The debate became stormy; Sarah had mentioned the Great Name, the wolf had appeared in the midst of the flock, in the freezing desert: Edward Said. It was like invoking the Devil in a Carmelite convent; Bilger, horrified at the idea that he could be associated with any kind of Orientalism, immediately began an embarrassed auto-criticism, renouncing everything; François-Marie and Julie were more nuanced on the question, while still acknowledging that Said had asked a burning but pertinent question: the relationship between knowledge and power in the Orient — I had no opinion, and I still don’t, I think; Edward Said was an excellent pianist, he wrote about music and created with Daniel Barenboim the West-Östlicher Divan Orchestra, managed by a foundation based in Andalusia, where the beauty of sharing and diversity is stressed.
The voices began to be conquered by the wine, the cold, and fatigue; we had set up our makeshift beds on the rock of the parvis. Julie and François-Marie on one side, Sarah and I on the other — Bilger (probably cleverer than us) had preferred to take refuge with his bottle in the car, parked a few meters below; we found Bilger again in the early morning, seated in the driver’s seat, face crushed against the mud-covered window, with the empty bottle wedged in the steering wheel, pointing its accusing neck at the face of the sleeping archaeologist.
Two blankets underneath, two on top, that was our Palmyran bed; Sarah had rolled up into a ball against me, her back against my stomach. She had kindly asked if that bothered me: I had tried not to let my enthusiasm show through, of course not, not at all, and I blessed nomadic life — her hair smelled of amber and wood fire; I didn’t dare move, from fear of disturbing her breathing, whose rhythm overwhelmed me; I tried to breathe like her, adagio at first, then largo; next to my chest I had the long curve of her back, barred by her bra, whose hooks I could feel against my folded arm; her legs were cold and she had entwined them slightly in my own — the nylon was at once soft and electric against my calves. My knees in the hollows of hers, I had to try not to think too much about this proximity, which was of course impossible: an immense desire, which I managed to stifle, consumed me despite everything, in silence. The intimacy of this position was at once chaste and erotic, like the Orient itself, and before burying my eyelids in her curls for some hours, I directed one last glance, beyond the blue wool, at the sky over Palmyra, to thank it for being so inhospitable.
Waking up was comical; the voices of the first tourists jarred us just before dawn — they were from Swabia and their singsong dialect sounded completely out of place in Palmyra. Before pushing back the blanket we were shivering beneath, intertwined like lost souls, I was dreaming that I was waking up in an inn near Stuttgart: totally disoriented, I opened my eyes onto a group of hiking boots, thick socks, legs, some hairy, others not, topped off with sand-colored shorts. I suppose these good people must have been just as embarrassed as we; they had wanted to enjoy the sunrise over the ruins and fell into a camp of Orientalists. I was overcome with a terrible shame; I immediately pulled the blanket over our heads in an idiotic reflex that was even more ridiculous. Sarah had awakened as well and was tittering; stop it, she whispered, they’ll think we’re naked underneath — the Germans must have made out our bodies under the blankets and heard our whispering; no way am I getting out of here, I muttered. “Getting out” was an entirely relative expression, since we were outside, but just as children hide in an imaginary cave at the bottom of their sheets, it was out of the question that I would rejoin the outside world until these invaders had left. Sarah joined willingly in the game, laughing; she had arranged for a current of air that would allow us not to suffocate completely; from a fold she spied on the position of the enemy warriors around us, who seemed not to want to leave the parvis. I inhaled her breath, the smell of her body upon awakening. She was right up against me, lying on her stomach — I dared slip my arm around her shoulders, in a gesture I hoped could seem brotherly. She turned her face and smiled at me; I prayed to Aphrodite or Ishtar to transform our shelter into rocks, make us invisible and leave us there for eternity, in this corner of happiness that I had made without meaning to, thanks to these Swabian crusaders sent by an inspired god: she was looking at me, motionless and smiling, her lips a few centimeters from mine. My mouth was dry, I looked away, muttered some absurdity, and at about the same instant we heard the voice of François-Marie resounding: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Fakhr ed-Din’s Castle”; we risked a glance outside of our improvised tent and burst out laughing, together, when we saw that the Frenchman had emerged from his sleeping bag, his hair standing on end, dressed solely in a pair of boxer shorts as black as the hair that covered his chest, to greet the dawn visitors — this djinn succeeded almost immediately at putting them to flight, but I didn’t make a move to lift the veil that was covering us, and Sarah didn’t either: she stayed there, so close to me. The growing light spattered the inside of our cavern with glints of sunlight. I turned over, not knowing why; I curled up in a ball, I was cold, and she pressed against me, I could feel her breath on my neck, her breasts on my back, her heart beating with mine, and I pretended to fall back asleep, my hand in hers, as the sun of Baal slowly warmed me — as if I weren’t hot enough.
