The Damascus Drum Chapter 3 'Takla and the Angel'

The wind coming across the Syrian Desert entered the hearts of the sleepers, the sleepers in the tents, in the villages, those still blessedly alive and snoring by their flocks in the hills and valleys. It entered too beyond the veils of bodily fatigue of the sleepers in the towns and cities, through keyholes, open windows, and doors left ajar. The wind carried with it scents of love and death, departure and longing. It filled the nostrils of the sleepers and provoked sweet dreams in some and grave and disturbing images in those discontented ones.  It was a wind from the south, from beyond Arabia, an awakening wind, and its perfume was gentle but uncompromising, insistent upon the souls of the sleepers who responded with whatever images were foremost in their minds at the moment of waking, in those moments of arrival which mark the end of the descent from that unfathomed and unconscious ocean to the shores of this earth; that prelude, the wardrobe of the mind where our deepest intuitions are enrobed in the attributes and actions which appear here on this endless shedding skin of reality we call our world.

Taqla was blessed with sweet dreams as befitted a young woman whose simple life of constant but undemanding labour brought her little pain and much happy recompense for her unprotesting effort. Taqla had dreamt of an angel, a tall and beautiful angel with golden hair. Really! it was such a handsome young man who came to her in her sleep, and gave her a loaf of bread, still warm and smelling of life itself.  She woke with a craving for her breakfast, as well as a wonderful feeling of lightness and well-being as the result of her nocturnal visitation.

Taqla donned a pair of thick woollen socks over her stockinged feet, and then strapped up her tough leather sandals. It was a cold morning and she would be walking far today. Under her dark and heavy wool skirt she still wore the warm cotton shift in which she had been sleeping. She added a blouse and a woollen cardigan, and then a thick blue shawl which she wrapped around her shoulders and over her head. Taqla did not wear the dark balaclava-like headdress which the nuns wore.  She did not cut her hair either, although that was hidden, tied up in a white scarf, the corners of which were embroidered in dusty blue forget-me-nots. If Taqla had possessed a mirror, she would have beheld a smiling face with huge eyes, full lips and very rosy cheeks. But Taqla did not have a mirror, and the only clue she had to her appearance lay in the response it evoked in those whom she encountered in the course of her day. ‘O Taqla, your lips are so red, your eyes so big, your cheeks so rosy.’ and other words with which her novice friends would greet her, giggling and smiling. The older nuns never made such comments, but even they always smiled when they saw Taqla, so that she felt herself inhabiting a climate in which few clouds passed to obscure the sun of her happy disposition.

Taqla was going home today. She went home every year at this time, just after Easter, to spend some time with her mama and papa, who lived a long day’s walk over the hills to the north.

Taqla was not a nun, and so far she had no intention of becoming one. She had been promised to the Convent of Seidnaya as a servant by her parents, in return for the grace which had saved her papa during an illness, grace which had been granted in answer to her mama’s prayers. It was the normal way of things. Her mama needed her papa, and so had offered to give up the thing she loved most in all the world, to save the thing she most needed. Taqla had acquiesced willingly, she loved her parents, and working in the Convent was not any harder than her life in the village. She missed her girlfriends at first, but some of them had eventually joined the convent and were now training to be nuns, and so life continued much as before.

At breakfast she was finally able to satisfy her craving for fresh bread which the sweet  scent of her reverie had provoked. After eating heartily, she packed her bag with a loaf, some cheese, olives and some dates for her journey. Then, filling a water skin from the kitchen, she walked down to the little door at the back of the convent and let herself out. She felt the sun on her face as soft and pure as a kiss from her forehead to her chin, and across her eyelids as she closed them in enjoyment of this warm embrace. The early morning before it is weighed down by too much heat, that is the best time of the day, she thought. Looking out over the broken rocky hillside to the north, beyond to where her family’s village lay, she saw the whole length of the day ahead of her, and the untrod steps between were simply spaces waiting to be filled. The earth did not look so dry in this early light. Long shadows still stretched down from the steep walls of the Convent, perched high above her like a castle. The sandy scrub and rocks of the landscape were clearly outlined against the blue of the sky. The cypress by the back door stood tall and green, so obviously cut from a different material from the earth and sky. It seemed to shiver as she passed. She began to walk.

