hour.”^44 It encompasses and encapsulates the whole, but it declaims, what Erik
Svarny terms aptly, “the unified self of spiritual autobiography” (p. 191). It is
through a bisexual vision that scenes are revisited, styles readdressed, and an
amount of proliferation is introduced. Ludic at large, Tiresias’s intent under-
mines itself, giving way to an enormous relativization, which shreds and quotes
only tend to increase. To al-Baymtl, too, al-Ma‘arrl, the blind philosopher and
poet, oversees a whole scene which he is unable to control or influence. His
awareness and insight increase a sense of disenchantment rather than rapture.
However, while there is a reason to draw a comparison between Eliot’s Tiresias
and al-Baymtl’s blind poet, al-Baymtl’s poetics escapes total mythicization.
Indeed, his mystical poems and the significant ones of exile parody the mythical
and interrogate its underlying cycle while they opt for a redeeming love.
Grounded in al-Ma‘arrl’s poetry, as his many dedications suggest, al-Baymtl
is no less at loss than al-Ma‘arrlin respect to the whole ontological issue.
Always striving to universalize experience, he makes good use of his prototype
who also contemplated precursors with a rigorous and revisionist method.
Although not particularly an expert in developing a “mélangeof evanescent
voices” (Svarny’s phrase 210), al-Baymtl’s readings offer him shards, fragments,
and a rich mosaic of poetic space that throbs with lively discussions and
critiques of life, love, death, exile, and poetry.
Al-Baymtl’s Ma‘arrlis impersonated in a poem titled “Sujnn Ablal-‘Alm’
(AbnAl-‘Alm’s imprisonments), written just before al-Baymtl’s death (1999).
No longer a mask or a ghost as in his earlier poems, the ancestor interfuses
into the poet’s persona and they become one. Certainly, Dante fuses into
Eliot’s voice, too. In the second section of “Little Gidding,” Eliot’s persona
and the “familiar compound ghost/ Both intimate and unidentifiable,” con-
verse, speaking of the past and the present. In James Olney’s words, they are
“a collection of disembodied souls representing our personal, professional,
national human past and informing our individual present.”^45 Dante appears
and identification and recognition are established, but ambiguity remains
there, too, to snap sustained reasoning. The practice is not alien to al-Baymtl
in his “First Symphony of the Fifth Dimension”:
I hear him sigh in my slumber
Smiling, he reads my thought and strokes my hair.
I hear him pronounce my name and say:
If this next night comes to folly
And the wind howls behind the Ural Mountains, you may come.
I tell him: I am blind and alone
The voice falls silent.
And I find myself on the pavement of my sleep
Riveted to the magnetic rock
Enveloped by the darkness in the depths of my own hell.
(Pt. III)^46THE EDGE OF RECOGNITION AND REJECTION