Our first night in the same bed (she would say later that we couldn’t reasonably call it the same bed) left me with an enduring memory, sore bones, and a rather glorious catarrh: I ended our expedition with my nose full of mucus, blushing from these otherwise harmless secretions, as if my nostrils revealed to the outer world, symbolically, what my unconscious had secretly distilled through the whole night.
The tourists finally dislodged us, or at least forced us to get up and surrender, the battle was lost in advance — patiently, burning some twigs, we managed to boil some water to prepare Turkish coffee; I can see myself again sitting on the rock, contemplating the palm grove far beyond the temples, with my cup in hand. I understood the verse that till then had been enigmatic by Badr Shakir Sayyab, “Your eyes are a forest of palm trees at dawn / or a balcony, with the moon far beyond” which opens his Rain Song; Sarah was happy that I mentioned this poor poet from Basra, lost in melancholy and illness. That night, that morning, this blanket had created an intimacy between us, our bodies had tamed each other, and they didn’t want to leave each other anymore — they continued to press against each other, to lean against each other in a familiarity that the cold no longer justified.
Was that when I had the idea to set that poem to music, probably; was it the freezing sweetness of that night in the desert, Sarah’s eyes, the Palmyra morning, the myths floating over the ruins that brought this project to birth, at least that’s what I like to imagine — perhaps there was also a game of fate, now it’s my turn to be alone, ill and melancholy in sleeping Vienna, like Sayyab the Iraqi, Sayyab whose fate so moved me in Damascus. I can’t think of the terrifying future the medical books predict for me, like the Pythia, to whom could I confide my fears, to whom could I reveal that I’m afraid of degenerating, rotting like Sayyab, afraid my muscles and brain little by little will be liquefied, afraid of losing everything, of ridding myself of everything, my body and my mind, piece by piece, bit by bit, squama by squama, until I’m no longer able to remember, speak, or move, has this trajectory already begun, that’s the most terrible thing, am I already at this moment less than I was yesterday, incapable of perceiving my failing — of course I take stock of myself in my muscles, in my folded hands, in the cramps, pains, crises of extreme fatigue that can pin me to the bed, or on the contrary the insomnia, hyperactivity, impossibility to stop thinking or speaking alone. I don’t want to plunge into the names of disease, doctors or astronomers like to give their own names to their discoveries, botanists prefer to give them the names of their wives — if pressed, you could understand why they might want to lend their names to asteroids, but why did those great doctors leave their patronymics to terrifying and above all incurable diseases, their names are synonymous today with failure, failure and impotence, the
Charcots, Creutzfeldts, Picks, Huntingtons, so many doctors who have (in a strange metonymic movement, the curer for the incurable) become the disease itself and if the name of mine is soon confirmed (the doctor is obsessed with the diagnosis; scattered symptoms must be gathered together and take on meaning in a whole: the good Dr. Kraus will be relieved to know I am mortally affected, finally a known syndrome, named as if by Adam himself) that will be after months of exams, wandering from department to department, from hospital to hospital — two years ago, Kraus sent me to consult an Aesculapian who specialized in infectious and tropical diseases, convinced I had brought back a parasite from one of my trips, and it was pointless for me to explain to him that Iran is not overflowing with aggressive bacilli or exotic infusoria (and above all that it had been years since I left Europe), as a good Viennese, for whom the vast world begins on the other side of the Danube, Kraus took on his knowing and clever air, typical of scholars when they want to hide their ignorance, to gratify me with a “you never know,” a phrase in which his proud Dr. Diafoirus attitude meant to convey “Me, I know, I have my own ideas.” So I found myself face-to-face with a specialist in exotic infections, with my shabby symptoms (ophthalmic migraines, insomnia, cramps, debilitating pain in my left arm), all the more annoyed at having to wait in a hospital corridor since (obviously) Sarah was in Vienna at the time, and we had urgent and awful tourist visits on the burner. I had had to explain my appointment at the hospital to her, but I didn’t tell her why: I was too afraid she’d think I was contagious, worry about her own health and put me in quarantine — it might be time for me to tell her about my difficulties, I haven’t yet dared, but if tomorrow the disease transforms me into a priapic, slobbering animal, or a chrysalis dried out on