Weimar was bombed massively three times in 1945. Can you imagine? Bombing a city of sixty thousand inhabitants without any military stakes, when the war was almost won? Pure violence, pure vengeance. Bombing the symbol of the Parliamentary German first republic, trying to destroy Goethe’s house, Cranach’s house, Nietzsche’s archives . . . with hundreds of tons of bombs dropped by young pilots fresh out of Iowa or Wyoming, who would die in turn burned alive in the cabins of their planes, hard to see the sense in that, I’d rather keep quiet.
I have a souvenir for you; remember my article on Balzac and the Arabic language? Well I could write another one, look at this beautiful page, which you must know:
It’s from the original edition of the Divan. Here too there’s Arabic, here too there are differences between Arabic and German, as you can see: in Arabic, it’s The Eastern Divan by the Western Writer. I find that title very intriguing, maybe because of the appearance of the “Western” writer. It’s no longer a mixed object, as in the German original, a “west-eastern” divan, but an Oriental collection composed by a man from the Occident. On the Arabic side of things, it’s not a question of a mingling, a fusion of one and the other, but an Oriental object separate from its author. Who translated this title for Goethe? His professors at Jena? At the Goethe museum, I saw a page of exercises in Arabic — the master was apparently entertaining himself by learning (with a pretty beginner’s calligraphy) words taken from the book by Heinrich von Diez, one of the first Prussian Orientalists, Denkwürdigkeiten von Asien in Künsten und Wissenschaften. (Good Lord how difficult German is, it took me five minutes to copy out that title.)
There is always the other in the self. As in the greatest novel of the nineteenth century, Leg over Leg, or, The Life and Adventures of Fariac — by Faris al-Shidyaq about whom I spoke this afternoon, that immense Arabic text printed in Paris in 1855 at the expense of Raphael Kahla, an exile from Damascus. I can’t resist showing you the title page:
Seen from here, the mixed nature of al-Shidyaq’s title calls to mind that of Goethe; you feel as if the 150 years following that have sought only to divide up patiently what the two great men had gathered together.
In Weimar one can also find (in no particular order) a reredos by Cranach with a magnificent misshapen, greenish demon; Schiller’s house, and Liszt’s house; the Bauhaus school; some pretty Baroque palaces; a castle; the souvenir of the Constitution of a fragile Republic; a park with beech trees that are hundreds of years old; a little ruined church that (covered in snow) looks straight out of a painting by Schinkel; a few neo-Nazis; sausages, hundreds of Thuringian sausages, in every form imaginable — raw, dried, grilled, and fond regards from Germany.
Yours,
Sarah
— to forget, rereading it, that death will no doubt take me before the age of Goethe or Faris al-Shidyaq the great Lebanese writer, at least there’s not much chance I’ll die at the controls of a bomber, hit by a DCA shell or shot down by a fighter plane, that’s more or less out of the question, even though a plane accident is always possible: in this day and age you can get hit by a Russian missile in mid-flight or be blown up by a terrorist attack, it’s not very reassuring. The other day I learned in the Standard that a fourteen-year-old jihadist had been arrested as he was preparing an attack in a train station in Vienna, a baby jihadist from Sankt Pölten, a den of terrorists, that’s well-known, and this news would be amusing if it were not a sign of the times — soon hordes of Styrians will rush onto Viennese infidels shouting “Jesus is great!” and will start a civil war. I can’t remember an attack in Vienna since the Schwechat airport and Abu Nidal’s Palestinians in the 1980s, God forbid, God forbid, but you can’t say God is giving the best of Himself, these days. Nor are Orientalists — I heard a specialist in the Middle East recommend we let all jihadist aspirants go to Syria, get themselves hanged elsewhere; they’d die under the bombs or in skirmishes and we’d hear no more about them. We’d just have to prevent the survivors from returning. This charming suggestion still poses a moral problem, can we reasonably send our regiments of bearded men to take revenge on Europe by killing the innocent civilian populations of Syria and Iraq? It’s a little like throwing your trash into the neighbor’s garden, it’s not very nice. Practical, true, but not very ethical.
5:33 A.M.
