Tales from the Thousand and One Nights

I spent Saturday afternoon at the Noor Iranian film festival with my friend Johanna to see Nasseredin Shah and His 84 Wives.  The documentary, made by a Norwegian director, combined animation with a photos taken by Nasseredin with the camera he received from Queen Victoria in 1842.  Much of the film centered around political and familial intrigue between the women as they rose and fell in their husband's favor.  (For a brief interlude he preferred a cat to all of them, but it met an untimely end.)

One striking thing about the group photographs of the women, aside from the fact that the photos exist at all, was that it showed a standard of beauty for the time that's markedly different from the one I'm accustomed to.  Although they came from different regions and ethnic groups in and around Persia, many of his beauties were heavyset and most had dark facial hair, with their "mustaches" and "monobrows" being coveted features.  During the Q&A after the film one of the festival organizers said she'd researched this and learned that these traits suggested a woman who would give birth to strong sons. 

This preference is a far cry from modern-day Seattle.  Certainly there are men who fetishize ample women's bodies (many of whom say so in rather tactless ways).  The opposite seems more common though.  Just this week I skimmed a dating profile where a man specified that his future girlfriend's BMI (body mass index) would need to be less than 24, "otherwise don't bother."  (He didn't appear to be particularly fit himself, but she needs to fall in the "normal" category to be considered.  I can't imagine why he's still single.)  His online brothers content themselves with the more straightforward description "slender", the encoded HWP (height weight proportionate) or the euphemistic "takes care of herself."

Another source of ideas about ideals is that's been on my mind lately is Tales from the Thousand and One Nights. I've been reading the Shahrazad stories a few at a time over the summer.  The Penguin edition has an introduction that says the stories owe their origin to three distinct cultures: Indian, Persian and Arab.  "They can be regarded as the expression of the lay and secular imagination of the East in revolt against the austere erudition and religious zeal of Oriental literature generally."

I expected desert tales and was surprised how many shipwrecks and islands there were.  Apart from sailing, mules and camel caravans, travel is expedited by tricking a giant mythological bird called a Roc into carrying you or by calling upon the power of a jinnee.  I was less surprised by the way beautiful women are described.  Here are sisters from The Porter and the Three Girls of Baghdad ("city of peace"):

p. 243 "A young woman, dressed in rare silks and cloaked in a gold-embroidered mantle of Mosul brocade, stopped before him and gently raised her veil.  Beneath it there showed dark eyes with long lashes and lineaments of perfect beauty..."

p. 244 "...the door was opened by a girl of surpassing beauty.  Her forehead was white as a lily and her eyes were more lustrous than a gazelle's.  Her brows were crescent moons, her cheeks anemones, and her mouth like the crimson ruby on King Solomon's ring.  Her teeth were whiter than a string of pears, and like twin pomegranates were her breasts."

p. 244 "A third girl, slim and exquisitely beautiful, was reclining on the couch.  Her face was radiant as the moon and all the witchcraft of Babylon was in her eyes.  A paragon of Arabian grace, she was like a star twinkling in a cloudless sky or a golden dome shimmering in the night."

I'd like to see a classroom full of young writers have fun with this - perhaps a description of their society's ideal, or a subverted version of it, or a translation of it into more lyrical language...

Jason Elliot's An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan

I'm clearing out my physical bookshelf as part of my preparation for life's next adventure, so I'm starting this blog as a place to put some dog-eared pages.  Maybe they get incorporated into lesson plans later or maybe they just help me lighten the load in my next move.  My sturdy 4-year-old laptop recently gasped it's last overheated breath and my public library generates myriad "send error report" messages when I try to reach my Wordpress blog, so here are some excerpts to consider over breakfast.

Elliot's book about his travels in Afghanistan was both interesting and a slog to read at times- florid writing that occasionally was as pretentious as it was informative.  Three passages about the experience of being a solo traveler with imperfect grasp of the local languages made me mark page numbers.

p. 191 "By one o'clock the sun had thrown a pale yellow light over the bare hills and the day felt already spent. I was worried about the way ahead.  Always there is this kind of suspense on a journey where you are both isolated and robbed of your own language.  Under such conditions the means by which you make sense of things begins to be transformed; you can no longer rely on familiar signals but a cryptic sequence of tiny events, the pattern of which you sense more keenly as your isolation grows.  It leads to a kind of parting of ways; you either let go of your worries and put your faith in the natural unfolding of events or are plagued with anxieties, which multiply as darkness falls.

