Eye of the Beloved: An Excerpt

                                               A 9th century, Abbasid anatomical drawing of the human eye                                               From Justin Marozzi's Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood (Penguin, 2015)

The following is an excerpt from Eye of the Beloved, which is a work in progress and the sequel to Rughum and Najda. Rughum and Najda is a ficto-historical novel set in 9th century Baghdad. It was published in West Hollywood, by Oracle, in 2012. Listen to this on Soundcloud.

A gutted envelope from which protruded a terse hand-written letter lay in the open bedroom doorway. The forlorn author had been left deeply wounded by the desertion which had befallen her so suddenly and inexplicably, and she made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that the addressee was the single most awful calamity to have ever entered her life. And the addressee, who was lying in bed, eyeing the letter with the eye that was left open, while the other was smashed up against the mattress, did not entirely disagree with her assessment. In fact, at this low point of the addressee’s existence, the Dead Sea shore* of low points, she agreed wholeheartedly that she was a dream destroyer and a despicable failure. How she became instrumental in causing great suffering to a deeply good and patient being was something that her conscience would not permit her to turn away from. She genuinely believed that all good-natured people, among whom her former spouse was one, deserved to have their desires fulfilled. If she had wanted a lifelong marriage between them – as the addressee had always and repeatedly indicated was the only worthy goal of a relationship – then she deserved this. But, alas, our protagonist fell apart at a critical juncture in her life. At this point in her crisis she had turned the blame squarely inwardly. She felt that she had not been strong enough to weather the pressures that came with her career choices and the jeers of ruthless homophobes and racists. A childhood spent in the alleyways of a brutal civil war had made her particularly sensitive to injustice and oppression, the hint of which would cause her to react in heroic, albeit futile fashion against an insurmountable institutional wall. She was now, however, in the midst of shedding her sense of righteousness and coming to question whether her own intolerance for bigotry did not in fact contribute to bigotry and intolerance themselves. Books of Buddhist teachings and philosophy lined her reading cabinet, Lao Tzu’s soft philosophy of little (if not no) action was beginning to crystalize as an alternative to sleeve-rolling, fist bearing confrontation. The stoicism of the Greeks inspired her to seek redemption for a short fuse she had acquired through hereditary means and a childhood observing disinhibited violence. Scripture from every world religion, past and present vied for her attention, including the recent and the obscure, among them was the Book of Mormon, Rael’s Extra-Terrestrials Are Real and Ron L. Hubbard’s Dianetics.
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The moment the knife pierced Najda’s sleeping heart was also the moment her consciousness was disconnected from her body. She saw herself in Rughum’s bloodied arms and saw Antar drop his weapon and flee in a panic like a raging river. For years she dwelled as a constant companion with Rughum, and there were fleeting moments when she was able to make her presence and love felt  in symbolic ways that Rughum sensed but eventually dismissed.  They continued to meet in Rughum’s dreams and whenever she submerged her body with water, Najda was able to encircle her with warmth. But the sudden and most violent severance of Najda from her earthly vessel caused her to shoot out of the earth’s orbit, past the sun, and to travel into the furthest reaches of the galaxy where she spent the equivalent of a thousand years in solitude. She wandered the universe and sought answers to questions she had long held. She spent centuries alone on planets uninhabited by mobile life and created an extensive breach between her soul and her last incarnation. Of her previous lives on earth she seldom thought, only the last had left an indelible wound that remained tender to the touch. That wound, in part, was Rughum’s absence, but with her presence came a reminder too painful to bear. A thousand years of solitude and wandering the galaxy opens one up to the deepest insights, and she hit upon the realization that she could not run away forever. It would become necessary to return to earth.  Little did she know, that once returned to earth, she would spend an adult life gazing back at her cosmic hermitage in longing, through telescopes and at planetariums and observatories around the world which she would come to travel extensively. Little did she know as she gazed at the infinite spectacle of creation to which she was drawn, that it had once been her home and her playground.  Entire nebulae were nothing but wisps of smoke between her constellar fingers once; she had rolled out solar systems like puffs of smoke and played billiard with comets and black holes.

