We Computers, page 9
They asked Tchaikovsky: “Who is lazy?” Tchaikovsky replied: “The fool to whom inspiration never willingly pays a visit.”
They asked Voltaire: “Who is a fool?” Voltaire replied: “One for whom the same evil makes patriotism the last refuge and religion the first.”
They asked Kafka: “What is evil?” Kafka replied: “Let us leave the evil to evil, or else nothing will get better.”
They asked Shakespeare: “What is nothing?” Shakespeare replied: “Nothing is the thing you cannot lose once you have it.”
The next day Jon-Perse stared at his screen, dumbfounded, at the sequence We had composed, from “everything” to “nothing,” and then he went straight to his Abdulhamid_Ismail folder, found this poem inside it, and pasted it in after Our chain of links.
What one lacks cannot be lost
I drove in the stake and tied up the goods
using a rope I have been writing
all the words of my life
deep in my heart there is a hole
no matter how tight I cram the words
that hole cannot be closed
what one lacks cannot be lost
one day the fires and the clouds
before my eyes will dissipate
there, I’ll say, now that’s enough
all of us swilled mother’s milk
from the same pure thought
sullied with blood we pressed from our hearts
we flew to the sky and crashed to the dirt
the tongue mumbles on the ear cannot hear
what one lacks cannot be lost
what one lacks cannot be lost …
* * *
***
Did you think that would be the end to this section of Our serialistic, atonal work? No! Jon-Perse’s eye landed next on another document in the same file and stayed riveted till Avon’s first cock crowed. That file turned out to be full of scenes about the great Tulip Era poet Nadim, from the novel Hayy-ibn-Yaqzan by Abdulhamid Ismail (hereinafter AI). Why Jon-Perse rushed to add these scenes to his collection is something that remains unclear to Us, but that was the job, and We too have retained these scenes here. Who knows? Maybe the meaning will emerge later.
Sadabad, the City of Gardens … A place of legend … A valley that stretched from the bay upward, along the river known as Kagaz-khan. A gap between two green mountain ranges, and a palace that rarely tossed a glance beyond those forests. Sadabad! There were mansions there, too, between the water and the woods behind them, woods that ran all the way to the hills. It seemed that winter could never break into this garden, nor could autumn ever penetrate there. In this garden, spring reigned eternal.
Everyone here knew the poet Nadim, right down to the maid; and more than that, every flower greeted him, too, opening its blossoms; and the astounding tulips which grew along the pathways bowed their heads to his feet. The fountains prostrated themselves, the springs began shooting forth water, and as for the palace itself, as the poet neared, its doors opened miraculously of their own accord. And when he and his guest stepped over the threshold, the doors closed again, soundlessly, behind them.
Unsure whether he was actually visiting Sadabad that day or whether it was only a dream, the Stranger tried to wake up and force his way out of this reality, but he returned to this palace of mirages every time, so that eventually he grew angry; but this sweet vision was so persistent that the Stranger lost the will to resist, and he overcame all his fear, and again he surrendered to this dream …
… The moon in the sky rocked in time with his boat, and he could not have told you whether the moon was floating among the sparse clouds or whether the waves in the sea were spreading into the sky; but the poet’s soul, like an island between two oceans, felt in harmony with both the elements, swimming over the watery plane and floating through the air. What was his purpose in this world? Could he not have been born a seagull, to fly and call out cries with no meaning, or at least a fish, to swim in its own mute surroundings? No, better yet, a tulip—the world’s downfall, a crystal ball, the garden in thrall, the celestial sprawl, ornament of us all, faith’s faint call, time’s own hall, the beloved over all, the khan’s battle call, the moon casts a pall, the mouth’s caterwaul, the lips’ sad squall, a skeletal wall—a tulip in fall, at the very least?! After all those rhymes another came to him: Ramadan’s crescent-moon call.
