"Like a Balcony": the philosophical text within the poetic metaphor.

Karaki, Balqis Al-

"Like a house's balcony, I overlook whatever I desire." At first glance, this line by the late Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish may not seem to bear multiple or complex meanings. A daring attempt at interpretation, however, can show that this simple metaphor is capable of bearing and provoking various philosophical ideas. To achieve this end, the interpretation invites the ideas of several theorists of metaphor and imagery, including Bachelard, Derrida, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Nietzsche, and Deleuze, in approaching Darwish.

I. Justifying the Imposition

"Metaphor is less in the philosophical text ... than the philosophical text within metaphor" (Derrida 258). This bold, intriguing statement by Derrida may be valid if we keep in mind that for a philosophical text to exist within a metaphor, a certain type of reading experience is required in order to find or create the philosophical text. The subject of this article is Mahmud Darwish's poem "'Ara shabahi qadiman min ba'id' (I see my ghost coming from afar) (Limadha 11-15), which is widely referred to by its first line: "'Utillu ka shurfati baytin 'ala ma 'uricT (Like a house's balcony, I overlook whatever I desire). (1) Among the desirable things the subject of the poem looks out on are: his friends holding the evening mail, a seagull, troop trucks, a neighbor's dog, the name of the Arab poet al-Mutanabbi, a Persian flower, trees, wind, ancient prophets, his image, words in the Arabic dictionary, the Persians, the Romans, the Sumerians, the new refugees, a crushed necklace of one of Tagore's poor women, a hoopoe, the supernatural world, his language, his frightened body, and, finally, his "ghost coming from afar." The poem is quite popular among those interested in Arabic poetry, yet such admiration may have nothing to do with potential philosophical dimensions that can be uncovered in an analytic reading.

Darwish published this poem in 1995, and read it numerous times across the world until his death in 2008. Several YouTube videos of Darwish reciting the poem are available, with a total view count of approximately 35,000. In the middle of this performance, Darwish received a loud applause as he read:

   I overlook the procession of the ancient prophets
   As they climb barefoot to Jerusalem
   And I ask: Is there a new prophet
   For this new time? (13)

One can easily argue that the reason for this applause is simply the political context. This may be true, but one must keep in mind that no other Palestinian poet, no matter how politically oriented his poems are, has received similar appreciation for his poetry. Thus there must be something in Darwish's poetry--something besides the political element--that draws this attention. As regards this poem, one can endlessly go looking for aesthetic reasons to justify this appreciation. One can claim, for example, that the poem's music is behind its "beauty"; that the poem is appreciated because some of its images are novel and unfamiliar; or that it is able to move the audience because it touches upon some common human concerns. These and other reasons which can be drawn from the wide literature of literary criticism may be correct in part, but may also be "fantastic creations" as well: "... where one did not know how to explain one learned to create," Nietzsche reminds us (Daybreak 27). And as it is probably impossible to come up with a prescription for writing a poem that will be appreciated with such a degree of "subjective universality" (to use Kant's terms) or "transsubjectivity" (to use Bachelard's), the real, complete set of reasons and causes behind this appreciation will remain inaccessible, or at least very difficult to put together accurately without serious reduction.

As in other artistic performances, no one among the members of the audience seems to have brought a pen and paper to Darwish's recital. This is because no one is there to interpret the poem, or to attend a lesson in philosophy or a lecture in politics. They are there to enjoy a certain aesthetic experience, and as to this poem, it is a short event that takes less than five minutes. Whether the audience members have read or heard this poem before is irrelevant: There is not enough time anyway to turn this short experience into a careful act of scholarly investigation. The closest description of this experience seems to--still--be Kant's "pleasure without interest," or at least, the interest which Nietzsche admires in Stendhal's description of the beautiful as "une promesse de Bonheur [a promise of happiness]" (Genealogy 83).

Nonetheless, the two experiences--the short, seemingly effortless encounter with the poem and the long effortful process of interpreting it--are not entirely disconnected. For it often happens that the desire for interpretation stems from a previous, short-lived experience of the poem, i.e. reading or hearing it without a prior intention of interpretation. It is because we briefly enjoyed a poem (or a piece of music, or a painting) that we find ourselves desiring to work with it in a non-passive fashion: either to try and find the reasons behind our enjoyment, or to extract its possible meanings, or--as often happens--to construct and impose the interpretation we prefer on the poem we liked and enjoyed. Fortunately, we live in a time when being unfaithful to the poet's intention is acceptable, and when an interpreter, unlike a theological commentator, does not have to insist that his interpretation is the original meaning of the text: The author is no God, not even close.

But where does the desire to impose and exaggerate a poem's meaning(s) come from? We know for example that the medieval theologians had very good reasons for imposing a certain interpretation on their holy texts. The Muslim theologians found it acceptable to read the words "thing" and "be" in the Qur'an as bearing the difficult philosophical problem of essence and existence. Christian scholars who interpreted the occurrences of ladders, twigs, or rods in the Old Testament as referring to Jesus's Cross did not consider this an imposition. Nietzsche is known for attacking such "dishonest," "impudent arbitrariness" and for referring to such practice as "the art of reading badly" (Daybreak 94). These may indeed be "bad readings" but not because they are seemingly imposed from "outside" the text, but because these interpreters did not know or admit that their interpretation was not the original meaning of the text. In all cases, they had serious wars to fight and which perhaps justified their need for imposing a certain meaning. What is interesting is that such a desire to impose, avowedly or not, does not require a persistent theological need to exist. Does not Heidegger make Holderlin say what he wants him to say? That is, he interprets Holderlin's poems in a way that will make them helpful in explicating his own ideas about art and history? In Holderlin's Hymn "The Ister," Heidegger even denies that his reading is an "interpretation" in the "strict sense of the word," but is only able to communicate few "markers," or "remarks" on the poetry it has selected, "signs that call our attention," and "pauses for reflection" (2). For Heidegger, such remarks are "always only" an "accompaniment," and are "simply imported and are not even 'contained in' the poetry" (2). This "accompaniment" for Heidegger is not an imposition, as the poetry is still "present as what comes first" (2).

