Black Light

by Galway Kinnell

  For Brita Jenssen Ziesler

  Copyright © Galway Kinnell 1966, 1980

  Afterword copyright © Robert Hass 2015

  Originally published by Houghton-Mifflin Co.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Robert Hass gratefully thanks Bobbie Bristol for making available copies of Galway Kinnell’s Iran journalism and drafts.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kinnell, Galway, 1927-2014.

  Black light: a novel / Galway Kinnnell; afterword by Robert Hass. — Revised paperback edition.

  pages; cm

  1.Self-realization—Fiction. 2.Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction.I. Title.

  PS3521.I582B5 2015

  813’.54—dc23

  2015023039

  Cover design by Kelly Winton

  Interior design by Domini Dragoone

  Author photo courtesy of Bobbie Bristol

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-659-9

  Observe the so-called ‘half-moon’. The half of it that faces the day is dressed in borrowed light. The half of it that faces the night is dressed in its own light. The same with a simple lamp. Down low, the flame is white. Halfway up, it already begins changing itself into black smoke.

  —Sohrawardi

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  A Note from Galway Kinnell, 1980

  Afterword

  chapter one

  Jamshid kept sliding forward as he worked, so that the patch of sunlight would remain just ahead of him, lighting up the motion of his hands. He was restoring the head of a bird of paradise, where a lump of charcoal had burnt its way through. As he always did when it was a question of a gap through which darkness was visible, he was working with nervous speed. He valued for more than its light this trapezoid of sunlight that glided beside him over the flowers and tendrils of his own carpet on the floor; it itself was like a carpet, but one that came from heaven.

  He finished weaving in the bird’s head, and he breathed more easily. Tomorrow morning he would seal closed the neck and breast, and then this gap too, like so many others, would be healed for good. The sun patch, touching the base of the wall, now started to diverge upward. Soon it would creep over the border of the geometrical and turn into chaos. This was the sign it was time to close shop.

  Getting to his feet Jamshid saw the bird’s head blur as it sank away from him. Closely as he had made it conform to the other heads on the carpet, it suddenly seemed peculiarly unreal, as if he had woven only the absence of a head. He felt a strange dread. In the last few weeks there had been other moments when a thing, when he glanced at it, would blur and become a dark tear in reality. But now the tear closed again as quickly as it had opened.

  He hung the pomegranate-rind red and walnut-husk brown wools back in their places on a wall entirely covered in colored wools. These clumps of wool all had the same formless bulk and the same spongy substance. Their colors alone held them apart, as if the sun patch on the floor, diffracting upward, had cast a spectrum of more intense reality on this dead matter. Jamshid took the carpet he was repairing over to the west wall, where the sun patch would light it up in the morning. He swept up the trimmed-off bits of wool. He picked up the trimming shears and placed them on the table. He put on his trousers and jacket over his pajamas and stepped into his cotton-soled geevays. He drew the blind: smeared sunlight vanished and the clumps of wool went drab. It was Jamshid’s own, punctual sunset.

  His practice at this time of day was to go to the mosque and try to nap until the general sunset took place. His shop was at the north end of the bazaar and the nearest mosque was the Masjideh Jomeh. But Jamshid did not like this mosque, for it was in bad repair, and he hated seeing, where tiles and stalactites had fallen out, the wrinkled mud walls and convoluted plaster. He would go, instead, to the Masjideh Shah in the Shrine of the Immam Reza, even though to get there he had to pass through the entire bazaar, whose gloom, noise, filth, and commerce he hated.

  Today, he felt particularly upset, and he made himself think of the harmonious mass of minarets and domes toward which he was going, azure and lapis lazuli, decorated all around with hieratic calligraphy and consummated by the golden dome that shed an essential light over its precincts. As he pushed through the suffocating maze, already dark, clogged with burdened men crying “Out of the way!” with donkeys, with bicycles jingling their little gasping doorbells, the passage seemed to Jamshid an ordeal to which he submitted only for the most ardent love of God.

  He broke from the crowd and came out into the courtyard of the mosque. He stood reaccustoming himself to his element. In this rectangular space he felt something of the ordered calm on which he had just turned the key back at his shop. Many persons were gathered here, it was true, but the place had a way of diminishing them and of throwing their voices upward.

  At the pool Jamshid washed his right hand, his left hand, his right foot, his left foot, his face and his teeth. He passed a dripping hand through his hair, from the brow to the back of the neck. As he stood up, he saw in the ripples an image of himself, and even though he shut his eyes he could not keep from seeing himself torn to pieces.

  He lay down, but he found he was unable to sleep. Long ago, during the little interval between his wedding and his wife’s death, he would lie awake under the stars a long time. Not until he had come to see that the stars were strung out in actual patterns had he become able to sleep. Recently, a new insomnia had returned. Now, he tried to empty his mind, but it was like looking into an empty sky and gradually seeing it was crawling with vultures. With relief he welcomed mundane worries back into his consciousness. If he was not going to sleep, he would at least think about something interesting in the attempt. Accordingly, he began fretting about his daughter. But soon he became aware of two persons talking to each other only a few feet away.

