Peter Valente
Plurality, Heterodoxy, and the Performance of Desire in Murat Nemet-Nejat’s Io’s Song (Chax, 2019)
through the prism of multiplicity, disintegration and chaos to have a glimpse of the divine (Islamic or pagan) unity is the essence of the Sufi experience. – Murat Nemet-Nejat
Murat Nemet-Nejat’s book length poem, Io’s Song, is as much a visual poem as it is a poem of linguistic play. Reading the poem is akin to watching frames from an experimental film, the words as a constellation in space, as much as it’s an auditory experience, so varied sonically, that it reminds me of the numerous and different sounds I find in freely improvised jazz music. For Murat, the empty space of the page is crucial. It is a kind of force field with a strong gravitational pull, and there are points where we enter a kind of black hole, the absence of light, where words seem to be in a process of forming and reforming, as they are pulled apart, emerging “on the other side of the doorway.” We are at the origin, prior to meaning, “at silences's threshold.” :
disappearance
ro!
or
o r
o p
o r!
o r
r
p
The pimp dropping encouraging hints on the other side of the doorway
In this boiling luminosity of language, the letters are tactile, in motion, fluid, an “erro / tic liquid,” a function of intense desire. Here I read the pun in errotic as erratic, and so in this primal space, words are not yet bound to their various authoritarian, imperial, meanings, but erratic, subversive signs at play in a linguistic pool, prior to Language; they’re also “errotic.” In Aristophanes, who was influenced by Orphism, we have this interesting description of the birth of Eros:
At the beginning there was only Chaos, Night (Nyx), Darkness (Erebus), and the Abyss (Tartarus). Earth, the Air and Heaven had no existence. First, the blackwinged Night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Darkness, and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Love (Eros) with his glittering golden wings, swift as the whirlwinds of the tempest. He mated in the deep Abyss with dark Chaos, winged like himself, and thus hatched forth our race, which was the first to see the light.
Murat speaks of desire (which is transgressive and erotic) as a vibration, a weaving of sounds, that avoid the trap of “content” which inhibits and restricts this motion. And thus the plurality of ideas are not burdened by the necessity for a conclusion, but free to coalesce or disperse in an unbounded space. It is this character of the language that gives it an erotic thrust. Standardized language is the language of the dictator, the colonialist, but here, language is freer, uninhibited, even childish, or coded like the language of a prostitute.
The following is a good example of this erotic thrust; it also shows how language operates in the space of Io’s song, the centrality of the pun:
pour
n unicorn
u-
cop-
ia
Pour / n = Porn but also “to pour, ejaculate?” “Unicorn,” the phallic image but also a fantastical horse, picks up the rhyme in “pourn.” The next line picks up the “u” sound from “un-icorn” and then we also have “cop-ia” with the pun on “utopia.” “Cop” suggests “copulation.” So a “u-cop-ia” is, roughly, a state of continuous copulation, i.e. of continuous linguistic play, continuous vibration of sound, subversive, and savage. But “Copia” is also the Latin word meaning “abundance or supply.” For example, Cornucopia combines “cornu” (Latin for ‘horn’) with “copia” and means “Horn of Plenty” or “Horn of Abundance.” So that the plurality of meanings at play in this poem never resolve into a final interpretation, but reveal endless possibilities. It is like an improvisation that is not recorded, left to play out its soundings in the moment, and not subject to the document of a recording, which in repetition simply plays “His master’s Voice,” which was the famous trademark of the recording industry. Except, here we could say that the “recording” is the printed page. And yet, Murat has said that the live performance of IO’s song, when he performed it at the Poetry Project in 1995, was unique, and could not be repeated. To this extant, these words present a challenge to a reader who expects the same reading every time. In fact, there are poems that cannot be “read” but only experienced visually. Meanings are fluid and dependent on a reader willing to navigate this plural space, to sift the strands, appearing and disappearing, arriving and departing in a shadowplay of language.