Sarah’s wrong, I’ve never been to Weimar. A condensation of Germany indeed. A miniature for collectors. An image. What strength Goethe had. To fall in love at the age of sixty-five with Hafez’s Divan and with Marianne Willemer. To read everything through the glasses of love. Love generates love. Passion as driving force. Goethe a desiring machine. Poetry as fuel. I’d forgotten that bilingual frontispiece in the Divan. We’ve all forgotten these dialogues, in a hurry to forget the books on nationhood without glimpsing the space that opens up between languages, between German and Arabic, in the gutter of the binding, in the spines of books, in the turning white page. We should take more interest in the musical adaptations of the East-Western Divan, Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, dozens of composers probably, up to the moving Goethe Lieder for mezzo-soprano and three clarinets by Luigi Dallapiccola. It’s beautiful to see how much Hafez and Persian poetry have irrigated bourgeois European art, Hafez and of course Omar Khayyam — Khayyam the irreverent scholar even has his statue not far from here, in the middle of the Vienna International Center, a statue offered a few years ago by the Islamic Republic of Iran, not at all spiteful against the poet of wine who was angry with God. Someday I’d like to take Sarah to the Danube to see this monument that sits in state in the midst of the UN buildings, those four white marble scholars under their brown stone canopies, framed by columns reminiscent of those of the Apadana in Persepolis. Khayyam, propelled by Edward FitzGerald’s translation, invaded literary Europe; the forgotten mathematician from the province of Khorassan became a leading European poet in 1870 — Sarah studied Khayyam through Sadegh Hedayat’s commentary and edition, a Khayyam reduced to the essential, reduced to quatrains stemming from the oldest recensions. A Khayyam who was more skeptical than mystical. Sarah explained Omar Khayyam’s immense worldwide fame by the universal simplicity of the quatrain form, first of all, and then by the diversity of the corpus: by turns atheist/agnostic or Muslim/hedonist or contemplative lover/inveterate drunkard or mystical drinker, the scholar from Khorassan, as he appears in the some thousand quatrains that are attributed to him, has something to please everyone — even Fernando Pessoa, who would compose, throughout his life, almost two hundred quatrains inspired by his reading of FitzGerald’s translation. Sarah openly admitted that what she preferred about Khayyam was Hedayat’s introduction and Pessoa’s poems; she’d have happily gathered both together, making a rather beautiful monster, a centaur or a sphinx, Sadegh Hedayat introducing Pessoa’s quatrains, in the shadow of Khayyam. Pessoa too liked wine,
Joy follows pain, and pain joy.
We drink wine to celebrate, sometimes
We drink wine in great suffering.
But from either glass, what remains?
and was at least as skeptical and despairing as his Persian ancestor. Sarah spoke to me of the taverns in Lisbon where Fernando Pessoa went to drink, listen to music or poetry, and in fact, in her story those taverns resembled the Iranian meykhaneh, so much so that Sarah would add ironically that Pessoa was a heteronym for Khayyam, that the Westernmost, Atlantic poet in Europe was actually an avatar of the god Khayyam,
After the roses, wine-bearer, you poured
Wine into my cup and moved away.
Who is more of a flower than you, who have fled?
Who is more wine than you, who refused yourself?
and during interminable conversations with our friend Parviz, in Tehran, she took pleasure in retranslating Pessoa’s quatrains into Persian, to rediscover, they said, the taste of what had been lost — the spirit of drunkenness.
Parviz had invited us to a private concert where a young singer,
accompanied by tar and tombak players, sang quatrains by Khayyam. The singer (maybe thirty, white shirt with a round collar, black trousers, handsome, somber, serious face) had a very beautiful tenor voice whose nuances were highlighted by the narrow living room we were sitting in; the percussionist shone — richness of clean, clear sounds, in both the low and high registers, impeccable phrasing in the most complex rhythms, his fingers rang against the skin of the zarb with surprising precision and speed. The tar player was an adolescent, sixteen or seventeen, and it was one of his first concerts; he seemed carried away by the virtuosity of his two elders, exalted by the audience; in the instrumental improvisations, he explored the gousheh (melody) of the chosen mode with a knowledge and expressiveness that, to my beginner’s ears, compensated greatly for his lack of experience. The brevity of the words sung — four poems by Khayyam — allowed the musicians, quatrain after quatrain, to explore different rhythms and modes. Parviz was delighted. He scrupulously wrote the texts of the quatrains down for me in my notebook. My voice recorder would allow me later to train in that terrifying exercise of transcription. I had already notated instruments, setar or tombak, but never voice, and I was curious to see, calmly, on paper, how the alternation of short and long syllables in Persian meter is skillfully organized into song; how the singer transposes the meter or syllables of the verse to include them in a rhythm, and how the traditional musical phrases of the radif were transformed, revivified by the artist according to the poems sung. The encounter between a twelfth-century text, an age-old musical heritage, and contemporary musicians who actualize, in their individuality, faced with a given audience, the ensemble of these possibilities.
Pour me this wine, so I may say farewell to it
Farewell to the nectar red as your fiery cheeks.
