LIFE OF A SUFI
THE ARAB HERDSMAN first saw his son in a dream, although he had neither sired a son nor even taken a wife to his bed nor even any animal, though he had loved all the animals of the herd and did not consider them unworthy of human carnal love, since it was clear that their spirits were in harmony with his own—most of the time, which was as much as you could say about any living creature. Of course the Holy Book forbade congress with animals, and as a good Sunni he did not want to violate its tenets when there was no necessity to do so, but still his imagination had considered the idea.
What is our connection to the animals? he pondered. Is not our flesh and blood very much like theirs? At times, even our joys and sorrows resemble theirs.
Before he was grown, he thought of his own imagination as being goatlike, familiar and friendly, playful, companionable. After he had spent his young manhood out in the desert, after he had been alone enough to feel his brain curing among the stars like meat cures from the proximity of myriad sugar grains, he came to believe imagination resembled not an animal but the brightest of stars—Capella. How many Arab men, when they became mature and proper herdsmen, had seen the bright star Capella and let it inspire a mirror brightness in their own hearts, in the depths of their hearts? (Capella was called the Goat Star, anyway, and it was essence of goat, lively and twinkling.)
As an aging man, after he journeyed to Cairo and became full of natural wisdom and of Sufi learning, he would know they were the same—the depth of his heart and the height of the stars. It was those unattainable and distant points of light that made the flatness of the earth meaningful to him. What was life if it had only length and breadth like a rectangle drawn on a flat of sand? No, it was the third dimension, that of height or depth (they were infinitely the same), that he had sought and found.
Even when he was still young, he first found meaningfulness as height in the heavens above when he stood watch at night alone on the dunes with the animals. He had thought of the shepherds in the story of the birth of the prophet Jesus and how with his birth a brightness had come to their minds and their inner voices had been allowed to speak and sing, “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.”
Second, he had found transcendence in the depth of his heart. Sometimes he told himself his own story (when he had no child near enough to listen):
One night when I had felt loneliness like the jaws of a nutcracker and myself the nut, when the starry sky was a jaw of teeth, the stark earth the lower jaw and I between—One night when I had felt unbearable loneliness, sky and earth came together and squeezed my brain till I knew I must take my herd to town and sell them and live in the city. (My own town was originally Nag Hammadi, and it had been my grandfather’s village when he himself was a boy who had stubbed his toe on the buried jar that held buried wisdom for the Christians, though most of them have learned little from it) And I thought, out of my solitary pain, though I am a man and not a schoolchild, I must learn to read and write and all that the teachers can say to me in the city, and that will be the path to salvation so that I will not go mad because I think I am alone in the universe, as all mortals are alone and wretched, not just ignorant but stupid and blighted, because they do not know reality but only these empty visible forms, these shapes we use as guideposts.
For weeks and months, perhaps years, I herded my goats toward the city on the Nile, and as we progressed, their bells tinkled in what Westerners would call a symphony of sound. It was the sweetest music I ever heard, that of my herd, and whenever we passed camels who had the talent for dancing, they recognized that this was music and began to dance, and the sounds of their harnesses and jangling gear added their own notes. This earthly music is too sweet to take to town, I sometimes thought. I hesitated and thought, Allah is telling me, Go back, do not surrender the unbearable peace (and loneliness) of your pure life in the desert for the city. There were many voices in the music, but finally I took this confusion to be a snare and a delusion, and I decided to obey the bright, clear idea that had first come to me. I continued to follow the flow of the river northward almost to the place where its waters bifurcate and fan into the Mediterranean.
But my hesitation, my ambivalence, had been real, and I had wasted time going first one direction and then backtracking, then going off at an angle, and reversing that path till my footsteps printed their own star in the dust as I tried out many directions. But finally again, I remembered the necessity of pursuing the road beside the north-flowing river, and I came to the city. I was to find my son, you see.
That was Allah’s will for me: to have the son I never had.
It was the crack of dawn when we came, the herd and I, not back to Nag Hammadi because we had not just traveled in a circle, but because my journeying in the wilderness for a long time had led to the very outskirts of the city of Cairo, which looked like a village to me, though I heard a kind of murmur that might have informed me had I paid attention and might have caused me to realize that a whole vast city lay beyond the villagelike outskirts. But this seeming village was only the fringe of the city, the frayed edge of the garment of the city.
BANG! Such a noise, and again BANG!
I recognized what startled me was the firing of a powerful gun such as no one should carry into the city where the most fierce animal is only man whose skin is so very tender and can be so easily pierced by even the weakest bullet, or even a knife. One can also kill another man with a wire for a garrote. And there is poison. Or one can drop down a simple rock from a high place. One can plant an evil seed such as a coiled snake or several scorpions under the blanket where his enemy sleeps. What is the need of a powerful gun?
I left my dog with the herd and took only one goat with me as a sort of escort because it was early morning, and I was a stranger in this place, and I did not want some ranger or policeman asking, “What is this man doing walking in our streets?” No. Instead they would see me with the fine goat and think, He is here to sell his goat, and they would let me pass.
