But there were boys outside at hunt. The battle cries subside at night, and the passionate restlessness silently begins to burns, ungratified, in turmoil, tossing and turning awake in wine and secret deeds. These young men who met in each other’s houses, womanless, the shenanigans, the unpunished sins sweetened by the shared secret misdeeds.

Here, like in many prohibitive cultures, love among the men is at the forefront. These boys dress up and put on make-up for their male friends. They do not have girl friends. They get married to procreate, for family and political reasons, but keep loving men as their mates and comrades, and lovers. In the same time, the unmarried boys dream Indian soap music, the roses drop from the foreheads into water, the sleeve embroidery flows in the air, the dark eyes cry for the desert lovers - city dreams on the dusty streets and white flesh under the young beard. A people at love and war, where every death and love is a sharing and a ripped off veil. But the blood keeps silent, heaves dangerously at every wound, until it heals. No love or death inflicts something that the next boyish kiss will not wipe off; and the blood will mean yet again.

Sensing these images in the distance, under the anonymous rooftops full of crimson passions, unrecorded ecstasies and despair, I found myself a woman, a non-woman, manless and fleshless, floating behind the walls of a fortress. I was full with unadmitted and uncommitted passions, chest-full for man’s kisses, hidden behind my own invisible walls, protected with heavy weapons and harsh vigil. I would have given myself softly to nocturnal fingers, my body would have yearningly risen to meet the heat of pure male skin. That was a secret I had to deny and pace on. I stood above the rooftops of Kandahar like a fortress within a fortress protecting nothing but the desire to love.

Everything that meets us is set in motion a long time ago. The desires, the fantasies, the little openings and soft spots in the being - they tear into major doorways for life’s blessings and disasters to enter. We summon what brings out our true nature, and it is in the nature of this world to bring out the best and the worst in us. Our destinies are already made within our hidden recesses. We know our destiny insofar as we know what is hidden inside us.

We, made of drives and dams of which we know so little. Our knowledge of our selves blindly flickers like    reflections on the ocean. Nothing new happens to us. We happen to ourselves. We just don’t know ourselves. What can a reflection know of the oceanic depths?

My hidden nature, I concluded that night, was a sea of passion fenced by a desert of fear - and the pleasures and the disasters that were coming my way, I knew, would be their exact replicas.
The moment ended, and I did what I had to do: I went to sleep.

(This is the sixth segment of Chapter 1 of the White Book of Feathers, which will be reproduced here in parts in the future. Please refer to the previous five posts on this blog for Segments 1-5 of the Book)

That’s what we seem in our perishable form. Dreams of yesterday, lost in the nakedness of the flat day. We, on the compound, were strangers to this world. We had almost no connection to life, we were lost. We cried long and in secret of each other on the shoulders of the trees, we hid in the shallows of the noon. We waded, tracking the thin threads of dreams which disappeared as soon as one set a foot on them. We were lost, and in the morning we might not exist. But butterflies were being born each day.

Perhaps the gold is still asleep under the pillow where no one shall ever find comfort again. Perhaps there is gold, like the sun, we leave behind.  After Kandahar, I knew I would never dream again of what I used to dream. When one loses a longing,no matter how obsolete, the gold which could have shone on us is a gold unborn. Dust.

I was tired. I wished that those hard times of overwork and conflicts to be past. Time is where the gold separates from the sand, and lush rainbows shed colors on the memories. I wished all to end so I could become a new beginning. A fresh new wind smothering me in golden sand and a new sun blinding my forehead. I dreamt I was a fragile giant, a statue in a desert without oases, and aeons passed before the hand cold reach the forehead to rub off the disturbed thoughts. Eternity seemed so long that to make a single move appeared senseless, however, it is the movement that creates the meaning of being alive. That’s how I dreamt.

There were days when even the air seemed agitated. Ready for escape; it would take flight under an attack, it would leave us alone and airless to finally entwine with the real violence pressing on our skin. Our security bubble would burst leaving a vacuum of breathlessness. In my mind, I saw naked white bodies dressed in crimson, limbs mingled in our last expression of love, our loyalty to each other. Our trust would lay exposed like a museum.

I saw our spirits there, hovering above our garden, slightly confused, trying to discern the bodies in the pile of generous flesh. It wouldn’t hurt any longer. We would be finally  a-flight, beyond the thoughts of good or evil. At last we would be fearlessly gentle to each other. We had not known anything beyond our shrunk selves, our slightly sad thoughts lingering abandoned in the bones. Confused by the intercession in time. Mild, like dewdrops.

