Authors: Delia Sherman
I have sketched the form, not of a god, but of a man. I know its emptiness. I have learned too from him that one can indulge illusions, if one recognizes them for illusions.
I erase. I do not erase. The emptiness is there even when the form endures.
I smile, calm and tranquil, while the convoy rolls.
I draw the people at the side of the road, and the buildings.
I do not draw the smile of the Blessed of Gandhara.
Not any more; no longer.
The Heart Sutra is not explained. It is only recited.
Translated from the French by Sarah Smith
When I was a kid, I wanted to become an archeologist. I liked to dig in old cultures, languages, and layers of soil. I discovered Buddhism when I was 15, and was fascinated
because
my mind was revolted by the concept. When your inner self reacts so strongly, there must be something to investigate! The Buddhas of Gandhara were the depictions I loved above all. I have regretted being a writer sometimes, because of the joy it must be to unearth these wonders. But now, looking closely into the alchemy of art, I come to see writing as akin to archeology. You dig, traverse, connect and reveal, delve for buried truths. And to achieve this, you must use yourself as an interface. The destruction of the Buddhas of Afghanistan was for me a wound, a loss, a face-off with anger, a sheer impossibility to understand that I had to transmute and decipher. I did this as an archeologist-writer, delving into this event though cracks in history and the inability of strangers to convene: looking for the truth of the crossroads, and how to deal with it. I did this by reciting the Heart Sutra. It's the hardest of all, and thus my favorite one.
Léa Silhol
You probably know that every wave we trace, with hands or feet or fingers or toes or legs or knees or elbows or abdomen, depicts a message for someone in this space, or in a coming time that for now we may ignore. For example: When I soak my toes like beards in a stream in the land of Ulga, this will be a sending that will affectâyears, months, and centuries laterâthe way the coward Dudú drinks his milk. But this occurred or will occur (depending how you see it) far later than the events that I'm about to narrate.
The land of Ulga is a vast domain, as large as many mountains bound together. That being so, is it a mountainous country? No, not at all. It is high, like the mountains, but there are no peaks. It is as long as those rivers which rise and fall, which come and go, but without contours. Imagine the opposite of a vast sea, without deserts. Ulga's contours have a different physiognomy: that of its waters. Waters which gently descend, plentiful and indulgent with its inhabitants and tourists; waters which recline against the banks of its rivers and unfurl into cascades and waterfalls.
The land of Ulga has 527,306 watercourses, of which we can count rivers, lakes, lagoons, brooks, seas, oceans, aquifers, geysers, swamps, pools, ponds, little rivers, dikes, hot springs, marshes, rapids, waterfalls, and streams, many streams crossing everywhere.
Just as Ulga is rich in waters, so also are the activities of its inhabitants. Every inhabitant of Ulga knows how to swim. Every inhabitant of Ulga knows how to drink from a crystal glass. Every inhabitant of Ulga bathes four or five times a day. Ulga is almost all water. But Ulga also has earth, firm as a rock and as hard as a riverbed.
The customs of Ulga's men and women didn't change much from generation to generation. They always did the same thing, more or less, despite being a stubborn, studious people. Their traditions passed from fathers to sons, from sons to grandchildren, from grandchildren to great-grandchildren, from great-grandchildren to great-great-grandchildren, from great-great-grandchildren to great-great-great-grandchildren and so on that way.
The blood of Ulga's inhabitants was mixed with that of its older denizens, a people of large boats and comfortable, old dresses. They came from the sea, from the immemorial glaciers, from the caverns close to the immemorial glaciers. They climbed the ice floes and wallowed over the frozen stone, playing at licking the rigid surface and drinking it in big mouthfuls.
As noted earlier, the messages of Ulga's first inhabitants had begun to reach its final inhabitants. While the coward Dudú drank his milk, the honey he dripped into his glass made great whirlpools which foretold the inconceivable. Dudú knew but didn't say. An augury of storms, and the death of eighty newborns under the full moon.
