The Missing

The Missing - Season 2

I am triggered into writing about my own life, because of the second season of this series. It talks about a few aspects that are always kept away from the public:

1. After having been captured and regained 'freedom', people are everywhere so happy that you are free, and then move on. 
2. The fact that you are not you anymore. A different you emerges, you are born again, not in a good way oftentimes. You have to reinvent life
3. So many things, so normal for others, do not exist for you anymore.

ad 1) Of course people move on, it's only logical. What is NOT logical however is that people expect you are happy to be free, that you are able to move on with your life. That is an impossibility, a gross lie you try to live by... And fail eternally. 

ad 2) I am not me anymore. I am not the person I was and never will be. That I have a different name now is quite apt. I am not a caterpillar born into a butterfly though.. I am a butterfly turned to caterpillar, living a humble life.

ad 3) These are a few examples:

• I cannot be touched anymore. If I want someone to touch me, I have to take the initiative first, if not I flashback in such a hard way that I might become catatonic. Although I am improving, this still happens;
• Speech, already an issue, is my major issue now. I can speak about myself in poems with emotion, everywhere else I can only speak about myself in a mechanical way, a summing-up-the-facts way;
• I live the life of a hermit, the world is too loud for me. I have friends, very real and loving friends, but they are online friends. I love my friends dearly, I fear physical nearness. I long to be with you, my love, physical, but it scares me so much the same time.

I am building a new life on the ruins of my old life. I hope that one day I can say I was born at age 20, when my true life began. And that it is a happy life ever since.

Dancing and wheelchairs

Dancing and wheelchairs.

As I have written before, I can stand, with effort, I've learned to make a few steps, with even more effort. Is it worth it?
Nah! Not at all. Walking is very nice if you have pleasure in it, but if not it's just a nuisance. Yes, you read that right: a total nuisance.

I do my therapeutic walk every day, because I need to for the blood to not clot somewhere, and to keep part of my body in shape. But I hate it. I am paraplegic, paralyzed from the waist down, can sense something here and there but that's about it. Walking is like floating in the air, and it's scary to say the least. WALKING IS OVERRATED. There, I said it ;)

I used to dance. I have a few dancing heroes, like Célestin Boutin:

and Sergei Polunin:

I started to dance while I lived with my grandfather, he was a ruthless and cruel man, as you already know. He also wanted me to excel in everything I did. He taught me to play the violin AND....
he made me take dance lessons.

I danced and it became my way out of a world of misery, all through my years I have danced until I got my injury and was forced to stop. I have learned to make my peace now. But do I miss it? Yes. I would most probably have never reached the level of perfection of both Célestin and Sergei, but my love for dance was and still is absolutely the same.

So, I enjoy watching ballet in all its forms: classical, contemporary, street dance.

And to make this perfectly clear: I am okay with my wheelchair, and I moved my passion from dancing to writing :)

HOLIDAYS, part 2

HOLIDAYS, part 2

Living in a home that has never been my home is a problem I have addressed a little in: Living with the 'enemy'.

Living there with the upcoming holidays is a bit of a challenge now. Last week we had a discussion about my home situation with my psychiatrist, social worker, my parents and myself. Although my parents had chosen to take me into their home, they hadn't foreseen the amount of work and time it would take to help me through my days.

I could have told them right away, and I did actually tell them, but as with everything, you only understand it when you experienced it. So, here we are. It is not easy. For the time being there will be a nurse mornings and evenings to make sure I get in and out of bed, take my medication and to help me shower. And, to all of my hospital and doctors appointments, a taxi will bring me.

Emotionally speaking? It is hard. I never had a home and I felt at home somewhere for the very first time of my life. It feels like the safety and love is taken away from me.

My sister is angry. Her husband and she are now clearing out a room on the ground floor of their house for me. Their little son, who until today sleeps there, will move to a bedroom upstairs. And for part of the week I will start living with them. First as a sort of 'test' to see if it works, and we all feel happy enough. And if we do, it may become permanent.

And the holidays? This will be my first time I m going to spend the holidays with my sister and her family, and a little spark of hope is flickering in me.

Happy Thanksgiving America!

HOLIDAYS, part 1

HOLIDAYS, part 1

Soon December will wash over us, with all its warmth and sense of belonging and community. That is a good thing.