Weary, my remorse is honest and sincere
As the arabesque of the curls of your hair.
The musicians were, like the rest of us, sitting cross-legged on a red Tabriz rug with a dark-blue central medallion; the wool, the cushions, and our bodies made the acoustics very clear, warm without any reverberation; to my right Sarah was sitting on her heels, her shoulder touching mine. The perfume of the song carried us away; the muted, deep waves of the drum, so close, seemed to fill our hearts made tender by the trills of the tar; we were breathing with the singer, holding our breath to follow him in the heights of those long strings of linked notes, clear, without vibrato, without hesitations, until suddenly, having reached the middle of that sonorous sky, he launched into a series of dizzying figures, a sequence of melismata and tremolos so nuanced, so moving, that my eyes filled up with held-in tears, shamefully choked back as the tar replied to the voice by taking up the phrase the singer had just sketched among the clouds, modulating it again and again.
You drink wine, you are faced with the truth,
Facing the memories of your days gone by,
The seasons of the rose, the drunken friends.
In this sad cup, you drink eternity.
I could feel the warmth of Sarah’s body next to me, and my drunkenness was twofold — we were listening in unison, as synchronous in our heartbeats and our breath as if we were singing ourselves, touched, carried away by the miracle of the human voice, a profound communion, shared humanity, in those rare instants when, as Khayyam says, you drink eternity. Parviz too was delighted — when the concert was over, after a long applause and an encore, when our host, Reza, a music-loving doctor friend of Parviz’s, invited us to move on to more earthly nourishment, Parviz emerged from his habitual reserve and shared his enthusiasm with us, laughing, dancing from one foot to the other to wake up his legs that had gone to sleep from sitting cross-legged for so long, he too half-intoxicated by the music and still reciting those poems we had just heard sung.
Reza the doctor’s apartment was near Vanak Square, on the twelfth floor of a brand-new tower from which you could see all of Tehran as far as Varamin on a clear day. A reddish moon had risen above what I imagined to be the Karaj highway, which snaked, flanked with its rosary of buildings, between the hills until it disappeared into them. Parviz was speaking Persian with Sarah; exhausted by the emotion of the music, I had no more strength to follow their conversation; I was dreaming, my eyes gazing into the night, hypnotized by the carpet of yellow and red lights south of the city, dreaming of the caravanserais of long ago, those that Khayyam had frequented; between Nishapur and Ispahan, he had probably stopped in Ray, first capital of his Seljuk protectors, long before the Mongolian conquest transformed it into a pile of stones. From the lookout tower where I stood, you could have seen the poet-mathematician passing by, in a long caravan of horses and Bactrian camels, escorted by soldiers to counter the threat of the Ismailis of Alamut. Sarah and Parviz were talking about music, I understood the words dastgah, segah, chahargah. Khayyam, like many philosophers and mathematicians of classical Islam, also composed an epistle on music, which uses his theory of fractions to define the intervals between notes. Humanity in search of harmony and the music of the spheres. The guests and musicians conversed over drinks. Pretty, colorful carafes contained all sorts of drinks; the buffet was overflowing with stuffed vegetables, herb cakes, huge pistachios with beautiful dark-pink kernels; Parviz initiated us (without much success on my part) to the “White Iranian,” a cocktail of his own invention consisting of mixing liquid yogurt with arak and a dash of pepper. Parviz and our host the doctor were complaining about the absence of wine — it’s too bad, Khayyam would like wine, a lot of wine, said Parviz; wine from Urmia, from Shiraz, from Khorassan . . . What a world, the doctor sighed, living in the country that has sung most about wine and the vine, and being deprived of it. You could make some, I replied, thinking about the diplomats’ “Neauphle-le-Château” vintage. Parviz looked at me in a disgusted way — we respect the Nectar too much to drink the putrid grape juices vinified in Tehran kitchens. I’ll wait for the Islamic Republic to authorize its consumption, or at least officially tolerate it. Wine is too expensive on the black market, and often poorly preserved. The last time I went to Europe, our host went on, as soon as I arrived I bought myself three bottles of Australian shiraz that I drank alone, over the course of an afternoon, watching the Parisians walking by underneath my balcony. Paradise! Paradise! Ferdows, Ferdows! When I finally collapsed, even my dreams were perfumed.