I could hear the two voices at work.  One was an incessant reminder about safety, fear of loneliness and insecurities of every kind.  How would I know if a truck came and went?  Would my bag be safe in the serai?  Time and again I had been told it was unsafe to travel alone...I had been from the beginning of the trip aware of this first voice; an almost relentless tale of worry about how things would turn out at every stage, like that of a homesick child longing for the familiar.  It had its own legitimacy but as anyone knows who has been touched by the spell of travel there is another voice longing to be heard, and now for the first time I was able to hear it; a calmer signal on which I was unwilling at first to rely.  It was the impulse to put my trust in the natural course of events, and to surrender not passively but intelligently, to the restraints and opportunities of the moment. Was I not fed and warm and in a place of beauty? Things would work out..."

p. 289 "What, after all, was a travel book?  That young Italian [Marco Polo] had started it all in the thirteenth century, and had given the telling of tall tales from foreign parts its subsequent respectability.  On the whole it had not changed much since Polo's time: a man or a woman sets off for foreign parts ignorant of both the language and geography of the place, with an out-of-date map and borrowed phrase book, preys shamelessly for as long as the family trust will allow on the hospitality of the native people, and returns home to hastily record his or her first impressions in a semi-fictional collection of descriptions that affirm the prejudices of the day.  Then reminded of the mediocrity of the experiences described and to ease the risk of any intellectual burden on the microscopic attention span of the reader; he or she retrospectively invents a fashionable 'quest' around which the narrative can be twisted in every direction except toward the truth, fits it tidily with invented dialogues, speculative history, sweeping inaccuracies, mistranslations, verbose accounts of having braved hazards endured daily by ordinary local people without complaint, portrays as a revelation long lists of trivial facts known to every local schoolchild, and bludgeons the original spirit of the endeavor in an attempt to appear erudite with the academic verbiage of out-of-print encyclopedias, disguising all the while the discomfort of being at sea in an alien culture by resorting to the quirky, condescending humor that its couch-bound audience will think of as funny.  The result?  Only a confirmation of what everybody already knows: better to stay at home."

p. 345 "Under the scrutiny of a dozen stern gazes I felt an old pang ignite defensively: to travel with an Afghan friend.  With the right company, the inevitable burden of enquiry would be shared more evenly between visitor and host, and polished exchanges would replace my own cracked idioms.  There would be no need to reach that point of mental debility where expression in another language seems an impossible exertion.  Only an Afghan friend could help decode literal truths from cultural prejudices or, conversely, explain satisfactorily to others the strange Western habits that risked giving offense; the wish to slope off and write, to be alone from time to time, to know the names of things, to visit places for no obvious reason.

In an unfamiliar language you make up a lot of what you lack in the spoken word by interpreting tensions of voice, gesture and ritual that betray another's meaning.  In a strange of dangerous place you are forever reading these signals, consciously or not, through an alliance of the analytical and the intuitive, and the more hazardous or unfamiliar the circumstances, the greater the meaning you come to extract from ever smaller events.  Sometimes lack of language seems to lighten things, and your contact with others is unburdened by definitions.  Bu at others there comes a point of exhaustion when you simply want to talk about ordinary things and not have to think about every word.  A journey magnifies both extremes; I was feeling the weight of the latter and, meeting the stares of twenty silent men, felt mute and helpless."

Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

It's a good thing I never got around to Rilke during college because I would have been insufferable!  My friend Barbara gave me a few of volumes of poetry when she moved and I especially enjoyed these two translations by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.  They throw out the rhyme scheme in favor of a more modern sound.  For those who don't read German, they've kept the first line as the title for the translated verse.  Please forgive me my missing umlaut on ware:

Wenn ich gewachsen ware irgendwo

If I had grown in some generous place -
if my hours had opened in ease -
I would make you a lavish banquet
My hands wouldn't clutch at you like this,
so needy and so tight.

Then I'd have dared to squander you,
you Limitless Now.
I'd have tossed you into the ringing air
like a ball that someone leaps for and catches
with hands outstretched.