There is a stutter deep inside this language, it is the language of the mythical Io, which is the voice of intense desire:
stutter
birth's
gno -
m an -
cla -
ture
The stutter appears in the language of the poem as fragments of desire: “oh, weeping fragments of language / the flower follower of my soul.” Desire is always immanent. We remember the story of Eros and Psyche. In the Greek, Psyche literally means, “Soul, or breath, life or the animating force.” The child of Eros and Psyche was Hedone (physical pleasure, or bliss.) In the following poem, which refers to the story of Pan’s pursuit of Artemis, we see how desire, thwarted, expresses itself as an absence; in response to Pan’s sigh, the reeds, into which Artemis has been transformed, “made also the echo of a sign”:
Pornography
..................., flowing
peaceful along the sandy banks, whose water
halted her flight, and she implored her sisters
to change her form, and so, when Pan had caught her
and thought he held a nymph, it was only reeds
that yielded in her arms, and while he
sighed
the soft air stirring in the reeds made also
the echo of a sign!
Desire is like wind stirring through the reeds. This alludes also to the Sufi idea that god cannot be seen, but only felt as the wind rustling the trees. God is felt as an absence. Murat has spoken of a godless Sufism. Not stasis but movement that is key. So, Io’s song is essentially about desire, which gives rise to the subversive play of words, destabilizing the status quo. The desire is unbounded, even vulgar, playing with high and low culture, the “glory hole” and the “rape of Io” as well as the high culture of the Greeks, and Walter Benjamin’s philosophy: “drinking stars from the urinal.” To perform this dance between high and low the language plays with performance and drag:
in the force fields of the wounded slashed I
the heightened graphicness of a life
is revealed.
This graphicness suggests a visual performance. Identity is fluid, the I is “slashed.” Murat speaks of “Hermaphrodic pronouns.” And the plural, and heterodoxical language that emerges from this split, is played out as a kind of drag performance. Sarah Chant writes, in “The Plurality and Quasi-Anarchism of Drag,” “Drag reinvents the experience of everyday life. Carol Ehrlich notes in Anarchism, Feminism and Situationism that this is done by ‘creating situations that disrupt what seems to be the natural order of things’” Furthermore, Chant writes, “What fascinates me about drag is precisely this: it opens up the possibilities for mind-body experience, creating a space and opportunity to go beyond the boundaries of expression.” In the following poem, Murat writes, “he made love biting her own lips.” The slippage in gender illustrates a drag performance. Take the following poem:
On the arms of the maternal smell
barbarians' scars.
Hermaphrodic pronouns.
He made love biting her own lips.
Her delights d o l p h i n - l i k e
they showed her penis above the ailments
he lived in
Clitoris arose dahlia!
ah, my c-l-i-t-o -p-e-t-r-a
a rose!
bitten tenderly
This erotic poem also plays on the name Cleopatra, substituting an “i” for “eo” to form the word “clit.” Furthermore, there is the word “petra” which is substituted for “patra.” “Petra” is the feminine form of “Peter.” “Patra” means “Father.” So the masculine is feminized, with a female genital organ. Murat’s subversive wordplay turns a beautiful woman into a post-op transsexual!!! In this way, he subverts the ideality contained in the name, “Cleopatra,” creating a fluid identity, that retains the ambiguity of performance and problematizes the distinctions of male and female, of subject and object, of here and elsewhere, of language itself. When a person is in drag, “a new being is born,” (a new kind of poem):
Nymphs
words bathe in water
and explode
on the other side
a new being is born
These could also be the Nymphs that aided Artemis by transforming her into reeds to escape from Pan. Desire does not find consummation in this poem. Nor does it seek it: “Intensity of feeling is words' inability to arrive at their illusive destinations. Intensity's that distance.” The failure of language projects onto the visual: “The eye always can see more than the tongue can speak. (That's what leads to a crisis of reading.) The eye enters the mysteries of the soul (of the world) more fully than words can.” Desire is not consummation but transformation, as IO herself is transformed. These kinds of puns and wordplay are essential to the poem, they subvert hallowed meanings or references, in this case the name Cleopatra, and delight in such inversion of textual meanings. They are also a kind of visual game, since eye sees double when looking at them. Take for example the following poem:
s p i n i t u a l w o r d s s p u n n i n g i n b o d i l e s s l i g h t
l i g h t l y , w i s h f u l l y w h i s t f u l l y ? w h i s p f u l l y -
w h i m f u l l y , - w h i p f u l l y w h a m f u l l y -? w h e r e f u l l y
w o m b f u l l y w h i c h f u l l y w h o r l f u l l y , e t c .