The night the stranger arrived in Ulga, all the goats bleated, all at once. All the moths crashed into lamps. The hogs tore down the corrals of their sties and two ewes gave birth to five-legged lambs.
The stranger didn't reveal his identity. He stopped at the inn by the White Lake. He asked for nothing but a spartan meal. But drink he did, taking long swallows from transparent bottles filled with fresh water. He washed his face with milk. He slept the whole night. It isn't known what he dreamed of. Some say he dreamt all the dreams of the whole humanity since the dawn of the world. I can't confirm that. It's a lot of time and a lot of memory. He was a powerful man. It could have been true.
The following day the stranger opened the curtains of his room, searched for a woman, and lay with her until nightfall. He supped on green vegetables of very few colors. He drank pure spring water and slept until the morning of the following day.
Today is Tuesday, and the stranger has breakfasted without saying a word. He has taken his clothes and walked the distance remaining to the center of Ulga. The stranger has looked in the village, has not spoken to the people, except once: he asked for directions to the Bamboo River. He arrived there. He sat on the riverbanks. He looked out for a long time. Before the daylight faded, he wrote something in his notebook with the yellow cover. Before leaving he told a passing shepherd without waiting for greeting: “The river doesn't say, but what it says is that the flood of the seas will come from the Heavens."
The shepherd remembered what he had heard. He went with his goats. The stranger never told anyone what he had written. But I'll tell you what his journal said:
From the waves of the sea came the first men with three-feathered hats in boats with figureheads at their prows. They were brought by a sarcophagus with sails and great loads of clay. The end is filled with silence. You can't talk with your mouth full of water.
They began to say many things about the stranger. That he came to steal secrets. That he was a smuggler. That he sold brown and white women. That he didn't want to die. That he came to die. That he loved a woman in the country of Begonias. That he would never, ever say what he had come to do. Silence feeds the circulation of words, their swelling-up and coursing-over.
One day he told them: “My name is Dikon."
But he didn't say anything else. Ulga's inhabitants knew, thanks to the shepherds, that Dikon had come to write what the seas and oceans said, and what the lakes and rivers, what the banks and shores along everything that ran a course had to say.
Everything that runs along a course might be of blood or of water or of sap or of juice. Everything that runs goes towards some place and comes from some place else: this murmuring has something to say.
Evidently Dikon was searching for a way by which to regain a flow, a gliding, the brush of a watercourse, the magic of a slope, the voice of a sound blue or green or white or chalk. All of the colors of those which could be water.
Another day Dikon sat by a waterfall of an intense sky blue color. Sky blue because the water splashed against stone and the sun gave it a fresh and very sweet clarity. Sky blue like Dula's eyes in winter while looking at reindeer. Sky blue like the stains left by the candies Jalim chewed beside the fire. Dikon watched and watched and listened and listened. Water is something to look at, but also, and before all else, something that must be listened to. In the end, it is something to be touched.
Dikon listened to the waterfall's musings. Its sound entered very deep inside his ears, it entered and swirled, turning around and around, it entered and left and entered again. As if something stirred it and spun it and swallowed everything one thought about, even those thoughts kept unshared. At last, Dikon saw the waves that went from one end to the other and continued on towards some destination, who knows where, maybe the end of the world, or the origin-place, or the place of greatest unknown. The water carried many things: dirty clothes, a secret from Milan, the astonished eyes of the Simelas, the last cry and sigh of a couple, the flame of an extinguished matchstick, an oak leaf, many insectsâanything, in fact, that might fit into the coursing water. And finally, Dikon wasn't content to watch and listen; he wanted to touch what he had heard and seen. He came close to the shore, extended a hand, then a forefinger, he sank it in, palpated the surface, submerged the hand entirely, then the arm ... quite soon the water was up to his throat. Soaking wet, spun round and round in a gasping whirlpool, he returned to the shore and sat in the sun. In the land of Ulga, the sun shines brighter whenever someone emerges from water; its radiance becomes incomparably smooth and sparkling.
