How Could I Know is a duo for clarinet and piano commissioned by Toronto-based clarinetist, Peter Stoll. It is inspired by Rumi's Ghazal, Swallowing the Sun.
How Could I Know reflects how the Women, Life, Freedom movement pushed me out of my comfort zone, forcing me to confront the disorder within myself and around me—disorder I had been avoiding for a long time. At the heart of the piece is a process of striving for change and learning to accept the present while embarking on a journey of transformation.
HOW COULD I know this melancholy
Would make me so crazy,
make of my heart a hell
of my two eye raging rivers?
How could I know a torrent would
snatch me out of nowhere away,
Toss me like a ship upon a sea of blood,
that waves would crack the ship’s ribs board by board,
tear with endless pitch and yaw each plank
that a leviathan would rear its head,
gulp down the ocean’s water,
that such an endless ocean could dry up like a desert,
that the sea-quenching serpent could then split that desert
could jerk me of a sudden, like a Korah, with the blend of wrath
deep into a pit?
When these transmutations came about
no trace remained of that desert or the sea
How should I know how it all happened
since how drowned within Howlessness?
What a multiplicity of how could I knows?
But I don’t know-
for to counter that sea
rushing in my mouth
I swallowed a froth of opium
Ghaal 1855
Translated by late Dr. Franklin D. Lewis
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