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Ta-happiness
There was another of Taha Muhammad Ali's poems that I could find on-line, but I wanted to talk about a particular issue raised by it in some more detail, so I saved the poem for its own entry. It's called "Warning":
Lovers of hunting,
and beginners seeking your prey:
Don't aim your rifles
at my happiness,
which isn't worth
the price of the bullet
(you'd waste on it).
What seems to you
so nimble and fine,
like a fawn,
and flees
every which way,
like a partridge,
isn't happiness.
Trust me:
my happiness bears
no relation to happiness.
The last two lines were the ones that drew the most discussion from my class, leading to a discussion of "what is happiness?" One of the ideas I brought up that some of my students found unconvincing--or perhaps incomprehensible.
Let me take a step back and lay some groundwork for this discussion. I want to draw a distinction between our experience and the labels we put on our experience. You feel something based on the chemical soup in your brain (and based on your conscious interpretation of what you're feeling; an emotion is the name you give to that feeling. We often use the same word for two different feelings. For instance, we label may label our feelings for our parents, our pets, and a boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife as “love.” Yet it’s obvious that each one of those emotions involves different feelings. Even above that, the “love” you feel for your father is probably different than what you feel toward your mother, and likewise the “love” for your first love interest is likely to be different from the love you feel for the second, third, etc. Our word “love” is just a category in which we place an almost-infinite variety of feelings which are—despite their differences—similar enough to go under that one name.
Once again, the point is to make clear the difference between feeling and the emotion-name we give to that feeling. It is a fact of our existence that our words cannot describe our feelings exactly. In fact, there is no way to describe to another person exactly what we are feeling. Nonetheless, words can do a fair job of giving us broad categories of experience. In fact, we can go further and try to make the distinctions between one kind of love or fear or anger and another.
Or, as our class discussion touched on, between different types of happiness. Within a single person, the experience of happiness may not be the same at one time as another, and certainly from person to person the experience of happiness isn't the same, even though we use the same label for that emotion. This is not just to say that different things make us happy, which is also true, but also that the experience of that happiness is different. It seems natural enough to me that the way that a Palestinian man who has been displaced in war and lived under the strain of being Arab living in Israel is likely to experience the feeling of happiness in a fundamentally different way than, say, an American from a privileged background whose life has been relatively easy.
I think that words give a sense of "happiness," for instance, as being a thing, as being something that is objective, that is always basically the same. This is not to say that all of this--or any of this--is precisely what the poet had in mind, but it was a consideration that seemed relevant to me.
Your thoughts are, as always, most welcome.