Compass Read online

  Die Augen schließ’ ich wieder,

  Noch schlägt das Herz so warm.

  Wann grünt ihr Blätter am Fenster?

  Wann halt’ ich mein Liebchen im Arm?

  Once more I try to close my eyes,

  yet my heart beats strong and warm—

  when will the leaves at my window turn green

  when will I hold my darling in my arms?

  — Wilhelm Müller & Franz Schubert,

  Die Winterreise

  On the Divers

  Forms of Lunacie

  in the Orient

  Orientalists in Love

  Caravan of Cross-Dressers

  Gangrene & Tuberculosis

  Portraits of Orientalists as Commanders of the Faithful

  Encyclopedia of the Decapitated

  COMPASS

  We are two opium smokers each in his own cloud, seeing nothing outside, alone, never understanding each other we smoke, faces agonizing in a mirror, we are a frozen image to which time gives the illusion of movement, a snow crystal gliding over a ball of frost, the complexity of whose intertwinings no one can see, I am that drop of water condensed on the window of my living room, a rolling liquid pearl that knows nothing of the vapor that engendered it, nor of the atoms that still compose it but that, soon, will serve other molecules, other bodies, the clouds weighing heavy over Vienna tonight: over whose nape will this water stream, against what skin, on what pavement, toward what river, and this indistinct face on the glass is mine only for an instant, one of the millions of possible configurations of illusion — look, Herr Gruber is walking his dog despite the drizzle, he’s wearing a green hat and his eternal raincoat; he avoids getting splashed by the cars by making ridiculous little leaps on the pavement: the mutt thinks he wants to play, so it leaps toward its master and gets a good slap the second it places its dirty paw on Herr Gruber’s coat, despite everything he manages to reach the road to cross, his silhouette is lengthened by the streetlights, a blackened pool in the midst of the sea of shadows of the tall trees ripped apart by the headlights along the Porzellangasse, and Herr Gruber seems to think twice about plunging into the Alsergrund night, as I do about leaving my contemplation of the drops of water, the thermometer, and the rhythm of the trams descending toward the Schottentor.

  Existence is a painful reflection, an opium addict’s dream, a poem by Rumi sung by Shahram Nazeri, the ostinato of the zarb makes the window vibrate slightly beneath my fingers like the skin of the drum, I should go on reading instead of watching Herr Gruber disappearing under the rain, instead of straining my ears to the swirling melismata of the Iranian singer, whose power and timbre could make many of our tenors blush with shame. I should pause the CD, impossible to concentrate; pointless reading this offprint for the tenth time, I don’t understand any of its mysterious meaning, twenty pages, twenty horrible, frosty pages, which reached me precisely today, today when a compassionate doctor may have named my illness, declared my body officially diseased, almost relieved at having given my symptoms a diagnosis — a deadly kiss — a diagnosis we’ll need to confirm while beginning a treatment, he said, and following the disease’s evolution, evolution, there it is, there we are, contemplating a drop of water evolving toward disappearance before it reforms itself in the Great All.

  There is no such thing as chance, everything is connected, Sarah would say, why did I receive this article in the mail precisely today, an old-fashioned, stapled offprint instead of a PDF accompanied by a note hoping it “arrives safely,” an email that could have given some news, explained where she is, what this Sarawak is where she’s writing from, according to my atlas it’s a state in Malaysia in the northwestern part of the island of Borneo, not far from Brunei and its rich sultan, not far from the gamelans of Debussy and Britten either, it seems to me — but the tenor of the article is quite different; no music, aside perhaps from a long dirge; twenty dense leaves that appeared in the September issue of Representations, a fine journal from the University of California for which she has often written. The article bears a brief inscription on the title page, without commentary, For you dearest Franz, with love, Sarah, and was mailed on November 17, two weeks ago — it still takes two weeks for a piece of mail to make the journey from Malaysia to Austria, maybe she skimped on the stamps, she could have added a postcard or some explanation, what does it mean, I went through every trace of her I have in my apartment, her articles, two books, a few photographs, and even a copy of her doctoral thesis, printed and bound in red Skivertex, two hefty volumes weighing three kilos each:

  “There are certain wounds in life that, like leprosy, eat away at the soul in solitude and diminish it,” writes the Iranian Sadegh Hedayat at the beginning of his novel The Blind Owl: the little man with round glasses knew this better than anyone. It was one of those wounds that led him to turn the gas on high in his apartment on the rue Championnet in Paris, one evening of great solitude, an April evening, very far from Iran, very far, with as his only company a few poems by Khayyam and a somber bottle of cognac, perhaps, or a lump of opium, or perhaps nothing, nothing at all, aside from the texts he still kept, which he carried off with him into the great gas void.

