89
DISTANT MANDATE
Concealed in its essence,
by its appearance revealed
We don’t even know what it was called, not a single contemporary document refers to it as the Alhambra, in part because there is no such document, or no such document has survived; in part because even if such a document did survive, this name is the most unlikely one, for its builders — if they were the ones we refer to today — would never have designated it by a name altogether not in accord with the building itself; as this name is not: if you derive an attribution from the expression based on the color of the materials used for the masonry, “qal’at al-hamra” or possibly “al-qubba al-hamra,” it could signify “al hamra,” accordingly “The Red,” which might refer to the name of the builder, a version which, although more faintly, does hold together in some fashion or another; the palace, with its breathtakingly harmonious magnificence within, surpassing the architectural beauty of any earlier or later period, is itself, however, inconsistent with this hardly exalted vernacular clarification, so distant from the nature of the Arab spirit; if we were to rely upon those whom we have to thank for this structure for the attribution, then they would certainly have found a loftier designation for it; so already we’re off to a bad start, it doesn’t even have a name, because “Alhambra” is not its name, that is only what we call it, moreover in distorted Spanish, that is to say that “Alhambra” could refer to anything at all, it just stuck somehow, not to mention that in Islam it was just as frequent for a sacred or secular building not to have a name as to be given one, because what was the name of the Mosque of Córdoba? the Aljafería of Zaragoza? the Alcázar in Seville? the al-Kairaouine mosque in Fez? and on and on along the North African shore onward to Egypt, Palestine, and northwest India? there were no names; so there are examples, if we think upon it more deeply, hundreds of examples that there can be good reason not to give a name to an immortal artwork, it’s just that this reason is indecipherable to us, just as indecipherable as the date of the construction of the Alhambra, because the records are fairly contradictory in this matter, as the whole thing depends on what the first one doesn’t know, the second one misunderstands, and where therefore the third puts the emphasis, that is to say how far away this or that one strays from the unverifiable facts; certain individuals report that there are Roman and Visigoth ruins on the mountain that served as the location for the later Alhambra — either the part of it known as Sabīka, or the entire locale — others are of the opinion that until the building of the Alhambra, this mountain, rising above the swift-flowing waters of the narrow Darro, thus including the Alcazaba, a fortress dating from the eighth century on the top of it, never played any kind of significant role, and that maybe there was some sort of battle between the Arabs and an ethnic group known as the Muladi after the Arab conquest of Al-Andalus in the ninth and tenth centuries; but yet again in the view of others — in opposition to those who say that the Jews only lived in the district known as Garnatha, that is to say down below, in the area of today’s Granada — there is only one fact worth mentioning, that in one of the centuries preceding the Alhambra, hence certainly by the eleventh century, starting from some point in time and ending at a later point in time, there existed, on the part of the mountain that was to become truly important later on, a Jewish settlement; after the fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba, an early Berber ethnic group, the Zirids, belonging to the Kutama tribe and thus to the Umayyads, who founded the city of Granada, located its center here and tried to “protect” the Jews; in any event there was a Jewish vizier by the name of Yusuf ibn Naghrallah, who built a so-called hisn, a fortified palace; we know, other scholars remark, that on the mountain beside the Darro there was, as far back as early Roman times but also after the Arab invasion of Iberia in 711, a strongly defended fortress, or at the very least from the eleventh century, an extremely well-built wall; and of course in opposition to this view there exist other opinions, according to which regarding this place — starting from Granada and the district known as Albaicín, from the nearly unverifiable fortress of Elvira nearby and the Jewish community of Sabīka, all the way to the Berber dynasties (the Almoravids and the Almohads), and the never-ending sheer butchery known as civil war — there’s nothing, nothing at all, from which we might glean a bit of certainty, and so then we finally arrive at the first Arab sources such as they are, because up until this point — here and now is the time to say this — there is no kind of usable historical material at our disposal whatsoever, because the location we are discussing never had any usable historical records or they have not survived; hypothetically, because this place, during the first centuries of Iberian subjugation, did not play an important enough role for it to have something like its own history, that is to say its own place in historical events, because this place began to acquire an important role only with the emergence of the Nasrid Dynasty, the sudden appearance of which coincides with the genesis of the Alhambra in today’s sense of the term, and it is better if we say at once its genesis, and avoid the question of who built the Alhambra, because this is already the third question after “what is its name” and “when was it built,” that we cannot answer, as even this is not certain, it never was, maybe not even to those who were involved with it, someone began it, of that there is no doubt, but as for the true founder, to take a huge leap forward in time, the true initiator and first patron of the Alhambra is said to be Yusuf I; supposedly it was he who commissioned it, who paid for a new palace complex on the ridge of the mountain — roughly the middle section — following the various and obscure