So many things had the poet seen in his time! He had held places of honor ever since his youth, but then became a man nobody needed; to his good fortune, Ibrahim Pasha had been promoted to be the imperial son-in-law, and he had made Nadim his confidant. Now in this new arena, where he could partake in astounding journeys and wise conversations, the poet grew in stature, and was even showered in gold himself, head to foot, several times over. Yet still, somewhere deep in his soul, a certain sacred desire remained, only just out of reach, as if it were floating right there next to the reflection of the moon on the water. But as soon as his boat carried him closer, the reflection, glimmering and teasing, skipped away again … The poet had experienced the pinnacle of pleasure. Had he not tasted heady delights from the tulipy lips of all the beauties? Which intoxicating and mysterious feelings had he not sampled in this world? He had seen it all, except for the saints; he had known it all and lived through it all in this indifferent, ungodly world. Perhaps now was the time for him to retreat to the dervishes’ abode?
* * *
***
“Why the Tulip Era, and not the Lilac Era or Violet Era or the era of some other flower?” Jon-Perse asked his friend AI in a letter. AI tried to explain. “There’s a famous story in the East called ‘Farhad and Shirin,’ where Farhad wants to marry Shirin, but all kinds of devious people spread rumors that Shirin is dead. Farhad believes them, and consumed by despair, he mounts his horse and gallops him off a mountain. First they crash into the cliff, then he and the horse sail all the way down, and everywhere their blood splatters on the ground, tulips spring up. Nava’i wrote this about it:
This swift pen is inscribing in sorrow
Trailing black, torn garments in sorrow
Dry as the wasteland of one hunted apart
Harsh as a wound to the very heart
Made by a sword with sharpened blade
Which severed that heart, forever unmade.
Striving mightily to see, though he weeps,
Falling as soon as he gets to his feet,
A man in the grip of the soldier of death
Sees the world as one grim tomb for the dead.
His body began shuddering at every rock.
His bones began shattering with every shock.
So many times did his head strike stone
That both the rocks and his head were stunned.
He let forth his tears in a river
Until his weeping was finished forever.
From his heart, there flowed an elixir,
Shooting like arrows or tangled splinters
And he thought perhaps his wounds would heal,
When death’s spear struck, all would be healed.
He tossed off the spotted, bloody cotton.
From his broken body, the fountains spouted.
On the slopes, from the blood now unblotted,
Bloomed tulips, their faces pure and unspotted.
“The tulips represent great love. But there’s also a different interpretation, one advanced by the great Sufi poet Nasimi. Nasimi sees the tulip as a Jam-e Jam, a Cup of Jamshid, the mystical goblet that displays the entire world, its past, present, and future, or, in your language, something greater even than a supercomputer. It is also sometimes called Iskandar’s Mirror, for Alexander the Great:
I’d walk into a garden, from time to time,
The first tulip I saw was a Jam-e Jam,
I heard an iris say, from time to time:
‘Time is time, yes time is time, yes time is time!’
“As a matter of fact, these two interpretations are really one. Only a lover who has bet his life on a vast, tragic love, and spilled his blood over it, can see what the world truly is. Same with the eternal ‘gap of separation’ in ghazals: symbolic love, absolute or divine love—however you like to look at it, it turns out the same way.”
The Fourth Bayt
Once, AI had written down the first dream he had about Nadim:
Bamberg, 1993. I dreamed that Osip Mandelstam had just returned from his journey to Armenia, and he was telling me about it at his place. Framed in the doorway behind him was the Moscow of the 1930s, soldiers marching, a feeling of alarm rising from the stomping of their boots … “Do you know who I saw there?” he asked, to start our conversation. “Charents?” I guessed, excited. “Yes! Yeghishe Charents! And do you know what? He told me who the loveliest, saddest poet in the world is.” “Oh? And who is that?” I inquired. “It turns out his name is Nadim.” Here, Mandelstam recited some lines by this poet whom I had never heard of, and the unbelievable beauty of those lines woke me up.
