The Folly of Violence: Yehuda Amichai
Yehuda Amichai
The Diameter of the Bomb
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won't even mention the howl of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.
Poems need not be long or difficult to impress themselves on us deeply.
Yehuda Amichai, an Israeli poet of surpassing brilliance, has written many poems which have left me speechless in admiration. One, in particular, is “The Diameter of the Bomb.” I don’t think it is particularly rich in difficulty or nuance. In fact, it is pretty simple. It elaborates on a geometric ratio. That’s it. But it packs an awesome punch.
Let me begin with a shorter poem, the first of “Seven Laments for the War Dead.” [1977]
Mr. Beringer, whose son
fell at the Canal that strangers dug
so ships could cross the desert,
crosses my path at Jaffa Gate.He has grown very thin, has lost
the weight of his son.
That’s why he floats so lightly in the alleys
and gets caught in my heart like little twigs
that drift away.
The poet meets a man whose son has died in the second Israeli-Arab war, a war which the second and third lines suggest had been fought for largely imperial interests.
But what the poet notices is how thin the man has become, how his weight seems to have been diminished by grief – the weight of his son has been subtracted from Mr. Beringer’s weight. There is a metaphor underlying the first two lines of the second stanza: corporal size is related to physical weight, which in turn corresponds to the ‘weight’ of the self. Losing his (physical) son to death in wartime has caused a loss in psychic weight: Mr. Beringer is a diminished man because of his loss.
And then the implicit metaphor is expanded and made explicit. Without the ‘weight’ of his son, Mr. Beringer is nearly weightless, floating in the air, his grief beyond earthly endurance; and yet, and yet, his grief is evanescently palpable as he floats through the streets like small and almost weightless twigs caught in the wind. He lodges himself – like those twigs, ensnared – in the poet’s heart. Weightless, yet somehow anchored in this world we live in, a world of feelings and “loss.” Mr. Beringer has lost his son; he has also been deracinated – without roots, like those twigs – because with the death of his son his ‘line’ will not continue. The world has ended with that death. Mr. Beringer wanders the streets of Jerusalem, weightless. Yet not entirely weightless: Loss sticks in the heart of not only him, but all he moves among.
Here's another poem, even shorter, from Open Closed Open [2000]:
The Precision of Pain and the Blurriness of Joy – 9
Sometimes my soul wants to get out of my body for a little run,
like a dog, and return calmer to the body. But it worries
that it won’t find the way back.
Short, yes. Simple? Well, yes, in that it is about being lost. But as it also deals with the soul’s relation to the body, and with what Amichai calls that strange mystical thing, ‘soul.’ Maybe it is not so simple. What the short poem tells us is that we seek calm, we seek disengagement (and exercise, both to strengthen ourselves and to escape from the tedium of the daily. Think: spiritual exercises). But there is that worry – see it isn’t so simple – that perhaps once being disconnected, maybe soul is irreconcilably disassociated from the body. We are, all of us, seeking: In our searches as we seek “calm.” Yet as we venture forth in search of that calmness, we can also lose our way, so that we are unable to orient ourselves to return to whatever is ‘home.’ All of this is captured – the seeking and the calm and the worry about who and where we are – in these three potent lines. Like the dog, we venture out in the world and then find ourselves lost in it.
So we come to one of the most wonderful poems of our times, “The Diameter of the Bomb” [1976]. As I said, the poem is simple, maybe deceptively so. It is about mathematical ratios, about the diameter of circles of increasing size: As the diameters increase, so does the area encompassed by the circles. [Mathematically, the relationship is written ‘pi times the square of the radius:’ ‘pi r squared ‘ or in terms of the poem, pi d/2 squared. A radius is half of a diameter.]
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
Two circles. The bomb and the blast zone around it, with the destruction within that zone.
The bomb itself is small, with a diameter of thirty centimeters (just under a foot). But when the bomb explodes, the circle expands – everything within a circle of 7 meters (about twenty-three feet) is annihilated or damaged. Easy enough to understand. A modest-sized bomb, with its blast circle a good bit larger.
The circles expand, again in a comprehensible way. Those injured by blast are taken to nearby hospitals; the dead are buried.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard.
One of the things I admire about this poem is how effortlessly, and how understandably, the circles enlarge. The reader follows the logic of the increasing diameters and circles, one enlargement following the next, always clearly and comprehensibly. Here, I think, the diameter is halved, to a radius:
But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably.
All are physical measurements: bomb, blast zone, cemetery where a victim is buried. The destructive reverberations of the bomb have now extended to a distance of more than a hundred kilometers” [sixty miles].
Then the circle enlarges again, this time a little less specifically – we move from physical space to psychological space, from death to grief– but still eminently comprehensible.
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
Notice how we have moved from small discrete object – the bomb – to including “the entire world in the circle.” I think the incremental changes, the radius/diameter increasing in understandable ways, is a tour de force on Amichai’s part. All so logical. The area of the circle, its size, increases line by line.
Up until this point, the poem has been about mathematics – about an increasing diameter, and so an increasing circle. Supported by a geometrical proof: pi times the diameter halved. But in the next lines Amichai uses a word that doesn’t fit neatly in with the arithmetic measurements that have so far structured the poem’s progression, although we have had “mourning.” But here we come upon a primitive and brutal noun (based on a verb): “howl.”
And I won't even mention the howl of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God
There are dead. We saw that almost from the start of the poem, with “dead” in line three and “graveyard” in line six. The deaths have consequences – one or more of them were parents, and so their children are orphaned. Those children, because their cries are without measurable dimension, are not within our tight logic of diameters: They “howl.” And the circle is enlarged, now beyond the arithmetically measurable, to “the throne of God.” The entire universe – including its spiritual dimension, the divine – is now implicated in the expanding radius/diameter, and circle, which we have been following.
The poem ends in spectacular fashion. It is one of the strongest endings of any poem I know. It stuns me each time I read it.
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.
For the circle extends because the radius has been extended, beyond “the throne of God.” The howls of the orphans implicate not only God, but a universe that is beyond God, without God. For how could an omnipotent being countenance the creation of orphans, and mindless suffering – that “howl” is beyond reason – as the destruction reverberates?
Consider those final lines. Suffering and inexplicable loss extend beyond the physical universe, beyond even the spiritual universe. The circle is boundless because the diameter is now so large it can no longer be measured. Amichai’s use of “no God” proposes that it is even beyond the capacity of God to measure how great the destruction occasioned by this bomb has been.
There is more, of course. “No God” reveals that in this extension of destruction and death and suffering and loss, we are in world where, as Nietzsche had it, ‘God is dead,’ or more radically, God does not exist. For the circles that began with the ‘diameter of the bomb’ have now extended into boundlessness, and in such boundless suffering, even the concept of ‘God’ has no meaning.
The poem is, as I have said, based on a simple geometric equation, a logic that is as deep and inconvertible as we have: As a diameter increases, so does the area encompassed by the circle it inscribes. We as readers follow that logic as Amichai lays it out, and by the end of the poem we have traversed to the edges of the universe and beyond, and have recognized that in the wake of destruction, it is impossible to believe that existence is ruled by a divine presence.
In fifteen lines we have proceeded, inexorably, from a small piece of ordinance to the largest of theological principles, a universe empty of divine logic. All stemming from our acceptance of the logic of geometry: We have been led us to the recognition that God does not exist in a world where men can kill one another. In a world of hate and destruction, there is no boundary to what can be destroyed. The final circle in Amichai’s poem has “no end.” And “no God.”