The Man Who Would Be Queen

by Hoshang Merchant

  Rumi and Shams-i-Tabrizi: Not until did Rumi lose Shams-i-Tabrizi did he start pouring out his soul ecstatically in poems. Once, Shams threw away all of Rumi’s manuscripts into a river. Rumi set up a hue and cry. When he gave them up for lost, Shams brought up each page from the water, intact and bone dry.

  At the Zurkhané (House of Strength) athletes descend into a pit, like Mithra slaying the bull. They liked me but I was shy.

  Tehran: a Gold-rush Frontier-town. The boys I slept with stole from me: cologne, underwear, jewellery, trifles. They were young, uneducated for any trade, usually unemployed. Wealth mattered; I was ridiculed for not holding down a job. Nobody read or cared for literature. Once we went without dinner to be able to afford tickets to a piano recital. The Iranian summer, laden with jasmine and orange, alive with solicitations.

  Howard, Tehran ’79

  ‘Now y’all celebrate me!’

  He’s a water buffalo at a bath Do my feet

  A sex adviser Do your thing

  A money maker Rake it in

  A quick-change artist What shall I put on?

  A Vietnam C.O. The Whiteman’s your enemy

  He coached a Crown Sharks will get the security

  Prince men first

  He has a Black mama A wife, son, nephew, retarded daughter perhaps

  Paul’s grandmother was the last empress of China

  Who looks like Divine who eats shit

  Howard has stopped fighting

  Howard has started living

  A Tehran astrologer told me, ‘You are Jonah; your sister, Daniel.’

  Jonah had a pact with the whale: he would not walk out free and the whale would neither digest him nor spew him out.

  I moved into a Youth Hostel, $2 a night.

  Virgil wrote:

  I wish to give up the academic and middle-class life at sixty. Now I understand the kind of terror you felt at a much younger age.

  ‘Fuck Gauguin!’—Henry Miller, Letters to Anaïs Nin.

  The artist is the beggar or the Buddhist monk in modern society. He fulfils a function; he makes the philanthropy of the rich man possible; he challenges the miser. He makes rebellion in the name of aesthetics. He keeps accounts. Finally, the capitalist marketplace absorbs him; his book is sold and bought; the bourgeoisie he baits take him to their breast and love him for being the spoilt child he is.

  Manfred gave up politics. In the wake of terrorism, the German police curtailed civil liberties. ‘I am declared an enemy of the state,’ he wrote sadly. He now wished to be a student of the film director, Alexander Kluge.

  Letter to Manfred:

  You chose the way of Marx, I of Freud, Jung and the writers Lawrence, Nin, Barnes. Now you have learnt that art too is politics, that you will reach large numbers of people and the police of course will not understand your films.

  I took my book to the States. Virgil urges publication. Call to Merrylees: ‘I am proud of you.’

  On a previous visit I had spent a night in New York and left on the same plane for Europe. Had shoplifted Nin’s sixth Diary, spent a night at the Continental Bath—‘Patrons with running sores, infected eyes, ears or nose, may not use the swimming pool’—and had nightmares about the many-headed dog.

  Ken’s mother intervenes. He will not see me. She tells me he still wears make-up but builds muscles and is going to Hollywood.

  I definitely break with Daniel, in New York.

  Jal easily picks up the thread where we left off three years before. Zenobia avoids me all summer. They now live the suburban American life; their son, now fourteen, an American kid. Jal has given up literature for administration.

  Linda, a school friend, has married a composer who uses no longer used instruments like the glass harmonica. She has written on Kafka, Grass, Kosinski. A published critic, she is out of work. We grew close when I consoled her after the loss of her German friend. Her grandmother was a friend to Luckács in Hungary. Her aunt died in Hitler’s gas chambers. I sent her an elegy on her mother’s death. ‘I liked to paint my mother’s portrait but it came out like mud.’ Though plain I felt attracted to her after years of friendship and Linda explained such a feeling was genuine.

