AT SEA

"They went to sea in a sieve, they did,

In a sieve they went to sea:

In spite of all their friends could say,

On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,

In a sieve they went to sea.

      *      *      *      *      *

"They sailed away in a sieve, they did,

In a sieve they sailed so fast,

With only a beautiful pea-green veil,

Tied with a riband by way of a sail,

To a small tobacco-pipe mast;" 

 

And so on. You see that it is quite possible to go to sea in a sieve—that is, if the sieve is large enough and the water is not too rough—and that the above lines are now realized in every particular.

  -- C.V. Boys – Soap-Bubbles and Forces Which Mould Them (1896).

Sunday In The Sahara (Baptism of Solitude 2)

        There are probably few accessible places on the face of the globe where one can get less comfort for his money than the Sahara. It is still possible to find something flat to lie down on, several turnips and sand, noodles and jam, and a few tendons of something euphemistically called chicken to eat, and the stub of a candle to undress by at night.  Inasmuch as it is necessary to carry one’s own food and stove, it sometimes seems scarcely worth while to bother with the “meals “ provided by the hotels.  But if one depends entirely on tinned goods, they give out too quickly.  Everything disappears eventually – coffee, tea, sugar, cigarettes – and the traveler settles down to a life devoid of these superfluities, using a pile of soiled clothing as a pillow for his head at night and a burnous as blanket.

        Perhaps the logical question at this point is:  Why go?  The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can’t help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute.  He will go back, whatever the cost in comfort and money, for the absolute has no price.

(Since this piece was written, the Algerian war has changed the Saharan picture.  Now the hypothetical warrior would probably not go back, because without special documents it is very unlikely that he would be allowed in.  The Sahara is not on display at the present time.)  

Link: Baptism of Solitude 1 (Sahara Dancing) 

Key:  Grand Erg Oriental Desert (top); Assekrem (second); Algeria/Libyan border (third); Algerian Sahara (fourth)

From:  Paul Bowles, Their Heads Are Green And Their Hands Are Blue.  New York, Random House, 1963.

The Cow (Paul Bowles)

The most satisfying exposition I have seen of the average Hindu’s feeling about this exalted beast is a little essay composed by a candidate for a post in one of the public services, entitled simply “The Cow.”  The fact that it was submitted in order to show the aspirant’s mastery of the English language, while touching, is of secondary importance.

THE COW

        The cow is one wonderful animal, also he is quadruped and because he is female he gives milk – but he will do so only when he has got child.  He is same like God, sacred to Hindu and useful to man.  But he has got four legs together.  Two are foreward and two are afterward.

       His whole body can be utilized for use.  More so the milk.  What it cannot do?  Various ghee, butter, cream, curds, whey, cova  and the condensed milk and so forth.  Also, he is useful to cobbler, watermans and mankind generally.

        His motion is slow only.  That is because he is of amplitudinous species, and also his other motion is much useful to trees, plants as well as making fires.  This is done by making flat cakes in hand and drying in the sun.

        He is the only animal that extricates his feedings after eating.  Then afterwards he eats by his teeth which are situated in the inside of his mouth.  He is incessantly grazing in the meadows.

        His only attacking and defending weapons are his horns, especially when he has got child.  This is done by bowing his head whereby he causes the weapons to be parallel to the ground of earth and instantly proceeds with great velocity forwards.

       He has got tail also, but not like other similar animals.  It has hairs on the end of the other side.  This is done to frighten away the flies which alight on his whole body and chastises him unceasingly, whereupon he gives hit with it.

         The palms of his feet are so soft unto the touch so that the grasses he eats would not get crushed.  At night he reposes by going down on the ground and then he shuts his eyes like his relative the horse which he does not do so.  This is the cow.  

Excerpt from "Notes Mailed At Nagercoil" in Their Heads Are Green And Their Hands Are Blue.  New York, Random House, 1963. 

