“Franz, you lack poetry. You now own one of the rare compasses that point to the Orient, the compass of Illumination, the Suhrawardian artifact. A mystical diviner’s wand.”
You may be wondering, dear Herr Mann, what Suhrawardi, the great twelfth-century Persian philosopher decapitated in Aleppo by order of Saladin, has to do with Beethoven’s compass (or at least the version of it tampered with by Sarah). Suhrawardi, native of Suhraward in northwestern Iran, discovered for Europe (and also for most Iranians) by Henry Corbin, the Heidegger specialist who switched to Islamic studies, and who devoted to Suhrawardi and his successors an entire volume of his great oeuvre, En Islam iranien. Henry Corbin is probably one of the most influential European thinkers in Iran, whose long labor of publishing and exegesis was instrumental in the revival, in tradition, of Shiite thought. Especially in the revival of the interpretation of Suhrawardi, the founder of “Oriental theosophy,” of the wisdom of Illumination, heir to Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, and Zoroaster. As Muslim metaphysics was dying out, in the darkness of the West, with the death of Averroes (and Latin Europe died with him), it continued to shine in the East in the mystical theosophy of the disciples of Suhrawardi. This is the way shown by my compass, according to Sarah, the path to Truth, in the rising sun. The first Orientalist in the strict sense of the word was that decapitated man in Aleppo, sheikh of Oriental illumination, of Ishraq, the Illumination from the East. My friend Parviz Baharlou the poet in Tehran, scholar with the joyful sadness, often spoke to us of Suhrawardi, of that knowledge of the Ishraq and its relationship with the Mazdan tradition of ancient Iran, the underground link that joined modern Shiite Iran with ancient Persia. For him, this current was much more interesting and subversive than Ali Shariati’s rereading of Shiism as a revolutionary weapon of combat, which he called “the dry river,” since tradition didn’t flow into it, the spiritual flux was absent from it. According to Parviz, the Iranian mullahs in power unfortunately couldn’t care less about either one or the other: not only were the revolutionary ideas of Shariati no longer current (already Khomeini, in the beginning of the Revolution, had condemned his thinking as blameworthy innovation) but also the theosophical, mystical aspect was erased from the religion of power and replaced by the dryness of velayat-e faqih, the “government of jurists”: clerics are in charge of earthly administration, until the Parousia — or Return — of the Mahdi, the hidden imam who will bring justice to Earth; the clerics are the temporal, not spiritual, intermediaries of the Mahdi. This theory had, in its day, provoked the wrath of great ayatollahs like Ayatollah Shariatmadari who had trained Parviz’s father in Qom. Parviz also added that the velayat-e faqih had had huge consequences for vocations — the number of aspiring mullahs had multiplied by a hundred, since a temporal magistery allowed you to fill your pockets much more easily (and God knows how deep they were, the pockets of mullahs) than a spiritual priesthood rich in rewards in the beyond but not very remunerative for this lowly world: so turbans flourished, in Iran, at least as much as functionaries did in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which is saying something. So much so that certain religious men complain today that there are more clerics than the faithful in mosques, that you find too many shepherds and fewer and fewer sheep to be shorn, somewhat similar to how there were, at the end of Imperial Vienna, more civil servants than constituents. Parviz himself would say that as he lived in the Paradise of Islam on Earth, he didn’t see why he should go to the mosque. The only religious gatherings where there were a lot of people, he said, were political rallies that gathered everyone together: a number of buses were chartered to pick up the inhabitants in the south of the city and they boarded cheerfully, happy with this free trip and the meal offered them at the end of common prayer.
Philosophical, mystical Iran was always there, though, and streamed like an underground river below the feet of indifferent mullahs; the holders of erfan, spiritual knowledge, pursued the tradition of practice and commentary. The great Persian poets took part in this prayer of the heart, inaudible perhaps in the racket of Tehran, but whose muted beating was one of the most intimate rhythms in the city, in the entire country. Spending time with intellectuals and musicians, you almost forgot the black mask of the regime, that funeral crepe stretched over all things within its reach; one was almost freed of the Zahir, the apparent, while one came closer to the Batin, the womb, the hidden, the powers of dawn. Almost, for Tehran also knew how to take you by surprise and wrench your soul from you and send you back to the most superficial sadness, where there was neither ecstasy nor music — that crazed would-be-Gobineau of the Abguineh museum, for example, with his Hitler salute and his mustache, or that mullah I met at the university, professor of something or other, who took us aside and explained that we Christians had three gods, advocated human sacrifices and drank blood: so we were not simple miscreants, but stricto sensu terrifying pagans. That was, when I think about it, the first time anyone ever labeled me a Christian: the first time the evidence of my baptism was used by someone else to single me out and (under the circumstances) look down on me, just as, in the Abguineh museum, it was the first time someone had imposed the label “German” on me to enroll me among the followers of Hitler. This violence of identity pinned on you by the other and uttered like a condemnation — Sarah felt it much more strongly than I did. The Name she could have borne had to remain a secret, in Iran: even though the Islamic Republic officially protected Iranian Jews, the little community present in Tehran for four millennia was prey to bullying and suspicion; the last remnants of Achaemenid Judaism were sometimes arrested, tortured, and hanged after resounding court trials that had more to do with medieval witchcraft than modern justice, accused as they were — among a thousand other crackpot charges — of adulterating medications and trying to poison the Muslims of Iran for the benefit, of course, of the State of Israel, mention of which, in Tehran, had the terrifying power of monsters and wolves in childhood fairy tales. And even if Sarah was, in reality, no more Jewish than Catholic, she had to be careful (given the ease with which the police fabricated spies) and hide the few links she might have with that Zionist entity that Iranian official discourse so ardently desired to annihilate.
