An Image for Longing

An introduction to the page, and then some thoughts on Ammons' poem

Introduction to the Page

بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ

Salaam, peace, and hello.

On a semi-regular basis, I hope to share poems and write about the ideas, questions, and feelings that lingered with me long after putting down the page. I am not an “expert” in poetry or criticism, but I do want to dismantle the notion that engaging with poetry requires anything other than being human. This is because poetry is our great, collective, human inheritance. Everywhere you find a people, you will find a language; and everywhere you find a language, you will find poetry; and everywhere you find poetry, you will find attempts at articulating something from the unseen that could, perhaps, explain some deep truths about the mysterious phenomenon of existence.

Poetry is for all of us because it is from all of us; indeed, it what makes an “us” possible. I don’t mean that in a Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities type of way, in which language “creates” a nation/people by allowing them to craft narratives and define a sense of nationhood. I mean that poetry houses our deepest expressions of being human, and we find that these attempts at expression and discernment are universal among peoples across times, cultures, and regions. Its universality speaks to our unconditional commonality.

Format

To the extent possible, I will post pictures of poems along with my annotations of them. The annotations might not be easy to read, and you don’t have to read them, either: everything in the annotations will likely find its way in the writing that follows. But I thought it’d be fun to show what my engagement with poetry looks like. It’s not just a single read-through, but a wandering and pausing meditation.

Below the image, I’ll share some thoughts on the poem. If you, upon reading, have ideas of your own that you’d like to share, please do email me, or leave them in the comments and I will be thrilled to reflect with you.

And with that said, let’s begin.

The poem below by AR Ammons is one of my all time favorites,¹ and the name of this blog comes from it.

For Harold Bloom, or An Image for Longing by AR Ammons:

In this poem, the image of the self is an image of longing:

 ...and nothing here shows me the image of myself:
for the word tree I have been shown a tree
and for the word rock I have been shown a rock
for stream, for cloud, for star
this place has provided firm implication and answering
but where here is the image for longing…”

But what is the nature of longing? The tree, the rock, the stream, all of these objects of the natural world are at home atop of the summit: the natural world is complete, whole, at rest, so to speak. After no image for longing can be found, the speaker gathers mud and “with [his] hands [makes] an image for longing.” But even then, it is not an image for longing while it remains atop of the summit:

     I took the image to the summit: first
I set it here, on the rock, but it completed 
nothing: then I set it there among the tiny firs
but it would not fit:

It only becomes an image for longing when it is removed from its place of origin:

so I returned to the city and built a house to set
the image in
and men came into my house and said
     that is an image for longing

I know this is a somewhat literal reading of the poem, but it’s a reading that spoke to me deeply. The feeling of longing hints at a sense of alienation and remove; a tree in the natural world does not speak of longing, but how must that tree feel when it is removed from the forest and fashioned into something else? This is exactly the case in the famous opening poem of the Masnavi by Jalaladdin Rumi:²

Listen to the story told by the reed,
of being separated.

“Since I was cut from the reedbed,
I have made this crying sound.

Anyone apart from someone he loves
understands what I say.

Anyone pulled from a source
longs to go back.

In Rumi’s poem, the wooden reed makes music in lament of its separation from its source; in Ammons’ poem, the the mud becomes an image of longing only when it is brought into the city, out of nature.

What source does our longing call us to? The great 14th century historian, jurist, and polymath, Ibn Khaldun, wrote that when God created human beings, He fashioned us with a “divine subtle entity” (latifiyya rabbaniyya), the essence of which “originates from the Spiritual World, where essences posses true knowledge directly.” Sometimes this entity is called “the spirit, sometimes the heart, sometimes the intellect, and sometimes the soul.” And this divine subtlety that resides within us “only attains perfection through its sojourn in this world.”³

In other words, each human being is endowed with knowledge of its origin—an otherworldly origin that is intimately and inextricably intertwined with the divine. And the sojourn, or journeying, that constitutes our lives is in many ways a response to that longing. We have knowledge of something beyond, something else, which we seek to discern and magnify through the lives we live, en route back to the origin.

In that sense, it is no surprise that Ammons’ poem begins with the speaker atop of the summit. We reach the speaker at the end of a sojourn, seeking an image for longing, an image that resembles the agitation of the heart that yearns for something beyond the purely material world, something from the unseen, something from the origin.

Even the irregular stanzas of the poem resemble a journey. The poem follows no clear meter or rhyme; the reader follows along, jumping from rock, to stream, to cloud, to the city. And yet, the poem does not feel disjointed. It appeals at the level of intuition because it is so firmly grounded in a terrain, both inwardly and outwardly. The journey that one takes when trekking a path is irregular, with stops and pauses, lingering in some places to take in the view, while trudging at other points, hoping to eventually reach some summit. So, too, is the inward journey of trekking through existential questions: some answers come easy, some take years, and many questions beget further questions. The path is irregular, and so too is Ammons’ poem. This is understood subconsciously, stanza by stanza.

And, at the end, upon discovering the secret of longing, the speaker recognizes that “nothing will ever be the same again.”

1. This poem is the epigraph to Ammons’ book-length poem, Sphere, the Form of Motion

2. Translated by Fatemeh Keshavarz for OnBeing. For a good translation of the Masnavi, see The Masnavi, Book One (Oxford University Press 2008).

3. The Requirements of the Sufi Path: A Defense of the Mystical Tradition by Ibn Khaldun (tr. Carolyn Baugh) (NYU Press 2022). This book is an explanation and defense of the Sufi path written in the form of a legal opinion by Ibn Khaldun in response to the question of whether one needs a shaykh or a spiritual guide to traverse the path. In answering this question, Ibn Khaldun defines and explores different elements related to the spiritual path, such as what is the heart, what is the spirit, and what are the different forms that spiritual wayfaring can take. It’s one of my all time favorites works on Sufism, and the bi-lingual edition presents the Arabic and English side by side.

For other works on the spiritual dimension of the human heart, see The Marvels of the Heart by Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (tr. Walter James Skellie) (Fons Vitae 2010). Ghazali’s book is a canonical text in the Islamic spiritual tradition and Ibn Khaldun himself refers to Ghazali’s books in his own text.

I think it’s worth noting that Ghazali, Ibn Khaldun, and the Islamic perspective on the heart in general holds that the human heart has the ability to understand and discern reality on a physical and metaphsyical level; a tree as it truly is, the moon as it truly is, a butterfly as it truly is. In other words, the heart has the ability to understand the essence of reality and collapse the difference between subject and object. This is quite different than the perspective of the speaker in Ammons’ poem, who feels alienated in nature: “…its speech could not get through to me nor could I address it".” Ghazali, on the other hand, would say that all of creation reflects the Creator, and the heart is able to recognize that and be at home in it. And God knows best.