work of feeling, imagination, and the unconscious, while the latter is the work of reason and conscious thought. The scholar Croce said: "The world of poetry is free of the thought and criticism that turn the world of imagination into the world of reality." Philosophy — daughter of reason — sentences poetry to death as soon as poetry approaches her; and often the poet kills his own poetry when he makes it an instrument of thought and philosophy — as al-Ma'arri did in the Luzumiyyat — or destroys himself when he turns from art to criticism, analysis, and philosophizing, and changes from a poet of images and colors into a crazed philosopher and a prose writer of disordered thought; or when he writes prose in the language of poetry and tries to think in the language of feeling.
Art and literature — in most of their states — are two backward-looking forces, because for the most part they bring back to us the same old thing in new forms — as the poets have described spring in a thousand images, and as the designers of fashions create shapes and forms of dresses that appear new while in truth they are drawn from the old by combining various parts.
And since the artist is by nature attached to the old, we find that his view of woman is generally marked by backwardness. It is the view of primitive man, who saw in her a beautiful body; or the view of the painter, who saw in her lines and colors; or of Ibn al-Rumi, who saw in her a garden of flowers and fruits; or of Qays ibn al-Mulawwah and Dik al-Jinn and the other love-maddened men, moved by selfishness and by the love of sole possession of those they loved, so that they were jealous of the very water she drank and the air she breathed. Or he looks at her with the view of the knights of the Middle Ages, who made her an object of deification and worship, and took her as a symbol of their dreams, or a goddess whose favor they vied to win, submitting to her and defending her. Or with the eye of the Platonists, who saw in her a symbol of the loftiest beauty and of divine perfection, and drew from her strength to ascend the heights of philosophy and contemplation — of this kind is Dante's relation to the princess of his dreams, Beatrice.
One of these poets once said to me:
"I hold woman above descending from her ancient throne and disowning her traditional function, which is to be for man a wellspring of inspiration and a source of beauty, delight, and joy. I want her to remain for man the like of da Vinci's Mona Lisa. I want her
a mistress of the house who keeps to her home and manages it like a queen, moving about in it like a warbling bird, pouring out ease and life upon those around her — and I am too jealous of her soft hands to let them be soiled with the dust of the factories, and of her delicate ears to let them hear the
Salim Najjar
Why do the ladies have shirts and pajamas made to measure?
Salim Najjar
• Beautiful in color
• Of superior fabrics
• Finely made
• Long-lasting
Salim Najjar