I would have painted you: not on the wall
but in one broad sweep across heaven.
I'd have portrayed you brashly:
as mountain, as fire, as a wind
howling from the desert's vastness

Ich bin auf der Welt zu allein und doch nicht allein genug

I am too alone in the world, yet not along enough
to make each hour holy.
I'm too small in the world, yet not small enough
to be simply in your presence, like a thing -
just as it is

I want to know my own will
and to move with it.
And I want in the hushed moments
when the nameless draws near,
to be among the wise ones -
or alone.

I want to mirror your immensity.
I want never to be too weak or too old
to bear the heavy, lurching image of you.

I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed
for where I am closed, I am false
I want to stay clear in your sight

I would describe myself like a landscape I've studied
at length, in detail;
like a word I've come to understand;
like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime'
like my mother's face;
like a ship that carried me
when the waters raged.

Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

I loved this description from the first chapter of Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd.  (Maybe it's just because lately I've spent too much time reading terrible profiles on dating websites.)  As a writing exercise give yourself 850 words to describe someone and close with the essence of what matters in fewer than 10.

"When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.

His Christian name was Gabriel, and on working days he was a young man of sound judgment, easy motions, proper dress, and general good character. On Sundays he was a man of misty
views, rather given to postponing, and hampered by his best clothes and umbrella: upon the whole, one who felt himself to occupy morally that vast middle space of Laodicean neutrality which lay between the Communion people of the parish and the drunken section, -- that is, he went to church, but yawned privately by the time the congregation reached the Nicene creed, and thought of what there would be for dinner when he meant to be listening to the sermon. Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he as considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.

Since he lived six times as many working-days as Sundays, Oak's appearance in his old clothes was most peculiarly his own -- the mental picture formed by his neighbours in imagining him being always dressed in that way. He wore a low-crowned felt hat, spread out at the base by tight jamming upon the head for security in high winds, and a coat like Dr. Johnson's; his lower extremities being encased in ordinary leather leggings and boots emphatically large, affording to each foot a roomy apartment so constructed that any wearer might stand in a river all day long and know nothing of damp -- their maker being a conscientious man who endeavoured to compensate for any weakness in his cut by unstinted dimension and solidity.

Mr. Oak carried about him, by way of watch, what may be called a small silver clock; in other words, it was a watch as to shape and intention, and a small clock as to size. This instrument being several years older than Oak's grandfather, had the peculiarity of going either too fast or not at all. The smaller of its hands, too, occasionally slipped round on the pivot, and thus, though the minutes were told with precision, nobody could be quite certain of the hour they belonged to. The stopping peculiarity of his watch Oak remedied by thumps and shakes, and he escaped any evil consequences from the other two defects by constant comparisons with and observations of the sun and stars, and by pressing his face close to the glass of his neighbours' windows, till he could discern the hour marked by the green-faced timekeepers within. It may be mentioned that Oak's fob being difficult of access, by reason of its somewhat high situation in the waistband of his trousers (which also lay at a remote height under his waistcoat), the watch was as a necessity pulled out by throwing the body to one side, compressing the mouth and face to a mere mass of ruddy flesh on account of the exertion required, and drawing up the watch by its chain, like a bucket from a well.

But some thoughtful persons, who had seen him walking across one of his fields on a certain December morning -- sunny and exceedingly mild -- might have regarded Gabriel Oak in other aspects than these. In his face one might notice that many of the hues and curves of youth had tarried on to manhood: there even remained in his remoter crannies some relics of the boy. His height and breadth would have been sufficient to make his presence imposing, had they been exhibited with due consideration. But there is a way some men have, rural and urban alike, for which the mind is more responsible than flesh and sinew: it is a way of curtailing their dimensions by their manner of showing them. And from a quiet modesty that would have become a vestal which seemed continually to impress upon him that he had no great claim on the world's room, Oak walked unassumingly and with a faintly perceptible bend, yet distinct from a bowing of the shoulders. This may be said to be a defect in an individual if he depends for his valuation more upon his appearance than upon his capacity to wear well, which Oak did not.

He had just reached the time of life at which "young" is ceasing to be the prefix of "man" in speaking of one. He was at the brightest period of masculine growth, for his intellect and his emotions were clearly separated: he had passed the time during which the influence of youth indiscriminately mingles them in the character of impulse, and he had not yet arrived at the stage wherein they become united again, in the character of prejudice, by the influence of a wife and family. In short, he was twenty-eight, and a bachelor."

(I recommend Nathaniel Parker's British English audiobook version to really hear this story.)