The body is bound
Jesus travels, a spirit, on the waves
—Rumi (Arberry translation)
Another memory is of Fayez and me at a school picnic at Pan’s Grotto in the occupied Golan Heights of Syria. The young Litani river is forced out at great speed with a roar echoing through a rocky glen. Hence, Pan’s grotto. Fayez had the habit of picking the biggest blossom in a garden for his lady love. All day I sulked alone seeing him walk with his heiress; a big, purple rose in hand. The deafening roar of the river increased my panic. At picnic’s end Fayez gave me the rose. I cast it on the waters.
FAIRUZ SINGS ‘LEBANON’
Again after five years
And I listen with the pores of my skin
I listen with the wounds
I gave Lebanon
And Lebanon gave me
I listen with the voice of Fairuz
I listen with her ears
and with her eyes
the voice of exile divorce sorrow
and more sorrow
I love you
My love my love my love my love
Why have you left me alone?
Your valleys I love
goodbye to the almond trees
of Lebanon
I listen with the voice
of the boys
who fall out of olive trees
who mingle with its streams
who become each stone and pebble
of Lebanon
Who die die
who translate for me
Their Lebanon
Their love love love
How can I leave it alone?
To remember it is to open a wound
To leave it is to open a wound
Fairuz: I’m that bleeding wound
Israel lays siege again to the Beaufort of my heart
I surrender: not everyone is meant for martyrdom
My final image of Palestine is Jean-Jouve’s:
Do not speak to me
of golden domes
The angel-lovers of Jerusalem …
Tell me of two steps we took
Joining our hands
in the faltering darkness.
Hyderabad
2008
Garden of Bliss
Prologue
21 February 1999 (Anaïs Nin’s birthday)
It is all a matter of concentration: If you concentrate on knowledge you become a wise man; if on money, a rich man; if on love, a prostitute but if you concentrate on god you become a saint.
—S. Radhakrishnan, Commentary on Gita
Every great document of civilization is at the same time a document of great barbarism. And when this document changes hands each transfer is marked by great violence.
—Walter Benjamin, ‘Essay on the Philosophy of History,’ in Illuminations
Sex is a way to sainthood.
—Anaïs Nin, Diary III
Why I write
I
‘As everyone knows by now, I’m homosexual.’ To write this sentence and to speak it publicly, which is a great liberation, is why I write. How did I write my first poem? I was beaten up while cruising the streets of a small university town in Michigan, one summer in the early 1970s. The man was a Chicano, a migrant Mexican labourer, nameless, of course. He wanted everything: love, money, food, sex, just as I did then because I was a poor student in the world’s richest democracy. I remember the room we made love in. I went into the kitchen to make tea, a light liqueurish Darjeeling which smelt of home. He stole the Nepali knife I had hung on the wall to beautify my rented room and tried it on the writing desk, cracking it from side to side. Was this the man I had made love to five seconds before? Was he a brute or a human being? Did I not wish to go over from my effete life into the vitalism of his life? Had I not stolen his manhood by stealth in a bed? Was he not justified in wishing me dead?
‘12 red roses splattered the shiftfront of my chest.’
—Lorca
The next night I could not sleep. I had stitches on my nose, slowly healing. But I was afraid of the dark. I changed my night lodgings. I slept in a different room the next night. I did not want my private terror to pursue me. In the morning I awoke to Josephine Jacobsen reading on the radio:
All need is dry/Rain is a metaphor.
Sex is a metaphor. A poem is a metaphor.
Love is a poem; a made thing.
And a poem is love; a communication.
I am not mad. I write in order not to go mad.
Zen is the art of not committing suicide, not going insane, not becoming a cripple.
—Suzuki, Zen Buddhism
(I learnt much later that Josephine Jacobson, consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, was crippled at birth).
There are no birds this year
In last year’s nest
I’m sane now
Then, I was mad.
—Basho, ‘Haiku’
II
I’m in a different room now. My mother has suddenly become a cripple. She cannot walk since the day father left her for another woman. I am sixteen. I know there is a lesson somewhere in this.
And I go back into this mansion of memory with rooms within rooms. And I’m a child of five. I’m sick with malaria. It is 1952 and all the quinine won’t work for this soul sickness.
I am in love with my mother.
She has a soft green kimono of mercerized cotton which always smells clean, and her long hair is soft. This mansion of memory could be my rich father’s house on the sea at Bombay or it could be my mother’s womb, the only place where I remember being truly happy.
My mother gives me her breast. A rich creamy soft breast. She lets me suckle long because I’m her only son.
Many years later I had a vision of the Phaeneromeni Mother, in Nicosia, Cyprus while awaiting a visa to Israel. She gave the Christ child a rich creamy soft breast. Phaeneromeni means the One Who Appears. The Divine Mother appeared to me and led me to the Promised Land just as my mother had led me up the staircase of sorrow leading to Bandra’s Mount Mary in Bombay.
III
Now I’m in a different room of memory. I’m twenty-three. I’m in Virgil Lokke’s office at Purdue University saying ‘I do not want to die before knowing everything.’ Virgil led Dante through Hell. Surely there must be a way out of this mess I made of my life at twelve! And now Virgil is dead.