Deleuze and Guattari speak of the thinkers who are "'half philosophers but also much more than philosophers" (Philosophy 67), claiming that:

   There is such force in those unhinged works of Holderlin,
   Kleist, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Kafka, Michaux, Pessoa, Artaud,
   and many English and American novelists, from Melville to
   Lawrence or Miller, in which the reader discovers admiringly
   that they have written the novel of Spinozism. (67)

In doing so, are they not imposing Spinozism--which Deleuze clearly admires--on those literary works which they also admire? Is it not possible to find or create traces of Plato, Descartes, or Nietzsche, for example, in the works of those "half philosophers"? Will these traces be "imported" from or "contained" in those works of art?

Indeed, imposition and exaggeration seem to be much more inviting than is faithfulness to the author's intention. In the case of Darwish's poem, it would take a knowledgeable reader, one who is interested in understanding the former's balcony poem within the context of his entire poetic corpus, to craft a link between "I overlook whatever I desire (or want) ['urid]" and, for example: 1- Darwish's poem "Ruba'iyyai' (Quatrains) where each stanza begins with "'Ara ma 'urid' (I see what I want to see), and which is also the title of the entire collection 'Ara ma 'urid (1990) (Diwan 377-86); 2- Darwish's masterpiece Jidariyya (Mural), written in 1999, which contains his famous line "sa-asiru yawman ma 'urid' (One day I shall become what I want) (12-16); 3- Darwish's poem "Lam yantazir ahadan" (He awaited no one), published in 2005, where he writes: "And I escape an oppressive question: What do you want. What do you want?" (Ka zahr allawz 33-35); 4- Outside the sphere of Darwish's poetry, the devoted reader can add to his intertextual reading Nizar Qabbani's poem "Rajul wahid' (A Lonely Man) which famously begins: "Law kuntu a'rifu ma 'urid' (If I knew what I wanted) (n. pag.). The same reader might also remember what Darwish said about the balcony in Dhakira lil-nisyan (Memory for Forgetfulness): "The balcony is life's attack on death. It is resisting the fear of war" (234). From this, the faithful reader can move on to claim that the subject in Darwish's poem wants to see or imagine certain things so as to resist the fear of war, but he does not seem able to resist it completely as he cannot escape seeing the trunks of the troops, and wishing for a new prophet to come as savior, and so on.

The question is: Why does it not seem interesting, at least to some readers such as the present author, to go along these somewhat safe and riskless paths? It is probably due to something in those readers. Time, some are happy to read or hear the poem, briefly share their experience with others, praise the poet in passing, and move on. For others, the desire to share their experience is far more persistent, and can sometimes be governed by certain egoistic motives and feelings of envy towards the poet. The stronger these desires, the harder it will be for the interpreter to fulfill them, and perhaps becoming a "mere" critic of, or a specialist in, the works of that particular poet may also fail to do so. Such "ungratified" reader can go far and try to find a role for himself, and mere enjoyment--something shared by many--and mere commentary will not be sufficient to satisfy his pride. And so after distancing himself from the original aesthetic experience, he decides that he wants to become a creator himself rather than a mere observer or faithful interpreter who is already in the worst of places: right in the middle, neither a poet nor a philosopher. Therefore, when this reader imposes an interpretation and it turns out to be good, it is as if he is saying that he is no less brilliant than the poet. Indeed, an interpreter can be credited for a good, post-performance interpretation, but not for the capacity of the poem to be loved and enjoyed at first reception. Thus "the reader's pride," as Bachelard calls it (Space xxv), cannot be entirely satisfied if we agree with Bachelard that the suggestive power of a poem--which allows for multiple interpretations--is a credit to the poets, and because of this "dynamism that belongs to suggestion," "the reader can go farther, even too far" (53). In other words, if the interpreter succeeds in forcefully extracting a good interpretation, it is not because he has created it from scratch and later imposed it on a metaphor or a poem, but rather because the metaphor has the suggestiveness which allows him to construct that interpretation, or simply because the "poem came first," to use Heidegger's words. It is only if the interpretation proves to be somewhat better than the poem to the extent that it can make a poem provoke a response that it did not provoke before that interpretation, it is only then that the reader's pride is fully justified and the interpretation can be described as an instance of creation. If the poet's task is to interpret the world poetically and create something astonishing from normal and familiar words, the "proud" interpreter's task becomes to create something even more astonishing with his raw material being the poem itself.

Bachelard has a lot to say about the dynamism of an image which, for him, can even exist in a single line (Space 11), and this seems to apply to our line here: "Like a balcony, I overlook whatever I desire." Bachelard encourages the reader to follow "the positive impulse of exaggeration," because it has the benefit of being interesting, free from the habits of reduction which is all too "easy and commonplace": "The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes" (Space 219-20). Bachelard sees such daring reader as a "phenomenologist":

He takes the image just as it is, just as the poet created it, and tries to make it his own, to feed on this rare fruit. He brings the image to the very limit of what he is able to imagine. However far from being a poet he himself may be, he tries to repeat its creation for himself and, if possible, continue its exaggeration. (Space 227)

