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The Ring Song of al-Andalus

© Del Marbrook

Poetry is alchemy. The poem is its catalyst. The poet employs algebra - the Arabic root words are "al jabara", the joining - to make an elixir to catalyze words unaccustomed to each other. The elixir combines opposites to create wholes that hold ideas in suspension. The whole serves up to the reader a whole new way of experiencing things. This whole becomes an instrument of the reader¹s quest to comprehend the universe, not unlike the medieval astrolabe and armillary sphere. Poems hand over the fabled alchemist¹s gold, the product of a transformation of disparate elements.

Viewing the making of a poem in this way we can posit a model for the transactions of nations. The campfires of man are often at war with each other. The peoples of the world find each other¹s shoes inhospitable. As fumbling leaders redraw global force lines to resemble the world of Peter the Hermit when he preached the Crusades it might be something more than an intellectual acrobatic to look to the Arab world for a way to hold opposing ideas in suspension so that reason can be balanced with faith.

The idea of algebra, the joining, did not come accidentally to a people profoundly interested in alchemy. The Arabs looked at Roman arithmetic and saw an inelegant melee of stick figures. They perceived that without the Hindu idea of the zero mathematics could not progress. Soon their own elegant numbers and the zero had paved the way for modern mathematics. At the same time Arab chemists - alchemy is merely the compaction of the Arabic words "al khemya", the chemistry - were convinced that elixirs to catalyze warring elements could be found.



Here then from the Arab mind we have models for understanding the poem and the world.

The media have habituated the West to look for trouble from the Arab world, trouble in the form of fanatics who refuse to weigh faith and reason in their minds. At the same time we are habituated to overlooking our own fanatics who are just as unwilling to offer up their minds as catalyst and their rhetoric as elixir. To Arab contributions to mathematics we owe modern trigonometry and calculus; that much is the history of mathematics, but underlying these contributions is the exquisite conviction that ideas seemingly inimical to each other can be joined to make larger wholes that enable mankind to evolve.

Every time a poet finishes a poem an instrument is given the world to understand phenomena differently. The poet is honoring the Arab vision of a joinery of differences framing possibilities beyond us.

It is no accident that the troubadour tradition, dating from the songs of William IX of Aquitaine, came to the West from the Andalusian Arabs and their ring song that licensed the use of vernacular in poetry, and not just the Arabs of al-Andalus but the Christians and Jews who lived creatively under their aegis. The ring song exemplified the Arab genius for assimilating cultures and ideas. With its musicality and mnemonic refrain, often accompanied by dance, it rejuvenated Europe¹s indigenous tongues and gave poetry range and lyricism it had lacked. It foreshadowed modern verse experimentation.

Such an advancement could not have come from a people hobbled by notions of singularity. The Arab willingness to catalyze and synthesize catapulted poetry, science, medicine and mathematics into the modern period. For this reason the adaptive Normans who invaded Iberia and Sicily were quickly Arabized. They intuitively grasped what has become so elusive for us in the 21st century, that ideas in conflict can be harmonized to create something better than they were separately.

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