The oleander was blossoming
in the courtyard of the tekija, a dervish lodge
set in a cliff, and in the last light of a September
afternoon the white blossoms shone against the red
rock. More than forty species of birds nest in the
cliff, which also houses the source of the Buna
River, an emerald tributary of the Nerevta flowing
through Mostar, in eastern Bosnia, where Sufi dervishes
arrived in the fifteenth century. They flourished
here until the Communist takeover of Yugoslavia
in 1945, when they went underground; they resurfaced
in 1991, when Yugoslavia began to break apart, and
now there were seminarians talking in low tones
at a table outside the kitchen, near a display of
prayer ropes, shawls, kilims, and devotional books
for sale. A waiter brought Turkish coffee to our
literary delegation. In the gloaming we watched
the swallows sweep along the cliff. I thought
of Rumi, the thirteenth-century Sufi teacher regarded
as the greatest mystical poet of Islam. Born in
Afghanistan, as a young man he fled with his family
to Turkey, and there he met a wandering dervish
who inspired his vocation. Rumi preached and wrote
thousands of poems, often in a trance. His work
is indeed ecstatic: in every encounter he sought
divinity--for him friendship was spelled with
a capital F--and his revelations about the nature
of existence are as pointed as they are timeless,
as this short poem suggests:
Inside the Great Mystery that is,
we don’t really own anything.
What is this competition we feel then,
before we go, one at a time, through the same
gate?
This was what I felt at our next destination--the
ruins of East Mostar, the mainly Muslim side of
the city which had borne the brunt of destruction
in the war of shifting loyalties dividing the
Bosnian Muslim, Croatian Catholic, and Serbian
Orthodox communities. The audience for our reading
was small, and at the dinner afterward our host,
a local Muslim journalist, apologized for failing
to send out invitations. From the veranda of a
restaurant overlooking the river we had a view
of the wooden bridge erected to replace the famous
Old Bridge, a sixteenth-century thing of wonder
that once linked the two sides of the city: a
symbol of tolerance destroyed in the war. But
the stones had been raised from the water. The
bridge would be rebuilt.
Links between local Christians and Muslims would
be harder to restore. The journalist, for example,
blamed the West for the immorality sweeping the
globe; homosexuality was his emblem of evil, and
he wanted us to explain why the Pope had sanctioned
same-sex marriages. Nor could we disabuse him
of his theological errors--to say nothing of his
intolerance. .
“Too much tolerance leads to chaos,”
he said venomously. .
His bitter words came back to me in the wake of
the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
when the father of one of the purported hijackers,
insisting his son had nothing to do with the crime,
used precisely the same language in an interview
to castigate the West. It is indeed the language
of fundamentalists everywhere, of those who are
uneasy with modernity, with what Henry Adams identified
a century ago as the chief characteristic of the
age--acceleration. But the dislocation common
to many members of the Islamic terrorist cells
we have gone to war against is little different
from the shock we felt as a nation on September
11th.
It is no secret that pain can lock up our emotions.
This is the subject of Emily Dickinson’s
famous meditation on loss, composed in 1862, the
year of greatest carnage in our Civil War:
After great pain, a formal feeling comes--
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round--
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone--
This is the Hour of Lead--
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow--
First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--
Dickinson’s poems, almost half of which
date from the Civil War, provide a map to the
broken heart of a solitary woman--and of a nation.
All was torn asunder by the Confederate secession,
a public betrayal that perhaps echoed events in
Dickinson’s affective life. Yet she found
“a formal feeling” for her grief,
which transcends its private origin. Indeed it
was in 1862, the pivotal year of the war, that
she vividly described the pain we now feel. That
September, at the battle of Antietam, more Americans
were killed on our soil than at any time in our
history until this September 11th. While neither
side could claim victory Confederate General Robert
E. Lee was forced to abandon his Maryland campaign;
his retreat prompted Abraham Lincoln to issue
his Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves.
1862 marked another emancipation: Dickinson completed,
on average, a poem a day--hers was a “Soul
at the White Heat,” as she wrote, which
traced, among other things, the hour of lead that
has fallen again over this land. Our hearts have
been stiffened by the terrorist attacks on New
York and Washington, and our writers must discover
ways to transfigure this grief. Otherwise we may
end up as embittered as the journalist in Mostar.