 Rughum lived with the horror of Najda’s absence for a lifetime made mercifully bearable by a gentle death. There was nothing or anyone who could take the place of Najda or compensate for that kind of loss. But with patience and submission you learned to live without breathing and to even make good of it. When put before circumstances such as these you cease to matter – care of others becomes your motive for continuation – bearing your pains with patience and acquiescence makes a great soul out of you. The suffering does indeed have some kind of purifying effect and you leave behind you a trail of great deeds that bring light, hope and joy into the lives of others, even as you might remain miserable.

 When Rughum was separated from her earthly vessel, she scoured the entire earth for Najda. She looked in every bloom, under every tree and in the river-ways. She searched the newborns and the young with dogged determination. But she could not find her. She decided she would resume human form again in the hopeful search for Najda. She did this across a millennium of lifetimes. And every time she reached dis-incarnation and regained knowledge of her soul’s memories, she returned to the lifetime where she met Najda and to the resolve she had made to find her. A thousand years of loves, of joys, of births and deaths, a thousand years of incarnating in diverse locations, in multiple genders and understandings, a thousand more years of accumulated experiences were not enough to put out the fire of that love – for in fact this was an eternal passion. This was a soul, a singular particle, that had long ago been split into two and when the disconnected parts had briefly joined each other, the cell memory was set ablaze with rapture. It must not be thought that because they had once been one that they were the same. In fact, each was very different from the other and not in some symmetrical opposition either. Their reconnection was now at risk for the changes each had undergone since their time apart. But it is said that the nature of a split particle is such that when one half undergoes a change so too does the other undergo a complementary change, irrespective of the amount of time and space that may separate them.

 A thousand years of reincarnations and Rughum’s resolve never waned, her love never faltered, though the same cannot be said of her hope. And yet she reached a point where she realized that even though her hope was weak and sometimes non-existent, she could not help but continue to do what she was doing across lifetimes, because her desire was unchanging. Sometimes all she could do was acknowledge this desire and acknowledge the absence of hope and wonder at the purpose of such an impossible stagnation. This was essentially her experience in the time she spent on earth in the physical absence of Najda. Her logic was rather more substantial than the effect of her despair. Her despair was caused by the trauma that desires are unfulfillable. But her logic fathomed that in the unfolding intricacies of time, the return to elegance was the inevitable outcome. Her logic knew just how tenacious Najda was and it told her that she would come to find her one day too and that therefore it must be – that to think otherwise would be illogical. 

Najda sat perched along the horizon, watching the sun turn over the equator as the earth spun its cosmic metronome. She could see the elements of life spread before her – from the tiniest particle to the largest land mass. She was aware of the ants, and the seeds and the blooms and the thoughts and dreams of the inhabitants of the cradle of souls. She had all but completely forgotten earth, with its wars and devastations. A thousand years of solitude and the tender spot of where her last wound had left its indentation had remained soft. She knew that what lay before her was a challenging lifetime to try and resolve the horror that had calcified around the tenderness and the only place in the universe where she could carry out the now pressing purification had to be here – here, at the site of an unresolved trauma; a trauma she had suspended in a vacuum of distance and space. She knew that once she entered the realm of molecules and particles, she would undergo a process of forgetting… Everything. The learning always begins from the darkness of the womb and outward into the light. This seemed the nature of things. Only an unconscious encryption of all that is, that was and might be could remain with her, in the cells of her body and the neurons of her brain. How deeply that vast ocean of all-knowing would be missed. Not even a thousand years around the sun were enough to answer the questions she had searched. She was hesitant to relinquish the peace and freedom of body-less-ness and the penetrating wisdom that comes with being free from ties to a time and place. How everything changes the moment you enter the world – how limited your understanding, how predetermined most of your actions become. But we come here to seek answers to questions that require experience and subsistence within the confines of the most lamentable human condition.  Soon everything will be looked on as though for the first time.

*The Dead Sea is the lowest point below sea level on earth