The Deep Zoo
Writing is the uncovering of that which was unrevealed.
—Ghani Alani, Dreaming Paradise
In the tradition of Islam, the first word that was revealed to Mohammed was Igrá (Read!) The world is a translation of the divine, and its manifestation. To write a text is to propose a reading of the world and to reveal its potencies. Writing is reading and reading a way back to the initial impulse. Both are acts of revelation.
The Ottoman calligraphers delighted in creating mazes of embellishments in which the text was secreted like a treasure. The text needed to be deciphered and the task proved the worthiness of the reader. These calligrapher’s mazes remind us that if the text is the mirror of an exorbitant, mutable universe, it is playful, too. The maze places the text within an intimate space, very like a garden, where the text hides, then reveals itself; perhaps it could be said such a text is irresistible. Writes Gaston Bachelard: “All the spaces of intimacy are designated by an attraction” (Poetics of Space).
The texts we write are not visible until they are written. Like a creature coaxed from out a deep wood, the text reveals itself little by little. The maze evokes a multiplicity of approaches, the many tricks we employ to tempt the text hither. The maze is both closed and open; it demands to be approached with a “thoughtful lightness” (Calvino). The powers lurking within it are like stars. Despite their age and inaccessibility, their light continues to reach us and to reveal us to ourselves.
A playful mind is deeply responsive to the world and informed by powers instilled during infancy and childhood, powers that animate the imagination with primal energies. A playful mind is guided as much by attraction as consistency and coherence—and I am thinking here of Lewis Carroll’s Looking Glass world—its consistent tyrants, the coherence of its nonsense and the energy of Alice’s fearless lucidity. The Looking Glass reminds us that the world’s maze is attractive to eager thinkers. After all, playfulness describes as much the mind of the scientist as the artist (and Lewis Carroll was both).
The idea that the world was engendered by the spoken word comes to us from Egypt. Here language flourished, mirroring and delighting in the phenomenal world. Here Paradise persisted; the gods and their creatures dwelling together in good understanding or, phrased differently, in knowledge of one another. And if the world of nature and its book indicated the divine, it also provided a place of unlimited encounters. To name a thing was to acknowledge and evoke its primary potencies—religious, medical and magical. Plants, minerals and animals were not only animated by the divine breath (nous), they were its vessels. Each tree, bird, river and star was an altar, the dwelling place of a god. To gaze upon the world’s imaged reflected in the waters of the Nile was to gaze into and reflect upon a sacred face or body: Hathor the cow-faced goddess embodied by the moon, Horus, the falcon, perched among the reeds.
Deep in the desert, each fossil shell was seen as Hathor’s gift, tossed to earth from the sky; the fossil sea urchin’s five-pointed star needled to its back indicated its stellar origins and explains why such things are found placed near the dead in ancient tombs. To use a lovely term of Gaston Bachelard’s, such a revery—and to leap from stone to star can only be called a revery—“digs life deeper, enlarge(s) the depth of life.” Bachelard offers these lines from the poet Vincent Huidobro:
In my childhood is born a childhood burning like alcohol.
I would sit down in the paths of night
I would listen to the discourse of the stars
And that of the tree.—The Poetics of Revery
Such sympathies—the stone, the moon caught in the branches of the willow, the gods, the stars—are born of a deep looking at the world and a deep dreaming. The ancient world of sympathies, rooted in inquisitiveness and informed by imaginative seeing, gave us marvelous aesthetic and scientific achievements; alchemy for example—that exemplary amalgam of science and poetry, that “immense word revery” says Bachelard. It would be a mistake to dismiss such sympathies as mere foolishness, for they were born of qualities of mind that illustrate what Italo Calvino calls “the lightness of thoughtfulness” (Six Memos for the Next Millennium) and illumine his phrase: “poetry is the enemy of chance.” The moment one reaches for the star-struck stone, the revery begins; the moment its star is recognized as a piece of the night sky fallen to earth, the poem begins. Chance gives way to a deep seeing and the recognition of a pattern that informs the mind with light, a pattern that incandesces and “burns like alcohol.” If poetry is the enemy of chance, it is also “the daughter of chance.”
