I have been fascinated by metaphor since I was an undergraduate linguistics major, when one of my professors assigned parts of Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In that book, Lakoff and Johnson argue that, as human beings, we use metaphor to give structure to the world around us. They point out, for example, that we describe the process of having or making an argument the same way we describe war. As examples, they offer this list of expressions:

1. Your claims are indefensible.
2. He attacked every weak point in my argument.
3. His criticisms are right on target.
4. I demolished his argument.

Lakoff and Johnson don’t stop there, though. They go on to show that we don’t just talk about argument as if it were war; we actually experience it that way as well. Like wars, for example, arguments are won or lost; and the people on either side of an argument behave in some ways as if they are doing battle with each other, taking different lines of attack, or surrendering some points in the hopes of gaining others that will lead to victory. To illustrate by way of contrast, Lakoff and Johnson ask us to

imagine a culture where argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different. (5)

Other examples abound. One of my favorite classroom exercises is to ask my students to list all the slang expressions they know for for getting drunk and/or high (the latter, of course, being a metaphor in itself). Here are some of the more common ones they come up with:

• wasted
• bombed
• annihilated
• blasted
• blitzed
• polluted
• shitfaced
• embalmed
• hammered
• pickled
• plastered
• smashed

Inevitably, my students are surprised not just at how violent the list is, but at the way these expressions portray getting drunk or high as violence one does to oneself–a way of structuring what it means to alter one’s consciousness that is very different from cultures that use such substances in religious or other spiritual rituals.

The story from Golestan that I have chosen for this week’s Sa’di Says is about the structure of power in a monarchy, and I think the metaphors that Sa’di uses in telling this story are fascinating. Before you read it, you need to know that Hormuz was the son of King Nushirvan, whose name is synonymous with what it means to be a wise and just ruler. Hormuz, on the other hand, was cruel and tyrannical. Here is the story:

When he was asked what crime his father’s viziers had committed, Hormuz replied, “None. I put these men in jail because they feared my power without respecting it. I knew that to protect themselves from the capriciousness they saw in me and the harm they thought might come to them because of it, they might try to kill me. So I had no choice. I took the advice of the sages, who said:

The power to wipe out a hundred men
should not replace your fear of one who fears you.
Watch when a cat is fighting for its life;
it plucks the tiger’s eyes out with its claws.
To stop the stone the shepherd might throw down
to crush its head, the viper strikes, and lives.

Hormuz is unapologetic in his explanation, but you have to wonder just how aware he is of how much his metaphors reveal about him. Look closely at the metaphor in those last two lines. By having the king compare himself to a viper, while at the same time comparing his father’s viziers to a shepherd, Sa’di uses Hormuz’ self-justification to reveal not just the fear and weakness at the heart of any tyrannical rule, but also something about the nature of power itself. The shepherd’s authority to kill the viper comes from his role as protector of the flock, though he can choose not to use that power if he doesn’t have to. (Hence, “the stone the shepherd might throw down.”) The viper, on the other hand–and I am following here the logic of the metaphor, not commenting on the behavior of actual snakes–because of the poison that defines it and the threat it poses to those around it, cannot afford to wait for the shepherd to make that choice. It must assume that the shepherd has assumed that it will attack and so it has no alternative but to defend itself accordingly.

The viper’s power, in other words, is defined by its fear of the world, its sense that the world is arrayed against it, while the shepherd’s power is defined by the choice that is available to him. Not that the fact of this choice will make the shepherd a good and wise ruler by definition; but it does seem to me that awareness of the choice is a prerequisite for a wise and benevolent rule.

The cool thing about a metaphor is that no single reading will ever capture its entire meaning, and so I know the reading I have presented here is a partial one at best. I’d love to hear what you think.

Cross-posted.