Paul Gauguin Paintings --  Top:  The Red Cow (1889); Center:  Seated Breton Girl (1889); Lower:  Horse and Cow in Field (1885)    

See also:  Here for Parrots
                Here for Cobras 

Baptism of Solitude (Sahara Dancing with Paul Bowles)

        In the Sahara as elsewhere in North Africa, popular religious observances often include elements of pre-Islamic faiths in their ritual;  the most salient example is the institution of religious dancing, which persists despite long-continued discouragement of the custom by educated Moslems.  Even in the highly religious settlement of the M'Zab, where the puritanism is carried to excessive lengths, the holding of dances is not unknown.

        At the time I lived there children were not allowed to laugh in public, yet I spent an entire night watching a dozen men dance themselves into unconsciousness beside a bonfire of palm branches.  Two burly guards were necessary to prevent them from throwing themselves into the flames.  After each man had been pulled back from the fire several times, he finally ceased making his fantastic skyward leaps, staggered and sank to the ground.  He was immediately carried outside the circle and covered with blankets, his place being taken by a fresh adept. 

        There was no music or singing, but there were eight drummers, each one playing an instrument of different size.

From Paul Bowles, Their Heads Are Green And Their Hands Are Blue: Scenes From The Non-Christian World..  New York, Random House, 1963.

Paul Bowles in Istanbul -- Hagia Sophia (Ἁγία Σοφία) and Selim The Grim

 October 6

        Santa Sophia?  Aya Sofya now, not a living mosque but a dead one, like those of Kairouan which can no longer be used because they have been profaned by the feet of infidels.  Greek newspapers have carried on propaganda campaigns designed to turn the clock back, reinstate Aya Sofya as a tabernacle of the Orthodox Church.  The move was obviously foredoomed to failure;  after having used it as a mosque for five centuries the Moslems would scarcely relish seeing it put back into the hands of the Christians.  And so now it is a museum which contains nothing but its own architecture.

Hagia Sophia (top two images)

Selim the Grim (left)  (r. 1512-20) wrote poetry under the name Mahlas Selimi. His arch-rival Shah Ismail I (right) (r. 1501-24) wrote poetry as Khata'i.

 

October 10

      At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Selim the Grim [1] captured from the Shah of Persia [2] one of the most fantastic pieces of furniture I have ever seen.   The trophy was the poor Shah’s throne, a simple but massive thing made of chiseled gold, decorated with hundres of enormous emeralds.  I went to see it today at the Topkapi Palace.  There was a bed to match, also of emerald-studded gold.   After a moment of looking Abdeslam ran out of the room, where these incredible objects stood into the courtyard, and could not be coaxed back in.  “Too many riches are bad for the eyes,” he explained.  I could not agree; I thought them beautiful.  I tried to make him tell me the exact reason for his sudden flight, but he found it difficult to give me a rational explanation of his behavior.  “You know that gold and jewels are sinful,” he began.   To get him to go on, I said I knew.  “And if you look at sinful things for very long you can go crazy; you know that.  And I don’t want to go crazy.”   I was willing to take the chance, I replied, and I went back in to see more.

Shah Ismail's Throne

[1] Selim I, Yavuz Sultân Selim Khan, Hâdim-ül Haramain-ish Sharifain (Servant of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina) (Ottoman Turkish: سليم اوّل, Modern Turkish: I.Selim), nicknamed Yavuz "the Stern" or "the Steadfast", but often rendered in English as "the Grim" (October 10, 1465/1466/1470 – September 22, 1520), was the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1512 to 1520. He was also the first Ottoman Sultan to assume the title of Caliph of Islam. He was granted the title of "Hâdim ül Haramain ish Sharifain" (Servant of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina), by the Sharif of Mecca on 1517. Selim carried the empire to the leadership of the Sunni branch of Islam by his conquest of the Middle East. He represents a sudden change in the expansion policy of the empire, which was working mostly against the West and the Beyliks before his reign. On the eve of his death in 1520, the Ottoman empire spanned almost 1 billion acres (trebling during Selim's reign).

