Black Milk (28 page)

Thus began my interest in Sufism and spirituality. Over the years it would ebb and flow. Sometimes it was more vivid and visible, at other times it receded to the background, faint and dusky, like the remains of a candle still burning, but at no stage in my life did it ever disappear.

Then why is it that now, after having devoured so many books on spirituality and religious philosophy, after having been through thick and thin with Dame Dervish, I once again feel like that timid girl in Smyrna? These days I cannot raise my eyes to the sky for fear that God might be looking down at me with his brows drawn over his eyes. Is that what depression is about—the sinking feeling that your connection to God is broken and you are left to float on your own in a liquid black space, like an astronaut who has been cut loose from his spaceship and all that linked him to Earth?

The pen puts its head down
To give a dark sweetness to the page.

—Rumi

O
ne morning in November when I wake up, I sense a strange presence in the room. The baby is two months old and is sleeping better now. There is a dusky light penetrating through the curtains, a whispery sound in the background and a perfumed smell in the air. I shiver as if being pushed into a Murakami novel where everything is surreal.

There is a creature in the corner—not human, not animal, not like anything I have seen before. He is as dark gray as storm clouds, as tall as a tower, as elusive as a will-o’-the-wisp. He has a long, black ponytail, though he has dyed a clump of it white and let it hang across his face. A diamond the size of a hazelnut glitters on one ear. His face is small, his goatee is tiny, but his fiery eyes appear enormous behind his metal-rimmed spectacles. One second he stretches up, his head reaching the ceiling; the next he widens, spreading from one end of the room to the other. Like thick cigar smoke he drifts in the air. In his hand he carries a beautiful cane and on his head is a silk top hat.

I immediately recognize him as one of the djinn my maternal grandmother warned me against in my childhood. I don’t know anything about their sexual orientation, but this one seems gay to me.

“Who are you?” I ask fretfully.

“Ah, but don’t you recognize me?” he says, chivalrous and poised, as if he were a brave knight and I, a damsel in distress.

“No, what do you want?”

“Please,
cheri,
” he says snippily. “Have you never heard of the djinni who haunts new mothers?”

I give a sobbing breath and my face gets hot. “My grandma says there is a djinni named Alkar1s1, known to molest women who have recently given birth.”

He cracks a laugh. “The times are changing fast,
cheri.
Alkar1s1 is so old-school. She retired long ago, that minx. Today nobody knows about her anymore. She wouldn’t make it to the top ten.”

I am surprised to hear the djinn have a top ten list, but instead of asking about this, I remark, “I didn’t know you guys could age.”

Taking a napkin from his pocket, he begins to wipe his glasses. “Of course we do age, though we haven’t lost our minds over Botox creams, like your kind. At least not yet—”

I look at him more closely, only now suspecting that he might not be as young as he looks.

Putting his glasses back on, he continues: “Of course, we don’t age as quickly as you poor sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. Your ten years are approximately”—he makes some calculations in his head—“equal to 112 years in djinn time. So a hundred-year-old djinni is just a kid where we come from. As for Alkar1s1, how should I put it? Her name is synonymous with
nostalgia
.”

“Do djinn have nostalgia?”

“Not us, you guys do! Don’t you ever watch Disney movies? They use us as decor. I mean, what is that thing about the djinni in a lamp? We are living in the twenty-first century, hello! No one hangs out in lamps anymore!”

“Do djinn find Disney movies politically incorrect?” I ask, mesmerized.

“You, too, would feel the same way if your kind were portrayed as pudgy-bellied, five-chinned, blue ogres with baggy trousers and fezzes on their heads,” he flares. “Don’t you see we’ve all adjusted to the times? I go to the gym four days a week and I don’t have an extra ounce of fat on my body.”

“Who are you, for God’s sake?!”

Like a good gentleman he tips his hat and bows to me with a roguish smile. “My sincere apologies if I forgot to introduce myself. I am your obedient servant, the Djinni of Postpartum Depression. Otherwise known as Lord Poton.”

I feel a chill go down my spine. “What do you want?” I ask, although I am not sure I want to hear the answer.