  “Only for one week,” the man was saying in a Kurdish accent.

  “Then I need a settlement of one hundred tomans. Not a rial less.” The woman spoke in the Shirazi accent, which is so lyrical when spoken by young women. Jamshid understood at once the nature of the transaction. He himself had once been mistaken for a pilgrim. A chaddor-clad woman had approached him in the courtyard and proposed to temporary-marry him. Though he tried not to notice them, at pilgrimage time one could see little discussions of
this nature taking place in the vicinity of the Shrine. The pilgrims from distant cities and from Afghanistan and the Arab countries liked getting married for the few weeks of their sojourn, it helped to ease the spiritual rigors of the pilgrimage. The man laughed.

  “In my country we say ‘year’ not ‘week’ when we mean all four seasons. One hundred tomans is fair settlement for a marriage lasting spring, summer, fall, and winter. But for a marriage lasting seven days, twenty tomans is all you will get! Not a rial more! And it’s only your outrageous charm that makes me offer so much . . .” Jamshid lay still. As the two went on bargaining, a powerful rage came over him.

  “And which mullah asks the least to perform the ceremony?” the Kurd asked.

  “Torbati,” the woman answered. “Everybody goes to Torbati, he’s the most experienced, the quickest . . .”

  Jamshid sat up. “Torbati!” he said aloud. It was like spitting. The man and the woman, startled, moved off. “Am I to trust the marriage of my only daughter to a mullah who is everybody’s procurer?” The moazzin in the minaret lifted his nasal call to prayer. The last sparkle of sunlight fell from the golden dome. At any moment Mullah Torbati would be making his appearance to lead the prayer. Jamshid walked to where he had left his geevays and stepped into them.

  “Furthermore, why should I let myself be led in prayer by the scoundrel?”

  chapter two

  Jamshid was one of the most pious men in the region, and he knew it. Yet, judging by the disrespectful way people treated him, one might suppose he was an infidel. He did feel a little ashamed that he had never made a pilgrimage to Mecca or for that matter to the Shrine of Fatima at Qum. But travel was expensive, and poverty was the price he paid for being honest. Other men cheated and grew rich, and then went on pilgrimages that consisted of sightseeing, good meals, and temporary marriages. When these travelers came home, they were called ‘Haji’, wore the green sash around their swollen bellies, and had only contempt for skinny and honest men like himself. Human sin—particularly among religious men—filled Jamshid with revulsion. Sometimes at prayer the feeling of revulsion grew so strong he could not concentrate on God at all. It was as if his virtue, his very devotion to God, were succeeding where vice had failed, in making an atheist out of him.

  A man and woman were walking ahead of him. He thought he recognized them as the two persons he had overheard haggling in the mosque. The woman was cloaked in a chaddor and the man was wearing a darvish skullcap. Jamshid walked faster. Was their sudden appearance some sort of sign? Had God picked him, Jamshid, to follow and be their witness? As he came up behind them he could feel his heart beating with excitement. But the man turned his head and Jamshid saw he was not the Kurd at all, but only a local darvish who repaired shoes in the bazaar.

  “Salaam alaikum, Jamshid,” the darvish said. “Not at your devotions tonight?” Jamshid noted the sarcasm in the man’s tone.

  “Salaam alaikum,” he answered. “Will you kindly mind your own affairs?” He had intended to take the long way home and arrive at the usual hour, so that his daughter Leyla would not know he had skipped the sundown prayer. It could only do harm to a young girl to see her father give up ancient practices, no matter how justifiably. But to escape this busybody Jamshid had to turn down the first street he saw, which was a street that led directly home.

  He heard a droshky behind him. It was moving only a little faster than he was, and it took a long time for it to overtake him. As it did, he turned his head. An old man sat in the high seat beating the old horse. A horse which apparently had discovered that to walk fast or to walk slow did not much affect the beating it got. The droshky seemed to be empty. At last it pulled ahead, shakily bearing away its little scene of harshness and indifference. It stirred some compassion within Jamshid—a compassion, he understood, for himself.

  By the time he reached his house he was beginning to regret that he had not said his prayers. When you snap a single thread, he reflected, you threaten the whole fabric. He wondered if he shouldn’t pray in his own garden. Or perhaps right here in the street. Or perhaps not at all, for a prayer said alone, he recalled, is twenty-seven degrees inferior to a prayer said in congregation. As he hesitated, the gate swung open. There stood Leyla and, close beside her, Akhbar the mason who had come that morning to repair the oven.

  “Salaam alaikum,” the mason said.

  “Salaam alaikum, papa,” Leyla said.

  “Your oven is finished,” said the mason. “I am just leaving.”