initiatives of the Nasrids; because there are many already who said that the first Nasrid was the one who built the Alhambra, he, the earlier ruler of Jaén, Ibn-al-Ahmed, his full name being Muhammad ibn Yusuf ibn Nasr, but better known under the name al-Ahmar, that is to say the prince known as “The Red,” who moved his residence from Jaén to Granada, and proclaimed himself Muhammad I, he became, after the Umayyads, the Almoravids, and the Almohads, the first grandiose founder of this place, previously not so splendid; in addition to this, in the history of the western Arabs, he simultaneously became, with his own last dynasty, the luminous ruler of Islamic ambitions westward, because he began by reinforcing, to a degree never before seen, the walls of the Alcazaba; and, well, if we can believe a so-called contemporary account, the beginning of the story of the Alhambra began with him, Abdallah ibn al-Ahmar, namely, the ruler himself, at least according to the somewhat adventurous manuscript baptized as the Anómino de Granada y Copenhague: “In 1238, he went up to the place later known as Alhambra, inspected it, designated the foundation of a castle, then instructed someone to build it,” the visit from which, supposedly, six palaces emerged, the royal residence in a northeastern orientation, with two round towers, as well as countless bath-houses, so somehow it got off to a start, it was begun like this and it became like this, and perhaps the romantic history of the Alhambra really did occur like that, but it’s also possible that it didn’t, as the description originates from a chronicle that — and here every self-respecting professional scholar, from Oleg Grabar and Juan Vernet and Leonor Martínez Martín up to Ernst J. Grube, raises his index finger — is completely unreliable; I for example, Ernst J. Grube writes in a letter to a close friend, have never once seen this account; so that they — all of these aforementioned scholars, including, as well, the amicable and as yet unpublished index-card notations of the scholarly team of four that authored the minor masterpiece The Language of Pattern — all agree quite clearly that the Alhambra was planned, commissioned, and built nearly one century later by Yusuf I, the Nasrid Sultan who ruled for eleven years after 1333, whose palace most likely bore within its embryo, or in its foundations — how shall we express it in this obscurity? — the concealed essence of the final Alhambra, although at this point one becomes completely uncertain, because it is necessary to add immediately that it was he, and after one of his own bodyguards ran a dagger through him, of course, his
son, because this whole has to be imagined in such a way, that they, so to speak, built this work of uncertain depth together, Yusuf and his son Mohammed V, both of whom, as it were, passed the trowel from hand to hand — an expression wishing to allude to their inseparability — therefore we can conjecture that in all likelihood both knew very well what they were doing, because in the end, after them, there is nothing else, it could have only been them; for if it is certain that this origin is as unclear as the origin of any work of art can be, moreover if one would venture to state that nothing is more unclear than the origin of the Alhambra, the end, however, is as certain as death: after Mohammed V and his long reign, ending in 1391, there can be no doubts about the end; about one hundred years then follow, during which the Sultanate of Granada, among others, consume seven more Mohammeds and four more Yusufs, but this period of one hundred years is one single chaotic tragic drama where, in relation to the Alhambra — apart from the construction of the Torre de las Infantas — nothing essential even occurs, so that when the last Nasrid ruler, Mohammed XII, known just as often as Boabdil, “The Unfortunate,” in 1492, upon the fall of his Granada and his Alhambra — seen from here, the conclusion of the great Reconquista — lamented, according to hearsay, that this was the end, no more, he must depart from all of this beauty, the Catholic Kings are marching into the Alhambra, kings who of course see the magnificent enchantment but do not understand it, but even more importantly, do not even wish to understand anything; yet they do not destroy it — how kind of them — which the non-Hispanophone historical accounts truly recognize as their one irrational, if beneficial act; in short the Alhambra’s fate was sealed, and with the victory of the Reconquista it was occupied by foreigners, and in the centuries to come they built this and that in the surrounding area, for the most part insignificant structures, so that the essential thing, looking at it from the reference point of Alhambra, was that the Arabs definitely vanished from the scene, and thus the Alhambra ended up in the most haunting of conditions imaginable, for if there was anyone at all who understood it, it was the Arabs, yet they had vanished from here for good, which means, in our case, that there remained no one, from this point on, who could approach its meaning, this is absolutely true, because there is no one up to this very day who has been able understand the Alhambra, it stands there aimless and incomprehensible, and no one can comprehend even today why it is standing there, so there is no one who can help in this situation, it is not the interpretations that are lacking, but the interpretive code through which it can be deciphered, and it will remain like this from now on, because it is not even worthwhile to keep going on in this direction, but more worthwhile to turn back, to wander back a little to the probable creators, and in the most well-founded uncertainty to say that yes, after 1391 — not including the interior of the Torre de las Infantas in the mid-fifteenth century — no one added anything anymore to the Alhambra, it came into being with Yusuf I and his son Mohammed V, and with them it also came to an end, in a word, it is more worthwhile to pronounce them indecisively as most likely to have commissioned the Alhambra; winding our way back, we cannot speak any less