…Mebis, yesterday (it happened by chance)
I found myself under Simeon's pillar.
I slipped in among the Christians
praying and worshipping in silence there,
revering him. Not being a Christian myself
I couldn't share their spiritual peace-
I trembled all over and suffered;
I shuddered, disturbed, completely caught up.
Please don't smile; for thirty-five years -think of it-
winter and summer, night and day, for thirty-five years
he's been living, suffering, on top of a pillar.
Before either of us was born (I'm twenty-nine,
you must be younger than me),
before we were born, just imagine it,
Simeon climbed up his pillar
and has stayed there ever since facing God.
I'm in no mood for work today- …
-Simeon by Constantine Cavafy
In October 2003 I was in Damascus on a Monday and I’d heard about Lukman Derky’s open mic poetry night, Bayt al-Qasid, at the Fardoos Hotel. I thought I’d go to read Constantine Cavafy’s poem about Simeon the Stylite. I had just been to see his wrecked basilica outside Aleppo in the so-called Dead Cities, ruined Byzantine era settlements large and small.
As often, Cavafy creates a fictional character of historical plausibility as the poem’s speaker, in this case a neo-platonic Hellene aesthete living in the 5th Century who interrupts an arid debate about who is the better poet, Libanius or Meleager, that he is having with his friend Mebis in order to recount a visit he had just made to Simeon’s pillar and his near-conversion experience there.
I thought, maybe there would be something in this poem for the young Syrian poets in the hotel’s basement bar. Any one of them could have been Mebis’ friend, the poem’s anonymous speaker, and they too may at one time or another have had a religious experience somewhere along the line.
I found Lukman in the corner smoking and talking to friends, I asked him if I could read Cavafy’s poem, and he said yes, but only if I could quickly find someone to translate simultaneously into Arabic. I would have to stop every few lines for the translator. That’s how I met Hala Feisal, a painter who said she would try. In a quiet corner I read her the poem, I explained its first person voice and how it should flow conversationally as if being spoken to a friend.
When my turn came I explained to the audience the situation of early Christianity in Syria, the poem’s moment in time, the gradual fall of Hellenism and the less gradual rise of Christianity, a slow motion paradigm shift of politics and belief. Hala did her best, the room was quiet, I think it followed and made sense.
This all happened barely six months after Bush invaded Iraq. There were many Iraqi refugees already in Damascus. I remember talking to some in a restaurant. They were glad to be out of there. I don’t know if any Iraqis were at the Fardoos that night. In any case, for them the paradigm shift in politics and belief was not gradual, but fast. But as did Mebis and his friend in Cavafy’s poem, they did not go back to discussing poetry after an improbable diversion to the foot of Simeon’s pillar. Then, there would have been nothing left, a bit like that rough stone that now sits on the pillar’s pedestal.
Kevin Bubriski’s superb b/w photographs of the Basilica of Saint Simeon are in Legacy in Stone: Syria before War, Powerhouse Books, 2018
open mic poetry night in Damascus, before the war
a stone marks the site of Simeon’s pillar