Taqla walked steadily, slowly without stopping, lightly downhill at first and then winding up over the first hill until soon her convent was out of sight and she was alone among the pale rocks, alone that is but for the occasional bird, a buzzard perhaps, flying high in the blue, some crows passing, black wings across the rock face, or sparrows flitting and fluttering near at hand. Small lizards swished in the undergrowth as her skirt swished the dry grasses. Insects creaked and croaked as they too awoke under the sun’s warmth. The breeze was still blowing its cooling scents from the south, and Taqla began to enjoy the delicious freedom of having the whole day to herself.

Taqla walked steadily all morning in this way, without tiring. She stopped at one point to drink a few sips from her water skin at the highest point of a pass. She stood and let her eyes go far across the desert below to the distant horizon. She stood there for what seemed ages, amazed that there could be such a distance, just amazed and full of wonderment at the plasticity of space, and intrigued that her eye could travel in it so effortlessly. That it could go on almost forever, she thought, and that it must keep on going all the way to the ends of the world. 

This thought, about the bigness and the largeness, preoccupied her as she set off on the downward track. In the narrow confines of the valley, the bigness and largeness stayed with her.  It did not occupy her in a troubling way. At first it was more of a novelty. Then as she gave space to the expansiveness of her thoughts, a change came over her. It was as if she expanded too. It was not a physical, neither was it a mental expansion. Taqla had a naturally abnegating disposition with regard to her own existence, and this humility had so far precluded the establishment of a limiting self-centricity. Rather it manifested as a sense of co-operation and integration with her surroundings, to which in general terms she felt quite closely attached.

Taqla was most unselfconscious, perhaps even as a child is. But Taqla was no longer a child, certainly not physically so, and although not possessed of a conventional literacy, she did exhibit a pleasingly mature and discriminating intelligence which soundly directed her judgement, determining this co-operation and integration within her environment in a manner which allowed her to view the world, with its apparent subsequences and consequences, uncluttered by conditions of self-attachment and historical convention, so that she saw things just as they were.

This expansion of Taqla’s was to do with her being, that inner sense of identity in which she counted herself of the same matter as the rocks and the trees and birds, the sky and all manner of outward appearances, that inner sanction in which she always felt at home with herself. And this sense of her being, of a mysterious yet awakening identity, she found was possessed of a tangibility more real than that which the effects of her external senses bestowed.

And today, as she descended in the dusty path of the valley, in the heat of the late morning, she felt closer than ever to the motivating force of this identity, within whose proximity she now expanded. In the same way that her vision had been extended beyond the dust of the desert’s edge to a place for which she could neither find words nor thoughts adequate, so now her being was overcome by a feeling of extravagant expansion. In its magnification, Taqla’s soul had outflown the limits of her knowledge, and was wandering effortless beyond the edge of its existence, like a fledgling lover lifted higher on the thermals of a new desire, which grows moment by moment within the eaglespan aura of the beloved.

And moment by moment, step by step as Taqla descended the valley, she began to experience in herself a need that she had never felt before, a need that entered her like a thirst, a hunger, an extreme longing to join and be joined in this expansion. But she found herself without any direction. There appeared no focus, no object of vision, within or without, in which she could collect herself in this newfound place of unlimit.

At midday, as the rocks bleached shadowless in the sun before her widening eyes, and the snowdrifts in the northern faces of the mountains shrank imperceptibly in the briefly warmed air, she turned from the path to a place where she was accustomed to stop and rest. Passing under a few bushes lodged in a steep rocky crevice, she found herself within a grove of trees, which masked the entrance to a small cave at the base of a cliff. A tiny spring of water issued from the cave, a rivulet which formed a pool from which it then flowed underground, re-appearing somewhere much further down the slope. Neither pool nor cave could be seen from the path, or the surrounding land, the rocky crevice blending into the general effect of the cliff face.

In the shade of the trees, Taqla sat down and found herself again, and in finding herself she found, in front of her, also sitting in the shade, a man. Her sense of expansion momentarily faltered, not out of any particular conditioned fear of the opposite sex, but due entirely to the requirement of bringing into focus this singular point within her now ever-growing sense of bewilderment. And then, in a flash, it was done. Not a blinding flash, not the inadvertent catching of the sun in a mirror, but a flash of instantaneous recognition, the known taking the place of the the unknown.

