🦋 It is I, Master Osman
They tell a story in Bukhara that dates back to the time of Abdullah Khan. This Uzbek Khan was a suspicious ruler, and though he didn't object to more than one artist's brush contributing to the same illustration, he was opposed to painters copying from one another's pages -- because this made it impossible to determine which of the artists brazenly copying from one another was to blame for an error. More importantly, after a time, instead of pushing themselves to seek out God's memories within the darkness, pilfering miniaturists would lazily seek out whatever they saw over the shoulder of the artist beside them. For this reason, the Uzbek Khan joyously welcomed two great masters, one from Shiraz in the South, the other from Samarkand in the East, who'd fled from war and cruel shahs to the shelter of this court; however, he forbade the two celebrated talents to look at each other's work, and separated them by giving them small workrooms on opposite ends of his palace, as far from each other as possible. Thus, for exactly thirty-seven years and four months, as if listening to a legend, these two great masters each listened to Abdullah Khan recount the magnificence of the other's never-to-be-seen work, how it differed from or was oddly similar to the other's. Meanwhile, they both lived dying of curiosity about each other's paintings. Later still sitting upon either edge of a large cushion, holding each other's books on their laps and looking at the pictures that they recognized from Abdullah Khan's fables, both the miniaturists were overcome with great disappointment because the illustrations they saw weren't nearly as great as those they'd anticipated from the stories they heard, but instead appeared, much like all the pictures they'd seen in recent years, rather ordinary, pale and hazy. The two great masters didn't then realize that the reason for this haziness was the blindness that had begun to descend upon them, nor did they realize it after both had gone completely blind, rather they attributed the haziness to having been duped by the Khan, and hence they died believing dreams were more beautiful than pictures. Chapter 51 seems to me like a huge achievement. It contains the climax of this book's inner story, the one about blindness and perfection, which I think is fully as mesmerizing and befuddling, as bestowing of clarity, as the outer story. I struggle to think of any other writer who can maintain this kind of structure in his tapestries -- Borges comes to mind but was not, after all, a novelist (in the contemporary sense of the word anyway -- and I'm not sure a sense of that word exists which would make it appropriate). Master Osman, who I believe has narrated once before but did not really grab me then, emerges as a powerful, tragic figure. (He is certainly the main character of this inner story.) This chapter marks the first time we are hearing about blindness, its seductive nature, its role in creation, from a character who has been identified throughout as nearing blindness. What could be more exquisite than looking at the world's most beautiful pictures while trying to recollect God's vision of the world?
posted evening of Friday, September 14th, 2007
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