its commode then I won’t be able to tell her anything, it’ll be too late. (Whatever the case, lost as she is apparently in Sarawak, how can I explain to her, what letter could I write, especially why write to her, what does she represent to me, or rather, even more of a mystery, what do I represent to her?) I don’t have the courage either to tell Mother about it, how to announce to a mother that she will find herself, at almost seventy-five, wiping her son’s ass, spoonfeeding him until he passes away, shriveled up enough to be able to return to her womb, it’s an atrocity I can’t commit, God save us, I’d rather die alone with Kraus. He’s not a bad fellow, Kraus, I hate him but he’s my only ally, unlike the doctors in the hospital who are apes, cunning and unpredictable. The specialist in tropical diseases wore an open white smock over a pair of blue canvas pants; he was a little chubby, with a big round face and a Berlin accent. How comical it is, I thought, obviously a specialist in exotic infections has to be German, our own empire has always been European, no Togo or Samoan Islands to study pestilential fevers in. Sarah asked me, That appointment, did it go well? I answered: Everything’s fine, the specialist looked like Gottfried Benn, which immediately made her burst out laughing, you must be kidding, Gottfried Benn, but Benn looked like Mr. Everybody — exactly, Gottfried Benn doesn’t look like anyone in particular, so this doctor is his spitting image. During the entire consultation I pictured myself in a lazaretto on the Belgian front in 1914 or in a horrible clinic for venereal diseases in the Weimar Republic; Gottfried Benn examined my skin in search of traces of parasitosis or “God knows what else,” convinced that humanity was always infected by Evil. I never followed up on the absurd exam requests from Dr. Benn, defecating into a plastic container being absolutely beyond me, which I obviously didn’t confess to Sarah — it should be said, in my defense, that being auscultated by the author of Morgue and Flesh doesn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence in you. To muddy the issue with Sarah, I launched into a clumsy comparison of Benn and Georg Trakl, who should be both likened to and contrasted with him; Trakl the subtle, secret man whose poetry obscured reality in order to enchant it, Trakl the sensitive man from Salzburg whose lyricism dissimulates, hides the self in a complex symbolic forest, Trakl the poète maudit, drug addict, madly in love with his sister and with the sap of the poppy, whose work is shot through with moon and blood, sacrificial blood, menstrual blood, blood of deflowering, the underground river flowing to the scenes of carnage of the Battle of Grodek in 1914 and to the men dying in the first combats in Galicia — Trakl saved, maybe, by his so-premature death from the horrible political choices of Benn, it’s Sarah who presented me with this atrocious verdict, dying young sometimes saves you from the terrifying mistakes of old age; imagine if Gottfried Benn had died in 1931, she said, would you judge him in the same way if he hadn’t written Der Neue Staat und die Intellektuellen, The New State and the Intellectuals, and made such horrible statements against anti-fascist writers?
This argument was specious, I maintained; many people who hadn’t died in 1931 still didn’t exalt “the victory of new authoritarian States” like Benn; with Benn the body is not the shrine of the soul, it’s nothing but a miserable instrument that must be improved by genetics to obtain a better, more efficient race. That scientists were later horrified by the consequences of their own theories does not absolve them. That Benn finally distanced himself from the Nazis shortly after their rise to power does not absolve him. The Benns took part in the Nazi illusion. Their subsequent terror when confronted by their Golem in no way excuses them.
Now the tachycardia and the suffocating sensation are coming back. The images of death, the smashed bones in Trakl’s melancholy, the moon, the shadow of the ash tree in autumn, where the spirits of the massacred sigh; sleep and death, sinister eagles — “Sister with the melancholy of storm, look, a boat is rushing forth under the stars, toward the silent face of night” — the wild moan of broken mouths. I’d like to go back to the desert, or to the poems of Sayyab, the Iraqi with such an unfortunate face, huge ears that stuck out, who died in poverty, solitude, and suffering in Kuwait, where he shouted to the Persian Gulf: “O Gulf, you who offer pearls, shells, and death,” with no other response than the echo, carried by the breeze of the Orient, “you who offer pearls, shells, and death,” and now here’s the agony, the noisy silence where only my own words resound, I’m drowning in my own breath, in panic, I’m a fish out of water. Lift my head from the pillow quickly, this profound swamp of anguish, turn on the lamp, breathe in the light.