A quick glance will see “spiritual” but the word is “spinitual.” Not “spinning” but “spunning.” This reminds me of the exhaustive experience that can be a result of the dizzy ecstatic vertigo that a lover in Sufism experiences when he is rising to a higher spiritual plane. Words are no longer part of a familiar language. We are in a spiritual plane, a “bodiless light.” Absence of Ego. There is the suggestion of birthing in “wombfully,” there is whim in “whimfully,” which suggests an impulse or passion,“whipfully whamfully” (this is the violence [in spirituality and love] that is the heart of Sufi sensibility; the violence is sublimated as a cosmic principle), time is obliterated in the poem, suggested by “wherefully” (another Sufi principle), and there is the helix in “whorlfully” which suggest dizzying movement. The entire poem suggests an ecstatic experience just beyond language. Visually, the poem succeeds in disorienting the reader, giving him a taste of that ecstatic vertigo.
Io’s Song is also a multi-vocal text. It is heterodox in its inclusion of numerous and disparate texts: there are poems and fragments and translations and poems by other poets such as Holderlin and the Turkish poet, Sami Baydar, woven throughout the poem, creating contradictory resonances, questioning even the idea of the primacy of the author. This plurality of voices subverts the idea of an authentic text and is part of its drag performance. Instead of authenticity we are given a language stripped of its familiar clothing, naked as a child, its words unabashed as first utterances, experimenting with words. But it is not only literary texts and translations that are included. Murat also includes a poem he wrote for his grandson. It is a charming and delightful poem:
Wombles: A Lullaby
(first written at the request of my grandson Abey that I write a poem for him)
for my grandchildren Abey, Hannah, Benny, Lola, and Gen-Gen (Cleo)
I knew of a pig with a pink nose
It always hunted with its nose for truffles
But that was not enough
It entered our kitchen and ate my breakfast waffles.
And I knew of a Siamese cat with big whiskers
It always scooted in the room without a whisper
But I knew when it meowed
It was asking for my cucumber pickles.
And I knew of a dog with drooping ears
called Wombles, that when I took a bath
It chased after the bubbles
I laughed and laughed that took away all my troubles.
The first part, “Signatures’ Colors (A Biographical Essay) Io’s Song,” enacts Io’s madness, after she is turned into a heifer in the myth, and as she wanders from country to country, crossing the path between Propontis and the Black Sea, which became known as the Bosphorus, which literally means, “the passage of the cow.” Io’s speech explodes in a multivocal, heterodox, plurality, punning, bending words, stretching them, scattering them across the page. Murat writes, in the essay, “The Problem Poem: Io's Song, a Crisis of Reading,” “Io's Song is a human voice speaking in an alien medium, through the mouth of a cow.” This is her/his heterodox language. This is the eda of Io.
But this is also a poem about history, about the problem of autobiography, about its essentially provisional nature. What should a person include in an autobiography, what series of events, in what order, what facts can be said to comprise a life? A life remains fragmentary and will not cohere, in a rational totality. The first section is called a biographical essay. Here we are introduced to Io’s madness. The next section is called the “Afterlife of Io, an Autobiography.” Pasolini spoke of a life in terms of cutting a film; the life existed between the cuts. The measure of a life can only be taken in death. And so here, in speaking about the autobiographical, Murat imagines the afterlife of Io. Here, we are “somewhere else….in the arms of the internal.” But eternity or God is not in a beyond. Eternity is a flat space: “Eden spins tautologies.. That's the mirage of depth, suppressing the reality of death in another space. god is everywhere. How can He know depth. can't feel perspective. Divine language is flat. Departure's arrival.” For Murat there is a problem and contradiction in the idea of a Paradise that is beyond. Death, or for that matter, Paradise, do not inhabit some mysterious elsewhere. It is here. The following poem puns on this idea of Paradise, even suggesting perhaps Mallarme’s famous Un coup de dés.
