Where the bee sucks

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I remember summer afternoons, walking home from school through meadows choked with thousands upon thousands of wild flowers. Every blossom seemed to vibrate with humming bumble-bees: they were everywhere. We would catch them in jam jars and hold them captive for an hour to two while we argued about which of us had caught the most, the largest, the loudest. We feared them a little for their sting, of course, but knew they would attack only once (and as a last resort) in an act of suicide (unlike the hostile wasp). We never harmed them, some vague instinct in us recognizing their value, their innate sanctity even. No-one ever killed a bumble bee except by accident.

Today, the meadows of my childhood have been replaced by housing estates. But in my own garden, which cannot contain the abundance of flowers it has produced this year (poppies, primulas, poeny-roses, azaleas, lilacs, etc.,) there is an eerie silence; and there are hardly any bumble-bees.

I have always admired the humble bumble-bee, respected it. It is a gentle, industrious, endearing, fat, hairy little beast, far friendlier than the commercially-useful honey bee (It is also solitary, and so does not swarm like its cousin).

Sometimes, (like this morning) an occasional one will blunder into my bedroom through an open window and get itself caught in the lace curtains. I flatter myself it has come to visit me rather than losing its way, for many poets in antiquity were said to have been visited by bees: it was a sign of the Bestowal of Great Wisdom. Pindar was one such poet honoured in this way: they brought honey to his infant lips. Even Plato, though no poet (and seeking to exclude poets from his grim Republic) was visited by a swarm of bees at his birth. (“The Wisdom of the Bees” is also much spoken of in Celtic legend)

The bumble-bee at my window, however, had probably just got lost and needed some help. It has no brain, only a double chain of neural ganglia. But who needs a brain when you have a heart like his: so much in love with the colours, the scents the textures and the tastes of heavenly blossoms? I am reminded that the ancient Egyptians, who preserved many of the internal organs of a dead person for use in the Afterworld, discarded the human brain altogether. It was one of the few organs left on the embalming room floor. Every Pharaoh went into Paradise brainless (along with his all his Egyptian subjects). But then perhaps Paradise can only be attained by those who have renounced their calculating, chattering minds and have tuned their hearts instead to vibrate, like bees, to the colours and shapes of eternity.

My errant bumble bee is impatient to return to paradise. I wonder how he perceives my garden, his compound eyes magnifying and multiplying everything he sees. His senses must become saturated with colour. He must occasionally become drunk on what he sees and giddy with ecstatic joy. Perhaps this is the meaning of his continual murmurings.

Our word for “Paradise” comes from the Persian word for a “garden”. We (humans) find so much beauty and symbolism in flowers that we often forget that they were created solely for the insects and not for us. Without the beetles, the bees and the mayflies, our landscapes would be drab and monochrome just as they were in the era of the dinosaurs. Our ideas of paradise would also have to be radically revised.

A real-life inhabitant of paradise, a paradisiac, a hairy bundle of love, I capture my errant bee in a wine glass and release him outdoors. He makes a direct bee-line for the lilac bushes, muttering loudly to himself.

Who will sing his praises once the bumble bee has disappeared forever from our landscapes? It is slowly being killed off (I am told) by a tiny parasitic mite that burrows into its flesh. Soon, in this corner of the world, there will be no more summer meadows filled with the onomatopoeic murmurings of innumerable bees. What an incalculable loss!

© Ryszard Antolak

Cloud Appreciation Society

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Clouds are endlessly fascinating. As children, we used to lie sprawled out in the long grass staring up at them for hours, relating to one another everything we saw. It was a time for imaginations to run riot. And sometimes, we really did see strange things! One particular afternoon, a huge angel with outstretched wings came bearing down on us from a crimson sky, and we ran home in fear to tell our parents.

Some years later at college, when the authorities were looking for new ideas for students’ organizations, I suggested that they start a “Cloud Appreciation Society”. I didn’t expect them to take me seriously. But they did. And to my astonishment, over thirty young freshmen arrived (with notebooks and pencils) to attend our first meeting! It was all great fun. We would drive out into the local countryside and just lie about in the meadows talking, sketching or writing about the clouds. But the secret of "Cloud Appreciation" is that it isn't really about clouds at all: it's about the cloud-gazers. We found ourselves talking endlessly about everything and everyone, until the serious types took over and Science began to rear its ugly head. There was soon talk about "making lists", and "keeping records". Profane words like “stratus" and "cumulus" were bandied about. It was then that I left. I didn’t want meteorology. I wanted the poetry, the imagination, the wildness. So I returned to the meadow and resumed my studies there alone.

But of course, I wasn't allowed to concentrate. Once again, I was made to realize that Cloud Appreciation is not really about appreciating clouds. First the lapwings started flirting with me (from a distance of course); then the grasshoppers came to see what I was doing; the skylarks played "peek-a-boo" above the long grass; the beetles walked over my notebooks trying to read what I'd written. Larger animals also began arriving to study me. A young deer once came so close that I could hear her breathing. I can still see her rounded eyes of surprise as she bounded off into the undergrowth startled by a movement of my pen. It was so difficult to concentrate! I’m sure I would have obtained my PhD in Cloud Appreciation (cum laude) from the University of "Universe-City", if only there had not been so many "distractions".

After all these years, the memory of the meadow has stayed with me while the clouds have disappeared over the horizon of age. I still remember the smell of the long grass, the flash of the buttercups, the pink streaks of foxgloves, the blood-poppies, (and those hussy little yellow poppies that look so fresh and flirty). I’ve always loved poppies, perhaps because they pine away and die the moment you pick them, and are therefore left alone by flower pickers and the commercial companies.

So what I've learned is simply this: if you go into the wilderness with the intention of studying “the wilderness”, you won't notice nearly as much as if you'd gone there to do something else. Heavy deliberation in these matters destroys all the spontaneity, kills the unique wildness, of the moment. You have to be just as wild and free and spontaneous as the things you’ve come to see. It’s like Love: holding too tightly to it is a sure way of losing it: you squeeze the (wild) life out of it. William Blake said it all so much better, of course:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.

