the elephant

The elephant was in a dark house:
Some Hindus had brought it for exhibition.
In order to see it, many people were going,
every one, into that darkness.

As seeing it with the eye was impossible,
(each one) was feeling it in dark with
the palm of his hand.

The hand of one fell on its trunk: he said,
"This creature is like a water-pipe."

The hand of another touched its ear: to him
it appeared to be like a fan.

Since another handled its leg, he said,
"I found the elephant's shape to be
like a pillar."

Another laid his hand on its back: he
said, "Truly, this elephant was like a throne."
Similarly, whenever any one heard (a description
of the elephant) he understood (it only in respect of)
the part that he had touched.

On account of the (diverse) place (object) of
view, their statements differed: one man entitled
it "Dal", another "Alif".

If there had been a candle in each one's hand,
the difference would have göne out of their words.

The eye of sense-perception is only like the palm
of the hand: the palm hath not power to reach the
whole of him (the elephant).

(Maulana Jalalu'l-Din, Mathnavi)

the elephant

You thus regard the Self as a limited entity, in the same way as a number of persons born blind perceiving the elephant through touching its different parts, come to have diverse notions regarding it (each one regarding it to be like the part that he had touched) and as none of them had touched the whole elephant, none had any idea of the elephant as a whole entity.

(The Chandogyopanishad, Sir Ganganatha Jha)

Upsilamba

Upsilamba! - the word carries me back to the spring of 1994, when four of my girls and Nima were auditing a class I was teaching on the twentieth-century novel. The class's favourite book was Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. In this novel, Nabokov differentiates Cincinnatus C., his imaginative and lonely hero, from those around him through his originality in a society where uniformity is not only the norm but also the law. Even as a child, Nabokov tells us, Cincinnatus appreciated the fressness and beauty of language, while other children "understood each other at the first word, since they had no words that would end in an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or catapult with wondrous consequences."

No one in class had bothered to ask what the word meant. No one, that is, who was properly taking the class - for many of my old students just stayed on and sat in on one of my classes long after their graduation. Often, they were more interested and worked harder than my regular students, who were taking the class for credit. Thus it was that those who audited the class - including Nassrin, Manna, Nima, Mahshid and Yassi - had one day gathered in my office to discuss this and a number of other questions.

I decided to play a little game with the class, to test their cruosity. On the mid-term exam, one of the questions was "Explain the significance of the word upsilamba, in the context of Invitation to a Beheading. What does the word mean, and how does it relate to the main team of the novel?" Except for four or five students, no one had any idea what I could possible mean, a point I did not forget to remind them of every once in a while throughout the rest of that term.

The truth was that upsilamba was one of Nabokov's fanciful creations, possibly a word he invented out of upsilon, the twentieth letter in the Greek alphabet, and lambda, the eleventh. So that first day in our private class, we let our minds play again and invented new meanings of our own.

I said I associated upsilamba with the impossible joy of a suspended leap. Yassi, who seemed excited for no particular reason, cried out that she always thought it could be the name of a dance - you know, "C'mon, baby, do the Upsilamba with me." I proposed that for the next time, they each write a sentence or two explaining what the word meant to them.

Manna suggested that upsilamba evoked the image of small silver fish leaping in and out of a moonlit lake. Nima added in paretheses, Just so you won't forget me, although you have barred me from your class: an upsilamba to you too! For Azin it was a sound, a melody. Mahshid described an image of three girls jumping rope and shouting "Upsilamba!" with each leap. For Sanaz, the word was a small African boy's secret magical name. Mitra wasn't sure why the word reminded her of the paradox of a blissful sigh. And to Nassrin it was the magic code that opened the door to a secret cave filled with treasures.

Upsilamba become part of our increasing repository of coded words and expressions, a repository that grew over time until gradually we had created a secret langauge of our own. That word became a symbol, a sign of that vague sense of joy, the tingle in the spine Nabokov expected his readers to feel in the act of reading fiction; it was a sensation that separated the good readers, as he called them, from the ordinary ones. It also became the code word that opened the secret cave of remembrance.

Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

Devam etmeden önce Afganistan'la ilgili başka şeyler de anlatır mısın?
Ne gibi?
Annenle, arkadaşlarınla ya da akrabalarınla ilgili şeyler. Örneğin köyünün nasıl olduğu...
Onlardan bahsetmek istemiyorum, mekanlardan da bahsetmek istemiyorum. Bunun bir önemi yok.
Neden?
Önemli olan olaylardır, hikayelerdir. İnsanın hayatını değiştiren şey yaşadıklarıdır, mekanlar ya da insanlar değil.

Denizde Timsahlar Var, Fabio Geda

"The waitress came and I ordered breakfast. I watched someone at the next table working away at his plate of ham with eggs. I had long since come to the conclusion that man's treatment of God's creatures makes mockery of his ideals and of the whole alleged humanism. In order for this overstuffed individual to enjoy his ham, a living creature had to be raised, dragged to its death, stabbed, tortured, scalded in hot water. The man didn't give a second's thought to the fact that the pig was made of the same stuff as he and that it had to pay with suffering and death so that he could taste its flesh. I've thought more than once that when it comes to animals, every man is a Nazi. Yes, I had always felt these things, but that morning they literally hit me on the head like a hammer. That morning I realised for the first time what a horrible hypocrite I was." 

The Penitent, Bashevis Singer