He was to me a father I never had. I had a father who laughed at a son who wrote poems instead of making money. He also frowned at daughters who did not marry, but praised their money making. My sisters and I were born modern, in independent India. But my poor father, who lost his doctor father at birth to the 1917 world epidemic of influenza, was brought up by an adoptive grandfather who was a wealthy but illiterate jeweller living in fear of an Avestan god and of Victorian morality.
Before her marriage my mother taught Gujarati in a Parsi school, sang Indian ragas, wore homespun for Gandhi and discussed Adyar’s theosophy. Father put paid to all that. I identified with my mother’s suffering.
So the first poem I wrote was on a photograph of the woman painter Georgia O’Keefe:
Gnarled, snarled hands
And light on the temple
A world is not given
But made.
It was not about life but about art. I was about life-in-art. Then came along Anaïs Nin saying pretty much the same thing. It was the Mother, the woman-artist who caught me and liberated me.
IV
When Venice was a village Isfahan was a world-empire.
Isfahan, nesf-e-jehan
Isfahan is half the world. Now I’m in the Sophy’s palace. I wander through the music room. Why was a king called the Sophy? Because he was a Sufi. He owned nothing. He held everything in trust for God.
When I gave up my father’s wealth, because homosexual sons don’t inherit, I gained the world.
Jalal-ud-din Rumi and Shams-i-Tabrizi. The teacher and student as lovers. Shams was murdered
on his way to Mecca, and Rumi poured out his heart in poems. ‘Separation leads to pain,’ is the first teaching of Zen Buddhism, of Sufism, of Christianity which speaks of a Fall. Rumi was Goddrunk and he danced and sang of the Return to Wholeness describing vast circles in space with his body.
I travelled to America, Iran, India, Tibet, Arabia, Palestine, Israel, Italy, Britain, Germany—vaster and vaster circles in space. I travelled like Rama for fourteen years.
I lost my innocence in Iran. My hair turned white almost overnight. Saw killing in the streets with my own eyes. A boy lifted his hand to throw a stone. He was met with the soldiers’ machine-gun fire. His hand was blown off. He was brought badly bleeding from the groin to the carpet shop where I had hid. The stench of the fresh young blood oozing purposelessly on those priceless carpets! In Iran, in Kurdistan, in Palestine, this same blood springs up as poppies in the fields at spring.
I learnt to love my students as Shams loved Rumi.
V
On 19 February 1999 my teacher was murdered in Bombay. Mehroo Jussawalla lived alone, a spinster from one of the city’s leading legal families. She taught us moral values culled from Spenser. She was murdered by a brute in her sleep. I wrote her a poem:
The Loneliness of My Spinster Teacher
The staircase would humorously creak
To bear your load
And you would laugh out loud
At the wooden protest
O that this too too solid flesh would melt!
That was no cosmic joke!
And the table groaning
Under mountains of food
And the full belly laughing at noon
There were other things under other suns
The Oxford girl reading Marvell or Donne
These hands were not meant for work or the kill
But only to prise a meaning out of a text
Her father’s own Penelope
And the cobwebs and the tapestry
The warp and woof of familial love
(Mother dead)
The weevil in the bin at work
The termite in the leather bookbinding
Ruskin, Venice and the honeyed sun of love
Sinking over Malabar Hill
The evenings longer
The laughter sharper
And then the night
(On the map
Bombay is a hand
But it is actually an open mouth)
Coda:
There was this healthy woman
With a disease, so lonely
That grew and grew
And the working-class thief
Who came up at night to kill
Was really a redeemer …
The branch is bent when green
And if not, then—
So I write to make sense of death.
What was Mehroo Jussawalla’s crime? She hurt no one. She was dutiful daughter, a conscientious teacher. She did social service as the women of her class are wont to do. Miss Jussawalla’s crime was that she could not see beyond her hilltop balcony to the slums below. In all probability a mafia landlord hired a slum dweller to axe her for her property. Walter Benjamin says that it is a fascist society that does not change property relations between social classes. Nazim Hikmet, whom I quote, writes:
The branch is bent when green
And if not, then—
So I am a teacher.
When Ramakrishna preached throughout India someone shouted from the crowd:
Do something for the suffering people of India
I CAN DO NOTHING, the master said.
‘This is the position of the artist,’ says Anaïs Nin, commenting on this episode.
‘I have taken the warning to my heart. I couldn’t, but my students will make the revolution.
When the revolution comes I will be the first one to be killed.’ (Nin)
How I Write
I shut my bedroom door, unplug the phone and the radio, sit cross-legged like a yogi in the centre of my bed and write. I say:
Knowledge is what comes by osmosis in a bed
Or
My poems are written in bed
They are meant for other’s heads
But this is just the final process. I write my poems on the streets, in buses, while shopping or teaching, in my head. As a medical student Zubin Mehta said a Brahms concerto was always running through his head as he cut up a dogfish.