Nor can we gauge how we will respond to such a
wound. Dickinson understood that trauma will cause
many people freeze to death, literally or figuratively.
What is certain is that in the years to come we
will recollect the ash that fell like snow one
beautiful September morning in New York. Who can
say how or why some of us will waken from this
cold? .
In fact the ashfall had not stopped when I visited
Ground Zero in November. The wooden walkway some
climbed to peer into the wreckage was slippery
with soot; the stench of death hung in the cold
air. Men and women wept. Sidewalk vendors hawked
American flags, T shirts, and hats emblazoned
with NYFD and NYPD insignia. A young woman embraced
a policeman. I circled the site, conscious of
what was missing--and of how absence may best
be described through what is there: the skeletal
remains of a building; a makeshift shrine of plastic
flowers and teddy bears; a chamber orchestra rehearsing
in a church in which the pews are covered with
plastic sheets. Yet the mind reels in the face
of such destruction--one reason why so many people
turned to poetry in the immediate aftermath of
the tragedy. For poetry, as Robert Frost noted,
offers a temporary stay against confusion. One
such stay is this poem by Donald Justice:
Absences
It’s snowing this afternoon and there
are no flowers.
There is only this sound of falling, quiet and
remote,
Like the memory of scales descending the white
keys
Of a childhood piano--outside the window, palms!
And the heavy head of the cereus, inclining,
Soon to let down its white or yellow-white.
Now, only these poor snow-flowers in a heap,
Like the memory of a white dress cast down...
So much has fallen.
And I, who have listened for a step
All afternoon, hear it now, but already falling
away,
Already in memory. And the terrible scales descending
On the silent piano; the snow; and the absent
flowers abounding.
Juxtaposing an Iowa snowstorm with a memory of
his childhood in Florida, the poet captures the
interplay between presence and absence, longing
and loss. Justice connects disparate realms of
experience by visual means--the color white, gestures
of falling--and through music, heard and unheard--the
C major and A minor scales, the silent piano.
The mysterious link between snow and a night-blooming
cactus sharpens the image of the bridal gown,
for this is a poem composed in the key of a dying
footfall, resolved in the alliteration of “absent”
and “abounding.” Isn’t that
how memory works? The more you lose, the more
you remember. .
That we have not even begun to tally the losses--physical,
emotional, cultural, and political--of September
11th is illustrated by the ever changing death
toll. What is clear is that we live in a new dispensation,
in which for some it was only a matter of chance
that they were not on board one of the doomed
airliners or in the World Trade Center or the
Pentagon at the time of the attacks. For the rest
of us there was “this sound of falling,”
in Justice’s memorable phrase, which in
televised footage was indeed “quiet and
remote.” It seems to me the sound of falling--of
buildings, of men and women, of political orders--is
what writers must now catch in their work.
What I am attempting to describe is a way of addressing
the changes occasioned by the events of September
11th, for it is up to the writer to discover new
lenses through which to view our circumstances--views
to counter the poverty of insight offered by our
commentators, on the left and right. It is all
too easy to look at the world through familiar
prisms--the exigencies of the media depend upon
such certainties--but in the midst of uncertainty,
which we now recognize as our permanent condition,
we must demand of ourselves nothing less than
what William Blake insisted upon: that we cleanse
the gates of perception. .
This was a quality I prized in my friend, Agha
Shahid Ali. From Ground Zero I traveled to Amherst,
Massachusetts, where he was dying. It was an irony
that a poet whose clarity of vision, personal
and poetic, had won him friends all over America
was unaware of the turmoil into which his adopted
country had been plunged, brain cancer having
destroyed his memory. He sat by the window in
the late afternoon, in the fading light, listening
to his favorite music--The Band’s cover
version of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be
Released” and Albinoni’s Adagio. Somehow
he knew he was dying, even if he refused to admit
it to his friends and family. But he retained
no memory of what had become of New York, his
favorite American city, or of the renewed violence
in his homeland of Kashmir, the subject of so
much of his poetry, notably in The Country Without
a Post Office. Nevertheless he recited his poems
until his final days. Shahid died on 8 December.
