Vocation Of The Poet

One of the most potent images from the Book Of J is that of Jacob wrestling with the Stranger. It is clearly a tale appropriated from lost oral traditions and may have referred originally to the dangers associated with travel by night in the desert--when jinn are active and the local spirits that haunt significant geographic features (in this case, "Jabbok's Ford") emerge to defend their territory.

The J-writer wove this image into a fragment about the patriarch Jacob, his wounding, and his assumption of a new name: Isra-El (one who travels by night into the realm of the High God). The Stranger bestows this name upon Jacob after wounding him in the dark. With the rising of the sun, the Stranger departs and Jacob is irrevocably changed.

Few images could be more Heideggerian, for critical to the German thinker's project was "developing a manner of thinking through language, that is, thinking that opens up new avenues and discovers unexpected insights less by way of concepts or arguments than by a specific way of listening to and being guided by language and its intrinsic ingenuity." ~ Krzysztof Ziarek, Language After Heidegger (2013), 1.

The agon with language that we find spread across the thousands of pages of prose he produced in his long and productive life puts one in touch with the lisan al-ghaib--the "other-worldly voice" (an epithet of Hafez appropriated by Frank Herbert for his Dune novels) that can be heard only when one "listens to and is guided by the intrinsic ingenuity of language" at work and at play.

Heidegger might have objected to the wrestling metaphor, preferring instead something more irenic (attunement cannot be acquired by force). And yet it strikes me that effort is expended, struggle entered, either way; and that is the point of the story.

Attending to lisan al-ghaib is the true vocation of the poet.


Image: Ken Katzen