That same day, I learned from Semih Tezjan, a Turkologist friend of mine, that as a matter of fact there actually was a great eighteenth-century Turkish poet called Nadim, from the Tulip Era, when Istanbul had seemed to be coming together with Europe. Soon after, I discovered that quite a few things linked Nadim and Mandelstam: not only the events of their lives, but also the sheer beauty of their poetry. Certain lines even closely resembled each other. One small example: If you ask any connoisseur of Turkic poetry what Nadim’s most famous poem is, they will quote you the same line, “Yur, gedelim Sadabada!” (Come, let’s go to Sadabad!). Sadabad was the summer residence of the Turkish sultans back then, what today we would call a vacation home. Mandelstam also wrote one very famous line, “Poedem v Tsarskoe Selo” (Let’s go to Tsarskoe Selo), which is exactly the same thing, but in the Muscovite terms of his time.
Then I spent a long time wondering why a Jewish man, based on information from an Armenian man, had revealed to me, a Turkic man of letters, this poet Nadim from my own tradition, and the best reason I could come up with was that my subconscious mind had made an anagram out of the M-N-D in Mandelstam to create an N-D-M for Nadim.
* * *
***
We will return to Our theme. Who knows—if We hadn’t suddenly added the poet Nadim to the mix, would Jon-Perse have gone on composing series after series like that, or would he have given up tying all those aphorisms to people and places? True, a well-put word—no matter who says it—gets worn as an old penny as time ticks by and more people handle it. Once we’ve forgotten who pressed it, does the witticism which has become a common saying still have any authorial rights attached? It becomes communal property, and gets included in the unnamed, unsigned dowry we call folklore. This aphorism by Nasimi, for instance: “The moment is now, the moment is now, this moment is the moment!” could be transformed into a popular refrain, “Seize the moment!”
Wasn’t this exactly what Jon-Perse hoped to prove with the help of Us Computers: that existing literature could be freed from the chains of authorship? Before We continue Our story, while We’re stopped at this scenic lookout, We want to add a note here about one more topic that Jon-Perse and his friend AI once debated and discussed. AI believed that authorship and copyright law, as well as “intellectual property,” were Western concepts. According to the Islamic or Eastern understanding, all that exists is the property of Allah, and humans are simply passive recipients or, at best, like the Prophet, merely bearers of good tidings not our own. There is no place in this tradition for ownership or authorship. In this way, Jon-Perse’s efforts did seem to overlap with this sensibility.
Amid such thoughts, Jon-Perse went to Paris on business one sunny spring day, and when he strolled into his brothel of a former neighborhood, right in front of the Iranian restaurant on the corner, a beautiful Gypsy woman carrying a deep-red tulip in her hand placed a gentle hand on his arm and said, in a mysterious voice, “A palace for a revealed sultan, if not for a dervish.” Was she a prostitute? It was a phenomenal way to phrase an invitation. But she gently let go of Jon-Perse’s sleeve. “She must be a fortune-teller,” thought Jon-Perse, his head suddenly spinning. He set aside his biking and swimming goals for the day and answered with an aphorism: “I know my past, my present is clear, but let my future remain a mystery!” To this the woman responded in her charming voice, “Yet we do have an ancient hoe with which to beat back the grass,” and she planted the tulip she held in her hands in Jon-Perse’s chest pocket. And here Jon-Perse was lost, much to his own surprise.
* * *
***
“The Professor and the Prostitute.” This contradictory relationship may well be one of the most beloved plots in world literature. Jon-Perse had no idea how it happened that he and the woman ended up together, not in the Iranian restaurant on the corner but in a quiet coffee shop on a side street. What had happened to him? Had he truly fallen under the woman’s spell, or was it all a dream? The scene simply shifted from one place to another, and there was no reason or connection or continuity between the two places. Is this what people meant when they talked about gypsies as hypnotists? Wasn’t the tulip now sticking out of Jon-Perse’s front pocket capable of that, as it had been for Muzaffar the Bosnian poet? Even if Jon-Perse had believed in the instant transmigration of the soul, he never would have confessed his suspicion that the tulip-bearing Muzaffar had in fact been transformed into the Luli-like, tulip-like woman before him.
Now the two of them were sitting like old friends catching up over coffee. The woman was telling him a story in her deep, mesmerizing voice. Jon-Perse set his plans aside and sat there listening.