The problem with Bachelard's characterization of the will to exaggerate in The Poetics of Space is that it does not place the "daring associations" at any conceptual level. It is true that Bachelard insists that a poet can give us a "lesson in philosophy" (185), that "we must listen to the poets" (89), and even claims that philosophers themselves would learn much "if they would consent to read the poets" (208). However, Bachelard is not in favor of what he calls "intellectualizing the experience" of reading, as he prefers not to attempt personal interpretation but rather to experience poetry as a "daydream" (see xvii, 17, and 218). He does not like the attempts that do not indulge themselves enough with an image, i.e. those which translate what is "believed to be" figurative language into reasonable language (225). In other words, the exaggeration he calls for is an exaggeration on the level of imagination, and the reduction he rejects includes any attempt to interpret the image as a traditional lesson in philosophy; i.e. a lesson which contains abstract concepts. An interpreter looking for such lessons is for Bachelard "a reader distorted by intellectualism who places abstract thoughts before metaphor" and "who thinks that writing is looking for images in order to illustrate thoughts" (Poetic Imagination 51). This is because Bachelard's epistemology rejects the possibility of synthesis or filiation between concept and image, and sees imagination as a feminine "fog" and "smoke" which threatens the "virility" of objective knowledge, while concepts which try to give stability to an image "would stifle its existence" (5-7). "I will not speak of my faithful love for images and then study them with the help of a great array of concepts," he says, for concepts and images should be loved "with two different loves": one in daylight, the other at nighttime (6-7). For him, poetic images should only be "lived," "experienced," "re-imagined," and allowed to "reverberate" in the reader's consciousness (qtd. in Gaudin xli). Any commentary that is not delicate enough threatens to "destroy the suggestive magic of images" (lvii). In the poetic fold, Bachelard says, "reveries replace thoughts and poems hide theorems" (4).

To be defending the possibility of translating a metaphor as containing a philosophical text is to be in a position where one cannot agree entirely--if at all--with Bachelard. However, it is still possible to benefit from Bachelard's notion of exaggeration by widening its field. Thus, one can argue that an exaggeration in interpreting the image using an array of abstract concepts has the benefit of avoiding the reduction of a faithful reading. It is also beneficial to keep in mind Bachelard's idea that the dreamer is never passive, and that dreams "reveal nothing to a lazy dreamer" (Gaudin xxvi, xxviii). True, interpretation is a somewhat daylight activity, but one can expand Bachelard's idea and argue that metaphor can reveal no philosophical texts to a lazy, passive interpreter. Unlike daydreaming, interpretation requires conceptual work as claimed by Ricoeur, whose construal of interpretation may be added to Bachelard's to help understand the philosophy of/within a metaphor. Ricoeur sees that interpretation functions at the intersection of metaphorical and speculative discourses: It "seeks the clarity of the concept" but also "hopes to preserve the dynamism of meaning that the concept holds and pins down" (303). He reads Kant's famous claim that aesthetic ideas force our minds to "think more" as meaning that the presentation of an idea by the imagination "forces conceptual thought to think more" (303). And since he clearly considers metaphor to be a form of such presentation, he states that metaphor "introduces the spark of imagination into a 'thinking more' at the conceptual level"; the "struggle to think more" is the "soul of interpretation," Ricoeur adds (303), which seems to encourage the intellectualization of the reading practice rather than settling for a concept-free daydreaming experience.

But how exactly can the spark of imagination, in interpreting metaphor, "think more" at the conceptual level? Analytical philosophy, especially the famous thesis of Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, has shown that through metaphors we "think" because our conceptual systems are essentially metaphorical. They regarded metaphors as part of "ordinary" rather than "extraordinary" language only; i.e. they are not confined to the realm of poetry and art. Since this article deals with a poetic metaphor and argues that it can help us think more at a conceptual level (a Kantian idea originally) leading to the formation of a philosophical text (Derrida's phrasing), the focus on continental philosophy appears to be justified. Through the applied part of this article, I will argue that the philosophical lessons or texts available within Darwish's balcony present themselves as dialogues between philosophical lessons which we already know and the metaphor that can bear them. In such dialogues, our minds will be forced to think more about some philosophical ideas with the help of a new image. True, the interpreter is not required to be a philosopher who creates concepts or to prove that the poetry is similar or superior to philosophy, but, as Deleuze and Guattari observe, philosophy, science, and art are all ways of "thinking and creating" or "modes of ideation" (Philosophy 8). Interpretation, then, can be seen as an interaction between different modes of ideation. In this light, the poem, during the process of interpretation, ceases to be merely a plane of "percepts and affects," as Deleuze and Guattari see art (24), and as short encounters with it may tell us. Rather, the poem becomes a plane where percepts, affects, concepts, and even propositions come into the play of forming associations. True, poetry and other arts do produce affects which "surpass ordinary affections and perceptions, just as concepts go beyond everyday opinion" (65), which is perhaps why the desire for working more with the poem exists. However, just as Deleuze and Guattari find both art and philosophy to be "Chaoids," i.e. modes of confronting chaos--art by creating affects and percepts and throwing a plane of composition, and philosophy by creating concepts and throwing a plane of immanence (197; 208)--we can say that interpretation also tries to confront chaos though not only by submitting to the affects of a poetic composition. Deleuze and Guattari argue that chaos is not disorder as much as "the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes" (118).

And as the reader's first response to a poem is usually characterized by an almost infinite speed with which any response or quick interpretation that was produced soon vanishes, we can conjure that the interpreter, like a philosopher and poet, also tries to fight chaos. He fights the chaos of his own response to the poem, and through interpretation, he tries to create some order to the way he receives a poem, which requires establishing some degree of filiation between concept and image, philosophy and poetry. Evidently, why the interpreter would want to confront this particular chaos is due to a desire to confront the greater chaos. He probably considers that the poem as "chaoid' is too elastic and thus is in need of some interpretive, philosophical work, one which can render the poem more useful for such confrontation. It may be true that the artists are the ones who, for Deleuze and Guattari, can be "hybrid geniuses" in whose works the plane of immanence of philosophy and that of composition of art can "slip into each other" to the degree that "part of one may be occupied by entities of the other," and who can occupy a plane of immanence with instances other than concepts, "poetic, novelistic, or even pictorial musical entities" (66). But it is perhaps the task of the interpreter to actualize the slipping of the philosophical plane into the poetic one, and to help establish the status of poets as hybrid geniuses and half-philosophers. Does not this apply, for example, to Heidegger's disclosure of Holderlin's philosophical significance?

