Madmen who were poets 6

Abu 'l-Bakhtarī said: The tales I used to hear of Abū Fahma, a madman of Baghdad with a gift for poetic improvisation, led me to seek him out. Our meeting came about in a lane of the city, where I said to him, "How are you today, Abū Fahma?" He replied in verse:

  "Today I awake at the edge of a cliff. Through you,
      the way lies open to the wellsprings of my ruin.
   I see you turning, but not toward me.
      Whose heart is least corrupt you least attend.
   O you whose absence prolongs my lovesickness:
      it is a sickness with more regret in it than love."
    
Abu 'l-Bakhtarī said: At this I withdrew from my sleeve a small bouquet of narcissus, and pressed it on him with my wishes that God prolong his life. He stood smelling them for a time, then delivered these verses:

  "On my wedding day, there came from the South great spattering
      clouds decked out with rain so black that they were brown.
   Then kicked in the East Wind with its fecundating showers,
      and the curtailment of our nuptials was hard for me to bear.
   Our babe was born still. Labor pains came on,
      and there was parturition, and that was the issue.
   Springtime wove a shroud, and as one hand
      the dew and breeze gave color to its fabric.
   It was [this] flower's composite yellow, white petals
      cupping ornaments of unsmithed gold 
   on emerald columns raised aloft with the morning,
      like unto the sun in eye-like beauty."

Al-Hasan ibn Hāni' [better known as Abū Nuwās] said: I paid a call on Mānī al-Muwaswas, who delivered these verses:

  "A live man's poem is uttered to you by a dead man.
      Stuck between death and life, he stands [right here].
   Vicissitudes have whittled his frame, and at his end
      he stays in hiding from the rest of creation.
   To look me over, inspecting my person,
      is to find not one iota of my former charm."

I then went on [continued Abū Nuwās] until I met Ju'ayfirān al-Muwaswas, an elder of the Banū Hāshim with a speech impediment. Around his neck he wore a golden collar with a silver chain. He asked me: "Where did you crawl out of, Hasan?" "Mānī's house," I answered. "Here's one for little old Mānī's mother's vulva," he said and, calling for pen and paper, told me to write this down:

  "Under cover of night, the rooster makes no sound
      - except on nights I strive along the pathway to your door.
   Not every eyeful leads the peeper to delight. 
      By night, the joys of bed-rest are what's best,
   - except those nights I mount the dark,
      desiring you. Braving a pair of linked shackles,
   I am playing with my life when I visit you. "Sweet Hope!"
      I am calling out, amid the night's black suit,
   to one who stokes the flames licking [this] wretch's heart,
      taking no care for his welfare nor his reputation.
   For treachery and fickleness your nature is unsurpassed
      by all the djinn and mortal men living put together now."

With that [continued Abū Nuwās], he told me to tear up what I had from Mānī, which I did.
      I went on until I encountered 'Adrad the Afflicted. Ringed by a crowd of boys, he was slapping his face and weeping as he wailed aloud: "O people! Bitter is the taste of separation!" So I asked him, "Abū Muhammad [which was 'Adrad's kunya], where are you coming from?" "Seeing off the pilgrims bound for Mecca," he said. "What makes it so hard to bear?" I asked.  "Some of my kinsmen travel with them," he said. "Did you deliver a poem on the occasion?" I asked. He responded that he had done, and recited:

  "They departed Thursday morning, and I bid them farewell
      when, taking up their burdens, they took their leave.
   As they turned to go, my soul turned with them.
     'Come back!' I said. 'Come back to where?' said she.
   To a rattling skeleton empty of blood,
     and bare of flesh but for a pair of eyes
   washed by grief, and the shell of an ear
     defiant in its deafness to all blame."

