Songs For A Stranger
Patience grows the taste of iron and ash
Since the start of the late unpleasantness, I’ve decided to live my beliefs out, or something, and this has meant hanging out with random Persian Sufis in the Bywater.1 To me, this seems like a thing that shouldn’t even be real, but whatever.
Now I know, but don’t care that Persian Sufis don’t speak Arabic as a first language.2 In some ways this is actually an advantage, and we are shattering all the third rails anyway, so let’s just garble some Arab poetry through Shia mystics and dust it lightly with my own bullshit. These Iranians can read Arabic pretty good, so I have been having them hack Andalusian poetry into a rough gloss, which I’ve then been fashioning into something like free verse.3
This is the Sandbatch Swisha House Remix4 of a poem titled only “And He Also Said,” by an obscure Andalusian medieval poet who comes down to us as Al-Tutili, or “The Blind Poet of Tudela.” Unsurprisingly, he was born at Tudela, in what we now know as Spain, but he was part of some flowering of Islamic poetics centered on Seville. His Wikipedia page is bare, but we know this. At some point he left Seville: “he later lived in Murcia. He died young.”
Virtually nothing is known about him in English, or at least virtually none of it is translated.5 I ran across this dude quite literally because a chain smoking old Arab Socialist dropped him in my lap, and said “not translated,” and then I said “well it’s either this or a real job.”
Song For the Stranger Oh you who wander, I greet you with palms open! Step down from your steed, set your feet in the grass and dew. Let rise your breath with the starlight, shoulders dipped in smoke and cloud. See how the night throws its great drape over the fields— I call to you, yes, you, to you! Riding there, body ghosted in lamplight, stride toward the high, unspeaking calling, harvest what the day’s hand has sown, let the coins of now gleam in your satchel, contented with bread, contented with darkness, singing away the old world’s blame. Wander the shining, sunlit road, where the high cliffs become blue mist, dress your soul in the dress of forgiveness, let your faith pulse like clean cool air— I witness you, comrade, moving always between light and shade. Letter Lost From gold I have gathered only the strain of striving. I staked my future untied my rope and slipped away. Now I wait in patience, put no faith in Fortune, plant no roots in borrowed shade. A stranger’s share is all I find, my fate lost like a letter never sent. I’ve cried out to the Sun; who turned away, knowing not my face. Where is my companion, the one who knows the path? Perhaps my voice will drift to him across this field. Spring Question Fresh news ending a cold spring reviving parched lips Mountain for a house (I have made) animals for friends wind and sorrow companions on the stone While joy endures no shade lasts. Swords will be praised by those who have bled. Mausoleum thistles flowering sands of time learn by walking endure a length of waiting Three days: hoping waiting leaving Patience I choose— drink from rain in barrels smell the roses pass, do not pluck Wisdom grows in the old; etched blown in rainburst entombed in dust scorched by Time Kindness Returns Downriver No longer for you the sunwild plain, nor the bottomless guilt of absence, choose now channels where shadows gurgle over root and stone. Cut loose the anchor! May strong current teach you rest. Run freely in the blackdrift. Doubt is but sand and wind. Patience is the slow swirl under cypress knees. Turn from envy—its teeth gnaw at the nerves. Let sorrow’s ripples pass. Speak only what the cattails know. Smile as the water closes round a stone. Forgive the stumbles of those moving through the reeds— come back to kindness as rivers returns to mouths. Let longing stand in the low mist, forget wrongs, noble-hearted, as the heron forgets the snare, lifting into the pale margin of morning. Comfort is Plenty I Clarity speaks in doubt; truthful men are scarce. Where is the wise one, My loyal, brother who holds fast? Flicker in the dark, cast light upon bodies without weight. Sadness settles in; I wait and wait. My youth is gone, hope burned down to ember. II Some stand near but drift far as fog. Some hearts only open when the weather turns. A true friend appears in trouble; loyalty is thinnest when comfort is plenty. Faithful ones fade, longing aches under all this sky. III Only blackbirds listen to what I can’t bear to tell. Patience grows the taste of iron and ash. How long, heart, will you hold this burden? When will sorrow set down its load on the road ahead? Graveyard Lesson This world— shelter for the stranger, not for the dweller. Its days: hope, waiting, departure. Oh soul— how long in sleep? How long blind to the wind of your fate? Listen: to those who have walked far, to the old who know the crossways. What I have gathered— years of knowledge, years of sorrow; from supulchres, reading silent lessons of those gone before. Chiaroscuro Past the reach of your fire, knowledge sleeps, cool in the half-dark, patience sifting tangled roots. Trouble and peace coil together like smoke and dawn. Hunt your supper in the shadow of the sycamore, curse not the rising silt when it stains your boots. Want only what half-blooms in dusk and sun. Let your call drift, neither whispered nor shouted. Forgiveness beads on the leaf, waiting for the wind. Companions in heart! Let patience rend your days when the bitch of luck flees and hunger tugs. All is washed away—moondark blurs to riverlight. Desire dissipates, shallow friends recede. Wisdom’s shade walks before you on the bank. See how the World, candle-lit and clouded, turns and glances away, shadowed in mystery. Keep your wounds under wraps like foxes in the canebrake. Walk upright, shadow-draped, humility your shield. Move quiet through places where sunlight doesn't pool, and journey on, starlit, as silence closes 'round behind you.