And then, a gentler expanse would open in the unforeseen sky, between the twilight of the worlds of the living and the dead. In a flicker, an oceanic presence would come forth, the ancient embrace, our true heart would open to call us back. Sparkling specks of dust were dancing in the air of this city which has seen thousands of generations bury its dead. We are simply mortal.
That is what I saw one morning in a vision. I wonder whether accepting these seen visions diverted them, or they were perhaps merely figments of a weary, agitated imagination.

Such thoughts were reserved for the dawn. The workday was discipline. I preferred to leave the office and work in the garden. There were dignified trees summoning doves in their branches. Birds pecked in the grass daringly approaching our feet. The roses scented the air, and I was alone on the lawn, amidst our armed Afghan and expatriate security and service personnel. My heart was in that garden. Peace and life dwelled there and no stress was stressful enough to resist the beauty of this surrounding.

After the previous years in the rainless southern deserts, I found myself confused to waddle through the mud on the Kabul streets. I stood at the rooftop balcony of the villa where I stayed, alone and foreign, while the mud water flickered on the ground. I was longing for the South. The distant horizons were as tender as always. The massive mountains descended through space like an unchallengeable curtain. I watched the silhouettes on the Kabuli streets, their sleeves and skirts flowing.

In this country, people walk with strength; the pace is simple, and everything leads to everything else. The feet are in concordance. In Afghanistan, of all places, I felt in concordance with myself. This country, hell and heaven within the same flicker of the eye. I was longing for the South, the regions of stark contrasts between light and shade, between heaven and hell, between one’s hidden depths and heights. The place on earth where one may be blessed with a true challenge. Nearly unendurable. Nearly enlightening. That was South.
A month after I arrived in Kabul, I indeed went to Kandahar, to be close to the desert I loved and to the front-lines of the project I was hired on. Perched on the rooftop in the heart of the city, surrounded by protective barriers and guns, and yet vulnerable, I felt the exposure and loved it. We were positioned like a heart on the chest, put forward for an embrace, guardedly open. I deeply inhaled and imbibed the spirit of Kandahar flickering in the air, carried by the sounds of the markets and busy traffic. It did not matter that the city could kill me. Fair enough. The beauty of its ancient spirit was truer than my sparse human life.

It was freezing beneath the turquoise blue I waited for our security personnel to pick me up from the deserted Kabul airport and I felt happy again, as happy as I hadn’t been since the last time I left the country two years before. The hidden warrior, the adventurer, the curious tomboyish child, the spiritual seeker in me - all were on the move once again, hands and boots in the dust, just where I like them. No way to tell what’d happen next.

It’s not a highly respected character attribute, but I live for challenges. People like me, slightly dislocated at the basis, push ourselves too hard, beyond our limits, because we do not really know where out limits are. Our boundaries of self-preservation have never been set or they’ve been breached long ago. Now we do not know when and how to stop. We feel fully alive only when this breach is reenacted, a pleasure beyond pleasantness or pain. We go far too inside, far too outside seeking the intensity of total exposure. With our silent secrets, we are driven to throw ourselves naked at the non-human World, into the Wild. Passionate and vulnerable, we move through our own breach beyond the set defenses, across the borders of the deserts, scorched and moving. We are shaken together with the Wild. We are nowhere under shelter because the Wild has taken abode in us. We break up and break down. We know that we can survive damage.

In 2007, in the deserts of Helmand in southern Afghanistan, far away from mental comfort, I wrote the following: “It is deluding to think of the human being as something naturally wholesome and solid. A breakdown closer to the essence of living, to the heart of Life, both soft and ruthless. The way we are, broken, we flow over. But we are all alone, unwhole, incomplete, useless and clumsy in the community of the wholesome people, of the perfectly rounded up, of the socially desirable ones, of the maintainers of order. We are outside and beside every order – at the margins, under water, above the waves, all at once. But we never resemble the perfect squares of sunlight on the surface.

We resemble life, dirty, strong, vulnerable, worn out, overflowing, from day to day, from hour to hour, we roll on without a destination, as if not by our own will. We let the waves roll us, kick us, leave us sometimes immobile for years in the forgotten straits of the world. We live with the invisibility of existence. We do not strive to emerge into daylight. We belong not. We sink and rise as if by some alien watery hand. We are not skilled at staying.

We cannot remain, not without losing our essence, our single, useless, untranslatable knowing. Simply, we are not good at it. From the fractures, however, and from the healing, rarely, something precious, something that may remain, is born.”
I had learnt to accept this. And now, three years later, something was stirring to be born, something different. For better or for worse, I couldn’t tell.

(continues)

Skapoceniot kamen na vodata - Rumi Izbor stihovi - Ana Pejcinova 2010

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