Continued from The Unique Necklace of Ibn 'Abd Rabbih

News of the pillar-priesthood of old Syria

The temple occupies a hill at the very center of Bambyce. Two walls run round it, one of them ancient and the other one dating to a little before our time. The temple's gateway is placed so as to admit the northern breeze and measures 100 fathoms [~182 meters]. Within these gates stand the pillars [Gk. phalloi] erected by Dionysus, rising to 300 fathoms [a fabulous height which some editors emend to 30 fathoms without troubling over the no-less-fabulous 100-fathom gate]. Twice a year, a man ascends to the top of one of these pillars and dwells there for seven days. The cause for his so doing is variously explained. Majority opinion has it that he converses with the gods on high, asking for blessings on behalf of all of Syria, and that the gods attend his prayers from up close. Others take it for a commemoration of the disaster that struck in Deucalion's day, when the flood sent people fleeing to the mountains and the tree-tops. I find this explanation unbelievable. I think these rites are performed in adoration of Dionysus, and I explain them thus: When they parade the phalloi in honor of Dionysus, they seat wooden figurines on them. The reason for this custom I will not mention - but I will give my opinion that the man who mounts the pillar does so in emulation of those little wooden men.

His method of ascent is this. Looping a cord around himself and the pillar snugly, he goes up it, following a path of wooden toe-holds. As he climbs, he cinches the cord higher, flipping it upward like a pair of reins. (Those who have seen palm trunks scaled in Arabia, Egypt or anywhere else will be able to picture what I'm talking about.) On completing his ascent, he lets down a second, longer cord that he has with him, in order to haul up whatever he pleases in the way of lumber, blankets and other gear, out of which he fashions a nest-like hut in which to sit out the above-mentioned duration. When devotees visit, they cast coins of gold, silver, and sometimes coppers into a container, saying their names as they do so. A man stationed at the pillar's bottom announces them to the man at its top, who says a prayer on behalf of each person named, amplifying his prayer with a brass noise-maker that he rattles loudly.

The man atop the pillar is barred from sleep. If sleep overtakes him, a scorpion climbs up and rouses him with a nasty sting - or so it is said in pious legends of the cult, for whose strict truth I shall not vouch. To me, the fear of falling would seem to suffice as a sleep deterrent. And with that I conclude my account of the pillar-climbers.

Lucian, On the Syrian goddess 28-29.

A philosopher in his own country

Hey man, the sole discoverer of wisdom I, Heraclitus,
         address you. - Wisdom carries less weight than patriotic duty.
— The dimwitted dads. I railed at them the way a barking dog does,
         stranger! - A shining credit to your upbringers. Now shove off,
won't you? - Easy! Something harsher than this is well on its way to you,
         courtesy of the fatherland. Now farewell. - Now get out of Ephesus.

Meleager of Gadara, no. 121 Gow-Page

Madmen who were poets 5

Abu 'l-'Abbās [Muhammad ibn 'Ammār] attributes these verses to al-Mānī al-Muwaswas:

   The cheeks on him are white and red:
      red in their middles and white at the rim.
   Thin but dewy, like a cup's glass walls
      streaked by swirling wine within.
    
Muhammad ibn Yazīd al-Mubarrad said: I got caught in a rainstorm, which quickly abated. When along came Mānī al-Muwaswas, who said:

  "Don't mistake for a real rain
      the rain that fell just now.
   A single tear from my eye 
      flows more freely, when
   assailed by the gloom
      of my worried thoughts.
   Behold the state of one left watching
      the change of heart inside a bosom."

Mānī al-Muwaswas went up to Abū Dulaf [al-'Ijlī] and said:

  "The look in your eye 'mid the enemy host
      saves you the trouble of taking out swords."

"By God," said Abū Dulaf, "no poet has ever praised me so well," and ordered ten thousand dirhams be given to him. But Mānī declined to take them. "It's all the same to me as half a dirham's worth of harisa," he said.