© Ryszard Antolak
(Painting: Nina Rahshenas)

The Woman

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For as long as I can remember, I have been holding an intimate conversation with an unknown, and perhaps non-existent, woman who haunts my thoughts. She exists partly in my imagination but is no less real for that. Her name, her description and her actions are scattered throughout the pages of my dream books, her footsteps imprinted on the Book of my Life.

It is not her beauty that has drawn me over the decades, nor any talent, (for she has none of these). It is her mere presence: so numinous that no sacrifice would be too great to win her attention.

She has always been there somewhere in the background, this woman whom I talk to in my head (at least for as long as I can remember). But I have not always recognized her. She is elusive and changeable. I have mistaken her often for others. I thought I caught glimpses of her in the faces of my mother, my sisters and the women in my life whom I loved and adored. Trusting in Her reality, I waited and prepared myself for her, certain she would reveal herself in the flesh (so many years I wasted waiting). When I met my wife I “knew” beyond all doubt she had finally arrived! I had found my pearl of great price. But the face soon faded away.

Today, I am still talking to her in my head, this woman who is closer to me than any other, relating to her every detail of my day, arguing semantics with her, pointing out a sunset. She is still here. And she is calling to me as she once did, drawing me out of my complacency, out of my shallow and incomplete understanding into those deeper levels of intimacy beyond spousal or blood relationships.

I will go wherever she leads me, of course, (how could I refuse a vocation from Beyond?). But this time I will not be deceived. In whatever form she comes, in whatever guise, with whatever face, I will know her for herself (for the hallowed presence that she is). She cannot fool me again. I have recognized her within my own self. So there is no more possibility of deception.

© Ryszard Antolak

Dark Carousel

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Sometimes the Future erupts into the Present in such a way that you cannot but take notice, even if you hardly understand what’s going on at the time. It’s almost as if you were being prepared in advance for some traumatic event in your life.

For example, one of the films which distressed me as an adolescent (and even more so also after I got married), was the musical blockbuster “Carousel”. Every time I watched it, I found myself weeping after the first fifteen minutes, something that became embarrassing, (and a great joke in my family). It puzzled me because Carousel radiates positive energy, warm sentiment and many feel-good factors that defy any inclination towards melancholia

For someone who spends many long evenings playing the piano alone, my first presumption was (naturally) that the musical score by Richard Rogers was to blame. Carousel possesses some very delicate and moving numbers: “When you walk through a storm”, “If I loved you”, “My boy Bill”, etc. Easily moved to tears by music, I presumed my emotions were being stirred by the songs. But then I finally bought myself a CD of the music and quickly realized that any emotive elements (for me at least) had to lie in the story.

Once removed from its scaffolding of infectious music, Carousel reveals a more sinister side. Based on the play “Liliom” by the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar, it is about people on the fringes of society: outcasts, low-life, carnival characters. Molnar had experienced periods of domestic violence in his relationship with his wife which had eventually contributed to his marital break-up, and it during one of these periodical “flare-ups” that he had written his most famous play.

For those who don’t know it, Carousel is the story of a handsome carnival barker, Billy Bigelow (played by Gordon McCrae) who falls in love with a sweet innocent mill-worker called Julie Jordan (Shirley Jones). Although they both love one another, the marriage is a disaster.

The tragedy of Carousel is that the hero, (Billy Bigolow in the musical, Liliom in the original play) loves his wife but cannot communicate any of those feelings to her. He is an artist without an art; and is “unable” to work because “normal” work is beneath him. Everything he touches he destroys. Not because he wants to. He has to live everything at a distance. He wastes his time gambling, flirting, and making up big (unrealizable) plans. His basic requirements are attention and excitement. Faced with the prospect of a real love (Julie’s) he discovers he does not know what to do with it. He cannot bear her devotion, because beside her, his actions are revealed for the selfish deeds they are. So he vents out all his frustrations on his wife, beating her up periodically with his fists (which is understated in the Hollywood version). Julie, however, loves him in spite of the beatings and the bullying. With a child on the way, Billy agrees to take part in a robbery to obtain money to provide for his growing family. The attempt is bungled: he falls on his own knife and is killed. (In the original play he commits suicide in order to evade his responsibilities as a father, but the story had to be softened for the American market).

Once in Heaven, Billy refuses to admit his love for Julie, and shows no regret whatsoever for his actions.

Sixteen years later (after his death), he is allowed to return to earth for a single day to do some good there. He brings with him a star he has stolen from heaven, which he intends to give to his daughter whom he has never seen. She is now 16 years old, a pretty, but unhappy child who takes after her father. She does not recognize him when he arrives to speak to her. He offers her the Heavenly Star as a gift, but she refuses and asks him to go away. (Too much like her father, she cannot accept anything good). He insists that she take it, and when she continues to refuse, he lashes out at her in his frustration and slaps her (the only way he knows to gain attention).

The girl runs away to tell her mother: she has seen a man who has hit her hard, and yet (somehow) it did not hurt. “Is it possible”, she asks her mother, “for someone to hit you hard, and for it not to hurt at all?” Julie, intuiting what has happened, tells her daughter, “Yes. It is possible for someone to beat you, and beat you, and beat you – and not hurt you at all”. Now invisible, Billy whispers to his wife: "I loved you, Julie. Know that I loved you." And Julie, (somehow), hears him. She joins her daughter and the rest of the townsfolk in singing “You’ll never walk alone”, as Billy heads towards Heaven.

As it stands, the musical Carousel can be said to condone domestic violence. It says that it’s alright to beat up your partner as long as the victim loves you and forgives you continuously.

The ending motto of the play and the film are the same: that there is a violence that doesn’t hurt the victim: that domestic violence can be interpreted as a blind form of love; and that it can be forgiven, both here on earth and also in heaven..( Billy is, after all, redeemed not by any effort of his own, but by the “tear of Love” that comes into Julie’s eye on hearing her daughter’s story.).

Once you knock on the door of your own self, the answer you receive is seldom the one you expect. When I first saw Carousel many years ago, I identified with Billy Bigolow, the flawed hero: he had the best lines I thought, the most seductive songs. But it is Julie Jordan who is the real flawed heroine, putting up with her husband’s behaviour, rationalizing his brutal actions, returning his beatings with a Christian love.

Today I know it possible to love someone who beats and abuses you. I know this because I have done it. But whether this is “right” is a different kind of question.