  Lost touch with Roz, a small-town Indiana girl, declared ‘schizophrenic’ after the break up of her first love affair. I would not sleep with her. She was to have married me to get me American papers. ‘Now they have tubs for straight couples. I patronize the Great San Francisco Hot Bath and Tubs Co.,’ she wrote. Engaged to a Chinese, who turned out to be married, I last heard she was in the Army pursuing a medical degree, which she wouldn’t have been able to had her history of incarceration been known.

  Revisiting the Chicago Baths I catch gonorrhoea, ‘fires of love’, ‘morning glory’ or ‘pearl’. Easily cured.

  ‘Newer and newer cures will be found but the fear will remain. Syphilis will be the symptomatic disease of our civilization.’—Henry Miller, Age of Assassins.

  Have to go to a South Chicago Free Clinic with pimps and whores. An immigrant Chinese doctor treats me. He speaks perfect American slang—‘Spread your cheeks’, and has never heard of Chinese alchemy—‘What’s that?’

  Carmela has written me for ten years. Tiring of the secretary’s life she has started a business recycling Society clothes: ‘The wife of the director of Araamco gave me a dress worth $1500.’ Her husband has had a leg amputated and lives alone in Westwood. Her daughter teaches now in China; her baby exclusively speaks Mandarin.

  Ruth Ann welcomes me warmly, puts her house at my disposal and presents me her first published poem:

  GIFT FROM HOSHANG

  The small box unfolded a bell.

  A calyx carved from six bronze petals

  Rings of a Parsi rose

  Infinite light in my hand

  I thanked him, hearing echoes

  Of changes rung, commands

  For ritual quests and the rhythms of homely days

  To wake, sing praises or to grieve

  But he said: No

  This is a dancer’s bell

  You must be the mover

  But we lost touch again.

  Gregg Fitzgerald is married. Single people make the best friends, fugitives also.

  The impossible love affair with my sister, that I had transferred to Zenobia, is rekindled. On the last day we remained silent.

  A dream of loaves and fish.

  I wrote her a poem.

  Freny and Jean Bhownagary picnic on the grass at Battersea on salmon and grapes. Freny walks with a cane—a knee injury—yet is still beautiful. The Indian artists F.C. Souza and Sabavalla had painted and sketched her portrait. We visit an exhibition of Japanese erotic art. Freny traces a line from the Japanese down to Toulouse-Lautrec. They have filmed Cambodian temples and will exhibit ceramics in Japan. Their friend, Satish Kapoor, asks me to recite from memory. He calls my poems ‘Vaishnavite’: an allusion to my love of cycles, circles, repetitions, reincarnations. Freny declares herself ‘a Parsi Buddhist’. ‘How come after such a life your poems are so pure?’ she asks. They had become so international one barely guessed their origins.

  Father gives me $500 towards the Nin book, and a Victorian guinea with St George on it.

  Flight back into the Iranian Revolution.

  Met a drunk man who displayed himself on a street during a blackout. We ran to his house hand-in-hand through the dark street to beat the curfew. He asked me to mount him. In the morning he showed me a huge portrait of his wife.

  Blood, beatings, killings in the street. I lost innocence. ‘Write your senator to stop the killings.’ (The regime had links with the Senate, of course. I shouldn’t have been so naive.) Asked an Imperial-Guard-turned-revolutionary if I could help: distributing leaflets, anything. ‘No you’re a foreigner.’ ‘Capitalist’, ‘bourgeois’, even ‘liberal’ overnight became dirty words. Everyone suddenly wished to belong to the ‘proletariat’ or became ‘radical’. I had become a generation older in a matter of months. My eyewitnes
s account was published in a Bombay quarterly.

  Lost my new job after the revolution. My boss, who had asked to sleep with my sister in exchange for a contract lost his job for being associated with the old regime. Under Islamic laws unmarried males may not teach women and homosexuals may not teach.

  Moved to the Zoroastrian poorhouse. Homosexuals caught soliciting are executed by firing squads.

  Revisit the fire temple. Ashes on forehead for humility.

  ‘Two is the perfect number.’—The Gathas

  Katharine: a horse-trainer-turned-English-teacher; an opium addict. Tells me she once worked as a prostitute outside London. Her policeman father committed suicide when her mother, a lesbian, moved in with a girlfriend, a woman who beat clients for money. She lied about her lovers to her husband, ‘to protect him’, she said. Dishonesty as a way of life of the badly loved child. Their friends Florence and Louis shoot heroin first thing in the morning. Louis was imprisoned for trafficking in Tehran.

