Black Light

For Brita Jenssen Ziesler

Copyright © Galway Kinnell 1966, 1980

Afterword copyright © Robert Hass 2015

Originally published by Houghton-Mifflin Co.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Robert Hass gratefully thanks Bobbie Bristol for making available copies of Galway Kinnell's Iran journalism and drafts.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kinnell, Galway, 1927-2014.

  
Black light: a novel / Galway Kinnnell; afterword by Robert Hass. — Revised paperback edition.

      
pages; cm

1.
  
Self-realization—Fiction. 2.
  
Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction.
  
I. Title.

  
PS3521.I582B5 2015

  
813'.54—dc23

2015023039

Cover design by Kelly Winton

Interior design by Domini Dragoone

Author photo courtesy of Bobbie Bristol

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e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-659-9

       
Observe the so-called ‘half-moon'. The half of it that faces the day is dressed in borrowed light. The half of it that faces the night is dressed in its own light. The same with a simple lamp. Down low, the flame is white. Halfway up, it already begins changing itself into black smoke.

—
Sohrawardi

chapter one
chapter one

J
amshid kept sliding forward as he worked, so that the patch of sunlight would remain just ahead of him, lighting up the motion of his hands. He was restoring the head of a bird of paradise, where a lump of charcoal had burnt its way through. As he always did when it was a question of a gap through which darkness was visible, he was working with nervous speed. He valued for more than its light this trapezoid of sunlight that glided beside him over the flowers and tendrils of his own carpet on the floor; it itself was like a carpet, but one that came from heaven.

He finished weaving in the bird's head, and he breathed more easily. Tomorrow morning he would seal closed the neck and breast, and then this gap too, like so many others, would be healed for good. The sun patch, touching the base of the wall, now started to diverge upward. Soon it would creep over the border of the geometrical and turn into chaos. This was the sign it was time to close shop.

Getting to his feet Jamshid saw the bird's head blur as it sank away from him. Closely as he had made it conform to the other heads on the carpet, it suddenly seemed peculiarly unreal, as if he had woven only the absence of a head. He felt
a strange dread. In the last few weeks there had been other moments when a thing, when he glanced at it, would blur and become a dark tear in reality. But now the tear closed again as quickly as it had opened.

He hung the pomegranate-rind red and walnut-husk brown wools back in their places on a wall entirely covered in colored wools. These clumps of wool all had the same formless bulk and the same spongy substance. Their colors alone held them apart, as if the sun patch on the floor, diffracting upward, had cast a spectrum of more intense reality on this dead matter. Jamshid took the carpet he was repairing over to the west wall, where the sun patch would light it up in the morning. He swept up the trimmed-off bits of wool. He picked up the trimming shears and placed them on the table. He put on his trousers and jacket over his pajamas and stepped into his cotton-soled geevays. He drew the blind: smeared sunlight vanished and the clumps of wool went drab. It was Jamshid's own, punctual sunset.

His practice at this time of day was to go to the mosque and try to nap until the general sunset took place. His shop was at the north end of the bazaar and the nearest mosque was the Masjideh Jomeh. But Jamshid did not like this mosque, for it was in bad repair, and he hated seeing, where tiles and stalactites had fallen out, the wrinkled mud walls and convoluted plaster. He would go, instead, to the Masjideh Shah in the Shrine of the Immam Reza, even though to get there he had to pass through the entire bazaar, whose gloom, noise, filth, and commerce he hated.

Today, he felt particularly upset, and he made himself think of the harmonious mass of minarets and domes toward which he was going, azure and lapis lazuli, decorated all around with hieratic calligraphy and
consummated by the golden dome that shed an essential light over its precincts. As he pushed through the suffocating maze, already dark, clogged with burdened men crying “Out of the way!” with donkeys, with bicycles jingling their little gasping doorbells, the passage seemed to Jamshid an ordeal to which he submitted only for the most ardent love of God.

He broke from the crowd and came out into the courtyard of the mosque. He stood reaccustoming himself to his element. In this rectangular space he felt something of the ordered calm on which he had just turned the key back at his shop. Many persons were gathered here, it was true, but the place had a way of diminishing them and of throwing their voices upward.

At the pool Jamshid washed his right hand, his left hand, his right foot, his left foot, his face and his teeth. He passed a dripping hand through his hair, from the brow to the back of the neck. As he stood up, he saw in the ripples an image of himself, and even though he shut his eyes he could not keep from seeing himself torn to pieces.

He lay down, but he found he was unable to sleep. Long ago, during the little interval between his wedding and his wife's death, he would lie awake under the stars a long time. Not until he had come to see that the stars were strung out in actual patterns had he become able to sleep. Recently, a new insomnia had returned. Now, he tried to empty his mind, but it was like looking into an empty sky and gradually seeing it was crawling with vultures. With relief he welcomed mundane worries back into his consciousness. If he was not going to sleep, he would at least think about something interesting in the attempt. Accordingly, he began fretting about his daughter. But soon he became aware of two persons talking to each other only a few feet away.

“Only for one week,” the man was saying in a Kurdish accent.

“Then I need a settlement of one hundred tomans. Not a rial less.” The woman spoke in the Shirazi accent, which is so lyrical when spoken by young women. Jamshid understood at once the nature of the transaction. He himself had once been mistaken for a pilgrim. A chaddor-clad woman had approached him in the courtyard and proposed to temporary-marry him. Though he tried not to notice them, at pilgrimage time one could see little discussions of this nature taking place in the vicinity of the Shrine. The pilgrims from distant cities and from Afghanistan and the Arab countries liked getting married for the few weeks of their sojourn, it helped to ease the spiritual rigors of the pilgrimage. The man laughed.

“In my country we say ‘year' not ‘week' when we mean all four seasons. One hundred tomans is fair settlement for a marriage lasting spring, summer, fall, and winter. But for a marriage lasting seven days, twenty tomans is all you will get! Not a rial more! And it's only your outrageous charm that makes me offer so much . . .” Jamshid lay still. As the two went on bargaining, a powerful rage came over him.

“And which mullah asks the least to perform the ceremony?” the Kurd asked.

“Torbati,” the woman answered. “Everybody goes to Torbati, he's the most experienced, the quickest . . .”

Jamshid sat up. “Torbati!” he said aloud. It was like spitting. The man and the woman, startled, moved off. “Am I to trust the marriage of my only daughter to a mullah who is everybody's procurer?” The moazzin in the minaret lifted his nasal call to prayer. The last sparkle of sunlight fell from the golden dome. At any moment
Mullah Torbati would be making his appearance to lead the prayer. Jamshid walked to where he had left his geevays and stepped into them.

“Furthermore, why should I let myself be led in prayer by the scoundrel?”