© Ryszard Antolak

(picture: Bita Vakili)

On the Character of Trees

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Sycamore
Sit contentedly under the welcome shade of the sycamore tree. It is friendly and helpful to man. Its wood is close-grained, exuding no harsh resins: good for household furniture, for table-tops and surfaces that come in contact with your food. It is sacred to Hathor, favourite goddess of Egypt.

Silver Fir
The evergreen Silver fir is the maiden of the trees. It is sacred to the moon and the goddess Artemis. Ulysses built the Trojan Horse from Silver Fir. It burned the topmost towers of Illium.

Almond
I said to the almond tree:
“Sister, speak to me of God”.
And the almond tree blossomed.
The almond is the magician among trees. Aaron’s wand was a branch of almond. Its buds sprouted miraculously to form the menorah.

Acacia
The ark of Osirus, the ark of Noah, the Ark of the Covenant: all were all made of acacia. A hard-wood, inhabiting desert places, it is the tree of the burning bush from which Jehovah spoke the words "I am who am” to Moses. Thorny, jealous, self-sufficient like the God himself, it strangles (like the Ash) the roots of other trees that dare to grow beside it. Egyptian spears were made of this. It is the "shittim wood" of the Old Testament.

Palm
The palm tree is our relative. When God had finished creating Adam, some of the red clay remained behind. From this the creator formed the palm tree. Hence, some medieval philosophers believed it to be half-vegetable half-animal. Banished from paradise, Adam uprooted the palm tree and took it with him. He planted it in Mecca. All palm trees are descended from the pits of its original dates. According to the Qur'an, Jesus was born under this tree.

Ash
Tall and proud, the Ash is cruelest of the trees. Its shade is harmful. Its roots strangle those of other trees. Spears were made of this wood. Cruel as it is, the ash tree exudes a sweet liquid from its bark (and leaves) which the ancient Greeks called "meli" or honey. Hence comes the saying: "Out of the strong shall come forth sweetness". The Meliae (honey ash spirits) were born from the blood of Uranus after Cronos castrated him. They fed the infant Zeus with their honey in the Cretan cave of Dicte.

With purple flowers and black mitre-shaped buds, the ash is the tree of bishops. In autumn, the keys of the Kingdom hang from its branches. It is the tree of Poseidon because oars were made from ash. The druidic wand was an ash.

Elder
Both blessed and cursed, the elder is a mysterious tree. It is the first to let out leaves and last to drop them. Although a tree of wastelands (it will grow in almost any soil) its berries are nutritious and make a rich red wine. In spring the blossoms yield their own yeast under the influence of the sun and make a fine white wine. It is the tree of the crucifixion of Christ. Judas hanged himself from an elder tree. In Ireland, it was the tree of the fairies. Roads were built around them because the penalty for cutting it down was death. Any child placed in an elder cradle was sure to die. It was never used as fuel because its smoke was considered noxious.

Broom
On Mount Horeb Elijah rested under a broom asking to die and an angel touched him and brought him food. It was used for expelling evil spirits from the house, and hence to sweep the floors of homes (our word for a broom comes directly from it). It is more of a bush than a tree, but was regarded as a tree by the Celts.

Pear
Because of its white blossoms, the pear tree was sacred to the moon. The image of Hera at the Heraeum in Mycenae was made of pear-wood; and Athene had a pear sanctuary in Boeotia.

Alder
The most brotherly of trees is the Alder. It is very gregarious and allows all other plants and trees to grow around it. An inhabitant of damp watery places, its wood was used to line banks, to build water conduits and to make buckets. The city of Venice stands upon alder piles hammered into the mud of the lagoon. It was sacred to the Celtic God Bran.

Rowan
Scottish gardeners plant mountain ashes in their gardens to keep away evil spirits. (I have one in mine)

© Ryszard Antolak
(Picture: Bardia Haddadi)

Iran, King Kong and Paradise Lost

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For Darius Kadivar, whose tireless efforts to persuade me to write this article finally bore fruit. With warm thanks. - RA.

In the latter years of his long successful life, Merian C. Cooper - the creator of the epic film “King Kong” - developed an inconsolable longing to return to the Zagros Mountains of Iran and live out his remaining days among the Bakhtiari nomads of the region. The idea haunted him periodically. All he needed, he used to tell his old friend Ernest Schoedsack, was to “buy horses, a few flocks of sheep”, and (because of his growing frailness) “get a couple of good Persian doctors”. But the dream with all its endless possibilities was never realized.

Cooper had first visited Iran in 1924 to film the movie “Grass”, a documentary about the Baba Ahmadi branch of the Bakhtiari tribe. Their epic journey over the mountains between Ahvaz and Isfahan every year in search of grazing has been described as “the greatest migration in modern history”. Images of tribesmen throwing themselves into the rushing Karun River (along with their livestock), and footage of them climbing the glacial face of the massive Zardeh Kuh in their bare feet, thrilled audiences all over the world. Grass became Cooper’s first commercial box office success, and on the strength of it, he was given money to complete other film projects (of which King Kong became the most famous).

In real life, Cooper was bigger than any of his movie creations. He was distinguished as a Hollywood film producer, movie innovator, explorer, war hero, adventurer, pioneer of commercial air flight and much more besides. The new biography of him by Mark Cotta Vaz is entitled “Living Dangerously” and this is a very fitting title. Because for most of his life, Merian C. Cooper lived “on the edge”, at the extremes of life: he needed to take life-threatening risks in order to feel truly alive. Life in Santa Monica and San Diego bored the pants off him and he was forever planning to escape.

In 1924, from his tent high up on the Zagros Mountains, he had written in his diary: "You risk your skin, and in the moment when life balances with death, no matter how afraid you may be, you get a touch of the animal value of existence ... wind and rain beats on your face as you brace yourself ... some man trusts you above all other men and you realize what friendship means. These are the seconds which give zest and fire to existence ... These are the moments when conscience and memory alike are drowned in the fine, physical or spiritual beauty of life..." (Vaz p6)

Cooper had experienced those heightened moments of existence before (in 1920) when as a volunteer in the Polish Air Force, he had flown dangerous missions against the invading Soviet armies. He had also experienced such moments on his journey with the Bakhtiari. He even envied one of the Bakhtiari leaders, Haidar Khan, who seemed to embody everything Cooper was looking for in life. (Some of Haidar’s qualities later found their way into the character of King Kong). But he could never find the heightened awareness he so craved anywhere else (except, perhaps in his cinematic imagination) although he longed for it until the day he died.

