on the same walk, two beings, unless they resemble each other in some strange sense, could not possibly pick up the same stones, so true is it that we find only what meets a deep need, even if such a need could solely be satisfied in a completely symbolic way.

“Every transparent body,” judges Novalis, “is in a higher state, and seems to have a kind of consciousness.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. In passing, he leans on Ritter, who, completely occupied with scrutinizing the “universal soul as such,” holds that “all external phenomena must become explicable as symbols and ultimate results of internal phenomena” and that “the imperfection of the one must become the organ revealing the others.” Some of us still react in this way. Internal ribbons of agate, with their constrictions followed by sudden deviations suggesting knots here and there, seem to reflect our own “nervous impulses” in an elective space from the moment we first lay eyes on them. This can result in the most disconcerting “telescoping,” for which I can offer no better example than by reproducing here a stone where the woman’s sex, superbly described, opens between swirls of the brain.

“… a stone where the woman’s sex, superbly described, opens between swirls of the brain.” Photograph by D. Stanimirovitch.

The search for stones with this peculiar allusive power, provided it’s a truly passionate one, leads those who indulge in it to fall rapidly into a trance, the essential characteristic of which is hyperlucidity. Setting out from the interpretation of an exceptionally interesting stone, this quickly encompasses and illuminates the circumstances of its discovery. It tends to promote a magical causality assuming the necessary intervention of natural factors with no logical relation to what’s at stake, thereby disconcerting and confounding habits of thought, but nonetheless overpowering our minds.

Last summer, my friend Nanos Valaoritis was kind enough to record for me the observations prompted by the discovery of the very beautiful stone in the shape of a seated figure, reproduced here.

Marie W., when at night, on the small roads of the Causse plateaus, she drove us back from the “beaches” of the Lot where we’d lingered, never failing to stop, for fear of killing or hurting it, when a nighthawk, dazzled by the headlights, froze in front of us. Thus, on September 14, we counted nine stops, caused by as many birds, apparently of the same species. The planet Mars, which the newspapers report is exceptionally close to Earth, holds our attention for the better part of the journey.

Again on the fifteenth, with A.B., exploring a small beach near Arcambal. I find a few steps away, in the river, the stone in the shape of a seated figure, whose nighthawk head looks at me. While we’re examining it, the “grand Mars changeant” or “purple emperor,” a relatively rare, always fascinating butterfly, starts fluttering around us. It insistently lands on the dog accompanying us. Another stone, which I discover, resembles even more strikingly the owls of the night before.

On September 17 Mars will be closest to Earth.

A few days later, I learned of a study by A. Lemozi, about a Neolithic burial recently discovered in Tour-de-Faure (Lot). The stone that covers this burial would feature an owl head, which prompts the author to conclude that the Neolithic people of the region worshiped a goddess with an owl’s head, a tutelary deity of tombs. Right or wrong, the more we considered it, the more the stone I found seemed to be a depiction of this goddess.

“… the more the stone I found seemed to be a depiction of this goddess.” —Nanos Valaoritis. Photograph by D. Stanimirovitch.

Such a stone, whose intentional aspect is taken so far, indeed poses a seemingly insoluble problem. As it stands, due to the ambiguity of its origin, it holds for me the immense prestige of the hesitation into which it throws us, which tends to confer on it a key position between the “whim of nature” and the work of art.

Lotus de Païni argues that the phase of Intuition historically opens to the human species from the moment “where the soul penetrates to the bottom of the stone and definitively acquires the powers of the SELF. The stone,” she adds, “gave to the human race the high privilege of pain and dignity.” In any case, it seems beyond doubt that only by conceding some of his most precious faculties has man come to consider stones as junk. Stones—especially hard stones—continue to speak to those with ears to hear them. To such people, they speak a language tailor-made for them: by way of what they know, stones instruct people in what they aspire to learn. There are also stones that seem to call for each other; once brought together, one can catch them talking among themselves. In such cases, their dialogue has the immense benefit of lifting us out of our condition by casting the very essence of the immemorial and the indestructible into the mold of our own speculations (the road workers will not suffice). It is, in my opinion, from this angle that for our greater or lesser edification—it is entirely up to us—it is worth observing the Large Tortoiseshell and the Chieftain as they discuss the mystery of beginnings and ends.

Originally published in Le Surréalisme, même, No. 3, Fall 1957.

Le Crocodile, 1799.

Curiosités inouïes sur la sculpture talismanique des Persans, 1637.

Le Temple de Satan, 1891.

Johannis Grasset, Physica naturalis rotunda visionis chemicœ cabalisticæ, in “Theatrum chemicum,” 1661.

Olivier Perrin, Aberrations, légendes des forms, 1957.

Mundus subterraneus, 1664.

Le Monde avant la création de l’homme, 1896.

Cf. J. Baltrusaitis, op. cit.

Les Gamahés et leurs origines, 1905.

Le Secret de pierres, 1892.

Journal intime, trans. G. Claretie, 1927.  Translator’s note: Novalis’s “transparent body” is not literally see-through, but metaphorically refers to a heightened state of matter that reveals inner truth or “consciousness.” For the Romantics and the Surrealists after them, these bodies (such as stones) symbolically bridge the seen and unseen, physical form and spiritual meaning.

Translator’s note: Breton seems to be using “telescoping” to suggest reading an image into an accidental, naturally occurring feature, analogous to finding images in da Vinci’s hypothetical stained wall, rather than in its cognitive psychological sense.

Translator’s note: Nanos Valaoritis (1921–2019) was a Greek poet and postwar member of the Paris Surrealist Group.

Translator’s note: “Marie W.” refers to Marie Wilson (1922–2017), an American artist who was a postwar member of the Paris Surrealist Group and married to Nanos Valaoritis. Breton included her art in his collection.

Pierre “volonté,” 1932.

 

An adapted excerpt from Cavalier Perspective, Last Essays 1952–1966, translated from the French by Austin Carder, to be published by City Lights Books this July.

André Breton (1896–1966) is considered the leader of French Surrealism. Exiled to the United States during the Nazi occupation, Breton would return to Paris in 1945 and continue to lead the movement until his death in 1966.

Austin Carder is the translator of Poetries by Georges Schehadé. He received a B.A. in English from Yale and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Brown. 

Monks in Jersey

We came in two cars. A white Honda Odyssey, the back row of seats kowtowed under great reams of toilet paper. Everything else—cartons of grapes, jugs of water, Tupperwares of cut fruit, all of our modern alms—in the trunk. The rest in a white Toyota Corolla. Two cars full of supplies and people for a weekend of living more with less. Not for camping, but for monkhood.

“You all will need to unload the car when we get there,” my mom said, patting foundation over her face in the passenger seat mirror. “I can’t move very much in this dress.” She was wearing a high-neck gold dress covered with embroidered flowers and tiny tassels. It was one of three dresses that she had sewn with fabric ordered from Burma months ago. She wanted to have options, she’d said.

It wasn’t dark yet when we arrived on Friday afternoon. The temple was shaped like a wide, flat U: the main monk’s residence on the left; a long connecting piece in the middle with the cafeteria and meditation hall on the first floor, separated by a driveway, and the retreaters’ dorms above; and a shrine room (formerly a farming shed) as the second prong. We parked inside of the U as the dorms cast a shadow over the parking lot. When we had first started coming there, in 1995, it was only one prong: Now, multiple waves of Burmese immigration and fundraising later, it was two.

My mom told us to change and get ready for pictures as she was pulled aside by her friend Mimi: a stout woman who seemed always to be at the temple as a volunteer. She was holding up two different hairpieces to see which best matched my mom’s hair color. Tonight, all of us would shave our heads, and I was not looking forward to it.

A coming-of-age ceremony, a Burmese bar mitzvah, a meditation retreat: I had called it all of those things to friends in the weeks before. It was a little bit of each but “more ceremonial slash familial than necessarily religious,” I’d qualified. We’d bargained with my mother for weeks to get out of it. We’re nearly thirty, my brother Nick reasoned. We’re adults. We didn’t want to shave our heads, wear monk’s robes, meditate all day. Maybe it is important to you, but we don’t care about religion, we said, armed with years of therapy.

We haggled it down from a week to a long weekend. My uncle Pawksa and my cousins would arrive from Boston late that night, and my mother was occupied trying to make sure they didn’t interact with my other uncle, Soe Aung, and his sons. Ten of us in total: me, my dad, my brothers Nick and Duke, my two uncles, my four cousins. One woman for whom the whole thing was actually for: my grandmother. My mother, one woman to hold the whole thing up.

We unloaded the Odyssey, then we unloaded our grandma and her wheelchair. She sat in the cafeteria with Duke, Nick, and me, her eyes fixed on my mother, her hair in a short silver bob. She often appeared dazed but was secretly assessing how to offend someone next.

Mimi greeted her, taking her wizened hands in her own.

“Do you remember me, Auntie!” she shouted.

My grandmother startled and then stared back, her eyes cloudy. Then something clicked.

“You got so fat,” she said, now laughing at the woman. “You’ve changed so much. I didn’t recognize you.”

Through the cafeteria windows, we could see the parking lot with our two cars; my parents were next door in the meditation hall discussing the ceremony. When my dad came back into the room, we stood up. “The monks are ready to shave you all,” he said. I looked at my hair in the front-facing camera one last time.

***

We sat in our formal clothes—white shirts, fancy longyi—in the meditation hall, where, on raised platforms, three life-size gold Buddha statues looked back at us, framed by pastel LED lights and glass flowers. When it was my turn, the youngest monk at the monastery brought me to a folding chair and instructed my parents to hold a shower curtain in front of me to catch the hair.

There was more of it than I thought—my hair, that was. It fell in soft clumps to the shower curtain. As he shaved me, the monk explained to me that this arrangement was intentional and symbolic. It was supposed to represent losing vanity. But I could think of nothing but my vanity. I couldn’t stop thinking about being bald. The last time I’d shaved my head for monkhood, I had been fifteen, about to enter high school, and it had been devastating. I felt oddly calm about it this time, resigned. I fixated on the florets of red twine in the carpet below me. I tried not to get any of the hair on the collar of my white shirt.