Certainly, rarely do readers of poetry get to become as important as Heidegger. But at least they get to enjoy, during the process of interpretation, a certain pleasure of forming associations, one that is quite different from their first, almost passive, response to the poem. The experience of interpretation involves a struggle to "think more" within different "modes of ideation" where concepts and images are not complete strangers, and where philosophy and poetry are allowed to slip into one another. Perhaps this process can be richer if the reader is allowed to slip in his own personal life as influenced or re-interpreted by the poem and by his interpretation of the poem, but this is something that is hardly--if ever-- acceptable in academic writing.

To say that Darwish's balcony contains philosophical texts is thus an attempt to show how an unorthodox interpretation of this metaphor can enhance our ideas about philosophical lessons which we already know. Although I will not argue that Darwish writes the poem of Bachelardism, Heideggerism, Nietzscheism or Deleuzism, I will argue that, as a "half philosopher," his metaphor allows the reader to construct traces of some of the arguments of those thinkers. And because it is in the end a metaphor and not an abstract concept, it can both support and destabilize the lessons which we know, through a dialogue that forces our minds to think more by trying to create new correspondences between the metaphor and a possible philosophical idea. The more accurate the correspondences, the more persuasive the interpretation, and a new pleasure with interest can be born.

Darwish was not the first to use the balcony literally or figuratively. Perhaps the most famous balcony in literature is Juliet's balcony, and there is also Jean Genet's play Le balcon; D. H. Lawrence's On the Balcony, Baudelaire's Le balcon; Oscar Wilde's Under the Balcony; Lorca's "Farewell" which begins: "If I die, leave the balcony open"; Octavio Paz's El balcon; and al-Sayyab's simile in "Hymn to the Rain": "Your eyes are two palm tree forests in early light/Or two balconies from which the moonlight recedes" as well as his poem "Shinashil ibnat al-Jalabi" (Enclosed balcony of the nobleman's daughter). With Shakespeare's play, the balcony became a symbol of love and of the anticipation of desire. In Genet's play, the balcony is part of an artful house of illusions, where secret theaters are formed for those who bring their own scenarios and find satisfaction in mirrors and trickery. Baudelaire's balcony is the "mother of memories" which will remember the beauty of caresses, infinite kisses, perfumes, etc. In Lorca's balcony, the subject can see the little boy eating oranges, and the reaper harvesting the wheat, therefore it is dealt with literally as a place from which one looks at things (and this is also true for Lawrence's balcony). Wilde is "under the balcony," speaking like Romeo of his love. The balcony of al-Sayyab's Ibnat al-Jalabi is no longer there after thirty years, and his desires to see her turn into "mere air, vanities, a plant without fruit or flowers" (DeYoung 260). Paz's balcony is in Delhi from which "he sees" things visible and invisible. The latter can be regarded as a precursor to Darwish's balcony from which he sees a crushed necklace of one of the poor women of the Indian poet Tagore. Of course, each of these balconies deserves an independent study and it is unfair to reduce their meanings to the summaries above. What can be said, though, is that Darwish's "balcony" is--at least as far as I know--the only balcony which is used as a metaphor for a subject looking at things. He is not under a balcony, or on a balcony, he is like a balcony. Because of this use, I find that the metaphor contains a rich philosophical text that can be drawn from distinctive features of the balcony, such as (1) its being immersed in the "outside" although it is part of the "inside"; (2) its providing of a view of the world from a certain perspective; (3) leading to the construction of certain desires. These three features form the three philosophical subjects in Darwish's poem as will be discussed in Part III, which is consequently divided into three sections: Subject/Object Interaction, Perspectivism, and Desire. The first section sets the metaphor in a dialogue with Bachelard and Heidegger; the second with Nietzsche; and the third with Nietzcshe, Deleuze, and Guattari.

Clearly, such interpretation is decontextual in nature and follows the path of the theorists who welcomed some "exaggeration"--imaginative and conceptual. And before going forward with my reading of the metaphor, the next part of this article (Part II) briefly explains how and why it clearly parts from most other readings of the same poem or the same collection.

II. Darwish Criticism and The Need to Undress the Eye

In the acts of criticism and interpretation, it may be true that one can never look at a text with a "naked eye." The poet is never dead, neither is the geography and history of his text. And, as has become all-too-known and generally accepted, the reader is inevitably a participator in such text: in the construction of its possible meanings and in its production of aesthetic and non-aesthetic effects.

There is a problem of perspective, it seems, when it comes to Darwish's criticism. As a general observation, it seems that this criticism is not only unwilling to try and undress the critical eye, but rather insists on overdressing it with Darwish's life and his identity as a Palestinian. The titles of the works written on Darwish in English often revolve around the following themes: "identity"; "resistance"; "Palestine"; "land" or "homeland"; "exile"; "memory", and so on. The quantity of such works is still incomparable to their counterparts in the Arabic-writing worlds of academia and media, wherein Darwish has been written about so extensively, and this "criticism" has been ongoing in a ceaselessly reproductive fashion, especially after his death in 2008. There is certainly much house-cleaning that needs to be done in this regard before one can sketch a map for a so-called "Darwish Criticism" in Arabic. Because of this, it may be early to make confident claims regarding the viewpoints and value of this criticism, even if certain observations seem to impose themselves on a reader who tries to follow the increasing number of writings on Darwish.

Among these observations, I will mention, with some caution, two remarks that seem to apply to the criticism of Darwish's collection Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? which contains our balcony poem.

