by Iyer, Pico
He scrolled down the list of files on-screen, looking for the last one he’d opened, checking by the date, and as he did so, he came across what had to be a mistake (though computers don’t tend to make mistakes): one file had been opened today, the machine said— 01-04-1996, 9:11. It couldn’t have been, he thought—he’d been away in India for eight days, and then in the rainy house with Camilla: he hadn’t even turned on the machine since the previous year. But the day’s contours stared up at him from the screen, telling him he’d already been on-line this morning.
He clicked on the file to open it—it was called ABANDON—and when it came up, saw the notes he’d put in a year or so before, while writing on de Caussade: the book whose title he’d been so taken by (Abandon à la providence divine) that he’d checked it out of the library on a whim.
“Abandonment,” he read now, and found himself going back to what seemed like another lifetime,
is the crime that God is accused of by man. Abandoning us to our fate, our sorrow, those not sympathetic to Him might say, as a negligent father leaves his children to the storm outside. Even Jesus on the Cross raised the same complaint: “O Father, Father, why hast thou abandoned me?”
Yet what if we take the word a little differently? What if, let’s say, God’s abandonment is not that of an indifferent parent, but, rather, that of a composer, a creator, so carried away by the forces that race through Him that He forgets everything around Him and lets the story run away with Him? What if God gets so lost in the delight, the forgetfulness, of creating that what He’s making somehow takes on a life of its own, as we say? What, in other words, if the abandonment that God is guilty of is not that of desertion but, rather, of rapture, the neglectfulness of an artist who lets the work take over?
Is it possible? Could it have happened that Man, the highest work in God’s creation, according to the Moslems, might have got the better of his Creator’s plans for him? As Iago might have run away with Shakespeare? And God, in whatever sense the word has meaning, “lost Himself ” in creating us and so, in a way that could not have been foreseen, lost us? God’s very abandon leading to our abandonment, not just on the level of a clever play on words, but much deeper, as when, surrendering, we give ourselves over to what we could never have expected? And so the beings He was creating acquired colors, or destinies, He could never have imagined, and the world became much richer, more full of contingency, than was planned.
It’s heresy, of course, to say that the purest Creator of all might be subject to the impulses of the very beings He created. And yet it tells us that we are never more God-like than when we give up—give up control, give up expectation.
He looked at it now, and tried to remember the different person who’d written this, in a momentary flight all those lives ago. Speaking for the very principle he wouldn’t embrace if it came to him in life.
At the bottom of the text, he now saw, was something he was sure he hadn’t seen there, and was sure he hadn’t put there: “Abandon everything,” Dionysus’s words to his followers. “God despises ideas.”
The next week, thanks to some of Sefadhi’s maneuverings, an Iranian was due to come onto campus to deliver a talk on passion in Islam. He was a complicated man, according to Sefadhi, who’d been forced to leave Iran in a hurry, and had lost everything he owned; but he has “wisdom you will be the better for. Even the thorniest rose has fragrance.”
His own research, though, seemed to be moving ever more in circles, as if the Rumi he thought he knew had turned into someone else, just as—McCarthy said—your room becomes something different as soon as you install a different kind of light. He’d taken Rumi for years to be the great laureate of love, in some ways giving voice, and spiritual elevation, to the excitement every teenager feels when he steps outside himself. But now, as his thesis drew towards a close, he saw that really he was writing not about love but about loss.
The great majority of his poems had been written (was this what Martine had been telling him, too, with her letter?) after his beloved’s absence. Their theme was not so much the intoxication as the more resonant and lasting question of what comes after. How do you begin to turn absence into presence and loss into a kind of discovery? He’d thought the poems were about passion; now he saw that that was true only insofar as passion, in the Latin, meant “suffering.”
As soon as she came back to his house, three days later, they put all words aside; and went in their minds to the rainy house again. He could ask her about the sentence at the bottom of the file, or whether she’d gone to Palm Springs with Greg; he could force her into the smallest box he could find (and diminish himself in the process). But the only point of their being together, it seemed, was to climb and to fall into something else.
Hands and mouths were flame, and everything that had been held back, pushed down for so long, seemed to come loose now, in a rush. She shuddered even when he touched her neck; he jumped around her like a madman, said things he couldn’t fathom. A door had sprung open, and everything came out.
“I can’t believe how well we fit together.”
It was the usual lover’s sentence, in the usual lover’s light: the sea was tugging at the shore outside, and their lives lay on the floor around them. Distant calls from far along the beach, and the light, as from a festive house, of the single derrick out to sea.
“You mean like this?”
“Like everything. The letters in our names. The circumstances of our lives—all the times when we could have been in the same room without knowing it. The way I felt something inside me and never guessed that it was you.”
The same things that every pair of lovers say when they’re ushered into the impersonal. She was lying on the pillow, her face turned away from him, caught by the light as it rose outside the window. Her hair was a wet tangle, and the skin around her neck, beneath her ears, was damp. His mouth was at the dampness, on the faint golden down on her back, at the hollows and arches down her spine. His voice was at her ear, and he was calling her name over and over and over.
