دار بيبليون
Preface by Prof. Jad Hatem to the book Mir’ât al-Qalb by Lwiis Saliba
مقدمة البروفسور جاد حاتم لديوان د. لويس صليبا مرآة القلب حكايات وأغنيات عاشق، 2005
The desire is all in its movement which is of union. That what God disassociated at birth should want to be one flesh, such is the great agent of transformations. In a kiss, the interpenetration of breaths is already at play. But since the breaths, as the etymology indicates, are of the spirit – “are not nafas and nafs one and the same thing? “(p. 132), the poet wonders – it is indeed the intermingling of souls that is hoped for from carnal contact. But this is not without ambiguity, for there is always the risk of an illusion. The lover knows these embraces where the spirit has hardly any part (p. 100). Bodies can indeed call to each other without having received an injunction from love (p. 99). The illusion is in the error of the instance that takes the initiative.
Poetry becomes the place of interrogative tension. The embrace, by definition, ignores reflection. Entirely at work, it does not ask itself any questions. It is in the space of the recovery of oneself in oneself that the lover questions his motives.
Rather than staying on the skin, has the flame spread to the Self (al-dhat)? (p. 99). Has he put the right word on the lived reality? That it is not easy to answer, we see by the use of poetry. This is the aim of the poem entitled The Princess of Black Desires.
On the one hand, poetry serves as a medium of revelation. This justifies the title of the collection: Miroir of the Heart. In it, one dares to reveal to oneself and to others what one would rather try to conceal between oneself and oneself, either to return to the daily task or to favour other adventures. But on the other hand, this medium is nothing less than the poet’s transparency to himself. Poetry reveals in ambiguity, as in the Delphic oracle, the sign that arrives bifid, in caduceus, for poetry certainly sees but in enigma, hardly from the front as subjectivity normally considers things. But precisely the affect is not one of those objects that one makes appear by drawing a circle. Thus, in another poem, Baiser de rencontre, of a very different tone, purified and which concludes on a mystical flight, the ambiguity persists in spite of the poet’s intention, which I believe is explicit. As far as the latter is concerned.
It is obvious that the composition of the text is based on an ascent from carnal union to spiritual union. He begins by stressing the sensual emphasis (p. 131), continues by mentioning the interpenetration of the two souls through the kiss (pp. 133-134), and finally discovers that the kiss, the vehicle that transports the lover from the valley of misfortune to the world of dreams and super-existence (baqâ’), emanates from the eternal (abad) (p. 135). In other words, he participates in the celestial eros that moves the sun and the other stars, which does not guarantee him the privilege of remaining in the sole service of the constellations. His eminence does not exclude his abasement.
That is why, as a “fragment of the Infinite”, it has fallen (hawat) (p. 131 – 132). Poetic language tells us that the kiss cannot have any other fate since it is an expression of passion (hawâ). In order to be an ascending force, eros cannot be housed in the heights, which is why Plato made it not a god, involuted in its self-sufficiency, but a demi-god (daïmôn) likely to descend as much as to rise. The kiss thus appears under a double face: immediate expression of sensual contact, it is also and first of all the tangible expression of the Link as such, i.e. of the aggregating power that works at all levels of the cosmos, even in the divine entity itself.
And yet, underneath all the formulations of the encounter that the poet uses, and particularly the term that best designates it in “souls that draw closer to each other and unite (tatawahhad) in the blaze” (p. 132), there slips in an opposite vocation, of separation, I would even say of anachoresis. Given the context, “Ikhtibâru tawh-huddin… tilka al-qublat al-tawîlat” (p. 131) is taken to mean that the long kiss constitutes an experience of union (ittihâd). However, the term implies a contrary value: tawahhud properly means the state of oneness. In theology, tawhid attests to the incomparable nature of God. In this case, tawahhud cannot immediately imply the union of the different. That if one wishes to maintain the nuance of the union (again depending on the context), one is led to favour another form, moreover paradoxical, which is the union of the identical: the two entities (man and woman, or God and the soul) are in reality one so that the kiss unites them less than it reveals their condition. The paradox is thus lifted: there is no real union, but rather identity; but there is indeed, following an awareness of duality, an awareness of union corresponding to the tearing of the veil of ignorance.)
Nevertheless, poetry does not force us to decide on this reading, since it is made up of all those that it generates in its language game. But there is still one more, the one that goes completely against the poet’s intention. In tawahhud there is an obligatory reference to loneliness. Among the mutawahhidûn are the monks, those who reduce themselves to the one in front of the One.[1] In its active form, tawahhud thus expresses a withdrawal into oneself, or even betrays a soul filled with its own gift. Consequently, the intransitive part of affectivity and its chosen modality, sensuality, cannot be neglected. What the lover experiences during the embrace is purely and simply his own. The poet, for his part, readily admits this elsewhere: “I seek you as if I were searching for myself, and when I hold you firmly against my chest, it seems to me that by my caresses I am joining my mind to my body” (pp. 110 – 111)[2].
In order to desire union, desire, different in this respect from dilection, is no less in itself an increase in self, describing the need for every being to experience itself in failure as well as in the surge.
If the reader is forced to choose between the sense of union (ittihâd) and that of splitting, the poem is not forced to do so, and lives by the dynamics it institutes. The fact that the sequel bears witness to union rather than split does not eliminate the initial ambivalence, but covers it up beyond this break in balance. I do not mean that it conceals it, but rather that it implies the prevalence of one meaning over another, so that through the feeling of the self, the feeling of the other is confirmed in the inter-communion. It is through this victory that desire is fulfilled as love.
Jad HATEM
[1]– See J. Hatem, Recherches sur les christologies maronites, Paris, Geuthner, 2000, ch. I.
[2]– It goes without saying that this passage is susceptible to a reading that favours the option of union, and then it is likely to evoke the “I am Layla” of Qays. Cf. J. Hatem, Mal d’amour et joie de la poésie chez Majnoun Laylâ et Jacques Jasmin, Agen, Quesseveur, 2000, ch. II.