  Nigerians in Tehran: independent, proud, gentle. ‘They were slaves,’ they said of the American Blacks. One complained about being picked as a sex athlete by women in Europe. Sex on the trains, etc.

  Met Siamak at the Hare Krishna Restaurant.

  —What is God?

  —Two people, I say.

  I left him as he rejects homosexuality: ‘I’m a most sexual person’ he said of himself. He told me he had starved in Benaras, pushed drugs in Germany, visited a Delhi brothel in monks’ robes, feigned madness to live free in a madhouse (he was discharged after a month), tried suicide by walking away into the desert east of Kerman, was certified ‘schizophrenic’ by army doctors and had stolen ashram property. The night of the revolution he stole bullets from the liberated army depots and gave then to people with guns in the street. He studied astrology in India: ‘A four year transit of the Dragon’s tail. A yogi can get liberation then,’ he predicts for me. He gave me opium.

  Kathleen Spivack writes:

  I am now divorced and living alone with the children.

  Money is always a problem.

  Survival, Survival.

  Stanley Kunitz had voted her one of the ten best young poets in America today.

  Sister sends me a $150 check ‘as crisis fund’. I return it.

  Joseph from Ananda Marga practices abstinence and urges me to do likewise. An ex-footballer from Reno, Nevada, he frequented whores: ‘They were nicer than the girls at my Catholic school.’

  Those friendships formed in need can be understood only by those who have been in such need.

  Juan. An echo of Ken. I feared him. There was something distant about him as in most dreamers. He came to my room to read books. I confessed my love. He equivocated like Penelope: ‘I wish to sleep with a man in the future. Bisexuality is true liberation.’ When I told him I definitely break with people who can’t reconcile their friendship with sexual love he looked sad. So I decided to be his friend.

  The poorhouse-room became vibrant when he moved in. I furnished it with mats, a rug, blankets given me by friends who had moved. I had two teacups, a kettle, a stove, a spoon. Juan bought a knife. We ate, slept, and bathed together. It was a childhood sexless love.

  ‘I’ve slept naked with friends without having sex,’ he said.

  He spoke in a monotone and in monologues as if somnambulating.

  He trembled reciting Baudelaire.

  He had repudiated the University, studied philosophy, taught fishermen.

  He idolized me. I broke the illusion. I demanded sex; talked openly and callously about my sex life.

  I had an illusion of him as my lover: he broke that illusion.

  The day was day again; books, books again; food, food. I felt a loss but also a freedom.

  He withdrew into himself. Smoked hashish. He was Piscean.

  ‘You live in a world of beauty and bruise yourself against the other’s rim,’ he told me. ‘You’re Anaïs Nin!’ Each time he wished to leave I wouldn’t let him. ‘In living you hurt others,’ he said—Ken’s exact words, only Juan wasn’t malicious.

  I told him every story. He made no allowance for my past. There is no way to understand a childhood hurt except by suffering it oneself.

  He said my autobiography was ‘made sublime’, that I wanted to present myself in a good light. To one’s beloved one shows the potential self, the beautiful self, though I do not care for public opinion. Autobiographical art is suspect. All art is falseness not only in the sense that it is a moulding, a retelling but also in the sense that art is the hand-making of one’s life; it is a made universe. Even autobiography is fiction. ‘You are using me to write poems,’ Juan said. ‘What do you want, literature or love?’ Virgil had asked. I would have rather lived peacefully. The invert in creating life destroys it. If our experience is destroyed our behaviour is destructive. But Juan taught me a respect for sex:

  —You think I’m a puritan.

  —No, sexual continence is a principle of conservation in the East.

  Juan himself was trying to undo in himself the excesses of the sexual liberation in Europe meanwhile trying to liberate himself truly.

  His grandfather was a nobleman who repudiated his heritage, went to Africa.

  His father heads a European Art Foundation.

  Juan’s favourite word was ‘harmony.’ He did not take kindly to my pride, anger, defensiveness, jealousy, melancholia and emotional outbursts. There is a germ in us: it is called doubt. Self-doubt breeds anxiety. No love can withstand anxiety.