Cooper’s two companions during the filming of “Grass” -- both Americans -- were the boyish, excitable Ernest Schoedsack (who did most of the camera work), and the enigmatic Marguerite Harrison, who put up half of the money for the enterprise.

The three characters had met four years earlier in Poland, during the Polish-Soviet war of 1920. Cooper had been instrumental in creating the Kosciuszko Squadron: a group of young American airmen who had volunteered to help Poland in her hour of need. From their flimsy wood and canvas airplanes, they had bombed and strafed the advancing Soviet armies of Semyon Budienny, which were attempting to turn Poland into another Soviet Socialist Republic.

Shot down over the Ukraine, Cooper was captured by the Russians and dispatched to the Gulag. There, he was saved from starvation through the intervention of Marguerite Harrison (a mysterious American spy who may also have been working for the Soviets). He eventually escaped, and after crossing the northern Russian wastes with two Polish friends, found safety in neighboring Latvia. He returned to Poland a war-hero, and was decorated (along with his squadron) with the highest military honor the country is able to bestow: the Virtuti Militari.

Marguerite Harrison had put up half of the money needed to produce “Grass”, but only on the condition that she was allowed to take part in the expedition, something to which Schoedsack objected. (During the journey, he was constantly irritated by her habit of applying make-up before every filming and generally treating the expedition like a family holiday). But his objection was over-ruled, and on December 14th 1923, the three Americans arrived in Shustar by boat to start filming.

Every year, at Norooz, the Bakhtiari nomads, 50,000 men, women and children (together with half a million animals), began an epic journey over the Zagros Mountains in a search of grazing. In their path lay two great obstacles: the treacherous fast-running Karun River (half a mile wide) and the snow-clad Zardeh Kuh mountains, fifteen thousand feet high. They divided themselves into 5 separate groups, each taking a different route across the mountains. Cooper and his companions accompanied the Baba Ahmadi branch of the tribe from the start of their migration north of Ahvaz all the way to the plains of Isfahan, filming the whole journey with hand-cranked cameras supported on shaky tripods.

In the course of their journey, Cooper came to admire Haidar Khan, the tribal leader of the group. He was particularly impressed by the older man’s physical presence: very hairy, “like a gorilla”, Cooper remembered later. But in the presence of his nine-year-old son Lufta, the chief’s whole demeanor changed and he would become soft and gentle in speech and actions. The relationship between this father and son became the central focus of the film Grass.

The first obstacle for the group, the crossing the dangerous Karun River, took almost a full week. It was achieved by constructing flimsy rafts from inflated goatskins, a method Alexander the Great had used two thousand years earlier. So strong were the currents, that several tribesmen were swept away and ended up smashed against rocks. At one point, Cooper and Haidar, both stripped to the waist, raced one another across the river to the opposite bank, the older man surging ahead to win and uphold the dignity of his tribe. Cooper was exhausted by the swim, but Haidar, to Cooper’s amazement, returned time after time to help others on the other side. "Here, in danger,” Cooper observed (clearly overawed by Haidar’s natural physical powers), “[is] a man, by glory!"

Cinematically, the highpoint of the journey was the crossing of the snow-clad Zardeh Kuh, the last great barrier to the land of grass. The Bakhtiari left their tents and other belongings behind in order to travel more lightly and began their ascent of the almost sheer glacier face of the mountain. Most of them attempted the climb barefoot. They were assaulted by wind and snow. At night, they slept out under the stars. Cooper thought he was living a maddening dream. Finally, having reached the summit, they looked out before them and saw a sea of grass stretching across the horizon in a vast, tight arc of green. Cooper wrote in his diary: “Here was the prize of the gallant fight. Here was the land of plenty. Grass and life!” (Vaz 129)

The journey across the Zagros changed Cooper forever. He came to idealize the way of life of the Bakhtiari people. He was acutely conscious of the immensity of their possessions: the sky, the grass and the mountains disguised as clouds. He was also saddened (and angry) at the realization that their way of life was coming to an end; and the modern world was coming to throw this culture of a thousand years onto the dung heap of history. Something of his anger went into the final scenes of “King Kong”, when the giant gorilla, threatened by the flashing weapons of modern technology (guns and planes) makes his final, defiant stand on the topmost pinnacle of the Empire State Building.

Cooper later admitted that despite the millions of words written about the symbolism inherent in “King Kong”, the film was really just a whopping great yarn. Nevertheless, it was one that resonated with audiences all around the world who saw in it something more than mere surface gloss.

The film script for “King Kong” was written by Schoedsack’s wife, Ruth, who based the dialogue on conversations she remembered between Schoedsack and Cooper on their voyages of exploration. Her husband, (Schoedsack), did most of the camera work. Marguerite Harrison, the “unwanted woman” on the Zagros expedition, was the inspiration for the Fay Wray character. The personality of Kong himself was partly based on Paul du Chaillu's description of the death of a gorilla in his book "Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa", which Cooper had read as a 6-year-old boy. The gentle, human side of the animal’s character was modelled on Haidar, gleaned from glimpses of his relationship with Lufta (his beloved son).

Despite all his many accomplishments, however, Cooper always felt that he had left something of himself behind on the plains of Isfahan. In 1947, he began to make preparations for a re-make of “Grass”, but hastily abandoned it after learning that metal bridges now spanned the Karun River and a railroad had been built through the Zagros Mountains. The Wilderness had been brutally destroyed! There was no where else on earth to explore. Cooper, always the adventurer, turned to the only uncharted area left - the human imagination (which for him meant the cinema). He explored that exotic realm with all the creative resources at his disposal, leaving behind him a bright catalogue of marvelous and unforgettable films.

Ryszard Antolak


Reference
Vaz, Mark Cotta. Living Dangerously. The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper (Villard Books. 2005).

