VISION I

It was in one of those nights. One of those nights when the narrow roads of the Old City hide their souls from the tourists in order to live out their own lunatic moods, vibrating with the nostalgia of a feverish desire which is not aimed at anything particular but goes back to the very day of creation.

I had been spending the day in a coffee shop enjoying the company of men who sought refuge in loneliness because disappoined love had burnt out their souls. Soothing my disenchantment with the pretense I was going to walk home, I strayed along those roads sullenly and, unhappy at my sullenness, I felt the desire to deliver myself unto them until I had reached the stage of having eventually been taken over. This happened soon and without the influence of qat.

I was an insect caught in the web of its own fire, and my soul was a cabinet of disproportionate mirrors. I collided with a blind dog. The startled animal came to with a curse and then continued on its way just as if it hadn't noticed a thing.

"Hypocrite!", I shouted after it, "Next time you cross my path I shall beat you to death! May your blood be consumed by the hidden curse of your mother!"

I spat out and made my way into the Old City's entrails. The streets were getting empty. That means the passers-by frequenting them were getting invisible. All of a sudden my eye was struck by a sight that turned everything upside down. It was -and what else would the experienced reader expect- the silhouette of a woman. A woman! The very word to an hermit is like the scent of paradise. Some poor heart was trapped again, and this time it was mine.

She wore a long garment and her oval face was framed by a scarf. The scarf was of darkish crimson colour, and so was her soul. Her flame danced through the streets with a slow and almost careless gait. She was deeply covered and, yet, her presence was absolute and overwhelming. For a long time I followed her traces carefully pretending not to see her. I absorbed her movement and the way the sunrays got caught in her dress. They let themselves fall upon it, surrounded the fabric, encircled it and penetrated its structure, diving into it and re-emerging on its surface with the perfidious joy of children playing a forbidden game and pretending not to know it.

I turned into one of those sunrays.  I immersed my fluid heat in her fragrance. She received my phosphorescent eyes like a shrine or a tomb receives a pilgrim. She called out my name shortly before taking up the pretension not to exist. Other sunrays got in my way. They were all over her like flies heavily fighting over every piece of garment, every milimetre of uncovered skin. I was soon identified as an alien and couldn't hold my ground. I was outgrown, inundated, flooded and got rid of. Colliding with the inciding light, I lost mass and fell in upward direction. The moths invaded my heart, seized the silence and carried me into the serail of their trance.

The Old City turned Arrak. I should have abstained but I was deprived of my will by a sudden upsurge of madness. A youth played the drum and the swelling rhythm got under my skin. I was the flesh of a crimson fruit and was consumed by the youth's pearlwhite teeth.

The woman who held me under her spell smiled behind her veil, which she had now drawn close to her face so it covered her lips and nose. The vibrant invisibility of her features burnt deep wounds into the night. Her lucid eyes featured prominently in the stars. Her silence gave her omnipresence. Her feet as she walked down into the innermost part of the city left traces of rosebuds in the garbage. I entered into the circle of odours. Something in me cried. It was my soul.

"Yalla 'nsha! Ansha!"; the ascending moon shouted, "be absorbed by the bitterness of your rapture!" A Sha'ir from the Hejaz once said: "Were we to answer the call of her love, our sighs alone would suffice to break bones..."

My eyes craved the aroma of mint tea. The woman spoke without moving her lips. The Old City covered the nakedness of her veil. All of a sudden she lost her glamour and  her youth made her appear very old. She turned on her heels and addressed me openly: "Let me tell you of a love that is destroying me: Entirely against my will, I have become the devotee of a man's eyes. I have done all I could to cleanse myself of this desire, for loving  a man is a senseless and self-destructive pursuit. But to no avail! My heart has been enslaved by his beauty, and all my life comes to naught in the instant I am deprived of his company. Why must we love so much that which destroys us? Give me an answer or teach me to love if you can! If not, teach me to forget!"