cautiously than this and perhaps what we have stated about Yusuf I and Mohammed V may be permitted, if one proceeds cautiously, a caution that at any single tiny point of this story is not in the least bit superfluous, particularly if we reach — as we are reaching right here and now — that point when it becomes clear that leaving aside the fact that we don’t know what the name of the Alhambra was, or even if it had a name at all, and that this isn’t even something without precedent, and so it is thus tolerable, that we cannot find a clear answer to when it was built and finally even to who built it; but now comes the point where the next thing we don’t know must be revealed; namely that we don’t know what the Alhambra is, that is to say we don’t know why it was built, what was its function — if we don’t view it as a residence, a private palace, or a fortification, because we don’t view it as that, then, well, how should we regard it? generally we don’t know, we have no idea at all, and this is difficult to explain, difficult, because now it seems as if everything is in order, one picks oneself up and travels to Granada, goes up the left bank of the Darro, then turns right and crosses above the Darro’s bubbling froth, reaches the road that leads to the Alhambra, drags himself up in the heat — for let us say that it’s summer and there is a dreadful, dry, scorching heat, and he has no parasol — and he buys the expensive entrance ticket, then a great surprise, more precisely an unpleasant surprise awaits him when at last, wandering with difficulty here and there up above, up here are all kinds of structures, from various gates to the chill, icy, unfinished, supposedly Renaissance palace of Charles V, but one feels that not one of them is it; then he finds it, because in the end, he finally realizes that it is there, at that little gate, where he has to go in, and then he finds out that he can’t go inside, that he has to wait, because visitors are only allowed in at certain intervals, and he is a visitor, he has to follow the rules, to wait in the inhuman parching heat, there is no refreshment stand, so accordingly he withdraws to a more shaded corner, and if he is lucky, and let’s assume that he is, then he has to wait for only twenty minutes, then he goes in and his jaw drops, because something like this, but like this, he says to himself, utterly stupefied, he has really, but really never even seen, this, the person says to himself, surpasses anyone’s imagination, but in the meantime it doesn’t even occur to him that something isn’t right; he thinks it is a royal palace, well yes, he reads the brief explanatory sheet that comes with the ticket, or he hears the bellowing of the tour guides, that Yusuf I, was it not, and his son Mohammed V, they were the ones who created this wondrous masterwork, this unsurpassable wonder of the Muslim Moors, he hears this and he reads the same, and it never even occurs to him to question whether this is a palace, or a fortress, or perhaps a private residence, or all of these things together — why, what else could it be? — well, the sultan lived here, or didn’t he? and here, living in his proximity, was the ocean of courtiers, and the women of the harem, courtly life, in a word, went on, there were huge feasts, splendid concerts, glittering receptions, the renowned baths, radiant celebrations and, well, of course, because this too is known, there were the thousands of ugly intrigues and machinations, secret associations and plots, and danger and murder, and chaos and blood and collapse, after which there always came the next sultan from the Nasrid dynasty, in a word everything went on just like it should in such a sultanate, one thinks to oneself, or perhaps doesn’t even think, as the images already precede the thoughts, when that which a person is thinking about gives rise to just one question, yet a question that remains unspoken because, well, who would ask it, maybe the tourist guide with his hand-held megaphone? — no, really no, the suspicion does not even arise within him that he now in such a place, for the first time in his life — because in the world there is only one such place as this, the Alhambra, where innumerable signs indicate that everything here, called only by their Spanish names — from the Patio de los Arrayanes to the Sala de la Barca, the Patio de Comares to the Patio de los Leones, the Sala de las Dos Hermanas to the Mirador de la Daraxa — everything here does not constitute a palace but something else; innumerable signs indicate to the visitor taking part in the immortal beauty of the Alhambra, that no, this is neither a fortress nor a palace, not even a private residence, but again and again — something else, and well, here, then we start with the walls, about which we should first know that they were originally whitewashed with lime, so that from below, from today’s Granada, or concretely the Darro or the Albacín quarter which once provided the Alhambra with water, the predecessor of the Alhambra was white, not red, and that is enough here about the name just one last time, but what is much more important is that these walls, for the most part towers connected to each other haphazardly — no matter what kind of well-intentioned expert sets to examining them — they were suitable for many purposes but it becomes ever more certain that they did not truly pr