I’m still breathing in the light.
My books are all facing me, looking at me, calm horizon, prison wall. The lute from Aleppo is an animal with a round belly and a thin short leg, a lame gazelle, like the ones hunted by the Omayyad princes or Marga d’Andurain in the Syrian desert. The engraving by Ferdinand-Max Bredt looks like her; The Two Gazelles, the girl with the black eyes, in harem trousers, feeding the beautiful animal from her hand.
I’m thirsty. How much time do I have left to live? What did I do wrong, to find myself alone and awake in the night, heart beating, muscles trembling, eyes burning, I could get up, put my headphones on and listen to music, seek consolation in music, in Nadim’s oud, for example, or in a Beethoven quartet, one of the late ones — what time is it in Sarawak, if I had dared to kiss Sarah that morning in Palmyra instead of turning over like a coward everything might have been different; sometimes a kiss changes an entire life, fate changes course, bends, makes a detour. Already when I returned to Tübingen after the Hainfeld conference, when I went back to my lover of the time (Sigrid, has she become the brilliant translator she dreamed of being, I have no idea), I realized how insipid our otherwise profound, daily connection seemed compared to what I had glimpsed with Sarah: I spent the following months thinking about her and writing to her, more or less regularly but always secretly, as if I was sure that in these nonetheless innocent letters such a powerful force was at work that it placed my relationship with Sigrid in danger. If my emotional life (let’s look things squarely in the face) is such a failure, it’s no doubt because I have always, consciously or not, kept a place for Sarah in it, and this waiting has prevented me, till now, from committing myself wholly to a love affair. Everything is her fault, the swish
of a petticoat sweeps a man away more surely than a typhoon, that’s common knowledge; if she hadn’t carefully maintained the ambiguity, if she had been clear, we wouldn’t be here, sitting in the middle of the night staring at the bookcase, hand still on the bakelite button (pleasant object, notwithstanding) of the bedside lamp switch. A day will come when I won’t even be able to carry out this simple gesture, work the switch, my fingers will be so numb, so stiff that I’ll have trouble shedding light on my night.
I should get up and drink something but if I leave my bed I won’t get back in before dawn, one should always have a bottle of water within arm’s reach, a goatskin bottle, like in the desert, a container that gives liquids its characteristic smell of goat and tar: kerosene and animal, that’s the taste of Arabia — Leopold Weiss, who spent months on camel-back between Medina and Riyadh or between Ta’ef and Ha’il in the 1930s, would have agreed, Leopold Weiss or Muhammad Asad by his Muslim name, the most brilliant correspondent in the Middle East of his time, for the Frankfurter Zeitung and most of the major newspapers of the Weimar Republic, Leopold Weiss, a Jew from Galicia educated in Vienna not far from here: he’s the man or rather the book responsible for my departure to Damascus after my stay in Istanbul. I can see myself again, in my last weeks in Tübingen, as Sigrid was taking a path that was leading her, as the days passed, inexorably away from mine, a distance that my trip to Turkey had accentuated even more, I can see myself again, between letters to that distant star that was Sarah, discovering, filled with wonder, the spiritual memoirs of Muhammad Asad, that extraordinary Road to Mecca that I read as if it were the Koran itself, sitting on a bench facing the Neckar, under a willow, thinking “if God needs intermediaries then Leopold Weiss is a saint,” so much did his testimonial manage to give voice to the anxiety that had gripped me since my experience in Istanbul — I remember precisely the phrases that had taken my breath away and brought tears to my eyes: “This sonorous, solemn mingling and parting of voices is unlike any other chant of man. And as my heart pounds up to my throat in excited love for this city and its sounds, I begin to feel that all my wanderings have always had but one meaning: to grasp the meaning of this call . . .” The meaning of the call to prayer, of the Allah akhbar ululated at the top of all the minarets in the world since the age of the Prophet, the meaning of this unique melody that had overwhelmed me as well when I heard it for the first time in Istanbul, the city where nevertheless this adhan is among the most discreet, drowned in the racket of modernity. Sitting on my bench in Tübingen, in a setting quite remote from Arabia, I couldn’t lift my eyes from these words, to grasp the meaning of this call, as if I were face-to-face with the Revelation, while this muezzin’s voice was resounding in my ears, clearer than ever, that voice, that chant that had fascinated Félicien David or Leopold Weiss my compatriot to the point of transforming their lives — I too wanted to try to grasp the meaning of this cry, follow