Friday
As Passover week comes to an end, here’s a Passover poem, recommended to me by my best friend from graduate school, poet and literary scholar Norman Finkelstein. In the past, I’ve shared Norman’s own Passover poem, which you can read here. This year he suggested the title poem from the collection Mountain, Fire, Thornbush by Harvey Shapiro, for whom Norman is the literary executor. Here it is:
Mountain, Fire, Thornbush
By Harvey Shapiro
How everything gets tamed.
The pronominal outcry, as if uttered in ecstasy,
Is turned to syntax. We are
Only a step from discursive prose
When the voice speaks from the thornbush.
Mountain, fire, and thornbush.
Supplied only with these, even that aniconic Jew
Could spell mystery. But there must be
Narrative. The people must get to the mountain.
Doors must open and close.
How to savor the savagery of Egyptians,
Who betrayed the names of their gods
To demons, and tore the hair
From their godheads
As lotus blossoms are pulled out of the pool.
The poem seems to be about how an encounter with the divine evolves to the Passover narrative. The encounter occurs when Moses hears God’s voice from a burning thornbush. The “pronominal outcry” (pronominal meaning “relating to a pronoun”) is God’s assertion, “I am that I am.” Shapiro describes this as an ecstatic outcry—divinity announcing itself as a fiery assertion—but what starts off as poetic images (mountain, fire, thornbush) becomes a collection of words (syntax) and then meaning in the form of discourse.
In other words, a poetic sense of the divine gets translated into language. Even an aniconic Jew like Moses–I think “aniconic” means literal minded and non-metaporical—senses mystery in those powerful images. In any event, that divine spark eventually leads to the exodus narrative: God calling upon the Israelites to rebel against the “savagery of the Egyptians,” to close their doors behind them (with all the door imagery that one finds in the Passover seder), and to journey to the mountain and freedom. Savoring Egyptian savagery is an unexpected twist to the poem but maybe it’s a reference to how the Passover narrative, to be compelling, needs a good villain.
In his opening declaration that “everything gets tamed,” Shapiro also seems to hint that something gets lost in the translation. The poetic ecstasy of encountering the divine dwindles to a story.
Does this convey a disappointment with the Passover seder? Is it no more than a demon, an icon, when compared with that initial thornbush moment? Is pulling lotus blossoms out of the pool a version of separating them from the life source? I confess to not really understanding the last four lines and would like help.
Yet it seems to me that, even if something is lost or betrayed following that initial encounter with the divine, not everything is lost. The Passover narrative retains at least an echo of the ecstatic meeting with God that birthed it. Tradition, after all, always starts off as poetic vision.