otect whoever was the ruler of the Alhambra, so then what were the walls for, what were they protecting: the Alhambra, fine, but from what, because in a military sense they were not really capable of defending anything; their significance, however, is as obvious as anything else in the Alhambra, or in relation to the Alhambra, so that then here, in the matter of the walls it is not really possible to arrive at any other decision than that the walls of the Alhambra — it is of course the outer walls of which we are speaking — did not provide any function of defense, but that their construction . . . perhaps . . . was intended as a kind of manifestation, namely to manifest that these walls were on the one hand like those of a fortress, accordingly high and wall-like, hence they could unconditionally protect something, something located behind them, yet on the other hand the people who commissioned these walls wanted to indicate that life within was unassailable, that it was not possible to enter here, not possible to breach these walls, and it was not even allowed, perhaps this sort of deliberation lay in the depths of the wishes of those who ordered it, who knows, no one has ever seen their specific plans, neither Yusuf I nor Mohammed V left any sort of trace behind as to what they were thinking when they built these walls here in this state, we can only guess, just as we also guessed as to why generally no written trace was left concerning the construction of the Alhambra, because nothing remained, and this still is not without precedent, for in the enormous territories of the Islamic empire, documents about this or that building are not too frequently available; it is however unprecedented that in the case of the Alhambra not even one single tiny piece of data has ever emerged about the construction itself, as if it would have been of particular importance to its commissioners that their work — how should one even express it, so as not to obscure things unnecessarily — would remain concealed, concealed in its essence, but by its appearance revealed, that is more or less the conclusion reached by one who lingers over these dilemmas, and this is just the beginning, really, because as one progresses in this Alhambra research, it will be ever more obvious that what earlier seemed self-evident here is anything but, that is to say that it can hardly be seen as an exception that in the case of a very old building, written sources do not survive, or that there are today very few experts to be found who can evoke, in spite of all their expertise, evidence, pertaining to how, for example, the days were spent in the Alhambra, or in any edifice, say, similar to the Alhambra; just that this complexity, this perfection appears to manifest itself as well in the concealment of any knowledge pertaining to the Alhambra at all; an attention extending to all things, that even of the tiniest, the most insignificant of facts, nothing at all should remain; this nonetheless causes one to ponder, because, well then, the question inevitably arises within one, if it isn’t this way because there were never any traces at all, it just appears that they were hidden, Professor Grabar, coming from the Marçais school, and towering far above the other scholars of the Alhambra as he is the only one who notices that in this wondrous masterwork there is too much obscurity, briefly he, an instructor at both the University of Michigan and Harvard, the son of André Grabar, wrote an entirely serious monograph about how the story of the Alhambra is in fact nothing but the story of a great conspiracy, and the Alhambra itself, in his view, is a singular attempt at the art of disguise, and clearly the reason why he thinks so, being a knowledgeable expert, is that he cannot resign himself to there being no explanation; it is simply palpable, as one reads onward in Grabar’s book, that this scholar of exceptional aptitude is hardly capable of conceiving that something could exist without a story, circumstance, cause, or goal; he can’t even conceive that its formation, its origination would have no logical continuity, to put it more forcefully, this Professor Grabar neither considers it possible, nor is capable of accepting, that an effect can appear without having been elicited by any cause, hence that ripples would appear on the lake’s tranquil surface without us having thrown a pebble into it, namely, in the case of the Alhambra that this, the Alhambra, could come into being without there being any real commission, and in addition, that the ones who commissioned it had no tangible intention and so on, but in the end Professor Grabar cannot, neither at Harvard nor at Michigan, cannot withstand that inasmuch as all of this is extant, that ultimately it all cannot finally be attributed to something logical, in this case then, perhaps in this unique case, we must confront the disquieting possibility that the Alhambra — already far beyond its really being neither fortress nor palace nor private residence — stands there with no explanation, it is wholly extant, the outer walls are extant, the entrance is extant, the spaces inside, ultimately traversable if with some difficulty, are extant, the presumed function of each single spatial element is extant, they point out, for example, that here is where the throne was, and here were the baths, and over there was the tower of the captive Infanta, things like that, they analyze the exceptional craftsmanship of the ornamentation, they look for correlations, and they find them in the universal regularity of Islamic architecture, and they do not grow perplexed when a less perceptive observer, in their view, does grow perplexed; they are not; we, however, are; for our gaze does not glide over self-evident things so easily, well, because we take one more step forward, and we note that no one is perplexed — only Professor Grabar with his own conspiracy-theory, but that is going in a different direction — accordingly then there is no one, although clearly this must have been obvious, or is obvious to every expert: no one is sincerely troubled by the Alhambra’s outwardly very restrained, almost desolate, characterless, attention-deflecting walls, the negligible mortar of these walls built from negligible materials, in a word, the Alhambra places a great deal of emphasis on showing nothing outwardly of the nearly inhuman enchantment with which everything dazzles there within, like the starry sky of a summer’s night above Granada; put differently, that the Alhambra from without betrays nothing of what is inside, and at the same time, from within, it does not betray what awaits a person outside, that is to say that the Alhambra betrays nothing about itself, and generally this or that quality is never shown in this or that direction, it never indicates here that over there this or that will follow; namely