There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

A poem is a swallow in flight. You can watch it soar through the infinite sky, you can even feel the wind passing over its wings, but you can never catch it, let alone keep it in a cage.

“In Ancient Sumerian, ki-ang was ‘to love’—strangely, the word meant ‘to measure the earth.’ Love was not a feeling or an emotion as much as an anchor that rooted you to a place. All these years I have never yet found myself compelled to measure the earth.

It’s interesting how the same word—hip libbi—could be used both for emotional and physical distress, a ‘shattering of the heart,’ though why that should be so, I cannot explain.”

The Ancient Mesopotamians believed mountains to be alive. Borders connecting the terrestrial and the celestial, in-between spaces. The fingers of earth jutting out as though hoping to touch the skies. One of the oldest words found in archeological excavations is hursag—“mountain.”

Remember, Narin, in the blackest sky there is a star glimmering high above, in the deepest night, a candle burning bright. Never despair. You must always look for the nearest source of life.” Grandma is a water-dowser. Grandma is a spring-finder.

To write is to free yourself from the constraints of place and time. If the spoken word is a trick of the gods, the written word is the triumph of humans.

Thus Nisaba’s fame grows.

She is the patron of archivists and librarians; the one who whispers into the ears of balladeers and storytellers. They invoke her when in need of inspiration. She comes to their aid in moments of confusion. She is the chronicler of time, the collector of stories, the custodian of memories. The goddess of writing documents the good and the bad: celebrations and lamentations, victories and defeats, beauties and atrocities, all that makes humans resilient and vulnerable in equal degree. In parts of Mesopotamia, she is so highly venerated that she is not only entrusted with recounting legends and tales but also with settling disputes and mending grievances. Justice, if it is to be at all meaningful, needs to be recorded.

The temple at Eresh, dedicated to Nisaba, is known as Esagin, the “House of Lapis Lazuli,” for this is her stone and this is her color. The goddess of knowledge and storytelling is imagined in the deepest shade of blue.

Writing is a craft like any other. It must be learned from the masters, pursued with dedication and practiced daily, until your fingers blister, your back hunches, your eyesight starts to dim.

He feels submerged in sorrow, like a candle drowning in its own wax.

It is an odd thing, to lose faith in the beliefs you once held firmly. How strange it is to have carried your convictions like a set of keys, only to realize they will not open any doors. Arthur no longer knows how he feels about excavating antiquities and carrying them off to England. He is unable to recall the thrill of discovery that once drove him. How will he continue to grub for buried relics when he is struggling to unearth his own sense of self? Has he, in his fervor for uncovering the library of Ashurbanipal, failed to give the same respect or attention to the living as he has to the dead? A sense of disquiet suffuses his every moment.

He feels hollowed out, outwardly the same but as empty inside as a blighted tree, its layers peeling back to dry heartwood.

How can anyone assume they will please the Creator by hurting His Creation?

In the blackest sky there is a star glimmering high above, in the deepest night, a candle burning bright. Never despair. You must always look for the nearest source of life.

“It is a famous poem: Layla and Majnun. Qays was in love with Layla and she loved him back, but they could never be together. She was married off to another. Qays lost his mind and so he became Majnun—the ‘possessed.’ He turned into a poet and started wandering the desert, like a madman, consumed by thoughts of Layla, even though she was out of his reach forever—do you see the resemblance?” Arthur smiles ruefully. “But I am no poet, my friend. I am just a devoted reader.”

His own life has been colored by the love of poems and the pursuit of words. He has spent his youth arranging and printing them in books, and then deciphering, translating and studying them on tablets. He has devoted himself to an ancient epic, finding joy in piecing it together verse by verse.

In the end, perhaps what separates one individual from another is not talent but passion. And what is passion if not a restlessness of the heart, an intense yearning to surpass your limits, like a river overflowing its banks?

Gilgamesh, the cruel and arrogant king who embarked on journeys, experienced loss and defeat, and learned humility. Ashurbanipal, the remorseless and cultured king, prided himself on his magnificent capital, palace and library, all of which were razed to the ground. And he, Arthur, King of the Sewers and Slums, so named by a band of good-hearted toshers, miles away from home, has lost the certainty of his convictions.

We carve our dreams into objects, large or small. The emotions we hold but fail to honor, we try to express through the things we create, trusting that they will outlive us when we are gone, trusting that they will carry something of us through the layers of time, like water seeping through rocks. It is our way of saying to the next generations, those we will never get to meet, “Remember us.” It is our way of admitting we were weak and flawed, and that we made mistakes, some inevitable, others foolish, but deep within we appreciated beauty and poetry, too. Each historical artifact, therefore, is a silent plea from ancestors to descendants, “Do not judge us too harshly.” We make art to leave a mark for the future, a slight kink in the river of stories, which flows too fast and too wildly for any of us to comprehend.

He closes his eyes, sinking back into a drowsy torpor. Unlike Gilgamesh, he is at peace with his mortality. The faqra taught him that death is less an end than a new beginning, an opening to the unknown, and Arthur, timid and shy though he has been all his life, is not afraid.

She is the only person who has ever begun to understand his full being, both the boy and the man, his humanity, his courage, his solitariness, his fervor and his frailty…And he has kept his word. He has returned.

It was no secret that one more Yazidi slave was being held captive in a house in a busy suburb in a booming city in Turkey, just as thousands of others were still in family homes in Syria, Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia…Prisoners in ordinary neighborhoods where life went on as normal.

I close my eyes and think of Thales of Miletus sitting on the banks of the winding Maeander River (the Great Menderes in present-day Turkey), which gave us the word “meander” (from Greek maiandros and Latin maeander). I picture him there, watching the water with a sense of wonder and respect, observing its restless movement and renewal. Then I imagine a tiny drop splashing on to the philosopher’s hand…the very drop that might have been inside my coffee this morning or perhaps inside yours, connecting us all beyond the borders of time, geography and identity.