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5 | "Imaginary Geography": The Gap between "Here" and "Over There"
- Brandeis University Press
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“Imaginary Geography” ][ 53 points on a real geographic map. In Ravikovitch’s words, hers is “an imaginary geography, lands I will never get to which are pleasing to think of.”5 Yet although some of the expressions of “over there” present a reality beyond time, others present a reality that, however imaginary, is grounded in recognizable historical fact. In any event, “over there” is a space of desire and wish-fulfillment, as expressed in the poem “Delight” (Chemdah): “There did I know a delight beyond all delight” (cp, 35; bk, 69). The speaker’s “over there,” an alternate time and space, contains her yearning for peace and for something unnamable: “many days from now/I will find what yet my soul sought” (“In Praise of Peacefulness” [Beshivchai hashalvah], in cp, 29). The poem “The Land of the Setting Sun” (Eretz mevo hashemesh) addresses the gap between “here” and “over there,” and presents an epistemological drama: the lanD of the setting sun And he took away the horses that the kings of Judah had given to the sun . . . and burned the chariots of the sun with fire. I heard there is a way to the land of the setting sun, but nobody ever said it’s a land where I could go. I had no friend to come with me so I set out alone for the land where the setting sun rides a chariot of gold. And they told me: kings without equal, magnificent kings, ruled over the land of the setting sun long, long ago. And I told myself: when I come to the land of the setting sun, they’ll give me a robe of purple, a throne of gold. And in that land I will find peace for ever and ever. [3.138.138.144] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:28 GMT) 54 ][ Estrangement —That tale I made up myself. That tale I was never told. (cp, 20; bb, 12; cf. bk 57) At the center of this poem stands the disparity between “here” and “over there.” While the description of “there” and the speaker’s desire for it are everywhere apparent, the “here” is suggested only by its absence. The “here” is characterized by a sense of loneliness, discrimination, and deficiency. The “over there,” on the other hand, the land of the setting sun, is a rich and fantastic place of well-being, presented through biblical language and imagery. A linguistic muddling of the motto from II Kings 23: 11—using the modern Hebrew word Mevo, which means entrance, instead of the biblical word Mibo, which means “[preventing from] entering”—frames the description of the “over there.” The speaker fuses her own imaginary land with the biblical image of the burning of the chariots of the sun as part of Josiah’s purification of the temple. What was destroyed with instinctive and colorful violence in the biblical text here ignites the speaker’s fantasies. Biblical layers join the speaker’s associative contours. She uses, for instance, the phrase “at the entering (the setting) of the sun” (Mevo hashemesh), which appears both in the blessing given to the Hebrew people in Deuteronomy 11: 30 and in the promise of the land in Joshua 1: 4 and 23:4. Such biblical authority is adopted in order to express truths about the speaker’s land of the setting sun: the exaggeration and intensity of these texts serves the sense of the definite and absolute that characterizes the “over there.” In this land there will also be “peace for ever and ever.” In other words, the desire for ultimate tranquility and an escape from time will be realized. This moment in the poem is the apex of the desire to escape from the “here,” the desire for annihilation and redemption. Two details in the poem warrant particular attention: the phrase “And I told myself” (fourth stanza), and the statement “That tale I made up myself” (fifth stanza). Here the speaker explicitly declares her awareness of the fictive nature of the land she is describing. Furthermore, these phrases reveal her mental mechanism, the establishment of the narrative that characterizes most of Ravikovitch’s work. The separation between the “here” and the “over there,” and the illusion that “over there” is a place one might actually reach, function as narratives through which the speaker in this poem, and Ravikovitch ’s character in general, establishes her own subjectivity. The stories that she tells herself over and over again, though expressed in different...