it, still wholly filled with the memory of the Süleyman Mosque; I had to leave, I had to discover what was behind this veil, the origin of this chant. You could say that my spiritual life has been the same disaster as my sentimental life. I find myself today as lost as before, without the consolation of faith — I am without a doubt not one of the elect; perhaps I lack the will of the ascetic or the creative imagination of the mystic; perhaps music, in the end, was my only true passion. The desert turned out to be (and this is putting it mildly) a heap of pebbles; the mosques remained for me as empty as the churches; the lives of saints and poets, their texts, in which I could catch glimpases of beauty, shone like prisms without their light, their Avicennan light, their essence, ever reaching me — I am condemned to the utopian materialism of Ernst Bloch, which in my case is a resignation, the “Tübingen paradox.” In Tübingen, I could see three possible paths: religion, as of Leopold Weiss alias Muhammad Asad; utopia, as in Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia or The Principle of Hope; the madness and seclusion of Hölderlin, whose tower projected an unsettling shadow, between the weeping willows and the wooden boats of the Neckar, over the entire city. Why the hell had I chosen to take advantage of the European community’s relative generosity toward students by going to Tübingen, and not to Paris, Rome, or Barcelona like all my comrades; probably the prospect of joining Hölderlin’s poetry, Enno Littmann’s Orientalism, and Ernst Bloch’s musical philosophy together seemed a good program to me. I had devoured thousands of pages of Littmann’s translation of the Thousand and One Nights and had begun to learn Arabic from his successors. It was strange to imagine that a hundred years before, Tübingen and even Strasbourg (where Theodor Nöldeke and Euting officiated, among others) had been, until the First World War turned the world of scholars upside-down, the most Oriental cities in the German Empire. In this great Orientalist network, Enno Littmann was one of the most important German connections; it was he who published, for example, the travel journals of that famous Euting whose adventures in Arabia, related by Bilger, had made us laugh so much in Palmyra; epigrapher, specialist in Semitic languages, Littmann traveled all around southern Syria as early as 1900 in search of Nabatean inscriptions; he describes, in a letter to Eduard Meyer, specialist in the ancient Orient, a dig in the Hauran in winter — battling with the cold, the wind, and the snowstorms, he relates his encounter with a Bedouin who calls himself Kelb Allah, “the dog of God”: this humble nickname is a revelation to him. As it was for Leopold Weiss, the humility of nomadic life was one of the strongest images in Islam, the great renunciation, the stripping-away of worldly trappings in the nakedness of the desert — that purity, that solitude drew me in as well. I wanted to meet this God who was so present, so natural that His humble creatures, in complete destitution, call themselves the dogs of God. Two visions contrasted vaguely with each other in my mind: on one hand, the world of the Thousand and One Nights, urbane, wonderful, abundant, erotic; and on the other, the Road to Mecca, its emptiness and transcendence; Istanbul had signified my discovery of a contemporary version of the first form — I had hoped that Syria would allow me to discover, in the alleyways of Damascus and Aleppo with their enchanting names, the reverie and sensual sweetness of the Arabian Nights, but also let me glimpse, in the desert this time, the Avicennan light of the All. As with Muhammad Asad, my avid readings in Ernst Bloch, his Traces and his little text on Avicenna had (to the great despair of Sigrid, poor thing, to whom I read out loud endless extracts from his works) planted in my mind a fertile disorder, where the utopian materialist took the Muslim mystic by the hand, reconciled Hegel with Ibn Arabi, and everything in music; for hours on end, sitting cross-legged in the deep, battered armchair that stood in as a cell for me, opposite our bed, headphones in my ears, without letting myself be distracted by the comings and goings of Sigrid (white legs, muscular stomach, breasts high and hard) I would visit the thinkers: René Guénon, who became Sheikh Abd al-Wahid Yahya in Cairo, and who spent thirty years following the infallible compass of Tradition, from China to Islam, passing through Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity, without ever leaving Egypt — his works on initiation and the transmission of Truth fascinated me. I was not the only one; a number of my comrades, especially the French ones, had read Guénon’s books, and these readings had launched the quest for the mystic spark for many, some among Sunni or Shiite Muslims, others among Orthodox Christians and the Eastern Churches, still others, like Sarah, among the Buddhists. In my case, I have to admit that the works of Guénon only added to my confusion.
Compass Page 17