  He came angry as Hamlet. He wished for purity, I thought. I thought he was angry at my sexual insistence. For a moment I saw him as Savonarola. Maybe I was projecting my own sexual guilt, my sexual frustration with him. He always talked of Platonism, of a higher beauty in male friendship. I thought, ‘I now understand Hamlet’s scene with Ophelia perfectly’:

  Talking about food won’t make you full

  Babbling of clothes won’t keep out the cold

  A bowl of rice is what fills the belly;

  It takes a suit of clothing to make you warm.

  And yet, without stopping to consider this,

  You explain that Buddha is hard to find.

  Turn your mind within! There he is!

  Why look for him abroad?

  —Han-shan, Cold Mountain (T’ang Period)

  —‘You live in literature.’

  We parted. I tried to break with him gently but firmly. But being sensitive he took that to heart and repudiated me: ‘Do not try to search me ever again. Ever. For I will be gone and never return.’ He was visibly trembling with emotion. ‘Your love was a falseness from beginning to end.’ He returned my poems: ‘They are only words.’ He returned all my gifts to him: ‘I want no material link with you. You’re mercantile. You gossip.’ But he kept the first poem.

  In a moment of complete isolation and bitterness I had confessed to a relative stranger my failure in spite of sharing food, home, books, money.

  This reached Juan, fifth-hand, through Joseph. I wrote him a letter, which he returned:

  You showed me how much the vocabulary of love partakes of the vocabulary of business: we invest in friendship, we reap profits, we suffer losses and so on … I wish freedom from this round of money and retribution through money. I consider myself generous. I hate pettiness in others. But for my generosity I do expect warmth and feeling in return … I never thought to ‘buy’ you. Attention is enchantment, luring, attracting, but the puritans see only solicitation not aesthetic beauty. Help in the world is always real, financial, practical.

  I later learnt Juan had had an interview with the asexual Joseph of Ananda Marga: Mushrooming gossip had again recorded an affair’s end rather than beginnings. Joseph was a scavenger, a squatter, one afraid to love, who partook vicariously of the loves of others, I rejected him.

  Juan wrote me a note on the back of the envelope he returned:

  My disgust over your behaviour towards other people is the origin of the grievance … You
are repressed and frustrated—even if you boast of being ‘free and liberated’—You don’t want to control your own Ego.

  ‘I is another.’

  When he left, what I remembered of him I pressed into these pages. Gossip had become aesthetic. I wrote him a sestina: he would smile each morning at waking and simply take up our talk about books or friends left unfinished the night before. At the spring new year he showered me with raisins. The night I decided to be his friend he kissed me goodnight and left to sleep in the hostel: ‘You disagree with commerce. So you take up travelling. You pay to sleep. You pay to eat.’ I saw his face illumined as many times before. Luminosity is a characteristic of nothingness (nirvana). But then this light was withdrawn.

  I gave him the address of a Hinayana monastery in Ceylon. He decided on the Seychelles instead.

  The image of the temples at Khajuraho: Outside, couples in erotic embrace, mad, easy, in abandon, in slavery to the body. It is all there, real, depicted. Within: the plain, empty, illumined reality of pure, passionless nothingness. The inside and the outside, the two sides of the same eggglobe, the temple and the cave. Juan restored for me this complementary aspect of purity and sensuality.

  The mystical love: the love for parents, sisters, friends. Perhaps all our loves are only a pale reflection always of what glows at the heart of the universe; of the love of the outstretched arms on a cross.

  La vida est Sueño: Perhaps all things are illusion, this crying, this crumbling, this falling away, this vanishing, this revelation of that which is no more, and there is nothing given but this dream. This dream is not given but earned.

  —Anaïs Nin, Diary VI

  Asha Coorlawalla, modern dancer, student of Kathakali and of Martha Graham’s, re-christened Uttara by Muktananda writes:

  Asha is the spiritual path.

  Uttara is the highest spiritual truth.

  Arjuna taught her dancing in the thirteenth year of exile as a eunuch dance-teacher. She was the king’s daughter.