Black Light: A Novel

By Galway Kinnell and Robert Hass

Black Light is a voyage of discovery and transformation. Set in Iran, it tells the story of Jamshid, a quiet simple carpet mender, who one day suddenly commits a murder and is forced to flee. With this violent act his old life ends and a strange new existence begins.

Galway Kinnell combines his gift for precise imagery with a storyteller's skill in this journey across the Iranian desert—away from the fragile self–righteous virtues of adopted moral tradition, into the disorder and sexual confusion of agonizing self–knowledge. First published in 1966 by Houghton Mifflin, this extensively revised paperback edition of Black Light brings a distinguished novel back into print.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Release date: Oct 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781619026599

Galway Kinnell

GALWAY KINNELL (1927–2014) was a MacArthur Fellow and state poet of Vermont. In 1982 his Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. For many years he was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University, as well as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. For thirty-five years—from The Book of Nightmares to Mortal Acts and, most recently, Strong Is Your Hold—Galway Kinnell enriched American poetry, not only with his poems but also with his teaching and powerful public readings.

Book preview

For Brita Jenssen Ziesler

Copyright © Galway Kinnell 1966, 1980

Afterword copyright © Robert Hass 2015

Originally published by Houghton-Mifflin Co.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Robert Hass gratefully thanks Bobbie Bristol for making available copies of Galway Kinnell’s Iran journalism and drafts.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kinnell, Galway, 1927-2014.

Black light: a novel / Galway Kinnnell; afterword by Robert Hass. — Revised paperback edition.

pages; cm

1.Self-realization—Fiction. 2.Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction.I. Title.

PS3521.I582B5 2015

813’.54—dc23

2015023039

Cover design by Kelly Winton

Interior design by Domini Dragoone

Author photo courtesy of Bobbie Bristol

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10987654321

e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-659-9

Observe the so-called ‘half-moon’. The half of it that faces the day is dressed in borrowed light. The half of it that faces the night is dressed in its own light. The same with a simple lamp. Down low, the flame is white. Halfway up, it already begins changing itself into black smoke.

—Sohrawardi

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

A Note from Galway Kinnell, 1980

Afterword

chapter one

Jamshid kept sliding forward as he worked, so that the patch of sunlight would remain just ahead of him, lighting up the motion of his hands. He was restoring the head of a bird of paradise, where a lump of charcoal had burnt its way through. As he always did when it was a question of a gap through which darkness was visible, he was working with nervous speed. He valued for more than its light this trapezoid of sunlight that glided beside him over the flowers and tendrils of his own carpet on the floor; it itself was like a carpet, but one that came from heaven.

He finished weaving in the bird’s head, and he breathed more easily. Tomorrow morning he would seal closed the neck and breast, and then this gap too, like so many others, would be healed for good. The sun patch, touching the base of the wall, now started to diverge upward. Soon it would creep over the border of the geometrical and turn into chaos. This was the sign it was time to close shop.

Getting to his feet Jamshid saw the bird’s head blur as it sank away from him. Closely as he had made it conform to the other heads on the carpet, it suddenly seemed peculiarly unreal, as if he had woven only the absence of a head. He felt a strange dread. In the last few weeks there had been other moments when a thing, when he glanced at it, would blur and become a dark tear in reality. But now the tear closed again as quickly as it had opened.

He hung the pomegranate-rind red and walnut-husk brown wools back in their places on a wall entirely covered in colored wools. These clumps of wool all had the same formless bulk and the same spongy substance. Their colors alone held them apart, as if the sun patch on the floor, diffracting upward, had cast a spectrum of more intense reality on this dead matter. Jamshid took the carpet he was repairing over to the west wall, where the sun patch would light it up in the morning. He swept up the trimmed-off bits of wool. He picked up the trimming shears and placed them on the table. He put on his trousers and jacket over his pajamas and stepped into his cotton-soled geevays. He drew the blind: smeared sunlight vanished and the clumps of wool went drab. It was Jamshid’s own, punctual sunset.

His practice at this time of day was to go to the mosque and try to nap until the general sunset took place. His shop was at the north end of the bazaar and the nearest mosque was the Masjideh Jomeh. But Jamshid did not like this mosque, for it was in bad repair, and he hated seeing, where tiles and stalactites had fallen out, the wrinkled mud walls and convoluted plaster. He would go, instead, to the Masjideh Shah in the Shrine of the Immam Reza, even though to get there he had to pass through the entire bazaar, whose gloom, noise, filth, and commerce he hated.