You never know how people are going to find your work, and you never know how it’s going to touch them or why. Earlier this month, a man contacted me asking for a copy of the uncorrected proof of my Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan, which I make available through my website to anyone who asks for it. All I ask in return is that they tell me a little bit about why they want it and how they intend to use it. I’ve gotten these requests from a wide range of people, including graduate students in Iran who are working on their MA in translation studies to people, a scholar in Russia who was preparing a multilingual anthology of selected works of classical Iranian literature, and several people from India who were studying Sa’di for their own purposes and preferred my translation to the ones that were available in their country.

The most touching request for a copy of this PDF, however, came this month from a man who, as he wrote, “happened upon [My Companion’s Scent Seeped Into Me] while reading The Male Privilege Checklist on Alas! A Blog.” I featured that poem on my blog on June 27th. Here it is again:

I held in my bath a perfumed piece of clay
that came to me from a beloved’s hand.
I asked it, “Are you musk or ambergris?
Like fine wine, your smell intoxicates me.”
“I was,” it said, “a loathsome lump of clay
till someone set me down beside a rose.
Then my companion’s scent seeped into me.
Otherwise, I am only the earth that I am.

That poem, he went on, “is a reflection of what happened to me.

I am a 46 year old male. I have recently been reunited with my ex-wife who I hadn’t spoken with for over twenty years. It has been a wonderful experience of learning and enlightenment thus far. She gave me a book to read by Don Miguel Ruiz called The Four Agreements which has had a profound impact on my life and the way I live it.  It is a book of wisdom. I would like to reciprocate by sharing this with her.

To know that my book has been a part of the experience this man describes–well, I can’t think of a better reason to write.

If you’d like to read this week’s “Sa’di Says,” it’s called “Creation Kills What It Was Made to Love.”

As usual, I’d love to know what you think.

Cross-posted.

Towards the end of his preface to Golestan, Sa’di—that’s a picture of me at his tomb in Shiraz–says:

Long after we have crumbled into dust,
and the grains of who we were are far-flung atoms,
these words, well chosen and arranged, will live,
and in them alone my spirit will endure.
Perhaps one day a sympathetic man
will offer a prayer for the labor done by dervishes.

When I was a sophomore in college, I took my very first poetry workshop with June Jordan, whose poetry and essays continue to inspire me today. I remember sitting in her office, talking about a poem of mine that did not make very much sense. She kept asking me what I was trying to say, and I kept resisting the question. I had, I thought, been very clever about planting clues to my meaning in the lines of the poem, and I wanted her to figure it out for herself. Finally, she looked at me and said, “You know, Richard, a poem is an act of communication. You are trying to say something to someone in a way that will change them, but if they can’t understand what you’re saying, or if they have to work so hard to understand you that they lose interest, then what was the point of writing in the first place? That’s how I feel about this piece you’ve brought in today. Since I don’t understand why I should bother, I don’t understand why you bothered. So why should I waste my time trying to understand you?”

Those words sound a lot more cruel when I read them back to myself than they do when I remember June saying them, but they are not so much different than the words I use with my own students when I tell them that if they don’t take themselves seriously as writers, they shouldn’t expect me to take them seriously either. I say this at the beginning of every semester to every writing class I teach, whether it’s developmental writing, which I’m teaching this month, technical writing, creative writing, or English as a Second Language composition, each of which I will be teaching in the fall. I want them to start thinking of the writing they do as more than a response to an assignment; I want them to start thinking about it as what they have to say, and I want to impress on them the audacity inherent in presuming that what one has to say is worth the time and/or money that someone else will spend in order to read it, even if that someone else is the teacher who assigned the piece of writing in the first place.