“What do I want?” he prompts. “It is a good question because, as it happens, my wish is your command.”

“Hmm, shouldn’t it be the other way round?”

“As I said, forget those clichés. Let’s get to know each other better.”

 

Lord Poton is such a shifty being that I don’t immediately realize how creepy he can be. For the first couple of days I watch him more out of curiosity than worry. Little do I realize that he is settling in during that time, making himself at home. Then one day, he produces a lockbox.

“What is that?”

“It’s my gift to you,” he says, grinning. “Don’t you always complain about how your finger-women tire you out with their endless quarrels?”

“Yes, but—” I say tentatively.

“Good, I will lock them all away so that they won’t bother you anymore.”

“Wait a minute,” I object. “I want no such thing.”

But he doesn’t listen to me. “My wish is your command, remember,” he whispers, as if to himself. Then he stretches out his manicured nails and pulls the members of the Choir of Discordant Voices out of me, one by one.

The first to get caught is Milady Ambitious Chekhovian.

“What do you think you are doing, mister?” she admonishes him as he holds her by the nape of her neck and forces her into the box. “I have important things to do! Let go of me!”

Next comes Little Miss Practical. I would have expected her to follow the course of least resistance and surrender, but apparently she finds swearing more practical. Smoldering with anger, she yells, “Yo, who do you think you are? You moron! Get your hands off me!”

“Please don’t bother, I will go where I need to go,” says Dame Dervish as she walks with dignity into the box.

“Poton, darling, why the rush? Why don’t we talk first tête-à-tête? Just the two of us. May I call you Potie?” says Blue Belle Bovary, pouting her lips, tilting her head to one side, trying to use her feminine wiles to get herself off the hook. Despite her best efforts, she, too, is sent into the box.

“But I have lentil soup on the stove, you cannot arrest me now,” begs Mama Rice Pudding.

Finally comes Miss Highbrowed Cynic. “You call yourself ‘Lord’ and you think you represent the black sun of melancholy. But you seem to have forgotten that that sun is not solely a destructive force. As Julia Kristeva said, ‘melancholy is amorous passion’s somber lining.’”

“Ughh?” asks Lord Poton, sounding seriously confused, but he tucks her into the box anyhow.

 

So it is that all six members of the Choir of Discordant Voices find themselves trapped in a lockbox. The silence in the house is disconcerting.

“At last we are rid of the Thumbelinas!” says Lord Poton, the sweetness in his tone contradicting the sharpness of his glance. “They are all gone.”

“Yeah, they are,” I say.

“From now on there will be no one around to yammer at you. You will hear only my voice. Isn’t that great?”

I try to join his laughter, but it just doesn’t pass through my throat.

Quickly I assess the new situation: centralization of authority under a dictator, the suppression of alternate voices via violence, systematic usage of propaganda, absolute obedience to the leader . . . All the signs are here. Political scientists have widely analyzed the connection between fascism and economic depression. In my case, there is a connection between fascism and psychological depression.

Now I know that after oligarchy and martial law, after monarchy and anarchy, the days of fascism have arrived.

T
oday Lou Andreas Salomé is less remembered as an author and intellectual in her own right than as the colorful and controversial woman behind several powerful men of letters. She is portrayed as the mysterious muse who inspired Rilke, Nietzsche and Freud to look more closely at womanhood and feminine creativity. Such descriptions, though no doubt intriguing, do not do justice to Salomé’s vision or versatility. In her time she was a famous author, which makes it hard to understand why her novels have been so widely forgotten today. In addition to fiction and plays, she wrote contemplative essays on a wide spectrum of topics such as Russian art, religious philosophy, theater and eroticism.

Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Salomé grew up with five brothers and was much loved and pampered by her father. As a child she had a special gift for telling stories, though she found it difficult to abandon her imaginary characters afterward. She felt guilty for leaving them. This tendency to blame herself for things for which she was not responsible would continue to haunt her throughout her entire life.