The next day, when he awoke, he was nobody he could recognize; nobody he could even trust. His thesis overturned, his adviser forgotten, the letter from the library recalling the book on Rumi’s Passion thrown under a pile of scrap papers on the desk. He came out of the bedroom and into the study, and wondered how much he’d become her, in a curious way: the person he’d longed to be when first he came to California, though no one that anyone could get on with very easily.
In the kitchen the clock said, “9:45”—too late for his morning run, too late for a desk in the library. Whatever he knew of anything seemed not a searchlight now, but a kind of screen, a wall that stood between him and a truer knowledge. And the person he’d thought he might become seemed locked up in someone else’s house, and all he had to get by on was a set of clothes that belonged to someone else.
He looked in on her where she lay, at perfect peace, but sure to be frightened, rattled when she awoke—the farther they went along their road together, the more terrified she would be (the more she could see how much there was to lose)—and the more obliquely they would have to move. He remembered the early afternoon on which he’d told her, “You take leave of your senses almost as if you were a mother seeing them off at the station. Waving and waving as the train pulls slowly away.”
“And you,” she’d said, “don’t take leave of them at all” (though in that respect, at least, she had been proved as misguided as he).
He thought of calling Alex, the way he’d always brought himself back to shore before, but then he remembered the last time they’d spoken. Alex had called to ask him why he hadn’t heard from him for so long—why he’d canceled all their meetings—and he’d said something vague and unpersuasive about being preoccupied. “You’re not falling subject to Religious Studies Syndrome?” his friend had said, and he, unable to resist, had said, “What’s that?”
“Suddenly,” said Alex, in a faintly operatic way, “you see all the
noble ideas you’re writing about—‘the dissolution of self,’ the ‘hidden stranger,’ the ‘unexpected liberator’—embodied, very conveniently, in the person you’re claiming not to see.”
“It isn’t like that,” he’d said.
“Of course not,” his friend had said. “I just worry. You may not see this story of the dithering Englishman and the flighty woman as being about this, but she will do so. I can guarantee it.” Then, as if he was truly worried, “You can’t use a poem to get closer to a woman. You know that, don’t you? And you certainly can’t use a girl to get closer to a poem.”
Since then, he’d been wary of his friend, but now, newly emboldened, he remembered Alex had said something about their going together to an exhibition downtown, of Islamic paintings from Washington. He drove over to his friend’s house, a few blocks away, on Embarcadero, and knocked at the door. There was no answer. Strange: this was the time when Alex was nearly always home. He walked around, knocked at the side door, but still there was nothing. Shrugging, he took himself downtown, and parked by the rambling gardens of the Courthouse. The sound of water playing from a nearby fountain.
He went through the Spanish-style courtyard, past the strummed canciones from the Mexican restaurant, the early flowers in the sun, and went up the two flights to where they were showing the miniatures. The room was kept dark—a sort of visual hush—and most of it was empty space: each tidy rectangle hung in a small area, hardly larger than that of a magazine, and around it there was mostly emptiness. Yet each of the paintings held a world in it. A pair of lovers waiting in a pavilion; a wounded deer; a royal hunting expedition: all the archetypal scenes of Islamic art through the centuries. In many pictures, a woman sat alone, in an upstairs room, waiting for her beloved on a night of rain.
In every one of the pictures—it was easier to see when they were all together like this—the same figures reappeared, as if, across centuries and continents, every painter had tried to draw upon the same pool of images. Indeed, as if every painter had tried to draw the same face, as if he was the same person. The artists had nullified personality, in both themselves and their subjects, till all the figures—types, really—seemed no more human than the script in gold, written on black panels at the bottom, or the ornamental frames that held the images in a cage.
He went from one room to the next, then back again, and found himself strangely calmed by the quiet, the darkness of the space. All kinds of worlds and environments soothed into this simple, unchanging order. And in every one, the world was seen, famously, not as we would see it, with its particularities and imperfections, but as Allah might (which is why you could see what was going on in every room at once). The celestial viewpoint was part of what accounted for the stillness in the paintings, the sense of calm. Even the scenes of blood-shed were strangely without drama.
At the very end of the second room, the curator had chosen to include three paintings from Venice, to show how the tradition had come up against a wall, and turned a corner, you could say. These pictures were notably different, because they had proportion, individuality. In Venice, rulers had asked that they be painted larger than their background, that they be shown as exactly who they were—the persons that their wives and mistresses saw. They’d even demanded (a small notice explained) they be painted in the middle of each frame. Pieces of the classical style were still apparent, but the heavenly serenity of the other paintings had been replaced by the jangle and vividness of the real.
There was a quote from Othello at the bottom of the last caption, and he thought of Iago and Desdemona fighting for the Moor’s soul, in Venice. The one whispering in the foreigner’s ear, to doubt everything he knew; the other, almost wordlessly, urging him to be worthy of his native majesty.
She was still in bed when he got back, but it was dark, and when he lit the candle by the bed, he saw for a moment a face from one of the last paintings. Then, blowing out the candle, he lay beside her in the bed and put his arms around the dark.