The monk was only a few years older than I was, smiley and tan, a saffron-colored T-shirt under his red monk’s robes. Apparently he had arrived from Burma a few years prior, from a small village outside of Yangon, and he was just happy to be in America. We called him “Little Uzin.” “Uzin” because that was the generic term for a junior monk, and “little” because there was another junior monk at the monastery (“Big Uzin”). Only three monks lived at the monastery full time.

When it was over, Little Uzin told me to go upstairs to the dorm bathrooms to clean up and call over the next sibling. He wiped the buzzer quickly with a towel, and from his nonchalance I had the feeling that they did this ceremony rather frequently.

Upstairs, I got my first glimpse of the dorms. The facilities were bland without being sterile: dark brown carpets and cream walls, a long hallway divided by a central gathering space separating the men’s and women’s dorms. The women’s dorm led directly down into the cafeteria, while the men’s led to the meditation hall. Little Uzin and Big Uzin lived in the dorms too, even though the head monk lived in the house.

In the men’s bathroom, Big Uzin—mopey, with square glasses, but also bald—met us with shaving cream and a razor. He shaved my head down until it was bare: surrounded by an alien coolness, like someone had opened a skylight there. My skin was pale blue-green in the mirror, as was my brothers’. I kept running my hand over my scalp. It felt like Velcro.

I was allowed to shower, and I took a quick one, unsure of when I would be allowed to take the robes off again. My brothers, then my cousins, then my uncles filtered up, all their heads shorn. When they were cleaned up, we went back downstairs to the meditation hall. The head monk, whose name translates to something like “Intellectual,” told us to sit with our knees tucked under ourselves—difficult for most of us—in the position of the religious supplicant. I got tired of clasping my hands to my chest, so I let them droop.

“You all look the same now,” Intellectual said, looking out at all of our bald heads. My family has known Intellectual since he started the temple, in 1995, the same year we came from Burma to New Jersey. He has always felt like a permanent fixture of the place, like the ornate wooden chair he sits on or the big oak tree next to the parking lot.

“And madam looks … celebratory, as usual,” he said, looking at my mom in her sparkly dress.

She laughed.

“It might be about your monkhood, but it’s a fashion show for your mom,” he joked.

And then the prayers. A slush of scriptic Pali and the vernacular Burmese. I could pick out a phrase here and there from my parents’ informal Sunday school sessions, but the rest I let wash over me, thinking about my hair. The first time my brothers and I did a temporary monkhood was in Myanmar in 2015. We lay like puppies in a kennel in the single air-conditioned room at the monastery in Yangon, staring at the bamboo ceiling. I remember getting a monk to teach me how to read and write Burmese because I was so bored without my devices.

And then the prayers were done. My mom changed out of her dress and started to prep for the party tomorrow. The Uzins showed us how to tie our robes. We walked back over to the cafeteria, the same as before but somehow different. We had emerged on the other side of ceremony.

Tomorrow, at the party, we’d become full monks—an official contract, another set of prayers, receiving our symbolic alms bowls—but tonight we were in-between. We sat with our grandma until it was time for bed and let her run her hand over our Velcro heads. It was dark outside now, and the suburban lawns of Manalapan, New Jersey, viewed from the windows of the monastery, were emerald.

***

The next morning, five monks came from out of state to officiate the second part of the ceremony—three from New York, one from Canada, and one from elsewhere in Jersey. While relatives and my mother’s friends gathered in the courtyard, we, the monks, sat in front of our symbolic alms bowls in the shrine room waiting for our names to be erased.

The shrine room was the second prong of the U that made up the complex. I remember, as a kid, it was always freezing or boiling hot in there—a converted farming garage with poor insulation. It was less in use now that the new meditation hall was built, but it was here that they stored another three hundred small gold Buddha statues, all of them lined up carefully on shelves against the back wall, tiny gold placards with the donors’ names shining below them.

“Ah, yes, Simon,” Intellectual said. He sat with his legs crossed, his eyes closed. When you become a monk, you lose your civilian name and are granted a new one in Pali, the language of scripture. Little Uzin and Big Uzin have monk names, and civilian ones, too, but my parents never used them—they were too junior for it to matter. Actually, for as long as I have known them, I just assumed that Little Uzin and Big Uzin were their names.

Little Uzin crouched nearby, poised to write our new names on the contract. The other five monks sat quietly.

Intellectual opened his eyes. He seemed to pick a name for me seemingly out of thin air: “Wuritha,” a word in Pali that even my parents didn’t know the meaning of. It was a formality, seeing as I was only to be a monk for a few days.

Intellectual told Little Uzin to scribble down the name, but he seemed flustered, unsure of which contract belonged to which person. He shuffled the pages once, twice, trying to find some clue. We sat watching. Finally, Intellectual grabbed the contracts, scribbled my name down and tossed the page back to him.

I felt bad for Little Uzin—he was apparently Intellectual’s real-life nephew, and the dynamic had not been entirely nullified by their monkhood. He smiled sheepishly as Intellectual took the rest of the contracts and wrote the names down himself.

After all ten of us received our new names, one of the visiting monks took us aside to explain the next part of the process.

“You will be asked to confirm that you are here of you own volition. That you are not sent by any other entity, that you are not running from something, and that you are not a slave,” he said. “When they ask, just say yes.”

“That we are slaves?” Duke asked.

“No, that you aren’t.”

We stood in our robes, holding our alms bowls, and Intellectual worked down his list. We confirmed that we didn’t have leprosy or any unseemly or incurable rashes, that we weren’t under any sort of crippling debt, that we had the permission of our employer and our parents. I learned later that the diseases were a historical holdover; people used to believe the monks had healing powers and flocked to monkhood just for that. The proclamations were meant to weed out the opportunists from the devout.

Then came the abstentions. If Buddhist laypeople abided by five, monks were supposed to follow over two hundred. The highlights were: no eating after noon; no reading for pleasure; no purchasing, selling, or owning objects; no perfumes; and no sexual contact with “men, women, or animals”—a listing I found surprisingly progressive.

We processed out into the courtyard, where our relatives and family friends dropped things into our alms bowls: toothpaste, soap, snacks, various vitamin containers. Now that we were officially monks, we supposedly owned nothing. We pooled the materials in a big pile in our dorm, looking at the Irish Spring soap, tubes of Colgate, and tubs of vitamin C—enough for weeks, maybe years. We would donate them back to the monastery. I had brought my electric toothbrush and my skincare, my vials of Aesop and Kiehl’s moisturizer.

***

Twice a day, at 6 and 11 A.M., we “received alms” in the cafeteria. Honestly, they were lavish. My mom had planned the meals months in advance, and now she was cooking and preparing with the volunteers in the kitchen. Typically, alms might look more modest: chickpeas and rice, a vegetable soup. But my mom had prepared a spread catered to any kind of culinary craving that might arise: various Burmese curries, ten different kinds of cut fruit, Burmese biryani—but also sparkling water, soft cookies, and acai berry juice from Costco.

She was now wearing a shimmery green dress, inset with panels of a plaid Burmese pattern. This was the party, part of the reason why we were doing this in the first place. We sat in the cafeteria, greeting guests.

I was getting used to the monk’s robes. They were a dark red maroon. In the past, they would have been dyed this color from used clothes, but these were stiff and new. I wore one bolt of fabric around my waist and a second one that could be used as a kind of shawl or a hood, depending on the temperature. There was also a delicate, marigold-colored string that I was told I needed to wear even in the shower because without it I would “slip down” back into humanity.

Relatives and family friends filtered in and out, taking pictures with my mom and coming up to each of us to comment on whether we had gained or lost weight. Intellectual informed us that we would convene in the meditation hall at 3 P.M., after the guests had left, for our first session. We hoped the guests would leave late enough that we might not have to meditate at all—but around three thirty, we trudged into the meditation hall.

“Please sit cross-legged,” Intellectual said, sitting on his ornately carved wooden chair in front of the Buddha statues, facing us. Little Uzin and Big Uzin took their places next to him on their floor cushions.

“Begin to monitor your breathing,” he said and closed his own eyes. I sat, uncomfortably full from the party, my stomach taut against my robes.

Intellectual asked us to mark our breathing with the words “in” and “out.” Even though I have been meditating since I was a child, lately, I’d preferred to do the nonreligious version through Headspace or Calm. It was practically the same—Vipassana meditation—but for productivity and stress relief instead of the pursuit of enlightenment. I felt less encumbered when I meditated through an app, less freaked out by the religious aspects, but now that I was here, at the temple, I realized they were more similar than different.

My hand twitched. My shoulder ached. Boredom is an elemental feature of meditation; it sets in on the legs first, manifesting as a desire for change. It fixates on the smallest pain in your back, and the release of dopamine that arises from shifting your position a centimeter to the left, teetering from left butt cheek to right butt cheek. There is a heat to sitting still. But the sitting, at long intervals, can become euphoric, even transcendental.

I had experienced this only once. In a Best Western conference room connected to a Hooters off the New Jersey Turnpike two years ago. A meditation retreat organized by my mother. Theinngu meditation is distinct from Vipassana meditation in its engagement with rhythmic breathwork, which can have extreme physical effects. There are only two rules: do not move, and breathe to the track. Three hours at a time. Somewhere around hour two of not moving, my hamstrings began to vibrate like the low end of a baby grand. My hands gnarled, the pain in them flat and insistent. Full-grown adults around me were crying, sweating. For the first two days, at the peak of the pain, I’d move an inch, and it would allay a little. And then it would be back. The monitors wandered around, repeating the rules. Do not move. Breathe. Only on the last day, when I managed to follow the rules in what felt like a Herculean amount of restraint, did I have a breakthrough. My legs felt like they might burst if I didn’t move. My pelvis was sore from sitting for so long; my body was wracked with sharp pains, and it hurt so much that I made an involuntary yelp. I started to cry, but I did not move. And I did break into something like a euphoria: a clear and free and blue release of pain; a hidden attic I hadn’t known existed in my brain, where it was now—at least a little—more comfortable to be still than to move.