that the Alhambra is always the same, and is always at every point identical only with itself, by which statement one does not wish to express, on the other hand, that one knows what this means, but precisely that one does not know, he just stands there and acknowledges it, and he acknowledges it by saying oh my, how peculiar that Alhambra is from the outside, a completely different building than within, and utterly different inside than outside, and so it goes, truly one step at a time, when one enters through the little gate; so that his own Alhambra story may begin within a truly insignificant place in the greater whole, the entrance, let’s call it that, but we don’t think of it as such, as we know very well that this entrance is only the present entrance, at one time it was not located here, this is claimed decisively by a few, although already not so very decisively as to where exactly it was “in olden times,” in short the entrance is concealed, says Professor Grabar from Boston or from Michigan, because who could imagine that the path into a palace of wonders would not pass through a gate of wonders, although, no, it isn’t like that in the Alhambra, examining either the presumably earlier or current entrances, it is as if the entrance neither wants to invite anyone in nor to lead him anywhere, it simply allows one inside, an opening, a point where a person may obtain access to the interior spaces if he so wishes, an arbitrarily selected place which merely happened to come about in the course of time, and which offers nothing, is just open and is always open, hence it is possible to step across it; well, after, of course, it is another question of what to do after one has stepped across it, because let us take the simplest scenario, twenty minutes have gone by, the sweat trickles down in the horrendous scorching heat, he pays the extortionately high entrance fee, glances at the brief description that comes with the ticket, and sets off in one direction that would appear to be the right one — just that
there is no such thing, the Alhambra does not recognize within itself the concept of a right direction, one is rapidly convinced of this when he realizes that fine, he headed off toward the Cuarto Dorado courtyard, and if he is moving inside a work of Islamic architecture for the first time, then certainly a few minutes will go by, perhaps even more, until he comes to, because the first encounter with a space determined by Islamic ornamentation — anywhere in the world, but particularly here in the courtyard of the Cuarto Dorado — completely overwhelms one: but let’s say he regains his senses and establishes that most likely he has approached the inner wonders of the Alhambra from the wrong direction, the courtyard of the Cuarto Dorado itself tells him this, as if it was saying, indicating in every one of its single elements, that here is the courtyard of the Cuarto Dorado, and the path does not lead here, and from here it does not lead any further, the courtyard of the Cuarto Dorado offers only itself, and again just completely by accident he “deduces” from the building’s construction that possibilities of coming into here and going out from there also exist, on the one hand inward, toward the Cuarto Dorado, on the other, away from here, finally from the Mexuar there are the two same directions and potentialities, but by then one is so stunned by the beauty, by this beauty that is so, but so unbelievably beautiful, that he thinks he is struck by vertigo, and consequently he just goes here or there, because he feels that the walls and the columns and the floors and the ceilings, the ornamentation carved with breathtaking refinement, have dazed him, the unendurable, immeasurable infinities of the tiles, the surfaces of the walls, the Moorish arches and the stalactite vaults, are collapsing onto him; that is why he proceeds in utter confusion, because only much later does he realize that no, his vertigo and his daze are not the reason why he does not find the right way in the interior of the Alhambra, and it is not because of that he continually feels that he is not stepping into one or the other room or courtyard from the desired direction, consequently, he realizes, his cloudlike enchantment is not the explanation, but that in the Alhambra there is no correct path, moreover, after a while he suddenly realizes that in the Alhambra there are no paths at all, the rooms and the courtyards were not formed in such a way as to link to each other, to flow into each other, to be contiguous at all with each other, namely that after some time, with a little good fortune and much spiritual exertion, one also comprehends that here every single room and every single courtyard exists for its own sake, the rooms and the courtyards have nothing to do with each other, which does not mean that they turn away from each other, or that they close themselves off from each other, that is not the case at all, every courtyard and room just represents itself, within its own self, and at the same time within its own self, represents the whole, the entirety of the Alhambra, and this Alhambra exists simultaneously in parts and simultaneously as one single whole, and every one of its parts is identical to the whole as well, just as the reverse is also true, namely the entire Alhambra represents, in every moment, the incommutable universe of every one of its parts, this runs through a person’s mind with crazed speed even in the resplendent light here, yet he has hardly even entered the Alhambra, he is still only in the Cuarto Dorado, he has hardly seen anything and yet he has already seen everything, just perhaps it has not entered his awareness, he however only really now is starting with the Mexuar, then on from there, as if turning back from a dead end in a labyrinth, then the alarming visit to the Sala de la Barca with its maddening wooden ceiling — a visit to the Alhambra — where every visit is alarming, as the Alhambra offers everyone the understanding that it will never be understood, it offers the incomprehensible in the Sala de la Barca, and it offers the