Authors: Pico Iyer
Does any of this make sense? And do you see why I’m writing it? French lessons from the Sixth Form aren’t what I expected to be sending you, or, I’m sure, what you expected to receive from me. But I thought it would be what you wanted to hear: Nicki said you felt very settled in your unsettled way.
Fond wishes and thanks again,
M.C.
He hadn’t expected enigmas from her, she was right; one of their problems had always been the way her directness glanced off his indirections. And yet she was giving him a present, clearly, of the deepest kind: something that wasn’t of interest to her, but might be to him. More than that, she was all but handing him over to what had always been her greatest, and least trumpable, rival: Rumi, whose story this so clearly reflected. The most selfless gesture of all: she was telling him to keep going, in a way, even if it was along a road that would take him away from her.
He put down the letter and wasn’t sure where to turn: our questions, the stories we carry with us through life, never really change, he thought, even if we wear different clothes for them, and think our circumstances look different. We’re really just in eternal syndication, as they’d say round here, playing the same parts over and over even if we think we’ve left all that behind. Here he was, on the edge of the New World, falling into a new relation—with everything—and he’d ended up, so it seemed, exactly where he’d been amidst the thirteenth-century cloisters in England.
He thought of calling Dick and asking him if he wanted to play tennis at seven o’clock, or perhaps making up the missed
Conformist
with Alex. He thought of a drive up to the temple in the hills, where he’d always gone to collect himself. But he didn’t want to carry ghosts up, of a kind that temples like that were meant to screen out; and he didn’t want to start talking to Alex or Dick about exactly what he ought to be keeping to himself. He turned on the computer, and decided it would be best just to still his mind by doing some routine work that required nothing from him at all: transcribing notes, perhaps, from one file to another.
He scrolled down the list of files on-screen, looking for the last one he’d opened, checking by the date, and as he did so, he came across what had to be a mistake (though computers don’t tend to make mistakes): one file had been opened today, the machine said— 01-04-1996, 9:11. It couldn’t have been, he thought—he’d been away in India for eight days, and then in the rainy house with Camilla: he hadn’t even turned on the machine since the previous year. But the day’s contours stared up at him from the screen, telling him he’d already been on-line this morning.
He clicked on the file to open it—it was called ABANDON—and when it came up, saw the notes he’d put in a year or so before, while writing on de Caussade: the book whose title he’d been so taken by
(Abandon à la providence divine)
that he’d checked it out of the library on a whim.
“Abandonment,” he read now, and found himself going back to what seemed like another lifetime,
is the crime that God is accused of by man. Abandoning us to our fate, our sorrow, those not sympathetic to Him might say, as a negligent father leaves his children to the storm outside. Even Jesus on the Cross raised the same complaint: “O Father, Father, why hast thou abandoned me?”
Yet what if we take the word a little differently? What if, let’s say, God’s abandonment is not that of an indifferent parent, but, rather, that of a composer, a creator, so carried away by the forces that race through Him that He forgets everything around Him and lets the story run away with Him? What if God gets so lost in the delight, the forgetfulness, of creating that what He’s making somehow takes on a life of its own, as we say? What, in other words, if the abandonment that God is guilty of is not that of desertion but, rather, of rapture, the neglectfulness of an artist who lets the work take over?
Is it possible? Could it have happened that Man, the highest work in God’s creation, according to the Moslems, might have got the better of his Creator’s plans for him? As Iago might have run away with Shakespeare? And God, in whatever sense the word has meaning, “lost Himself ” in creating us and so, in a way that could not have been foreseen, lost us? God’s very abandon leading to our abandonment, not just on the level of a clever play on words, but much deeper, as when, surrendering, we give ourselves over to what we could never have expected? And so the beings He was creating acquired colors, or destinies, He could never have imagined, and the world became much richer, more full of contingency, than was planned.
It’s heresy, of course, to say that the purest Creator of all might be subject to the impulses of the very beings He created. And yet it tells us that we are never more God-like than when we give up—give up control, give up expectation.
He looked at it now, and tried to remember the different person who’d written this, in a momentary flight all those lives ago. Speaking for the very principle he wouldn’t embrace if it came to him in life.
At the bottom of the text, he now saw, was something he was sure he hadn’t seen there, and was sure he hadn’t put there: “Abandon everything,” Dionysus’s words to his followers. “God despises ideas.”
The next week, thanks to some of Sefadhi’s maneuverings, an Iranian was due to come onto campus to deliver a talk on passion in Islam. He was a complicated man, according to Sefadhi, who’d been forced to leave Iran in a hurry, and had lost everything he owned; but he has “wisdom you will be the better for. Even the thorniest rose has fragrance.”
His own research, though, seemed to be moving ever more in circles, as if the Rumi he thought he knew had turned into someone else, just as—McCarthy said—your room becomes something different as soon as you install a different kind of light. He’d taken Rumi for years to be the great laureate of love, in some ways giving voice, and spiritual elevation, to the excitement every teenager feels when he steps outside himself. But now, as his thesis drew towards a close, he saw that really he was writing not about love but about loss.
The great majority of his poems had been written (was this what Martine had been telling him, too, with her letter?) after his beloved’s absence. Their theme was not so much the intoxication as the more resonant and lasting question of what comes after. How do you begin to turn absence into presence and loss into a kind of discovery? He’d thought the poems were about passion; now he saw that that was true only insofar as passion, in the Latin, meant “suffering.”
As soon as she came back to his house, three days later, they put all words aside; and went in their minds to the rainy house again. He could ask her about the sentence at the bottom of the file, or whether she’d gone to Palm Springs with Greg; he could force her into the smallest box he could find (and diminish himself in the process). But the only point of their being together, it seemed, was to climb and to fall into something else.
