Collection of Sand

by Italo Calvino

  But if I attribute an aggressive intention to the forest, if I see the roots and the lianas taking action, assaulting, outmanoeuvring the enemy, I am not doing anything other than projecting the mythology of the bas-reliefs on to what is vegetation and lymph. Language (every language) constructs a mythology, and this way it has of being mythological involves also what we thought existed before language. From the moment language made its entrance into the universe, the world has taken on language’s way of being, and cannot manifest itself except by following its rules. From that moment on the roots and lianas became part of the discourse of the gods, from which every discourse stems. The actions made of nouns and verbs and consequences and analogies have involved the elements and prime substances. The temples that guard the origins of language atop the stone steps or at the bottom of subterranean crypts have imposed their dominion over the forest.

  But today, are we sure that the gods still talk the language of the forest, from their ruined temples? Perhaps the gods that rule over discourse are no longer those that repeated the story, horrific but never leading to despair, of the succession of destruction and rebirth in an endless cycle. Other gods speak through us, conscious that what finishes never comes back.

  Iran

  The Mihrab

  A frame sculpted in relief, surmounted by an architrave with a decoration perforated like a piece of lace; within the frame, a pierced decoration runs along the jambs with arabesques sculpted in low relief, and above all this, on a horizontal level, a line of fluent writing stands out as though suspended there. Everything is of the same light colour; the material is stucco. Below the frame emerges a tympanum with a pointed arch, framed by a grooved archivolt, upheld by thin columns, and thick with sculpted letters. In the margins every spare piece of surface is studded with ornaments, inlaid with lines and loops, and porous like a sponge. The columns and the positive ogive of the tympanum act as a frame for the negative ogive of a pointed arch, surmounted by a high architrave, which is also perforated, and the background to all this is hollowed out and sculpted in minute detail. At this point one would really need to use all the previous words again in order to describe similar details that are on a tiny scale and bunched and woven together in different configurations. And inside this arch that is at the very interior of all the arches, what does one see? Nothing: the bare wall.

  I am trying to describe a fourteenth-century mihrab in the Friday Mosque at Isfahan. The mihrab is the niche inside mosques which indicates the direction of Mecca. Every time I visit a mosque, I stop in front of the mihrab, and never tire of looking at it. What attracts me is the idea of a door that does everything to put on display its function as a door but which opens on to nothing, the idea of a luxurious frame as though to enclose something extremely precious but inside which there is nothing.

  In the Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque the mihrab (from the seventeenth century) is in a wall entirely covered with indigo and turquoise majolica, under an ogival span with at its centre a fake ogival window made of bright tiles that are criss-crossed by a geometric blossoming of spiral lines. The mihrab is a cavity—ogival again—which opens into the depth of the wall, which is resplendent with blue and gold majolica, and which is adorned over all its surface area with patterns of arches—hexagonal ones, this time. It has a vault composed of so many little cavities like a honeycomb, little cells without a floor which lie on top of each other in layers. It is as if the mihrab, by subdividing its own limited and composed space into a multiplicity of ever smaller mihrabs, was opening up the only way possible for it to reach the limitless.

  All around, the white script flows across the blue tiles, binding the space with its calligrams, which are rhythmically punctuated by parallel bars, curves that loop like whips, speckles of oblique or dot-formed lines, launching the verses of the Koran on high as well as down below, to right and left, forwards and backwards, along every dimension that is visible and invisible.

  After staying for a good while contemplating the mihrab, I feel I need to reach some conclusion. Which could be this: the idea of perfection which art pursues, the wisdom accumulated in writing, the dream of satisfying every desire that is expressed in the luxury of ornaments, all these point towards one single meaning, celebrate one foundational principle, entail one single final object. And this is an object which does not exist. Its sole quality is that of not being there. One cannot even give it a name.

  Void, nothingness, absence, silence are all names that are heavy with meanings that are too cumbersome for something that refuses to be any of these things. It cannot be defined in words: the only symbol that can represent it is the mihrab. In fact, to be more precise, it is that something that is revealed not to be there at the end of the mihrab.

