New Waw, Saharan Oasis

VII THE DYADIC BIRD OF THE SPIRIT WORLD

1

The tribes knew another bird.

The tribes knew another bird in other times, and succeeding generations described it in praise poems that people still enjoy reciting today. Songs mentioned that he was a skillful singer and had only lost his marvelous body as a result of absorption in songs and fascination with melodies. But he was never absent from the world of the wasteland, because many blessed individuals saw him. Seeing him was a good omen for them, because they soon lost their bodies too and were liberated from captivity in the wasteland.

It was reported in histories that successive generations learned from experience that individuals whom the Spirit World favored saw its noble bird and soon shared its fate. They too lost their troublesome bodies and fled from the desert as the void became their homeland.

2

He arrived the way he always did, with the first breaths of autumn.

Yellow was garlanding the clumps of trees in Retem Valley, and the wind was variable. It blew from the East but then immediately changed and blew from the sea. Then it suddenly became so still that people in the encampments were sure it had departed to distant lands. Next it blew from the North at dusk with even greater force. Plants throughout the desert were agitated, the scant grass seeking the earth’s protection swayed back and forth, and retem tufts and acacia crests responded with fervent trembling. The desert was singing with delight at the change of the seasons.

The bird came from the Unknown to sing his song as well.

He came to sing about the sad change in the trees’ characteristics and to celebrate in songs of sorrow the mysterious, precious thing that autumn filches from the breasts of the wasteland’s people every year. They feel really sad at its loss, even though they have never perceived its secret. They often feel sad, but would experience a greater suffering if they knew that this lost jewel is called “life”!

3

Narrators disagreed about his size, color, and behavior.

Some said he was a little smaller than the mola-mola bird. Others said he was much smaller than a mola-mola. A third faction swore he was the size of a worker bee.

People of the wasteland also disagreed about his color. Some said he was speckled. Others affirmed that he was silver with wings washed with chartreuse. They said this made him look captivating during the fleeting moments when he darted from tree to tree and light deluged his wings. A third faction went even further and said he had no color, because it was impossible to discern the color of a being no one had ever seen. They also claimed that the people bickering about the bird’s size, color, or behavior were nothing but poets, who typically see what ordinary people don’t, hear what other people don’t, and say what others don’t.

But such a claim did not prevent the tribes from arguing about the bird’s behavior as well. Narrators said that he was terribly fond of valleys and preferred to hide in retem groves that autumn’s yellow assailed, hiding for a time by the trunks of these shrubs before breathing through his pipes and beginning his amazing music-making. Others said he only descended into the lower valleys toward the end, because he sheltered in the crests of the acacias on the higher plains and stayed there for longer or shorter periods, slipping into the valley bottoms only at the appointed hour for singing.

Skeptics, however, attacked these narratives too. They said that the desert people still suffer from an ancient illness that antiquity itself named blindness! The proof is that they are still incapable of distinguishing between what is true and what is false, between what is good and what is evil, and between what is visible and what is hidden. If suffering this ailment had not been an everlasting curse for them, they would have been able to discover easily that the bird they describe isn’t the same bird that fascinates them with his song. The bird they have always thought to be one bird actually visits the settlements in the company of another bird, his mate. Everything the tribes said about this songbird’s size, color, or conduct does not apply to the bird of the Spirit World but to the bird’s mate, which they typically view with the eyes of blindness.

4

The skeptics further discussed the bird and said that each body is divisible into two parts: the original and its shadow. They spoke for a long time about what is visible in the wasteland and what is hidden. They concluded that the shadow of a being is what the being’s eye sees with its blind vision. The original of the being is what is hidden from the eye of blindness and perceived only with the eye of the Spirit World. The people of the desert are wretches who have brought incurable ailments to the desert. They are incapable of distinguishing between these two types of vision and are equally incapable of distinguishing between all the weighty contradictions.