Hands and mouths were flame, and everything that had been held back, pushed down for so long, seemed to come loose now, in a rush. She shuddered even when he touched her neck; he jumped around her like a madman, said things he couldn’t fathom. A door had sprung open, and everything came out.
“I can’t believe how well we fit together.”
It was the usual lover’s sentence, in the usual lover’s light: the sea was tugging at the shore outside, and their lives lay on the floor around them. Distant calls from far along the beach, and the light, as from a festive house, of the single derrick out to sea.
“You mean like this?”
“Like everything. The letters in our names. The circumstances of our lives—all the times when we could have been in the same room without knowing it. The way I felt something inside me and never guessed that it was you.”
The same things that every pair of lovers say when they’re ushered into the impersonal. She was lying on the pillow, her face turned away from him, caught by the light as it rose outside the window. Her hair was a wet tangle, and the skin around her neck, beneath her ears, was damp. His mouth was at the dampness, on the faint golden down on her back, at the hollows and arches down her spine. His voice was at her ear, and he was calling her name over and over and over.
The next day, when he awoke, he was nobody he could recognize; nobody he could even trust. His thesis overturned, his adviser forgotten, the letter from the library recalling the book on
Rumi’s Passion
thrown under a pile of scrap papers on the desk. He came out of the bedroom and into the study, and wondered how much he’d become her, in a curious way: the person he’d longed to be when first he came to California, though no one that anyone could get on with very easily.
In the kitchen the clock said, “9:45”—too late for his morning run, too late for a desk in the library. Whatever he knew of anything seemed not a searchlight now, but a kind of screen, a wall that stood between him and a truer knowledge. And the person he’d thought he might become seemed locked up in someone else’s house, and all he had to get by on was a set of clothes that belonged to someone else.
He looked in on her where she lay, at perfect peace, but sure to be frightened, rattled when she awoke—the farther they went along their road together, the more terrified she would be (the more she could see how much there was to lose)—and the more obliquely they would have to move. He remembered the early afternoon on which he’d told her, “You take leave of your senses almost as if you were a mother seeing them off at the station. Waving and waving as the train pulls slowly away.”
“And you,” she’d said, “don’t take leave of them at all” (though in that respect, at least, she had been proved as misguided as he).
He thought of calling Alex, the way he’d always brought himself back to shore before, but then he remembered the last time they’d spoken. Alex had called to ask him why he hadn’t heard from him for so long—why he’d canceled all their meetings—and he’d said something vague and unpersuasive about being preoccupied. “You’re not falling subject to Religious Studies Syndrome?” his friend had said, and he, unable to resist, had said, “What’s that?”
“Suddenly,” said Alex, in a faintly operatic way, “you see all the noble ideas you’re writing about—‘the dissolution of self,’ the ‘hidden stranger,’ the ‘unexpected liberator’—embodied, very conveniently, in the person you’re claiming not to see.”
“It isn’t like that,” he’d said.
“Of course not,” his friend had said. “I just worry. You may not see this story of the dithering Englishman and the flighty woman as being about this, but she will do so. I can guarantee it.” Then, as if he was truly worried, “You can’t use a poem to get closer to a woman. You know that, don’t you? And you certainly can’t use a girl to get closer to a poem.”
Since then, he’d been wary of his friend, but now, newly emboldened, he remembered Alex had said something about their going together to an exhibition downtown, of Islamic paintings from Washington. He drove over to his friend’s house, a few blocks away, on Embarcadero, and knocked at the door. There was no answer. Strange: this was the time when Alex was nearly always home. He walked around, knocked at the side door, but still there was nothing. Shrugging, he took himself downtown, and parked by the rambling gardens of the Courthouse. The sound of water playing from a nearby fountain.
He went through the Spanish-style courtyard, past the strummed
canciones
from the Mexican restaurant, the early flowers in the sun, and went up the two flights to where they were showing the miniatures. The room was kept dark—a sort of visual hush—and most of it was empty space: each tidy rectangle hung in a small area, hardly larger than that of a magazine, and around it there was mostly emptiness. Yet each of the paintings held a world in it. A pair of lovers waiting in a pavilion; a wounded deer; a royal hunting expedition: all the archetypal scenes of Islamic art through the centuries. In many pictures, a woman sat alone, in an upstairs room, waiting for her beloved on a night of rain.
In every one of the pictures—it was easier to see when they were all together like this—the same figures reappeared, as if, across centuries and continents, every painter had tried to draw upon the same pool of images. Indeed, as if every painter had tried to draw the same face, as if he was the same person. The artists had nullified personality, in both themselves and their subjects, till all the figures—types, really—seemed no more human than the script in gold, written on black panels at the bottom, or the ornamental frames that held the images in a cage.
He went from one room to the next, then back again, and found himself strangely calmed by the quiet, the darkness of the space. All kinds of worlds and environments soothed into this simple, unchanging order. And in every one, the world was seen, famously, not as we would see it, with its particularities and imperfections, but as Allah might (which is why you could see what was going on in every room at once). The celestial viewpoint was part of what accounted for the stillness in the paintings, the sense of calm. Even the scenes of blood-shed were strangely without drama.
At the very end of the second room, the curator had chosen to include three paintings from Venice, to show how the tradition had come up against a wall, and turned a corner, you could say. These pictures were notably different, because they had proportion, individuality. In Venice, rulers had asked that they be painted larger than their background, that they be shown as exactly who they were—the persons that their wives and mistresses saw. They’d even demanded (a small notice explained) they be painted in the middle of each frame. Pieces of the classical style were still apparent, but the heavenly serenity of the other paintings had been replaced by the jangle and vividness of the real.