by Ryad Girod
We agreed, you and I, in the back of the classroom in our Damascus high school, when we sought to resolve a problem or to understand a situation, we agreed that there was a kind of continuity to ignorance. Right up until the accident. Our thoughts continually drifted in a void much in the way that Abdelkader’s hand advanced perpetually in the direction of his friend’s hypothetical shoulder … in this way free of any encounter, our ignorance flowed along the billions of circuits of our brains until an unexplained discontinuity transformed it into perfect understanding. In the back of the classroom, we were waiting, thinking and discussing and dreaming, for that discontinuity, that accident, to put us face to face with a reality until that point unknown. But where had all of it gone? Through which fissure had it all escaped? What winds had carried off our desires and our hopes of understanding anything about anything at all? We have been carried off by opposing winds and we have ended up stuck in this dusty grid until your body suffered from everything of which your self had been deprived. You found refuge among the sands and I pictured you atop your dune, following the thread of your thoughts, continuously, right up until an accident took place, right up until an unexpected leap revealed something else to you, something out of the ordinary, a moment outside of time during which you saw, perhaps, the shadow of a saber. When your executioner brings his blade down upon your offered neck and your whole is divided into parts, at which exact moment will you leave us? At which exact moment do we pass on? Between two things, but also between two states, as close together as they may be, there is always a path leading from one to the other … and along this path, there is inevitably an intermediary state and so on to infinity, just as sprawling as the universe that contains us. So when will you pass on, Mansour? At which exact moment? Or maybe never? A trace of you, eternally, in the infinite that separates two seconds that follow one after the other, two fractions of a second that follow one after the other, two thousandths of a second that follow one after the other … amid the infinite, stuck between two dust specks of an instant, you will reside in this unforeseen eye of the needle, within the infinite that conceals itself in behind … and I am here this morning, right near you, and I beg once again all that you can grant me as far as forgiveness and love … and I am here this morning before you rejoin the infinite that the blade will liberate. Take me with you, Mansour, I won’t be a heavy weight to lift off this earth … I have so little strength left, Mansour, that you’ll have no difficulty raising me up from down here. I grew lighter atop your dune, infinitely so. From that river of sand where we wandered, was it necessary to consider each grain, to have a precise understanding of each one, or instead was it necessary only to consider the whole? And when I saw you cross the crest of your dune, when you followed that line with the elegance of a tightrope walker and the grace of an angel, I could clearly see that you simultaneously considered each grain of sand and the whole that made up the dune … I could see Poincaré balanced on both sides, like at the summit of two ways of thinking, advancing into the yellow brilliance of the desert and addressing the void that surrounded him: Then I turned to the study of arithmetic questions, without much apparent success, and without a suspicion that it might have anything to do with my previous research. Disgusted with my failure, I went to spend a few days at the seaside, and I thought of other things. One day, while walking atop the cliff, the idea came to me, with just the same characteristics of brevity, suddenness and immediate certainty, that the arithmetic transformations of quadratic forms were identical to those of non-Euclidian geometry. I was sinking into the hollows in the sand and there was no one but you to lift me out. How, Mansour, did you manage to reach me? What miracle nullified the distance that separated us? Or, between you and me, between two things, between A and B, that distance is a part of the immensity of space and time that contains us … such an amazingly infinitesimal distance … that there is no longer any separation between you and me and A is inside B and the blade of the saber has never been separated from the smallest particle of your neck. I climbed up onto the highest dune and I scoured the infinite expanse with my eyes and I looked everywhere for it … but I did not find it. And so I sat down, I drowned in the yellow immensity and I searched within myself … it was there deep within me.
