The Equator of the Heart

I would wake up with a dead eye that could see and a living eye that remained closed.
—Wilson Harris.

If Paradise exists it must have the velvety feel and the freshness of a fruit salad. But that’s another story; I am eager to harvest the juicy essence of my tale. The rising tide would drag in corpses that looked as if they were alive as they crossed the sea. Their fat batrachian eyes would blow up in the muddy salt water, eyes twice as big as a grown man’s fist, smiling blissfully at the nighttime stars. Eyes that could then swim against the current and wash up on the basalt beaches to find a sepulture worthy of them under a rock surrounded by fine sand and foam.

The reverberation reached its height at noon, as corpses with gouged-out eyes nonchalantly floated by. A smell of plankton, thirsty earth and gelatinous vegetation embalmed the living corpses while their eyes swam against the current on the path of return to life, crossing the Acheron once again. A few eyes duly accompanied by their fat-cheeked corpses were drifting along with the current. In a little while the earth would look like old tough meat again. It would be swarming with billions of pairs of eyes, legs and as many arms floating around on the disaster-filled and above all stagnant waters. Waters refusing to follow the course of History.

We could hear watery sounds. The woman next to me wasn’t floating as well as I was. She was obese: she must have been pregnant without giving birth, and she still had a few streaks of bright red varnish on her remaining fingertips. She wanted to roll out her whole string of sad stories on me, but I had absolutely no need of her misfortunes. At this rate I’ll never reach the bank, I said, and besides, by then my eyes will be beached on the other bank of the gulf. We had been drifting on the shiny surface of the water for close on to a night now. In the tarry darkness we were looking for the voices of our friends lost in the ocean. Madness: the next-to-last gate before the waiting-room of Hell. Unless saving angels look over the world. One angel over the world’s left ear, another over the right. They are called Munir and Makar, a last hope before the series of little cosmic hells. A worn-out, threadbare destiny, that’s what half of humanity has been left with. No wonder there’s hatred dancing in your neighbor’s eye. A man can no longer look calmly at little ordinary hells.

I was enjoying both the company of my fat-cheeked companions and the voice from across time. Only the magnitude of the silence could bother me, and sometimes I would get frightened, for we were drifting blindly. The noonday sun was over our heads like a mortuary nimbus, a singular halo of the world’s end. The sky displayed a riot of ochre and anthracite in wild arabesques. The great wall of earth was behind us. We were captives of a glacier—the ocean—where the solar artillery couldn’t manage to extort its daily taxes. Tired of trying, the sun cast its anathema on the ocean. Still swimming against the current, our eyes would be pecked at by winged dogs or whirling horses that exploded the rocks with superhuman violence. These houri-rumped horses (right out of the Islamic imagination?) were looking for secret sap. During the era of clairvoyance, it was said that things seen by more than ordinary face-to-face eyes were no longer secret, but who had ever seen these diabolical horses? Everything was drifting around us: gilded placentas, seven-day-old fetuses, the charnel-house breasts of a nomad woman who seemed to want to drown her child in the mobile glacier, a miniaturist with titanic mustaches, a monumental head as porous as a soft sponge, etc. Everything was reflected in everything else. It was hard to look straight ahead with empty eye-sockets: some of my companions’ heads had made a full rotation. I would have given anything to move forward a few yards, slide down a few waterfalls and have the whitish foam for a bed. I could certainly go for a tango of waves. To go out in glory I would demand that my skull be smashed against the first big rock, the dragonflies would sing the Song of the Dead just for me; Beelzebub would no doubt be waiting for me at the foot of his citadel of exile (this Pharaonic creature has what is called the third foot, an object of seduction as fearsome as it is lacerating); Munir and Makar would threaten me with their houri eyes. But for the moment, let us go on.

As you may have realized, an eyeless being (not blind) can only express himself in waves of images. When he wants to describe a town, he first indicates a horizon-line, then the mountain that takes the place of the town, then the lights twinkling over the mountain, and so on.

You couldn’t complain about this night and this ocean that humiliated us by giving us temporary shelter. I was hoping I could have my eyelids burnt off, Lord knows why. Suddenly the sea turned into a torrent and we were drifting towards the middle of the ocean. Then we slid down six or seven heavens while everybody thought we were sliding towards the turf. It was a miracle none of my companions croaked, as Charles Baudelaire wrote when he translated Poe (“The Manuscript Found inside a Bottle”): “Every minute threatened to be our last.” Here the skin of the night revealed what daylight hides. We were overwhelmed by that jazz of despair, we were puppets and the ocean was our puppeteer. We saw despair, we felt it beading in drops over our bodies. At dawn the sea unveiled its colored punctuation: the sea reddened by the blood of our odors. Gulls were gliding over our heads and we could see them. Their wings no longer had the rudder they used to have. Further upstream, the eunuchs of the effeminate Pharaoh had diverted a great part of the sea to irrigate their fish farms. The sea, reddened by an excess of salt, threatened to evaporate and carry us off in its murderous wake worthy of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945.) The reddened sea showed its logic: there are no real facts, it is the succession of facts that can have meaning. My companion on the right was telling me: “I am dreaming of Baal, I am one of the sons of Ham born in the desert, the crocodile is my emblem, I do not want to end my days in the middle of a glacier showing off its muscles under the rod of a visibly absent god.” My companion on the left, not the old man with cuttlefish lips or the obese woman with the buffalo rump, I was talking about the companion on my left, the one with a prophet’s voice (he was known to be a muezzin and exhibitor of African monkeys in Jericho, the oldest city in the whole world), said: “Time has no value, chance alone has meaning.” As for me, I let him go on with his fantasies. I had come to enjoy his Babel of words. He was telling me I had the soul of a voyager, like the ancients. From his bric-a-brac of names, I picked two: Ibn Arabi and Omar Khayyam (that peerless mathematician and libertarian poet, born in Baghdad in the 11th century B.C., made Satanic verses at will).

All we had to do now was to escape from the muddy river of forgetfulness. And we would have the power to see into the great gap of the night. We would be able to cross the equator of the heart, its weight of darkness, and like Al-Sina (that pre-Islamic god of the Yemenite highlands, a friend of the Moon), to act from a distance.