  “I can see,” Jamshid answered. He entered the garden and walked over to the little brick oven that stood in one corner. Akhbar followed.

  “It is better than when it was new,” he said.

  “You didn’t waste your cement, I’ll say that,” said Jamshid, though in the dusk he could hardly see anything at all.

  “Didn’t waste my cement?” Akhbar replied. “What do you mean? I wasted a full kilo. Look, I put some around in back where the bricks were coming loose. Catch any other mason putting cement back there where nobody is ever likely to look. I even borrowed an extra handful from my father, which I wasn’t planning to charge you for unless he notices it’s gone.”

  “If you have wasted, as you say, a full kilo of cement, you have been eating it. How is it, by the way, that it took you a whole day to repair a tiny oven? I should be cursed by my ancestors for hiring the slowest mason in Meshed.” Jamshid was talking almost automatically. He stopped short, as he remembered the haggling in the mosque.

  “I have worked from morning to just now on this difficult oven,” Akhbar was saying. “You see how queerly the thing is built, not a first-rate oven at all. But I have made it as good as new, if not considerably better . . .” Jamshid had stopped listening.

  “Come to my shop tomorrow, we will settle matters then.”

  When Akhbar had left, Jamshid knelt by the pool. Though the water in it was cleaner, certainly, than that of the mosque pool, it felt unpleasant to wash for prayer in it. For that purpose one needs mosque water. Then, spreading his carpet in the direction of Mecca, he offered his evening prayers.

  Dinner passed in silence. When Leyla was not serving him, she was standing off to one side. It seemed to Jamshid the rice was a bit too hard tonight and the curd-water just slightly too thin. He would tell her about it in the morning, when they did their accounts. After dinner had been cleared, Leyla brought him his waterpipe, on which she had already set the burning coals. He liked sitting on his carpet in the garden, drawing up the drenched smoke. It was nice, too, to hear the regular bubbling of the pipe, and to see the high, angular walls of the garden around the starry sky.

  Jamshid shivered a little. The night air was cool. He felt like talking to his daughter. She would be eating in the kitchen. Should he mention the rice now, while she could see what he meant? He knew he had to prepare her to be a wife, and he congratulated himself that he was succeeding. She could cook well. She was quiet and obedient. She was in good health. She was pretty. With those virtues it was strange that, although she was sixteen, she had received not only no offers from suitors, but no inquiries either. Jamshid had brought up the matter with Mullah Torbati, who knew about such matters. He had heard of several advantageous marriages this mullah had arranged for girls with far fewer claims than Leyla. His discovery tonight that Torbati also specialized in temporary marriages had come as a shock to Jamshid. He would drop the mullah and find a husband for his daughter himself. Even if he had to go so far as to marry her to the son of Fereydoon the beet seller! He puffed angrily at his pipe. Leyla looked from the door.

  “Papa, you sound like a lion.”

  “Leyla,” Jamshid said, “did Akhbar really work hard all day, as he told me, or was he lolling around in the shade a good part of the time?” Leyla looked at him, he thought, a little oddly. Was there some trace of defiance, even contempt in her gaze? She dropped her eyes.

  “Yes, father.” Her voice was meek. “I did not watch him especially, but when unavoidably I
happened into the garden I could not help noticing that he was always hard at work.” She is a good girl, thought Jamshid, she loves and respects her father and does credit to the memory of her mother. It should not be hard to find her a suitable husband.

  “Good,” he said, and unrolled the bed clothes she had brought out for him. As he lay trying to sleep it struck him that Leyla had not inquired why he had said tonight’s prayer at home. It irked him that, as far as he could tell, she hadn’t even noticed. He looked up at the stars and cursed the neighbors, as he did every night, for growing that tree which, showing above the top of the wall, impinged on his rectangle of heaven.

  chapter three

  The next morning Jamshid knotted in the colors on the bird’s neck and breast. He felt upset. He had slept only fitfully the night before, and he had had nightmares of this bird. In one nightmare the bird had changed into a vulture and had begun devouring the corpse of Leyla. In another it had swooped down on him extending its red beak, which changed into the mullah’s henna-stained right hand, which then struck him. In another, its eyes contained hints of defiance and contempt, as they lowered in attitudes of perfect modesty.

  Now, lighted by the trapezium of sunlight, it was the same bird as yesterday, once again belonging to paradise. But still from time to time he paused and stared at it and felt a strange dread, as if he were observing a snowflake just fallen on his warm palm. He knotted the knots very tightly, so that the bird would never fly again.

  “Bird of Paradise . . .” he muttered, “Bird of Paradise . . .” He did not know why he said this. The bird did not hear.

  By late morning Jamshid had finished weaving in the bird’s neck and breast. He had knotted in all the colors and had clipped the wool ends smooth. His sense of discomfort had gone. The sun patch touched the center of the floor and was on the verge of becoming a perfect square. Jamshid dressed. At any minute the moazzin would begin calling the faithful to the noon prayer.