The Water-carrier

Still life with Mounir's ceramic donkey, wedgewood pot, and Turkish tiles.

Eid Mubarak to all my Muslim friends.

I find myself thinking a lot about what to paint or draw these days. With Gaza and our chaotic world so much on my mind, it's hard to focus on simple beauty: it somehow seems trivial, oblivious to reality, self-indulgent. And yet simple beauty and simple pleasure are what nearly every human being desires, and deserves.

The little ceramic donkey in this drawing belonged to my father-in-law, so it's precious to us. I think it came from his native Syria, though I'm not sure; to him it was a reminder of the donkeys that used to bring fresh cool water from the mountains into Damascus. In the later years of his life, he had a whole menagerie of small animal figures: birds, monkeys, camels, an elephant, snakes: a veritable Noah's ark. None of them were to scale, which gave the arrangement an even quirkier air. When he still lived in a house, they were arranged around, and in, a large houseplant. After he moved to a retirement home, they were on a wooden stand, and he sometimes liked to rearrange them for his own amusement. His favorite was a tiny mouse made of ivory. One day it disappeared and he was disconsolate. We searched everywhere but never found it. He blamed the housekeeper, saying she must have knocked it onto the floor and vacuumed it up. After he died I hoped it would turn up as the apartment was emptied, but it never did: I like to think it scampered away to live behind the bookshelves, exactly as long as he did.

Last night I began reading Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun ("Bab al-Shams"). It's been on our shelf ever since we heard Khoury read at the Blue Met literary festival in Montreal some years ago, when he was interviewed and spoke about his close friend Mahmoud Darwish. Afterward we went up and met him, and he inscribed this copy to J., whose grandmother's maiden name was also Khoury. The novel is a story of relationships that contain Palestinian and personal histories; it is woven together rather clumsily - as the NYT reviewer notes - from snatches of stories, but this was a deliberate device by the author, who tried to write in a way that mirrors Palestinian reality: the history of the nation and each person seeming torn and patched together.

The novel is written in the voice of a surrogate son sitting at the bedside of his "father," an elderly freedom fighter who has had a stroke and lies in a coma. The son, a medic in a hospital in a refugee camp, spends most of his days bathing and caring for the dying man, refusing to believe he won't regain consciousness, and then at night, like Scheherazade, tells him stories, hoping that the words are still penetrating. I've been afraid of reading it, and now, even though I've started, I still am.

In addition to the tragic and horrifying events it recalls, the book of course also reminds me of my own dialogue with my very alert, very aged father-in-law, and of the last few months when he slipped in and out of present time and space as we sat by his bed, talking to him and listening to his own stories. When he died, at 99, a door into our family's life and history closed forever; now we too must patch it together out of fragments. Last night, when the narrator began reciting bits of verse by al-Mutanabi, perhaps the greatest of all classical Arab poets, I felt myself back in the familiar room with its blue and yellow silk carpet, the books lining the walls, the statue of Socrates on the stand in front of the old shortwave radio, and my father-in-law, leaning back in his chair, eyes shut, smiling at the ceiling as he recited poetry.

Terrible times can paralyze us, or we can use them, turning their negative energy into something better. Perhaps the time has finally come for me to pull out those dialogues that were collected here under the title The Fig and the Orchid, and see what can be done with them. As sad as my father-in-law  -- a former UN administrator of a refugee camp in Gaza, among his many positions through a long life of teaching and ministry -- would be over the events today, he always believed in the power of education, beauty, literature, noble ideals, and -- most especially -- reason and truth. He often spoke about their remarkable ability to endure across the millenia, lifting people above the worst.

"The desert knows me well, the night and the mounted men.
The battle and the sword, the paper and the pen.

--al-Mutanabi (915-965)

Al-Mutanabi, I have just learned, was the son of a humble water-carrier.

Comments

[Loretta]

I do believe that in these days of violence and hatred, of earthquakes and famines, and of planes being shot out of the sky, all we have ad individuals is the little circle of light we draw around ourselves in the form of prayer, of art, of family love, and of friendship.

[mary]

Beth,
I've been hoping that you'd get back to these reminiscences of your father-in-law. Whenever you wrote about him on the blog, I couldn't get the images out of my mind for days.

[Roderick Robinson]

Raddled with Alzheimer my younger brother moved into a retirement home two or three months ago. It's a long drive away and I still haven't made the journey though I'm hoping to in a few weeks. He had two wives both of whom ensured his various homes were elegantly appointed. Even now I'm wondering whether he has something elegant close by. Perhaps something to remind of his passion for sailing, but might that be too poignant?

Since I'm six years older it seems inevitable that I should speculate on what mementos I would choose. Books are logical but they'd have to be titles that offered deeply personal and significant links. That might mean "grand" books, perhaps difficult to read. Might there be something fraudulent in staring at the spine of a book that now lay beyond one's intellectual capacity? Always assuming one was capable of such nice judgments.

My mother was well-read and was prepared to struggle with hard books. But some years before she died she said to me - radiantly - she would from now on only read whodunnits. I've always borne that bit of honesty in mind

A painting is perhaps a better decision; paintings can be appreciated at different levels, depending on the state of one's sharpness. Surely you would be beset in making such a choice; your own work vs. that of others; something classical; something spiritual. The plain fact is none of us knows and - unlike most forms of uncertainty - this form is to be welcomed.

For the moment I have a half-formed need for Hogarth's The Shrimp Girl. It is full of youthful life, but not oppressively so. More than that, I first became aware of it during my own youth, at school. Unlike a piece of marine memorabilia for Nick, I wouldn't be risking an excess of poignancy. Or so my mind tells me at the moment.

[hattie]

Beth: I will read the book.I feel so heavy hearted about Palestinian.

[Duchesse]

To be surrounded by beloved mementos, even when the living space reduces to a room, is essential to the sense of self. For that reason, my mother spent quite a bit to stay (against the rules) in her retirement home rather than a nursing home or hospice, and we agreed. That sense of home probably kept her alive several more years.

When I try to assess the history of our specie's propensity for violence, I do not know if we are making any progress, and feel heartsick. But I do sense we witness more firsthand thanks to the ability to see more; less is hidden.

[Hattie]

That is Palestine, of course.

[Laura]

Dear Beth, Your first statement brought this to mind.

I happen to be reading the journals of Emily Carr (whom you've mentioned in this space before), and her words on this subject seem apt:

"The only thing worth striving for is to express God. Every living thing is God made manifest. All real art is the eternal seeking to express God, the one substance out of which all things are made. Search for the reality of each object, that is, its real and only beauty; recognize our relationship with all life; say to every animate and inanimate thing "brother"; be at one with all things, finding the divine in all; when one can do all this, maybe then one can paint. In the meantime one must go steadily on with open mind, courageously alert, waiting always for a lead, constantly watching, constantly praying, meditating much and not worrying."

She then quotes the last stanza of Whitman's "Song of the Rolling Earth," which would bring a tear to any eye. (I can't seem to embed a link, sorry. quick to find online).

Beth, it's voices and art such as yours that raise a sweet song to counter the violence and hatred in the world. To mix metaphors, keep shining your light forth and raising your torch high in these dark times -- it's the other side of being human and we just have to keep affirming it. We have to keep enacting our eternal side and making it real every day. Thanks for doing that for us so often in so thoughtful and deep a way.