"What could I teach you", I responded, "as each time I believe to have found an answer, it turns against me and transforms my life into a question! Each time I believe to have found in me certain faith, faith itself turns against me and transforms my words of 'aqida into the abominations of an unbeliever. I told my wife: Leave the attributes aside so as to focus on the essence and then divorced her for the attributes' sake. I told her: The veil is meaningless once you have seen truth and then spat her in the face when I saw her leave the house without hijab. I told her: You shall be free if you love me but I called her a traitress when I saw her disobey the conventions of purdah. Because I loved her, I married her and because I loved her, I divorced her."

"She wasn't the right one for you.", the woman said.

"And I am not the right one to teach you.", I answered.

"There is no one ever right for the other.", she said, "But no one lives there who has nothing to give. If you are wise, teach me wisdom! If you are a fool, teach me folly!"

With an eerie sigh I answered lightly: "Mortality is in my way to being either an absolute sage or an absolute fool. Hence I can be neither, and so all I can teach you is to be mortal."

She smiled into my fear: "I shall tell you of my beloved: He is neither black nor white, neither without existence nor immortal, neither eternal nor without duration. Neither ám I seeing him from face to face nor does he seek my love. His language is not mine nor is my language his, yet both our languages are means to the same end and both are ships sailing the same ocean in pursuit of the same pearl."

"O daughter of this night", I exclaimed, "while my eyes followed you, my heart did not hope for fulfilment, and now as both heart and eye are mere obstacles to be discarded, I am telling you of my feelings for a divorced wife, and you are speaking to me of your love for a man I do not know. I'm beginning to understand that when I sought you, what I really sought was myself, and the same can be said of you."

"Every self is part of a greater one", reflected the veiled beauty, "but every greater self is part of a lesser one, too. If a perishing distance draws us further apart, it may be caused by the narrowness of perspective."

I stood there and had nothing more to say. The world I recognised had been pushed to its limits. I wished to be an animal and I wished to be an angel. I wished to be without law and I wished to be law-giver and law-preserver. And I wished, as I still do, to be a plant or a tree.

Had we not taken our words for the core of our discourse, those spoken and those unspoken, and had we not been made to search even silence for its literal meaning, we could have listened to he beat of each other's heart and discarded a ballast that had no bearing on us. We would have connected our perception and endeavours to the given truth that does and cleansed our emotions of the lethal sterility of interpretation. We would then not have been the victims of fate but its instruments. We would not have hesitated  to surrender our pride to the challenges of a life without predetermined answers to questions we refuse to ask. We would have surrendered to each other and to being what we are meant to be, for surrender is neither resignation nor defeat but their opposite. Its widsom is not without purpose but without afterthought. I concede: we might not have known perfection but we would have known love.

 

VISION II

A curfew drove the night to an end, sudden and unexpected. The city's riot police run mad, and minutes afterwards the entire town was under attack from the air. The threat had been acute ever since the day we determined to be safe.

Heavy air bombardment rained whispered curses down on us. On our skins they exploded and burned themselves deep into our intestines. Laughing vultures descended upon a breathless earth to turn her fruit and wealth into carrion. We bled and screamed in pain but we refused to admit it. Skies surged up violently. We sought a different place to dwell in, heaven or hell, no matter which, as long as it was different from this haunted, undignified earth. The pride to which we had sacrificed everything was raped by strangers now and couldn't protect us.

We were ants whizzing with the fractured vanity of our lives reduced to the smallest statistical size: desparately proud, masslessly toiling blind vulnerable ants under fire from heaven. The microcosm of our shrinking disintegrating universe reminded us that we were descendants of gigantic ancestors advanced due to the crudeness of their tasks and their means, elevated to grandeur by the crudeness of the earth they had to toil and enabled to support within themselves the pillars of civilisation by the patterns of their thoughts plainer and broader in structure than ours. Every generation is a creature of the times that shaped it and a victim of the times it shaped.

I sought your eyes. I am searching for them still.

