Windy Day at Brighton

Artist: Charles Conder (English, 1868–1909)

Date: ca. 1904-1905

Medium: Oil on canvas

Jannes de Vries/ ‘Steentil’ (1966)

Gilded silver reliquary casket, England, early 14th century

anyway, here’s the poem.

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The Blesséd Word: A Prologue

The Hour draws nigh and The moon is rent asunder. –THE KORAN, Surah 54.1

We shall meet again, in Petersburg –OSIP MANDELSTAM

I From an untitled poem, that opening line announces heartbreak as its craft: a promise like that already holds its own breaking: “We shall meet again, in Petersburg / as though we had buried the sun there.” From Kashmir, that Vale where the Titans sought refuge, where, just before Saturn began to speak to Thea, “There was a listening fear in her regard / As if calamity had but begun,” from there: “When you leave home in the morning, you never know if you’ll return.” “We shall meet again, in Srinagar,” I want to answer Irfan. But such a promise? I make it in Mandelstam’s velvet dark, in the black velvet Void.

II Let me cry out in that void, say it as I can. I write on that void: Kashmir, Kaschmir, Cashmere, Qashmir, Cashmir, Cashmire, Kashmere, Cachemire, Cushmeer, Cachmiere, Cašmir. Or Cauchemar, in a sea of stories? Or: Kacmir, Kaschemir, Kasmere, Kachmire, Kasmir. Kerseymere?He reinvents Petersburg (I, Srinagar), an imaginary homeland, filling it, closing it, shutting himself (myself) in it. For there is the blesséd word with no meaning, there are flowers that will never die, roses that will never fall, a night in which Mandelstam is not afraid and needs no pass. The blesséd women are still singing. A patrol is stationed on the bridge and a car hoots like a cuckoo. Maybe the ages will die away and the loved hands of blesséd women will brush the light ashes together?

III And the night’s sun there in Srinagar? Guns shoot stars into the sky, the storm of constellations night after night, the infinite that rages on. It was Id-uz-Zuha: a record of God’s inability, for even He must melt sometimes, to let Ishmael be executed by the hand of his father. Srinagar was under curfew. The identity pass may or may not have helped in the crackdown. Son after son—never to return from the night of torture—was taken away.

IV And will the blesséd women rub the ashes together? Each fall they gather chinar leaves, singing what the hills have reechoed for four hundred years, the songs of Habba Khatun, the peasant girl who became the queen. When her husband was exiled from the Valley by the Moghul king Akbar, she went among the people with her sorrow. Her grief, alive to this day, in her own roused the people into frenzied opposition to Moghul rule. And since then Kashmir has never been free. And will the blesséd women rub the ashes together? Each fall, they sing her songs. They create their rustic fuel for winter: they set fire to the leaves, sprinkle water on them as they burn, and transform them into fragile coals. But the reports are true, and without song: mass rapes in the villages, townsleft in cinders, neighborhoods torched. “Power is hideous / like a barber’s hands.” The rubble of downtown Srinagar stares at me from the Times., Maybe the ages will die away—we will pray in Mandelstam’s night—and the loved hands of blesséd women will brush the light ashes together?

V And that blesséd word with no meaning—who will utter it? What is it? Will the women pronounce it, as if scripturing the air, for the first time? Or the last? Srinagar hunches like a wild cat: lonely sentries, wretched in bunkers at the city’s bridges, far from their homes in the plains, licensed to kill … while the Jhelum flows under them, sometimes with a dismembered body. On Zero Bridge the jeeps rush by. The candles go out as travelers, unable to light up the velvet Void. What is the blesséd word? Mandelstam gives no clue. One day the Kashmiris will pronounce that word truly for the first time.

The Entrance to the Villa Beaulieu in Honfleur (also known as Before the Storm), 1916, Felix Vallotton