Far From The Shatt-Al-Arab Poem by J.S. Harry

Peter wonders if pigs could fly
& thinks, yes, they could, pink & squealing,
if someone put them in a helicopter.
He doesn’t know it’s NOT
“all right” to fly around
with PIGS
in a Muslim country.
He’s heard planes overhead all day –
he’s somewhere on the outskirts
of Baghdad – there is, it seems,
some kind of “war” going on.
What is “war”? He hears the Flowerbed Rabbit’s
anxious voice in his ears, though she is far away –
something she’d wanted to understand, when they
were sampling fresh ears of seeding autumn grass,
after the two thousand & two
Australian drought’d turned
parts of western New South Wales
into desert; other parts of Australia, too,
he’d mused, then; they’d been out west,
wild pigs around . . .

the seeding grass
’d come after the rains . . .
Where is rain, now,
in this Iraqi desert?
He couldn’t answer the Flowerbed Rabbit.
He’d arrived in Fiji after the coup . . .
& anyway, that wasn’t a “war”.

He is drifting into sleep, without shelter
on the flat
dry gritty sand that’s plainly not
greybrown like rabbit’s fur – he’s aware
of nowhere to hide . . . Dreaming of Arctic
animals whose fur
’s, mistakenly, stayed dark
when the first, Arctic snows came down,
he sees, on the sand,
the small troubled figure
of the philosopher Alfred Jules Ayer
crouched under a rock. There is a
scratched drawing of a tree
with the letters “Bo”
scrawled under it.
The philosopher’s paws are clasped
round the pages of a book
with LANGUAGE, TRUTH, AND LOGIC
emblazoned on its spine.
It seems he is struggling with RE-
VISIONS to this work
which he first finished
in n i n e t e e n
t h i r t y
f i v e.

Putting out a shaking paw, Ayer says, in less
or select file tthan confident “voice”, I am gaining a sense?datum
of fur, long ears, & round, brown eyes,
the sense?experience of what
in language, I’d likely call a rabbit.
Ayer cogitates. (Has
his remark, his “locutionary act”,
given the impression
he is “impulsive”, “hasty”, “rash”?)

Peter thinks about the Flowerbed Rabbit’s head.
He can imagine her plunging headlong
down a burrow. When she’s scared, it’s what
he’s sometimes seen her do.

Ayer worries. He thinks he’s been accused,
by another philosopher, of making
“too headlong
expositions” . . . (Were John Langshaw Austin’s
counter arguments
right?)
He has, he says, been teasing out
his most famous book’s
arguments,
& themes – perception . . . knowledge of “the past” . . .
knowledge of “other minds” . . . for most of his life.

Peter’s ears turn
to catch every bit of what Ayer is saying.
He asks, What
is your most famous argument about?

Ayer has been eating dates.
Spat-out stones, bone pale & sticky, strips of the darker
date-flesh clinging to them, rest on the sand.
He has placed Language, Truth and Logic at his feet.
He does not speak. He is remembering finishing
A Concept of a Person and Other Essays,
which Macmillan, London, published
in nineteen sixty-three.

Peter is remembering the Tigris & Euphrates, how he
threaded his way through some marshes
to get to where he is now.
He has been reading The Middle East Review, & realises he is
now south-west of Baghdad – a long way north of
Shatt-al-Arab, where the two rivers have one mouth.

He remembers seeing
estuarine wildlife die, after the oil spills
during the Gulf War. He was in Kuwait, then.
He also remembers the fires. He did not see the war.

The sky is black from smoke plumes somewhere beyond them.
Parts of Baghdad seem to be burning.
Ayer is muttering about his criteria of verifiability;
Austin seems to think he got it wrong.
Peter says, Parts of Baghdad are on fire.

The Kurds need a state of their own, Ayer says.
Peter looks at the newspaper in Ayer’s shaky grip.
It is one of Rupert Murdoch’s. It affirms:
STATELESS KURDS
NEED HOME.

Peter thinks of the pictures of mountains he has seen on the
map, to the north, pale brown, a lightish tan . . . once part
of the Ottoman Empire . . .
Perhaps that coloured place with the
“three thousand metres” marks is where the Kurdish people
want their home-land . . .
He’s heard
they’ve wanted one, for over eighty years.

A little round to the side of the rock,
Professor J. L. Austin is not thinking about the Kurds.

Austin thinks about all the ink he has spent, examining Ayer’s exposition of
the Argument from Illusion.

Was it a WASTE?
Austin is a Professor of Moral Philosophy.
He believes in fine discriminations in the use of words.

He has been thinking all night, re?creating
the argument of a paper
he wrote in nineteen fifty-eight –
Austin is very precise.
His nineteen fifty-eight paper
is about “action”.
He does not show it to Peter. What he is holding in his hands
has printed on it: THREE WAYS OF SPILLING INK.

Peter thinks there might be four ways – if you
splashed it north, south, west, & east. He thinks of
the map of Iraq.

The Kurds want an independent state to the north, Ayer says.

Peter hasn’t met any Kurds yet.
His tummy is rumbling.
Perhaps there will be grass, dry or dying,
away from Ayer.
He hops closer to the base of the rock, exploring, moving
around it. It is very large, & seems to have some carving –
strange faces, lumpy raised & sunken bits that look like words,
It reminds him of the language/s he couldn’t read on the Iranian
stones.
Professor J. L. Austin is peering at the carvings.
Peter has seen him before – in a photo
on a desk at Oxford. He remembers reading:
Professor J. L. Austin . . . worked in Military
Intelligence
during the Second World War.
Austin is looking at the vertical lines on the rock,
imagining
how something
might flow down them, & how one would, or might,
describe it.