In Khorezm

The severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that this world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some more real substance in the invisible fabric.

Sir Thomas Browne

IN KHOREZM

From the journals of al-Biruni (973-1050)

Ghazni 418AH

And did I dream you also, Roxalana? The seventh child of a seventh child. Seven sisters all called Roxalana and none saw the next. You whom I sat with at the close of day below crimson clouds on the rim of the world. Swallows flitted around the minarets. And later by the river when the stars appeared and I showed you the Pleiades which I said were the crystallised souls of your dead kin, and that only when you in your turn died would the seventh star be seen. Did I dream you too?

I can no longer distinguish between what I dreamed then and what I imagine and what I remember. I remember all of them; they are all memories, memories of the day and of the night, memories of the mind and of the body and of the spirit- memories of the soul. Perhaps I dreamed Khorezm, perhaps I imagined it. I still dream of it and I still imagine it, so maybe that is all it ever was, an improbable place surrounded by three deserts, a place to which no-one would ever journey, populated only by passing travellers from distant lands. But surely there were others who came and stayed, and those who were born there as I was, in great cities like Kath and Gurganj, as fine as any in the world, where there were libraries full of books, and observatories. Did I not myself write books on many subjects, including the history of Khorezm? Perhaps I dreamed that history, for Khorezm is a palimpsest that has been wiped clean and everything forgotten, first by command and then by time. But if I dreamed it once can I not dream it again?

My parents are many years dead and I have no children. I have ancestors upon ancestors but there will be no descendants. Whatever God created us as, miracle or experiment or plaything, He will get no more from this line. All that my parents invested in me will come to nought when I die. Sometimes after I have sipped my nightly syrup, I lay upon my pallet and close my eyes, and a series of figures appear in sequence, turning and turning, revolving and revolving. They are not in my mind’s eye for they are real images, phosphenic residue, and they are not in my eyes but behind them. Sometimes they look grim and accusing and I can accept no more of them and I press my eyelids tighter and a red light appears and diffuses my visitations.

Then I dream, and if I am on my back then my dreams are ripe and violent, and Khorezm is again destroyed by tribesmen from the West bringing fire and sword and another burning faith, and history begins all over again. But if I sleep on my side then my dreams are more peaceful but harder to take hand of and they repeat themselves as they have for thirty years or maybe forever. A new dream is a memory that has been retrieved. I take hold of it knowing how many times it has slipped from me but that it is as much a part of my life as my meditations and my studies of the grammars of Panini.

And always the huge house with pillars and a courtyard with fountains and roses and peonies, clerestoried on three sides with a great arched curtain wall at the front, and I am staying on the right side but have left my baggage, my chest of papers and my medicines, on the other side but I cannot find my way round to it and the place grows as I search, a huge serai with many rooms and many people in each room until at last I can no more find the room that I once had than the room which I now have, and I am lost in outhouses and sculleries, and rubbish strewn yards with stunted palm trees.

It is not in money that I have invested but in memory. For the present is always an investment for the future and we do things and we read books and we visit far shores so that we shall have the memory of those things. The present is an illusion; it is the blade of a sword that has no width or duration; it is the grain of sand passing through the middle of the hourglass. It tumbles into the past as other presents as yet in the future rush forward, desperate to enter the solace of the past where all blood has been spilt and all sweat sweated and there is an end to effort.

But the past is no more fixed nor secure than the future. Either can be changed and will be changed as our imaginings and our memories require. One man will say that there is a fixed past that happened once and forever. Another will say that there is a changing past that alters each time that we remember it. A third will say that there is no past, that we are continuously reborn and that we are but a day old and that our memory is a library like the libraries of Gurganj or Pergamon common to all, reachable by all. So that what I write you could write for we are all of the same stock.

Roxalana cleaned my rooms twice a week. I was always entranced by the smallness of her face. She has the red circles of ringworm on her wrist which she had caught from tending the horses in the fields beyond the town gates. They belonged to a minor chieftain who raised troops for the Shah in times of disturbance. She was abused by him and I bought her from him. I knew her father who was the dyer at the end of the street who had borrowed funds from this man against a consignment of purple which never arrived.

I still watch Roxalana as she dusts and cleans my few possessions, my mirror, my astrolabe, my books. The mirror, perhaps my only true indulgence, I purchased from a Varangian amber merchant who had acquired it during his travels. At that time it had four cherubs dancing on its rim which I have to admit were most pleasing on the eye but injudicious to possess in this place. So I engaged Hassan, the woodcarver, to replace them with arabesques.

The astrolabe is vital to my studies and I am always nervous that Roxalana will drop or damage it but I know the girl takes particular care of it though she does not of course understand its mysteries. The alidade has worked itself loose perhaps through her over zealous rubbing.

I have walked in the Oxus delta where the cormorants dive beyond the reeds. And I have ridden away from the river and into the Red Sands and seen shells on the floor of the desert and I know that once many, many years ago the sea flowed there. I have seen deserts blistered by the sun and small, brave rivers that dream of the sea. And in those deserts there are arches and spirals and carvings that no man has designed but are rocks worn over aeons of time by wind and water and salt, which once worn invite the wind back to work further and the sand burrows into their infirmities and their very substance turns traitor on itself. I have watched as the sun fell down the sky in those places. A sky perfectly divided into three bands of colour, blue and yellow and red, as if the light had been refracted through glass until the yellow smudged the blue and they descended together with the red until all that was left was darkness and a red aureole of fire. And the spirals and carvings become great silhouettes, stark against the land beyond, and there are gnats in the air. Emanations of the Divine.

