TWO MYSTICS

Abylai Mikhailovitch, may the earth sit lightly on his bones, lived as a child for thirty-three years, as a sage for sixty-three years, and as a mystic for sixteen minutes.

From his birth-shriek all through his boyhood, Abylai Mikhailovitch was hounded by words, and words eluded him. Every word he heard spoken to himself or to others stung him all day afterwards, and the more beautiful the words, the sharper the sting. And whenever he sought words himself to speak about a three-legged donkey he had seen on the road into town, or the sweetness that wafted in on a spring fog, or the painful green of an oak leaf fallen into the ashes of a traveller’s campfire, only a warm draft came out of his mouth, and he felt the words crouching and taunting him, hidden in the ferns and reeds in the pits of his lungs.

At seventeen Abylai Mikhailovitch learned Arabic from a passing hafiz, who took as payment two milk-pails of aquavit from Abylai’s father’s shed. Now the boy could speak, but only in citations from the Qur’an, which his family and friends could not understand. His new knowledge did not stop the words from hunting Abylai, nor from fleeing him. And so he took to the open road, studying every language he could find, in hope of a cure. By thirty-three he could read perfectly in Persian, Sanskrit, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Tamil, Armenian, Chinese, Slavonic, Oirat, and Khmer. Wherever he travelled he drew an eager following, more of gawkers than of disciples.

It was, after all, a hard and silent business to be the disciple of Abylai Mikhailovitch. If spoken to in any of the languages he knew, the boy would cower and hold his palms before his face, like a man trying to steal two more breaths before becoming a wolf’s breakfast. Those who wished to consult him had to write their questions down and hand him the paper. After that Abylai Mikhailovitch could answer, but only using words found on the paper in front of him; the words still fled and mocked him when he sought them in his own memory.

One day as he passed through the town of Bursa, Abylai Mikhailovitch was approached by a boy of seven or eight. The child held out a slingshot in his left hand and a dead squirrel in his right, and spoke through sobs: “He is dead, efendim: he did not taste the pistachios, he kept running away, and now he’s dead.”

Abylai Mikhailovitch could make no answer: no words he had ever read matched the scene. But at last the sage began to see the source of his own troubles. No language, not one, was adequate to the things which it named or the thoughts it voiced. All languages, written and spoken, sought to capture the true shapes and resonances of things. Some languages, like Chinese, leaned more towards shape, while others like Greek tended towards resonance, but all languages had to contend with both elements.

Abylai Mikhailovitch now had a dual task before him: first, to examine carefully every thing in the world to know for himself its true shape and resonance; second, to grasp how each language had attempted – and failed – to capture these elements, so that he might draw out from all languages the right name of each thing and the true form of each thought.

For thirty-two further years Abylai Mikhailovitch travelled, collecting shapes and sounds. He would stand and stare at a shepherd’s hut for days on end, moving by only a hair every minute so as to see it from every angle. He would listen to rushing streams with his head right above the water, then dunk his head under to listen from inside. He would spend an afternoon rolling a single grain of sand on his tongue. And as anyone must who undertakes such a task, he filled his heart with the light of all beings and of their Creator.

For another thirty-one years after this, he copied out, over and over, every word in every language he knew, setting the words on top of and beside each other, pulling out the true, original words from this confusion of symbols and sounds. And as will happen to whoever does such a thing, he fell in love with the true words he uncovered and with the Word which wrote them before time began.

At the age of ninety-six, in a small apartment at the top of a tower, Abylai Mikhailovitch completed his task. With an eager pen he splashed on a fresh sheet of paper the first true words ever strung into a true thought. These words should be, as he saw it, the sum of what he had learned, and so he wrote simply, God is One. As he finished the final stroke, Abylai Mikhailovitch felt a chill run through him, and he stood up to close the window.

Now it happened that from the window he turned back to look at the desk, and went stiff: viewed upside down, the page read not God is One, but God Cannot Be. The words had been written, and so he could speak them: he opened his mouth to say the first true words ever said, and heard that “God is One” was composed of the same sounds, in the same order, as “God cannot be”. He picked up the page and turned it round in his hand, and read again God is One, but finding he couldn’t control his fingers, they kept spinning the page round and round, from God is One to God Cannot Be and back again.

It then dawned on Abylai Mikhailovitch that there was no way for anyone else to know which way the page was supposed to be held, which of the two thoughts the author had meant. Bending forwards and wresting the page from his hand with his teeth, the mystic drew the true language into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and jumped out of the window to his death.

It is said that Abylai Mikhailovitch lived another quarter of an hour after hitting the ground, for Death, who had not expected to receive him so soon, had to shake off her slumber and travel many miles to meet him.

In that quarter of an hour, in Abylai Mikhailovitch’s hometown far away, was born Avram Selimovitch, who became a mystic at the age of five when he ate butter in a dream and woke up with a greasy tongue. He lived three hundred years and died smiling.

–Malcolm Sepulchre

Malcolm Sepulchre is from Nova Scotia and now lives in Montreal, Quebec. His work has previously appeared mostly on park benches, in lengthy strings of phone memos, and perhaps down the sides of a couple bus seats.