First, it seems that much of what has been written about this collection, in Arabic and in English, departs from similar--if not identical-standpoints. The latter can perhaps be summarized by what Subhi Hadidi wrote on the back-cover of the collection published in 1995, where he stated that the Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? is an autobiography of Darwish's life and a biography of place as it becomes "contained by geography so that history can spread in it." The majority of articles contained in, for example, Mahmoud Darwish: Exile's Poet that tackle the collection seem to depart from the same perspective. Najat Rahman, for instance, discusses Darwish's poem "'Ara ma 'urid'-a possible intertext of our balcony poem-before moving on to his Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? She interprets the former as an attempt to "create" a homeland by writing poetry which will become the poet's "only guard" against the absence of his home (42). She moves on to read Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? through the lens of home and history, and thus she chooses from the balcony poem the lines which have strong political connotations (the same lines quoted earlier on the need for a new prophet) (43). In her reading of both texts, she relies on the idea that Darwish's poetry became "a space for survival" after Beirut (42), which clearly shows that the perspective of autobiography and biography of place, similar to Hadidi's, is dressing (or perhaps overdressing) her reading. Fay sal Darraj's reading of the collection is similarly contextual, and he highlights the collection's difference from Darwish's earlier works: "After thirty years of poetic experience, however, Darwish's work came to depict truth, tragedy, and history. Tragedy has remained, in the form of continued occupation, replacing the certainty of liberation with its probability instead" (67).

This is not to say that such readings are incorrect or poor in value. However, despite the fact that any attempt to understand each poem in its proper context is definitely one interesting way of looking at Darwish's poetry, it should not be the dominant approach to its interpretation, let alone being the sole, almost exclusive, method. Decontextualization, the approach of the present article, is an attempt to free Darwish from seemingly overdressed critical eyes, and may thus produce more interesting results, but only if it manages to render the interpretation coherent and consistent--something which is perhaps easier to achieve using contextual and intertextual approaches. Needless to say, the two approaches can always enrich one another. For example, Najat Rahman's notion of creating a homeland poetically may have been richer, had she not restricted poetic creation to a quest for the compensation of a lost land. For why would the subject in the balcony poem "look over," in an attempt of creation as Rahman would have it, "a woman basking in herself'? He looks at her "ka shurfati bay tin," and "bayt" in Arabic means both "house" and "hemistich"--a note which would have enhanced Rahman's idea of creation and compensation, had it been slightly freer from autobiography, for she would have certainly found interest in other lines of the poem and examined other ways of compensation through poetry at a more individual level as suggested by the poem (the creation of a woman, friends, poetic ancestors). The burden of context also seems to limit Darraj's reading which tries to examine the transformation of the "self' throughout Darwish's poetry, claiming that by the time the latter wrote Limadha he had already departed from a "Romantic self' and transformed into a non-Romantic, "poetic" one, thus Darraj entitles the section where he discusses Limadha as "Homeland Outside the Self' (67-74). The notion of "self' for Darraj appears to be somewhat constrained in order to fit his political perspective, and when this notion is applied to the balcony poem, it will restrain, I think, the vast energy of the metaphor claimed in the present article; i.e. its capacity to bear and problematize the subject-object relation (including self-homeland interchange) at a complex conceptual level. Still, when Darraj's reading is compared to Hadidi's, especially in his use of "self," he will seem far more thorough in his dealing with this concept and with Darwish's text in general. From here, I will move to my second remark on the criticism of Darwish's collection under question: the problem of concept and of critical language.

Even more than twenty years after Hadidi's initial identification of Limadha with autobiography (in "Dama 'ir Mahmud Darwish")--an identification that is not as problematic as the language of Arabic criticism mentioned above--some critics are still reading the collection and its poems through the same eye using the same writing style. Fakhri Salih, for instance, discusses Limadha in a section entitled "Shibh sira dhatiyya" (A quasi-autobiography) (139). He states that in this collection, Darwish "refurnishes his poem with the primary elements using the child's memory to look over the spatio-temporal sphere which witnessed the cry of the narrator in the poem" (139). It is again the perspective of autobiography and biography of place that shapes his reading twenty years after this claim was first made. Like Hadidi, he writes that the title of the balcony poem "emphasizes the element of birth observed through the eye of the subject [dhat] in an imminent temporal sphere" (139). Again, an overdressed critical eye is stubbornly shaping the criticism of this collection in Arabic until this moment, and it is also evident that Salih's writing style and use of concepts bear the same problems of Hadidi's. The former's discussion of the balcony poem begins by noting that the poet in the first lines of the poem uses a simile that "implies stillness and a view of the surrounding place. . . . The world is thus exposed in an explicit way [safira] before the eye that observes, but this observed world soon transforms into a scene looked at through the inner eye of the narrator-poet" (140). And without discussing the particulars of the metaphor any further, Salih decides to classify the looked-at elements in past-present categories, in order to defend his interpretation of "I see my ghost coming from afar" as "a journey of the memory in the past of the self [dhat] and a recapturing of the details of the absent time and place" (140).

It is surprising how the balcony of Darwish criticism in Arabic and English fails, even after twenty years of the publication of Limadha, to look out on newer things in this poem, and insists on rendering an overdressed eye, and sometimes using difficult concepts inattentively, which results in failure to evoke a new interest in the poem. My reading

of the balcony metaphor in "I see my ghost coming from afar" in the following part (III) claims to both undress the metaphor to explore its possible productiveness of philosophical ideas such as (Subject/Object interaction, Perspectivism, and notions of Desire) as well as treat each concept that converses with the metaphor with the necessary caution in order to render the interpretation valid, coherent, and insightful.

III. The Philosophical Text

III. A. Subject/Object Interaction

"Like a balcony, I overlook whatever I desire." The subject is merely like a balcony, and so, from the very outset of interpretation, any understanding of "subject" drawn from this metaphor will be "charged with hesitation," as Bachelard would say (Space 222). This is because "like" also signifies "is not," but not "the same," as Ricoeur tells us (7). Such "tension" between "identity and difference in the interplay of resemblance" (247) reminds us that any meaning concerning the subject that we can draw from the features of the balcony will remain far from becoming a definition of "subject," because the balcony is an object that will never be the "same" as the human subject.