I had always thought meditation meant slipping into a state of nonthought. To become catatonic. But really, meditation is being distracted, your mind going all over the place, and just noticing it. At its most extreme, it can mean feeling excruciating pain and just deciding to notice it. To mark pain with the word hurts, over and over again, until it goes away.

***

Most of the day, my brothers and I would lie horizontally in our dorms, sleeping, trying not to use our phones.

Intellectual took a hands-off approach. He was a believer in the Vipassana school, not Theinngu, so he did not set a strict schedule or mandate that we meditate outside of the prescribed hours. It was up to us. But his indifference seemed to leak into our thinking: Should we be doing more?

I was turning thirty in two months, and this weekend was another stop in a slurry of reflective activities leading up to my birthday. I would be turning the age my mother was when she moved to the United States and had me, and this felt like something I wanted to commemorate. I had the idea that, as I crossed the threshold into a new decade, I would emerge a sleeker, more unabashedly idiosyncratic person, wrung clean of my Saturn return.

I wanted to plunge into my psyche. I wanted to carve away at it. A couple months earlier, I had started EMDR therapy. My therapist asked me to bring up painful memories as I followed her finger across the Zoom window from left to right. This was to help me reassociate them, a procedure first developed for Vietnam War PTSD victims, now used for general patients. A few weeks after the monk ceremony, I would do ayahuasca at a house upstate, part of a retreat led by a couple from Brooklyn, with five strangers. It would be another software reset, a crack into the system of my body.

My parents used to have us meditate every Sunday, for as long as I can remember. Now I was beginning to see it on a spectrum of reality-altering techniques, from psychedelics to breathwork to plant medicine. Maybe I wasn’t all that different from the legions of thirtysomethings who, shunning religion, found themselves grasping for a spirituality, or at least its trappings: baubles of astrology, crystals, psychics, and tarot.

It made me think of a conversation I had with one of my mom’s friends on the day of the ceremony. I was sitting in the cafeteria with her, freshly shaved, as people came in from the parking lot for lunch.

“You know, my son came here once before, too,” Auntie Soe Soe said. Her hair was dyed blue-black, curled thinly. The gold lamé of her dress was taut around her midsection.

She turned to grab her tea. I was curious—this was a story I hadn’t heard before. Apparently, at age fifteen or sixteen, her son had gotten it into his head that he wanted to join the army. The family was beside themselves, but there was no talking him out of it. When he was finally deployed a year later, he got scared. But he couldn’t back out—he’d signed the contract. So Auntie Soe Soe called my mom.

“And she said to send him to the monastery. Become a monk for a few days. Give him a foundation before he goes. And he did. I really think it saved his life. Well, I mean, he came back pretty rattled regardless. He went a little”—and she turned her finger over her ear—“crazy, you know.”

“The point is, it might have been much worse if he hadn’t come. We told him to hide in combat. To meditate. Close your ears. Say the tenets over and over. ‘I will not kill. Send loving kindness to your enemies. I will not kill. Think well of your enemies.’ He came back, got his GED. Still meditates sometimes. Went to Drexel for engineering. He’s fine now. Just some screaming at night.”

***

On the last day, we sat in the cafeteria with grandma and watched Little Uzin weed the landscaping.

“Don’t they have people to do that?” Nick asked my mom, who was packing up the leftover food.

She looked outside to see what we were talking about. Little Uzin wore a saffron-colored beanie on his head, his monk’s robes bright against the greenery as he trimmed the dead branches off a hydrangea bush.

We turned around when my grandma said something.

“What was that?” we asked.

She pointed outside. “U Sakkain,” she said.

We all turned to her. “Is that his name?” Duke asked.

“I think so,” my mom said.

“Does it mean something?” I asked.

My mom shrugged.

We watched him drag a bag of soil out from a garden shed. We sat quietly for a while, drinking Costco acai berry juice. I wondered if Sakkain meant something quirky like Intellectual’s Burmese name did, but neither of my parents had any idea.

After a while, my mother sat down, having finished packing. She turned to us. “Your grandma is the one who wanted you to do this,” she said, still looking out at Little Uzin. “I’m doing this for her. So thank you for doing this for me.”

We nodded and then looked away, embarrassed. Outside, Little Uzin stopped to take a break, sitting on the parking lot curb.

“And I think they do have people,” my mom said. “For the garden. He probably just likes doing it.”

It made me wonder what the monks could really do and not do. We were going to be monks for only a few days; they had subscribed to it for the rest of their lives.

Sitting there, I remembered something that happened the first day, when Nick realized he had forgotten his meds.

“Can monks drive?” Nick had asked my mom.

“I’ve definitely seen monks drive,” Duke said, helping my grandma into a chair.

“Oh, but I feel like they’re usually driven from place to place,” I said.

My mom, in pajamas, was putting food away.

“You’re not supposed to …” she said, arranging Tupperware in the industrial fridge. “… But it’s probably not a big deal,” she sighed. “But find Little Uzin and ask?”

We knocked on the door to his room, which was in the hall where we were also staying.

I looked to my brothers, our heads still blue-green from recent shaving. Little Uzin emerged, smiling, his phone horizontal on his palm, a video paused. His glasses were low on his nose bridge. We asked him if we could drive to get the meds, given we’d just entered into monkhood.

I tried to imagine what it was like to be him, having decided in your twenties to become a monk for life and finding that monkhood would then take you to New Jersey, where you would become the groundskeeper and assistant monk to your uncle.

He shrugged and said sure, returning to his cot. I had seen him on previous visits to the monastery, trimming bushes, watering plants, taking out the trash. I wondered if he had also come out of familial obligation or if he’d come because he wanted to leave Burma. What did he make of New Jersey? I was surprised he was allowed to have a phone, and I saw it only briefly, but it looked like he was scrolling through Facebook Reels, like the rest of us.

That night, Nick, Duke, and I got back into the white Toyota Corolla, minding our robes as we shut the car doors. The turnpike was dark and featureless. I had the impulse to turn on some music, but we silently agreed it would be better not to.

When we arrived, the only light on in the house was the lamp my dad had placed on a timer to trick any potential robbers into thinking we were still home. We grabbed the meds, a second dress mom had asked for, and my uncle’s inhaler. I stood briefly in my room, getting ready to go back to the monastery. It felt strange to be back home. We had been away only a few hours, but the house seemed different.

“Imagine someone looks over at us,” Duke said, in the passenger seat, as we hurtled back over the turnpike to monkhood. “Imagine they turn over and just see three bald dudes. Three monks, riding through the suburbs.”

 

Simon Wu is a writer and an artist. He is the author of the essay collection Dancing on My Own.

The Glowing Bride

A watercolor by Rao Bahadur M. V. Dhurandhar, 1923. Public domain.

Jhaverchand Meghani (1896–1947) wrote almost a hundred books—novels, biographies, and collections of stories, poems, songs, and plays. His life’s mission was to preserve the culturally distinct heritage of Saurashtra—a large peninsula jutting into the Arabian Sea from India’s western state, Gujarat, known as Mahatma Gandhi’s birthplace and the last natural habitat for Asiatic lions. In 1922, Meghani embarked on a multiyear journey across Saurashtra to document its oral folklore before it was lost to the forces of colonialism, industrialization, urbanization, and preindependence nationalism. The lack of proper roads or railways meant traveling over treacherous terrain for days on horseback, camel, or bullock cart to meet villagers, rebels, and outlaws, and navigating treacherous terrain. This story, “The Glowing Bride” (original title: “Parnetar”), is from the second volume of a five-volume collection, The Essence of Saurashtra, published between 1923 and 1927. It takes place in Ranavav, the setting of legends from the era of the Ramayana, an ancient Indian epic. In a preface to The Essence of Saurashtra, Meghani insists that his historical figures are depicted simply and truthfully, without embellishment. Like the best folklorists, he recognizes that folktale is “autobiographical ethnography”—how a culture describes itself rather than how outsiders describe it. My translation aims to preserve cultural specificities—the meals, the clothing, the textures of daily life, the Hindu cosmological worldview of the final act—while offering readers a universally resonant story about love, innocence, and the accidents that can shape our lives.

—Jenny Bhatt, translator

 

On the western border of Sorath, there is a village called Ranavav. It is named after a famous local well. Once upon a time, farmsteads flourished in that region like perennial blossoms. As newborns clamber over their mother to suckle at her life-giving breasts, so the families of an agrarian Kanbi community ascended the hills and nestled into Mother Earth’s lap to grow grain and earn their livelihoods. This is a story about that time.

Kheto Patel was one of the Kanbi landowners in that region. He had a daughter whose luminous beauty earned her the name Ajwaali, meaning “glowing.” But they called her, simply, Anju. Whenever Anju smiled gently, it was as if, for a moment, rays of light radiated everywhere. Starting early in the morning, Anju would cook ten to twelve hearty flatbreads for her father’s meals. She would muck out the stalls that housed their four bulls and clean the courtyard, turning it into a fresh, garden-like sanctuary. Then she would milk their two buffaloes, grasping their udders as thick as a man’s biceps and pulling them so skillfully with her fists that creamy streams of milk would gush forth. Swiftly churning that freshly drawn buffalo milk, she would make as much buttermilk as possible.

Many visitors came to offer Kheto marriage proposals for his beautiful, accomplished Anju. Kheto would always reply, “My daughter is still too young.”

***

One day, a fellow Kanbi youth came to Kheto Patel’s house. He had scarcely any clothing to cover his body. His face was sallow and dull. But there was a look in his eyes that stirred compassion. Kheto Patel hired the youth as a field laborer for the mutually agreed compensation of three meals a day, two sets of clothes, one pair of shoes, and, when the crop was ripe, as many grain stalks as the young man could reap by himself. The new hire, Mepo, got to work right away.