After the air raid we caught the next bus to be got and crowded the nearly weightless freight of our existence into it. All of a sudden, there was a blast and once again heaven's sore intestines errupted. There was nothing in the air but our own bones this time, some heavily haram meal of blood and pieces of human flesh. Well, a starved soul would munch down even that. Us, the survivors who had made it to the last safe haven, we had been cooked, boilt and fried now. There was a sweetish cannibalic craving in my depth. Somebody must have pulled the trigger. It happened to be me.

What a shame! A man of my intelligence, still in the presence of his enigmatic beloved with a  new word on his lips which he only just discovered in a dictionary... It's all very sad.
Against all expectations, actual death reduced me in size. I had expected enlargement but it wasn't like that at all. Being blown up by the trigger in my breast -an organ to which other people at other times and under different circumstances might have referred to as "the heart"- wasn't orgiastic in any sense -if the word is permissible- but rather icily depressing.

Beyond the horizon huge sea gulls watched us all die with their wings folded and as we were catapulted into the sun's rainbow coloured abyss, they shrugged their shoulders and remarked in a conversational manner: "Some more. They keep coming like flies, dying and dying, some one way, some another." Could that be what angels look like? Birds who sat on the cliffs chatting to each other quietly, untouched by the despair of my heroism and who by the way of casual remarks were saying such a thing? Enough-- it is obvious that the splashing of my brain across all the ends of the known world and the partial progress of some of its fractures into worlds completely unknown with the speed of the light had made me delirious. My being was no longer coherent. Some parts of me mingled with some parts of those I hated while some other parts of me mingled with those of others I loved and again other parts of me mingled with again other parts of those I hated in part and loved in part, and then there were even such parts of me that mingled with parts of those I loved and hated at the same time. Each part in communion with the other seemed to form different and new entities of which I could not say it was me nor could I say of them they were not I, or part of the entity I was, was said to be or should have been meant to become. I won't condemn myself for not knowing who I was, for none of you had known it either. All you could resort to were lies used to defame something that had nothing to do with me, and you had made me resort to them, too. So I'm not surprised how difficult it is to describe myself or draw the right conclusion from this description while excluding the lethal dangers that lurked behind the wrong one, or even to know which is which. The scope of my language, as you have observed long since, is inadequate to the infinite wealth of exegesis able to transform each single word into a thousand others and every thought into its opposite but time has its own language and history tends to interpret itself.

The real surprise was that she -you know who- was still beside me, her beauty like my own scarlet intestines torn apart into a thousand different hues. Now we were pebbles indeed; pebbles of a mosaic in which the smallest pattern carries the largest. I could hardly believe what I saw: her eyes were unharmed and all she had been lay still in them, so her soul was intact. Despite having been torn to pieces she had not changed.

Managing to reassemble what remained of my own -my own eyes and my own soul that is- I let them take over communication, as was dictated by the lack of any other means to communicate.

"Whatever I have been talking to you about, all I really was speaking of were you. It was not a divorced wife but my fearing your love while wishing to deliver my entire existence unto it, my being left with no choice but seek you, regardless whatever pain you may cause to a heart that cannot sustain itself by its own power, which I was trying to explain. It was that. But you have killed me by talking to me of nothing but the man you loved. You expressed your passion for him and described his advantages and disadvantages to me in words that were the sweetest I have ever heard; tell me now as we are closer and further apart than we could ever be again: Who was this man?"

She lowered her eyes, closed them and raised them again to let them penetrate deep into my soul as she answered: "It was you."

"I...", I screamingly-whisperingly stammered from eyes wounded by fulfilment, "This answer had I dared to ask the question, would have been all I longed for."

"If you can find it in you to respond my heart's call", she demanded, "take the mirror through which your presence is reflected in this story and sacrifice it to my love!"

"How would I know of my presence if not through this mirror?", I asked. I had no answer, and I didn't know where to find it, and eventhough I had not hesitated to sacrifice my life, I shied away from sacrificing the mirror.

The blood swelled into a rain flood. All around us nothing moved. Looking into her beautiful eyes that were turning sad now and pitiful, I watched myself break.