To write for publication, no matter how small the audience, is to possess a healthy dose of this audacity, but it is also, often, to take on a correspondingly healthy dose of doubt. For most of us, after all, writing doesn’t pay well enough to make a living; for many–especially poets–it doesn’t pay at all; and given that any kind of fame or enduring significance is as much a matter of chance as skill, that obscurity, if not oblivion, is the fate that awaits most of our work, it would be strange if we didn’t sometimes wonder, as June Jordan asked me, why we bother in the first place. Until something happens to reminds us. The first time I felt the power of knowing that my writing had made a real difference in someone’s life was in 1988. I had published an essay about reproductive rights with a profeminist men’s magazine called Changing Men. It was my first publication, and I was stunned, happily stunned, to find in the issue after my piece appeard a letter to the editor from a woman who said she was grateful to have read it. It had, she wrote, helped her figure out how to talk to her now ex-boyfriend about her unexpected pregnancy and her decision, which he had opposed, to have an abortion.

On another occasion, a colleague of mine told me that an essay I’d written about pornography for the long-and-unfortunately-defunct American Voice had been the subject of conversation at a dinner party she’d attended. One of the guests, not knowing that she knew me, told about reading the entire piece out loud to some of his friends, male and female, so they could have an honest discussion about porn. Then, my colleague said, he talked about giving the essay to his teenage son as way of starting a conversation about sexual values. I’ve even gotten this kind of response to my book of poems, The Silence of Men, when someone wrote an open letter to me on the Internet–it is, sadly, no longer online–about how the book had helped a friend of his come to terms with some family issues.

Most recently, however, I saw how my words have touched people when I discovered the hashtag #Saadi and learned that, without my knowledge, someone with the Twitter handle @ShaykhSaadi has been tweeting 140-character-or-less excerpts of my Saadi translations since 2012. ShaykhSaadi has more than a thousand followers, more than have bought, and certainly more than have read The Silence of Men–and they have been drawing comfort, inspiration, and guidance from the voice I’ve given in English to a Persian-speaking Iranian writer who’s been dead for almost eight centuries. Knowing this has certainly put any ambitions I have for my own work into perspective, and I am conscious that Sa’di brought that kind of perspective in thinking about his own endeavors. In the section of Golestan where this week’s Sa’di Says occurs, he puts it this way:

The nobles of my lord’s court, may his victory be glorious, are pious men and profound scholars. How could I dare to speak in their presence? If in the passion of the moment, like a child trying to speak with his parents as an equal, I added something of my own to what they had to say, my thoughts would be revealed as simplistic trifles, paltry imitations of the noble’s subtle and supple ideas. Glass beads in the jewelers’ bazaar are not worth a barley corn; in the presence of the sun, even the brightest lamp will fail to shine; and who will call a minaret’s height lofty if the tower is placed at the foot of Mount Alvend?

Granted that the conventions of writing for a royal patron demanded this kind of courtly flattery–the nobles of the king’s court, after all, could very easily have conspired to ruin Sa’di, or even have him killed. Still, it’s hard not to hear at least a hint of sincere doubt (and perhaps also mockery) in Sa’di’s tone. “Why do I bother,” he seems to be asking. “These men will never really hear what I am saying, no matter how worthwhile it may be.” Then, on the very next page, he answers his own question:

Nonetheless, trusting that the great men of the king’s court will be generous and discrete, choosing not to see the faults of those beneath them and to keep silent about the crimes their inferiors have committed, I have devoted a portion of my precious life to setting down in this book, in a shortened form, some rare events, stories, and poems about our ancient kings.

Sa’di’s answer, in other words, amounts to this: I write because I have something to say that I think it’s worth your time to read. What’s more, he goes on to say, finishing with the lines I quoted at the very beginning of this post, what I have to say is far more important than I am. It will outlive me and, because the words in which I have said it are mine, a part of me will outlive myself. Let me quote those lines again:

Long after we have crumbled into dust,
and the grains of who we were are far-flung atoms,
these words, well chosen and arranged, will live,
and in them alone my spirit will endure.
Perhaps one day a sympathetic man
will offer a prayer for the labor done by dervishes.

Sa’di’s spirit has indeed endured and I am happy to have built a home for it, with my words, in English.

Cross-posted.