Seeking a Poetics of the Fertile Crescent
2010; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 55; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-5804
Autores Tópico(s)Archaeology and Historical Studies
ResumoFertile Crescent sweeps across the eastern shoreline of the Mediterranean, down to Egypt, and stretches inland into the desert wastes of modern Iraq. That's a large enough area to host a conglomeration of myths and oral traditions, each with its own aesthetics. Here, I would like to describe three literary models, three ancient paradigmatic forms--the katabasis, the qasida, and the arabesque--that appear to have emerged out of specific topologies or ground conditions of a region that has served as a conduit between the East and the West for thousands of years. But why a poetics in the first place? Do we really need yet another literary model? Might it not be best to simply go on your nerve, as Frank O'Hara wrote in Personism: A Manifesto? If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run. O'Hara was constantly looking for ways to outwit his own habits of thought; his spontaneity, his own kinetic discharges and indeterminacies, were not only a part of the poetics of his time and place, but may have originated, albeit unknowingly, in one of the models I will be discussing here. But I am running ahead of myself. Why a poetics then? Or rather why seek a poetics? It is the pursuit here that counts, and in effect the three topographical models I will be introducing share a common rule--they are all on the move. It follows that the region's vast, shifting sands and the sort of nomadic existence it fostered would leave an imprint on its poetry. To inscribe is to possess and be possessed by the land. Perhaps this is what D.H. Lawrence meant in speaking of Walt Whitman: The soul living her life along the incarnate mystery of the open road. mystery of the journey here encompasses both the ancientness of the three topologies in their eastern dress, as well as their relocated western guise in our own time. We inscribe and are inscribed by traces of all three landforms in the sprawl of our own urban scapes, in our thoroughfares, tentacular suburbs, and straggle of strip malls--locus of the modern imagination. Ever since the Biblical injunction to Abraham, Get thee out of thy country, caravans have crossed and recrossed the Fertile Crescent. Step out into the desert and you can still find traces of temporary habitation, way stations, watering holes, the rutted remains of ancient spice routes and the Roman King's Highway. marvel is that so many people tramped through these barren grounds. There were, to name a few, Canaanites and Hittites, Jebusites, Hebrews and Mesopotamians, Egyptians and Arabians, Phoenicians, Philistines, Persians, Greeks and Romans, Nabateans, Byzantines, Muslims, Franks and Ottomans, Mameluks, Circassians, and closer to our own times, Palestinians, Druze, Jews, Armenians, Germans, Italians, French, and British. These were nomads and farmers, seafarers and caravaneers, slaves and freemen, merchants and mercenaries, colonists and zealots. Some drove their neighbors out, while others took on their dress and customs. All insured that the flow of goods between Asia and Europe continued to run through their territory. Household gods were swapped on the sly like choice marbles, divine names reshuffled and duplicated in the heavens--at least until the Israelites trekked out of Sinai with the brainteaser, EHEYE ASHER EHEYE, I AM THAT I AM, or, in another rendition, I WILL EVER BE WHAT I NOW AM. Predating the Sinaic theophany by a millennium, however, are the Sumerian tales of the goddess Inanna, inscribed in cuneiform on clay tablets. And it is specifically in The Descent of that we witness the very first description of a katabasis, or a down-spiraling voyage into the Great goddess Inanna's journey begins by the awakening of her auditory faculty, for the word in Sumerian also stands for wisdom: From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below. (1) What follows is a narrative of descent, bodily fragmentation, rescue, substitution, self-transformation (common to so many myths), and slow reascent: Inanna is stripped of her clothes and jewels as she passes through the seven gates of the underworld; struck by her envious sister Ereshkigal, ruler of the underworld, she is turned into a corpse, /a piece of rotting meat, /and hung from a hook on the wall, until rescued and reanimated from the Great Below by her faithful servant, Ninshubur. …
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