Nasso - June 14, 2024
Sale
I met her at a garage sale.
Gorgeous but aged.
I brushed her face.
Rebound her spine.
She opened up
sharing tales of loss, love, life.
I met him at a shop.
Popular. In front of all the others.
Proud. The best seller.
He took my hand
firm, turned
and taught me how to become a millionaire.
I sat them down in my room
back to back
looking at one another. I was beyond lucky, in my senior of high school, to be taught English by the great (in my school’s lore) Victor Alcindor, freshly ordained as a PhD in postmodern poetics, humbly refusing to be called “doctor.” He taught us how to genuinely read poetry, which might be the most arduous and acquired kind of reading. Before that class, I thought that “good poetry” was supposed to be descriptive, passionate, tastefully strewn here and there with “flowery” lines, and the periodic absurd (e.g. June Jordan’s “If you will look at my [George Washington Carver’s] feet you will notice / my sensible shoelaces made from unadulterated / peanut leaf composition that is biodegradable / in the extreme.”)
Victor presented a wide variety of contemporary verse, especially (and newly for me) the postmodern voices of understatement, compression, gleamingly terse, bare of any “high point SAT vocab words,” reendowed with - in Victor’s signature gesture, outstretching his arm and opening his hand, rotating it from palm to backside up - “doubleness.” Doubleness is neither metaphor, allusion, nor simile. It is a plain word with at least two new faces (usually without outside reference). The epigraph’s poem, “Sale,” was the first I wrote after adopting this new idea of what poetry could be. It won a high school contest and then a college contest (with an infamous “money party,” for which I withdrew the prize money in dollar-bills and made it rain with friends - oh, to be 18 again). I’ve written many poems since then, and I’ll write many more, but I think that, for its crispness and beginner’s luck, it will remain a goodie.
This week’s parasha, Nasso נָשֹׂ֗א, makes at least tripleness of its title. The opening line is commonly translated as: “Take a census of the Gershonites - נָשֹׂ֗א אֶת־רֹ֛אשׁ בְּנֵ֥י גֵרְשׁ֖וֹן.” As noted in last week’s ODP, the word rosh רֹ֛אשׁ often means “head,” but it can also mean “sum/census.” Nasso נָשֹׂ֗א can mean “to rise/lift up,” “to exalt/elevate,” and “to bear/carry/accept.” A frequent phrase in Genesis is “שָׂ֣א נָ֤א עֵינֶ֙יךָ֙ - lift up [one’s] eyes.” Thus the intuitive reading of this line is “raise up [the tribe’s] head” from the depths of their tribulation. The Meor Eynayim, an influential rabbi of 18th century Chernobyl, interprets the line as, “Uplift and raise high [the word] et, [which indicates] the twenty-two letters from Alef to Tav. Raise them to the RoSH, the ‘Head’ or ‘First [of all things],’ [i.e. God] . . . If you do so, the sons of Gershon, the letters that have fallen and been expelled [the root of Gershon] can also rise up.”
Later, a series of instructions on how to absolve marital infidelity concludes, “Then shall the man be guiltless from iniquity, and the woman shall bear her iniquity - וְהָאִשָּׁ֣ה הַהִ֔וא תִּשָּׂ֖א אֶת־עֲוֺנָֽהּ” (Numbers 5:31). After a priest has executed numerous rectifying acts, perhaps the woman elevates her crime, such that the (really brutal) punishment leads to a transcending of sin.
Then, at the Priestly Blessing’s debut (Numbers 6:22-27), Moshe is commanded to bless Aaron and his sons: “God will lift up God’s face upon you and give you peace.”
There’s not much insight in just pointing out that words can have multiple meanings. My curiosity is, rather, how is the word poetically compressed? Accompanying census, adultery, and divine blessings, nasso contains a volition that is almost always commanded by another - unlike other verbs, nasso is rarely done on one’s own accord. It’s a type of looking that requires an exterior mover. It’s a verb of codependency.
The final piece in Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems is entitled “Not Ideas About the Thing But The Thing Itself.” This phrase conveys the dual irony and will of all Stevens’s meta-verse, his thrusting for the essence of a thing with a palette of signs - words - that obviously can never be the thing. Making art might seem futile if it never measures up to experience per se; however, art is a standalone experience. Susan Sontag writes, “What a work of art does it to make us see or comprehend something singular, not judge or generalize. This act of comprehension accompanied by voluptuousness is [its] only valid end . . . From the point of view of the artist, it is the objectifying of a volition; from the point of view of the spectator, it is the creation of an imaginary decor for the will.”
I call great works of art “divine” because they invent a new, concrete expression of what’s intangibly between things, a perception caught and refined in the amber of the artist’s consciousness. Sontag’s notion applies to “the greatest art” as well as Biblical and postmodern poetics, that they need “to be understood not only as something, but also as a certain handling of the ineffable.”
Nasso is the opposite kind of verbal device. Most often, nasso is an act through which God - the “presence of the inexpressible” - renders a tangible human into an abstraction. A moment’s ascent. It understates, compresses, gleams terse, shaves off the extraneous, and writes the world into proto-modern poetry, endowed with doubleness. Like an outstretched arm and open hand, rotating from palm to backside up. To see what lifts up the many faces of our books, of our sins, and of our eyes.