It is said that this faction was the first to caution the tribes against the allure of the Spirit World’s bird when they recounted the effect of his songs on people’s souls and the domination of his tunes over the intellects of even the wisest intellectuals. People would all jump up and hurry to the valleys to hear his hymns of amazing sorrow. Noblemen, vassals, slaves, herdsmen, women, young men, and even the children would rush to the valleys. The bird would seize control of them with his voice, and they would stay in the wadis for days, frequently forgetting themselves there. They would stay as long as the bird did — not eating, drinking, speaking, or sleeping. Then they would become emaciated and quiver with feverish ecstatic trances. The jinn tribes that resided in their breasts — which they thought they had forever destroyed with the talismans of the ancients — would awake. The feuding tribes in their breasts would wake up and become ecstatic, foam at the mouth, and reel.

But the devastation affecting their chattels at such times surpassed the devastation affecting their bodies. Jackals were able to slay people’s flocks in the pastures at will. Camels wandered off to other lands, where they fell into the hands of brigands and rustlers. Autumn winds blew and unruly storms plundered their tents, carrying away the furnishings. When people finally regained control of themselves, they discovered that the Spirit World had not returned them to the desert but had tossed them into the labyrinths of the wasteland for the first time. Then they were obliged to search for their way, starting afresh.

At this point the soothsayers intervened, thinking they should take charge of the matter themselves.

5

The soothsayers made the rounds of the tribes and dictated their call to the herald. They said the seductive bird wasn’t one of the messengers from the Spirit World but a new device of the immortal enemy Wantahet. So people should be wary and extremely cautious. They said via the herald that the ancient, ignoble one had been unable to destroy them with bribes and it hurt him too much to take them with the weapon of seduction. Therefore he had devised the strategy of singing to annihilate their bodies, destroy their physiques, and devastate their homelands, because he had discovered their weakness for music. He had realized that nothing could annihilate creatures’ bodies as effectively as singing. They also said that the immortal sorcerer was hiding in the bird’s body this time just as he had previously hidden in the bodies of serpents. He had borrowed the bird’s voice and slipped into the neighboring valleys to rob them of their bodies and souls through the domination of this voice, because the ignoble one knew their secret and perceived the weakness they had inherited from their ancestors regarding the voice and the delight of the voice. So he had decided to take them by means of the sovereignty of the voice. They needed to be on guard from that day forward against every voice!

Panic swept the tribes, and an argument erupted among the sages. Many attacked the edicts of the soothsayers. One faction tried to mount some opposition. Skeptics said that the diviners did not merely wish to shun the minds of the intellectuals, and never tired of repeating the lies they had fabricated long ago to lead the nations of the desert toward life (even though the tribes realized that they were merely terrifying claims), but today again they had come to drag the tribes far from the truth, claiming that they did this from a desire to prevent the community from going extinct, whereas they knew better than anyone else that they were preventing the community from enjoying the eternal longing for immortality, because they also knew that a being that doesn’t become immortal unless he loses his body does not mind dispensing with the shadow body if through this sacrificial offering he can assume the body of light, the body of the Spirit World, the original body that doesn’t know bodies.

In their opposition to the soothsayers, the skeptics went to the extreme of accusing their foes of depriving the wretched tribesmen of the sole pleasure the Spirit World had granted them and said that the diviners, by forbidding listening to and enjoying music, were not just imitating the severity of Wantahet but were appropriating his role and speaking with his tongue. In fact they were digging for the people of the wasteland that foul pit to which Wantahet had sworn to lead them one day. The soothsayers weren’t soothsayers; they were Wantahet.

6

North winds frequently carried clouds to the desert, the valleys flowed with plentiful water, from the floors of the tents rang the painful screams of newborns frightened by the terror of childbirth, and the successive days destroyed many bodies, which then slumbered in the slopes of the mountains beneath piles of gray stones, but the bird of the Spirit World never stopped singing.

The bird never stopped singing, and his passionate fans never stopped descending to the valley in order to emigrate via song from this valley and all valleys — from the whole desert. Then they would see what they could only see through song and hear what they could only hear through song, and live another life that they could only live through song.

Their bodies grew emaciated, withered, and wasted away till they vanished. But they did not retreat. They did not want to return to the land of shadows, because anyone who travels far and explores other homelands beyond the wasteland will not return to the realm of the wasteland. He will not return to lands that can only be seen with the eye of blindness!