Continuity: 7

Nijat mamedov

Translated from RUSSIAN by Esmira Serova

Distance encourages the ascent towards the Future.
Anticipating myself in the act of writing,
in an attempt to place words on paper,
articulating the resistance of inertia of the current moment,
I peruse the previously written pages,
misuse some lines as I go,
and think of the all-encompassing lexeme.
I take the word “Allah”, subtract the human, all too human
Interjection “ah” and get “All” which means what it says.
I am drawn to the transcription of this word—“Ol”. Zero and one,
Non-being and Being, yoni and lingam. In Azerbaijani, “Ol” means “Be”.
According to the Quran, with the word “Be” the Allah can wake
things and souls slumbering in the Non-being.
The multimove above shows that language is not the reflection
but the deflection of the reality, to speak is to distort,
but poetry is distorting the distortion and thus
coincident with the reality in many ways.
A poet doesn’t know what he intended to say himself at times.
One thing was intended, a different one was said.
(Who or what is speaking through him? Putting on his tongue names
that leave things like a soul leaves the body in one’s sleep?)
Just as well. Which means refusing to substitute the world
with one’s own deficient, a priori inefficient hollow
knowledge of it. It is good when an author prefers the becoming,
something unconsolidated, milk instead of cheese.
It is good when he doesn’t build any systems,
realizing that one must always question
fundamentals and even resort to banality.
Sometimes, all these worn out words and meanings are so fresh…
You roll them in your mouth and brain and say, “This is life.
This is like climbing every day up the stairs
leading to the doorstep of your apartment.”
Subjectivity is born by the will of the writer alone.
Confirmation and violation of the reader’s expectation is a bilateral act.
And the reader perceives the text in a slightly different way every time,
depending on the time of day and the quality of sleep at night.
So a poem is not a fact but still an act.
The reader is happy to get lost in a poem, when it
captivates and plunges into the unknown
like a fleeting kiss, the drive of collective soul.
(The impossible does exist but there is no map or compass.)
This is why we should penetrate inner landscape,
catch with nets the butterflies that pollinate the neural networks of writers, divine
with mouths pressed tight, tolerating the grating existence, not opening mouths for lamenting.
We are made from disjoined echoes, flashes,
spirals of spirituals, rituals (like when earth is buried in earth
and you wince thinking that even an infant’s swaddle resembles burial sheets).
Our voices continue to seek out one another despite the pauses
but sometimes the password is unknown, and sometimes critical force yields nothing.
But it doesn’t matter much.