  We don’t know if he left a letter or a sign other than his novel The Blind Owl, finished long ago, which would earn him, two years after his death, the admiration of French intellectuals who had never read anything from Iran: the publisher José Corti published The Blind Owl soon after Julien Gracq’s The Opposing Shore; Gracq would experience success after the gas on the rue Championnet had just had its effect, in 1951, and would say that the Shore was the novel of “all noble rot,” the kind of rot that had just finished off Hedayat in an ether of wine and gas. André Breton defended the two men and their books, too late to save Hedayat and his wounds, if he could have been saved, if the sickness had not been, very certainly, incurable.

  The little man with the thick round glasses was the same in exile as he was in Iran, calm and discreet, speaking softly. His irony and his malicious sadness led to his censorship, unless it was his sympathy for madmen and drunkards, maybe even his admiration for certain books and certain poets; perhaps he was censored because he dabbled in opium and cocaine, all the while making fun of drug addicts; because he drank alone, or had the defect of no longer expecting anything from God, not even on certain evenings of great solitude, when the gas calls; perhaps because he was miserable, or because he believed sensibly in the importance of his writing, or didn’t believe in it — all disturbing things.

  The fact remains that on the rue Championnet there is no plaque marking his stay, or his death; in Iran there is no monument to his memory, despite the weight of history that shows he cannot be overlooked, and the weight of his death, which still burdens his compatriots. His oeuvre lives on today in Tehran in the same way that he died, in poverty and secrecy, on stalls in flea markets, or in truncated reeditions, shorn of any allusions that might plunge the reader into drugs or suicide, in order to preserve the young people of Iran who suffer from those diseases of despair, suicide, and drugs, and who thus throw themselves into Hedayat’s books with delight, when they can find them. Celebrated and under-read in this way, he joins the great names that surround him at Père-Lachaise, not far from Proust, just as sober in eternity as he was in life, just as discreet, with few visitors and without any ostentatious flowers, ever since that April day in 1951 when he chose gas and the rue Championnet to put an end to all things, eaten away by a leprosy of the soul, imperious and incurable. “No one makes the decision to commit suicide; suicide is in certain men, it is in their nature,” Hedayat wrote in the late 1920s. He wrote these lines before he read and translated Kafka, before he introduced Khayyam. His work begins with the end. The first
collection he published opens with Buried Alive (Zendeh beh goor), with suicide and destruction, and clearly describes the thoughts, it seems, of the man in the instant he abandoned himself to the gas twenty years later, letting himself fall gently asleep after taking pains to destroy his papers and notes, in the tiny kitchen invaded by the unbearable perfume of the nascent spring. He destroyed his manuscripts, braver perhaps than Kafka, or perhaps because he had no Max Brod close at hand, perhaps because he trusted no one, or because he was convinced it was time to die. And while Kafka faded away, coughing, correcting until the last minute the texts he’d end up wanting to burn, Hedayat left in the slow agony of heavy sleep, his death already written twenty years earlier, his whole life pockmarked by the wounds and sores of the leprosy that ate away at him in solitude, which we might guess is linked to Iran, to the Orient, to Europe and to the West, as Kafka in Prague was at once German, Jewish, and Czech without being any of those things, more lost than anyone or freer than everyone. Hedayat had one of those wounds of self that make you reel through the world; it was that crevice that opened up until it became a crevasse; in this there is, as in opium, or in alcohol, or in anything that splits you in half, not an illness but a decision, a will to fissure your being, until the very end.

  By opening this article with Hedayat and his Blind Owl, we propose to explore this crevice, to go look inside the cleft, to enter the drunkenness of those men and women who have wavered too much in alterity; we are going to take the little man by the hand to go down and observe the gnawing wounds, the drugs, the elsewheres, and explore this between-space, this bardo, this barzakh, the world between worlds into which artists and travelers fall.

