Let us live with veracity and love

There’s news from the war. News and fake news. News so recurrent that the word seems distinctly odd. News which, like the bread of Egypt (as Octavio Paz once said) is poetry over which the night has passed, rendering it unpalatable.

In the passing news, I read a name. Shiraz. It was a recognisable name from dozens tossed around by news agencies, sprinkled all over ‘stories’ so easily that one might forget that places are made of people.

There would have been people in Shiraz when the Israeli military executed airstrikes across the city. There must be people there even now, as I write. Even continuous strikes with bombs and missiles cannot really erase the people-signature of a city with a population close to 2 million. Shiraz is the capital of the Fars Province of Iran. Would take a lot more bombs. Or a nuke. Shiraz, like Iran, has survived the onslaught of tyrants and blood-thirsty, booty-seeking, megalomaniacs over centuries and millennia. One day both place and name will be gone or forgotten. For now, they exist.

I don’t know anyone living in Shiraz. I just know the name of a single person and he’s dead now. Khājeh Shams-od-Dīn Moḥamma or Khwaja Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafez-e Shirazi lived and wrote in the 14th Century. Hafiz (or Hafez) was his pen name and is derived apparently from the Arabic to mean guardian or keeper of the holy text. So he was Hafiz of Shiraz. He had a nickname too. Lesān-al-ḡayb. The tongue of the unseen. He was, in addition, referred to as Tarjomān al-asrār, or ‘interpreter of mysteries.’ A sufi he was and perhaps spoke the word of the ‘one god’ that people believe in but call by different names, as he himself observed: 

I don’t know if the people who gave the order and those who executed it had ever heard of Hafiz or indeed Shiraz. Indeed, they may take their ignorance to their respective graves. The people of Iran, irrespective of ideological preference, political loyalty and probably belief systems, would know. As their ancestors did and perhaps as generations yet unborn will. It is said that his works or at least excerpts from his verses are found in Iranian homes. Iranians apparently learn his poems by heart and use them as everyday proverbs.  I’ve been to Iran only once, about 15-18 years ago, but I do remember a Hafiz-poem adorning the wall behind the reception of the hotel I stayed in. I can’t remember the verse.

The Shiraz of the combined genocidal insanities of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu returned me to Hafiz, the poet who more than any other writer influenced Persians from his time to now. And I remembered a line from one of his poems

“Listen: this world is the lunatic's sphere,
Don't always agree it's real,

Even with my feet upon it
And the postman knowing my door

My address is somewhere else.”

Are addresses known? Well, yes. After all, we live in a world of pinpoint strikes that can target and take out the leaders of a country. A world where ‘target and take out’ is applied to schools, hospitals and households, which, logic says, could be ‘pinpointedly’ avoided but are not. The address(es) that Hafiz talks of are different. They don’t have street names. They are not located in cities that have names. It is not in a lunatic’s sphere. And this is why the maniacal Trumps and Netanyahus of our world utter unadulterated gibberish about war-statuses and objectives. They can’t find the ‘address’ of ‘the enemy.’

Hafiz says:

I once asked a bird,
how is that you fly
in this gravity of darkness?
She responded,
‘love lifts me.’
 
There is darkness, this is agreed upon. It is grave. Agreed upon. We would fly if we could. Wings are what we need. A good wind. Both love-made. But then, that’s just the uttering of someone in a poetic bubble, a ‘rationalist’ might say. Can we, with words, ‘intercept’ a butcher’s command, bend the arc of a missile, stamp upon it ‘return to sender’ and direct it towards the unmistakable address of a butcher of children, sick and elderly? No. But with a word or words appropriately conjoined we can manufacture breath, we can fuel the will to live.

When? Now!  Now, Hafiz says, is the time:

Now is the time to understand
That all your ideas of right and wrong
Were just a child’s training wheels
To be laid aside
When you finally live
With veracity and love.

How else can we truly live, truly breathe and truly feel alive, if not with veracity and love, we must ask ourselves.  

And the war? It will continue to generate news and fake news. Odd news manufactured with odd words. Words rearranged to generate ideology-laden narratives that are twins of outcome preferences. Words, whichever way they are arranged, will fall apart and float into oblivioun when they are confronted by truth. And love.

There are many ways to live. And die. We might as well open household, community and country to those intangible, definition-resisting creatures. Veracity and truth. They give wings. We need them, for we must fly now. Way above aircraft and missile. Just so we can walk this earth again, watering it with poetry and coaxing the soil to yield flowers and grain in deserts and craters.