Also by Mānī al-Muwaswas:

   Grazing on hearts, some gazelles are preoccupied
      with necklaces. And in my heart there is just grass.
   My life is forfeit to gazelles. Instead of antlers
      they are rubied and empearled with bangling gold.
   O beauty that stole mine eye unwittingly,
      seldom though the stolen glance unwitting be!
   The beauty of her eyes elicited my heart from me,
      and I gave it ovcr, little heeding its acceptability.
   If they do not look my way, the attraction's finished.
      What good are eyes to me if she declines?
   A thief and his hand are soon separated,
      but hearts are for stealing at no such penalty.

'Alī ibn al-Jahm rode up on a man in the grip of a brain-fever who was encircled by a hostile crowd. On spotting him, the man took hold of his horse's bridle and said:

  "Do not swell the company of
      wastrels before me. I swear by the prerogative
   of the One Who aggrieves my life with them,
      and the One Whose forgiveness I beg for them:
   compared to the fallen of their own number,
      these are fallen further still."

His rolling gaze then fixed on a shapely boy with a handsome face, and he rent his tunic, saying:

  "This one, their most nobly favored,
      now treats me with surpassing baseness!"

Continued from The Unique Necklace of Ibn 'Abd Rabbih

The dawn of fabric

Whatever tale of origins persuades you, the world's first man was surely naked and unclothed when his Potter threw him, before the untimely and unlicensed hold he took of knowledge. But enough of esoteric lore. Let's have one of yours instead - the Egyptian narrative set down by Alexander for his mother to read about the age of Osiris, back when Ammon, rich in sheep, came out of Libya. It was in their company, the Egyptians declare, that Mercury chanced to brush his hand over a ram, and was so pleased by its softness that he separated a little sheep from its skin. The material's pliancy moved him to keep working it, and at his continued plucking a thread streamed forth. This he wove using a technique he had practiced on strips of linden-bark. But Minerva is credited by you with all wool-craft and construction of looms, even though the work at Arachne's shop was better done.

Tertullian, On the philosopher's cloak 3.4-5

Madmen who were poets 4

The grammarian Muhammad ibn Yazīd al-Mubarrad said: En route to Wāsit from Baghdad, we took a detour to the Monastery of Ezekiel [at al-Nu'māniyya] to see the madmen there. Their madnesses were all of kinds known to us, or so we thought until we spied a well-kept young man in laundered clothes sitting apart from the others. "If any," we said, "then this one." So we approached him with a pious greeting, which he did not return. "What's the matter with you?" we asked him. He said:

  "God knows how sad I am.
      To none other can it be described.
   My soul is two, one in this land
      while another land keeps the other.
   The one stuck here can endure no more.
      The hide around it is about to give out.
   I believe the absent soul to be in the same state.
      By my troth, hers is the present soul's matter."

"Well done, by God!" I said to him. At this, he motioned as if throwing something at us, saying: "Who says 'Well done' to the likes of me?"
      Al-Mubarrad said: We were making haste to get away from him, when the young man said: "Come back, by God, I beseech you, until I recite for you another poem. Then you can say whether it's well or poorly done." So we went back to him and said: "Recite." He began:

  "Just before dawn, at the kneeling and the saddling
      of their palomino camels, bearing off their statuesque cargo,
   she faced me through a curtain [one last time],
      looking out at her observer with tear-swollen eyes.
   Bid farewell by fingers branching like the 'anam-tree, henna-tipped,
      I called out to Jamal: "My two-legged camel! Do not be carried away!'
   A cry of agony for the separation that dissolved our bond
      and came between us, the separation tearing her from me
         at their departure!
   Driver, slow your palominoes that I may lengthen my farewell.
      Driver, your departure speeds the hour of my death.
   For all my time on earth I'll not renounce my longing to be with them.
      I wish I knew: what did they with the rest of theirs?"

We said to him: "They [must have] died." At his he gave a cry and said: "Then I, by God, die also," fell to all fours, stretched out and died. And we did not leave the place until we had him buried.