For me it is ambiguous, ambivalent. Until I was 15, I had never had a celebration of anything. No birthdays, no Christmas, nothing. It is new, and I have to admit that I am not sure how to feel about it. My father, mother, my little sister, and my big sister and her husband are already excited, and they are discussing form, brand, and size of the Christmas tree to buy.
My little sister is writing a wish list on her laptop as we speak.

I am an outsider. I stand at the window, looking in. Longing, not being able. Hoping to be seen while wanting to hide.

To make matters worse, my back surgery has been postponed until I am physically and mentally stronger. I don't know how to do that. I am not anorexic, but I DO have problems eating. And the constant nightmares, flashbacks and the pain make me nauseous. It's a challenge. I will have to find food I can stomach, pun intended.
And if anyone has a way to handle pain? By all means, let me know :)

See you later with part 2

LIVING WITH THE 'ENEMY'.

Living with the 'enemy'.

The strange house I am living in, I am not completely used to it yet. The people surrounding me are my flesh and blood, but still they are strangers to me.

I left the house when I was about 2-3 years old, and never saw them between ages 9 and 15. I cannot see them as parents anymore. I learned I had a little sister when I was 15.....

The only person I am still strongly attached to, is my older sister. And also her husband and her two little ones. They wanted me to come and live with them, but I refused. They have a young family and both have jobs. Taking care of me would be one extra job, I cannot do that to them.

So.... after mediation by my psychiatrist, my parents have agreed to let me live with them. They want me to.  And between hospitals I did not have a real place to live, everything has been temporary. Now suddenly I have a permanent place to live. With a futuristic bed, a desk, closets.... It's strange and I am not yet used to it.

There are so many issues we have to get out of the way. They have sessions with a therapist, I have them, and sometimes we have them together. Problems we face are for instance:

• My mother goes to church every day to pray for my healing. Healing in the sense of physical and mental healing, but also..... she hopes to pray me cured of gayness, because she honestly thinks my grandfather (her father) made me gay;
• My father and my little sister are autistic. I have no problems with that, it's quite refreshing, but my intrusion in their regulated lives gives them some problems;
• My health in every way requires a lot of maintenance. A nurse comes by every day to help me take a bath and so on;
• We are still so awkward around each other. Strangers in a strange land.

Family ties. We can never choose our biological family, but sometimes, for diverse reasons, we suddenly are back to biology....
I love my chosen family. Will the day come that I love my biological family?
I certainly hope so, let the awkwardness disappear!

-Darren.

ʿArūḍ

ARUD

Metre (or meter) according to Wikipedia:

"In poetry, metre (meter in US spelling) is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study and the actual use of metres and forms of versification are both known as prosody. (Within linguistics, "prosody" is used in a more general sense that includes not only poetic metre but also the rhythmic aspects of prose, whether formal or informal, that vary from language to language, and sometimes between poetic traditions.)"

Arud is the arabic science of prosody; of poetry; of poetics. As in any other system (western, greek, latin), arabic poetry relies heavily on meter. In all countries with a strong oral tradition (oral meaning here: not written transmission, but by recital, singing and so on), meter, cadence, rhyme (internal and otherwise) is even stronger.

My studies concern the whole of Arud, but to limit it down, I am working on the poems of a totally megalomanic poet: al-Mutanabbi. I won't bore you with this, just mentioning it.

Most of us use a sort of rhythm when we make a song, or a poem. But these rhythm have names and are categorized for ages now. Let's name the ones most frequently used in western world:
IAMB: -v  -v
TROCHEE: v-  v-
DACTYL: v - -  v - -
ANAPEST: - - v  - - v

And an example of Iamb:
Shakespeare: Come live | with me | and be | my love
In the iambic meter, stress is on the syllable I made bold and italic.
Official notation: -v | -v | -v | -v
Where unaccented syllables are represented by '-'
And accented (stressed) syllables are represented by 'v'

Meaning that Trochee starts with an accented syllable, followed by one unaccented; Dactyl with an accented, followed by two unaccented; and Anapest with two unaccented, followed by one accented syllable.

Short but hopefully not too confusing explanation of how we in the western world often use rhyme and cadence, and the most commonly used names for these rhythms :)

Arabic has a similar system.
The Arabic word for meter is tafa'il (metrical feet), The metrical system of Classical Arabic poetry, just like those of classical Greek and Latin, is based on the weight of syllables classified as either "long" or "short" or, as we have seen above: stressed and unstressed; accented or unaccented.