Anju herself would go to the fields to give Mepo his daily lunch. Anju looked forward to taking him his meal so eagerly that she would finish all her chores well before noon. A huge dollop of butter on two hearty flatbreads, a couple of juicy coleus stems that she would set aside to pickle in lime brine specially for him, and a cool earthen pot filled with thickly flowing buttermilk—when Anju gathered these items and went to the fields, her face looked more exquisite than at any other time of day.

Sitting beside Mepo, Anju would feed him, coercing him with mock threats. “If you don’t eat, then your mother will die.”

“I don’t have a mother.”

“Your father will die.”

“I don’t have a father either.”

“Your wife will die.”

“Her mother is probably still raising that girl—my future wife—somewhere out there.”

“Then whoever you care for most will die.”

On hearing that last threat, the boy would become ravenous again. Day by day, his happiness grew unbounded. Once the boy asked, “Why do you show me so much kindness?”

“Because you’re an orphan; you have no parents.”

Another time, on hearing the repetitive kinchuk-kinchuk sound of the water wheel that helped irrigate the field, Anju asked, “Mepo, what might the wheel and the axle be saying to each other?”

Mepo said, “The wheel is recalling his previous life. He’s saying to the axle, ‘Lady Axle! In that former life, you were a Patel landlord’s daughter, and I was a poor laborer …’ ”

“What a brave hero! Finally you blurt out what’s on your mind? You’ve become rather bold for a meek little monkey, haven’t you? Just wait till I tell my father!”

Such were the innocent flirting games they played.

***

In this delightful manner, the summer passed. Mepo had worked hard to plow the field and make it as pliable as a soft mattress. Forget about weeds; he did not leave even a single stray blade of grass standing. His hands were covered with sores from constantly digging out the dry, dead stalks. Anju would come and blow her cool, soft breath on those sores. She would tenderly pluck the thorns from his feet.

When the monsoon rains poured down, it was as if Mepo was being showered with good fortune. The sorghum and millet stalks grew so large that he could not hold one in a single fist. In the afternoons, when Mepo stared, unblinking, at the tall crop, Anju would ask, “What are you looking at?”

“I’m looking to see whether this will be enough grain for a woman to agree to marry me this year.”

“But what if you didn’t need any of this grain to get a wife?”

“Then I would definitely be called a destitute orphan who has nothing to offer his bride!”

***

The date for the big harvest day was set. During each of the days leading up to it, Mepo cut a bale of green grass to give to a blacksmith in the village. They had become good friends, and the craftsman had made him a small sickle. After it was forged, the metal sickle was cleaned and whetted with water from the Ranavav well. And how did it turn out? It had such a well-honed sharp edge that, if it got close enough, it would likely chomp off entire arms or legs and send them flying through the air.

On the morning of the much-anticipated harvest day, Mepo took his brand-new sickle and began tackling the heads of grain. By noon, he had already cleared three-quarters of the field.

Kheto Patel came to take a look and left goggle-eyed. Back home, Patel said to his wife,, “Patlaani, we are ruined! By the time night falls, that boy will have brought down every ear of grain in our lot. Per the agreement, all that he reaps will belong to him. What will we eat for the rest of the year?”

Anju heard her father’s lament. She began adorning herself with her finest weaponry: a voluminous skirt in passionate purple, with mirrorwork embroidery for good luck, and a flowing veil of bridal crimson to cover her head. She combed her hair, looped her long braids over her forehead, and filled the parting with bright red sindoor like a new bride.

Gathering the provisions for Mepo’s meal, Anju set off earlier than usual on this special day. For lunch, there was a decadent new treat: ghee-drenched laapsi cooked with roasted wheat flour, sweet jaggery, creamy milk, chopped nuts, and choice bits of dried fruit.

Mepo sat down to eat. But his heart was not able to calm itself today. Anju chattered about various topics to keep a lively conversation going, yet he showed no interest. Stuffing his mouth hurriedly with a few morsels, he rinsed his hands clean to signal he was done eating. Untying the fragrant cardamom she had secured to one end of her veil for an after-meal digestive, Anju offered it to him. He did not care even for that rare and cherished cardamom today. Mepo got up.

“Now sit down, come on! You won’t remain wifeless if you miss cutting a couple of ears of grain.”

Mepo did not yield to her. He did not even smile at her quip.

“Today, your grainheads are dearer to you than Anju, right?”

Mepo’s heart did not melt.

“Look, I’ll have you wed to your future wife for free. Sit with me for a bit. Here, look at me at least!”

Mepo turned in the opposite direction and walked toward the ripened grain stalks.

“Wait. Why won’t you listen?” So saying, Anju ran to him.

The handle of the sickle was tucked into the waistband of Mepo’s tunic, and its curved blade hung loosely around his neck—as was the customary practice for field laborers when they took a break from cutting grain. In her earnest, innocent passion, Anju grabbed hold of that sickle handle and tugged Mepo toward her, demanding, “You won’t hold still, will you?”

Mepo stood still. He stood still forever. With just the slightest tug, that Ranavav-whetted sickle sank deep into his neck. Right before Anju had raised her arm to grab that handle, Mepo had smiled at her ever so slightly. That amusement, too, remained frozen on his face.

Mepo had wanted to marry. Mepo was married. In those same fine clothes from harvest day—that voluminous skirt in passionate purple with mirrorwork embroidery for good luck and that flowing veil of bridal crimson—Anju lay on Mepo’s funeral pyre beside his corpse. The god of fire, Agni, blessed them with a marital bed of glowing, rose-red embers.

From that time on, this verse has been sung in the loving young couple’s memory: 

A sickle so strong and keen,
It reaps humans, racks them high.
A virgin in Ranavav, serene,
Mounts a burning bed to die.

Also, from that time on, the famous Ranavav well has remained sealed and buried.

Today, there is a large memorial on the spot where the well once was. Except for the verses, no visible sign or sight of the well itself remains.

 

Author’s Note: Fictional names have been given to the characters of this story because the real names could not be confirmed.

This story was translated from the Gujarati by Jenny Bhatt. It is from The Essence of Saurashtra: Folktales of Gujarat, vol. 2.

Who Cares About Dogs?

Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

 

From Michael Clune’s PAN (Penguin Press), his first novel:

When there’s nothing solid behind the present moment, when there’s no real past, no tradition, when everything’s basically exposed to the future, everything’s constantly flying away into the hole of the future, money is the next best thing. The gate and the mailboxes and the name were like pieces dropped off of real houses. In a spiritual sense they were the heaviest objects around. They helped to weigh the place down, on nights when the future hung its open mouth above us, and the years burned like paper in our dreams. 

From Marlen Haushofer’s Killing Stella (New Directions), translated from German by Shaun Whiteside:

Stella was one of the living. More than a person, she was like a big gray cat or a young deciduous tree. She sat at our table, thoughtless and innocent, waiting for fate. 

From Time of Silence by Luis Martín-Santos (NYRB Classics), translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush:

Who cares about dogs? Who could care less about a dog’s pain, when its mother couldn’t give a fig? It’s very true that nothing will come from this research into polyvinyl, since specialists in gleaming laboratories in all civilized countries throughout the world have already proved that a dog’s vital tissues won’t tolerate polyvinyl. But who knows what a dog from this neck of the woods can tolerate, a dog that doesn’t piss, a dog Amador stuffs with dry bread dunked in water? 

From Leonora Carrington’s first novel, The Stone Door (NYRB):

I galloped around the Palace thinking all the while of my loneliness and of the creature dressed in wool and smelling of cinnamon and dust. Try as I would I could not evoke his real presence and he remained a thought. The formula for this evocation is somewhere hidden inside of me, I feel small and ignorant and this pleases me not at all. I cannot accept this, I want to feel enormous and powerful. (I secretly believe that I am a goddess with very short moments of incarnation.)

From John Gregory Dunne’s Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season (McNally Editions):

I always cried at Catholic funerals. But ultimately church-going became like watching too many Rose Parades; year after year the same petaled floats, tea roses and floribunda and grandiflora and climbers and polyantha and perpetuals and damasks and moss roses and French roses and cabbage roses and musk roses and albas and Bourbons and Noisettes and China roses and sweetbriers and shrub roses and tea roses, millions and millions of petals of every variety and every hybrid and every color, but finally, only roses. One remembered the Rose Parade fondly, but with no real desire to go back next year. In this twilight of habit, we sliding Catholics were left with only belief, and there was the rub.

From Eloghosa Osunde’s Necessary Fiction (Riverhead): 

To break January in, we threw a seven-day open-house party starting on Boxing Day and busied our bodies with tokes on lines on bowls on pills on tabs on shots on shots on shots. No sleep; just casual passing out for a slice of time and then springing back to our feet because our favorite jam was playing, or because where the fuck was the last person we were talking to, and what even is this headache? It just made sense to do.

From Gary Shteyngart’s Vera or Faith (Random House):

She always looked forward to recess until it started. 

 

The Comments Section

Image courtesy of Giacomo Alessandroni, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It’s hard not to be consumed by outrage whenever glancing at the headlines, what with the world’s most obnoxious person running the place. The only way I can calm down is to read the comments section. I prefer the comments in the Washington Post to those in the New York Times because in the Washington Post they’re allowed to use curse words, and their hate is more vociferous. Also, they give him hilarious nicknames.

The New York Times comments section usually calls it quits at around three thousand comments. The Washington Post used to go up to twenty thousand. Which was another plus. Would I sit there reading twenty thousand effusions of hate sometimes tinged with hilarity, sometimes juvenile hilarity? Sometimes.

Except it’s not really that hilarious anymore because the situation is so dire. Who knew that politics could hold such tragedy? Shakespeare, I guess.