Today, he felt particularly upset, and he made himself think of the harmonious mass of minarets and domes toward which he was going, azure and lapis lazuli, decorated all around with hieratic calligraphy and consummated by the golden dome that shed an essential light over its precincts. As he pushed through the suffocating maze, already dark, clogged with burdened men crying Out of the way! with donkeys, with bicycles jingling their little gasping doorbells, the passage seemed to Jamshid an ordeal to which he submitted only for the most ardent love of God.

He broke from the crowd and came out into the courtyard of the mosque. He stood reaccustoming himself to his element. In this rectangular space he felt something of the ordered calm on which he had just turned the key back at his shop. Many persons were gathered here, it was true, but the place had a way of diminishing them and of throwing their voices upward.

At the pool Jamshid washed his right hand, his left hand, his right foot, his left foot, his face and his teeth. He passed a dripping hand through his hair, from the brow to the back of the neck. As he stood up, he saw in the ripples an image of himself, and even though he shut his eyes he could not keep from seeing himself torn to pieces.

He lay down, but he found he was unable to sleep. Long ago, during the little interval between his wedding and his wife’s death, he would lie awake under the stars a long time. Not until he had come to see that the stars were strung out in actual patterns had he become able to sleep. Recently, a new insomnia had returned. Now, he tried to empty his mind, but it was like looking into an empty sky and gradually seeing it was crawling with vultures. With relief he welcomed mundane worries back into his consciousness. If he was not going to sleep, he would at least think about something interesting in the attempt. Accordingly, he began fretting about his daughter. But soon he became aware of two persons talking to each other only a few feet away.

Only for one week, the man was saying in a Kurdish accent.

Then I need a settlement of one hundred tomans. Not a rial less. The woman spoke in the Shirazi accent, which is so lyrical when spoken by young women. Jamshid understood at once the nature of the transaction. He himself had once been mistaken for a pilgrim. A chaddor-clad woman had approached him in the courtyard and proposed to temporary-marry him. Though he tried not to notice them, at pilgrimage time one could see little discussions of this nature taking place in the vicinity of the Shrine. The pilgrims from distant cities and from Afghanistan and the Arab countries liked getting married for the few weeks of their sojourn, it helped to ease the spiritual rigors of the pilgrimage. The man laughed.

In my country we say ‘year’ not ‘week’ when we mean all four seasons. One hundred tomans is fair settlement for a marriage lasting spring, summer, fall, and winter. But for a marriage lasting seven days, twenty tomans is all you will get! Not a rial more! And it’s only your outrageous charm that makes me offer so much . . . Jamshid lay still. As the two went on bargaining, a powerful rage came over him.

And which mullah asks the least to perform the ceremony? the Kurd asked.

Torbati, the woman answered. Everybody goes to Torbati, he’s the most experienced, the quickest . . .

Jamshid sat up. Torbati! he said aloud. It was like spitting. The man and the woman, startled, moved off. Am I to trust the marriage of my only daughter to a mullah who is everybody’s procurer? The moazzin in the minaret lifted his nasal call to prayer. The last sparkle of sunlight fell from the golden dome. At any moment Mullah Torbati would be making his appearance to lead the prayer. Jamshid walked to where he had left his geevays and stepped into them.

Furthermore, why should I let myself be led in prayer by the scoundrel?

chapter two

Jamshid was one of the most pious men in the region, and he knew it. Yet, judging by the disrespectful way people treated him, one might suppose he was an infidel. He did feel a little ashamed that he had never made a pilgrimage to Mecca or for that matter to the Shrine of Fatima at Qum. But travel was expensive, and poverty was the price he paid for being honest. Other men cheated and grew rich, and then went on pilgrimages that consisted of sightseeing, good meals, and temporary marriages. When these travelers came home, they were called ‘Haji’, wore the green sash around their swollen bellies, and had only contempt for skinny and honest men like himself. Human sin—particularly among religious men—filled Jamshid with revulsion. Sometimes at prayer the feeling of revulsion grew so strong he could not concentrate on God at all. It was as if his virtue, his very devotion to God, were succeeding where vice had failed, in making an atheist out of him.

A man and woman were walking ahead of him. He thought he recognized them as the two persons

Reviews for Black Light

[absurdeist · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Like the mythological Persian king he's named after, Jamshid, the carpet repairer, restoring the burned rug fibers of the head of a bird of paradise when we meet him on his knees working, thinks he's better and more brilliant than everybody else. It's not pure diabolical arrogance per se, but pride the murky result of his unprocessed pain (his wife is recently deceased and his daughter, Leyla -- unmarried and without a single suitor at the age of sixteen! -- might as well be deceased) has made him bitter to the point of apostasy. As his faith fades, he comes dangerously close to losing everything, not unlike his unfaithful namesake from the hallowed Persian epic, Shahnameh:

