Wake Up!

There’s that poem by Primo Levi about waking up – when as ‘on a cold, dour morning’, there is that "Danger!" like ak describes. Somebody will remember the title of the poem, the Polish word for ‘wake up’ I think: in the first verse Levi recalled the wake-up call by the guard in the concentration camp in Poland and his reluctance to leave the safety of his sleep for the danger of the day, in the second verse he described, back in Italy with his family after the war, the intrusion of that same wake-up call again into his dreams. How unsafe sleep had become.

We are walking in the territory of "active boundaries". I have taken the phrase from Anne Carson’s Decreation (Pp37 and 38): "…opening this dialogue in such a way as to align the realms of waking and sleeping, drawing our attention to an active boundary between them – active because it leaks". Levi’s poem drew our attention in the same way. Dangerous and startling, and there is nothing so terrifying as the sudden realisation of not knowing where you stand.

The tourist postcard announces:

"Libya… is a day-dream"

The brief poetic text – in both Arabic and English – expresses the ‘wake up’ call perfectly, better even than the prose of Our Guide’s Green Book from that country. So, add Tripoli to Belgrade and Istanbul to the list of cities, a spice of danger as ak says – "perfect for the purpose".

mmj