[A shorter iteration of the same report.]  Al-Mubarrad said: On entering the Monastery of Ezekiel, we were met by a madman with a rock in his hand. "O assembly of my brethren, hearken unto me!" he said as the people scattered. Then he began to recite:

  "Many's the soul of an eminent man
      reduced to moaning without remit,
   who wheels to face the host in battle
      and shrinks from single combat."

Continued from The Unique Necklace.

Recounted also in al-Mas'ūdī's Meadows of Gold, the Thousand and One Nights, the Letting People Know of al-Itlīdī, et alibi.

Madmen who were poets 3

Abu 'l-Wāsi' [companion to Sālih, son of Hārūn al-Rashīd] was in the company of his sons when a poet of the madmen called and asked permission to perform an ode. Abu 'l-Wāsi' declined, but the poet importuned until his resistance fell. After the final verse:

   Irrefutable man, on this day you are their head,
      and around you the cream of your eminent sons!

Abu 'l-Wāsi' said to him: "If you would only leave us en masse" (lit."head by head").
      It is said that a mad poet of the desert Arabs visited a 100-line ghazal upon Nasr ibn Sayyār containing only two lines of praise. "By God," said Nasr to him, "your craft was spent on amatory prelude, with nothing left over for panegyric!" The poet said: "I can change that." So he came back the next morning with a poem that began:

   Can you make out the house of Umm al-Ghamr?
      - Leave that! and let's have a poem in praise of Nasr.

Nasr voiced his ingratitude for both poems with an untranslatable remark.
      One of the scholars said: "For sheer hermeneutic depravity, the only thing I have heard to rival the Rāfida was something a madman of Mecca said about a poem [by al-Farazdaq]. This man said: 'The Banū Tamīm are the biggest liars I have ever heard. In the poem:

   He Who hung the sky has built for us
      a house whose columns soar above all others.
  The house the Sovereign built is ours, and what
      Heaven's Arbitrator builds cannot be shaken.
   The house in whose courtyard Zurāra sits arrayed,
      and Mujāshi' and Nahshal, father to horsemen...

The Banū Tamīm claim these names belong to their own!' " [As is the case, Mujāshi' and Nahshal being direct ancestors of the poet himself.]
      The scholar said: "I asked him: 'In your view, what do they mean?' He said: 'The "house" is the house of God; Zurāra is the stone that is "buttoned" [zurrirat] around it. Mujāshi' is the well of Zamzam, whose water is "coveted" [jushi'at], and "Father to Horsemen" is the mountain of Abū Qubays in Mecca.' I said to him: 'And Nahshal?' For a whole hour he thought it over, then said: 'It is the tall black lamp-stand of the Ka'ba. That is what Nahshal is.' "

Continued from Ibn 'Abd Rabbih's Unique Necklace

High and low estate in the world to come

FRIEND. Tell me, Menippos: Those who lie in lofty above-ground tombs, replete with images and epitaphs and upright slabs - do they command more honor in the underworld relative to the common run of dead?

MENIPPOS. You've got it backwards, guy! Even Mausolus - the Carian made famous by his tomb - if you had seen him you would still be laughing, I am sure, so despicable was the cranny in which he was flung. Far from bringing him distinction among the rabble of the other dead, the extent of his monument's benefit was that a burden of equivalent weight pressed down on him. The tenant of any plot that Aiakos marks off must be content to lie wedged within its ambit, you see, be it no more than one foot square.
      Buddy, you'd get an even bigger laugh if you could see the kings and satraps over us reduced to beggary, salt-fishmongering and teaching the alphabet. By all who happen by they are abused and smacked about the head like no-account chattel. Philip of Macedon is given out as a cobbler-for-hire of rotten sandals, and when he was pointed out to me in his corner I could control myself no longer. And the Polycrateses, Xerxeses and Darii of the world could be seen panhandling at every fork in the road.