The flash which made the connection was in the eyes, but the recognition between souls outstripped the measure of her normal sight. Taqla, as if herself a mirror, returned that glance involuntarily. She had recognised in the being of the person opposite something very familiar, of that same single substance which she knew was no other than her own self. And that something now expanded beyond the furthest limit of her thought, and at the same time appeared reduced to... well, a kind of relaxed nothingness. She was the empty space in the pupil of her eye. Then voluntarily, as one to another in the confines of their distinct forms, glances were exchanged. Turning in correspondence to their own planetary motion, they moved closer to each other, so that first their hands, and then their breaths mingled. And briefly, water meeting water, again the sense of recognition, of complete closeness but more so, to the point of total extinction in each other.

Taqla’s union was the most natural and delightful event that this young woman had ever experienced. She felt refreshed throughout every atom of her body. Her mind, now no longer bewildered by a seeming disparity between the limits of her known and the absolutes of her unknown self, was as calm and reflective as the pool of water in which she now bathed. She took time to look closely at the form of the man lying asleep in the shade a few feet away. He was naked but for an old camel hair blanket wrapped around him. She smiled. He looked so peaceful, like a sleeping boy. He was handsome, she knew that instinctively. A well proportioned face lay beneath the dark stubble of a week’s growth of beard, muscles well-formed but not over-developed sat on wide shoulders, and a certain generousness of girth which spoke of wealth and ease gave balance to the overall composition. Of course, she did not think this at the time, only in later months and  years, as this moment came back to her as a form of nourishment, recollecting to herself in an overwhelming sense of wholeness, of completeness of being, which would remain with her all her life.

For the moment Taqla was only aware of the pleasure she felt from beholding him, the same pleasure which she had felt when their eyes had met, and the world around her had dissolved. Its subsequent reconstitution, which could have taken place within the blinking of an eye, or after an eternity, took nothing away from the experience. To say that what she felt was profound love would not be true, for she did not yet know what it was she felt. But certainly, it was love indeed which had taken her like a wave, pulling her from the shore of her innocent unknowing into the depth of its original impulse, and bringing her all inside out and back again in its return. She was certainly in love, but did not yet love, and somewhere in this surge she had travelled to the white hot core of life itself and glimpsed the beauty of her perfection, the focus in which her completion appeared, and from which she now emerged, glistening and glowing anew, with the order of the original metal itself. This being of perfection, this she would learn to love.

Taqla dressed, not waking the man who continued to sleep peacefully there in the shade. She left beside him her blue woollen shawl and the loaf of bread, and continued her journey to her parents village. It was long after dark when she arrived, but she walked with a deepened sense of belonging, in which not even the stars seemed distant any more, but reflected the presences of knowing collected in her own heart, a heart which now she felt could embrace the whole universe. In her mind’s eye she knew she could walk to these heavenly bodies as easily as she had walked to her own village.

And here we must leave Taqla, who has no need of us and our story for the present. What? Do we hear dissent? Do we hear the question, but what happened to her next? The question, O God forbid! ‘Did she really make love to the man?’
 
Haven’t we been listening? LOVE made love, o what fools we are! Love made love as it always does, divine, spiritual, earthly love, and moves on, leaving us hanging like ragged dolls tangled in the wires of our limited desires. Atoms, suns, we are all bodies pulled apart out of a singularity. Don’t ever believe that the unlimited can be caught for but a moment in the limited. No net of our making is big enough for this fish. One flash from a single scale destroyed Taqla’s past, one flash brought her back to life again. But time is moving on and we still haven’t a drum, and without a drum...

Yes, I know, there is the question of whether or not she was impregnated? Did shame come upon her? Was it a boy or was it a girl? Does she ever see her man again? WHAT HAPPENED next? Hang on in there! Patience is necessary if the story is to unfold as it should. Patience, after all, maketh the man. And Patience is not to complain to anything other than the reality of Patience. But Patience, in a story, is mostly sitting still and listening. Let us return now to the predicament of Daud.