Salomé arrived in Zurich in 1880, only nineteen years old. She was beautiful, brilliant and dauntless. Almost instantly she was drawn to the avant-garde circles where she met Europe’s leading scholars and artists. With them she engaged in heated debates, surprising many with her self-confidence and zeal to learn. Women, in her eyes, could not be expected to just complement men, or be sidelined, silenced and strapped in housework and motherhood. A woman was an affirmative, inventive creator on her own—not an object to derive inspiration from, and thereby not necessarily a muse. Salomé believed that every attempt to control women would damage their natural, creative femininity.

Rilke adored her, seeing Salomé as the personification of sublime femininity. Inspired by her, he maintained that an artist, whether man or woman, had to bring out the feminine power within. Producing artwork was akin to childbearing, for through this process the artist gave birth to new ideas and visions. Rilke claimed that “one day . . . the woman will exist whose name will no longer signify merely the opposite of masculinity, but rather something in itself, something thought of in terms not of completion and limitation, but rather of life and existence.”

Yet it was rather ironic that it was Salomé who later convinced Rilke to modify his name on the grounds that it sounded “too effeminate.” The “Rene” in his name was changed to “Rainer,” though Rilke didn’t give up “Maria.” Thus he became Rainer Maria Rilke.

Salomé had a long affair with the author Paul Ree, and later got married to the linguistic scholar Carl Friedrich Andreas. Being a married woman didn’t seem to change her critical views on bourgeois marriage. She openly flirted with men, all of whom happened to be intellectuals or connoisseurs of the arts. The fact that she was married and had many lovers makes it difficult to understand how it was that she remained a virgin for long years. Her marriage was unconsummated. The powerful, independent writer and thinker was either scared of sexuality or unwilling to lose herself in an Other.

Nietzsche once said, “For the woman the man is a means: the end is always the child.” As compelling as it sounds, the statement did not apply to Lou Andreas Salomé. Not that she did not want to have children. She did. She even proclaimed motherhood as the highest calling for a woman. Her own childlessness was a source of regret and sorrow for her and she talked candidly, sometimes mordantly, about it. She interpreted the bond between the mother and the child as one that truly connected the Self to the Other.

Yet she also loved men. Those she treasured she did not see as a means to an end. In her eyes, each was a world unto himself. Like a housewife who took a special satisfaction in ironing out the wrinkles in a shirt, she patiently strived to smooth down the flaws in their personalities. She was an intuitive, insightful and controversial writer with strong opinions. Those who loved her—mostly men—loved her deeply; those who hated her—mostly women—did so with the same intensity.

 

Marguerite Duras—the diva of French literature according to many—was born in Saigon in 1914. Her parents were both teachers there, working for the French government. She lost her father at an early age, after which her mother remained in Indochina with her three children. The family did not have an easy life and there were financial problems deepened by quarrels and domestic violence. When Marguerite was a teenager she started having an affair with a wealthy Chinese man, a relationship she wrote extensively about in both her fiction and her memoirs.

At the age of seventeen she went to France, where she got married and wrote novels, plays, movie scripts, short stories and essays. She moved deftly between these different genres. When she wrote
The Sea Wall,
which was based on her childhood in Indochina, she and her mother had a huge quarrel about the way she had depicted her family. “Some people will find the book embarrassing,” she said. “That doesn’t bother me. I have nothing left to lose. Not even my sense of decency.”
¹⁷
There is a scene in her memoirs where her mother reads the book for the first time upstairs and the writer waits anxiously for her approval downstairs. When she comes downstairs her mother’s face is stern, showing her dislike. She accuses Marguerite of distorting the truth and playing to the gallery of readers; Marguerite, in turn, defends her book and her right to blur fact and fiction.

If the past is a foreign land, Duras visited it often, coming back with different memories of the same events. “No other reason impels me to write of these memories, except that instinct to unearth,” she said. Her interpretation of the story originally told in
The Lover,
which was based on her affair as a teenager with a Chinese man twelve years her senior, subsequently changed from book to book. Though prolific and generous with her craft, Duras was a writer who did not shy from exploring the same themes over and over. After the turmoil of 1968, her writing took on a more political overtone. In tandem with the spirit of the period, the title of one of her books reads
Destroy, She Said
.