from “The Spring Flowers Own”
* I know flowers to be funeral companions they make poisons and venoms and eat abandoned stone walls I know flowers shine stronger than the sun their eclipse means the end of times but I love flowers for their treachery their fragile bodies grace my imagination’s avenues without their presence my mind would be an unmarked grave. * from The Spring Flowers Own & The Manifestations of the Voyage (The Post-Apollo Press, 1990)
If you ever want to know what it’s like to dream in and through language, then read Etel Adnan’s poetry. It is a poetry of mystification and enchantment and wonder. It is a poetry that subverts at the same time as it explains, in the way a dream — finally, you’ve been dying for it, haven’t you — gives voice to that un-languaged feeling you’ve been chewing on for the longest time in a way that you can, for once, understand. When you wake up, it’s as if you’ve known something, with certainty, for the first time. That’s what I mean. About poetry. About Etel Adnan’s poetry.
There are also Adnan’s paintings, which mystify and delight. Like these:
They remind me, through their mystification and boldness, through their texture and color, of the work of Nicholas Roerich, which is forever on display in New York City at a small museum named after Roerich on the Upper West Side, which is always free and always closed on Mondays. It is one of my favorite places in the city, bar none. Here are some of Roerich’s paintings, which transfix and delight for similar reasons to Adnan’s, in that they live in the world, but seem to center, always, what is better said by Larry Levis: “light, & what it does to us.”
In an interview published in The Paris Review a couple of years after her death, Adnan said:
Creation is a form of thinking. It’s abandoning a certain world of preoccupations in order to enter into another. I like the word make; the word create reminds me too much of religion. We’ve separated creators from noncreators. And everyone creates, in that sense. Everyone does things that generate the world of philosophy. There’s no absolute division. There are different intensities.
I love this, this fervent belief in the capacity of people to make art. I love, especially, what comes next:
I’m astonished by the metaphysical questions that children ask. They have a freedom such that they’re able to surprise you with their remarks. We don’t record them, and fortunately we don’t publish them. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t moments of higher thought, flashes of illumination. Lately, I have come to the conclusion that, on the level of what we call thinking, everything thinks.
There is something at work in Adnan’s answers here — and there is something at work in Adnan’s poetry — that sings of illumination. It’s there, especially, in today’s fragment, which does that wonder-work that she attributes to children. She looks at a flower and says hmm. She looks at a flower and says what if. She looks at a flower and finally, as if for the first time, really sees it.
Like, look at the opening stanza:
I know flowers to be funeral companions they make poisons and venoms and eat abandoned stone walls
Here, Adnan begins with a surface-level noticing — that flowers accompany the dead. But then, notice the verbs — make, eat — and how they give, as the poem progresses, the flowers a kind of violent agenda that absolutely astonishes. Reading this, I found myself saying no! Flowers aren’t violent!
(And I found myself saying, too: funny, how violet and violent are just a letter apart)
But flowers and vines and all sorts of growing things are violent, as Adnan points us toward. They do climb and eat and take over walls. They are treacherous for all of this. And yet, and yet, and yet. It’s a funny kind of violence, isn’t it? It’s the kind of violence a kid would notice. The kind of thing that you might not give a second thought. But Adnan does. She gives it a second thought. And that’s part of the beauty of her poetry. And, in so doing, she illuminates something. And it’s something remarkable, isn’t it? It’s something like: yes, I bet you didn’t think of flowers as violent. It’s something like: but not all violence is the same. It’s something like: even something that is capable of grace is capable of violence. It’s something like: even something that is fragile is capable of something that might test someone or something’s fragility. It’s something like: this violence is capable of love, and without that love, I’d be nothing.
It’s something like:
without their presence my mind would be an unmarked grave.
Yeah. There’s a playfulness here that ends with a reminder of our own fragility, our own mortality, and our own need for beauty. And there’s a question, too, that I think is couched in this poem. It’s a question that goes something like: we, as humans, are as fragile as flowers and as violent, but are we moving our capacity toward the kind of beauty that might make people cherish us?
Adnan’s perception of flowers reminds me of something I just read Kaveh Akbar saying in a forthcoming interview with The Believer, in response to the question “What kind of rage do you seek to harness?”:
Rage that is a measure of tenderness. Rage that rises out of a surfeit of compassion. Rage that emerges from an ability to perceive the interiority of the harmed. I feel that an engine that runs on rage, the right sort of rage, will never sputter in empire.
That rage that Akbar alludes to is the kind of violence that, I think, Adnan sees in flowers. It is a rage that contains all things — from tenderness to compassion to grace. It is a rage that is enraged because of love. To discount such rage, then, is to discount love. This is why, I think, something like the act of cultivating a garden makes such an apt metaphor for cultivating a community of care. A garden is a growing thing, and, in so being, is a thing that eats and consumes and takes over space. And yet, it is also a thing that is fed, and tended to. Such actions acknowledge the consumption of a garden while also pointing such consumption toward beauty, and through love. There is a wholeness in such actions. Nothing is discounted. Tenderness ensues.