The Old Man and his Neighbour

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There was once an old man who had nothing in the world but a few acres of land, a dutiful son, and one horse. The horse was a magnificent animal, however, and the king offered him a great sum of money for it. But the old man refused. The horse was a family member, he explained. It was not for sale.

Next morning, the old man woke up to discover that his horse had run away during the night! A neighbour rushed to comfort him. "How terrible for you!” he exclaimed. “Now you have no horse and no money. It's terrible what has happened to you!"

But the old man merely shook his head. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad”, he answered. “All I know is that my horse has gone and I have no money left. "

A few days later, the farmer's horse returned, leading six beautiful wild horses behind it. The neighbour told him they were worth a fortune. "You were right, old man! It was not such a bad thing after all that your horse ran away! Now you have seven fine horses in your field. It was a stroke of luck that your horse ran away!"

But the old man merely shook his head slowly. "I really don’t know if it’s good or bad”, he answered. "All I know is that my horse has come home with six other horses”.

The next day, the farmer's son was trying to tame one of the horses when he fell off and broke both his legs. The neighbour immediately rushed to comfort the old man. "Oh, you were right!” he lamented. “It really was a terrible thing that your horse returned with six more horses. Now your son has broken both his legs. You'll have no-one to help you in the fields. How will you survive the winter? It's terrible that your son has fallen off his horse!"

But the old man merely shook his head slowly. "I don’t know if it's good or bad”, he answered. “All I know is that my son has fallen and broken his legs. That's all"

The very next day, the King declared war on a neighbouring country. All the young men were immediately rounded up and sent to fight against the enemy. The farmer's son did not have to go, of course, because he was an invalid. When the neighbours heard the news, they went to the old man and said, "You were right, old man! It was a stroke of luck that your son fell and broke his legs. Now he won’t be killed in the war like our sons. Your son will be a comfort to you in your old age. It was lucky that your son broke legs!”

But the old man merely shook his head. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad. All I know is that my son doesn't have to fight in the war. That's all”.

But the neighbours were still unconvinced……………..

Forgotten Exiles

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Turkmenistan has long been a place of compulsory exile for poets, revolutionaries and writers. Over the years, countless thousands of Poles, Russians, Germans, Chechens (and other nationalities) have been forcibly deported to this distant corner of the Soviet empire to silence their voices and suppress their activities. With the collapse of Communism and the break-up of the old Soviet Union, they are (at last) able to return to the lands of their ancestors if they wish; and most of them have done so. Only the Poles remain, abandoned by the International Community (and their own Polish Government), stranded in the most repressive and isolated of all the former Soviet Socialist republics.

Once the most far-flung, southerly region of the Russian empire, Turkmenistan still has the air of being somewhat on the periphery of the world. Its capital, Ashkhabad, is a soul-less city of Soviet concrete with a distinct feeling of impermanence about it (the result no-doubt, of the 1948 earthquake that demolished the city). There are few cars on the broad tree-lined boulevards. The ever-present dust of the great Karakum desert hangs oppressively over the city, turning the air at times into a soup of suffocating sulphur. This is a place that has long since resigned itself to the despair of barrenness, and only waits expectantly for the next chapter of its history to be meted out.

Waiting for me at the airport is Pani Irena, an elderly member of the Polish community in Ashkhabad. She was deported here in 1946, a victim of the Soviet-engineered wave of arrests that awaited many Poles who chose return to Poland after the war.

Although she has never seen me before, she picks me out from among the crowds at the arrivals gate and calls out to me (by name).
“How did you know it was me?” I ask, when I finally reach her. Her smile is broad and infectious, revealing a prominent gold tooth. “Who else could you be but you?” Her logic is unassailable. She speaks in a luxurious, old-worldly accent that is found today only among the oldest members of émigré communities. She hands me a small bouquet of wild flowers with the dewdrops still clinging to them like living pearls, and embraces me as if I were a long-lost member of her family. I am humbled and made silent by the gesture.

Security in the arrivals hall is surprisingly tight in what is, by European standards, just a small provincial airport. The boys in smart suits are eyeing me intently from the entrances, and I feel out of place among the colourful Turkoman crowds bustling around me.

“They are always suspicious of everything”, Irena explains in a low conspiratorial tone as we head for the taxi. “Nothing very much has changed here since the Soviet era.”

Her voice, I realize, is the only thing about her that is still young. She is matronly, composed of rounded forms, but comfortable and loose in her own body. Her hair, stained with an immensity of grey, is drawn up tightly on her head in a neat bun. Her unnaturally pale cheeks are veined in a watered ink. I wonder how old she can be. Seventy? Eighty? It is difficult to tell.

As we drive through the rambling assemblage of suburbs, shadows are already beginning to tug at the corners of buildings, and the sun is low over the Koppe Dag (the mountains that separate Turkmenistan from its turbulent southerly neighbour, Iran). Despite being on the edge of one of the most inhospitable deserts in the world, the city is remarkably cool and green at this hour. There are narrow irrigation channels criss-crossing the roads at regular intervals, and old established trees line the boulevards, giving welcome shade from the sun. One cannot, however, escape from the Orwellian presence of the nation's eccentric president-for-life, Turkmenbashi Saparmurat Niyazov, whose image is reproduced everywhere. “We even have a statue of him made of gold”, Irena tells me dryly. “It revolves in a full circle every 24 hours so it is always facing the sun…..He is supposed to be the light of our nation, you see!” She laughs sardonically.

There is a bitter edge to her laughter. During the Soviet era, no one was permitted to speak of the mass deportations to Turkmenistan. Even today, no one does so openly. Freedom of speech is non-existent here. There’s no right of assembly, no right of association. Every organization has to be registered with the state. The country has been slow to throw off its old Communist habits.

Once arrived at her apartment on the second floor of a modest housing block, Irena draws the curtains and (at last) begins to breathe more easily. Tomorrow, she tells me, she will introduce me to her circle. But in the meantime, I must be hungry.

She begins to take over the kitchen, as women often do, and asks me to help her chop some vegetables. I bow to her authority. We dovetail splendidly: I cut, and she prepares. The luxury of exotic cooking smells begins to infiltrate my senses and I know we are going to get along famously. Within an hour, we are eating our our “plov” (a local rice dish) by candlelight, the Turkish coffee is served, and we begin to talk.