P a r a / D i c e
P a r a d e / I c e
Here, a shift of stress/accent from the first to second syllable in “Paradise” creates alternate meanings. Murat jokes about the idea of Paradise: it is an icy parade around a pair of dice! But the word “die” is hidden in dice, it’s the singular form of the word. As para means in front of or around, we have here “in front of death.” “Parade,” from the mid 17th century French, literally means a “showing,” from the Italian parata, based on the Latin parare, “to furnish, or prepare.” So we have a kind of showing or preparing for Ice! The absurdity of these permutations in language is meant to subvert the notion of a “Garden of Eden, or Paradise.” As a matter of fact, the icy quality is more in keeping with Dante’s Hell! Murat writes, “The Greek root of Parádeisos is an enclosed park. But the whole history of paradise in the west is about expulsion.” There is the exclusion of non-western languages or culture. For example, today there is the problem of immigration at the border, and the Trump administration’s racist policies of exclusion. And the rise of Nationalism in support of the superiority of the white race. My family were immigrants who came to America in the 60s. My father could not speak a word of English when he arrived in the States. Through his life he spoke very little English. It was a choice. When I visited Italy with him in the early 90s, I saw his joy speaking in Italian in a café with friends. So I was very sensitive to the difficulties and sacrifices my father made moving to this country. I, myself, was not born here in America but in Salerno, Italy.
Murat quotes Walter Benjamin: “But the subject of all myth’s arrival.” He follows with a quote “The heart yearns for departures. In the v a g a b o u n d a r y of the sea,” putting into the mouth of Odysseus these lines from the Turkish poet Ece Ayhan’s book, The Blind Cat Black, which Murat has translated. The wandering refers, in one respect, to Io’s wanderings from country to country to arrive at the Aegean Sea and Western Anatolia. In Holderlin’s poem, the Ister arrives at the Black Sea which is next to Istanbul. There is also Odysseus’ arrival home from his wanderings. Odysseus does not die at home in Ithaca, but on a second trip he takes after his return, having gone beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar), his boat with his crew sinks in the Atlantic. Dante sees this second trip as an act of pride and puts Odysseus in Hell for it. This idea of arrival / departure is crucial for Murat. In the following poem about this idea of arrival and departure, the personal, subjective vision, becomes, at the end of the poem, objective: “river is a mirror.”
in the arms of the eternal--Odysseus
departure
in the concave mirror
arrival return
in the mirror
departure
in the mirror
arrival
in the mirror
arrival
in the mirror
departure
river
is
a mirror
is
A river (the Bosphorus) flows up and downstream, subject to currents and wind, arriving and departing. So too, the ocean tumbles onto the shore, only to recede again. It can be said too, that there are arrivals and departures in the poem itself: the fragment cannot be said to reside anywhere specifically, semantically, it is provisional, not fixed, it’s meaning is unstable. Poetic meaning is discharged in the interplay between fragments, in a relay. So the fragment is fluid, dynamic as opposed to the fully realized sentence, and in endless expansion: “Whereas what we have is endless expansion, tracing the motions of endless soul.”
I have spoken above about drag performance but there is another kind of performance central to the poem, brought about by the repression of the Jewish religion:
Reintegration
When my dad moved and later brought his family from Iran to Istanbul, he adopted
a new signature in Latin characters. From an unlit corridor entering his study in our
Istanbul apartment as a kid, I saw on his desk pages on which he h'd scribbled practicing
a florid version of his public name "Seifollah" (the Sword of Allah) over and over again.
My parents were Marrano Jews, in Iran, pretending to be Moslems, while practising
Judaism in secret. He'd a warrior Moslem name and a meek Jewish name, the stuttering
Moses’s brother Aaron's, able to speak clearly and glibly, the Torah's first politician and
bureaucrat, the starter of the line of Cohens, the Jew St. Peter.
The adoption of the Muslim religion is made necessary because of the repression of the Jews. So the public Muslim name is a the warrior’s name, (the English of the conqueror, the imperial language,) and the private name is the meek Jewish name, the language of the outsider, the immigrant, the flaneur, the stutterer with an accent, who subverts Standardized English, destabilizes our Latin root. But the Jewish name is of a twofold origin: Moses, the stutterer and Aaron the politician and bureaucrat. For Murat, the Jew is always moving between these two tendencies. But one must remember that this is also a performance to avoid persecution. Disguising the name in another name. A word in another word. A language in another language. And so the pun is crucial to Io’s song. Outwardly it resembles one thing but reveals another. So too, the fragment suggests one thing in isolation, and another in relation. But the poet’s work is serious. As serious as your life.
Io’s Song is an endlessly proliferating text of meanings. It is subversive, multi-vocal, heterodox, raw and savage, fragmentary, playful, absurd; it is a text with puns, visual poems, jokes, translations, poems by other poets, and poems by Murat, where words bend, separate, form and reform, explode, and transform. It is an anti-biography and an anti-autobiography. It is an anarchic text, where intense desire electrifies the blank of the page. Finally, it’s a poem in drag, that performs a subversive and scandalous dance, collapsing the authority of the King’s English, with its eye / I toward the East.