Clive Cazeaux calls for an epistemological metaphor or family of metaphors which can "articulate the relation between subject and object in a way which does not repeat the internal-external dichotomy" (150). He argues that such a metaphor is introduced by Bachelard and Heidegger because "[t]hey configure the encounter between subject and world as an opening, which is to say that the subject and world meet each other not as two pre-formed components but as entities who acquire their being through their mutual participation in or as an opening" (150). The balcony metaphor also introduces this relation in a nondichotomous manner. Like a balcony, the subject looks out on the world. The balcony is already part of the inside and also a way for the subject to be outside to some extent. In our daily speech, we say that someone is "out on the balcony," but to be "out" on the balcony one has to be "in" the house first. Being "on" a balcony means being "in" and "out" at once. This allows us to read the metaphor as suggesting that the subject "overlooking" the world is not detached from the world "outside," but is already "immersed" and "engaged" with this world as Heidegger would put it (Cazeaux 151). For Heidegger, this world, in turn, does not have a mind-independent structure, but emerges before us humans in a way that is not detached from our concerns, interests and desires (Cazeaux 153-55). The balcony metaphor also bears this idea because, despite its engagement with the outside, the balcony remains part of the inside, a part that provides a limited view of the world outside.

In the poem, the things that the subject-as-balcony overlooks also support the idea of subject/object mutual disclosure. In the first line of the poem, the speaker claims to see whatever he desires. True, he sees things that are attached to some individual and cultural concerns, which he projects upon the world, but these projections are all made possible because of his being immersed and already located in the world. To better understand this, we must remember that the state of "overlooking" or "looking over" in the poem is probably a mental state, as the subject looks at imaginable things besides visual ones, and at times it is difficult to decide between the two. What is clear, however, is that some of the things he looks at are wishes, memories, and desires. Like a balcony, the speaker looks out on the friends who bear the evening mail, wine, bread, novels, and records; the seagull and troop trucks which change the trees of the place; the dog of the neighbor who emigrated from Canada; a procession of ancient prophets; a woman basking in herself; the trunk of an olive tree that hid Zachariah; the Persians, Romans, Sumerians, and the new refugees. These things can all be seen, imagined, or wished for because of the necessarily biological, social, and political natures of the subject, or because of his status of being "immersed" in the world: the wide world of nature, and the smaller worlds of social and cultural contexts. Being engaged in nature, he desires to "overlook" a woman. Being in a part of the world where there is conflict, he looks out over troops and a procession of new prophets. Being in a part of the world where language is Arabic, he looks over the Arabic dictionary, and the name of al-Mutanabbi. Nonetheless, it is impossible to claim that every human being who is a Palestinian poet would necessarily see or imagine the exact same things, and so it is not viable to say that the individual is entirely subordinated to the forces of the worlds in which he is immersed. Within the possibilities that the subject's engagement with the world allows are possibilities which emerge due to a subjective constitution that is not entirely passive. The balcony metaphor strongly bears this idea: A balcony would not allow two Palestinians to see what is behind the house, but within the space they can both see, their attention would not be necessarily drawn to, or focused upon, the same things. Each will see what he looks for, and his personal interests will be reflected.

Thus, the metaphor destabilizes the subject/object dichotomy because the balcony is part of a structure whose construction is particular to humans, even if it is open to the world. What further thickens the whole situation is that the speaker can see his frightened body, and later his ghost approaching from afar. This makes it more uncertain which things belong to the outside and which to the inside, or to the subject and to the world (Cazeaux 174). The subject of the poem is given the metaphor of the balcony--an object--and overlooks his body and his ghost. Though these two are irremovable parts of the subject reflecting, they are both "objects" of his reflection. In other words, the subject is given the metaphor of an object to experience itself as a subject encountering itself as an object. The inside becomes a way of seeing the outside, which already contains and mirrors this inside. "Poets are well acquainted with the existence of this hesitation of being," write Bachelard (Space 214). As a particular space of an opening, the balcony metaphor allows for the complexity of this circuitous, hesitant interaction. Its unsettledness lacks the sharp geometry which Bachelard criticizes in the dialectics of inside and outside as presented by some philosophers. In this metaphor, inside and outside can no longer be experienced by imagination--and intellect--in their "simple reciprocity" (216).

Another philosophical idea is present in the approaching of the subject's ghost from afar. The ghost brings to mind the unformed spirit in the Cartesian mind-body dualism. But is it a way of saying that this unformed spirit is already part of nature, rather than being distinct from it as Descartes had it? Such interpretation is problematic, because both body and spirit, which are opposed in Descartes, approach the balcony separately as it overlooks them. But although they are not united and not identical, they are not opposed to one another either, and thus an anti-Cartesian interpretation is invited. It is here that the body is frightened, not the spirit, which is also anti-Cartesian since emotions are not linked to matter for Descartes. Thus the "I" which overlooks both its body and soul may not exactly be in our metaphor the Cartesian identification of the self. Still, the fact that it can see both its soul and body as objects can imply that it is indeed the Cartesian consciousness. Also, the fact that all the subject-balcony does is imagine and reflect seems to invite Descartes's cogito as the thinking being. True, the balcony is made from "materials" in the world, but its construction and function are particularly human. Therefore, within the metaphor, Descartes's idea of the mind as immaterial is questioned at the same time that the metaphor itself retains, though hesitantly, the specificity of the human mind a la Descartes to some extent. Does not this metaphor answer Bachelard's quest for a new image, one that is "sufficiently new in its nuance of being," which can "furnish a lesson in ontological amplification," and whose newness can help us "reverberate above ... reasonable certainties"? (Space 216)

Obviously, what has been forcing us thus far to "think more" is the balcony's relation to space. It does not separate neatly the inside from the outside. And so, in spite of its brevity, the balcony metaphor is able to "disturb the common notions of spatiality" (Space 219). Bachelard does not mention the balcony in The Poetics of Space as bearing this disturbance. However, he discusses a comparable image: the door, which seems to bear similar capacities as those of the balcony. He finds that a poetic image of "door" allows us to explore the being of man "as the being of a surface," as a region where "the movements of opening and closing are so numerous, that we could conclude on the following formula: man is a half-open being" (222). The balcony resembles Bachelard's door, and it might even be more suited to the "half-open being" formula. Like a door, it seems to separate man from world but it is only a delicate separation where no sharp boundaries exist. For Bachelard, the door can give images of "hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect" (224), and requires only a "slight push" (222) for "our fate to become visible" (223). The balcony can also give such images, and perhaps others, and it does not even need that slight push in order to reverse the "ordinary common sense" of the perspective of inside and outside (225). I am like a balcony, the subject of the poem says: both outside and inside.

