The many 'I's of Amichai

"The idea of the `eternal retour' means the idea of the total and endless cyclical nature of all things" - Nietzche, "Ecce Homo."

On the surface, this is strange: Within a generational stratum that challenged the "we," and even more than that, challenged Natan Alterman's fear of "subjectivity," there remains among "the poets of the 1950s and the 1960s" a fear of the autobiographical experience - like the fear of someone vomiting on the bus. That aversion to Amichai's excess "I" supposedly reflected a flinching that comes from good taste, a kind of longing for T.S. Eliot's "objective correlative" and the poet's obligation "to see outside himself" and not only "scrutinize himself."

There is no truth to this. A poet can write again and again in the third person and still be impervious to the world around him, and a poet like Amichai, for example, or Avot Yeshurun, can be a rich poet and see a world full of people, animals, plants and pain, and along with this still write autobiographical poetry - lyrical, not epic.

That aversion to Amichai's excess "I" was not a flinching from the "ego," but rather the exact opposite: the ego's flinching from the trembling earth of the subject. The ego - that is, the "I" (the subject's object), is the coherent "I," the product of education, primarily education to seemly behavior in the public and familial sphere, that knows how to protect itself from the pain of "decide what you are already," from loss of control, from the unbridling of the tongue - all these are precisely the characteristics of the ego culture, of a prolonged education to be a "social human being." And in short, the fear of subjectivity is the fear of its heterogeneity, the fear of the stubborn refusal to obey the "up to here this is I and from here this is you," whether this is with reference to vomiting, the crying of the other, or his language that is not understood, or wild laughter, or the intimacy that one forces upon you with his voice.

What of all this is true of Amichai? For him, there is not a single "I," and within the one body, many live: "After everything I do, they march / As at funerals: the child I was years ago, / The boy in his first love, the soldier I was / In those days, the gray-haired man I was an hour ago, / And others, strangers too, that I was and forgot, / One of them may be a woman" (translated by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav in "Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry 1948-1994," HarperCollins, page 373). Amichai brings to the poem the wealth of indeterminate possibilities that live side by side. In his 1974 collection "Behind All That Hides a Great Happiness," in "Songs of Body and Soul," he writes: "I am riding myself, hunting / with I-dogs the fleeing I: / barking and prophesies, trumpets and forest / a hunt to the death" (translated by Vivian Eden).

Even more important is the corporeal way Amichai perceives this heterogeneity, which is derived from this concept of the subject: "The blood that stands the member erect / Is not semen. / And spilt blood certainly / Is not seed. // And semen drowning in blood is not seed, / And blood without semen is nothing / And seed without blood is naught" (tr. Harshav and Harshav, page 238).

Did those who have finicky reservations about Amichai's poetry not include the aversion about speaking about the heterogeneity in its primal kernel, blood and semen, the source of the central taboo in the life of the body?

Constant subversion

Freedom of language like this - the swift move from context to context, from one semantic field to another - always exists in the "primal" language, but in the literary language it encounters difficulties. The novel, of course, is the great liberator of language in Western literature, after hundreds of years of elitist control by the "sublime" genres. There is no place where the homogeneity of language strangled the art of the poem like in England, for example, as contrasted utterly to Ireland, the United States, or the islands of the West Indies. But even if this sounds paradoxical, the Israeli novel, in its own regal way, does not like heterogeneity. In stark contrast to it stands the poetry of Amichai. It is impossible to bypass bold lines like: "I hear the children of my childhood / Sing songs for the memory of the dead, Therefore / My heart is glad and my glory rejoiceth but my flesh / Shall rest in hope,' and suddenly - erection" (tr. Harshav and Harshav, page 439).

The transition from the memory of the past, through the verse from Psalms that also appears in the liturgy, to the erect penis - it is this transition that ensures Amichai his future on our bookshelves, the bookshelves of people who bite themselves and the neck of the other, and not as a "national poet": No education system can really destroy this plenitude, or render it homogeneous, and there is no harsher contrast to ideology, any ideology, than the heterogeneous. Ideology is always the transformation of human multiplicity into the homogeneous. In his poems, Amichai knew how to crumble any ability to formulate an orderly national philosophy, and even if within the loud volume of our grim verbal life, he sometimes said something stupid in a newspaper interview, totally heretical lines like those cited here will not be erased in the carcinogenic nationalism of our literary life.