History is more than just a series of events. There are patterns and movements of men and of ideas. But history becomes the judgment of posterity, the story of the victor, prejudicial and after the event. The conquered are vilified or patronised or ignored. History becomes memory and the memory of memories. It hovers there awhile before receding into myth. Myth is the never was yet always will be, a balance of distillation and significance.

Blessed is the man who travels only to return.

Blessed is the man who experiences only to remember

Blessed is the man who reads only to write

Blessed is the man who learns only to forget

Occasionally I would call on Roxalana’s father in his dye shop. I watched him work, his sleeves rolled up beyond the elbow revealing his hairy muscular arms as with huge wooden poles and props he drubbed the fabrics boiling in his great tubs. And he taught me some of the secrets of his trade. It was not the dye that truly mattered he told me but the quality of the mordant used to fix it to the fabric. That is why the rich always had garments of the brightest and most fashionable colour while the poor wore their linen as if it were dirty or bleached or smudged- the dye had faded and not always evenly. Twice cursed I said for even if the mordants were of the same quality and they faded together the rich being rich would be able to replace the garment and the poor would not. He smiled. That is why the rich are rich he said because they pay good money at the outset which saves them paying bad money later.

The old dyer turned from his work for a moment and looked at me and said that if he had a dirham for every thought that passed through my busy head then he would be a rich man. I smiled and said that thinking had a number of drawbacks and that all in all I suspected that a man who worked with his hands was a more contented man than a man who dealt in books. Let me show you something he said, a little synthesis of the two, and he left his tubs and indicated to me to follow him to a dark little corner of his workshop. I can no longer make a living out of dyeing he said so I am doing a little book illustration as well and he had spread out on a trestle a new edition of the 1001 Tales open at a picture of Sindbad on the shores of Serendib. There were beautiful little brushes laid out on pallets and pots of lapis and realgar, and some special pigment mix that he called Blood of the Gazelle.

Memories, at once intrusive and welcome. As children we remember things without effort or awareness absorbing all our experiences and all our surroundings in unconscious riot and abandon and filling our minds with lush imagery and wordless vocabularies. A spinning top, a cistern in the desert, the smell of pine resin, a mother’s careful smile are all etched into our minds. They place us in our world and establish who we are. In our middle years our minds are still able and welcoming to new impressions but the magic if not gone has been deferred. A child is of the moment; it is charmed and enthralled at the time by what it sees and is only much later that the adult may reflect but all that reflection may achieve is to point to the discrepancy, the loss.

An adult is more measured. Many a time I have travelled to some new place and felt a vague sense of disappointment at the time but on returning home the images and the memories start to be sorted and I realise retrospectively that I have taken value from my journey. But in age it is different yet, for now I take little from my present circumstances, and the memory of the immediate past falters and the mind seems shuttered against experience and muffled with cotton wool. Is this because I am in exile, displaced, or because I am old? Both I suspect. But tonight I will read more of the old poet of Rum and imagine him in Constanta, that windy port, in the last months of his life with only his books and his memories for succour. What strange yet magical tales of men transformed into stags or trees or stars, women into cows and spiders. I recall the tale of the Seven Sisters I told Roxalana. Did that come from him, filtered into my own imaginings by some form of osmosis- writers acting and interacting through the ages.

This is all past now. Or rather it is all present, present in my memory as if it was happening now for what is actually happening now passes through me like light through a window. Time may be an illusion; certainly memory orders thing differently. My tenses are no longer the tenses of the grammarian. Each morning when I wake as the cocks crow across the valleys I am in Khorezm not Ghazni. I am becoming a child again. Everything reminds me of the past. I see it in the faces of people I see in the street. The goats that pass below my balcony are Khorezmian goats like the little finches in the birdcages in the market, and the drinking fountain in the central square was donated by an old Saminid margrave. My life is a dream. This morning I lay on my pallet and stared at the window and it shrunk before my eyes until it was a miniature and I have not experienced that sensation since I was a child.

We are all many things. We may be capable of everything, and every feeling and every gesture made by any man at any time can be reached within all of us. But we are not all the same. For in each man the preponderance of these feelings and gestures is different. And that makes it difficult for us to know our fellows and them us.

A man tells stories to the world and may come to believe them himself. The reverse of which is (for everything has a reverse) that every story bears its own truth though he who told it may not see such a truth or wish to see it. I was once asked why I dwelt so much on the truth of matters. I answered that it was because I wanted to be able to look into mirrors.

So I live a dual life. In space Khorezm and Ghazni are sequential but not in time. Time has no fixed units. It accelerates through the units that mankind has created in an effort to contain it. Each new day or month or year builds up speed towards its own end. Before slowing down just a little. Just enough for an old man to catch his breath. And recall ancient memories anew, like islands now in the silted waters of his mind.