To express a Bachelardian enthusiasm towards the balcony image for its elasticity and for placing us at the "very limit" of what we are able to imagine (227) is not without problems. True, it can perhaps place us at the crossroads between subjectivity and objectivity, realism and rationalism, and other similar dichotomies. Indeed, our thoughts of these are destabilized, and are given a new body--the balcony metaphor--through which they can be thought and re-thought. However, at the same time that the metaphor seems to encourage a dichotomy-free reflection of subject and object, we still find some dualisms to be unavoidable. The interpretation cannot do without the concepts of "subject" and "object" even if it challenges their dichotomy. This invites Derrida's construal into the play of "thinking more": Within the metaphor, "subject" and "object" play and differ in the relation to one another, leaving only a trace. At the very end of the poem, the "ghost" or "spirit" coming from afar may be read as this trace. The subject is not completely dissolved in the world: It is still as durable as a balcony, retaining some "insideness" or a "trace" of identity.

III. B. Perspectivism

Other philosophical ideas may be drawn from another characteristic of the balcony--apart from its relation to space as a delicate separator of inside and outside--i.e. its perspectival nature. The balcony cannot overlook what is behind the building of which it is part. It cannot overlook other spaces. And thus as a metaphor for human subjects, it discourages the God's-eye view of the enlightenment, and suggests that all human knowledge is perspectival--an idea which Nietzsche is most well-known for. Nietzsche rejects Kantian notions of "the intelligible character of things," "absolute spirituality," and "knowledge in itself':

for these always ask us to imagine an eye which is impossible to imagine, an eye which supposedly looks out in no particular direction, an eye which supposedly either restrains or altogether lacks the active powers of interpretation which first make seeing into seeing something (Genealogy 98).

Is it not also impossible to imagine a balcony that overlooks all directions at once? Our poetic balcony is much like Nietzsche's "eye" in his analogy, and so within the balcony metaphor, knowing can only be perspectival. For Nietzsche, the only way that conception and objectivity can be complete is by having "more feelings about a matter," "more eyes, different eyes which are able to view this matter" (98). Time, one balcony may provide a better view of the outside world than another balcony, but never a complete one. This contradicts sharply with the spirit of the first line: "like a balcony, I overlook whatever I desire." The subject will need to be "like" several balconies for this to be possible. True, his desires and feelings will influence what he overlooks according to Perspectivism, and his attention will be drawn to what he desires within the space he can see, but this does not imply that he cannot desire what the balcony does not overlook.

III. C. Desire

The philosophical problem of desire is not absent from the balcony metaphor. The balcony per se can provoke images of desire and temptation given the reference to Romeo and Juliet. However, like Bachelard's door image, the balcony metaphor can be read as a symbol of both desire and restriction of desire. Because the subject-as-balcony is immersed in the world and can only see it from a certain perspective, his desires are necessarily constructed. "Whatever I desire" in the poem and also its previous intertext "'Ara ma 'urid' seem to disbelieve the notions of construction and restriction of desire, but the things which the subject-balcony desires to overlook imply otherwise. The subject desires to look at conflict and troop trunks, and these are related to realities which one cannot choose or easily neglect or "overlook." The balcony already overlooks the absence of independence and the lack of freedom and justice, which will all create a desire for looking at the procession of ancient prophets and the emergence of a new one.

As regards "lack" of independence and freedom, it is known that Deleuze and Guattari argued in Anti-Oedipus against understanding desire in terms of the categories of the Negative such as limit and lack (25-26). But one has to wonder if any theory of desire that dismisses these terms can convince a Palestinian that he does not "lack" freedom and justice, but that what he thinks is lack is actually the effect of desiring-machines in which the unconscious is a factory (24). Deleuze and Guattari argue that "Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it," and so there is no lack of object, but a lack of a fixed subject (26). In the poem, the subject finds it enough that a woman's hand is held in his for him to "embrace his freedom." He uses "I desire" confidently, trying to dismiss the total dissolution of the subject in the process of social production, even if the laws of prohibiting national and sexual freedoms have a say in creating his desires. The balcony he resembles is often part of a construction which does not collapse easily under the effects of nature, unless these effects are natural disasters, which are exceptions and do not happen everyday. Thus, within the metaphor, we cannot easily agree that the subject is lacking. However, the fact that the poem ends with the speaker seeing his ghost provokes us to understand the "I" of "I desire" as not bearing that confident a tone. The subject is split between being like a balcony, conscious of his body and soul, and being a separate body and a ghost (or soul) approaching this balcony from afar.

The splitting of the subject challenges the previous interpretation which is based on the durability of the balcony. The "I" of "I desire" may be split between several unconscious "drives" of which we are ignorant as Nietzsche believes (Daybreak 64). He argues that the mind is "a blind instrument" (65) for the vehement drive struggling against another, and thus our notions of "purposes" and "wills" may be "fantastic commentaries" on "an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text" (76). We do not act, we are "acted upon," he says (76-77). And thus, he adds, there is "perhaps" only one realm, that of "chance accidents" and "cosmic stupidity" rather than the realm of purposes and will, which are only imagined (80-81). In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari also encourage an "acted upon" theory, based on their claim that: "Man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other--not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc.); rather they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product" (4-5).

