As the fountains go
A poem for Vigen
October 30, 3003
The Iranian
Bi to khamusham dar in shahre farang
Tuye qorbat dele man baaz shode tang
Kei mishe baaz dobaare shab berese
Taa bebinam khaabe tehrune qashanq
Yaade shahram az del penhun nemishe
Be khodaa hich kojaa tehrun nemishe
So another one
bites the dust. Vigen died. Perhaps like so many others I didn't
think I would ever hear such ludicrous news. As a matter of fact
I don't
believe it. It is just shocking how words lie, but also how sometimes
these lies manage to shake us into thinking, thanking, and recognizing
again our members and remembering.
Vigen is not dead, at least
if death would mean anything like an end. Let there be no talk
of heaven and hell: Vigen is always, and has always been and will
forevermore be, a resident of Fardows, always in ecstatic
song searching and becoming being-there and arriving.
Tonight I'd
like to translate a poem by Rainer
Maria Rilke for us, and for Vigen, our Armenian-Iranian Orpheus:
The
Eighth Elegy
With all eyes sees the creature
The open, only our eyes are,
How backwards and turned on themselves,
Traps around their free exit.
What the outside is, we know from the gaze
Of the animal only; for already we twist around
And compel the early child to see backwards,
Figures, not the Open, that
In the face of the animal is so deep. Free from death.
It we only see; the free animal
Has its going-under ever behind it
And before it God; and when it is alright, it goes
In eternity, so as the fountains go.
We have never, not one single
day,
The pure space before us in which the flowers
Eternally bloom. Always it is world
And never nowhere without nothing: the pure
Unsupervised that one breaths,
Unendingly knows, and desires not. As a child
Loses oneself one in the quiet to this, and becomes
Riddled. Or someone dies and is it.
For close to death, one sees death no more
And stares outwards, maybe with a great animal glance.
Lovers, were it not for the other who
Adjusts the view, are near to it, and marvel...
As if by an oversight, is opened
Behind the other... but from it no one ever
Gets away, and for it the world becomes ever again.
Always devoted to invention,
We see onto it, the mirroring of the free
Darkened before us. Or that an animal,
A mute-one, looks quietly through us through,
This is called destiny: to be up against
And nothing but that, always up against.
If the consciousness of
our kind
Were in the secure animal that pulls towards us
In the other direction – it would wrench us around
With its change. Yet its being is for it
Unending, uncomposed and without an outlook
On its own situation, pure, so like its perspective.
And where we see future, there it sees everything
And itself in everything and healed forever.
And yet in the watchful
warm animal
There is weight and worry of a great melancholy.
For over it too, always hangs what often also
Overwhelms us, - the memory,
As if that, for which one yearns
Has been nearer, more worthy, and its connection
Unendingly tender. Here everything is distance,
And there it was breath. After the first home,
The second one is for it androgynous and fleeting.
O salvation of
the small creature,
That always remains in the womb that carried it out;
Oh the bliss of the gnat that still hops inside,
Even when it has its wedding: for womb is everything.
And behold the half-assurance of the bird
That knows both and from its origin,
As if it were a soul of the Etruscans,
From a dead who received a space,
Be it with a resting figure as a cover.
And how consternated is one who must fly
And yet stems from a womb. How shocked
Before itself, flashes across the sky, like a crack
Through a cup. So rips the trace
Of the bat through the porcelain of evening.
And we: spectators,
always, everywhere,
Turned towards everything and never outside!
Us it fills. We organize it. It falls apart.
We organize it again and fall ourselves apart.
Who has twisted us
around so that we,
Whatever we do, are in the posture
Of someone who is going away? Like he on
The furthest hill that offers him his whole valley,
He, who once again turns, stops, lingers -,
So we live and always take leave.
(Note: Animal, death and
bird share the same -- masculine and neuter -- possessive pronoun,
sein, which when capitalized
means "to be". Creature and gnat are feminine.)
***
So, there is one less exile in the Diaspora, and
one less infidel to break the laws of the Islamic Republic and
one less refugee,
whose plight can be played
down by the reformists and their propaganda machine.
Good night and good morning.
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