eclipsed verbosities

the phislophying of Jibran

July 2006, Lebanon. We sojourned one day with fellow local tourists in two buses (I think the three of us were the only ones who didn’t speak Arabic). The trip was titled, “The Cedars”, and the first stop was Khalil Jibran’s one-upon-a-time home in the hills at Bsharri, a rusticky museum-ed tribute to an iconic artist/poet/philosopher of the land from the slightly remote past (he died in 1931).

(Another living Lebanese icon, Fairuz, was scheduled to have a concert in Baalbek around the same time, but Israel attacked and there was no more song.)

That Jibran’s erstwhile home was a definitive stop said something about how he is still esteemed by the Lebanese. As a non-Lebanese long smitten by the people, land, song and food, it is telling that I have never felt any pull towards Jibran (except for picking up his Prophet in my younger days as that was the thing to do: did nothing for me; never got anywhere with it). Perhaps, at some level, I sensed Jibran’s airyfairy spirituality was just a ruse to cover up a deep worship of power: the antithesis of a revolutionary.

…

A few days ago, I watched Chris Hedges interview Orlando Reade on the relevance of the revolutionary Milton. Enlightened by the talk, I downloaded Reades’ book, “What in Me is Dark” and read the chapter on how the two fascist poets (no mincing of words here) - Pound and Eliot - tag-teamed a Miltonian takedown under the guise of Modernity, cheered on for a while by the cheerless Woolfe (doing a flip-flop from her earlier adulation of Milton), all of it failing - at least that is the way I read Reade.

…

I’ll let the rivalries between englishmen&women rest here, and let Cesaire speak his mind on whatever it is that rings rightfully relevant when I think of revolution:

                                       the Message
through the dust of the confines
and the belly of the wave
you kept it always above your head
at arm’s length from mud
at heart’s length
       from fear
faithful to the intimate order.

…

July 2006 again. The last stop of the buses was in historic Tripoli at a traditional sweets place, Hallab, where everyone lined up to get Hallab’s famed halawatul-jibn. The intimate order has a sweet tooth.

In resonance with the intimate order then:

It is a powdered noon thrumming past an im-
     modest rain filling the brim of chance with
     a light that drains you of impossibilities -

It is the long diffidence of time,  its tentacled 
      impossibility and the hour at hand massively
      out of sync with beginnings, with the diffidence 

of time in wrapping loss and the counting of loss
       knotted in space, parceled vocally, mangled
       with furrows, demons and eclipsed verbosities-