Murat Nemet-Nejat’s book length poem, Io’s Song, is as much a visual poem as it is a poem of linguistic play. Reading the poem is akin to watching frames from an experimental film, the words as a constellation in space, as much as it’s an auditory experience, so varied sonically, that it reminds me of the numerous and different sounds I find in freely improvised jazz music. For Murat, the empty space of the page is crucial. It is a kind of force field with a strong gravitational pull, and there are points where we enter a kind of black hole, the absence of light, where words seem to be in a process of forming and reforming, as they are pulled apart, emerging “on the other side of the doorway.” We are at the origin, prior to meaning, “at silences's threshold.” :
disappearance
ro!
or
o r
o p
o r!
o r
r
p
The pimp dropping encouraging hints on the other side of the doorway
In this boiling luminosity of language, the letters are tactile, in motion, fluid, an “erro / tic liquid,” a function of intense desire. Here I read the pun in errotic as erratic, and so in this primal space, words are not yet bound to their various authoritarian, imperial, meanings, but erratic, subversive signs at play in a linguistic pool, prior to Language; they’re also “errotic.” In Aristophanes, who was influenced by Orphism, we have this interesting description of the birth of Eros:
At the beginning there was only Chaos, Night (Nyx), Darkness (Erebus), and the Abyss (Tartarus). Earth, the Air and Heaven had no existence. First, the blackwinged Night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Darkness, and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Love (Eros) with his glittering golden wings, swift as the whirlwinds of the tempest. He mated in the deep Abyss with dark Chaos, winged like himself, and thus hatched forth our race, which was the first to see the light.
Murat speaks of desire (which is transgressive and erotic) as a vibration, a weaving of sounds, that avoid the trap of “content” which inhibits and restricts this motion. And thus the plurality of ideas are not burdened by the necessity for a conclusion, but free to coalesce or disperse in an unbounded space. It is this character of the language that gives it an erotic thrust. Standardized language is the language of the dictator, the colonialist, but here, language is freer, uninhibited, even childish, or coded like the language of a prostitute.
The following is a good example of this erotic thrust; it also shows how language operates in the space of Io’s song, the centrality of the pun:
pour
n unicorn
u-
cop-
ia
Pour / n = Porn but also “to pour, ejaculate?” “Unicorn,” the phallic image but also a fantastical horse, picks up the rhyme in “pourn.” The next line picks up the “u” sound from “un-icorn” and then we also have “cop-ia” with the pun on “utopia.” “Cop” suggests “copulation.” So a “u-cop-ia” is, roughly, a state of continuous copulation, i.e. of continuous linguistic play, continuous vibration of sound, subversive, and savage. But “Copia” is also the Latin word meaning “abundance or supply.” For example, Cornucopia combines “cornu” (Latin for ‘horn’) with “copia” and means “Horn of Plenty” or “Horn of Abundance.” So that the plurality of meanings at play in this poem never resolve into a final interpretation, but reveal endless possibilities. It is like an improvisation that is not recorded, left to play out its soundings in the moment, and not subject to the document of a recording, which in repetition simply plays “His master’s Voice,” which was the famous trademark of the recording industry. Except, here we could say that the “recording” is the printed page. And yet, Murat has said that the live performance of IO’s song, when he performed it at the Poetry Project in 1995, was unique, and could not be repeated. To this extant, these words present a challenge to a reader who expects the same reading every time. In fact, there are poems that cannot be “read” but only experienced visually. Meanings are fluid and dependent on a reader willing to navigate this plural space, to sift the strands, appearing and disappearing, arriving and departing in a shadowplay of language.
There is a stutter deep inside this language, it is the language of the mythical Io, which is the voice of intense desire:
stutter
birth's
gno -
m an -
cla -
ture
The stutter appears in the language of the poem as fragments of desire: “oh, weeping fragments of language / the flower follower of my soul.” Desire is always immanent. We remember the story of Eros and Psyche. In the Greek, Psyche literally means, “Soul, or breath, life or the animating force.” The child of Eros and Psyche was Hedone (physical pleasure, or bliss.) In the following poem, which refers to the story of Pan’s pursuit of Artemis, we see how desire, thwarted, expresses itself as an absence; in response to Pan’s sigh, the reeds, into which Artemis has been transformed, “made also the echo of a sign”:
Pornography
..................., flowing
peaceful along the sandy banks, whose water
halted her flight, and she implored her sisters
to change her form, and so, when Pan had caught her
and thought he held a nymph, it was only reeds
that yielded in her arms, and while he
sighed
the soft air stirring in the reeds made also
the echo of a sign!