Lucian, Menippos 17

Pyroglossia

My brothers, let not too many of you become teachers. We who teach are subject to sterner judgment, you know, and all of us are frequently in error. Anyone whose discourse is free from error is a consummate man, with a hold on the bridle to his whole body. So do we steer whole horse's bodies, when we put bridle-bits in their mouths, in order that they obey. And behold the ships: big as they are and driven by the crashing winds, they are steered by a tiny rudder in whatever direction the pilot's whim pleases. In this way, the tongue is a small appendage that makes grandiose declarations. Behold what a quantity of timber is kindled by a tongue-sized fire!

The tongue is itself a fire. Among our appendages the tongue was installed as an ornament of iniquity, which defiles our whole body and sets aflame the wheel of coming-into-being with a flame caught from Gehenna. For humankind is capable of enslaving every kind of beast and bird, every reptile and creature of the sea, and has done so; but the tongue is something no human being has ever enslaved - an unsteady evil, swelling with deadly venom. We bless the Lord and Father with it, and with it we curse [our fellow] human beings, who were born into God's likeness. Curse and blessing issue from the same mouth - my brothers, it shouldn't be this way. Do fresh and stagnant water bubble up from the same spring? Can fig trees put forth olives, my brothers? or grapevines figs? Neither can seawater can be made fresh to drink.

James 3:1-12

Madmen who were poets 2

['Abd Allāh son of Abū 'Abd Allāh Muhammad ibn Ahmad?] al-'Atabī said: "Abū Wā'il said to my father: 'Despite my dementia, if you ask me about poetry you'll find that I know a thing or two about it.' My father said: 'Do you compose any poetry yourself?' Abū Wā'il said: 'Yes - much better than yours. Here's one of mine:

   If, after my ribs lie buried, their weeping forgotten,
      Jawmal would only speak to me,
   I bet my bones would answer her.
      I bet my old carcass would spring back to life.'

My father said to him: 'Not bad, except that the woman's name is ill-chosen.' Abū Wā'il said: "In reality her name is Juml ["Stout rope"], but I improved it.' My father said to him: 'God save us from the dementia that makes you think so.'
      "My father also told me that Abū Wā'il recited to him:

   When it hurts this much to part from from a stranger,
      how much more when from a lover's side [min habībi]?
   My heart is stupefied with longing
      when I remember he is dead [yamūtu].

'That doesn't even rhyme!' my father told him. 'One verse ends with bā' (ب), the other tā' (ت).' 'And you cannot supply the missing point?' said Abū Wā'il. 'Furthermore,' my father said, 'the voweling is off. One verse has a genitive case ending where the other ends in an indicative verbal suffix.' 'I say,' replied Abū Wā'il, 'when faced with difficulty you supply no point.' "
      When the mother of Sulaymān ibn Wahb al-Kātib passed away, a lunatic scribe named Sālih ibn Shīrzādh regaled him with an elegy, reciting:

   By what happened to Umm Sulaymān we are laid low
      as if at a blow from the amputator's sword.
   You were the reins of the house, Umm Sālim; now,
      the house's reins have wound up in the grave.

Ibn Wahb said: "When was one of God's creatures so mistreated? To lose one's mother and hear her mourned with such a [crappy] poem, in which my name is changed from Sulaymān to Sālim!"
      Another verse of Sālih ibn Shīrzādh's goes like this:

   Do not liken the silent fart to a cure;
      if so, any gas-passer would be an Ādharītūs [Adrastos?]

Continued from Ibn 'Abd Rabbih's Unique Necklace

Names of the Rain

Al-dayima is "continuous" rain without thunder or lightning, lasting no less than one third of a day or night. Most rains do not last this long. Similar to al-dayima is al-tahtān ["The Trickle"]. A poet said:

   My beloved, the weeping of your nostrils
      is like the tahtān of a rainy day.

Two varieties of al-dayima are al-hadb ["The Hard Rain"] and al-hatl ["The Spattering"]. A poet said:

   At Dhu ’l-Radm the tended fires were overshadowed
      by summer rains hadb-down-coming.