I could easily imagine the effects that ingesting three bottles of red from the Antipodes could have on a Tehranese who had never drunk it. Even I was a little buzzed after just one screwdriver and one White Iranian. Sarah seemed to appreciate Parviz’s horrible mixture, in which the yogurt was coagulating a little because of the arak. The doctor was telling us about the glorious 1980s, when the shortage of alcohol was so great that he embezzled fabulous quantities of 90 percent ethanol to make all sorts of mixtures, with cherries, barley, pomegranate juice, etc. Then, to prevent theft, they added camphor to it, which made it impossible to drink, Reza added with an air of sadness. And do you remember, Parviz interrupted, when the Islamic Republic began censoring the dubbing of movies and foreign serials? That was great. All of a sudden when you were watching a Western a guy would enter a saloon, Colts on his hips, and would say in Persian to the bartender: “A lemonade!” And the bartender would serve him a tiny glass of amber liquid that the cowboy would down in one gulp, and then repeat: “Another lemonade!” It was hysterical. Now we don’t even notice it, Parviz added. I don’t know, it’s been ages since I watched Iranian TV, Reza confessed.
After these considerations on alcohol and after availing ourselves of the buffet, we went home; I was still reeling from the concert — in a sort of altered state. Musical phrases kept coming back to me, in snatches; the beat of the drum was still in my ears, the flashes of the lute, the interminable oscillations of the voice. I thought with melancholy about those who were lucky enough to give birth to such emotions, who possessed a musical or poetic talent; Sarah, on her side of the back seat in the taxi, must have be
en dreaming of a world where they would recite Khayyam in Lisbon and Pessoa in Tehran. She was wearing a dark-blue Islamic cloak and a white polka-dot scarf from which a few locks of her red hair emerged. She was leaning against the door, turned to the window and the night of Tehran which was streaming past around us; the driver was shaking his head to ward off sleep; the radio was blaring some slightly sinister cantilenas about dying for Palestine. Sarah’s right hand lay flat on the artificial leather of the seat, her skin was the only brightness in the compartment, as I took it in mine I was able to catch hold of the heat and light of the world: to my great surprise, without immediately turning toward me, it was she who held my fingers tight in hers, and drew my hand toward her — and didn’t let it go, not even when we arrived at our destination, not even, hours later, when the red dawn set fire to Mount Damavand and invaded my bedroom and lit up, in the midst of the sheets crisscrossed with flesh, her face made pale from fatigue, her infinitely naked back where there lazed, rocked by the waves of her breath, the long dragon of vertebrae and the traces of its fire, those freckles that flowed up to the back of her neck, like so many stars whose fire has been quenched, the galaxy that I journeyed across with my finger outlining imaginary voyages while Sarah, from the other side of her body, clutched my left hand below her breasts. And I stroked her neck illuminated by a thin pink ray of light sharpened by the venetian blinds; as the dawn hummed, still surprised by this total intimacy, by her breath made sweet from fasting and hints of alcohol, astonished by the eternity, by the eternal possibility of finally burying myself in her hair, of traveling at leisure across her cheekbones, her lips, stunned by the tenderness of her kisses, lively and laughing, brief or profound, short of breath, at having been able to let her undress me without any shame or embarrassment, blinded by her beauty, by the reciprocal simplicity of nudity after minutes or hours of cloth, friction of cotton, of silk, of clasps, of tiny clumsy gestures, attempts at oblivion in the unison of body, of heart, of the Orient, in the great ensemble of desire, the great chorus of desire where so many landscapes are found, past and future, I glimpsed in the night of Tehran Sarah naked. She caressed me, I caressed her, and nothing in us sought to reassure ourselves with the word “love,” so deep were we in the murkiest beauty of love, which is absolute presence next to the other, in the other, desire satisfied at every instant, renewed at every second, for every second we found a new color to desire in this kaleidoscope of light and shade — Sarah sighed and laughed, she sighed and laughed and I was afraid of this laughter, I was afraid of it as much as I desired it, as much as I wanted to hear it, just like now, in the night of Vienna, as I seek to catch hold of the memories of Sarah as an animal tries to catch shooting stars. In vain I search through my memory, nothing but flashes remain from that night next to her. Flash of the first contact of our lips, clumsily after our cheeks, lips that were numb and greedy, that get lost too on the fingers that travel over our faces, lips that make up for foreheads bumped together, by surprise, by that strange clumsiness of the surprise of discovering yourself in the process of kissing, finally, without anything, a few minutes before, really preparing you for this clenching of the heart, this lack of air, neither the years spent envisioning it, nor the dreams, the many startling dreams devoted to this carnal topic, faded, erased by the flashes of a beginning of reality, the taste of a breath, a gaze so near that you close your eyes to it, reopen them, close the eyes that are observing you, with your lips, you kiss those eyes, you close them with your lips and you realize the true size of a hand when the fingers finally meet, no longer holding each other but intertwining.
Compass Page 37
