Flights of Fancy

Philosophy with no intent to philosophize!!

Can any one of us fabricate a state of the soul?

This is the question that dragged us into a long debate which ate up one long evening of our evenings.

The key to the question was a collection of sad poems by a poetess who could not but be faithful in depicting her emotions and in drawing inspiration from the inner reality we live.

Such a question branches into a thousand, but its backbone is this: can happiness be fabricated?

If what is demanded is that poetry, the story, the melody, the picture, be the expression of some inner reality, then how can a human being be asked to be other than what he feels, other than what he suffers, other than the emotions he senses?

It is said that suggestion to the self—that there is a life that can be planned, and that there is a will that can pour into the plan a life which may drive new tributaries to empty into the stagnant lake—and I say: true, this is possible. But it is a successful method of flight from the true self; and this may bear fruit as social success, but it cannot bear fruit as happiness except in the measure that chance is allowed to play its part here. And this chance may give birth to happiness—but a happiness that has no relation whatever to fabrication, for it may come—if it so wills—from a corner never reckoned with in the designing of plans.

Then what is happiness? And what is its relation to an artist? Is it a state of stability which the artist is happy to grasp with both hands?

It seems to me here that any state of stability is the enemy of art. So long as there is anxiety and tension and crisis and yearning and a looking-out toward an unknown, there is a splendid new thing that can be said in the world of melody, letter, and color.

And the periods from which all these factors are absent are periods that imprison the gift, stingy from the artistic point of view. The proof is that the themes of joy in the artistic heritage are not abundant.

One question remains:
Who are the happy.. always?

They are, in my belief, a class of people who do not let the small daily joys escape them, and who as a rule are not prepared to spend their days in a crush of continual questionings. And artists are not so. They are bearers of wearying questions for which they go searching for answers.

And another question.

Does the absence of tension mean happiness?

One cannot, of course, pronounce a flat no or yes. The artist's happiness lies in immortalizing his states of anxiety, of crisis, and of misery, and in finding for them the beautiful artistic frame.

And perhaps that is his happy consolation on the journey of life!

The Thief Who Stole My Pen

The old is not the new, and whoever prefers the second is mistaken.

A new chair is no more than shining wood, and an old one is heaps of memories. Houses may have grown dear to us in their furnishings, but their memories are not bought along with them, for they are the daughters of long companionship. So I felt some days ago, as I pressed my fingers around a new pen, after a thief had stolen my pen and other things.

If only the thief who robbed me had been a poet—then he would have left me my pen. But he took it,

and left me one thing only: the fever of the pen's clinging to my fingers, which goes about persuading me that this is a life!!

Emily and Her New Name

Listen, my Emily.

Let me congratulate you first, and accept my congratulations, for they are not late—I offered them the day Edvick made of you the bride of the cover, given the choice of what your name should be.

Listen, my dear.

In this East, where woman's existence reaches no further than being the wife of So-and-so, a woman takes her husband's name to the point that people forget, and she herself forgets, that there was once an old name that was hers.

That is the rule.

The exception is that her name remains hers, because she toiled to give it a standing before she married a ready-made standing!

And here her name remains hers when she writes or when people speak of her, and she is the wife of So-and-so when she is presented in society. Nor is there any harm in the wedding of two names—her name before marriage and her name after it—on condition that the result does not come out something long, like the headlines of local crimes in some of our newspapers; and on condition that the wedded name is not, from the side of music, a discord in which the letters rattle.

It remains for you to decide for yourself—and for us to know from the new name that you are So-and-so—that old one!

A thousand welcomes to our friend Samira Azzam, appearing before us anew with her delightful Flights of Fancy, after a separation between us that lasted a whole year!

But the separation was compulsory—so affirms the programs supervisor of the Iraqi radio, for all her hours are taken up with work.. "May God give you strength and health, Samira."