KHALED MATTAWA

Selections from the Ibn Hazm Epistolary

From Cordoba

God made souls in the shapes of spheres then cut them into halves. And when God made the body he placed only half of a sphere within it. That is why we are born without speech, weak and defenseless. And that is why a child is curious, attaching itself to all that may fill the gap in its chest. In adulthood, the person that finds the other containing the other half of his soul develops an attachment based on that old splitting occasion.

Of course, people’s reactions to this encounter depend on the sensitivity of their natures. Some are puzzled, some ecstatically joyous, some horrified, but all are deeply moved by it at the expense of everything else.

Thus love is a welding of the shattered beings of this creation. So tell your friends that the catalyst for love burns and becomes part of its ruins. And in closing remember that the secret of bliss is not effusion, but a series of contacts and departures.

From Cordoba

You look at grains of iron on a flat surface, and they are like a tribe that has found its farming grounds and pasture and settled. However, once you bring a piece of magnet near them, you can easily move them from one side of the earth to the other. The lover who’s found his beloved is all packed like those grains under the draw of the magnet, enclosed onto themselves. He is not a person, but a herd of passions guided by the impulse that momentarily triumphs over others. All is urgent, the moments of stasis and waiting are as desperate as the movements themselves.

It is difficult to know whether we enjoy this state or not, and we can never answer such a question. We are elated and we are pained because we are in the grasp of the terrible forces that brought this world into existence. The struggle of love is thus a confrontation with the question whether it is better to live or not to have been born into this mortal world in the first place. Only those among us who have truly lived and loved know that there is no answer to that question, and they know that our inhaling and exhaling are the echoes of our wavering between these two answers.

From Cordoba

The soul too in this world of clay becomes earthbound. If it finds difficulty letting go, it may not enter love. And then if it does enter, what will it find? Love is not a fall, it is a leap. If you feel you’re falling despite yourself, you are falling in all the senses of the word. Rather you should feel as if letting go, but toward a destination. Those who love quickly are falling into blindness. They can easily gather themselves because all they held within them was hollowness. They write callused poetry. They address their amours with battered words.

Then there are those who claim to love more than one lover. They are tearing themselves up in order to reach their various destinations, their concurrent loves an ongoing process of scarring, their souls assemblages of torn parts. I remember visiting the palace of my friend the Prince of Seville. In one room that the prince decorated with thousands of mirrors facing each other in every possible manner, I remember seeing my image multiplied a thousandfold. Every mirror I stared at reflected itself on other mirrors. And since the room was full of images multiplied a hundred times, I saw myself divided in my peripheral vision. I could not see a straight image of myself unless I brought my eyes so close to one of these mirrors that I was almost blinded by the strain of my effort. This is the state of the lover of many loves.

From Granada

All fictions lose their story lines, all ruses come to an end. All break-offs are a construct of hate. Thinking bewilders here, the disaster reaches its ripening. What did she want, what will he approve of. No change can change things. No catalysts. The chests of hope depleted. We took our love into a corner, as if embarrassed by our intimacy, as if we thought no one would believe us. Why did their presence disturb us so. We’ve left each other with ruins and with them we are building labyrinths.

From Jativa

If the lover cannot dissuade the beloved, if the thought of her only brings fatigue, then let him resolve on oblivion. Let him examine his soul, and consider the misery and privation it is suffering, let him labor to satisfy his desire in whatever manner he can.

I have said before that each one of us contained one of two halves of a soul. But to think that one is the lesser of the two halves is love too. To think of the discovery of flaws one did not know one had, the constant deferral to the loved one, the avoidance of conflict, the surrender, to think these are dishonor is wrong. To love is also to ask if one is worthy of love. On the other hand, if one thinks that he or she is the better of the two halves of the soul, it cannot be love he is feeling.

From Cordoba

Nothing in the world matches two lovers who have escaped intruders and gossips, and who have ceased to be apart from each other, who were saved from ennui, saved from enmity, who were compatible in manners, and who have matched each other’s love, and whom God has offered sustenance, good work, and a quiet peaceful era, and whose union is in accord with God’s pleasures, and whose friendship lasts until that drowning no one will escape. This is a gift few attain, and a need not found by all its seekers, a state that overcomes the passing of youth and the loss of kin. I have known a couple that has possessed all this, and yet on whom no sun rose without a quarrel. But both were stamped unto each other. One day one is the boiling ore and the other is the clay into which it is poured, no drop ever wasted. Love is then a root of pity and a branch of it as well, and thus must be unperturbed by motives and measurings.