Desire is like wind stirring through the reeds. This alludes also to the Sufi idea that god cannot be seen, but only felt as the wind rustling the trees. God is felt as an absence. Murat has spoken of a godless Sufism. Not stasis but movement that is key. So, Io’s song is essentially about desire, which gives rise to the subversive play of words, destabilizing the status quo. The desire is unbounded, even vulgar, playing with high and low culture, the “glory hole” and the “rape of Io” as well as the high culture of the Greeks, and Walter Benjamin’s philosophy: “drinking stars from the urinal.” To perform this dance between high and low the language plays with performance and drag:
in the force fields of the wounded slashed I
the heightened graphicness of a life
is revealed.
This graphicness suggests a visual performance. Identity is fluid, the I is “slashed.” Murat speaks of “Hermaphrodic pronouns.” And the plural, and heterodoxical language that emerges from this split, is played out as a kind of drag performance. Sarah Chant writes, in “The Plurality and Quasi-Anarchism of Drag,” “Drag reinvents the experience of everyday life. Carol Ehrlich notes in Anarchism, Feminism and Situationism that this is done by ‘creating situations that disrupt what seems to be the natural order of things’” Furthermore, Chant writes, “What fascinates me about drag is precisely this: it opens up the possibilities for mind-body experience, creating a space and opportunity to go beyond the boundaries of expression.” In the following poem, Murat writes, “he made love biting her own lips.” The slippage in gender illustrates a drag performance. Take the following poem:
On the arms of the maternal smell
barbarians' scars.
Hermaphrodic pronouns.
He made love biting her own lips.
Her delights d o l p h i n - l i k e
they showed her penis above the ailments
he lived in
Clitoris arose dahlia!
ah, my c-l-i-t-o -p-e-t-r-a
a rose!
bitten tenderly
This erotic poem also plays on the name Cleopatra, substituting an “i” for “eo” to form the word “clit.” Furthermore, there is the word “petra” which is substituted for “patra.” “Petra” is the feminine form of “Peter.” “Patra” means “Father.” So the masculine is feminized, with a female genital organ. Murat’s subversive wordplay turns a beautiful woman into a post-op transsexual!!! In this way, he subverts the ideality contained in the name, “Cleopatra,” creating a fluid identity, that retains the ambiguity of performance and problematizes the distinctions of male and female, of subject and object, of here and elsewhere, of language itself. When a person is in drag, “a new being is born,” (a new kind of poem):
Nymphs
words bathe in water
and explode
on the other side
a new being is born
These could also be the Nymphs that aided Artemis by transforming her into reeds to escape from Pan. Desire does not find consummation in this poem. Nor does it seek it: “Intensity of feeling is words' inability to arrive at their illusive destinations. Intensity's that distance.” The failure of language projects onto the visual: “The eye always can see more than the tongue can speak. (That's what leads to a crisis of reading.) The eye enters the mysteries of the soul (of the world) more fully than words can.” Desire is not consummation but transformation, as IO herself is transformed. These kinds of puns and wordplay are essential to the poem, they subvert hallowed meanings or references, in this case the name Cleopatra, and delight in such inversion of textual meanings. They are also a kind of visual game, since eye sees double when looking at them. Take for example the following poem:
s p i n i t u a l w o r d s s p u n n i n g i n b o d i l e s s l i g h t
l i g h t l y , w i s h f u l l y w h i s t f u l l y ? w h i s p f u l l y -
w h i m f u l l y , - w h i p f u l l y w h a m f u l l y -? w h e r e f u l l y
w o m b f u l l y w h i c h f u l l y w h o r l f u l l y , e t c .