same in the long mirror of water of the Patio de los Arrayanes, in the marble-lace intangibility descending ethereally onto the slender columns in the Baths or finally, arriving at the fountain in the Courtyard of the Lions, the Patio de los Leones, one already suspects that he is not a visitor here but a sacrifice, a sacrifice to the Alhambra, but at the same time he is honored by the radiance of the Alhambra as well, a sacrifice because everything is forcing him to take part in a dream that he himself is not dreaming, and to be awake in another’s dream is the most horrifying burden — but at the same time he is a favored being, as he can see something, for the sight of which there is only a distant mandate, or there isn’t one at all, this cannot be known, he can see, in any event, the moment of creation of the world, of course all the while understanding nothing of it, how could he even understand anything of it, for if we know nothing about the story of the Alhambra, it does seem indisputable that its creators, let’s call them Yusuf I and Mohammed V, didn’t even know, it was only through their genial stonemasons that they experienced that knowledge, formed by the Greek, the Jewish, the Hindu, the Persian, the Chinese, the Christian, the Syrian, and Egyptian cultures, in enormous unity permeating the emirates and the caliphates, and creating the highly refined civilization of the Arabs; and it may be, as was already mentioned, that it was the two of them although it is also possible — and this was not mentioned earlier — that the construction of the Alhambra originates solely with Yusuf I, in any case it doesn’t matter, what is certain is that if the creator of the Alhambra was solitary, he had something to rely upon, if however both of them took part equally, then they were also not alone many times over, because until that thought, the thought of the Alhambra, could reach Granada, it had to make its way through an enormous cultural space, spanning continents, countries, and epochs, where Mohammed Bin Musa al-Khwarizmi and Yaqub Ibn Ishaq al-Kindi and Abu Ali al-Hussain ibn Abdullah ibn Sina and Omar al-Khayyam and Abul Waleed Mohammed Ibn Rushd lived and created; Bayt al-Hikmah, the renowned academy of Baghdad under the reign of the flourishing caliphate of Abdallah al-Ma’mun Ibn Harun-ar-Rashid was needed; the nearby caliphate of Córdoba was needed as well, and the spirit of Al-Hakam II, that philosophical spirit, which transmitted to the contemplators of the imagined Alhambra, across inspirations that were so Greek, and yet not Greek, Jewish and yet not Jewish, Sufi and yet not Sufi, the splendid captivating argumentations and world-explanations of Abu Ishaq Ibrahim ibn Yahya Al-Zarqali, Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Abd al-Malik ibn Mohammed ibn Tufail al-Qaisi al-Andalusi, Abu Mohammed Ali ibn Ahmad ibn Sa’id ibn Hazn, and Abu Bekr Muhammed ibn Yahya ibn Badshra, those learned men so sensitive to the mystical and universal veins of thought, although in the first place it is necessary to mention the exceptionally great figure of Arab culture, Abu Zayd’ Abdu ar-Rahman bin Mohammed bin Khaldun, that is Ibn Khaldun should be mentioned, and named yet again, and even then it would still be impossible to make palpable how great his significance was in the genesis of the Alhambra, even if we pronounce his name again and yet again, namely that originally he was born in Tunisia, but, in an important period in his life, this genius who had returned as one of the followers of Mohammed V became, in al-Andalus, that is, in its center, Granada, the advisor to the sultan, and it is very likely, but not demonstrable, that he had a fateful influence upon Mohammed V, who perhaps continued to build, or was starting to build, the Alhambra on the basis of these inspirations; if it were not the case that it was Yusuf I alone, and not the two of them together, and if just Mohammed V himself were alone the creator of the Alhambra, then Ibn Khaldun as the lion of the Arab spirit truly sufficed, or could have sufficed to persuade the sultan to build such a universal masterpiece, such a monument to the contemplation of universal mysticism, as is the Alhambra, and not just to persuade him, but also to grant the most essential information and spiritual assistance necessary for the creation of such a structure, so that, well, it cannot be excluded — hypothetically, but not demonstrably, because nothing here indicates that the role of Ibn Khaldun in the creation of the Alhambra was much more than we think it was today, but by then one has already gone beyond the Sala de las Dos Hermanas, the Mirador de la Daraxa, and the Sala de los Abencerrajes and their wordless enchantment, and his attention begins to be concentrated on one single aspect of the Alhambra, that is to say he begins to exami
ne the surfaces of the walls, the arches, the window-frames, the moldings, the columns and their capitals, the pavements, the wells and the cupolas, the surfaces: accordingly, the profound depth of the Alhambra, which starting from below, from the level of the flooring up to chest height, is written onto tiles of varying color, and from that point upward onto the plaster-work, or respectively the stucco, because yes, the entire Alhambra has been written into here, completely, in a faultless alphabet telling a faultless narrative; here, as if with inhuman detail and nearly terrifying solicitude, as if in one thousand, ten thousand, one hundred thousand forms something was being written, continuously, until the end, on the material of these tiles and stuccos; one does not think of the actual verses inscribed onto the Islamic buildings, which have aroused much attention on the part of researchers — whether they are quotations from the Quran in various rooms of the Alhambra, or the mediocre hymns originating from the work of a certain Ibn Zamraq, or other poetic excerpts of similar value taken from the work of an early poet known as Ibn al-Yayyab — no, it is not at all a question of these specific writings but of a language, arranged out of the so-called girih motif