  Sarah’s prologue is a surprising one, these first lines are still, fifteen years after she has written them, just as disconcerting — it must be late, my eyes are closing over the old typescript despite the zarb and Nazeri’s voice. Sarah had been furious, when she was defending her thesis, at being reproached for the “romantic” tone of her preamble and for her “absolutely irrelevant” parallel with Gracq and Kafka. Morgan, her thesis advisor, had tried to defend her however, albeit rather naively, saying “it’s always a good thing to talk about Kafka,” which had made the jury of vexed Orientalists and sleepy mandarins sigh. They could only be drawn out of their doctrinal snooze by the hatred they felt for one another: in any case they forgot Sarah’s unusual introduction rather quickly to squabble over questions of methodology; that is, they didn’t see how walking through the text (the old boffin spat out this word like an insult) could have anything scientific about it, even if one allows oneself to be guided by the hand of Sadegh Hedayat. I was passing through Paris, happy to have an opportunity to attend a “Sorbonne-style” thesis defense for the first time, and happy that it was hers, but once past the surprise and amusement of discovering the dilapidated state of the hallways, the room and the jury, relegated to the backwaters of God knows what department lost in this labyrinth of knowledge, where five authorities would, one after the other, display their utter lack of interest in the text that was supposed to be under discussion, all the while deploying superhuman efforts — like me in the audience — not to fall asleep, this exercise filled me with bitterness and melancholy, and when we walked out of the room (a dingy classroom with cracked, warped desks made of chipboard, desks that held not knowledge but distracting graffiti and stuck-on chewing gum) to let these people deliberate, I was seized by a powerful desire to take to my heels, to go down the boulevard Saint-Michel and walk by the water so as not to meet Sarah and so she couldn’t guess my impressions of this famous defense that must have been very important to her. There were about thirty people in the audience, a big crowd for the tiny hallway we were crammed into; Sarah came out with the attendees, she was speaking to an older, very elegant lady, whom I knew to be her mother, and to a young man who looked disturbingly like her, her brother. It was impossible to move toward the exit without passing them, I turned around to look at the portraits of the Orientalists adorning the corridor, yellowing old engravings and commemorative plaques from a sumptuous time gone by. Sarah was chatting, she looked exhausted but not dejected; perhaps in the heat of scholarly debate, while taking notes to prepare her replies, she’d had a totally different impression from the audience’s. She saw me and waved. I had come mostly to support her, but also to prepare myself, even if only in imagination, for my own doctoral defense — and what I had just witnessed was not reassuring. I was wrong: after a few minutes of deliberation, when we were readmitted into the room, she received the highest grade; the famous presiding judge, the enemy of “walking through the text,” complimented her warmly on her work and today, as I reread the beginning of this text, I must admit there was something strong and innovative in these four hundred pages on the images and representations of the Orient, non-places, utopias, ideological fantasies in which many who had wanted to travel had gotten lost: the bodies of artists, poets, and travelers who had tried to explore them were pushed little by little toward destruction; illusion, as Hedayat said, ate away at the soul in solitude — what had long been called madness, melancholy, depression was often the result of a friction, a loss of self in creation, in contact with alterity, and even if it all seems to me today a little over-hasty, romantic, to be honest, there was probably already an actual intuition there on which she based all of her later work.