Proust had his cork-lined room; Anaïs Nin her fireproof bunker. It is a luxury to say poets write about nature. They do not. They write about culture. It was a luxury for Kim Novak, the 50s movie-star to bathe in a sea-facing bathroom at her Big Sur home with polar bears for company. But I bet her neighbour, Henry Miller, would bolt at the sight of a bear. In fact he writes Nin from Corfu that he longs to be at the Opera. The modernist poet is a citified being. As I wrote:
In a city where behemoths
Compete for space with buses
The absence of poetry is also a poetry.
Poetry is not about Nature. It is about Homer. The poet ransacks the traditions. If I’m in Iran I read Sufi poetry rather than the Avesta because I need to make sense of the Other, as a Parsi I need to know the Moslem.
Enemy, my enemy I name you friend. (Neruda)
Hart Crane tore around his New York City bachelor apartment crying: ‘I am Baudelaire; I am Rimbaud; I’m Christ.’ So the French poetry of symbolism comes naturally to anyone seeking to revolutionize sensibility. It did to Lorca, Crane, Nin, Ginsberg.
My first published poem, ‘Circles’, was based on the Soviet silent film ‘Earth’ by Dovzhenko:
He died dancing
Among harvest fruit
His widow tore her weeds in grief
And it rained
Till the melons rotted
And the landlord who shot him
for a piece of land
Was so joy ridden
He stuck his head
In the mud
And danced in circles
Till he died.
I was trained in the West. I was not brought up on the Shah Nameh, which is the Persian epic, nor on the Hindu Mahabharata. I read Homer and about the Greek wars at school. I saw my warring Parsi family as cursed as the House of Atreus. At college I found an echo of my conditions in A Streetcar Named Desire or A Long Day’s Journey into Night, in Phaedra first and only later in the epic of the hapless Siavosh accused wrongfully by his stepmother.
It is when we make our lives into myths that we find our true meaning. This is, of course, a paraphrase of Nin who might be paraphrasing Jung.
So our writing is marked by hybridity and mirror imaging: Echoes within echoes, box-within-box as in a Chinese box, mirrors mirroring mirrors in a fun house. To parody Leonard Cohen:
Giving head in a hired bed
With the taxi throbbing in the street
How else do I make sense of the boys I bed? No, I do not write to beautify them; I write in order to go over to them, as Pasolini did. So there is this great democracy of sex and death, Whitman knew, and Lorca, and poor Wilde, and of course, Pasolini. And the boys we dream of come out of the Old City slums or from the recently bourgeoisified proletariat. They all imitate Shah Rukh or Salman, Saif or Aamir, the four reigning Khans of Bollywood. And, as I teach Kubla Khan, I dream him and become him in my poems.
Just as my mother was the 1940s tragediennes Meena Kumari or Nargis with her tears, I was the 1960s gamins Sadhana or Saira at sixteen being wooed in Bombay’s overcrowded suburban trains. If this sounds weird, I’m conscious of it. Art does not imitate life as Arnold was silly enough to believe, but it is life that imitates Art as Wilde saw it in The Decay of Lying.
What is the relation of a homosexual artist to his body? Poems are written on the body. Ask the English painter Francis Bacon or the Japanese gay Zen poet, Takahashi. My student writes about my work in Deccan Chronicle in 1994: ‘Hoshang Merchant has a beautiful body.’ (You can now change that ‘has’ to ‘had.’)
Nin was beautiful into her sixties. Ginsberg was photographed nude by Richard Avedon with his handsome lover placed behind him so that we see the hippie poet’s large belly and largish member delicately cut out of the frame. Or, take the gay Mapplethorpe’s photographs of the body. Once in a Greenwich Village gallery I saw a gay artist mount a cross in the nude to complete his real-life sculpture entitled ‘The Crucifixion’. In a Japanese film on the relation between silence and the spoken mantra in Zen Buddhism, the entire sutra was tattooed on the live body of a monk to the beating of gongs, lighting of fires, loud chanting, and of course the monk’s screams. But these are extreme examples. Yet no one is surprised to read at school that Poe was found dead naked on the city’s busiest thoroughfare one morning, a bodily sacrifice to the bitch-goddess who devoured him for hymning the moon goddesses.
The gay Parsi poet’s body and language are colonized by Parsi culture first and then by the dominant culture he inhabits in India or Iran or the West—by heterosexual notions of sexuality, by colonial history. Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity all forbid homosexuality. The men we sleep with in childhood are married men who are heterosexual or bisexual.
The language we speak at home is a hybrid Parsi/Gujarati born out of the long love of the Parsi for his Gujarati neighbour. We took to English like ducks to water but we lost our language a second time and we stand accused of ‘chamchagiri’ (toadyism) towards the British. The case of Kafka comes to mind. An Austrian Jew, he spoke Yiddish but wrote in German to his eternal shame and glory.
One way for me to rejoin India was translation. I came to Urdu through Hindi, Persian, Arabic: the languages I picked up on my travels.
Art is to be lived, not merely read. Now that is a dangerous proposition leading to the madhouse and to death.
The Man Who Would Be Queen Page 11