based upon the pentagon, but in any event, an inaccessible language rendered from a geometry sacredly conceived; which at first one experiences as pure decoration and considers as a form of ornamentation assembled from tiles or engraved or pressed into the stucco, and at the beginning it really is possible to be satisfied with the impression that this is decoration and ornament, because the dizzying symmetries, the suggestive colors — not only the plentiful but simply immeasurable glittering form-ideas — do not leave behind themselves any questions or uncertainty; yet few are those who have entered, proceeded through all of the rooms, towers, and courtyards of the Alhambra in whom the realization arose that these decorations aren’t even decorations but the infinities of a language; few, but there are some, and they all wander between the rooms, the towers, and the courtyards, and they have absolutely no idea of where they are and why they are exactly there and not somewhere else, there are those for whom, after a while, their attention begins to turn to these enchanting surfaces, they stand still ever more frequently to examine the patterns, ever more frequently are they utterly absorbed by this or that crazed symmetry on the wall, it happens to them ever more frequently that underneath one cupola or another, for instance in the Torre de las Infantas, they simply become incapable of movement, there is a spasm in their necks, as their heads are fully tilted back to look, they look into the heights and they try to rationally comprehend how all of this is somehow possible, well, just who could those people have been — the thought flashes through those numbed heads — who were capable of such wondrous efforts, maybe angels? but there isn’t even a Heaven, let alone angels! these heads are thinking, or maybe two of them are thinking this, in any event one is, and really we don’t know about angels, yet we do know about stonemasons, so that it is nearly certain — inasmuch as one can speak of such coarse certainty in this divine or infernal complex — that there were stonemasons, and it’s interesting — it flashes through the benumbed head atop the neck that is already demanding a massage, through the head of at least that one person, as he looks again and again into the heights of the cupola — how peculiar that we have no, but in the entire God-given world, absolutely no knowledge as to who they could have been, these stonemasons, these geniuses of carving, these genius tile-setters, these pattern-makers and arch-constructors and well-builders and water-engineers, how many hundreds of them could have been here, and from where? from Granada? from Fez? from Al-Karaouine? from the Heavens? — which don’t exist?! — it is truly astonishing what unbelievable skill, experience, knowledge, and technical ability were alloyed here across the decades, and yet something else too, one thinks, as he returns to the close examination of the surfaces of the walls, these innumerable figures, these innumerable formations, these innumerable outlines . . . as if there weren’t even so many, as if there were merely a few figures, a few formations, and a few sinuous outlines on the walls’ surfaces, just repeated, repeated a hundred and a thousand times, but how? here the question needs to be posed, in wonderment, but it is not possible to answer, that is to say as these figures, formations and lines repeat, occurring and recurring, it is so terribly complicated, like the entire Alhambra, they do nonetheless repeat, the person leans closer to this or that pattern in the wall, it really is so complicated, he steps back a bit to look at it from the requisite distance; but, now, is it simple or complicated, he asks himself, well, it is just that, exactly that which is difficult to decide, although it isn’t even difficult, but actually it’s impossible to decide, namely the question has occupied every serious geometrician, in particular from the beginning of the eighties of the last century, when in 1982, in an article in the journal Science entitled “Decagonal and Quasi-Crystalline Tilings in Medieval Islamic Architecture,” written by a certain Peter J. Lu and his colleague Paul J. Steinhardt, the two researchers discovered that five hundred years ago Islamic architecture, inspired by the Arab geometricians, was already familiar (how could they not have been?) with that peculiar — because forbidden — instance in symmetry that the rest of humanity, apart from the medieval Arabs, discovered only in the twentieth century, sometime in the seventies, through the findings of the researcher Penrose, the essence of which is that there is a certain geometrical and thus mathematical pattern in five-fold rotational symmetry, which, however, in crystallography, is not possible; we can transform each point of a pattern, that is we can shift, reverse, reflect it countless times, as with a crystal, but not the pattern as a whole; to explain it differently, there exists in the mathematical crystal such a divergent, just a minutely divergent case, where, as opposed to a real crystal, it is not possible to transform any point at all into any other point, so as for attaining the given pattern, we do not attain it, we do not call such a figure a crystal, but, since the discovery by Roger Penrose, a quasi-crystal, well, these forbidden symmetries appear in Arab architecture, said this Lu from Harvard and this Steinhardt from Princeton, then others also confirmed that in this Islamic architectural art, the basic figure is what is known as the Persian girih, which is comprised altogether of five different geometric forms: a regular decagon where every angle is 144 degrees; a regular pentagon, where every angle is 108 degrees; an irregular hexagon with angles of either 72 or 144 degrees; then a rhombus where the angles are 72 and 108 degrees; and finally an irregular hexagon where the angles are 72 and 216 degrees; well, and with these five forms any sort of surface plane can be put together, that is it can be assembled faultlessly, without any sort of gap, this would accordingly be the girih, and it is