In Them Alone My Spirit Will Endure

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.