This summer night was like all the others during that particular season. The sky was studded with stars; the moon rose and shone, and the silence was as deep and expansive as ever. Yet deep within, this night was of a kind rarely encountered, one in which passion ferments and birth-pangs intensify. This night and its attributes were to glow only by virtue of al-Hakim’s state, through the lexicon of his perception and the way insistent thoughts kept flooding over him. Such a night was only so remarkable and noteworthy because al-Hakim was determined to control his internal vertigo and hold forth about his symptoms and misgivings, all in the hope of being cured and saved and in quest of a text for recovery.
As al-Hakim started dictating his thoughts to the scribe, he was still wavering between twin delights, the violet oil and the wine that kept impinging upon his visions.
“The head,” he said, “the child and its tragedy; the head split apart and its history. Two charts for compiling the trial, one of scrutiny and embarking on the caravan of travail….
“Regarding the most miserable of heads, speech may often be useless and ineffectual.
“The most miserable of beads, the most outstanding, is the mournful one with a wailing-woman within; the feverish head that has broken oars and rudder, plows through the waves, and appears before God wearing hempcloth as it waits for trousers to dry in the sun, trousers that have cleft both waves and virgins and that one day were the focus of women both pregnant and bereft.…
“The trial of the head is in vanishing behind its own bulk, to the measure of its own shivering and gloomy mien.
“Its sign is the desert where there is neither ruler nor ruled, where it is to be seen alone plunging its torments into the sand and using negligence and delay to resist its own tumble.
“The head must inevitably disappear behind its own shadow, like an egg that abandons its own color and vanishes. Egg and head share color, the whiteness of repetition and beginning, the whiteness of concealment and discretion.”
For a moment al-Hakim said nothing, then he continued, “If I were a child, I would ask for a father who would teach me to shoot at women and mirrors, and how to ride and disappear; he would bequeath me both a desert within me as expansive as fate itself and a love for refreshment through silence, biers, absence.
“Were I a child, I would ask for a father with the rest of pre-lslamic culture in his bosom, a father who would teach me, through sense, knowledge, and poetics, how to burn down walls, though they be of silk, how to worship the sea and urinate in it….
“Were I a youngster, I would dream of a father who would say to me, ‘In these times love and knowledge have disintegrated, each one of them bearing its own ignorance or complaining about its she-camel, operating in its own unique fashion. And your lot is to wander in the desert wastes and turn your back on mankind, or else to devote yourself to a life of madness as you try to govern them.’”
At this point al-Hakim regained his normal consciousness, but stayed totally silent, almost as though he were in a swoon. When he started talking again, it was in short bursts. The exhausted young secretary found it utterly impossible to record them all and only managed to write down some snippets, such as:
“The desert, the desert!
“Tremulous hope and bitter words!
“I realize I’m making my way through a life where there is neither sweetness nor horizon.
“I know orphan exposure, whether on its own or with others. I know that it proceeds either alone or in mixed company, as it heads toward its pit or its own deviation before fragmenting.
“In the abode where there is neither movement nor strife, cogitation is good, planning effective. Then death arrives, fast-paced and on time, right on time….
“In vain do we grow old; we only learn about life when it is all over and we are close to the end.
“Death repeats itself, but without any originality! So what? I ask myself. The wombs of women bring forth humans, and the earth swallows them up. So what, I tell myself, if this process of bringing forth and swallowing up involves behavior that is prescient, pain that is reduced, and harm that inflicts less damage? But what matters is the blindness, the space that shudders, the felicitous opportunity in a crisis. Instead of national refreshment, open space, and a change of air, there was smoke, crowd, and constricted space.
“Before the earth swallows me up, I told myself, here I am relishing the ultimate happiness, progressing toward the highest degree of certainty, moving ever forward till my head is held high and my talents are fully applied.
“I waited for her body to arrive, confident that my bride would come to me:
“a radiant gift of destiny to crystallize me,
“breasts that sigh
“chemistry of felicity and beauty.
“But not long after she came to me as my bride the whole thing turned into a disaster; her body became a mistake, chaff for the wind.
‘“Patience, patience!’ I told myself. So I waited till the clouds scattered, the sky was clear once more, and life came. But instead, calamity fell on me from an unexpected direction. Dangerous notions arrived, and misfortunes too. Survival there was, but it was endowed with multiple opportunities for downfall. I was unable to control this slippery slope; without lamp or axe, I had to engage in a fierce struggle to keep my head from exploding and my very face from collapse.
“I awoke one day and told the women who used to share my bed, ‘By my life, it would be a wonderful idea to put you all in closed coffins and throw you into the Nile.’ With that, I left them and went out into the early dawn atmosphere, there to resume my interest in smelling the scent of roses and listening to the beat of birds’ wings.
“The biggest issue of alclass="underline" changing this world. The very love of change, that headlong rush to sever the ties that bind self, oppression, and want to each other; the very love of change, to abolish the contradiction between life and the things that overwhelm and destroy it. However, my dear devotees, why am I destined forever to drink wine and collect varieties of grass in order to foster this headlong spirit within me?
“My ruses and medicaments will all come to naught; my drugs will lose their efficacy one-after the other. I shall spend the rest of my life making countless attempts to understand what has happened, to comprehend those things that were not foreseen, to assess this sense of depression with an analytical eye, this suppressed feeling deep down that dogs human beings whether alone or in company, like a clap of thunder sometimes, and at others like a prolonged, plaintive refrain.
“Beyond what has already happened what else is there? What’s happened has indeed happened! What else is there besides depression? It comes in two types: a normal type that justifies itself and is deeply enmeshed in its own essence, the rusted tedium of passing days, the travail of preserving health and peace, and the assaults of others. Then there’s a second type, an exceptional kind that inhabits times of joy and clings to them like some hidden sense of fear that such times may soon disappear. Both types of depression are controlled by the sigh, something that can only be bested by the mastery of perpetual absence.