In the same poem that today’s fragment is from, Adnan writes the following:
* Under a combination of pain and machine-gun fire flowers disappeared they are in the same state of non-being as Emily Dickinson We the dead have conversation in our gardens about our lack of existence. *
That machine-gun fire is of a different sort than the violence of flowers and the rage that is born out of love. It is part of the violence of empire, which contains no love, really. And so it destroys the growing things, like flowers, like landscapes, like people, who contain so much.
In another of her essays, Adnan writes:
The sun shines through my windows with no difficulty as they are wide open. I try to touch the light but it disappears at that very moment; all I do is make shadows with my fingers. Then I think that the world is somewhere else, in Mexico, in India… Why should it always be in a named place? Why should it, altogether, be?
Those questions at the end, the ones that repeat, one after another: why? I think of them as the kind of questions a child would ask. And I mean that with all respect, all honor. I believe, with all my heart, that those are the kinds of questions we should always be asking, because, at some point, we seem to be pushed away from that kind of questioning, and pushed toward a questioning that feels more certain of the world and all of its structures and systems and ongoing reproductions of power. When Adnan asks those questions, I feel it. I feel the longing and the curiosity and the wonder at the heart of them. Why, I find myself echoing. Why? Why? Why?
I think of this bit of spoken word attributed to Karl Rove — George Bush’s senior advisor — in The National’s song “Walk It Back,” a song that fears the ideas named in the quote below:
We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
Rove has refuted ever saying these words, to which The National, quite rightly, have had their own explicit reaction. There is such certainty in Rove’s words, a certainty, I think, we should all fear, as we feel the ramifications of such certainty every day. It is the certainty that discounts Adnan’s questions above, that discounts the wonderings of children, the kind of curiosity that says, either with imaginative possibility or anxiety or both: Why does it have to be like this? Why can’t it be different?
And so, when I read Adnan’s poetry, I feel a deep rebuttal to the machinations of empire outlined above. I feel desire, and longing, and wonder, and the potential for joy. All of these things do not seem possible under empire. They seem like the stuff of revolution. As I write this, in Lebanon, where Etel Adnan is from, people are being made the unwilling subjects of Israel’s countless attacks, objects exploding and rocketing through the mundanity of the everyday. I have seen some of the footage of the attacks, the ordinary moments shocked through with terror and strangeness and violence.
And I am thinking of Adnan’s work not just because of where she is from, but also because of the way it centers and enacts a kind of thinking that feels lost — through the forces and acts of empire — on the world today. There are ways of thinking that privilege the rationale of adults, and there are ways of thinking that acknowledge the near-unlimited grace and imagination of children, ways of thinking that include — as children do — permissive, empathetic, and interesting questioning of this world. Those ways of thinking are not centered by those in power. I know this because children die — so often, as they have this week in Lebanon — by the acts of those in power. They become, through such acts, collateral damage. They become the newly invented language of politics that is often used to both justify the actions of empire and to place distance between the people of empire and their actions. Adnan recenters the imaginative thinking of children. She brings them to life again because, in her, their imagination, and their lives, never died.
In the poem today’s fragment is from, Adnan has a phrase:
This unfinished business of my childhood
I think that is a profound way to look at a life. Not as an ascent into adulthood, but rather as a way to return to and maintain the serious business of childhood. We adults claim seriousness all the time. But the reality seems to be that, though the consequences of our actions are serious, sometimes the actions themselves are so flippant and impossibly reckless, driven by desires — for power, for capital — so shallow and emptied of real value that they ruin us.
The truth is that, in my work as a teacher, I have never encountered children to be anything but serious. And the truth is that I view my work not as calibrating students to become serious adults, but rather as an ongoing attempt to help students see the various ways that they can direct their seriousness. It is hard to view the powerbrokers of empire seriously when they can politspeak their way out of killing children, who are serious people capable, each day, of serious feeling. I take the consequences of empire’s actions seriously, but I find it one of the great tragedies of our time that such ruthless killing is treated as something worth spelling out and justifying and analyzing rather than simply naming for what it is: awful, awful, awful.
And so, I return to Adnan’s poetry, which imagines, and takes the act of imagining seriously. A worthwhile reminder, I think. Because, as Adnan says, “everything thinks.” Our care, I imagine, should follow.
Some ongoing notes:
I started following Workshops 4 Gaza, an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.
I’ve been following the work of the Gaza Sunbirds, a Palestinian para-cyling team also doing work to share resources and support relief efforts in Gaza. You can support their efforts to compete in the Para-cycling World Championships here, and also support their ongoing work in Gaza here.
Consider donating to the work of Doctors Without Borders to support their ongoing work in Gaza.
As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here. Here, too, is a link to the New York War Crimes page — their ongoing publication.
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I live in an old town, and I’ve noticed in old towns the presence of this delicate, fragile ivy called Kenilworth Ivy. It’s about a quarter the size of English Ivy and in no way as robust. It does have delightful purple/pink flowers. It always grows out of stone walls, the walls being their own little version of empire. I love to think that before, during, and after my life the Kenilworth Ivy is doing its work of eating these walls.
Todays poem and essay were brilliant, and for me, these question are what have brought me to Poetry. Poetry for me offers another way of being that flies in the face of empire, be it personal or national. It offers sustenance that reminds me of the mystery all around and where the power truly lies.