In the collection "From Man You Came and to Man You Shall Return" (1989), in the poem "Awakening from Sleep in the Evening," he wrote: "My only flags are my clothes, / my anthem, my breath, / and my first and last word / is `here'" (tr. Vivian Eden).

But tragically, even the heterogeneity of the language of Hebrew poetry gets lost in the nationalist kitsch that inundates us, even in the liberal version of the kitsch (those on the right exalt the fetish of the land, and those on the "left" exalt the fetish of the language). Here it is important to recall Amichai's loyalty to Modernist poetics. Returning to the place where he fought in 1948, he writes: "But as long as I live, my soul remembers / And my body ripens slowly in the flame of its own annals." And at the end of the poem, there is: "And now I do what every memory dog does: / I howl quietly / And piss a turf of remembrance around me, / No one may enter it" (tr. Harshav and Harshav, page 410).

How can this constant subversion be explained in terms of "the poetic voice," the voice that can speak in many roles? It is possible to begin, for example, from the biography: not a "family of educated German Jews," like the prevalent stereotype, but the grandson of a farmer from Bavaria; or indeed the Palmachnik with the soft yekke (German Jewish) accent, and a hostility toward physical education classes, and a love of the seashore, and a hatred of the summer sun - and, in short: total alienation from the place along with the strong love of a person who is from the place.

All of these contrasts cannot explain the richness and contradictions. However, I believe that the constant undermining of the "solid signifier" of the "I of the speaker" is nourished, above all, by the figure of the father, who is always also a son; hence the role of memory in this poetry, memory that blurs the rigid drawing of the present (and those who have contented themselves with reading the early Amichai have certainly missed the importance of this double role in his later poetry, the poetry of a relatively elderly father to his small children): It is impossible to separate the soft father who is a soft son from the soft son who is a soft father, as in the "Poem to My Father's Cheeks," from "Behind All That Hides a Great Happiness": "My father's cheeks, in my years, were soft / as the velvet of his prayer-shawl bag" (tr. V.E.) and even more than that, in "Letter of Recommendation" from the same volume: "I remember my father awakening me for Selihot. / Caressing my cheek he did this / not tearing the blanket off me" (Selihot are the early morning prayers for forgiveness during the period prior to the High Holidays; tr. V.E.)

Father-son relationship

In the Oedipal context in which we all live, "being a father," which breaks down with the help of "being a son," and vice versa, endows the poems with the ceaseless crushing of meanings that surround us, meanings that regularly divide our lives first of all into "men" and "not men," and then, as men, into father and son. A father is a father, a son is a son, just as in "up to here this is I and from here this is you." Amichai the father longs to be a father, but to do this in the bosom of his children, as if he were their son: "My daughter has little red shoes, / My two sons wear shoes my size, / But they don't have my father / And they don't have his God, / They have only me like a toy bear, big and hairy, / To stroke and play with, / So they will remember me and mention me to their children" (tr. Harshav and Harshav, page 461). And also, in "An Hour of Grace," in the poem "My Wild Children": "My wild children: In the morning / they eat my dreams, in the evening / they gobble my memories. / I am their manger." And afterward: "I want to light up my eyes / in their eyes / like a man on a dark nighttime street / asks for a match to light a cigarette" (tr. V.E.).

This relationship, the fatherly-childish stance, is the key to the figurative richness of Amichai's poetry. This richness is a result of the breakdown of the dominant meanings, part of the everyday that we all share, and this poetry evades them, as if out of a cage.

In an interview (to the literary journal Hadarim 6), Amichai told Helit Yeshurun: "Memories aren't memories. I live, because I am the child that I was, and I am the lover that I was, and I am the father of my children, and I am the son of my dead parents, and my parents are here. Everything exists. Nothing has died for me." In his discourse as a male - man, husband, lover, father, son, fighter, true war-hater, immigrant, a person from here - Amichai's hero-not-hero "floats" from one masculine signifier to another. Each signifier collapses the one adjacent to it and makes it difficult to construct a "single figure": that is - given to simple representation, and even God, as noted in the previous article ("What the womb promises," Week's End, August 6), does not allow him this except through negation.