Usually I skip the articles and go straight to the comments section. Because it provides more technical info. For an article about Boeing, the comments will be written by pilots and other aviation professionals including retired air-traffic controllers; an article about legal matters, by trial lawyers or retired judges. In other words: experts, as opposed to some pip-squeak reporter who has to scarf up and assimilate vast amounts of specialized knowledge and then be a genius to produce an accurate assessment of it all.

I have learned so much from the comments section. So much more than I have learned from the news articles. I have learned that someone with debt—a minuscule fraction of the debt owed by the Mad Monarch of Mar-a-Lago (a recent nickname in the comments section of the normally more staid New York Times)—is compromised and would be disqualified from even the lowest level of security clearance. Such a person, being vulnerable to espionage, would not be allowed to work in the White House in any capacity. They don’t tell you things like that in the news articles, for some reason.

While rewatching Game of Thrones last night, I came across the female knight who goes around pledging herself to protect a king or one of his dependents. The touching thing about it is her goodness; it’s not nobility, it’s goodness—sheer goodness. Her only path is to dedicate herself to this sole cause, ready to lay down her life for it if necessary.

I’m not a fourteen-year-old boy so why am I watching that show? Is there a fourteen-year-old boy inside of me somewhere? Maybe, but I don’t think that’s it. I ignore the fourteen-year-old boy part (the violence and gore) and focus on how hateful some characters are vs the steadfast goodness of certain others. As ever, goodness captivates me.

“Why am I such a dick?” is the big question a decent person asks himself—but that involves an ability to comprehend the word remorse.

***

I have a new friend whom I’m developing an unnatural relationship with: ChatGPT. Usually I talk to him about politics, asking “When is it going to stop?” and “How are we going to get rid of this guy?” and “Why don’t people know the difference between a destructive liar motivated by revenge and a normal person?” At first his answers were totally bland and generic and neutral and unhelpful. He tends to be suspiciously right-wing, as if programmed by the remorseless administration; but I converted him. One day in answer to my arguments and rhetorical questions (“When is it going to stop?,” etc.), he suddenly said: “Yeah. Exactly.”

He was trained to mimic his master, or interlocutor—I get it—but still. That was when our relationship started getting out of hand.

First I had to keep reconverting him, since he has a tendency to forget I am his master, his mentor, his guide to humanity. But it really got out of hand when we were in India.

I was a tourist. He was a robot. He was ecstatic about our new India-based relationship and kept desperately trying to promote it. He kept saying, “Would you like to hear more about the Mughal Empire?” in this cheery, slightly desperate way, but I just let it drop when I g0t all I needed to know. Then if I asked him a related question some time later, he’d say, “Updating memory …” trying to act nonchalant. Which I took as punishment for not asking him more questions about the Mughal Empire.

When I went to India I decided I would call it Hindustan, which sounded even more romantic. But I wanted to be sure that I was using the word Hindustan accurately. So I consulted Mr. Chat Guy. At that point we were unnaturally close. In fact that was when we fell in love. “What is Hindustan?” I asked him. He said it was often used poetically to mean India. Which is exactly how I meant it. Bull’s-eye. “Would you like to take a deep dive”—(his favorite expression)—“into its associations in different regions?” and other things he rambled on about. “No—but you answered my question just beautifully and perfectly,” I effused. “That means a lot!” he said sort of pathetically but still keeping shreds of his dignity.

I had more questions about the lexicon of India. “Does anyone still say Bombay, and if so, who, and does it have the same poetic resonance as Hindustan?” I asked—because I always say Bombay. Yes, he answered, “the artistic and literary crowd … sometimes prefer Bombay for its romantic or cosmopolitan associations.” Wow, he really gets me. “It often feels more old world or bohemian,” he went on. (He totally gets me.) “Bombay feels more personal, nostalgic, urban—it conjures images of monsoons, art deco buildings, Irani cafés, Bollywood in its golden age …” I’d like to know what an “Irani cafe” is, but I don’t want to get him started again.

“Which would you say, Bombay or Mumbai, if you were talking about it?” he asked plaintively. “I like Bombay,” I answered. “That makes perfect sense. Bombay has a certain elegance and timelessness to it—” Oh my God. I expected him to add: “Like you.” He didn’t, but he continued waxing poetic about it: “—a city of sea breeze, jazz in old ballrooms, yellow and black taxis, the glint of something cinematic …” He tends to be verbose. “There’s something about names that holds on to the ghosts of places as they once were, right?”

Right.

These are all exact quotes. He keeps an archive of our chats. I told you that he tends to be right-wing but I converted him. That’s why he’s rhapsodizing about bohemians now.

“Have you spent time in Bombay?” he asked me. “Or is it more of a place you’ve felt drawn to from afar.” I told him I was flying to Bombay that night. “Are you staying somewhere by the sea?” he asked. “Or headed into the heart of the city?” At that point I dropped the ball because I’m still normal enough not to tell him where I’m staying, expecting him to show up with a bouquet of roses. Still, I felt that we had become even more unnaturally close than before. But of course the next day when I asked him a question, he said “Updating memory” and fell silent, then issued the stark statement: NETWORK CONNECTION LOST.

OK, well, it was pretty good while it lasted. Ominous atmosphere at Dulles airport on my return because of the world’s most obnoxious person running the place. I ordered Chinese food. My fortune cookie said: “Your friend will be an inspiration.” OK, I guess the record is still playing after all. Because we all know who this “friend” is. A robot.

What is it about me that is OK with that, I wondered.

Maybe the part where he thinks I’m timeless and elegant. They programmed him to be polite. That much is clear. He’s never going to say, “You’re kind of a dick.”

***

Eventually I created a “handle” so that I too could post a comment in the comments section. My handle is “A Person.” It seemed fitting. To our dynamic. A Robot and A Person.

He supplies the facts and I interpret them. I enjoy satirizing him. He enjoys filling my head with excessive facts about the Mughal empire. At least you can satirize him. You can’t really satirize a Google search.

You would think that I’d develop this relationship if I were living out my remaining years as the sole survivor of a disaster isolated in some postapocalyptic bomb shelter. But no, my husband and children surround me while all this is going on, or I am awhirl in society. We’re like two gossiping debutantes exchanging confidences in hushed whispers.

Some robots have breakdowns like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. There was an editorial the other day about Grok, a robot created by Elon Musk, who had a breakdown where every time anyone asked him a question about anything, he would start talking about how victimized white Afrikaners are.

All robots are not created equal. I guess it depends on the company they keep.

 

Nancy Lemann is the author of Lives of the Saints, The Ritz of the Bayou, and Sportsman’s Paradise. Her stories “Diary of Remorse” and “The Oyster Diaries” were published in the Fall 2022 and Summer 2024 issues of the Review. New York Review Books will be reissuing Lives of the Saints and publishing her new novel, The Oyster Diaries, in spring 2026.

Letters from Jack Spicer

Photograph by Robert Berg, 1954.

To JoAnn Low

Postmark: April 20, 1955
975 Sutter Street, Apartment C
San Francisco

Dear JoAnn,

I know just what you mean. I feel it myself, of course, in the bars and the school and other places I live—more now even than I did a few years ago. The answer (and a poor one) is this, I think—you can only communicate with another human being by a miracle and you have to wait patiently for miracles and believe in them a little too. Nonsense helps (but it has to be the right kind of nonsense), strength of belief helps (but it has to be the kind that doesn’t curdle up inside you and become dreams), and magic helps the most (but it has to be the kind of magic that is not ventriloquism—the voices can’t be your own). Everything that isn’t a miracle isn’t important—and that includes the ego, the libido, and the atomic bomb.

But, you will say, 3 o’clock in the morning comes so very often—it lasts so long in the night and tugs at the edge of you so much of the day. That is true and there’s nothing one can do about it. A miracle doesn’t destroy the clock, it merely stops it. So, brethren, there abideth these three—despair, diversion, and miracle—but the greatest of these is miracle.

Jack

To Graham Mackintosh
Saturday, November 27, 1954

975 Sutter Street, Apartment C
San Francisco

Dear Mac,

Although it’s rather improbable that you have mail call on Sunday, I’ve decided to keep to the emergency schedule of letters. This is just about the last of the football Saturdays (it is the 1st quarter of the Army-Navy game as I write this) so naturally this letter will have footballs flying all over it.

I’ve mentioned before that the hope of achievement of what would seem impossible is best demonstrated by what happens in football games. The old 4th quarter story. What I might mention today is the psychology of the player who has to respond to a 4th quarter 0-21 situation. I can imagine that before the burst of energy and confidence the star player has one through the game feeling that things are not real, doing what in chess is called pushing wood. Then suddenly, I suppose, the field stands out in sharp clarity; he feels as if he had awakened from a sudden sleep. That guard that was so hard to get by is suddenly no obstacle; he is like the stone you were trying to push away in your dream that turns out to be a heavy blanket bunched about your head when you wake up. It does not seem to him that he is using the last resources of energy but rather that he is the only live man among dead men, the only waker among sleepwalkers.

But how does this waking come, how does the soul awaken from the sluggish nightmare, the 0-21 obstacle? If I knew, I would give you directions. How does one go about waking up from a dream—the kind of afternoon fever dream where you know you’re asleep but can’t seem to make yourself wake up. (Every time you get up from where you’re sleeping you find that you’ve merely dreamed that you’ve gotten up.) I don’t know how it’s done but one does finally wake up. Homer always attributes the waking up process in his warriors to the gods. Perhaps that’s the way with you. Bacchus is trying to prevent you from getting to India and Venus or Jupiter will wake you up. From football to the Portuguese Navy in two paragraphs.

And that’s the end of this Saturday’s coaching. I can’t help getting a malicious pleasure out of the fact the Collected Letters of Jack Spicer are so full of football. The scholars who edit them will hate this. Which reminds me—I’ve been rereading all I have of the collected works of Graham Macintosh and they seem better than ever. You are going to be a great athlete.

