Joining the Tempest of Voices

Joining the Tempest

13 Nov. 2019

Years ago—the spring of 1971, to be more precise—The Paris Review printed “A Song and the Sultan,” by Mahmoud Darwish, translated from the Arabic by Rose Styron.

It contains a firm message to talk back to stifling authoritarian single-mindedness, and a pattern to pursue to that end:

“[The Sultan] said, ‘The fault is in the mirror

So let your singer be silent…’"

To which the Song replies:

“Songs are the logic of the sun…”

“…the pebbles of the Square are becoming

like open wounds …”

When the Sultan resisted me

I grasped the key of the morning

And groped my way with the lamps of wounds.

Oh how wise I was when I gave my heart

To the call of the tempest!

So many signals here:

“the lamps of wounds”—as with Rumi’s “The wound is the place where the light enters you,” and Leonard Cohen’s “There is a crack, a crack, in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” The cuts and slashes, the painful wounds inflicted to keep us in line, establish our private and public boundaries. The wounds and the pain establish when and where we are being misled or going wrong, and indicate the need to turn ourselves aside to pursue more positive results. They enlighten us to the errors of our ways and of those who would lead us.

The wounds hold out the “key of the morning,” awaken us to “the logic of the sun” we are here ever to grope our way towards, guided by the message of the enlightening wounds.

My favourite part tonight under the influence of a full moon shining in my window across this desk, is the business of giving your heart to “call of the tempest.” Joining it is multifarious. 

• It is to join the tempest of voices saying “No,” “No More,” or asserting “Not this way.” 

• It is to blow against whatever creates and sustains the wounds as mere pain and destruction of what would advance the quality of individual and collective life. 

• It is to recognize and point out that “more of the same,” or “getting back what we have lost,” reclaiming lost greatness, or any claim trying to pass itself off as the permanent, immovable answer to all, for they are: the building blocks of the wall that says “Beyond me is all hell,” when it is actually what walls us in to the hell it creates for the enrichment of the Sultan and his cronies.

So learn to welcome the blandishments and warnings for what they are—the knives that open the wounds that indicate it is time to grasp that key of the morning, and to refuse the invitation to silence. Join the tempest of voices, be part of the “loud mirror” that the Sultan so resents. The more desperately he protests the fault of the mirror, its "fake news," the better.