A quick glance will see “spiritual” but the word is “spinitual.” Not “spinning” but “spunning.” This reminds me of the exhaustive experience that can be a result of the dizzy ecstatic vertigo that a lover in Sufism experiences when he is rising to a higher spiritual plane. Words are no longer part of a familiar language. We are in a spiritual plane, a “bodiless light.” Absence of Ego. There is the suggestion of birthing in “wombfully,” there is whim in “whimfully,” which suggests an impulse or passion,“whipfully whamfully” (this is the violence [in spirituality and love] that is the heart of Sufi sensibility; the violence is sublimated as a cosmic principle), time is obliterated in the poem, suggested by “wherefully” (another Sufi principle), and there is the helix in “whorlfully” which suggest dizzying movement. The entire poem suggests an ecstatic experience just beyond language. Visually, the poem succeeds in disorienting the reader, giving him a taste of that ecstatic vertigo.
Io’s Song is also a multi-vocal text. It is heterodox in its inclusion of numerous and disparate texts: there are poems and fragments and translations and poems by other poets such as Holderlin and the Turkish poet, Sami Baydar, woven throughout the poem, creating contradictory resonances, questioning even the idea of the primacy of the author. This plurality of voices subverts the idea of an authentic text and is part of its drag performance. Instead of authenticity we are given a language stripped of its familiar clothing, naked as a child, its words unabashed as first utterances, experimenting with words. But it is not only literary texts and translations that are included. Murat also includes a poem he wrote for his grandson. It is a charming and delightful poem:
Wombles: A Lullaby
(first written at the request of my grandson Abey that I write a poem for him)
for my grandchildren Abey, Hannah, Benny, Lola, and Gen-Gen (Cleo)
I knew of a pig with a pink nose
It always hunted with its nose for truffles
But that was not enough
It entered our kitchen and ate my breakfast waffles.
And I knew of a Siamese cat with big whiskers
It always scooted in the room without a whisper
But I knew when it meowed
It was asking for my cucumber pickles.
And I knew of a dog with drooping ears
called Wombles, that when I took a bath
It chased after the bubbles
I laughed and laughed that took away all my troubles.
The first part, “Signatures’ Colors (A Biographical Essay) Io’s Song,” enacts Io’s madness, after she is turned into a heifer in the myth, and as she wanders from country to country, crossing the path between Propontis and the Black Sea, which became known as the Bosphorus, which literally means, “the passage of the cow.” Io’s speech explodes in a multivocal, heterodox, plurality, punning, bending words, stretching them, scattering them across the page. Murat writes, in the essay, “The Problem Poem: Io's Song, a Crisis of Reading,” “Io's Song is a human voice speaking in an alien medium, through the mouth of a cow.” This is her/his heterodox language. This is the eda of Io.
But this is also a poem about history, about the problem of autobiography, about its essentially provisional nature. What should a person include in an autobiography, what series of events, in what order, what facts can be said to comprise a life? A life remains fragmentary and will not cohere, in a rational totality. The first section is called a biographical essay. Here we are introduced to Io’s madness. The next section is called the “Afterlife of Io, an Autobiography.” Pasolini spoke of a life in terms of cutting a film; the life existed between the cuts. The measure of a life can only be taken in death. And so here, in speaking about the autobiographical, Murat imagines the afterlife of Io. Here, we are “somewhere else….in the arms of the internal.” But eternity or God is not in a beyond. Eternity is a flat space: “Eden spins tautologies.. That's the mirage of depth, suppressing the reality of death in another space. god is everywhere. How can He know depth. can't feel perspective. Divine language is flat. Departure's arrival.” For Murat there is a problem and contradiction in the idea of a Paradise that is beyond. Death, or for that matter, Paradise, do not inhabit some mysterious elsewhere. It is here. The following poem puns on this idea of Paradise, even suggesting perhaps Mallarme’s famous Un coup de dés.
P a r a / D i c e
P a r a d e / I c e
Here, a shift of stress/accent from the first to second syllable in “Paradise” creates alternate meanings. Murat jokes about the idea of Paradise: it is an icy parade around a pair of dice! But the word “die” is hidden in dice, it’s the singular form of the word. As para means in front of or around, we have here “in front of death.” “Parade,” from the mid 17th century French, literally means a “showing,” from the Italian parata, based on the Latin parare, “to furnish, or prepare.” So we have a kind of showing or preparing for Ice! The absurdity of these permutations in language is meant to subvert the notion of a “Garden of Eden, or Paradise.” As a matter of fact, the icy quality is more in keeping with Dante’s Hell! Murat writes, “The Greek root of Parádeisos is an enclosed park. But the whole history of paradise in the west is about expulsion.” There is the exclusion of non-western languages or culture. For example, today there is the problem of immigration at the border, and the Trump administration’s racist policies of exclusion. And the rise of Nationalism in support of the superiority of the white race. My family were immigrants who came to America in the 60s. My father could not speak a word of English when he arrived in the States. Through his life he spoke very little English. It was a choice. When I visited Italy with him in the early 90s, I saw his joy speaking in Italian in a café with friends. So I was very sensitive to the difficulties and sacrifices my father made moving to this country. I, myself, was not born here in America but in Salerno, Italy.