  This was what I thought I had understood in that distant journey of mine to Isfahan: that the most important things in the world are the empty spaces. The honeycomb vaults of the cupolas of the Mosque of Shah Abbas; the dark cupola of the Friday Mosque which is supported on a succession of arches of decreasing size, calculated according to a sophisticated arithmetic in order to join the squared base to the circle supporting the canopy; the iwans, the great quadrangular doors with their arched vault: everything here confirms that the real substance of the world is provided by what is hollow.

  The void has its own fantasies, its own games: the ‘music room’ in the Alì Qapù palace is covered along its walls and on its vault with an envelope of perforated, ochre-coloured chalk in which outlines of cruets or lutes are engraved in negative, like a collection of objects reduced to their own shadow or their idea of themselves without a body.

  Certain forms of time are made for certain forms of space: the sunset hour in spring goes with the madrassa known as ‘the Shah’s Mother’s Madrassa’, an eighteenth-century enclosed garden, white with majolica and green with plants and ponds, above which there soar great raised rooms, empty, decorated by strips of tiles in which the agility of the writing comes to rest in the impassivity of the enamels. While visiting the madrassa, seeing the tranquil familiarity with which Isfahan’s inhabitants feel this place and this hour, I think that I too would like to occupy the mezzanine of one of those spacious niches, like the man there who is sitting with his legs folded under him and reading, or the others who are chattering, or like that man who has stretched out and is sleeping, or like that other man who is eating bread in thin strips with salad. I envy the group listening to a mullah, as though they were Socrates’ disciples, all crouching round one carpet, or the boys who have come out from school and are opening books and homework notepads on another carpet.

  Perhaps a city that has been made following a happy arrangement of solid and empty space lends itself to being lived in with a cheerful spirit even in times of megalomaniac despotism: this was the thought that came to me as I walked in the animation of the evening, through the famous square in Isfahan, watching the mosques with their blue and copper cupolas, the houses all the same height, with their communicating terraces, and the wide vaults of Abbas the Great’s palace and of the bazaar.

  Some years have gone by. What I see now from Iran are very different images: with no empty spaces, it is full of crowds shouting and gesturing in unison, darkened by the blackness of the cloaks, which extends everywhere, full of a fanatical tension that knows no respite or peace. I saw nothing of all this when I was contemplating the mihrab.

  The Flames within the Flames

  The fire is preserved in the sacred chamber of the Zoroastrian temple, which is locked. Only the mobet has the key and can enter; during the ceremony the flame is visible through the iron grating.

  The temple is a small, modern villa, surrounded by a modest garden, in Yazd, a city on the edge
of the desert, in the centre of Iran. The mobet is a young Parsee Indian from Bombay (for more than a thousand years the Parsees in India have kept alive the most ancient religion of their ancestors who fled from Persia after the Islamic conquest); handsome, proud, with an attitude bordering on smugness; the white shirt he wears, the little white cap on his head, the white veil that covers his mouth to stop the sacred fire being contaminated by human breath all give him the look of a surgeon. He revives the fire with his little shovel; he adds some bits of sandalwood to the brazier. He recites the prayers to Ahura Mazda in a chanting voice, which begins in a whisper and slowly gets louder until it reaches top volume; then he stops, is silent, strikes a bell that resounds with deep vibrations. His voice alternates with the litanies of the women who are gathered in the temple, their heads covered by short, coloured mantillas, absorbed in the reading of their little books: prayers in a modern language, or at least one that is understandable nowadays, while the mobet prays in the Avestan language, in which are preserved the most archaic stratifications of the Indo-European language stock.

