how the “poppy hangs in sleep.” It’ is not for us to eat. It’s taken its own medicine. It’s succumbed to being.
Maybe the remedy to the problem of self is falling asleep. It must be a different sleep than that which occurs most every night, though each night is a glimpse into what such sleep must be. Mostly, we’re insomniac. Don’t know, as the poppy knows, how to sleep inside ourselves as the blossom sleeps in the bud. Don’t know how to take a dose of our medicine, because our medicine is us.
No wonder those men wept, dragged back to the boat to go home. The honey-sweet lotus freed them of their purpose, released them from their desire, and desire sees with eyes that find distances in every direction, distance hidden in distance, time hidden in time; desire shows us who suffer it a gap that must be crossed, an ocean of climbing waves we must ourselves climb only to find the next one towering even higher; and say somehow we hear a music come to us, we think at first it’s the music of our own beating hearts; but no, it’s not a music within but a music without; say we hear that music, say we breathe it in, and find our wives and children, our home and homeland, all dispersed like pollen in the air, blown into every open thing, the lotus-opened heart and the sleeping poppy.
Who wouldn’t weep to be brought back to the ships and tied up with rope and placed in the belly of a boat.
Image of false labor. Forget it. I mean: give yourself forgetting.
The only work is breathing in.
Genius guards us from forgetting what we’d die to neglect: breath, heartbeat, digestion. Genius tends the body so that we can begin to forget more deliberately all that can be forgotten.
Linguist Daniel Heller-Roazen recounts a Middle Eastern tale:
Abu Nuwas asked Khalaf for permission to compose poetry, and Khalaf said: “I refuse to let you make a poem until you memorize a thousand pages of ancient poetry, including chants, odes, and occasional lines.” So Abu Nuwas disappeared; and after a good long while, he came back and said, “I’ve done it.”
“Recite them,” said Khalaf.
So, Abu Nuwas began, and got through the bulk of the verses over a period of several days. Then he asked again for permission to compose poetry. Said Khalaf, “I refuse, unless you forget all one thousand lines as completely as if you had never learned them.”
“That’s too difficult,” said Abu Nuwas. “I’ve memorized them quite thoroughly!”
So Abu Nuwas disappeared into a monastery and remained in solitude for a period of time until he forgot the lines. He went back to Khalaf and said, “I’ve forgotten them so thoroughly it’s as if I never memorized anything at all.”
Khalaf then said, “Now go compose!”
Betray, betray, Genius demands; betray, betray is the poem’s command.
Abu Nuwas’s poetic education is the only tale I know in which forgetting is the work that is done. It is harder work than memory is, forgetting. For many years I didn’t know what to think about the story. Even so, I shared it with many of my classes. I’d read it to them out loud, and no matter the amount of class time remaining, I’d send them out to begin forgetting it. In my heart I kept a secret wish. That the door to the classroom filled with a mist made of water from the river Lethe so that walking away from the desk was to forget all that had been heard.
Now maybe I glimpse it. Abu Nuwas memorizes the ancient poems, chants, odes, and occasional lines and recites them not to prove to Khalaf he has succeeded in accomplishing such an impossible task, though it must have felt so to him as he recited perfectly those thousands of pages over many days. You don’t become a poet by swallowing the library whole. He recites them to put back into the air those words pulled down and made by others into poems. A kind of repair. As if one could breathe back into the sky a cloud that had gone missing, but the cloud is transparent, and not made only of dust and water and air. Abu Nuwas gives back all the words Genius gave others, strange sacrifice to the minor god who keeps life for each of us intact. The only way the sacrifice is pure is if nothing of it remains, and so Khalaf orders Abu Nuwas to forget those lines he’d memorized quite thoroughly. That labor of forgetting repaid a debt inherited from others but nonetheless also his own, for to become a poet means to accept the debt of others as one’s own, and to labor to repay it so that the dead can go free from their bonds. The work isn’t writing poems so much as it’s forgetting them. And if you forget them well, those poems you love, then Genius has some pity on you, and in the absence of what once you knew places in you some words you didn’t know you knew, and so you write them down.
(Then a finger pushes a bead across the metal bar on the abacus. The bead is but a dried poppy head. The finger belongs to the accountant we cannot not know. And what is owed begins to accrue.)
Through lidless eyes they stare, the gods.
The animals turn their gaze away.
Pascal speaks of the wretchedness of our condition—
that we cannot be one nor the other,
that our ignorance cannot rescue us from what our reason cannot grasp.
We stare at what we want to exist so that it exists,
or we stare at what threatens us, or what confound us,
the object of contemplation—
And blink.
John Keats writes to Fanny Brawne in February 1820: “I have found other thoughts intrude upon me. ‘If I should die,’ said I to myself, ‘I have left no immortal work behind me, nothing to make my friends proud of my memory, but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had time I would have made myself remember’d.’”
The work of his greatest brilliance is behind him. The odes are littered with forms of immortal silence:
tuneless numbers
secrets
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter
spirit ditties of no tone
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity
Darkling I listen
Fled is that music
a silent deep-disguised plot
To steal away
and leave my
