Driven by the fear of his own eclipse, Gilgamesh pushes on, eager when Enkidu — now nothing more than the embodiment of the king’s worst instincts, his demon—reassures him. In his youth, Gilgamesh had seen dead bodies floating in the swollen rivers. He is aware that his glory is nothing more than a “breath of wind.” And he knows that if he destroys Humbaba, even if he dies in the attempt, his name will persist. This is what fatally drives Gilgamesh: the idea of an interminable name. And there is something else, a kind of helpless rage and fearfulness. Gilgamesh can do nothing to evade the underworld. Only the gods have access to heaven. Here, as Enkidu dreams it, is the underworld of Mesopotamia: submerged in darkness, the dead sit together like blind and flightless ravens, with only their wings to hide their nakedness. The dead sit in silence in the dust and the shadows and they eat clay. This is how Gilgamesh and Enkidu will spend eternity: lamenting in obscurity, incapable of dreaming.
Perhaps this is the Real’s greatest paradox: it must be dreamed in order to be lived. After all, to dream the Other is to dispel the shadows of distrust and prepare for the initial encounter. Before he falls into the world, the child is dreamed. As is the lover, embraced in a reverie that is the gift of clairvoyance. Or the city one imagines, before walking its streets — Paris, Oaxaca, San Cristobal, Baghdad. When it is dreamed, the real flourishes like a garden. But one must, as Italo Calvino says, dare dream very high dreams.
When he was a child of three, Jorge Luis Borges saw a tiger at the zoo; a delightful little drawing of the tiger, Borges’s Aleph, his Zahir, survives. Borges’s biographer suggests that the tiger seized his imagination because, like Borges’s own father, it was beautiful, impossible to approach, powerful, and enigmatic; dangerous, perhaps. This tiger became the primary potency that animated that necessary writer’s imagination. Which was the tiger that enabled Borges to become Borges? Was it the Javanese, the Balinese, the Caspian? Three tigers that are now extinct. Three tigers that have been obscured forever.
In the jail at Nighur, the governor showed him a cell whose floor and vaulted ceiling were covered by a drawing (in barbaric colors that time, before obliterating, had refined) of an infinite tiger. It was a tiger composed of many tigers, in the most dizzying of ways; it was crisscrossed with tigers, striped tigers, and contained seas and himalayas and armies of what resembled other tigers.9
[The] animals race by. .10
— Once upon a time there was a parrot whose entire body trembled with passion when it sang.
Friends, it will be lonely.
— There was once an owl who called out to its companions telling of rain, and who cherished accordion music.
There are lonely times ahead.
— Once a macaw the color of lapis lazuli.
Our children will be wistful for those things that tell them who they are. .
— A giant sea tortoise whose flesh, according to Pliny, was an excellent remedy for the bites of salamanders.
The marvelous lineage of the living.
— A fish who cautiously carried her young in her mouth.
Wistful, they will want to see the vanished lions.
— Like the lion that continues to prowl the alchemical manuscripts, sometimes with the sun held in his teeth.
And if our limits are determined by the opacity of others, the obscurity of our own intentions and desires, the hidden neurosis that saps our energy and capacity for lucency. .
— Once birds flew in such numbers their bodies obscured the sun. They made a sound “like a hard gale at sea passing through the riggings of a close-reefed vessel” (Audubon). They made a sound like the rattling of many thousands of small bells in the fists of as many children.
— Once there was a country rich in moles; and a large bird whose skin was used for lining boots.
Flocks of butterflies,
Waves breaking upon waves.11
In this sea of enigmas.12
— Once upon a time there was a bird — I think I said this — whose wings made a sound like a hard gale at sea. .
O merveille, un jardin parmi les flammes!13
Candles of Ink
The French occupation of Algeria began in the early nineteenth century. It was characterized by a brutal disregard for the Algerian people, Berber and Arab alike, whose languages, cultures, and landscapes were violently disarticulated. Torture shaped Algeria’s war for independence, as did genocide and the massive deportation of people who died by the tens of thousands in concentration camps.
I lived in Algeria from 1964–1966, and have brooded ever since over the horror of what happened there — horror that continues to shape the present for us all. In the winter of 1964–1965, my then-husband and I hitchhiked from Constantine — in the north — to the southern oases of Biskra, Touggourt, and Ouargla, where we were picked up by a truck driver who was carrying baryte — a kind of barium used in the making of cement — to an American oil rig deep in the desert, at an unnamed place between Hassi ben Harrane and Temassmin. In the middle of the night, he left the road to navigate by the stars. I recall that the lights from the rig became visible hours before we reached it, and that no oil had been found. They were digging in six hundred meters of salt.
Although the violence had ceased about seventeen months earlier, the war had left traces everywhere. They were visible in the scarred mountains that had been mined, the many villages burned to the ground, the immense napalmed areas along the Tunisian border, and on the face of the truck driver, who had been tortured for weeks with live electric wire. The burns had left a kind of indigo script at the corners of his nostrils, his mouth and eyes, and in the delicate hollows beneath his ears. His dignity, he claimed, was recovered at the moment of his country’s independence; the term he used was self-determination. He told us that throughout his ordeal, he had refused to speak. That now it pleased him to eat and to sleep “in his own time.” During that long night, he did not eat nor drink.
The novel I am currently writing is an attempt to enter into his country’s tragic story, and to reconstruct my memories of that extraordinary time and place. Because, if I shall always be a trandji — and this is a marvelous Arabization of the French word étranger, or “foreigner”—a forty years’ haunting demands, at the very least, a leap of faith and mind.
The early Arab scholars named the first language lughat sûrryâniyya: the language of the sun’s illumination. The hot bones and breath of this language of light persist and are revealed in a book written by the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Ibn ‘Arabî, called The Book of Mîm, Wâw, and Nûn. Vowels that like snakes bite their own tails, the Mîm, Wâw, and Nûn are the tangible expressions (not to be confused with artifacts) of the original event. They are the sparks that ignite the “sacred community of letters” and curiously, they are also the “sublime dwelling” that contains the promise of the entire alphabet. Written in candles of ink, sacred texts are secreted in the bodies of calligraphic lions and mazes and mazed trees of life. I should add that the Koran calls things that are concealed katta: rendered calligraphically And that in Arabic, the verbs “to write” and “to release” are one and the same.
To animate the dry bones of overuse and to illuminate the riddles of divine intention, the sacred words are sparked: these allow them to leap like flames and, like crystals, to scatter light. And they demand a pause, an intake of breath. A measured breathing is essential to the writing of calligraphy, which is also a form of rigorous choreography. Breath punctuates and enlivens a text whose initial impulse, after all, was breath. The pauses are windows also, by means of which we are invited to dream, to, in the words of Gaston Bachelard, be more “vividly alive.” He is evoking poetic leaps of mind, a process essential to the reception of new ideas and novel connections, what the Kabalists call skipping and jumping. The word for vowel sounds in Arabic is harakât, which also means “movement.”