The fun part for me here is that the Arabs have (parts of) words to indicate every syllable in a specific meter. Now here it is getting weird for you, I realise that, so I will give you just a small example found on Wikipedia:

Western:   v –  –  v  –   –  –  v – –   v  –  v –
Verse:    Qifa nabki min dikra habibin wa-manzili
Mnemonic:  fa`ulun  mafa`ilun  fa`ulun  mafa`ilun

The mnemonic here indicating a help-line showing exactly the rhythm and positioning of the v and the -. To the new eye of a starting reader, those v and - seem to be positioned randomly. By adding the mnemonic, a pattern arises.

Now here I will stop before it will become too difficult. Have fun reading, and if you want to know more, just ask :)

-Darren

with love.

Addendum, taken from: http://lecturers.haifa.ac.il/en/hcc/rsnir/Documents/Other%20Barbarians.pdf

Meter According to the conventional metrical system that was unchallenged in Arabic poetry from the pre-Islamic times till the mid-twentieth century, every verse [bayt] in a qasida [the classical ode] consists of a certain number of feet [taf‘ila, plural tafa‘il], divided into two hemistichs. Every foot [taf‘ila] consists of short (U) and long (-) vowels. Each one of the sixteen meters consists of different sequences of feet. A common rhyme is used at the end of each verse throughout the entire poem even if it consists of hundreds of verses. In the late 1940s, there emerged a new metrical system of “free verse” called in Arabic shi‘r hurr [free poetry] or shi‘r al-taf‘ila [poetry of taf‘ila]. The essential concept of this system entails a reliance on free repetition of the taf‘ila, the basic unit of the conventional Arab prosody—i.e., the use of an irregular number of a single foot instead of a fixed number of feet as was dictated by the classical meters. Additionally, in shi‘r hurr there is no need for a common rhyme throughout the poem. The poet varies the number of feet in a single line and the rhymes at the end of the lines according to his need. In Darwish’s collection all the poems use the new system of “free verse,” but what is highly peculiar in this collection is that a single foot, that of the mutaqarib meter (U - -), is used in all of the poems. This is a rare phenomenon in Arabic poetry; ever since ancient times poets, even if they wrote on the same theme, generally used various meters for different poems, as in the case of the qasida; modern poets have used various feet for different poems. Here Darwish uses the same single foot for all the poems, as if to direct the attention of the reader to the unified character of the collection. Of course, it is this unity of the meter that enabled Salman Masalha to compose a poem from the titles of all the poems, serving as a kind of summary of the entire collection.

COMA

COMA

Five, no six years ago, I was rescued.
There was not much life left in me, and they needed to do emergency repair. But first they needed to make sure I was as comfortable as possible, so they induced coma.

In between the nightmares that haunt my every night, sometimes I am having the strangest dreams, in which there are sounds that are not very coherent, but soothing.

Sometimes small fragments of conversations moving from my left to my right, in which my name is mentioned but of which I can't understand anything. People with concern in their voice; authoritatve; loving; caring. Voiced in several languages. Or maybe in one language, but I am not able to understand any language except my own incoherent thoughts.

Sometimes small rays of light whirl in front of my eyes and sihouettes moving through them, in silence. A smile around a mouth. And then the heartbreaking sobbing of my little one, whose voice I wil recognise among myriad other voices.

Sometimes I felt things. One time I felt my little one taking my hand and put it on his head while he crept next to me on the bed. I KNOW, I REMEMBER, and I felt tears in my eyes. This did happen, because months later I had the chance to ask about this very vivid picture in my mind, and it was confirmed by nurses and doctors.

Soft beep beeps. Comforting sound in a strange environment where I seem to float. And a wish to open my mouth and produce sound, but nothing happens. A painful feeling in my throat where something is inserted that prevents me from speaking.

It is all this I have been trying to condense into this small poem:
My COMA poem. Click me please.

It is not meant to be a negative poem or blog post. On the contrary really. To me personally it means that despite the coma, I was able to feel, see and hear, in a dreamlike fashion. And all that while they managed to keep the pain away from me. If anything, this is something I am truly grateful for.