  Once the verdict was given, very happy for her, I went over to offer my congratulations, and she kissed me warmly asking: What are you doing here, and I replied that a happy coincidence had brought me to Paris, a white lie, she invited me to join her and her relatives for the traditional glass of champagne, which I accepted; we found ourselves upstairs at a neighborhood café where these sorts of events are often celebrated. Sarah suddenly looked dejected, I noticed that she was floating in her gray suit; her form had been swallowed up by the Academy, her body bore the traces of the effort made during the previous weeks and months: the four preceding years had all been building up to this moment, had no meaning except for this instant, and now that the champagne was flowing she was displaying the gentle, exhausted smile of a woman who has just given birth — she had dark rings under her eyes, I imagine she’d spent the night going over her paper, too excited to sleep. Gilbert de Morgan, her thesis advisor, was there of course; I had met him in Damascus. He didn’t hide his passion for his protégée, he was gazing fondly at her with a paternal air that veered gently to the incestuous as he consumed more champagne: at the third glass, his eyes alight and his cheeks red, leaning alone at a high table, I caught his eyes wandering from Sarah’s ankles to her belt, from bottom to top and then from top to bottom — at which point he let out a little melancholy burp and then emptied his fourth glass. He noticed I was observing him, looked fiercely at me before recognizing me and said with a smile, We’ve met before, haven’t we? I refreshed his memory, yes, I’m Franz Ritter, we saw each other in Damascus with Sarah — oh of course, the musician, and I was already so used to this contemptuous mistake that I replied with a slightly moronic smile. I hadn’t yet exchanged more than a few words with the graduate, she was being sought out by all of her friends and parents, and I was already cornered with this great scholar whom everyone, outside of a classroom or a department meeting, wanted ardently to avoid. He asked me all the conventionally approved questions about my own university career, questions I didn’t know how to answer, questions I would rather not even ask myself; but he was in good form, chummy, as the English say, not to say bawdy or lewd, and I was far from imagining that I would see him again a few months later in Tehran, under very different circumstances and in a different state altogether, still accompanied by Sarah who, at this moment, was immersed in conversation with Nadim — he had just arrived, she must have been explaining the rebuttals and ins and outs of the defense, why he hadn’t been there, I don’t know; he too was very elegant, in a beautiful round-collared white shirt that lit up his olive complexion, his short black beard; Sarah was holding his
hands as if they were about to start dancing. I excused myself from the professor and went to talk to them; Nadim immediately gave me a brotherly embrace that brought me back in an instant to Damascus, to Aleppo, to Nadim’s lute in the night, intoxicating the stars in the metallic sky of Syria, so far away, so far, ripped apart not by comets now but by missiles, bombs, screams, and war — impossible, in Paris in 1999, with a glass of champagne in hand, to imagine that Syria would be devastated by the worst violence, that the Aleppo souk would burn down, the minaret of the mosque of the Omayyads collapse, so many friends would die or be forced to go into exile; impossible even today to imagine the amplitude of the damage, the scope of this suffering from a comfortable, silent Viennese apartment.

  The CD’s over. What strength in this piece of Nazeri’s. What magical, mystical simplicity, this architecture of percussion that supports the slow pulsation of the song, the distant rhythm of the ecstasy to be attained, an hypnotic zikr that sticks in your ears and stays with you for hours on end. Nadim is a lute player who’s internationally recognized today, their marriage had caused a big commotion in the little expat community in Damascus, so unexpected, so sudden it became suspicious to many, and especially to the French Embassy in Syria — one of the countless surprises so typical of Sarah, the latest being this particularly startling article on Sarawak: not long after Nadim arrived I said my goodbyes, Sarah thanked me at length for having come, she asked if I’d be staying a few days in Paris, if we’d have time to see each other again, and I told her I was returning to Austria the next day; I respectfully took my leave of the academic now entirely slumped on his table.

  I walked out of the café and resumed my Parisian stroll. For a long time, with my feet scuffling through the dead leaves of the Seine quays, I went over the real reasons that made me waste my time like this, first at a thesis defense and then at the drinks that followed, and I caught a glimpse, in the halo of light that enveloped the brotherly arms of the Parisian bridges, pulling them out of the fog, of a trajectory, a promenade, whose goal or meaning might not appear until afterward, and which obviously has to pass through here, through Vienna where Herr Gruber is coming back from his walk with his filthy mutt: heavy footsteps on the stairs, the dog yapping, then above me, running and scratching over my ceiling. Gruber has never been a considerate neighbor but he’s always the first to complain about my music, Schubert’s fine, he says, but these old operas and all this, ahem, exotic music, it’s not exactly to everyone’s taste, if you know what I mean. I understand the music bothers you, Herr Gruber, I’m very sorry about it. However I would like to call to your attention the fact that I have carried out every experiment possible and imaginable on your dog’s hearing, when you’re out: I have discovered that only Bruckner (though only at sound levels bordering on the unacceptable) calms down his scratching on the floor and manages to quiet his shrill barking — which the entire building complains about for that matter — something I plan on developing in a scientific article on veterinary musical therapy which will without a doubt earn me the congratulations of my peers, “On the Effects of Brass Instruments on Canine Moods: Developments and Perspectives.”