My goat—his name was … His name is a blank. My goat’s name and even his meaning to me have become like two blank eyes staring over time at me. His name and his features have been erased from my memory, but still I remember he was. In any case, I turned the corner, and there we saw a young woman sliding down the wall of a building, leaving a smear of her own blood behind her on the whitewash of the wall. She sagged down onto the street. In amazement and horror, I turned for an explanation to my goat, but now he had grown large and turned into a cow—yes, a cow. (Usually to turn a goat into a cow, there must be a trade between two men each of whom owns one of each, but in this case that step was simply stepped over, and I looked into the sweet, gentle eyes of a cow.)
And then I saw my boy where once there had been nothing but a blank wall. He was wrapped in a woman’s shawl, but I knew him to be my boy, all huddled at the place where the wall met the flat street, that juncture where two dimensions meet—like an incomplete corner. I simply reached down and took his hand. We hurried. Hurry was essential. It was from my desperate fear for his safety that the idea of real hurry was born.
And then I knew the depth of my heart. It matched the height of Capella the Goat Star. I knew my own essence, which was to love this boy with all my spirit, and all my mind, and all my heart, and in knowing this love I would know God beyond myself but within me as sure as the stars sprinkled the sky above me because what is inner is also outer.
Amen.
That is my story. This is the end of the story that swooped me up in its wings.
But it is not the end of what happened. When we left the bloody wall, he seemed both to know and not to know that his mother was gone. The boy was very young, but he knew his name. He told me his father was French, and from that he had been named Pierre, but he used his mother’s last name because his father had left them (though his mother said he was a good man), so his name in its entirety was Pierre Saad.
I told him that I had come to the city to learn the mystic ways of the Sufi. He asked me how I had found him, and I told him how I’d followed a star and found him.
He asked me which star, because dawn was just breaking and we could still see a few bright points in the gray sky above the edge of the city.
And I answered it was the star named for my goat, who had just turned into a cow.
When he laughed and squeezed my hand exactly the way a boy should who is sharing a secret with his father, I knew that he was a boy who would find joy in his life.
You may ask me, Did your boy who must be a man now find joy?
And I will say the path is not always straight. On its own—not just through our hesitations—it twists and turns. I would tell you he found joy and lost it. He keeps his own joy in his child, now a grown woman but not married and who may or may not marry because she is married to her work. My son has also found joy in his work. Like me, he loves images.
He understands images to be the mediators between what is mortal and what is divine, what has form and what is real beyond any shape or form. The image is not the betrayer, as some Muslims think; it is the gate. My son is not a Sufi; he is a scientist. But he is a good scientist; he knows he does not study reality; he knows that he and his colleagues only work to construct a picture of reality. He has told me this many times so that I do not worry about him.
But I do worry about him. Violence has visited his life twice to take from him those who are dearest to him. His mother and then his wife were taken from him by those who would lock religion in a box bound with metal. Patterns sometimes run in threes, and it may happen again. I only hope he does not lose his daughter, because she is the future that rightly belonged to both his mother and his wife. Finally I hope only that my son remains safe and alive till I am not. I hope that in the afterlife I do not ache with anxiety about his safety or his happiness. I wish him protection. Beyond that I wish that joy may visit my son named Pierre Saad again.
Voices braid together to tell a story. Sometimes one section disappears behind another. How many strands are there, and where do they come from and how does one story disappear or emerge unexpectedly?
Pierre Saad trusted his father and took his hand because his father was accompanied by Hathor the Cow, the goddess of beauty, and the little orphaned boy believed in the truth of beauty that depends on imagination. The Sufi father taught the boy as he grew that the text is always open to new interpretations because story conjures images, and pictures partaking of the infinite transcend both space and time. Pierre Saad wanted to read the earth—pictures left in caves when humans were original, close to their beginnings as humans. He wanted to read the artful images painted on, etched in, shaped from, stone, carried in the hand, or abandoned on a cave wall, or buried with the dead, or simply dropped and lost by those earliest humans.
For almost forty thousand years, images begat images through the hands of mankind, and most men went away and forgot the cave art and did not understand even what it was. Incised or painted on an envelope of rock, the mail was left undelivered. Only a few people knew the rock images were addressed to them and to their children’s children.
Pierre the anthropologist was curious, too, about reading the starry sky—such as his friend Thom Bergmann (really only a voice on the telephone at first, then the voice arising from printed letters on a sheet of paper or on a screen, finally the man bleeding under a broken piano) had wanted to share with him. “What will it mean,” Thom had asked through his letters, “if we can picture a universe with others Out There? What will it mean about humanness?”
Sitting in his oaken library in the Dordogne Valley of south-central France, smelling through his open window the fragrance of wheat ripening in the sun, Pierre Saad held a sheet of fine stationery between his fingers and read a blackly inked text suggesting he might become national director of parietal art for the country of his father, who had deserted his mother. Though his adopted father had taught him that only God has power and glory (and yet He is nothing), Pierre Saad began to want them both for himself.