this geometry as well as the mathematical knowledge that pertains to it that we discover, if we lean in closer — in imagination or reality — to the surfaces of the walls and arches and pavements and ceilings and columns and parapets of the Alhambra, and we see these peculiarly behaving formations pressed into the fresh plaster-work or engraved into solidified material, carved into the marble columns, arched vaulting, cupolas, laid out or drawn onto the floors, the ceilings, and the tile walls — to put it more precisely, as this is the case here — growing dizzy inside the labyrinth of the Alhambra; much more significantly, we discover these peculiar symmetries, we recognize them and immediately we are lost in them, because this quasi-symmetrical space is on every ornamented surface of the Alhambra, here every, but every single square millimeter is ornamented, it fixes our gaze in the face of the infinite; our gaze is not used to this coercion into the infinite, not used to looking into this infinity; and it is not just that this gaze looks into the infinite but it looks into two infinities simultaneously: not just a monumental, expansive infinite perceived by this gaze, as, for example, in the case of the already mentioned Torre de las Infantas, but also, there are its completely tiny elements, a miniature infinity as well, if, for example, one turns back toward the Sala de los Banos and in the proximity of one of the stairs leading this way next to a gallery, one tries to find u
nderneath the left-hand capital, the bordering-elements of one of the patterns, where one narrow, parallel motif follows the path of a line leading upward until it loses itself entirely; again he just grows dizzy and doesn’t understand how these lines, constructed from star-shaped points, can lead into infinity, the entire space allotted to them is so tiny, and it is this that leads to the thought that in the Alhambra, a truth never before manifested reveals itself, that is to say that something infinite can exist in a finite, demarcated space; well but this, how can this be? because it is as if here all these little infinities are independent of all the others and at the same time are connected, just the individual rooms were at the beginning, as was his first impression, this can be determined; but then it is better, if he stops and seeks out a spot where, given the circumstances, he can gain a moment of relative rest, his legs, his back, his neck are hurting, his head is buzzing, his eyelids, especially the right one, are twitching — really this is the moment for a bit of transitory peace, otherwise the time originally apportioned with the scandalously expensive ticket to one or another visitor for the viewing of the Alhambra has most likely run out, it is better if he lingers a little in the Alhambra in a place suitable for this; all the same it is not possible to sit; to touch any space here that could be used for such a purpose is clearly an insolent desecration, but stopping for a little bit and closing one’s eyes, and trying to breathe with regularity, inasmuch as this is possible, to be tranquil, already even just the intention is healing, such a behemoth weighs upon one by now, and this behemoth is the Alhambra; at least inside him there is a need for a little silence, an inner slackening, so that the thoughts and the suppositions and reflexes and conclusions and the recognitions and images — the images! — would not vibrate so dreadfully beneath his trembling eyelids, and after a while it is already clear that this intention really was beneficial, but not enough; it is necessary to withdraw, gradually, from here, a few steps yet to those rooms that draw one back with particular strength, back one more time to the Mirados de la Daraxa, and with that, it is enough; yet one feels that a bad decision brought him here, for he will remain and not gradually withdraw: he looks at the rooms’ stalactites swimming in gold, preparing to break off, but never breaking off, he grows blinded from the radiance of the vaulted fenestration as the light streams from without, he allows once again for this unearthly ornament of the patterns of the walls and the ceiling to descend upon him, and the thought is already there, too, in his head that ah, the essence of Islamic pattern is not to be found in what it seems at the beginning, not in the genial application of geometry, but rather in how it is used as an instrument: this glittering, delicately-lived pattern points to the unity of the nature of various experiences, the unity holding all as one in a net, because the geometrical composition used by that Arab spirit, across the Greek and Hindu and Chinese and Persian cultures, actualizes a concept, namely that in place of the evil chaos of a world falling apart, let us select a higher one in which everything holds together, a gigantic unity, it is that we may select, and the Alhambra represents this unity equally in its tiniest as well as its most monumental elements, yet the Alhambra does not make this comprehensible, even just this once, it does not demand comprehension but rather continuously demands that it be comprehended, but then one is already standing sadly in the magnificence of the Mirador de la Daraxa, and really will begin, slowly, to leave; he stands in not-knowing, a garden yet awaits him, the celestial Generalife, which is not far from here, the hill known as el Sol will admit him, enchanting the visitor with its heavenly panoramas — he stands in not-knowing, and despite all of this dazzledness there is something of disillusionment within him, it is as if a mild, unwished-for gentle breeze of recognition strikes him as he departs, it is as if he already suspects that the Alhambra does not offer the knowledge that we know nothing of the Alhambra, that it itself knows nothing of this not-knowing, because not-knowing does not even exist. Because not to know something is a complicated process, the story of which takes place beneath the shadow of the truth. For there is truth. There is the Alhambra. That is the truth.
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