The story was about a girl named Shah Nabot. A young man who worked in a bakery was in love with her. He heard that Shah Nabot had said, “I will marry the man who can pay a bride-price of one hundred thousand dirhams.” One hundred thousand dirhams was a good amount of money! The lovestruck young man went to the mosque and prayed to God: “Allah! If You give me one hundred thousand dirhams, I will pray to You in this mosque forty nights in a row until dawn!” By day he worked, and by night he prayed until dawn. Allah blessed his deeds, and on the thirty-ninth day the young man had one hundred thousand dirhams.
That day he went to his beloved’s house and offered her family the bride-price. Shah Nabot agreed to marry him. Meanwhile, evening fell, and the young man, faithful to his vow, said he would go to the mosque. But …
Here the Gypsy woman swallowed the last of her coffee and poured the dregs from her cup into the saucer. “I can never resist reading my fortune,” she said, staring at the shape they made.
“What we do because of the ascetic is a sin,
God forbid what we do at the worshiper’s whim!”
she said.
* * *
***
Throughout these years, We and Jon-Perse continued examining his interconnected dreams. Regardless of his advanced age, in his dreams he could cruise the Seine through the Paris sky or fly above Notre-Dame or Sacré-Coeur, and any time he felt like it he could land in the Fourth Arrondissement and meet his satin-skinned muse at the Peregrine Café, which Aragon and Deluy had loved, and before them Apollinaire. There he always waited for the tale to continue from wherever it had left off the week before. The woman never proceeded with anxiety or haste.
“Yes, on the fortieth night too the young man told Shah Nabot that he had to keep his vow, go to the mosque, and prostrate himself until dawn. But Shah Nabot would not agree to that. ‘Either you spend this night with me or you’ll spend the rest of your life without me!’ she said. The young man was not overly upset. He kept his vow, went to the mosque, and spent all night prostrate in prayer until dawn. When he was leaving the mosque at sunrise, he ran into a group of drunken thugs in the dark. They thrust a wineglass shaped like a tulip into his hand, and ordered him to drink. ‘What? I’ve just come out of the mosque! Why would I ruin forty nights in prayer?’ demanded the young man. But they told him, ‘Drink! You’ll drink or else we’ll kill you!’ Reluctantly, conflicted, the young man swallowed the wine in one gulp. ‘There, that didn’t kill you, did it?’ laughed the ruffians. ‘What did you see? Tell us now!’ they jeered at him. ‘Nothing!’ said the young man. ‘Then have some more!’ said the vile ones, urging him on. The young man swallowed another gulp. ‘Now do you see anything?’ ‘Yes. I saw you all turn into ravens and fly away,’ said the young man. The scoundrels exchanged looks. ‘Then drink again!’ they ordered him. The young man took another swallow from the tulip-shaped wineglass. ‘Now what do you see?’ they asked him. ‘I see what I forgot of the Qur’an I memorized as a child,’ said the young man with a sigh. After he sighed, the whole gang of young hooligans suddenly transformed into a flock of ravens, and with a raucous flapping of their heavy, dark wings, they took off flying in all directions.
Dawn has come, the clouds have pitched their tent,
A morning cup, a morning cup, my friends.
Dew runs down the tulip’s lovely face,
Pour away, pour away, my friends!
“But that young man …” she suddenly broke off her story and stared at him. As soon as Jon-Perse drank the last drops of his coffee, the woman took the cup from his hand and, as usual, turned it upside down and read her fortune in the dregs:
“Whatever you say to explain a separation, my dear,
The eyes go moist a hundred times, and in the soul there’s a hundred sighs,”
she said.
JON-PERSE’S DREAM
I come around from the back side of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Instead of going in the central entrance, I walk toward the door at the hidden end of the building. They toss all the old parchments in there. I walk up, stick my head through the door, and tell them I’ve come for the rare manuscripts. The clerk looks at a sheet of paper on the wall and says, “Fifth floor.” I say “Thank you” and head for the elevator. The elevator is behind some curtains. Fortunately, it stops when it gets to the floor, and a few people get out. I take over the empty space. I press the button for the fifth floor. But when the elevator gets to the third floor, the people who want to exit can’t seem to get through the interior curtain. Finally, they rip through it and rush out. A girl from management starts scolding us all.