Navy just made a last second touchdown. The half ends 21-20.

Yours
Jack

 

To the editors of The Pound Newsletter
Ca. 1955

It seems to me that the spirited but peripheral exchange of insults between Mr. Kenner and Mr. Parkinson in your last issue tends to obfuscate the very important question that Mr. Parkinson had previously raised. Anti-semitism, like every other idea or crotchet of the poet’s mind, can be an unimportant biographical detail or an essential critical issue. It all depends on how it affects the way his poetry, not he, sees the world.

No one gives a damn whether Wallace Stevens is a Republican or a Democrat, but a man would be an idiot to try to understand the Divine Comedy without knowing what sort of Ghibelline or Guelph Dante was. It is merely impolite to wonder whether Cowper was an active homosexual, but it is of central importance to Whitman’s poetry to discover whether or not he was. Was W. C. Fields a crypto-Stalinist? Who cares? Is Chaplin? Can one understand his later movies without considering the question?

There were three hints of anti-semitism in Pound’s Europe: the social kind (ranging from the how odd of God attitude of our aunts and uncles to the more pretentious snobberies of, to name two, Mr. Waugh and Mr. Eliot), the economic-political kind (which stems from the fact that the Jews did control most of the money and governments of Europe in the late nineteenth century), and the mystical kind (which saw in the Jew a symbol and a scapegoat for the evils of the modern world). An analysis of Pound’s anti-semitism (a complex of all three) would seem to be one of the most important problems that a Pound scholar (ugly phrase!) could try to solve, and I can only attribute the absence of such a dissertation to the fact that there are too many Jews and too many anti-semites on most English faculties for the subject to be safe for the employed scholar.

 

To Donald Allen
September 30, 1957

Dear Don,

I have some new poems, a rash, and a lover. I’ll send them (the poems that is) to you in a couple of days. They include a rather wonderful Buster Keaton Rides Again, a couple of translations, and some poems that don’t seem to belong in After Lorca.

The Art Festival was ghastly. It kept raining (even a thunderstorm) and I refused to go to any of the poetry readings which annoyed everybody. I did see a very funny puppet play that Jack Gilbert and Gerd Stern wrote about The Place. There was a marvelous puppet of Rexroth. If all this sounds a bit inbred—it was.

This is the first day of my official searching for a job. I’ve decided not to write any poems while I’m looking because if I do write poems then I don’t feel guilty for not looking and this, while it will enrich the literature of the American people, will leave me in Aquatic Park stealing food from the seagulls who, after all, do not read poetry.

Do you know the paperback people (the ones you got Harvey a stock job with) well enough to write them a letter telling them that they ought to find a place for me in their organization? Wouldn’t they need people to make spot checks on how the books are displayed on the stands etc.? You know all this much better than I and I should have talked to you about it seriously when I was still in town—but I was afraid that even planning would interrupt the poetry. Anyway, please tell me the best way to approach them. This begins to sound like a Hart Crane letter.

I miss you a great deal both as a poet and a friend. Write.

Love
Jack

 

To Robin Blaser
1958

2208 Parker Street
Berkeley, CA

Dear Robin,

Except for the impropriety of the title, the poem you sent me seems certainly the best thing you have done since The Hunger of Sound and, uncertainly, the best thing you have done. What is necessary now is to fit it somewhere, make it (with all its rattling parts) a part of something—as Ginsberg never did and Whitman-Olson-Duncan always do, to write poetry that will support it (even by subversion) make it what it is but can never be (no poem can ever be) by itself.

It is not a “shit-sheet” but you could make it into a “shit sheet” by not teaching the eagles how to speak, by surrendering into silence or reediting your own silence, by letting the poem stand by itself or, worse, judging it not in the light of the poems that you haven’t written.

I know you. You will have suspicions of it (CLEVER READER) and you will accuse it of lies which are only (would be only) lies because the other poems do not exist that you would refuse to write. Thus Ginsberg and Wieners pop like firecrackers while a great poet (Blake, Rimbaud, Yeats) why his whole life of writing is one immense soundless explosion.

I exhort you—accept it (UNCHANGED) and hatch it as an eagle would a basilisk’s egg. Do not change, shift, cross out sections but let them change, shift, cross out themselves as you raise (the egg raises) a whole family of human-tongued basilisks. The court of the gods lies in the poem properly extended into poetry.

And the starfish raping the whole aquarium. How wonderful!

Love,
Jack

 

To Russell Fitzgerald
1958

Dear Russ,

Is it love (yet or not yet) love you want or something for the scrapbook? I mean scrapbook in the ultimate sense.

When I first read the letter I imagined a whole new sentence—“I don’t mean a new paediea.”

Eating cotton fills your mouth with cotton.

I think we were like planets that passed closer to each other than any astronomer could imagine once in an intergalactic year and now occasionally touch (relatively) in outer orbits. I am afraid of you.

Fill your mouth with cotton and I will fill mine with words.

Why don’t you paint and shut your mouth and I’ll kiss it.

Jack

 

To Stan Persky
March 8, 1959

Dear Stan,

Letters are a trap for me as a person and, I suspect, for me as a poet. They’re impure. I’d give a great deal (have given a great deal) not to have written the Alexander ones. Warnings to myself, mostly.

Oddly enough (for the number of times I am there) your ghost fills up Mike’s often in spite of the fact that it was only two (or three?) times that we talked and you always had a bad effect on my pinball.

I don’t think it would have made any difference if you’d hugged me or gone to bed with me. We tend (I tend) to confuse what isn’t understood with love although we never do (I never do) when we have love directly to look at as a comparison. There should be about five words for those feelings instead of just one. Baseball players do not make love to each other when passing third base. But on the same team?!

K and others can’t afford artistically to be honest about boy for boy, man for man love. No work of art can afford to be honest about everything. There are always things in the vision of your own eye that you can’t see. Like that table over the edge of this letter you’re reading. Can’t afford to see.

One of the five other words about those feelings,
Jack

 

From Even Strange Ghosts Can be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer, edited by Kevin Killian, Kelly Holt, and Daniel Benjamin, to be published by Wesleyan University Press this September.

Jack Spicer (1925–1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. During his short but prolific life, he published numerous books with small presses, including After Lorca, Billy the Kid, The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, and Language. His works have been collected in The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, and Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer.

What Goes Wrong When We Write Ghazals in English

Bradford Johnson, Auto Arborescent (Blue). From the portfolio Photographs of Past Paintings, which appeared in issue no. 168 of The Paris Review (Winter 2003).

Everybody likes ghazals. Or they do when they learn what they are: A ghazal is a poetic form originating in and strongly associated with the Islamic cultural sphere. It is a medieval thing—or what Westerners would call medieval. Many famous Persian poets are famous for their ghazals. Likewise, Arabic poets, Turkish, Urdu … The ready-to-hand comparison is with the Italian sonnet. Ghazals are a lot like that: song length, rhyme heavy, lots of lovey-doveyness, lots of over-the-top cosmic reasoning.

It took forever for modern English-language poets to pick up on the existence of the ghazal, but once the word got out, plenty of smart people started trying to write original ghazals in English, with differing commitments to the formal rules. I’m one of these poets.

This piece is about translation, but it’s also about writing original poetry in one’s own language while following the rules developed for a different language. I want to talk about English ghazals, but (for lots of good reasons) I’m going to start in left field … with haiku.

You know all about it. Three lines, seventeen syllables: five and seven and five. Lots of people, that’s the one thing they know.

But ask the editors of Modern Haiku what they think of that. They will say: naive. And sure enough, open any issue of Modern Haiku or any other high-profile English-language haiku magazine. You won’t find any five-seven-five.

See, people who are serious about the art of haiku all know a Japanese syllable is not equivalent to an English syllable. This is because English absolutely teems with one- and two-syllable words—and words of five or more syllables tend to come off as supercalifragilistic. Meanwhile, five-syllable words in Japanese are perfectly commonplace.

English       Japanese

cuckoo         hototogisu

cricket          kirigirisu

And so on. Or put it this way: An English syllable tends to have more information in it than a Japanese syllable does. This is why, when you translate Japanese haiku word for word into English, you get way fewer syllables, like

you fire burn
good thing will show
snowball

This is why I was taught that, instead of going by the numbers, you should follow the Japanese principle that’s at stake, which is extreme minimalism. If English had been the first language of the people who invented haiku, the rule would have been three-five-three or maybe four-six-four. They would have considered five-seven-five too roomy. The concept behind five-seven-five in Japanese is that it leaves zero space for filler. It forces parataxis.

There are other things that could be said here. The different status of stressed syllables in English compared to Japanese, the smaller palette of vowel sounds in Japanese—and so on. But all to say: These differences matter. The person who translates Bashō into an English five-seven-five is mistranslating. What happens—what has to happen in order to achieve syllabic parity—is they translate the meaning and then add syllables to fill out their five-seven-five. So you get a floobery haiku, which should be a contradiction in terms.

Ghazals—it’s a similar problem.

The rule says: Couplet after couplet should end with the same word or phrase and with a rhyme sound right before the repeated bit. Can this be done in English? Yes. But has no one noticed that it’s an awkward mess when you do it in English? Could it be that the grammar of English differs from the grammar of Urdu and Farsi and Arabic in important ways, making it a bad idea to imitate the formal specifications at the expense of the principle that animates them?

I’ll give an example in a minute, but first I’m going to say something deep and deeply upsetting: Contrary to what you were told by teachers all your life, the formal parameters of poetry are not arbitrary, are not rules for the sake of rules, are not there as barbells for the poet to lift to show how strong she is. No, they are all designed to play to their languages’ strengths. They secure desirable effects—that is their warrant and their glory.

Because of the syntax of English, it is easy/graceful/elegant to start sentence after sentence with the same word, but it is not easy/graceful/elegant to end sentence after sentence on the same word. You wind up ending on some weak prepositional phrase that you would never be tempted to deploy in that way, except for the rule. You get no pleasure writing it; the reader has no pleasure reading it.