  Is it to gather an echo of the mythical origins of words that I have come here, amongst the latest custodians of a discourse that has been handed down identical in letter and even accent for thousands of years? Or is it to see if something distinguishes from all the other fires the fire that apparently has been burning from the time of Cyrus, Darius, Artaxerxes, constantly rekindled from an uninterrupted succession of coals that have never been allowed to go out, a fire that has been guarded in secret during the 1,300 years of Islamic domination, and fed with seasoned and split sandalwood always according to the same rules, so as to produce a clear flame without a hint of smoke?

  My journey to Iran is taking place in the last phase of the Shah’s rule. This Shah persecutes many categories of people but not the minority that is faithful to the Mazdean religion (those whom we call Zoroastrians or Zarathustrians or, less accurately, ‘fire-worshippers’). In opposition to the predominant Shiite clergy and from the time of the arrival on the throne of the present Shah’s father, the Pahlevi dynasty has declared itself to be secular and tolerant of minority religions. Thus the capricious logic of political balances returned freedom of practice to the cult of Ahura Mazda, a cult which not only in its Indian exile but also in these remote regions of Persia had continued for centuries to be practised in secret, around fires that were always kept lit on the mountains and in houses.

  With all the wariness of those who live amongst infidels, the Mazdeans continue to keep the fire locked away, visible only through a grating. But even when the altars flamed high on the monumental steps of Darius’ Persepolis, the true chamber of fire was always a room without windows, aerated solely by air-holes and inaccessible to the sun’s rays. There the flames were nourished with trunks of sandalwood seasoned to the point where every residue of earthly sap had disappeared, with the fire going out and being relit a thousand times from its own ashes. In this way the flames were purified of the dross of evil which pollutes all the elements and stars and plants and animals and above all man. The sacred fire shines in the dark: it must not mix its light with the light of day, which is exposed to all kinds of contamination. And perhaps even a human glance is enough to profane it, if it rests on the fire with indifference, as though it were a thing that was on the same level as all other things; like my glance, which is that of a man who vainly tries to recover a meaning for ancient symbols in a world which consumes everything it sees and hears. The true fire is the hidden fire: was it to learn this that I have come here?

  Searching for the Zoroastrians of Yazd, yesterday afternoon we went back and forward across an endless, semi-deserted district, amidst blind walls made of earth and straw or of bricks of raw clay, terraces on the low, flat roofs from where a girl looks out, clusters of old women sitting around a thin threshold or underneath a niche in which a candle is burning. The women’s religion is recognized by the shawl they cover their heads with: in this district the coloured ones outnumber the black ones. Through a door, a hallway, a series of communicating courtyards, we reached a low room where many candles were burning in front of some photographs of the dead: a kind of chapel, a space for a private cult; the fire, the famous fire, is announced only by these feeble little flames. The courteous passer-by whom we called on in the street and who has taken us this far gives us explanations that are lost on us because of the lack of a common language. He is even prepared to accompany us to the main temple, but only to show us that it is closed and that he can only point it out to us through the gate: an anonymous, modern, building. When we asked around, we learned that the next day they were expecting a foreign television crew, to film the celebration of a rite.

  At the local office of the state television service, which is where we turned to, a functionary with five portraits of the Shah hanging on the wall or framed on his desk (the Shah on the throne, with his wife, with his children, in colour, in black and white) finds the contacts for us so we can be present at the filming.

  Here I am, then, admitted to the temple, after I too put on a little white beret and took off my shoes (hair and the soles of shoes are the vehicles of contamination which one must guard against most), but everything I see still seems very distant to me. Distant from what? What have I come here to find amid the faithful followers of Ahura Mazda, the first god to reveal himself to the Indo-Europeans as the supreme transcendental principle? What can that mean for me, that bearded outline flanked by two huge wings which is repeated everywhere, from Darius’ bas-reliefs at Persepolis to the modest modern furniture in this little room? He is a schematic human figure seen in profile, with a long, curly beard and hair similar to his beard and on top a cylindrical hat: in his hand he holds a circle and he in turn is surrounded by another, bigger circle, from which there open out two huge wings, maybe eagle’s wings, and some forewings or antennae which are perhaps lightning-bolts; only the figure’s bust is visible, down to his waist, framed by the winged circle like an aviator installed in the cockpit of a primeval flying machine. It would be natural to believe that this is Ahura Mazda in person, but I certainly will not fall into such a vulgar error, because I know there can be no images of an invisible, omnipresent god (just as Ahura Mazda is also just a way of speaking, not a name). At most he must be a divine emanation, which descends from heaven on to the heads of Emperors, or a heavenly archetype of their majesty, and which we instead can understand as hovering above us, a benediction to invoke or a model to imitate.

