Idris El Asha Biography

As a biography this poem I once wrote may well do:
In Praise Of Reading
An Advertisement, Autobiography & Biography of Reading of Sorts
Action is the consumption of life. thought is the ordering of life. And thought leads to action.
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I got sick
A schizophrenic
With plenty of time
And no work.
Monotony and boredom led me to the college library in my little town, which I seldom visited when I was studying there when I was young and enjoying life in a wrong way, but boredom made me frequent it.
So, thanks to boredom
To lead me to action I was looking for
I forced myself to sweat, going and coming to that library
I frequented it
And I read:
I read about libraries been burnt, and books thrown into the river till the water turned the color of ink, and about many who had been persecuted for having written.
I read
Took a peek at the beginning of time, with a big bang in my head
Hunted an picked:
Here something of the meditating Yogi
There a little chat with the conversationalist whose pupil taught to differ.
Got into Troy by a ticket from Homer
Cried with Oedipus and sailed with Sinbad to the high seas
My imagination shuddered at the hell of Dante
I ate the forbidden fruit in a lost paradise
Sometimes spent sometime in the Globe accompanied by the Dane
Under the portrait of Mona Liza, I with Freud tried to fathom its creator.
In my Jallabia and on a praying rug that were a gift from Makah from my late uncle who memorized the Quran I found in Sartor Resartus 'My inarticulate cries and sobbing like a dumb creature, which in the ear of heaven are prayers.'
Then I smelled some flowers of evil.
I stayed with the maudit a season in hell
Then wondered at the Illuminations
Peacefully I saw people acting war and peace
In Petersburg with Dostoyevsky I delved into the heart of a young man so dark that it shone
Heart of darkness.
Then it happened that I visited the waste land in the west from the west bank listening to Isadole and Trestian, and saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness leaving an Ariel behind. Mice And Men got a hold on the back of my mind like the hole the shot made in the back of Lenny's head.
The old man went so far into the sea inside me while the sun also shining saying farewell to arms, thinking to me the bells toll.
I lost my memory in one hundred years of solitude, forgetting to write to the colonel, and my love in the time of cholera foretelling my death.
In Tropic of Cancer I nearly smashed my head on the wall screaming, 'I'll confess…I'll confess'.
Afterwards, with much cudgeling of my brains and a little deciphering, I could glean from Kant what seemed the big picture, until the publication of 'Conversation With God'.
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Now to all the tribe of storytellers and the clan of poets in my country, who wrote what I'd like to write but couldn't. To my big brother and his friends who were writing and panting on broken pavements, who never been read but by a few elite of readers while the ignorant troglodytes never noticed them, till the corrupt government bribed them with pork barrels, and they had to accept to get far from the maddening crowd. To them I express respect.
To that prolific giant, Elkoni. I read what I could read. Who is known here to some because he conquered the western world with a pen and not a gun. And to that great writer and thinker, Elneihom, whose books were banned in Lebanon, one of the most liberal countries in the Arab World, known here for its beautiful women.
And here thanks to Bill Gates, I've got a window on my expatriate, Khalid Muttawa, whom I envy because he carpe diem before me and published in America, which is my dream. I express my admiration, who showed me that death may come riding the coattails of a breeze.
A breeze that brought me to believe what Yeats believed 'In the practices and philosophy of what we have to agree to call magic…in the vision of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundation of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are:
1) That the borders of the mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.
2) That the borders of our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of nature itself.
3) That this great memory can be evoked by symbols…'
** ** **
At last now, when I could, I take a walk in the beach with
Ulysses on the beach.
Waves Waves Waves
Words Words Words
A world of words.

And now, I'm tiresomely reading. I walk to that library, and talk to Asma, it's beautiful female attendant.
I walk and talk.

To write and read in blood without shedding blood. And then to make up for the time lost in hospitals in libraries.
So, thanks to that library
That little town in which I got bigger.
Thanks to Asma
Thanks to the first hand that wrote
And the eyes that deciphered
That appealed to my freedom, and accepted my freedom.
Thanks for the print
Words, words, words
And it was there
The action I looked for was there
To say:
'I didn't waste my life in vain'
And to know:
'The word is a deed'
And here I am. Waiting with Becket, who made me wonder that Lucky could be me.
Reading, Waiting for Godot, an anticlimax for all time. One hundred years of solitude
Waiting for Godot…
Estragon: (gestures toward the universe) .This one is enough for you? (silence) it's not nice of you, Didi. Whom I to tell
My private nightmares to if I can't tell them to you?
Vladimir: Let them remain private. You knew I can't bear it.
Estragon: (coldly) .There are times when I wonder if it wouldn't
Be better for us to part.
Vladimir: You wouldn't go far.
Estragon: That would be too bad, really too bad? (pause.)
Wouldn't it Didi, really too bad? (pause) When you
Think of the beauty of the way.(pause.) And the
Goodness of the wayfarers.(pause. Wheedling.)
Wouldn't it Didi?
** ** **
Last but not least, please read me with, Fires, of Raymond Carver, which a lovely ignorant bitch borrowed from me and never returned, and lost forever, which I would've memorized if I ever got it again. Read some of the poems I translated into Arabic and published with it;
ا س ك ر