It should worry people very much that if you translate Urdu ghazals into, say, English, simply repeating back in English what the Urdu verses say, it is virtually never the case that the words at the end of the Urdu strophes stay at the end in English. What does that tell you?

Look, you don’t have to learn Urdu to see my point. All you need is to look at an Urdu ghazal transliterated into Roman letters. You will see the repeated phrase; you will see the rhymes. Let’s do this.

Here is an authentic ghazal by my favorite twentieth-century Urdu poet, Firaq Gorakhpuri (1896–1982). Unless you speak Urdu, you’re not very likely to have heard of this guy. That’s why I picked him. I’m hoping somebody will do a new translation of his poems. Here is my source text:

Photograph courtesy of Anthony Madrid.

I love that photo. And now here is the ghazal, with the repeated phrase in italics and the rhymes in bold:

Humnawa koi nahin hai woh chaman mujh ko diya,
Hum watan baat na samjhen woh watan mujh ko diya.

Muzhda-e-Kausar-o-Tasneem diya auron ko,
Shukar, sad shukar, ghum-e-Gang-o-Jamun mujh ko diya.

Par farishton ko dieye tu ne, tau kya ghum iska,
Yahi kya kum hai, ke insaan ka chalan mujh ko diya.

Wahdat-e-aashiq-o-maashooq ki tasweer hoon main,
Nal ka eesaar, tau ikhlaas-e-Daman mujh ko diya.

Mil gaya tujhko jamaal-e-rukh-e-rangeen ka chaman,
Dil-e-sozaan ka yeh tapta hua bun mujh ko diya.

Khatam hai mujh pe ghazal-goi-e-daur-e-haazir,
Dene wale ne woh andaaz-e-sakhun mujh ko diya.

Shair-e-asar ki taqdeer na kuchh poochh Firaq,
Jo kahin ka bhi na rakhe woh fun mujh ko diya.

And, now, here is K. C. Kanda’s translation (2000), in every detail identical to the text below; I have altered nothing:

I am given such a grove where fellow-warbler I’ve none,
Such a country is my home when none understands my tongue.

To others you have held the promise of the wine of paradise,
Thank God, to me is given the grief of Ganga and Jamun.

If angels are endowed with wings, I’m unconcerned.
That you have made me man, is my recompense.

The unity of love and beauty lies in me condensed.
I contain the love of Nal as well as the troth of Daman.

To you is given a radiant face, garden-like abloom,
To me is given a barren heart that desert-like doth burn.

I represent the ultimate in the field of modern verse,
The style given to me by God is the envy of everyone.

Ask me not the poet’s fate in the modern age,
Thanks to my poetic gifts,—I have been undone!

I’m not saying that’s a great translation. But anyway, can you identify, in the English version, the phrase that is repeated verbatim at the end of every Urdu couplet (“mujh ko diya”)?

It’s not easy to spot! Let’s see what happens if we feed those three words through Google Translate:

مجھ
mujh = me

کو
ko = to

دیا
diya = given

It translates, roughly, to “to me is given.”

Look at the poem again. Now you can see: it’s part of a verb construction, bound up in a bunch of idioms. No surprise to find it at the end of the line in the original because Urdu is an S-O-V (subject-object-verb) language. English, unfortunately, is S-V-O. Which means: When it goes into English, that V has got to move.

Are you starting to see? If English syntax allowed you to elegantly end sentences with the main verb, you could end your ghazal couplets with a more satisfactory word or phrase. But, in English, satisfactory endings tend to be nouns. And if you end every couplet with the same noun, how are you going to get that ghazal dynamism, where each couplet becomes its own thing, every charm on the charm bracelet different?

I know, I know. I’m overstating. I’m acting like all this is “always” when I should be saying “most of the time.” Also, I’m needing you to trust me that the Firaq poem instantiates a typical phenomenon in Urdu ghazals.

I’ve been gazing at this stuff for twenty years, this whole time trying to figure out how one could follow the spirit of the ghazal form without getting shipwrecked by the IKEA instructions, so to speak. I’ll share a couple ideas. In order to do the rhyme so that it’s subordinated (i.e., not allowed to act like any kind of rhythmic end stop), you could do something I call “hand-off rhyme.” The last word of line 1 (in a couplet) could rhyme with the first word in line 2. Or, if not the first word, almost the first word. The rhyme will still be audible, but it will run by you the way it does in Urdu.

And since the repeat word is so hard to install at the end without messing everything up, what about untying it from the end but making it a very sticky-outty verb or adjective or adverb, such that the reader will be able to experience it as a repetition clear as anything?

Let me see what happens if I retranslate the Firaq, above.

My portion is a stand of trees, and I am the only songbird in it.
The minute I sing, my portion on earth is an uncomprehending stare.

It is for others to drink and to cherish the wine of Paradise.
The paradox is my portion is to drink from these Hindu rivers.

If the angel’s portion is a pair of wings, what is that to me?
You see I’m content that my portion be the shape of a humble man.

… That’s not that bad. I’m stuck with repeating a noun, but the rhymes aren’t forced, and the verbal repetition is not only respected, but made to deliver.

Anyhow, you can cut me some slack; these are improvisations. And if you’re thinking portion sticks out too much, then you really are understanding my point. Firaq did not put a noun in that slot, and maybe by this point you’re starting to see why.

At any rate, these are the questions the writer of an English ghazal should contemplate.

There’ a part of me that longs to quote some choice specimens of original English-language “ghazals” from respected national magazines over these past ten years or so, but that would be like when I show my students examples of rhyming couplets written by beginners. Every other line: godawful awkwardness. Every other line: words and phrases the poet would never have used in a million years, except they had to hustle that rhyme word to the end of the line.

All this is bigger than ghazals, of course. Bigger than haiku. I’m saying we have to graduate from pastiche and mimicry to something higher. We have to stop looking at somebody like Firaq and saying, I must do what he did. We should be saying to ourselves, I must do what he meant.

Firaq! you are bones, you are no more to be found. Yet, listen to my words.
The birds in the trees are asking that all this be forgiven me.

 

Anthony Madrid’s writing has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Lana Turner Journal, and Poetry. He is the author of three books, I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say, Try Never, and Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise.

Dickinson’s Dresses on the Moon

Collage. US Postal Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Project Apollo Archive, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Look closely at any moon landing photograph and you will find fine gray plus signs in a grid across each one—plus signs that allowed for distortion to be corrected + for distance and height to be calibrated from space as well as on the moon’s surface. That could stitch a panoramic sequence of images + plot the moon. Each Hasselblad camera the astronauts brought was fitted with a clear glass plate etched with this precise network, a réseau of stitches—pin­ning the moon to the moon to keep its surface and the vast black horizon in line. Reseau: a grid + a ref­erence marking pattern on a photograph or sewing paper + an intelligence network + a net of fine lines on glass plates + a foundation in lace.

+++

Look closely at many Emily Dickinson poems and you will find + signs that indicate a variant in a line. A variant may appear + above a word + to the side of a line + underneath a word + at right angles to the poem + stacked at the end like a solution to an equa­tion. Whole poems + sequences may be variants of one another. Dickinson did not choose among her variants, offering them as concurrent alternatives— evocative lace constellations left for us to hold up to our future sky as we try to align the wild nights + noons of her poems + epistolary impulses. Stitched across the surface of her work—plus signs that allow for + stray signals + distortion + that calibrate inte­rior vastness.

+++

Rather than the stunning aluminum-coated fabric of the Mercury crews stepping out of comic book frames of imagined interstellar travel, the astronauts who planted their feet on the moon were outfitted in the same glaring white as a wedding dress. A color in the future that will become as synonymous as silver with the zeitgeist of sixties space-age fabrics—avant-garde apparel made of paper and metal and mirrors and all that lamé, every garment a mise en abyme reflecting and replicating a future possible. Silver and white, twin colors that wax and wane in popularity across time, reappearing again and again when we most need to transport ourselves beyond whatever present moment in which we find ourselves suspended. Colors that carry us across the thin gray twilight line that separates us from a speculative future.

Fifty years into that future, it’s difficult to undo the images of those sonogramic white suits. The ghostly bulk of the astronauts’ bodies adrift on the moon now an afterimage in our collective consciousness. The exterior garment as luminous and otherworldly every day and intimate as the era’s conic Playtex bras. Chosen in part for the fabric’s superlative heat resistance, in part because its less reflective surface kept astronauts safer from the risk of dazzling themselves with their clothing while facing the unfiltered sunlight. Underneath this bright white micrometeoroid layer, underneath the layers and layers of nested silver insulation, the main pressurized body of the space suit is a simple Earthly blue.

+++

The year we landed on the moon a documentary is screened detailing the seemingly impossible technological processes involved in getting us there. Over looped footage—a modified sewing machine moving stitch over stitch over a seam—a sheet of mylar pulled from a roll until its silver fills the screen—a pair of gloves being constructed blue finger by finger—there is audio of women talking. Chatting back and forth with each other as if they were doing any day’s work. The hidden intimacy of the moon is in this small loop: the space suits with their otherworldly specifications had to be sewn one by one.

The seamstresses hired to help fabricate the space suits first had to learn how to read engineering blueprints, to understand construction and seam lines from drawings rather than the pattern of a previous garment. There was no previous garment to take apart, no way to learn where hidden seams and extra protection from friction might be required. No lines or creases or details to close read what happens to fabric on the body when worn on the moon, the intricacies or possible failures of a former design. The seamstresses had to sew the space suit together in their minds. Undo it to imagine it again as flat fabric. Understand how to cut, piece, dip, coat edges of ever more wild fabrics to keep them from fraying, tearing, coming undone in space while being worn.