“The first wave of political prisoners came here from Poland in the mid nineteenth century”, Irena explains. “They were revolutionaries, sentenced to hard labour for taking part in the 1863 Polish Uprising, which was bloodily put down by the Russians. They were forced to make the journey on foot. Hundreds of them perished during the building of the 700 km railway across the Karakum desert from Ashkhabad to Krasnovodsk. Later, other groups joined them, in 1903, 1921, 1935, and 1948. At one time, a tenth of the population of Ashkhabad were Poles”.

Irena knows her dates from memory. The still, deep river of her heart hoards its images and reflects them in a language that is simple, but powerfully effective, because still raw. Here is a woman whose life stands for something. For 15 years, she has devoted her energies to documenting and preserving the names and histories of the exiled. Her stories are without number. She keeps scrawled notes in faded children's jotters, hidden from prying eyes between the volumes of Russian Poetry on her bookcase. She brings them out and we go over the manuscripts together, correct references, peer myopically into maps sprawled across the living room floor

“No-one knows how many of us are left, because all archival material is considered secret. Any information we have has had to be passed by word of mouth. Hardly anyone, for example, has even heard of the mass deportations here in 1921, even though they were some of the largest. They occurred just after the Polish-Russian War when borders were established for the first time between the two countries. Poles who found themselves on the Soviet side of the border were deported to Kazakhstan, Uzbekhistan, Turkmenistan, Siberia - god knows where else. Most of their names are lost. We don’t know what happened to them”

Hours pass, talking of distant, but not-forgotten wars. Irena brings out sepia photographs, more coffee-and-cream than black-and-white, and enlarged to ridiculous proportions. We talk of the millions who lost their lives during Soviet and Tsarist eras, their names unregistered in any account book, buried without ceremony or marker in mass graves all over Russia. “If we do not remember them,” she says, “who will”?

She is a religious woman. But it is a faith expressed less in words than in the silences between them. She has nothing with which to confront the events of those years except her simple faith in a god, she says, “who betrayed them”. She uses the word “betrayed” with strong emphasis. “One day”, she adds, “God will take them into his arms and beg forgiveness for having forgotten them”. She looks directly into my eyes. “You and I will remind Him”
“What kind of God do we have who can be so... unjust,” I ask delicately?
She thinks for a moment. “You are talking about a God ‘up there’ in Heaven judging people’s actions in accordance with human concepts like Justice. That’s a naïve notion. That kind of God doesn’t exist. It’s enough for me to remember the millions who have died and been murdered to know that God exists… and is not just. It is we who must be just.”

She releases the hair from the bun on the back of her head and it fans out freely around her. The glow of a distant youth begins to emanate from her presence. She must have been beautiful in her youth.

What are her chances of repatriation to Poland? She makes a gesture of despair with her hands. “It’s possible only if a county or a district (in Poland) invites you over, offers you a place to live, and a job, and social security... before you can even think of applying. Who’s going to do that? It's hopeless. And we can’t travel anywhere else abroad because our wages are too low. She points to a photograph on the bookcase of two beautiful women with dark hair and poppy coloured lips. “My daughters. I am too old now, of course. But I would like my daughters to have a better life. We would even go to Russia if we could. But you have to show a birth certificate proving that you were born or have relatives there".

In the bloom of the candles, she looks young, even girlish, but is now visibly fading. In an effort to raise her spirits, I begin to tell her stories of my journey to Ashkhabad: exaggerated anecdotes involving lost companions, mysterious visitors and confiscated hand luggage in Istanbul. She begins to smile, and we are soon both transformed into schoolchildren, giggling and rocking against one another. I continue in the same vein for a few minutes. But when I look up, I find her fast asleep on the sofa, a cushion cradled in her arms like a child, her mouth slightly open.

I acknowledge my affection for this remarkable woman, forty years my senior. I feel a great spaciousness of soul in her, and a purity of being which I recognize but cannot convert into terms of my own reality. The varieties of love are so manifold that we do not possess the words to define all of them.

I cover her with a blanket, blow out the candles, and wander off to my room. Dawn is already in evidence. From my small window, the Persian mountains across the border hang weightless and rosy in the fresh morning light. It has been a very long day.

Ryszard Antolak
© PSA

The Young man and the Mighty Oak Tree

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There was once a simple young man who lived on a vast, dusty plain. Beside his cottage grew a mighty oak, the only one for miles around. In winter, it protected his home from the prairie storms. In summer, it gave shade from the fierce glare of the sun. The tree was everything the man had ever wanted. It met all his needs. It was large enough to provide him with firewood from its fallen branches; and it had many strong boughs, which the man occasionally cut to make furniture. It was good and strong, noble and tall. Everyone who passed by the cottage remarked upon the beauty of the old oak, which pleased the young man, for he loved it dearly. The oak tree was his whole life, his constant companion. He liked nothing better than to sit in its shade and read a book. He was very happy with his tree.

One day, the young man decided to make a chair for his library. So he took his saw and went out to the tree. As the metal bit into the thickness of a branch, the wood snapped off as if it were brittle, shooting painful splinters into the man’s face and eyes. He was surprised and hurt. Wiping away the tears, he looked at the wood and saw it was riddled with small holes. The man knew in his heart that the wood would never serve for furniture. But he dismissed these thoughts from his mind and returned to his books.

A few weeks later, he tried again (for life presses on). He went out to his beloved tree and began to cut another branch. Just as before, the wood shattered and sprayed him with its sharp splinters. But this time, (because he was prepared) he turned his head and the splinters (sharp as kitchen knives) showered him on the back of the neck, drawing blood. Again, he looked at the wood, and once more, he saw the same pithy, brittle mass of holes and cavities.

Gradually, the man learned from his books that his precious tree was unwell. It had become diseased - infested by an insect (the prairie oak flea) that was known to cripple oak trees, but not to kill them.

As the months passed and the disease progressed, the man was conscious he was getting less and less of what he needed from his tree. Its leaves became thin and scattered, and could not provide shade from the hot glare of the sun. Storms came. But instead of sheltering the house, the oak let loose its weakened branches onto the cottage roof with a loud and angry thunder. Once, a heavy limb crashed right through into his bedroom in the midst of a storm, and the man had to spend a cold, miserable night waiting for the daylight in order to mend the hole.