The balcony is immersed in the world and can thus bear the idea of the subject being one with the forces of nature and society. But as it retains some sort of space that keeps it from being entirely on the side of the "outside," the metaphor succeeds in not rendering desire entirely de-individualized. True, some of the goals of the subject-as-balcony are seemingly constructed (women, independence, justice, friendship, the refugees' right to return), which can all be understood as connecting points within greater matrixes of social production. Other desires, however, cannot. The desire to overlook the name of al-Mutannabi and the Arabic dictionary may be an instrumental desire through which the poet can achieve greatness. But to understand this desire as merely a connecting point in some other greater machine where, for example, great poets attract publishers who will profit from such satisfaction of desire seems somewhat reductive. Conversely, Deleuze and Guattari find that ego-based theories of desire, such as Freud's Oedipus complex, are the ones which should be accused of reduction. But does not an oedipal model of interpretation (such as Bloom's anxiety of influence) seem very valid in understanding the mention of the great Arabic poet al-Mutannabbi, a powerful precursor or Freudian father?

Supposing that we agree with Deleuze and Guattari that there are only "group fantasies" whose productions are real (Anti-Oedipus 30), is there any way in which the desire to see al-Mutanabbi's name can be understood in this framework? This desire is seemingly individual, but if we understand its effects as inspirations for writing a poem keeping in mind that many poets are inspired by al-Mutanabbi, and if we consider the poem to be something "real," then the interpretation can bear the claims of Deleuze and Guattari. They propose that "If desire produces, its product is real," as they are against the understanding of production as production of representations and fantasies, and argue for the "intrinsic power of desire to create its own object" (25-26). This is perhaps clearer in the desire to overlook a procession of ancient prophets, but as the "real" object created eventually by this desire is "merely" a poem, this desire cannot be seen as a connecting point for a social production in a time of conflict, unless one exaggerates to the point of believing in an enormous effect of poetry on its readers. The exaggeration will entail considering the poem itself an instance of aesthetic "investment" in a wider social unconscious (104), and which can be seen as part of a "revolutionary machine" (293) that seeks to break other mobilizing flows where the inhibition of revolt has become unconscious (119).

But if this was possible, then why would the subject helplessly desire the emergence of a new prophet? Is it not because the desires of the latter-- who is not merely a poet--initiate action and can indeed be connecting points in revolutionary desiring-machines that eventually can produce something real, more real than poetry? Again, the balcony metaphor can bear the theory of connecting points primarily because of its status of being immersed in the world, a status which made prophets come into the scene in the first place. It can thus bear Deleuze and Guattari's view that "our 'object choice' itself refers to conjunction of flows of life and of society that this body and this person intercept, receive, and transmit, always within a biological, social, and historical field where we are equally immersed or with which we communicate" (293). Still, the metaphor's bearing of this idea is not without instability and hesitation. The title of the poem and its final fine contain a ghost approaching from afar, which can be interpreted as the eventual return of the ego: It approaches the subject of "I desire," refusing to be a mere illusion. Adding to that the rough identity that the balcony retains through being a small separating space, the metaphor leaves a small possibility of human agency and free will. It is only a small possibility because the immersion of the balcony in the world and its perspectival nature cannot allow the subject-as-balcony to overlook "whatever" he desires.

Conclusion

Heidegger, like Bachelard, was disinterested in interpretation in the strict sense of the word, and preferred that his reading of Holderlin be viewed as an "accompaniment" to the poetic text, a "pause for reflection." Bachelard encouraged the reader to go "too far" and follow his impulse of "exaggeration," which he limits to the realm of imagination and "daydreams." Ricoeur, however, following Kant, viewed metaphor as an invitation to "think more" at a conceptual level, and believed that interpretation functions at the intersection of metaphorical and speculative discourses. Derrida went further to claim the existence of more philosophical texts within metaphor than metaphors within philosophical texts.

This article has relied on these theoretical encouragements (outlined in Part I) to read Darwish's balcony metaphor differently from most of Darwish criticism (reviewed in Part II). Part III attempted a philosophical "accompaniment" to the poem, based on three ideas linked to the balcony: inside/outside interaction, Perspectivism, and desire. Doubtless, such "thinking more" has been made possible by the "suggestiveness" of the metaphor (Bachelard) and the poetic metaphor "came first" indeed (Heidegger). The metaphor, however, has not created new concepts or become clearly propositional thus maintaining a Deleuzian distinction between poetry and philosophy. Still, it did not remain a plane of "affects and percepts" (Deleuze and Guattari), but a plane of associations which provoke a straggle to "think more," conceptually, in search for a philosophical text underlying or accompanying the metaphor.

Notes

(1) For the most part of this article, I use "overlook" as a translation of 'utill, i.e. in the sense of "looking over or at something from a higher place," and not in the sense of "ignoring" or "disregarding." Although "overlook" is rarely used in English for humans to indicate the first meaning, I believe it is here acceptable since, in Darwish's poem, the human subject is given the balcony metaphor to imply a state of looking at something in the same way that a balcony looks out on something, and because it is difficult to find an exact counterpart in English for 'utill which in Arabic is equally used for both humans and non-humans. In Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, Amira El-Zein uses "I gaze upon" as a translation for 'utill (55-57), which I do not think is accurate because nothing in the word 'utill suggests gazing or staring, and because "gaze upon" is not used for non-humans except metaphorically. Darwish's metaphor intends to compare the human subject to the balcony and not the other way around as would be implied if 'utill is translated into "I gaze upon." Jeffrey Sacks in his 2006 translation of the collection uses "I look out on" for all the lines of the poem beginning with 'utill, except for 'utillu 'alamawkibi al-anbiya'i al-qudamawahum yas'aduna hufatan ila urshalim which he translates into "I look out over the procession of ancient prophets climbing barefoot to Jerusalem" (Why Did You Leave 2-6). Sacks's two choices--unlike "gaze upon"--successfully maintain the figurative structure of the Arabic original because, like 'utill, "look out on" and "look out over" are used for objects. For this reason, I use "overlook," "look over," "look out over," and "look out on" interchangeably in this article. My preference for "overlook" stems from the fact that when used as a noun, it means "an elevated place that affords an extensive view" (The American Heritage Dictionary), a definition almost identical to the Arabic 'itlala, verbal noun form of 'utillu. All translations from this poem are mine.

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