Massachusetts blue law prevented his family from
following the Muslim custom of burying him within
twenty-four hours of his death, on a Sunday; his
graveside memorial the next day thus fell on Emily
Dickinson’s birthday--a conjunction Shahid
would have loved. It was the anchorite of Amherst,
after all, who provided him with the crucial line--“a
Route of Evanescence”--for the title poem
of A Nostalgist’s Map of America. “I
want to eat Evanescence slowly,” she wrote:
Shahid’s motto. That night, after breaking
the fast of Ramadan with his family, I went with
friends to Dickinson’s grave, where we found
on her stone a sprig of holly and several pennies--an
image I carried with me the next day on a flight
to Central Europe, where meetings kept me occupied
until the weekend, when at last I had a chance
to reflect on the losses of the autumn. .
I was staying in a castle, in a wine region near
Brataslava, in Slovakia, where a conference titled,
Back in Europe, was concluding. Writers from Austria,
Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, and Yugoslavia had
gathered to discuss their declining spiritual
and material conditions; the spread of American
culture was roundly condemned; the writings of
Danielle Steele came in for particular scorn.
The conference, convened by the Austrian Embassy,
hearkened back to the Habsburg era, and it set
me to wondering about the passing of old orders--the
Dual Monarchy, National Socialism, Communism,
perhaps even the American order. For this was
a decisive moment in history: never had a country
amassed so much power and wealth, and never had
it seemed so easy to topple the edifice, as in
the first days and weeks after September 11th.
The feeling here, too, was of loss. No one could
tell me the fate of the castle’s Hungarian
owners, who had collaborated with the Nazis; the
castle belonged to the Slovak Literary Fund, explained
a poet who had lost most of his family at Auschwitz;
his latest book included a sequence about an angel
with feathers blackened by the soot of the crematoria.
And my host, whose father had just died, kept
bursting into tears. We had met in Prague, where
he had given a reading, which drew from his Czech
audience questions tinged with nostalgia: isn’t
it a pity that Czechs and Slovaks are so distant
now? There was even talk of requiring visas to
travel between the two countries, which for much
of the last century had been united. But now the
Czech republic was ensconced in the West. Slovakia
was caught in a geopolitical netherworld.
My first night I slept in the Black Room, in which
Nikita Krushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Vaclav
Havel had also stayed. In the morning, when the
writers departed, my host led me to a smaller
room near the balcony from which someone had leapt
to their death, and then took his leave. It sounds
romantic--a weekend alone in an empty castle--but
it was not long before I fell into despair. The
walls of the salon were lined with paintings of
dead Slovak writers; the glass bookcases containing
their works were locked. A wedding party arrived--the
bride and groom, a photographer and the driver
of a black Mercedes with a doll in a white dress
propped on the hood. The photographer took the
couple’s picture on the front steps. When
they tried to drive off, the car stalled. .
It was the coldest winter in a century; a foot
of snow lay on the ground; the poplar-lined driveway
to the castle had not been cleared. The restaurant
in the neighboring village was closed. Likewise
the café. A pair of death notices was taped
to the wall of the municipal building, which doubled
as the bus station; at the top of a hill a cross-country
skier was breaking a trail in a field, a lone
figure set against the overcast sky. Villagers
roamed in the park surrounding the castle, picked
pine boughs, pulled children on sleds. I walked
through woods thick with mistletoe to a shrine
to the Virgin Mary, where She is said to have
appeared. Snow crunched underfoot; a jay squawked
in a pine tree. I have never felt such desolation .
When I returned to the castle, I took tea in an
alcove above the reception area, between a statue
of the Madonna and Child and a large white oven,
decorated with pink flowers. The light was fading
in the trees. Two older women, the weekend manager
and the cook, were talking by the front door;
smoke from their cigarettes wafted up the circular
staircase. My thoughts turned to the recent discovery
of a novel by the Hungarian writer Sándor
Márai, Embers, published in 1942. The Communist
authorities burned the remaining copies when Márai
fled to the West in 1948; when he committed suicide
in San Diego in 1989, just months before the Berlin
Wall came down, he was all but unknown. But new
translations of his books, in more than twenty
languages, are earning him a place in world literature.
Knopf plans to publish his entire body of work
in English. .