[2]  Shāh Ismāˤil Abū l-Muzaffar bin Haydar bin Sheikh Junayd as-Safawī (Persian: شاه اسماعیل / Šāh Ismā'īl) (July 17, 1487 - May 23, 1524), was a Shah of Iran and the founder of the Safavid Empire, which survived until 1736. Isma'il started his campaign in Azerbaijan in 1502 as the leader of the Safaviyya, an extremist heterodox Twelver Shi'i militant religious order and unified all of Iran by 1509.. Born in Ardabil in Northwestern Iran, he reigned as Shāh Ismāˤil I of Iran from 1502 to 1524. Isma'il played a key role in the rise of Twelver Islam; he converted Iran from Sunni and Ismaili Shi'i Islam, importing religious authorities from the Levant.   In Alevism, Shāh Ismāˤil remains revered as a spiritual guide.  Ismā'il was also a prolific poet who, under the pen name Khatā'ī ("Sinner") contributed greatly to the literary development of the Azerbaijani language.

Paul  Bowles in Tangier



Paul Bowles excerpts from Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue, Scenes From The Non-Christian World.  New York, Random House, 1963.

Cape Comorin, South India, March 1952 (Paul Bowles)

     

 

     Last night I awoke and opened my eyes.  There was no moon; it was still dark, but the light of a star was shining into my face through the open window, from a point high above the Arabian Sea.  I sat up, and gazed at it.  The light it cast seemed as bright as that of the moon in northern countries; coming through the window, it made its rectangle on the opposite wall, broken by the shadow of my silhouetted head. I held up my hand and moved the fingers, and their shadow too was definite.  There were no other stars visible in that part of the sky; this one blinded them all.  It was about an hour before daybreak, which comes shortly after six, and there was not a breath of air.  On such still nights the waves breaking on the nearby shore sound like great, deep explosions going on at some distant place.  There is the boom, which can be felt as well as heard and which ends with a sharp rattle and hiss, then a long period of complete silence, and finally, when it seems that there will be no more sound, another sudden boom.  The crows begin to scream and chatter while the darkness is still complete.

     The town, like the others here in the extreme south, gives the impression of being made of dust.

-- From Notes Mailed At Nagercoil

 

All Parrots Speak (Paul Bowles)

I. The boat came in fifteen hours late, and there was nothing we could do but sit in the breathlessly hot room and wait.  Nothing, that is, until the proprietor appeared in the doorway with a full-grown parrot perched on his finger and asked us if we wanted to converse with it. 

“Does it speak?” I asked.

“Claro que si.  All parrots speak.”  My ignorance astonished him.  Then he added, “Of course it doesn’t speak English.  Just its own language.”

II. The next pstticine annexation to the household (in the interim came an armadillo, an ocelot and a tejon – a tropical version of the raccoon) was a parakeet named Hitler.  He was about four inches high and no one could touch him.  All day he strutted about the house scolding, in an eternal rage, sometimes pecking at the servants’ bare toes.  His voice was a sputter and a squeak, and his Spanish never got any further than the two words perquito burro (stupid parakeet), which always came at the end of one of hs diatribes; trembling with emotion, he would pronounce them in a way that recalled the classic orator’s “I have spoken.”

III. Two parrots live with me now.  I put it thus, rather than, "I own two parrots", because there is something about them that makes them very difficult to claim as one's property.  A creature that spends its entire day observing the minutiae of your habits and vocal inflections is more like a rather critical friend who comes for an indefinite stay.

IV. I think my susceptibility to parrots may have been partly determined by a story I heard when I was a child.  One of the collection of parrots from the New World presented to King Ferdinand by Columbus escaped from the palace into the forest.  A peasant saw it, and never having encountered such a bird before, picked up a stone to hit it, so he could have its brilliant feathers as a trophy.  As he was taking aim, the parrot cocked his head and cried “Ay, Dios!”  Horrified, the man dropped the stone, prostrated himself, and said, “A thousand pardons, senora!  I thought you were a green bird.”

Excerpts from Their Heads Are Green And Their Hands Are Blue

See also:   Here for The Cow
                 Here for The Cobra