Ghayn: Divagations on a Letter in Motion

Abstract

Fascination with the alphabet as an aesthetic construct begins with children, but sometimes it expires with them too. If adult readers remember the hypnotic appeal which the letters once exerted, their sounds and their shapes, the alphabet can become a means to access the aesthetic traditions of a culture, a device to put the eyes close to the text, to trace the verbal texture of a poetic tradition. The letter ghayn, as an example, allows an entry into the specific aesthetic shapes of Arabic and Persian, Turkish and Urdu, through the key words which remain constant as poetic traditions pass through one language community after another. Words that begin with ghayn allow a contemplation of change--both terms for change and terms for the objects of change. Imagery of transformation and metamorphosis, always at the heart of poetic traditions, helps us sketch a phenomenology of poetry, which in many of the traditions using Arabic letters is synonymous with that ghayn-initiated word, ghazal (love poetry). ********** If the alphabet could talk, what would it say to us? It serves long stretches of its time mute, unobtrusive, passively attending to the meanings of the people who use it. We know it is there, but once we have mastered it we also learn to ignore it. It carries our messages for us and beyond that we take it for granted, but like unobtrusive servants noticed only by newcomers or by children, the letters are still there, and right in the foreground. Sometimes a calligrapher makes us notice them again. Perhaps all this time they are mumbling among themselves. (Ouch, that ragged-edged reed pen hurts. Oh great, there's that dull pencil again. Be careful where you put those dots.) And different alphabets might have different things to say. Here is a cunning shape--open to the right like a lower-case c in English, dotted. Drawn with a reed pen, it undergoes a subtle thickening as the arc descends past the midpoint. Inside a word the same letter pulls tight like a knot with two sharp shoulders, the dot still floating above unchanged. It shouldn't be hard for us to follow its tracks, shadow it like a photographer stalking a celebrity, or the narrator of a novel tracking a character as it goes about its work, listening to hear what it is saying. Perhaps it too will tell us stories. And stories lead us inevitably to the story of stories, The Arabian Nights. Ghazala For those of us who feel that the Thousand and One Nights is more than a collection of stories, indeed that it is the ultimate narrative template, the toaster text we can consult to find out what narrative really is, all we need to do to make our case is read the first story Shahrazad tells. This is the story about the merchant who angers an 'ifrit. It combines all the elements that will recur so charmingly in the later stories--the speed and sense of mystery which draw the reader in and the feeling of suspense, combined with unexpected transitions, that give it a surreal atmosphere. The merchant sits down to have his lunch under a tree--an opening scene that we could freeze-frame and discuss at length. The self-sufficiency of the individual alone on the road, reaching into the pack where his lunch is packed, throwing the date pits happily behind him, is already compelling. When the 'ifrit appears, huge and menacing, to say the merchant must die, it is enough of a disruption to be horrifying, but sudden and unpredictable enough to be funny too. The 'ifrit explains that the flying date pit has killed his son, a fact so marvelously discordant (we know that sons don't always resemble their fathers, but this seems an extreme case) that we know we aren't going to be very frightened by what follows. As a spoken story it draws us in. As a written text it allows us to skip from one episode to another, to speed things up and slow them down. Such is the advantage the alphabet gives us over a listener like Shahzaman. …