Al-dhihāb are both weak and strong rains. Cloud cover that darkens the sky and brings no rain is called al-dujunna ["The Overshadow"]; such a cloud is called dājina or mudjina. Days and nights so affected are described as dajn and dujunna, both adjectivally ["the day was dujn"] and in the genitive ["a day of dujn"]. Al-dājina is also said for a raincloud that covers the sky, delivering rain continuously, and al-dajn is a plentiful rain. Another kind of continuous rain is al-rihma ["The Discharge"]. Of all the dayima rains, al-rihma falls hardest and is first to pass away. Al-hafā' ["The Flutters"] are similar to al-rihma and are called by al-'Anbarī al-afā'. Yet another kind of dayima is the light rain called al-daththa ["The Scotch Mist"], which is a light rain, and similar to it is al-hadma ["The Nebulous"]. Al-watfā' ["The Beetle-Brow"] is a cloud of rapid-flowing rain that is counted among the dayima rains whether it is of long or short shedding. Al-qatr ["The Drip"] is said for all rain, weak and strong, as is al-dhihab. A diffuse fall of light droplets is called al-rashsh ["The Spray"]. The most abundant rain with the biggest droplets is called al-wābil [“The Downpour"]. Al-jawd ["The Profusion"] is said generally for abundant rain falling at any time of year. A poet said:

   I am Jawād son of Jawād, and the grandson of Sabal:
      When we rain, we're a jawd; when we pour we're a wābil

Al-'Anbarī recited this verse with a slight variation.
      When part after part of something comes in succession, the whole is called al-midrār and al-dirra ["The Torrent"]. This may be said of all rains. Al-rikk ["The Lean"] is a weak rain of no benefit unless it is followed by al-tabi'a ["The Consequent"] which is one rain after another.       Al-sāhiya ["The Inundation"] is an epithet of al-wābil, and vice versa: both wābilun sāhiyatun and sāhiyatun wābilun are heard. It is an expression for the rain that scours all it touches and sweeps it away. When profuse rains grip the earth to the point that its depths are uprooted, its topsoil becomes its bottom, and its hidden and visible shares are inverted, it is said to be mashūra ["Ensorced"]. The rain called jārr al-dabu' ["The Hyena Driver"] never falls without setting the earth aflow, and is so called because it penetrates the hyena’s den and sends it fleeing.
      Al-muhtafal ["The Hugger-Mugger"] is a fast-falling, uninterrupted rain. Similar to it is al-sahh ["The Flow"], with the difference that in al-sahh individual droplets may not be observable. Al-munhamir ["The Fluent"] is like al-sahh, as is al-wadq ["The Bout"]. Al-darb ["The Stroke"] is used for light rain, as is al-qatr, and al-dihhān ["The Gentle Strokes"] are much the same. Al-murawwiya ["The Water-Bringer"] is a rain that quenches the earth, while al-mulabbid ["The Damper"] wets its surface and causes its dust to settle. Al-hayā ["The Life-Giver"] is abundant rain. Al-ahādīb (plural of the plural of al-hadb, q.v.) are hard rains consequent upon other rains. Al-halal ["The Incipient"] are the beginnings of rain. Al-muth'anjir ["The Plenishing"] and al-mushanfir ["The Fleet"] are plentiful in their flow. Al-waliyy ["The Boon Companion"] is said for rain that follows rain in any season. Al-'ahd ["The Pledge"] is a first rain; a land in which the rain is widespread is said to be ma'hūda ["fulfilled"], and when it is touched by a nufda of rain it is said to be mu'ahhada ["empledged."]. Al-nufda ["The Shiver"] is said of rain that falls on one region and passes over another, as are al-shu'būb ["The Vehement"] and al-najw ["The Wind-Breaker"]. And land that is mansūha ["satisfied"] has been blessed with abundant rain.
      Al-ghayth is a name for rain in general. Al-sabal ["The Trailing Garment"] is rain that hangs between cloud and earth, from the point of its leaving the cloud to its landing on the ground.

From Abū Zayd al-Ansārī's Book of Rain