Therefore, thus far all kinds of Post-Modern "subject opponents" can applaud in Foucauldian glee. But what emerges from Amichai's poetry is in fact the persona, the persona of the poet, the one person whose faces are very many, the one voice that can be many things, yet nevertheless "the same thing." He is a pornographer: "In totalitarian regimes, the women's / Cunts are particularly big and their appetites endless" (tr. Harshav and Harshav, page 348). And he is seductive - "Will you come to me tonight" (from "Saturday Night Poem" in "Two Hopes Away") - and a loving husband: "Because of love and because of making love / And because the pain of the unborn / Is greater than the pain of the born, / I said to the woman: `let us make a man / In our own image.' And we did" (tr. Harshav and Harshav, page 376). And so on.

The landscapes enter his world through longing, as if the time were the present, as if the seasons of the year were the present.

Meeting of extremes

The most important point in the meeting between the two extremes of memory, the present and the past, or the father and the son - between which the poet's memory is the only bridge - is the fact that there is no before and after in this memory. As far as these experiences are from Nietzschean pathos, they offer themselves as experiences of Nietzsche's eternel retour. In "Elegies on the War Dead," Amichai writes: "I, the son of Meir and the son of Frieda and born to die, / I who am about to die bless those / who will remain after me, like lords in an arena / before the last battle. / I who am losing describe in fiery words that which shall be lost to me, / I whose home will be destroyed and whose body will decay / praise the new homes / and the bodies that are still fresh and full of love" (tr. V.E.).

It is also possible to do without Nietzsche. What is the great spirit that Amichai's poetry instills in its readers? That power to live life anew each time, in contact with the materials, in fingering the world, in involvement in it. Even the memory of the distant war arises in him like physical contact with the present. In "Elegies," he also writes: "My good friend died in my arms, his blood / In the sands of Ashdod, 1948, June. // Oh, my friend, / Red-breast" (tr. Harshav and Harshav, page 250). How sensual and painful this description is. Since the description of the death of the medic Amichai, in S. Yizhar's novel "Days of Ziklag," there has not been such physical love of a friend in battle, not a fighter and not a comrade-in-arms and not the winner of a citation for bravery and not my Aunt Fanny - but rather a beloved friend bleeding, living forever as a beautiful bird. Heterogeneity is a stance in relation to the body, to blood, to semen, to touch and to death. And there is not a moment of total elation without a descent, a downward fall. In "Behind All That," in "The Candles," he writes: "I seduce my blood / in digestion and coitus / so that it will spread in the intestine and in the organ / and not give me the thoughts of an aching head" (tr. V.E.).

It would suffice us to link this heterogeneity to the love of the world and of humanity and longing, in order to see how much Amichai knew that it was a matter of language and of what is beyond it. In the poem entitled "I'm Tired," in "Even a Fist Once Was an Open Palm and Fingers (1989), he writes: "I'm tired like a very ancient language / that is penetrated by foreign words, I cannot protect." And, subsequently, "But on evenings of grace the street is still full / of surrogate fathers and surrogate mothers" (tr. V.E.).

Is it possible to err in describing Amichai's greatness as a description of the eternal retour? No. After all, when everything passes and the quarrel of "but you wrote that he was no good" is over and forgotten, and the clods of earth cover the body, what remains of the poet are his books of poems, like the harp that King David had, and it plays music of its own volition.

Another question has to do of course with the matter with which the previous article began: How much time would the substance of our life have allowed Amichai to live in this country, never mind Jerusalem, and sing this vivacity? Was the autumn of 2000 really the last line, the last connection between the passion to sing vivaciously and the mourning for our evaporating hopes? Did this rift not occur even before then (and is thus evident in his last book, which insists on finding in the stories of the Bible what the substance of the language no longer invented, during those years of the Oslo carnival - that is, during the years when it was clear that there is no way the occupation is going to end? Hasn't optimistic poetry been condemned since then to be cocquette, like so many of our optimistic poets sound?

Second of two articles.

	Yehuda Amichai: the corporeal way.