Murat quotes Walter Benjamin: “But the subject of all myth’s arrival.” He follows with a quote “The heart yearns for departures. In the v a g a b o u n d a r y of the sea,” putting into the mouth of Odysseus these lines from the Turkish poet Ece Ayhan’s book, The Blind Cat Black, which Murat has translated. The wandering refers, in one respect, to Io’s wanderings from country to country to arrive at the Aegean Sea and Western Anatolia. In Holderlin’s poem, the Ister arrives at the Black Sea which is next to Istanbul. There is also Odysseus’ arrival home from his wanderings. Odysseus does not die at home in Ithaca, but on a second trip he takes after his return, having gone beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar), his boat with his crew sinks in the Atlantic. Dante sees this second trip as an act of pride and puts Odysseus in Hell for it. This idea of arrival / departure is crucial for Murat. In the following poem about this idea of arrival and departure, the personal, subjective vision, becomes, at the end of the poem, objective: “river is a mirror.”
in the arms of the eternal--Odysseus
departure
in the concave mirror
arrival return
in the mirror
departure
in the mirror
arrival
in the mirror
arrival
in the mirror
departure
river
is
a mirror
is
A river (the Bosphorus) flows up and downstream, subject to currents and wind, arriving and departing. So too, the ocean tumbles onto the shore, only to recede again. It can be said too, that there are arrivals and departures in the poem itself: the fragment cannot be said to reside anywhere specifically, semantically, it is provisional, not fixed, it’s meaning is unstable. Poetic meaning is discharged in the interplay between fragments, in a relay. So the fragment is fluid, dynamic as opposed to the fully realized sentence, and in endless expansion: “Whereas what we have is endless expansion, tracing the motions of endless soul.”
I have spoken above about drag performance but there is another kind of performance central to the poem, brought about by the repression of the Jewish religion:
Reintegration
When my dad moved and later brought his family from Iran to Istanbul, he adopted
a new signature in Latin characters. From an unlit corridor entering his study in our
Istanbul apartment as a kid, I saw on his desk pages on which he h'd scribbled practicing
a florid version of his public name "Seifollah" (the Sword of Allah) over and over again.
My parents were Marrano Jews, in Iran, pretending to be Moslems, while practising
Judaism in secret. He'd a warrior Moslem name and a meek Jewish name, the stuttering
Moses’s brother Aaron's, able to speak clearly and glibly, the Torah's first politician and
bureaucrat, the starter of the line of Cohens, the Jew St. Peter.
The adoption of the Muslim religion is made necessary because of the repression of the Jews. So the public Muslim name is a the warrior’s name, (the English of the conqueror, the imperial language,) and the private name is the meek Jewish name, the language of the outsider, the immigrant, the flaneur, the stutterer with an accent, who subverts Standardized English, destabilizes our Latin root. But the Jewish name is of a twofold origin: Moses, the stutterer and Aaron the politician and bureaucrat. For Murat, the Jew is always moving between these two tendencies. But one must remember that this is also a performance to avoid persecution. Disguising the name in another name. A word in another word. A language in another language. And so the pun is crucial to Io’s song. Outwardly it resembles one thing but reveals another. So too, the fragment suggests one thing in isolation, and another in relation. But the poet’s work is serious. As serious as your life.
Io’s Song is an endlessly proliferating text of meanings. It is subversive, multi-vocal, heterodox, raw and savage, fragmentary, playful, absurd; it is a text with puns, visual poems, jokes, translations, poems by other poets, and poems by Murat, where words bend, separate, form and reform, explode, and transform. It is an anti-biography and an anti-autobiography. It is an anarchic text, where intense desire electrifies the blank of the page. Finally, it’s a poem in drag, that performs a subversive and scandalous dance, collapsing the authority of the King’s English, with its eye / I toward the East.