But the man continued to love his tree. It was beautiful. “It is my oak, and I love it”, he said to himself. “I know it has a disease, but that’s not the fault of the tree. I chose to build my home in its shelter, and now I am committed to staying with it whatever the winds of Destiny may decide.”

And so it was. The man now decided he would live with less furniture in his house than before. He read his books sitting on an old fruit crate instead of a chair. In winter, he went about the house wearing many layers of clothes to keep himself warm. He learned to sleep lightly, always listening for any crack in the oak wood that might cause the next bough to break above his head. It was worth the sacrifice.

Until one day, a passing wagon stopped, and an old man with a face as wizened as an ancient oak tree asked him, “Why do you stay with that sick tree? It causes you so much pain, and there are so many things it can never give you?”
“I love my tree,” answered the man. “It’s the disease that I hate. The tree is beautiful and good. And it is my life.”
“But look,” said the old man in the wagon. “Its wood is rotten. Its shade is useless. Instead of sheltering you, it harms you in storms. You have no decent furniture because its wood is so pithy and brittle.”
“I have learned to separate the disease from the tree", replied the simple man. “If I didn’t do that, my heart would surely become embittered.”
“But if the disease is separate”, asked the man in the wagon, “then tell me, where is your tree without the disease? I don’t see a healthy tree standing next to a disease. All I see is a pithy, bug-eaten tree that can barely stand on its own. If your tree is such a good provider, then why do you have so little, and why is your roof patched and leaking? Why do you have no decent furniture in your house? Why are you always frightened that a branch might come crashing through your roof at any moment? Is that any way to live your life?”

The man thought for a while. He looked around at the cold and empty shack his home had become and at the miserable state of his own life. He sat down on a rotten log and began to weep. “You know” he said, “maybe you are right. No matter how much I say I love that tree, it can never give me the things I need from it. I guess you’re right. The tree and the disease are all the same thing. I don’t have a tree and a disease. I have a “diseased tree”. And the longer I stay under it, the longer I’m going to live without the shade, the shelter, and the furniture that I need. One day soon, I’m going to be conked on the head by a falling branch and that will be the end of me. Maybe I need to start looking for another tree to give me what I need...”

With tears in his eyes, the man began to pack a suitcase, and before long, he had set off to look for another place to build a home. In time, he found one, with a healthy maple tree growing nearby.

He hated the idea of building a home all over again from scratch, but he was a courageous man, and was firmly resolved to try. It was very hard. After a few brief months, however, he had built himself a brand new home, shaded in the summer, shielded from winds in winter, and safe from storms. The tree was not a noble oak of course, but it could provide him with all the wood he needed for his furniture. Bees even came to suck nectar from its blossoms. Very often, he would sit contentedly in the evenings under its extensive canopy and write letters to his friends (who also had problems with their trees). He wrote to them about his beloved oak, and about the deep peace he had found in the shade of his simple unassuming maple. The man was content.

As for the oak tree: it continued to grow in its same spot, dropping its branches during every storm, just as it had before. Just as it always would in the future.

Retold by Ryszard Antolak

February 10th

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I am a child of Siberian exiles. Many of my ancestors are buried in the cold soil of that bleak land: all of them exiled against their will by a ruthless totalitarian state. Siberia is in my blood. Its winds blow loudly through my soul.

On this date in 1940, five members of my family, together with almost half a million other men, women and children, were forcibly taken from their homes at gunpoint, packed into cattle trains, and transported to the forced labour camps of northern Siberia and Kazakhstan. Their crime: that they were Polish citizens.

They were given no hint or warning of what was to come. The vast operation, carried out all over eastern Poland on a single night under cover of darkness and snow, had been prepared months in advance. It was first of four mass deportations of the population resulting in the incarceration on Russian soil of almost two million Polish citizens. They were taken away so no trace would ever remain of their language or their culture in the territories occupied in 1939 by the Soviet Union.

You are not likely to have heard any of this at school, or read about it in the mainstream history books. Britain, the US and the Soviet Union colluded together for almost 50 years to cover up, or obfuscate, the details of the crime. Even in (Soviet- dominated) Poland, until as recently as 1989, it was forbidden to refer to any part of this story.

All the arrests on that fateful night, February 10th 1940, followed a basic standard pattern. At four o’clock in the morning, when the whole family were asleep, a loud knock was heard at the door. Three or four soldiers entered, armed with pistols. They herded everyone (including children) into one room and put them up against the wall in their nightclothes. Meanwhile, the house was searched and an inventory made of all the family’s assets. They were then ordered to dress warmly and given fifteen minutes to gather together their belongings and prepare for what they were told was, “a long journey”.

It was snowing heavily outside. The temperature was minus 40 degrees. Two horse-driven sleighs stood waiting to transport them to the railway station. Once there, they were summarily loaded onto cattle wagons (thrust tightly in a standing position, one person next to another) like sardines. It was not uncommon for seventy people to be packed into each wagon, families with children. There was often no room to lie down, or even to sit.

In the centre of each cattle truck stood a small stove, the only source of heat. For ventilation, there was only a tiny window near the ceiling covered in masses of barbed wire. A rough hole in the floor served as a toilet. The doors of the wagon were padlocked loudly and not opened again for three days. Some of the children began to faint from lack of air and water. The men beat loudly against the doors in desperation, but to no avail. Finally, after four days, the train began its passage northwards to the frozen wastes of Siberia, a journey that was to take upwards of four weeks.

Many, however, did not survive to reach their intended destinations. The children were the first to succumb to the intense cold, the lack of air and the scarcity of food and water. Now and again, the train would stop at some abandoned station in the wilderness, and the doors unlocked to allow the passengers to dispose of their dead. The earth was frozen hard, and it was not possible to give them a proper burial. So they merely covered the bodies in a light sprinkling of snow, said a few prayers over them, and continued their journey northwards.
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The story of their exile, the miracle of their eventual release, and the desperate attempts by hundreds of thousands of them to cross Russia to freedom in Iran, is a subject too vast to outline here.