A few hours later, she awoke, and at some point in the night that followed the two of them disappeared. No he or she, any more; no cause or effect. Just the sound of the ocean outside the window, the moon occasionally catching something on the water.
She reached for him where he lay, and then turned back to light the candle on the bedside table. Outside, through the window, the lonely single light of the derrick out to sea.
“When did you first know, do you think?”
“I didn’t know. It never began.”
“But when did you first think?”
“As soon as I said goodbye.”
A little later, there was more darkness around them. The last planes had come in to land by now, and there was only the shape of their shadows, coming together, moving apart, on the wall.
“Are you warm? Are you cold?”
“Not warm. Not cold. Not anything.”
“But you’re shivering? You’re shaking.”
“Not shaking. Just breathing.”
“You’re frightened in some way?”
“How can I not be terrified?”
Then, as the light began to seep into the room again—she blew out the candle, and they were just shapes in the dark, nobody they could easily recognize—
“Lie still. Just there. Don’t move.”
“Hang on. Don’t stop. Just there.”
“Let go. Go wild. Don’t stop.”
“I’m gone.”
It was afternoon by the time he got up, and Debra’s seminar was due to begin in twenty minutes. He got ready quickly and cycled across campus in a kind of trance, hardly noticing the figures on the beach, the dogs with twigs in their mouths, the smudge of tar on the sand, but seeming to see everything that was inside them or around them, the networks that were part of them. He wasn’t himself, he felt, and his feet weren’t touching solid ground: a box of lightbulbs stands on a factory floor—he’d met the image in a book by McCarthy—and the bulbs are all individual, mortal; but turn them on, and the light they transmit is not particular to any one of them.
Debra had chosen to talk of Zen mindlessness—“no mind,” as she chose to call it—and as she spoke, all he could see (the lover’s self-absorption, he imagined) was his own poems, translated into a different tongue. The Zen student, she was saying, seeks to set a torch to every image or abstraction behind which he might hide: the long nights of meditation, the crack on the shoulder with the wooden stick, the mindless repetition of routine—it was all a way of trying to break through the mind to what lay beyond it. “If you see the Buddha along the road, you must kill him.”
“You could almost say the Zen monks are Sufis who never move,” he said when she was finished, and there was laughter around the room. But he’d been serious. At some level, as with all these disciplines around the world, the names were not important.
“That might be a useful beginning,” said Debra, taking his comment and already putting it into the tidy frame of her thesis. “But for the Zen student, as for the Buddhist—hence the confusion between the two—the ultimate truth is emptiness: shunyata. Whereas, for your Sufis, from what you told us in your enlightening presentation” (she was laying the ground for a compliment in return), “it’s more a case of affirmation. They believe in something, it’s just a something so far beyond their categories they don’t have words for it. Except ‘the Beloved.’ ”
Yet what, he thought, as he cycled home, did any of it have to do with the shadows on the wall, the candle she’d set back so they wouldn’t knock it over? He thought of his father, working so selflessly year after year for a company that would repay his faith only with occasional bonuses. Giving himself so fully to what he knew could never sustain him that when he woke up it was as if he’d dreamed through all his life.
Along the ocean, as the light began to fade, a woman in a black catsuit was walking along to the distant point, a surfboard under her arm. A prehistoric ruler, he thought, in his altered state, off to lay her offerings on an
altar for the gods.
When he walked into the house, she was getting her things ready, to go back to L.A. again—fearful, he guessed, of how far they were going. “I’ve got to work on something at home,” she said. “I can’t tell you because you’re a part of it.”
He followed her out to the car and watched her drive off into the distance. “Mysteries are not to be solved”—it had been his favorite line in Rumi once upon a time. “The eye goes blind when it only wants to see why.”
He had to track some books down before the Sufi came up next week—if only so he could know what questions to ask—so, getting in the car, he drove towards Chaucer’s. He sped through town, and then, looking up, realized he’d missed the turn; the places he knew were remade for him now, and he in them a stranger.
He turned around and doubled back, feeling foolish, and when he got to the bookstore parking lot, found it full as ever. Edging along to find a place, he suddenly saw someone he thought he recognized.
“Alex,” he called out, rolling down the window. “Is that you?”
“John.” His friend didn’t look pleased.
“Hang on. I’ll be there in a minute.” He went round the corner, and parked in the handicapped zone near the post office—apter than he knew, he thought—and then ran back to check in with his friend. He’d felt bad that he’d been ducking him ever since Alex had said something about “folie à deux.”
Then, coming up to where he’d seen him, he realized something else had been going on. She was very young, with bright red lipstick, wearing a thick fur jacket even on the unbuttoned California afternoon. Her short blond hair peeped out from underneath a small black cap.
“It’s been a while,” he said to Alex, and when he got back nothing but a shrug—Alex, too, didn’t seem himself today—he realized he would have to take the initiative himself. “John Macmillan,” he said, extending a hand towards the stranger.
“Enchanted. Sophie Rajavi.” She offered in return a soft and ring-less hand, a jangle of gold bracelets dancing around her wrist.