Gassouh! Gassouh! they shout again now that you are already on your knees, your neck extended and prepared to receive the blade that will divide you in two as if anything at all can be divisible. Gassouh! Gassouh! cries in a virile melee not this crowd but this black horde draped in long white clothing, shouting and pushing and impatient to see the miracle that constitutes the divisibility of a single being by two. And me, I’m there, lost among them with my gaze riveted to the sky so as to not see your torment. Eyes lost in the immensity of the sky above Al Safat Square like you Mansour atop your dune eyes lost in the immensity of the desert, in the hope of bringing an end to this unbearable worry that is comprehension. As Abdelkader had been, his eye invoking the protection of the geometric forms of the tiling, the mosaics or the ornaments of that great mosque which was in a certain way the visible beginnings of Islam and its grandeur, stuck in the squares and star-shaped polygons, stuck in the complexity of the symmetries and the rotating tessellations, stuck and slipping without cease around the circumferences of the circles, without cease without end and without exit, lost as one can lose oneself in the desert and seeking refuge for his mind, in a manner of speaking, within that superior intelligence so as to hopefully appease his soul because he could not comprehend why the tribes had abandoned him nor why the Duke of Aumale had held him prisoner so long, no more than he would understand, later on, the intense friendship of Napoléon III and France’s eagerness to decorate him to photograph him to exhibit him and he also wouldn’t have understood, even if he have lived as long as Noah or even as long as Abraham, the plundering of the country to which he had in a manner of speaking given birth, nor its destruction and ruin by the dark hordes who pillaged and killed in the name of Islam … or not … but the hordes of Yajuj and Majuj who poured out of the Pashtun mountains or hurled themselves from atop the cliffs of the Najd only then to hurtle down from the heights of the Atlas or the Djurdjura or the Aures and swoop down on the cities as if a single man, or even more a horrendous beast, face marked by screams and eyes full of hatred, to destroy everything and make a clean slate of everything it had been possible to build, patiently, ingeniously, intelligently, just as much to bear witness to the greatness of the divine as to bear witness to the human exception … to make a clean slate of the past until there was no longer any possible future. Those black hordes come out of lands just as black and resolutely determined to level anything that could proudly stand tall to make room for emptiness and likely for less than emptiness and even less than oblivion … those black hordes exterminating the darkness itself until the advent of the end of days or, in any case, the end of Islam.
When his heart had finally managed to contain the love of humanity in its entirety, that of the dead like that of the living, there was no longer room for anything but the love of God.
Gassouh! For the love of God, gassouh!
12.
THE GALLOPING GAZELLES on the vast prairies of your heart kick up too little dust, the noise of their flight as light as that of hooves on sand. But the muffled echo of their hooves propagates in circles, opening out like those of a drop of water that slams into the ocean, taken up in a wave that swells and grows until it becomes a tsunami … and in the same way, when your head falls on the mat that is being trampled on by the unbelievers, it will be a sound as faint as that of a hoof on sand … a tiny little sound, dry and imperceptible, that the years and the decades will cause to swell like a wave that swells of its own volition and that will come crashing down in a deafening roar … because, how could it be otherwise? How could your martyrdom be as insignificant as the extinction of a butterfly? And your ordeal as ephemeral as a caress? Yesterday, I fled the courthouse, letting loose the horses of your Camaro which carried
me away far to the west, the sun in my face and the dunes in the distance. From cliff to cliff, I flew along a yellow road, covered in dust that the sun reflected without any glare … a fog of sand fell continually on the road, the bridges, the wadis, the palm groves, and the rocky faces of the Najd … in that dust that fell like rain, the setting sun plunged that entire backdrop into an almost greenish paleness and was no more, itself, than a pale and ordinary star vanishing behind patches of fog that blanketed the surface of a sky turned menacing. A storm rumbled behind the dunes … but what did the storm and its consequences matter? Behind me, Riyadh also disappeared into the fog of sand and the top of Kingdom Tower already no longer existed, as if its construction had never been completed … Where is all of it going? you said. And you, Mansour? Where will you go? Elsewhere? Or will you remain here? Beneath the dry earth of the Ad Deerah cemetery, across the street … under a rock … lost among the stones laid over remains that are just as insignificant as stones. Or you’ll go off somewhere else even as you remain here, once the blade that your executioner is raising in front of this suddenly silent crowd arrives at the end of its long journey to reach your neck … in front of this crowd which will see almost nothing of your separation seeing how everything is growing whiter and whiter, more and more blurred by the winds full of dust that blow among us. Where will you go once the blade has crossed the infinite distance that separates it from you? Will you rediscover the infinite from which you are constituted? When, as Hallaj did, you hear the words Here I am now in the dwelling place of my desires and when you feel the iron cleave your flesh and when you accede to the dwelling place of your desires … You will once and forever be the point and the circumference reunited, the here and the elsewhere reunited. This saber that gleams only in the eyes of the crowd, will it only manage to travel half its path and then half of half … and if it should actually reach its destination, at which moment will you disappear? Between which infinities will you find sufficient oblivion for you to gather together your soul? Or maybe, for the first time in the history of humanity this paradox will not make it all the way to its contradiction … and for the first time the blade of the saber will never reach the neck of its victim … Abdelkader reached out his arm toward Dupuch’s shoulder the same way your executioner raises his saber to the sky … and all of Abdelkader’s willpower hadn’t sufficed to hold back his hand and all of my willpower, it hadn’t sufficed either to keep me on that long yellow and dusty road that I hoped would never end so that we could remain there … eternally.