But few of those who managed to escape from Siberia ever saw their homes again. By a cruel twist of fate, their political destiny was sealed in Tehran in 1943. In November of that year, the leaders of Russia, Britain and the USA met in the Iranian capital to decide the fate of Post-war Europe. During their discussions (which were held in secret), the United States and Britain endorsed Stalin’s ethnic cleansing in eastern Poland. They decided to assign Poland to the zone of influence of the Soviet Union after the war. Poland would lose both its independence and its territorial integrity. The eastern part of the country, from which the exiles to Siberia had been originally expelled, would be incorporated wholesale into Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Polish government was not informed of the decision until years later, and felt understandably betrayed. 48,000 Polish soldiers would go on to lose their lives fighting for the freedom of (among others) the very nations whose governments had secretly betrayed them in Tehran, and later (in 1945) at Yalta.

February 10th may not mean anything to most people. But in some households such as mine, this date on the calendar can not be allowed to pass without solemn remembrance and reflection. Siberia is in our blood. Its winds blow coldly through our hearts.

© Ryszard Antolak
(picture: Nikolai Getman)

Thought of the Heart

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For our ancestors in antiquity, the mind was often believed to reside in the heart (the center of the human organism), and not in the head. Many so-called “primitive" peoples today still believe this. So when a philosopher such as Zarathushtra entreated us to "ponder with a clear mind on the best of things", he would have been pointing to his heart, and not his head, when he said it.

To ponder something “in the heart” is very different from pondering it "in the head”. Something that is "learned by heart", for example, means the learner is totally involved in the process of learning, the heart (or sometimes the lungs) being regarded as the seat of his soul where all the senses commingle. Related to the heart, the cultivation of a "clear mind" can refer not only to a "heady", dry, intellectual, logical kind of thinking, but to a wisdom of the whole organism, symbolized by the heart which sits at the centre of the body: to that "mingling of wisdoms" (so beautifully described in the Avesta) as constituting the state of Haurvatat (immortality).

Of course, poets have long known this. A whole vocabulary of "heart thought" was developed centuries ago by the Persian poets and philosophers. Alexander’s invasion of the East all but put an end to this school of thought. But it re-surfaced in the 11th century. A philosophy of the heart continued to blossom among poets and thinkers in Persia, in the works of such philosophers as Suhrawardi, who tried to revive so many of the ancient concepts and make them acceptable to a hostile Islamic public (and for which he was duly executed by Saladin at the age of only thirty-nine). It re-surfaced also in Medieval Italy among the "Fideli d’Amore", the philosophical group to which Dante and his companions belonged. But the obsessive rationalism of the Enlightenment suppressed its development and banished it to the distant borders of poetry.

In Western Philosophy, the idea of the "thinking heart" can be found as far back as the works of Aristotle, for whom the heart was the organ of aisthesis, “dhawg” (the Persian term), or "heart-savour", which meant at root: "taking in" and "breathing in" - a gasp, that primary aesthetic response.... taking to heart, interiorizing, becoming intimate with.... so that it shows its heart and reveals its soul"
(James Hillman. The Thought of the Heart. Ascona: Eranos Foundation 1981 pp 31-32)

Later, in Sufism, Dawg was defined as "creative intuition". It meant literally "tasting", but attained the meaning of "heart-vision": direct experience of Truth beyond Reason and physical senses. Dhawg could be attained only by "taste", not solely by learning, and led to the idea of "divine intoxication".

To turn to our own time, the idea that we only think with our heads is fast becoming a quaint and antiquated concept. Today, we are beginning to re-discover the faculties of the heart known to our ancestors. Over the past ten or twelve years, images of the heart as “only a pump" have had to be radically re-examined. Research published in the American Journal of Cardiology is showing that the heart possesses its own kind of independent thought which informs the brain. It may even have its own memories. The head and the heart exchange information via the vagus nerve, a "cable” of thousands of scintillating neural filaments working in both directions. Each organ affects the other, and they work hand-in-glove.

If we banish the idea that the “mind is wholly in the head” then new doors begin to open, and new insights are revealed. Rule of the Heart (Xshathra, in ancient Persian thought) becomes defined as the coming together of all wisdoms, rational, emotional, sensual, mythological, spiritual, psychological etc. It is not at all a sentimental or overly-emotional response to experience.

If we confine our ideas of "a clear mind" merely to what is narrowly logical and rational, a wealth of meanings can be lost, leading to a rigid kind of one-dimensional thought..

“We are bereft in our culture of an adequate psychology and philosophy of the heart, and therefore also of the imagination. Our hearts cannot apprehend that they are imaginatively thinking hearts, because we have so long been told that the mind thinks and the heart feels...if we would recover the imaginal, we must first recover its organ, the heart and its philosophy"
James Hillman. (Thought of the Heart p.3)

© Ryszard Antolak
(Picture: Sara Alavi Kia)

Aphorisms 2

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To love without covering up one’s eyes – that truly is a great art.

You can drink from a carafe if you grip its neck and press it to your lips. But if you want to drink from a spring, you have to get down on your knees and bow your head.

It is better to lose your life beneath a tattered tree you have planted, than to wander in the desert believing mirages to be your orchards.

Truth is not just knowledge, it is life itself.

No one can destroy a nation without the co-operation of that nation's citizens.

I have seen carrots and turnips cut into the most elegant patterns to place into a broth: stars and numbers, burning hearts, and crosses… Even so, the carrots and turnips remained just carrots and turnips.

Imitation of those who have introduced something concerning the overall development of mankind is not imitation, but humanity.

The spirit of a nation is like water – if you sweep it from the hills into a valley it will erupt into the sky by the measure of its debasement.

Not everything super-logical is anti-logical.

If human speech consisted merely of a certain number of words and certain combinations of expressions (as certain wise men would have us believe), there would be no difference between literature and mathematics: literature would simply be faulty mathematics!

The best healer is the one who is himself the medicine

To have a heart, one has to use it

There can be no progress without heresy.

A nation consists not just of what distinguishes it from other nations, but also of what binds it to other nations.

Love is like coal. When it is lighted, it burns; when it goes out, it leaves a dark stain.

The poet and the prostitute are alike: both sell priceless merchandise for a pittance.

He sleeps best who does not know how badly he sleeps.

There is no worse nonsense than educated nonsense

Those who profess most faith in doctors are the healthy.

The way out is through the door you came in.