Jamshid surveyed the world, and saw none there
Whose greatness or whose splendor could compare
With his: and he who had known God became
Ungrateful, proud, forgetful of God's name

Even before we meet Jamshid in Galway Kinnell's novella, we know from the opening line -- "Jamshid kept sliding forward as he worked, so that the patch of sunlight would remain just ahead of him, lighting up the motion of his hands"-- that light and what light signifies in Kinnell's context -- heaven's wisdom, favor, and rewards -- will probably elude Jamshid, yet remain ineluctably visible, all too close, O so nearly within his grasp, as if he were in Hell gazing at Paradise, imploring Abraham with outstretched fingertip for just one mere drop of water. Black Light's evocative, symbolic opening is also fitting foreshadowing for this fable riffing off the downslide of Persia's once omnipotent king, Jamshid.

Jamshid, the poor but not so humble man of Meshen, Iran, only feels "a little ashamed that he had never made a pilgrimage to Mecca or for that matter to the Shrine of Fatima at Qum." On the precipice of his spiritual abyss, so far gone in his rage over his life that didn't turn out right, Jamshid internally snubs those journeying to Mecca, the Hajis, and can barely stomach their contemptuous, Afghani glances cast his way. As if they're so self-controlled, so holy, "getting married for the few weeks of their sojourn," in order to make easier the supposed "spiritual rigors" required in their once-in-a-lifetime quest. Their false piety makes Jamshid laugh. Maybe his last. For in an impulsive instant, in a furious fit of pent-up pique upon hearing the news that his daughter's rumoured "indiscretions" have made her unfit for marriage -- unfit unless Jamshid agrees to the local mullah's assistance in the delicate matter (a bribe veiled in the white robes of religious duty), Jamshid lashes out with all the force in him at Mullah Torbati. Suddenly and inexplicably, Jamshid's carpet shears that just moments before moved in mindless attendance upon a charred rug, trimming the kaleidoscopic plumage of a bird of paradise, now lie next to a sacred corpse, bloodied.

And so begins Jamshid's anti-pilgrimage whose terminus is destitution, whose life sentence might be despair. Roaming a hard desert road as far removed from Mecca as the crescent from the cross, haunts the frail figure of Jamshid through his nomad existence. His destination is nowhere. Transformed into a tramp like so many infidels before him, he seeks he knows not what, maybe an oasis, anyplace he can create some purpose out of killing more time. He meets Ali out in the endless sands somewhere, a grizzled old man who's traveled back and forth himself for decades on the run, or in circles, from one fringe settlement to another, selling trinkets from whatever weathered sacks his decrepit camel still manages to haul, in exchange for bare necessities. But the supplies and the shelter and the sex never last. Nor do Ali's and Jamshid's doomed partnership.

What is Jamshid to do with the constant eclipse that's become of his tortured past, his very life? How can he forget when his past bleeds darkness out of deep wounds into every successive step, and the steps he'll trudge tomorrow? How can he see where he's heading, or from what or whom he must flee; how will he ever chance upon potential refuge with his eyes smothered by black light? Is redemption even possible for a man as accursed as Jamshid, who "could always sense the blackness of vultures in the sky. Never visible ... a constant presence."? One may wonder, too, whatever became of Persia's ancient king, their legendary Jamshid?

Galway Kinnell spent a year in Iran during 1959 and 1960, half the time as a lecturer at the University of Tehran, the other as a journalist for an English language newspaper, exploring as much as he could every corner of the country he'd come to love. In Black Light's mid-section, with its vast outdoor scenery set under stars, "an ultimate landscape of desolation," we get a glimpse of how the ruggedness and isolation of Iran's arid geography impacted Kinnell's imagination. We get a sense too that maybe Kinnell got lost in the mountains and deserts of Iran often, as in his narrative there's an unspoken feeling in Jamshid that he likes being lost, enjoys the spontaneity of adventure and perceived freedom his "lostness" inspires, the adrenaline rush he gets never knowing one night to the next what cave or ancient ruin he'll lay his weary head in. If Jamshid embraces though never accepts being lost, his process of self-discovery makes the bleak existentialism of Black Light all the more fascinating -- and fun.

Escape with Jamshid from the many consequences of his crime like some vicarious Persian Raskolnikov along for the camel ride, outpost to outpost, palm grove to palm grove, swathed in the paradox that is Black Light's luminescence. It's a reading experience at times reminiscent of what The Sheltering Sky invoked. Mystery. Meaning. Wondering. Why?

While Kinnell is better known as a poet (The Book of Nightmares) and translator (The Poems of François Villon), his rare digression into prose in Black Light is certainly one to savor and reflect upon repeatedly, like enjoying time and again the myriad gradations of illumination in a radiant poem.