  In short, Ahura Mazda remains distant, even in this temple with its neon lights, and the metal chairs painted white, and the white-robed priest who is very happy to officiate in front of the television cameras. There are few decorations hanging on the wall: a painting showing Zarathustra in the style of those popular Oriental oleographs, a mirror, a calendar in which the emblem of the bearded man with wings stands out against the Iranian tricolour.

  The only image possible of Ahura Mazda is fire. Shapeless, limitless, it heats and devours and spreads, with the agility of its dazzling tongues, which change colour every second: the fire that languishes in its slow death in the brazier, which hides itself under the grey ash, and suddenly flares up again, raises its pointed wings, recovers its impetus, soars upwards in a violent burst of flames. All I have left to do is to stare at the glare of the flame rising up from the hidden brazier, and to look at the men and women praying to the fire and to try to imagine how they see it. With attraction and fear, as I see it? Certainly: as a friendly force, a necessary condition of our existence, but the attraction that the sight of the flames exercises is more instantaneous than any reasoning about it, it is instinctive like the terror that the sight of fire instils in us as an en
emy force, a force for destruction and death. And even further beyond that they see in the fire an element that is incompatible with everything that is obliged to be subject to the business of life and death, an absolute way of being, so much so that they associate it with the notion of ideal purity. Perhaps because man may think he can master it but cannot touch it? Because inside it no living being can survive? Is what is untouchable by man pure? Is what excludes life from itself pure? Is what lives stripping itself of every body and wrapping or support pure? And if purity is in the fire, how can one purify the fire? By burning it? Is the flame that the Mazdeans are reciting their prayers to a fire that has been set on fire? Is it a flame that has been set on fire?

  Over and over again the stars continue to burn their fuel through century after century. The firmament is made of braziers that light up and go out, incandescent supernovae, red giants that slowly die out, burnt-out relics of white dwarves. The earth too is a ball of fire that is expanding the crust of the continents and the ocean sea-beds. The universe is one big fire. What will happen when all the sandalwood of atoms has disappeared in the stars’ crucibles? When the ashes of ashes are consumed in one blaze of evanescent heat? When the pyres of the galaxies are reduced to opaque vortices of soot? How can one conceive of a fire that keeps itself lit from the beginning of time and that never goes out?

  The world I inhabit is governed by science, and this science has a tragic core: the irreversible process that will lead the universe to decompose in a cloud of heat. Of the liveable and visible worlds there will remain only a dust-cloud of particles which will no longer find a shape, where nothing will be distinguishable from anything else, the near and the distant, the before and the afterwards. Here amidst the faithful followers of Ahura Mazda, in the fire which has been guarded in the dark and which the mobet revives and nurses to the sound of his chanting voice, I am shown the substance of the universe which only manifests itself in the combustion which ceaselessly devours it, the form of space expanding and contracting, the rumble and crackle of time. Time is like the fire: at times it flares up in impetuous bursts of heat, at times it smoulders buried in the slow carbonization of epochs, at times it creeps and spreads out in unexpected, lightning-quick zig-zags, but it always points towards its only end: to consume everything and to be consumed. When the last fire goes out, time too will be finished; is that why the Zoroastrians perpetuate their fires? The thing I seem to be on the point of understanding is this: it makes no sense complaining that the arrow of time rushes towards the void, because for all that exists in the universe and that we would want to save, the fact of being there means just this burning and nothing else: there is no other way of being except that of the flame.