Dikon wrote this in his journal, once dry:
Whatever I write wouldn't suffice to pronounce the name I was told today, when the sun flamed as a myriad of red suns. I didn't dream it. The name was sun, earth, air, axis, center ... and a word that now I can't remember. And it was the most important one! I'm afraid. Endings always frighten me. Especially if they come from on high.
Dikon's gaze was as deep as the ocean bottom. Dudú, who had met him once at a bend in the road (precisely at a junction), was heard to say afterwards that he had seen a storm, like a falling curtain of water as he looked into those eyes. The truth of it was, a great many speculations were set forth about Dikon's life. Dudú defended him before the tribe. He argued that a look as clear and diaphanous as a current of water was proof of his honesty. Not a person to be distrusted. The others laughed, ha ha ha, and Dudú didn't say another word.
Every night at the tavern of Ulga, the entertainment of choice was to eat truffles and trade news about who had sighted the stranger (no one called him Dikon, even though they all knew his name)âin what region, near which river or stream, and what he had been doing.
Lar, the man with curly white hair who liked to eat pickled gherkins, admitted that he had spied on him once from behind some ferns. White over white, hair over spines, he had watched Dikon sitting for a very long time along the water. Dikon sat in peace, ears pricked at every sound, and finally flung himself, fully dressed, into the water. Spinning and spinning, carried along by the obstinate current, Dikon returned to earth two kilometers further near the border with Jaspur, where the people of Lapas dwelled. Curious to know Dikon's destination, Lar had observed his journey down the river and his ascent towards the earth. The stranger had stretched in the sun like a caterpillar, yawned eight times, and finally returned upstream against the current to his point of origin. Dried, renewed, and tanned by the sun, the stranger had taken up a feather and written many strange words in his journal. Then he took a breath and fell into a very deep coma.
Simurg told a different story. That he had seen the stranger at some blue springs. Dikon had undressed in the mist and bathed there casually until sunset. Then he had dressed languidly, drunk from a bottle of clear water, and lain down to sleep with his stomach full of milk. Later he started a fire and wrote many words or drawings (Simurg wasn't sure) by its light. And then he had left by the same way he came, along one of those trails without beginning or end.
Lampebo spoke last. He said that he had seen Dikon swimming in the Lake of the Three Names. The stranger had studied the heavens, as if waiting for a ciphered message. He had watched the waters, then dove into their depths and emerged half an hour laterâlong after Lampebo had taken him for drownedâcarrying something in his arms. What it was, or how, or where he carried it, Lampebo didn't know. But he knew that Dikon was laden with the Truth. And that was the last time that anyone saw Dikon in Ulga.
The Council reviewed the particulars, pondered long over the accounts, but did not come to any conclusions. Partly because the inhabitants of Ulga don't think very hard. Or partly because everything in Ulga is simplified, like water. Partly because the people live secluded lives and don't argue much. Partly because everything is largely decided ahead of time. The Council resolved to wait, attentive, and see if the stranger reappeared. The information was uncertain and improbable. Like the rains that threatened to fall over Ulga.
Dudú drank his milk with honey; he saw something in this unrest. On the next day he left Ulga, on a caravan with his sister and the rest of the family. No one ever heard of them again. In their exodus, they left behind only the walls of their homestead, four nets, a machete, and the contents of two wine bottles, spilled in a fountain. A letter had arrived.
What follows is excerpted from the journal of Dikon, which I found floating in this vastness of water, within a box hermetically sealed with paraffin and seals of wax. The seventh seal broke when the moon departed and I read the following:
Journal of Dikon.
In the Fifth Day of the Calendar of Ur.
My gods signaled it. The water doesn't lie; I repeat what they ask of me. The water will announce what awaits us. Deathâthe greatest catastrophe in Ulga's history. I write these words to a handful. The sea will be high, very high, almost to where the skies are now. And I, I who am below, shall swim for those who deliver the backwards waterfall. If the sea should fall on our heads, what good to swim? To navigate a boat? Ulga's delivery. This is my last entry. The one they ordered me to leave. It's what I read in the water, what the waters dictate to me; the words I hear, in any case, in their gushing.