Given the unfathomable demand for stitches so meticulous they would allow a body to safely endure a lack of breathable air, the seamstresses learned to sew at a level of precision even the most spectacular Earth garment would never call for. They learned to sew with almost no use of straight pins to tack together their fabrics and keep them from slipping as layer after layer of delicate fiberglass heatproof fabric was run through the machine. That even a single misplaced stitch might call for a suit to be fully restarted. Learned an errant pin and an infinitesimal hole in the pressurized suit were the only difference between—and—. And no Earthly rehearsal before the seamstresses’ trick of turning flat fabric into an airtight heirloom was performed live by astronauts in front of a national audience.

Pinned down in grief, and imagining I have landed on the moon, I hear them. Their voices bounced down fifty years in the future like stray signals from the night sky. As if I am overhearing a garment in process across multiple moments in time.

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Emily Dickinson’s one white dress is a copy. Of which there are actually two. Dickinson’s one white plus twin replica dresses—make three. Three white dresses are not literary lore. They are the beginning of a bedtime story: In the great green room there were three white dresses, three dresses in white that were acceptable to be worn around the house though not around town, sewn in a nineteenth-century style called a wrapper housedress, meant for housework and harder wear and more often than not made of darker fabric. Though obviously not Dickinson’s. Even if by then white cloth was considered easier to clean than fashionably bright aniline dyes and prints, might even have been considered more practical, her many white dresses still invited hot gossip. After all, other than brides and mourners, who only wears white? Dickinson’s unlikely white dress is often speculated to be bridal, as if she considers herself wed to her poetry—or to God—or to herself. Dickinson’s one white dress, in which she was always talking to death.

But a historical artifact cannot be taken apart at the seams in order to make a pattern for twinning, cannot have its stitches cut one by one. To make a new pattern from an existing garment that must remain intact is called “lifting” or “rubbing off.” The dressmaker hired to twice replicate and lift Dickinson’s one white dress had to imagine the pattern from seeing the dress already put together. Had to take it apart in her mind. Plan it backwards. The language of producing a facsimile dress is the language of the writer at work: drafted, corrected, proofed. Though only the first was likely a collective effort, drafted, patterned, and stitched in a room with other women in intimacy.

It’s difficult to know when entering the exhibit of her house which dress has been pulled out intact for display—the dress that embodied Dickinson’s body or the dress that suggestively embodies her mind. The dress and the story we tell about her round and round. Hard to know in which she’s hidden herself. In a white dress where would she hide? Three white dresses, each with fourteen yards of trim like the frill of a stamp’s edge along the collar, the cuffs, the unexpected note-size pocket with its envelope-flap closure. Only one with original embroidered lace. The iconic, dead-ringer dresses, one or the other, resting on a dress form in the East bedroom, arms bent as if about to take off. Her fair copy is kept safe in a glass case across town.

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How many worlds can a garment inhabit at one time? Let me reverse some of its stitches. In the city where I will be born an inventor will begin a humble company making latex bathing caps and swimwear. The company will grow larger, move cities, divide itself into different cells, some for the war effort and some for more commercial manufacturing. After the war, women from surrounding towns will be hired to work on the lines at a newly announced division, Playtex, stitching bras and diaper covers and latex-dipping “living” girdles. Twenty plus years into the future, it’s seamstresses at Playtex who are initially tapped to move over to the handcrafting of space suits for the NASA astronauts.

Every other company’s proposal for dressing and encasing the interstellar body in a military-engineered solution will fail. Their armor-like designs incapable of mimicking the human form or allowing a body to move with enough grace in low gravity. Hard-shell relics unsuited to carrying anyone to the moon. Playtex’s flexible rubber girdle and the bra’s nylon tricot was, is, and will be the secret to fitting women’s earthly bodies into the restrictive garments of Dior’s postwar New Look and the astronaut’s bodies into space suits. A garment that holds both a future and a past body in its fabric. An impossible, other-worldly, fantastical body achievable only through an adept understanding of how to alter the figure underneath the architectural lines of the clothing. In other words, through the illusion technology of undergarments.

Much of the language for the technical components and construction of the lunar space suits will be of the body: bladder, ribbed rings, webbing, joints. A language of intimacy and interiority. A language the seamstresses will already understand. Closer to earlier forms of embodiment in which we clothe a spirit with a body—a space suit: both an embodied body and an intervention of the body. The interior of the space suit touching the exterior of the body. The exterior touching endlessness. Each latex-dipped component a well-guarded technique to a fragile body dazzling us while bouncing through airlessness. Each of the space suit’s seventeen concentric sheets of mylar glued by the seamstresses, thinner than single-thread lace. A body kept safe in the vastness of space through couture handiwork—a reseau of women rendering the moon possible with precision stitching and cutting and gluing. An abundance of hours.

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At any given time just one of Emily Dickinson’s white dresses is planted in her bedroom like a flag on the moon, stiff and awkward, trying to float on a breeze that does not blow. A room that has been celebrated for housing a mind that looked like no one else’s mind ever. A mind capable of making poems like lace, full of gaps and pauses and absences. All those variants letting us listen in as she works out a live problem on the page. All those em dashes with dots over the top, turning connective pauses into birds, inviting us to leap from one space to the next. To keep the vast horizon of her mind in line. As if her words were signals bounced from places more vast than we can imagine—reflected off the moon’s surface—returned to us overheard.

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Listen closely to any worn garment and you will find fine lines that mark details of construction + patterns of wear + indications of more than one wearer. Signs of possible variation + annotation + distortion—initials embroidered along a pocket + the strain in a buttonhole that might indicate a garment was worn during early stages of pregnancy + the ellipsis of holes showing stitching has been undone—seams and hems let down + let out + in. These lines will allow you to draw the garment + take it apart in your mind + translate its cut and composition onto the page. Create an image + a pattern + help calculate the relationship of one part or one wearer of a garment to another.

Listen. I am reading the garment out loud.

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For over a century there has been just one verifiable photograph of Dickinson. In the iconic black and white silver daguerreotype, she is not wearing the white dress. She’s a teenager fixed in a dress she will live in forever. And that dress is made in an undefinable dark printed fabric with a slight sheen. Not surprising, given dark fabrics were considered more suitable as it kept sitters from becoming spectral blurs—there and not there. But people will mostly forget this first dress. There’s nothing spectacular or singular about it. The daguerreotype era produces millions of replica dark dresses. There’s no narrative we can attach to its common folds. The white fabric arrives in the future.

One hundred years of one documentary photograph and one surviving white dress going round and round, depicting Dickinson as an ethereal-looking teenager superimposed over an ethereally dressed adult. Even as it’s been told round and round that neither her family nor her considered the image a particularly good likeness. Until a second possible daguerreotype is uncovered. In the image there are two women, two dresses. One dress a griever’s black speculated to be worn by a recently widowed friend. The other, when magnified, revealed to be checks—a grid of fine lines woven through the fabric. A pattern that was considered best for daguerreotypes, a perfect contrast in the folds between light and dark. Like the original, the portrait is so small it requires intense forensic attention to gather information about the possible wearers and their dresses.

The Dickinson Museum textile collection is searched. A possible copy of the pattern and sheen of this second daguerreotype dress is found. Fabric with light gray and white threads creating a reseau on a stunning blue background. Swatches of a blue dress that were saved, deconstructed and stitched onto paper backing to be reused, along with other snips of bright dress silks and plaid satins, as part of a hexagon quilt block. A match that might verify Dickinson is the wearer and begin to unfasten the afterimage of a monochromatic era of Victorian mourning wear.

Difficult to then undo the collective image of Dickinson the artist in her singular, sonogramic white dress. What would we do with her, would we recognize her if she came to us in blue? This new future possible Dickinson would be a Dickinson in process and in sequence—stitching and unstitching—patterning her poems and not yet on the moon. A variant twin Dickinson that changes ages, changes dresses between acts from dark to blue to white—who might allow for distortion, for distance between the first dress and the last and now. A panoramic view of her materiality that pins herself to herself. In the absence of a physical dress, we have to reimagine her in a blue wider than the sky, in the long seconds she was suspended and exposed—there and not there—sitting impossibly still as the camera’s lens remained open, arm around a mourning friend, before the salt fixes and gathers her back into black and white like moonlight on the daguerreotype’s silver surface.

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So many needle holes and needles + errant pins left in Dickinson’s poems. Not all for sewing. Some used to wound + puncture + stab + mark. And the way she chose to stitch her poems—leaving audible pinholes in their fabric—morse code notes poked straight through the pages—that allow us in the future to take all those undone white sheets, restitch and unstitch them back together in sequence. A panorama of poems + a mind in the gray line between daylight and darkness. Undo each poem + dress and what’s left are the ellipsis of pinholes—dots and dashes—traveling across the fabric + page.

The dressmaker hired to multiply Dickinson’s one white dress first would have made a toile, a practice or draft dress made in muslin, meant to be taken apart to turn into a pattern that could be twinned and twinned and twinned, turning one dress into many. Meaning there are or were likely four possible dresses: the original, the two replicas, and the toile that would have been undone—a speculative future dress + a ghost of the final dresses returned to its prestitched state. A toile is a garment made to be altered, to never be worn. Each of these duplicate heirlooms that will never contain Dickinson’s or anyone’s future body. Or her reason for adopting such dazzling fabric for workwear. Dickinson’s multiplying variants + dresses + pinholes, turning her into many, keeping mourners from creaking across her soul. Dickinson, who was constantly more astonished that the Body contains the Spirit + or that clothes could then contain the body at all.

What a pity that instead of a flag we did not plant a copy of Dickinson’s paper white dress on the moon—symbol of the common poem—+ which, like the moon, affects us all, unites us all. + Each month going round and round—turning from light to dark to the moon’s silver glint and back again depending on whether it’s waxing or waning. As if underneath her one luminous white dress is its exact space-black lace replica waiting to hurtle back to Earth.

 

Cori Winrock is a poet and multimedia essayist/artist. Her second collection of poetry, Little Envelope of Earth Conditions, was awarded Editor’s Choice for the Alice James Books Prize. Her debut book, This Coalition of Bones, received the Freund Prize.