Embers is set in a manor house in 1941, at the
base of the Carpathian Mountains. The war is a
distant presence for the aging General who over
the course of a single night will tell the story
of the day his world collapsed, at the turn of
the century. He and his best friend, faithful
members of the Emperor’s army, had gone
hunting early that morning; when a deer emerged
in a clearing ahead of them the General made a
terrible discovery. Let me quote Márai
at some length here to give you a sense of his
writing and his keen understanding of the human
condition. “And then something happened
that I could never prove in a court of law,”
the General explains to his friend who after forty-one
years has crossed mine-laden seas to visit him,
but that I can tell you because you know it already--it
was a little thing, I felt you move, more clearly
than if I’d been watching you. You were
close behind me, and a fraction to the side. I
felt you raise your gun, set it on your shoulder,
take aim, and close one eye. I felt the gun slowly
swivel. My head and the deer’s head were
in the exact same line of fire, and at the exact
same height; at most there may have been four
inches between the two targets. I felt your hand
tremble, and I knew as surely as only the hunter
can assess a particular situation in the woods,
that from where you were standing you could not
be taking aim at the deer. Please understand me:
it was the hunting aspect, not the human, that
held my attention right then. I was, after all,
a devotee of hunting, with some expertise in its
technical problems, such as the angle at which
one must position oneself in relation to a deer
standing unsuspecting at a distance of three hundred
paces. Given the geometrical arrangement of the
marksman and the two targets, the whole thing
was quite clear, and I could calculate what was
going on in the mind of the person behind my back.
You took aim for half a minute, and I knew that
down to the second, without a watch. I knew you
were not a fine shot and that all I had to do
was move my head a fraction and the bullet would
whistle past my ear and maybe hit the deer. I
knew that one movement would suffice and the bullet
would remain in the barrel of your gun. But I
also knew I couldn’t move because my fate
was no longer mine to control: some moment had
come, something was going to happen of its own
volition. And I stood there, waiting for the shot,
waiting for you to pull the trigger and put a
bullet through the head of your friend. It was
a perfect situation: no witnesses, the gamekeeper
and the dogs were a long way back, it was one
of those well-known ‘tragic accidents’
that are detailed every year in the newspapers.
The half minute passed and still there was no
shot. Suddenly the deer smelled danger and exploded
into motion with a single bound that took him
out of our sight to safety in the undergrowth.
We still didn’t move. And then, very slowly,
you let the gun sink.
This is only the first blow the General suffers.
His wife and best friend have conspired against
him, a betrayal played out in silence. His friend
leaves for the tropics, and he moves into the
hunting lodge, refusing to speak to his wife again,
even when she falls sick and dies. The rest of
his days he devotes to rehearsing the story he
will tell his friend, if he ever gets the chance.
Indeed his life depends upon him telling this
story well, in order to elicit from his listener
answers to the questions he has carried with him
ever since the day his life fell apart.
Embers may be read as an allegory about the demise
of various orders--a family, a friendship, the
aristocracy, the Concert of Europe, the Dual Monarchy.
Nor it it an accident that it is set in the midst
of world war, when another order was taking shape--an
order that disappeared within months of Márai’s
death. Now the book is finding an audience even
as another order is created. I do not wish to
belabor an obvious political point by reminding
you that large numbers of people around the world
feel betrayed by certain American foreign policies,
to say nothing of the fiscal strictures imposed
by the international lending institutions associated
with our Treasury Department. The General takes
his revenge by recounting his betrayal, spinning
a tale at once haunting and true. But others will
seek revenge of a different order. The sound of
falling may be quiet and remote: a shot not fired
in the woods; the silent unraveling of a marriage;
a friendship abandoned without explanation. Or
it may be as thunderous as a plane slicing into
a building, a bomb exploding in a cave. In any
event it is up to writer to record that sound,
which has its own music. And there is consolation
in getting it right, as the General learns at
daybreak, when his guest departs. His old nurse
asks if he is feeling calmer now. Yes, he replies.
And as they walk through the portrait gallery
he instructs her to restore his wife’s picture
to its place on the wall, for she can no longer
hurt him. The nurse makes the sign of the cross
on his forehead, then they kiss. “But like
every kiss,” Márai confides, “this
one is an answer, a clumsy but tender answer to
a question that eludes the power of language.”
A kind of absolution is thus conferred upon the
teller of this tale--and upon the reader, too.
Isn’t that a kiss we desire?
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