The city and country of the mind

April 03, 2008 It seems to me that poetry combines the outside world, visible to all and a tactile source of imagery, with the inner world, that second source – or is it the first? Poetry combines what is felt with what is seen: whether one lives in city or country, the fields of the heart vie with farm fields, the cities brimming in our minds compete with Bangkok, Johannesburg, Amsterdam, San Francisco. That is, city and country, different though they are, conflate to constitute the Outside to the poet.

I grew up near an American metropolis, and I live now in a Middle Eastern city which has less than half a million inhabitants, but which is international, crowded and traffic-filled. However, the country in which I live is so small that I can easily get to the countryside, just outside of my city, or a few hours drive away. Recently I found myself in Zippori, a Galilee farming community. I saw a group of Thai farm workers eating a meal outside the one grocery shop which serves this village and began to consider the city-country spectrum and the tendency of many poets to see ourselves and our concerns in both these semantic fields.

While browsing the PIW site, I began to question the very representation of the country and the city. For the country, many poems use abstractions drawn from nature and not strictly from the countryside: the mention of snow, a tree, the sea, a cloud, all of which might very well be found in cities but somehow register as rural. Is the city marked in our urban lives simply as the absence of nature?

Perhaps, in our world, where long distances are traversed by middle class tourists but also by poor immigrant workers, where travelers traipse with cameras through the rural Third World, and Third World farmers crowd their cities looking for work, there is no longer a strict division of these spaces in anyone’s imagination.

Nearly a hundred years ago, Hebrew poet Rachel, who lived in Ottoman and then Mandate Palestine, wrote this way about the spiritual advantages of country living:

a man awakes and through the window sees
a pear tree blossoming,
and instantly the mountain weighing on his heart
dissolves and disappears.
( ‘Pear Tree’  Tr. Robert Friend)

But even Rachel was ambivalent; notice that “mountain”, however metaphorical, that weighs on the heart. In her case, it may have been the mountain of agricultural work she took on near the Sea of Galilee.

Even the most emotionally troubled poet, perhaps especially the emotionally troubled, retains deeply imprinted memories of the outside world. One may hear echoes of the Romantic idea of nature as healer even here. “Behind the closed forehead”, the South African Ingrid Jonker writes, and “the heart locked against itself”:
sits the green mantis of the veld
and dazed we still hear
small blue Namaqualand daisy
answering something, believing something, knowing something.
( ‘Daisies in Namaqualand’  Tr. Antjie Krog & André Brink)

Our minds and hearts, crammed full of unfortunate family and world history, worries and migraines, imagine nature as a small, knowledgeable palliative, and more than this, carry it within, no matter how shut off we feel.

For other poets, the self is a more comfortable place, a refuge from the outside world, in this case the city, as Georgian poet Rati Amahglobeli (hear the globalization inside his name!) writes:

Let it snow outside, let’s not remember anyone outside.
Let the town fall into a heavy sleep, let the town sleep,
Let fathers, brothers sleep sweetly and bitterly.
Let every place, space and area be covered in white snow.
Let factories, stations, the airport sleep in peace,
Let the sky too rest in sleep, let there be no flying,
Let the yard dogs, the tramp, the bird on the wire
Be overcome by slumber, let everything surrender […]
( ‘Untitled’, Tr. Donald Rayfield)

The Australian Noel Rowe, on the other hand, saw irony nearly everywhere he looked, in city and country, whether holy or profane. Near Jerusalem, in the pastoral but gentrified village of Ein Kerem on its outskirts, the promise of Christianity is inextricably combined with the good life on earth, with property rights and housekeeping:

Today, having lunch
next door to where they say John the Baptist was born, I looked up
from pumpkin soup and saw that the people across the way
had hung a rug out to air, had hung it over the ancient stone wall
that held their property in. Maybe, I thought, this is all the sign
you’ll get; maybe this
is the bent welcome of a clean and contrite heart.
( ‘And on Jerusalem Peace’)

For the Belgian, Herman De Coninck, nature permeates the consciousness of receptive minds in a city and birds have the last word. Poetry is a tactile and not only a mental experience of connection; perhaps inner musing depends on the outside world?

I think that poetry is something like fingerprints
on the window behind which a child who can’t sleep
stands waiting for dawn. Earth generates mist;

sorrow, a kind of sigh. Clouds
are responsible for twenty-five kinds of light.
They actually hold it back. Back lighting.

It’s still too early to be now. But the rivers
are already leaving. They’ve heard the murmuring
from the silver factory of the sea.

Daughter beside me at the window. Loving her is
the easiest way to remember these things.
Birds hammer at the anvil of their call

all, all, all.
( ‘Fingerprints on the Window’  Tr. David Colmer)

It is hard to remember, in our virtual world, whether we have seen things first hand in the country (or city) or have seen them on television, in movies, or online. What does it matter where we are when we speak on a mobile phone? We are inside our heads. (The amount of car accidents caused by this daydreaming activity is witness to its dematerializing effects.) The soul, and the connection between nature and human spirit, may now be transmitted with technology, as the Moroccan poet, pediatrician Fatiha Morchid writes:

I and the sea here
Your breath
In a cell-phone
. . . carries me
beyond
a sail,
without astrolabe
and the horizon your eyes . . .
( ‘Sailing’  Tr. Norddine Zouitni)

Politics lives on the farm as well as in the city. Whereas Israeli poet Agi Mishol once wrote about sorting fruit with Palestinian workers from Gaza, she now writes about the racism inscribed on a hand-me-down t-shirt worn by migrant workers from Thailand, and the way news, via radio, accompanies the most mundane of her daily chores:

[…] the scent of rice has already faded
from the Thai workers trailer.
The sorting machine grumbles in the shed.

Because of his wool hat it’s hard to know
whether he’s Tawa-chai or Nee-pon,
“Kahane was right” printed on the t-shirt
someone gave him.

Through the slats in the creaking shutter
I see the sun poking the wheat
and the grayhound chasing crows.

Silken voices emerging from the radio
and the beeps of the fruit truck backing up
signal time to rise

to give water to the dogs,
a wash tub to the geese
and milk to the porcupine,
to sprinkle the ground
so that a scent rises
and then –
to listen to the news.
( ‘Pastorale’  Tr. Lisa Katz)

City and country are not the same, and we are apt to fantasize about the other space when we are located in one of them. The sounds of the city are harshly different from country sounds as British poet Clare Pollard records:

Baby screams twist through the block of flats,
then shattering sounds, domestic rows,
TVs saying: lines are open now.
The grey roads swill with rain,
and advertising hoardings turn,

then turn again,
as pizza heats through in my oven.

Common sense tells us, though, that we might not really enjoy stopping by the woods on a snowy evening and getting stuck there:

What would I have me do?
Trill to birds like some Disney Snow White?
Forage like some broadsheet tourist?
Imagine the cold — no fridges, no taps.
I’d bore myself, kill myself; can’t even strike a match.
I’d end in constellations of maggots.
( ‘The City-Dweller’s Lament’ )

Keats once wrote in what was then rural Hampstead Heath, a manicured garden outside the windows. Less people live in the true countryside now; cities attract migrant workers and migrant writers. A creative writing teacher I know has her students photograph the places where they write, which are now likely to be noisy wifi cafés. It will be interesting to see how the countryside can be crammed into the small screens of cell phones and YouTube, along with the rest of our culture, and how it will survive in verse.