It’s strange to think that today in Europe one so easily places the label “Muslim” on anyone who has a last name that’s Arabic or Turkish. The violence of imposed identities.
Oh, the second exposition of the theme. One should examine it under the microscope. Everything vanishes. Everything flees. We are advancing into new territory. Everything is fugue. It should be acknowledged that your pages on Beethoven’s 32nd sonata are apt to provoke the jealousy of musicologists, dear Thomas Mann. That stammering speaker, Kretzschmar, who plays the piano while bellowing his commentaries to be heard over his own fortissimi. What a character. A stammerer to talk about a deaf man. Why is there no third movement to the Opus 111? I’d like to submit my own theory on this matter. That famous third movement is present implicitly. By its absence. It is in the heavens, in silence, in the future. Since we expect it, that third movement, it breaks the duality of the confrontation of the first two parts. It would be a slow movement. Slow, so slow or so fast that it lasts in an infinite tension. At bottom it’s the same question as that of the resolution of the Tristan chord. The dual, the ambiguous, turmoil, the fleeing. The fugue. That false circle, that impossible return is inscribed by Beethoven himself at the very beginning of his score, in the maestoso that we’ve just heard. That diminished seventh. The illusion of the expected key, the vanity of human hopes, so easily deceived by fate. What we think we hear, what we think we expect. The majestic hope for resurrection, love, consolation is followed only by silence. There is no third movement. It’s terrifying, isn’t it? Art and joy, the pleasures and sufferings of humans resound in the void. All those things we cling to, the fugue, the sonata, all of it is fragile, dissolved by time. Listen to the end of the first movement, the genius of that coda that ends in the air, suspended, after that long harmonic m
eandering — even the space between the two movements is uncertain. From fugue to variation, from flight to evolution. The little aria pursues, adagio molto, to one of the most surprising rhythms, its march toward the simplicity of nothing. Another illusion, Essence; we don’t discover it in the variation any more than we discern it in the fugue. We think we’re touched by the caress of love, and we find ourselves rushing head over heels down a staircase. A paradoxical staircase that doesn’t even lead to its starting point — or to paradise, or to hell. The genius of these variations, you’ll no doubt agree, Herr Mann, resides also in their transitions. That’s where life lies, fragile life, in the link between all things. The beauty is the passage, the transformation, all the schemes of the living. This sonata is alive, precisely because it goes from fugue to variation and ends up at nothing. “What is inside the almond? Nothing. There it stays and stays.” Of course you can’t know those lines by Paul Celan, Herr Mann, you were dead when they were published.
A Nothing
we were, are now, and ever
shall be, blooming:
the Nothing-, the
No-One’s-Rose.
Everything leads to that famous third movement, in silence major, a rose of nothing, a rose of no one.
But I am preaching to the choir, dear Thomas Mann, I know you agree with me. Would it bother you if I turned off the radio? In the end Beethoven makes me sad. Especially that endless trill just before the final variation. Beethoven sends me back to nothingness; to the compass of the Orient, to the past, to illness, and to the future.
Here life ends on the tonic, simply, pianissimo, in C major, a very monotone chord followed by a semiquaver rest. And then nothing.
The important thing is not to lose east. Franz, don’t lose east. Turn off the radio, stop this conversation out loud with the phantom of Mann the magician. Mann the friend of Bruno Walter. Friend even in exile, friend of thirty-five years. Thomas Mann, Bruno Walter, and the Wagner case. The Wagner aporia, always. Mahler’s disciple, Bruno Walter, whom the Munich bourgeoisie would end up dismissing from his post as conductor since, as a Semite, he was soiling German music. He wasn’t making the Wagnerian statue gleam brightly enough. In the United States he would become one of the greatest conductors of all time. Why am I so wound up against Wagner tonight? Maybe it’s the influence of Beethoven’s compass, the one that points east. Wagner is the zahir, the apparent, the sinister dry West. He dams underground rivers. Wagner is a dam, with him the stream of European music overflows. Wagner closes everything. Destroys opera. Drowns it. The total artwork becomes totalitarian. What is there in his almond? Everything. The illusion of Everything. Song, music, poetry, theater, painting with our sets, bodies with our actors and even nature with our Rhine and our horses. Wagner is the Islamic Republic. Despite his interest in Buddhism, despite his passion for Schopenhauer, Wagner transforms everything into that Christian alterity in self. The Victors, Buddhist opera, becomes Parsifal, Christian opera. Nietzsche is the only one who was able to distance himself from that magnet. Who was able to perceive its danger. Wagner: tubercular. Nietzsche: syphilitic. Nietzsche the thinker, poet, musician. Nietzsche wanted to Mediterraneanize music. He loved the exotic exuberances of Carmen, the sound of Bizet’s orchestra. He loved them. Nietzsche saw love in the sun reflecting on the sea in Rapallo, in the secret lights of the Italian coast, where the densest greens suffer the heat. Nietzsche had understood that Wagner’s question was not so much the summits he’d been able to climb but the impossibility of his succession, the death of a tradition that was no longer invigorated (in its own self) by the other. Horrible Wagnerian modernity. Belonging to Wagner will cost you dearly. Wagner wanted to be an isolated rock, he hurled the boats of all his successors onto the reefs.
Compass Page 29