Gabriel Levin is no more bound by categories than he is by national borders
By MATT NESVISKYThe Dune's twisted edge521(photo credit: gabriel levin)
The Jerusalem-based writer Gabriel Levin may properly be classified as a poet’s poet – see his most recent volume of verse “To These Dark Steps” – and based on “The Dune’s Twisted Edge” we might also call him an essayist’s essayist.Such categorization is a mixed blessing, suggesting elevated craftsmanship and low readership. This is the price such artists often must pay. To be sure, the six essays in “The Dune” are dense, convoluted, challenging, and occasionally frustrating.Yet, ultimately, they are provocative, delightful and deeply rewarding.The subject of the explorations in “T.D.’s T.E.” is the influence or interplay of Middle Eastern topology and the oral traditions, narrative and verse of the land’s inhabitants. More specifically, the essays focus on the wild landscapes of the Land of the Bible and their impact on pre- Islamic poetical forms, and on Muslim, Christian and Jewish verse, both religious and secular.But Levin is no more bound by these categories than he is by national borders.He travels both inside and outside Israel’s fences, and his sources range from natives to pilgrims to wandering tribes and invading conquerors, from Greek poets to British archaeologists, from classical sources to medieval writings to modern poets of countless nationalities and languages.Levin tells us that this salad bowl of sources reflects his own mixed identity.He is the son of a French mother and an American father (the late novelist Meyer Levin), was raised in Israel, educated in the US and, although denied Israeli citizenship because of his non-Jewish mother, settled in Jerusalem, in 1972.He feels himself best identified as either an ivri (Hebrew) or, in the formulation of the Tel Aviv poet Yonatan Ratosh, a Canaanite. Whatever the case, Levin seems to find himself as much at home among the Bedouin of the Negev or the dunes and ruins of Jordan’s Wadi Rumm as he does in the 19th-century Templer architecture of Jerusalem’s German Colony.The poet proves himself an inspired travel and nature writer as he describes his visits to remote desert canyons, ancient sacred hot springs and Bedouin encampments (where among other people he encounters a Jewish girl from Tel Aviv who has married a desert shepherd). But whether he’s chasing down wandering sheep or contemplating Hezekiah’s Tunnel, Levin is always on the trail of poetry.What most entices him are such literary, calligraphic and topographical concepts as katabasis (“descent”), or as Levin posits, “a form of divestment, a whittling down of the self and dispelling of the false” as evidenced everywhere from T.S. Eliot to Primo Levi to Herman Melville (Levin must be among the few alive who have read “Clarel,” Melville’s verse-novel set in Jerusalem). Then there’s the qasida, a kind of versified Arabic boasting that can have both religious and erotic character. And next the spiraling, wind-blown sand dunes of the arabesque, of which both the “One Thousand and One Nights” and Levin’s own essays are examples.Indeed, “The Dune’s Twisted Edge” can be rather dizzying at the outset, what with vocabulary to the order of autochthonous, theophany, intrapsychic, toponyms, boustrophedonic and the like. But when Levin is puzzling over ancient Nabatean petrographs in the desert or chasing down an inscription attributed to the Empress Eudocia in the Hamat Gader baths near Tiberias, the reader is utterly engaged and even charmed.Credit this to Levin’s literary skills.Example: “I follow a rudimentary map of the area to Wadi S’bach, crossing several narrow ravines before reaching a spring surrounded by fig trees with newly sprouted leaves. Is it the tenacity and transience of desert flora that marshals its colors so? White broom. The tiny field marigold. Lowlying shrubs release a sweet fragrance into the air when I brush against their leaves. A flat sandstone boulder will do as a seat so I can wriggle my toes in the faint morning breeze and squint at the west face of Jebel Mayeen rising above the ramshackle Bedouin village of Rumm. A troop of floppy-eared black goats appears out of nowhere and scrambles up to the spring, nosing the bone-white shrubs.”Among the mysterious inscriptions Levin puzzles over is a curious graphic notation found in a notebook that belonged to his friend Dennis Silk, an extraordinary English-language poet who died in Jerusalem in 1998. Many will remember the utterly unique Jerusalem anthology edited by Silk called “Retrievements,” first published in 1968, and as much a delightful literary arabesque as Gabriel Levin’s “The Dune’s Twisted Edge.”These two splendid books will keep good company on my shelf.
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