Ghayn: Divagations on a Letter in Motion (Arabic Letter Ghayn in Love Poetry‪)‬

Fascination with the alphabet as an aesthetic construct begins with children, but sometimes it expires with them too. If adult readers remember the hypnotic appeal which the letters once exerted, their sounds and their shapes, the alphabet can become a means to access the aesthetic traditions of a culture, a device to put the eyes close to the text, to trace the verbal texture of a poetic tradition. The letter ghayn, as an example, allows an entry into the specific aesthetic shapes of Arabic and Persian, Turkish and Urdu, through the key words which remain constant as poetic traditions pass through one language community after another. Words that begin with ghayn allow a contemplation of change--both terms for change and terms for the objects of change. Imagery of transformation and metamorphosis, always at the heart of poetic traditions, helps us sketch a phenomenology of poetry, which in many of the traditions using Arabic letters is synonymous with that ghayn-initiated word, ghazal (love poetry). **********