When he wearied of his contemporaries’ sarcasm, the fool enjoyed repeating, “Your minds are in your heads; mine is in my heart.” Then he would quit them as if fleeing to eternity.
What the fool could not bear was discussion of the mysterious voyage during which he lost his mind — or was liberated from that tyrannical demon, as he liked to put it. Whenever people chanced to mention that and inquisitively attempted to pry the secret from him, his eyes gazed off across the empty countryside. Sorrow pervaded his look, and his right eye became even more dominant. The most he would say was that the earth had answered his appeal, transporting the hill where he sat at twilight, to deposit him in the land of Longing. He never once, however, answered nosy questions about the land he referred to as “Longing.” When people showered him with inquiries, eager to hear more, he would slip away from the gathering and escape to the open countryside. The tribe’s elders said, “Fools are a community who will not betray their message. The only reason they lost their earthly minds was to recover their hearts in the spirit world.”
2 The Sage
Western marauders who launched a raid against his tribe’s lands one year found him tending his camels in the region adjacent to the Blue Mountains. They fastened a palm-fiber rope around his neck and took him away as a captive to sell in the markets of Tawat, where a noble from the Ahaggar tribes, who live in the western deserts, purchased him. His new master set off with him toward his tribal homelands. The two men spent the night in a grim ravine ringed by clay banks. Then the captive took from his pocket a flute he had himself cut from a reed thicket in an oasis swamp of his lost homeland and — once his master had withdrawn partway down the valley bottom — breathed through it his grief for this lost land. After midnight, however, the master returned and loomed above his captive like a ghostly jinni, swaying to the melodies of the flute. The man stopped playing, but his master urgently gestured for him to continue. He breathed into the flute’s opening his longing and articulated his despair through these yearning breaths. The master swayed, experiencing the intoxicated trance of mystics. In fact, he liberated himself from the dignified behavior of nobles and chanted an ancient lament to the melody that flowed from the flute. Longing flamed in his heart, and with each breath he exhaled this fire, as the reed responded with complaints and wails. The stillness grew even more profound and this melody made the desert’s solitude seem even more pronounced. The heavens abandoned their eternal serenity to lean down toward the valley bottom, and the stars glistened with an inquisitive, inebriated gleam. Once the captive put down his flute and silence supplanted its harmony, the master observed, “I never would have thought a man could sing with a palm cord around his neck.”
Panting from exhaustion, the captive replied, “The cord’s around my neck, master, not around my heart.” He fell silent but added, “We lose nothing, master, as long as we have not lost the self.”
The master asked in a manner that showed his astonishment, “Haven’t you lost your self?”
“Of course not. Perhaps I’ve lost control of my body; I’ve not lost my self.”
“Isn’t slavery the ultimate loss?”
“Slavery is the body’s ultimate loss of control, not the heart’s. We lose our selves, master, when our heart is enslaved and we are free. We gain our selves via the heart’s freedom while we are captive.”
“Are you a poet?”
“All of us are poets, master.”
“Have you suffered a great deal?”
“What is life save a succession of pains that eventually accustom us to enjoying pain’s bitterness?”
“Woe to anyone who does not acquire a taste for pain’s bitter flavor.”
“Master, your slave here present before you, has in his lifetime seen calamities that make the affliction of slavery appear insignificant.”
“But don’t people say death is easier to bear than slavery?”
“Death actually is easily borne, master. Death is easier to bear than anything else, even when slavery isn’t the alternative. So, what if we’re able to wager only the body and thereby assure life for the heart?”
“That’s a hard choice!”
“Living’s hard; dying is easy.”
When the master did not respond, he continued, “It’s difficult to live, because we learn through pain. It’s easy to die, because we are made miserable by what we learn.”
The master expressed his agreement in a pained moan like a mournful ballad. He did not leave to sleep until shortly before dawn.
The following evening he sat with his captive and asked him to discuss calamities. So he told his master he had seen a land quake so violently that it swallowed what stood on its surface, a homeland trade one set of inhabitants for another, a windstorm blow hard enough to carry off people and their livestock and bring in other residents, a son raise his hand to stab his father, and a daughter disguise herself each night to couple in bed with her father. He told his master about the effects of an epidemic when it sweeps across the desert, about calamities occasioned by drought, the terrors of hostile raids, and many other afflictions.
It was not hard for the man to discern in each misfortune he heard recounted a message from the spirit world. So he developed a taste for these evening conversations and persisted in sitting with his captive each night until they became boon companions. He told him confidentially one day, “Man should not fear a man who has suffered, because just as there is nothing to fear for a man who has suffered, there is nothing to fear from him.” That was before he put all his possessions at the captive’s disposition. In fact, it was before he made him master over his whole world, so that even the master was at the captive’s beck and call. He commented jokingly at the time they concluded this contract, “In our world, the owner is the slave and the slave the owner. So don’t imagine I freed you when I relinquished control over you. From now on, I’ll be a chain around your neck.” Thereafter he did not discuss anything having to do with his possessions, until he fell prey to an illness that quickly dispatched him. Then his household found in his possessions a piece of leather by which he left his captive half of his livestock along with a gift called freedom. So, emancipated, he returned to his homeland.
He regained his homeland in the northern desert but found no family members, no fellow tribesmen, and no pastures. His family had perished, the tribe had been dispersed, and the earth had been scorched by drought. So he headed south and left half of his herd of camels — untended — to forage for any grass that had survived the lengthy drought in the sandy areas near the oases. Then he settled in the oasis and sold the remainder of his herd in the markets. He built a hut there and waited, gleaning information about his camels from wayfarers and caravan leaders and inquiring about the desert’s condition. The drought’s curse, however, continued unabated. So he thought he would defang calamity by amusing himself. He forgot that man always errs when he decides to amuse himself, because amusement — as subsequently became evident — is actually nothing but an affront to the mind.
Having taken a fancy to a girl from a farming family, he asked himself, “Why don’t I do today what I will have to do some day? Why don’t I give in and hitch myself to a woman, the way my ancestors did before me?” He only realized later that he had committed another error the day he decided to prefer a course of action that had not been recommended by his sovereign intellect but that tied him instead to his ancestors.