And that is my wish to you. I am afraid our correspondence may not go on for long. I’ve heard that a large army has arrived at Tarifa and is on its way to our city. I am certain we cannot fight them off.

From Almeria

Fidelity is to keep her secrets, her public and private, large and small actions should all be important to you. You should conceal her bad points, cover her faults, announce her best aspects, see her actions in the best light, trust her desires, and help her fulfill them. When she is excited you should not be languid, when she is weary, you should not be imposing. Fidelity demands that we prefer charity to justice, no conditions imposed, no goals established.

From Almeria

The world oppressing you and the love that spurns you. To the first you must be harder than iron, sharper than swords, not answering to what would lower you, never assisting in your own cowering. In the second, you must be softer than cotton pressed until nothing of you seems to remain. Delve into humility. Bend and soften with your tongue words and sighs enlarging the rage directed against you so that you can quell it. Echo pity when it rises, or when whispered, into deeper resonance and meaning. Lend art to what was being shaped, firm up and wall all that is about to seep or scatter.

Love is not of this world. Otherwise why would we seek it. Do not be your old self. Make a better self to live in. Even seducers who shatter us with their betrayals, the rage they boil in us, is really a measure of our hope. When seducers flee from the face of the earth, consider the earth and all its inhabitants dead. And love is dead too when there is no rage. In the beginning of love, quarrels are liquid and warm like blood. They are signs of health. When they are cold and bitter, they are calculations, the applying of oil or grease to rusty hinges, a way to ease a door into opening for love to depart.

From Valencia

There is a breaking off when the beloved begins to treat the lover harshly inching away in favor of another fancy or when tediousness sticks to his sides he sees death before him when he utters his desire for parting he gulps the choking draughts of despair. Look at those two, the man breaks off talking, the woman off in silence. If they have no lovers to run to they walk into failure tediousness strapped to their sides they park their cars, open the doors they turn on the switch their houses blazing with emptiness.

From Cordoba

After many weeks of resisting the impulse, I finally visited the ruins of our home in Balat al-Maghith. I did not go earlier because I could not bear recalling the days that passed in that distant mansion, the joys I knew there, the months of my young years I spent with beautiful girls, whose company could immediately fire the most sedate of men, and soften the heart of the most ardent. Walking around it, I imagined those women now lying beneath the dust, or dispersed to distant parts and faraway regions, scattered by the hand of exile, torn to pieces by the claws of expatriation. I heard owls hooting and screeching overhead. Back then night followed day with bustle and movement, coming and going of countless feet. Now day follows night there, and all was forever hushed and desolate. These sad reflections filled my eyes with tears and my heart with anguish. My soul was shattered as if by a jagged rock, and the misery of my mind waxed ever greater. So I took refuge in poetry, and carefully uttered the beautiful sounds of the words.

From Fez

There are times when the lover says NEVER, thus giving up on the beloved. Of course, his longing burns him; he tosses in sleep, cannot stand the company of others, their voices like beasts howling at his ears, the songs of birds sound like cutting of stones or the hammering of nails. He seeks darkness, and when he does finally sleep, his dreams open a vista unto the rest of his life or the lives of others that he does not want to let go of. Though a rich and sustaining domain the joy and comfort these dreams give him does not spill into or affect the anguish of his waking hours. It is an exclusive domain; he has to dip into it to get its rewards. As such it embodies his wish to die and connect with the world of the hereafter. Yet at the same time it is his even breathing while asleep, ebbing and flowing to the tides of the sea of being, that release the poison from him and free him at last.

Of course, even detachment, even with acts of strong will, the lover may ignore his best judgment. One day he may find himself heading, nay pacing quickly or even running while others look away, to reunite with his beloved. Tears will fall from their cheeks and cleanse their souls. They reunite and may in fact bring their bond into a happy union. But oh that NEVER, that fire which he branded his heart with. Of its ashes, he, knowing or unknowing, builds a room that he will keep onto his own. A place he will never allow his beloved to enter. A tomb of his embittered self, which he alone can revisit. A small heart made of scabs beating alongside his heart.