I called this a “Swisha House Remix” jokingly, but really not all that jokingly. It isn’t a translation, and it isn’t even a transliteration. It is, instead, a work situated in that liminal zone (I hate this phrase, but it works here) Frye called the “green world”—a landscape where myth, memory, and language mingle and are recast by the fixed demands of a determined “Present.”6 Here, the “original” poem, attributed to al-Tutili, is less a fixed artifact and more a revenant pilgrim, or a stranger at the crossroads, waiting to be hailed.7
Frye reminds us that every mythopoetic act is less about the surface of content and more about the underlying vibe— in this case, the deep structure of exile, return, and recognition. In these remixes, the anxiety of loss is met with the refusal to mourn without creating:. Old-world metaphysics become new-world roadside sermons, and the “shelter for the stranger” is reconstructed in the peculiar grammar of Louisiana’s waterlines and humid heaviness. The “letter lost” is not merely a symbol of failure or incompletion, but the emblem of any tradition in motion.
Not to toot my own horn, and especially not in this relatively mundane, kind of squashed cycle, but I've gotten away with it because of the curious way I form narrative, which is to first allow an image to form in my mind, and then another, and then another. Sometimes the process takes months and years, but at this point I ahve a steady supply of crystalline images, and when they come together in a triad, I stick a stringer through them like fisheyes and say "that's a beginning, middle and end." It's a story now. The cool thing about doing it this way is it can be time independent. The Islamic Golden Age can be transferred directly to a Bywater summer. Potentially, every reading can create a new narrative.
If I were to lay out my narrative of this particular poem or cycle, or whatever it is… it would move something like this: We begin with the invitation to the stranger—the recognition of exile, the opening of the gate, the handshake at the threshold. There is the sense of standing outside one’s own story, both host and guest in the world. From there, the sequence passes through the reckoning with lost hopes and unclaimed messages—the “letter lost,” the gold that brings only fatigue, the question of whether one’s voice is ever heard at all. Next comes the season of questions: spring arrives, but with it the knowledge that no shade, no joy, can last; wisdom is earned by endurance, waiting, and loss, even as the roses bloom and wither at the same time.
After these wanderings comes a turn—a kind of gentle return downriver, to the work of forgiveness, the ache of patience, the river’s lesson that kindness is a homecoming, even when it’s solitary. The next movement sifts through complexities of loyalty and sorrow, the rarity of true companionship, and the endurance of longing when all comforts fail. The graveyard lesson comes at last, teaching us, through the speechless knowledge of the dead, that every life is ultimately a shelter for strangers, a place of passage more than of dwelling. And in the end, chiaroscuro: light and darkness swirl together, and the poem walks out quietly, bearing the residue of loss and (hopefully) the gift of humility.
It’s all, in the end, an almost Dylanesque or Lynchian experiment in what Frye might call “myth as process”—not a single story, but the continual making and unmaking of stories in the tension between exile and home, speech and silence, image and memory. And it is, too, a New Orleans story, if only because this is where you can still hear these kinds of songs.8
One of the "Seven Dry” neighborhoods in New Orleans, East of the French Quarter and known for its artists, ‘eccentrics,’ and a density of esoteric and countercultural gatherings per square foot unrivaled anywhere else in America. It’s not even close, actually.
Sufism is a mystical tree of traditions within Islam; Persian Sufis (from Iran) are heirs to poets like Rumi and Hafez. Their presence in New Orleans is both improbable and, somehow, inevitable.
"Gloss" here means a quick-and-dirty literal translation or paraphrase, not a polished literary rendering. I did that part. (So blame me).
“Swisha House” is a Houston rap collective famous for “chopped and screwed” remixes. Slowed, warped, and heavily sampled.
There is one, impossibly hard to find (limited to 1000 copies) English language translation of some Moorish poems entitled “In Praise of Boys” by Erskine Caldwell, but I’ve no idea if this particular poem is in it. Yes, that Erskine Caldwell (1903–1987): the Southern novelist most famous for Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre. In a twist that feels apocryphal but is entirely real, Caldwell also produced a tiny, limited-run English translation of medieval Arabic homoerotic poems under this title. Copies are nearly impossible to find.
Northrop Frye, Canadian critic and author of Anatomy of Criticism, coined “the green world” to describe the liminal, transformative settings of Shakespearean and mythic narrative, where characters are freed from ordinary constraints.
“Revenant” means ghost; “crossroads” is a blues and folklore motif for meetings between worlds, fateful choices, and spiritual traffic.
In New Orleans, the boundary between the living and the dead is porous; stories and songs survive in ways they don’t elsewhere.