I arrived at Ksour al-Moqbel where, from the top of a minaret, the call to prayer calmly rang out. I stopped near a mosque with the desire to go in and pray for miracle to protect us from this reality … but I couldn’t manage to get out of the luxurious interior of what had been your beautiful red Camaro and I stayed there, listless, watching the believers rush to give thanks to the Lord of the Worlds … Reaching me, carried by the winds of the desert, was the imam’s gentle and serene voice. Windows open and eyes closed, I listened to that prayer as if it was your final prayer. As if it was the rites that you were due … And because of their saying: “We slew the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, Allah’s messenger” … they slew him not nor crucified him, but it appeared so unto them, … But Allah took him up unto Himself. And Allah was ever Mighty, Wise … And the night fell almost as quickly as the blow of a saber and I mingled my prayer with that of the believers, opening my eyes in the direction of your dunes, unfolding without any astonishment an unending sky, and calling out to God, from beyond the infinite that separates us, so that he listens to my prayers … I will be the one to pray! I will be the invoker! Sliding down onto my knees beneath this sky full of the infinite where I will be the implorer the supplicant who opens himself up to Him to pray that He save the one who has loved him so because he no longer belongs to the ephemeral … he who has loved him so cannot disappear … You cannot kill the one who has loved you so! By opening myself up to the opening He had left above us … facing that unending sky … By opening up my voice and daring to ask Him
Let him say and become
Let him become the infinite
Let him become eternity
Let him become You
Let him love You and become You
You who speaks
You who knows
You who can
You who acts
I am on my knees so that you will lift him up … and I have just now implored it one more time, without holding back my voice, to the menacing looks of the still silent crowd … I have just now cried it out instead of reciting it as I clear myself a path toward the center from where you will rise up … a path like a transversal trajectory along which I was likely given kicks and spat on … but I am here, a few feet away from you and I am crying out your name. Mansour! Mansour! Piercing through the concentric circles that have tightened around you, crying out your name, receiving the blows of the unbelievers, anointed by gobs of their spit and mouth bloodied, so that you will know one last time all of my love. I want to be in the first circle, among the next of kin, even if that proximity might reserve for me a fate similar to yours. Is there also an order where you are going? Concentric circles around the light of lights? Or is there nothing other than your light? Neither order nor disorder nor objects nor anything else at all and in a way that is just as implausible as there being anything here … Or maybe there is nothing but disorder and maybe things are distributed over there just as randomly as they are here where we have exactly the same odds of having different lives … where, you the same as me, we might never have known this kingdom of Saudi Arabia and where you just as easily could have been the opposite of Stan whom Nadine would have met in a hectic and exciting Paris, which would have brought you together for life and nothing but life … Or is there perhaps, like here, equal amounts of order and disorder, so that chance, perverted by the wills of certain great men, could very well have arranged everything differently in a peaceful and luminous Damascus that we had never left … but there was nothing but a long black rumbling, interminable, and I again hear the deafening crash of hooves that turned over our lands. The gazelles of your heart fly for the east of the East, there where the sun rises and never sets.
Night had come to blanket my mind and extinguish my voice to leave what I still had left of a soul to gallop behind the gazelles of your heart, to attempt to follow their trajectories as they diverged one from the next until my final slumber to which you came, in my dream, to say your farewells. Your hair had grown down to your feet and you had eyes that gleamed brighter than a diamond. I was once again stretched out on the sand of your desert and you had leaned over me and you smiled, telling me that it was Friday, like today, and like the day when the ashes of al-Hallaj were scattered to the four winds and the Tigris carried them away to irrigate great swaths of earth. I welcomed your visit last night the same way al-Maʾmun received that of Aristotle, in 829, enjoining him to consider as speech only speech which conforms to reason … I welcomed your visit the same way Muhyi al-Din, Abdelkader’s father, welcomed that of his master ʿAbd al-Qadir Jilani, announcing to him that his son would be sultan of the West, and responding in this way to his desire to understand by means other than reason. You had leaned over me and you took my hand in yours and you ordered me, with all your love: You will be my eyes! My eyes and my voice! and you said to me: Your mind is a great levee, built over many centuries by those who came before you, and there you must take refuge each time the waters where you swim grow cloudy and each time the lands you roam are without paths. Your mind is a great levee, and you must frequent it for as long as you will seek to know the destination of the roads traced upon the earth and each time the waves seem to want to inform you of something. Your mind is a great levee full of pitfalls on which you will stumble and you will sometimes find yourself in the mud and sometimes in the brambles but you will get up again each time. You will go to find the sense of things by diving into the sea until the waves hold you up and c
arry you back to your levee. You will train your eyes on virgin lands and there you will trace new roads. I welcomed your visit like an inheritance but I didn’t yet know this when I awoke, inside your Camaro, in Ksour al-Moqbel, smelling of embers and ashes, and in that terrifying morning I had to live through to get myself to you. Yes, I will be your eyes, Mansour! And when my mind allows it, I will also be your voice! The billions upon billions of particles of dust fall on us like a rain of glints from mirrors reflecting one another in a brilliant light. I will be your eyes and your voice!