(King of the Wise)
by B. F. Harvey
I decided on this one particular weekend in the dead of winter to disconnect from society. No phone, no music, no distractions. Just my eyes, the world, and my pen. During this time, which was January of 2018 on MLK weekend, I found myself in a desperate and undeniable need to catch my breath amongst, what I felt, was a continually morphing world. There was a blissful coat of snow on the ground reminiscent of the night before, and a deep chilling wind that screeched in my ears as I leaned against the car window. I looked out of the mystified window towards the obelus trees we'd passed by and the countless rural mid-Pennsylvanian farms that populated the area. These towns we’d pass through were all as quiet as when the first sound of lightning strikes in a storm, as opposed to home, a place that no matter where you are or what life you live, seems to be a loud and concentrated place that fills your ears with familiar harsh tones and pains that can only exist in that one spot.
At the time, I’d been walking around this ragged, broken down barn house that had been transformed into a bookstore filled with what seemed to be infinite knowledge on virtually every topic there was known on this Earth. It was a place as narrow and confined as the catacombs, defined by its brisk air and variety of materials that made up the barn. There were times where the doors and walls would be completely wooden and times where they would be a dead grey stone that made you feel locked away. For a while, I walked around hopelessly trying to find some point of interest in a book, and then I came across the poetry section that seemed like its orchestrator was John Keating himself. Most of what was there were just empty shelves and the shelves that did seem to be filled were unorganized and had nothing to do with its category. I looked at a sign that said, “Robert Frost Poetry”, and yet it was completely empty except for the one book on the top shelf wherein I had to climb a wooden ladder that looked to be built by a carpenter with only four fingers. At the top was no Robert Frost poetry, but a burgundy leather coated book with a shade of viridescence in its deteriorating corners.
I could tell it was old by its smooth and seemingly antique texture, the silkiness of its binding, the touch of the paper upon my frigid fingers, and the font which illuminated throughout the book. On the first page, in fading cursive letters it read:
Arthur,
From
Janice
X-mas, 1913
It was the oldest book I’d ever seen, apart from the three-generation copies of Pride Prejudice locked away in my living room cabinet. It was a collection of poems, all thematically connected, called the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. An author whose name has no real existence anymore, and a person who was famous just only two thousand years prior to the point of which I found this scripture, but now forgotten in time. He was a man who looked at the stars, an astronomer and philosopher who wondered why it was that we do the things we do. Omar Khayyam seemed to be someone who had everything, who was tutored by the best scholars in all of ancient Persia, never having to go off to war, and yet resisted against the views of the average day. In secret, he was a nihilistic, agnostic human being who saw the world around him and understood that those who had everything would always want more, and never want to lose as much as a single piece of gold from the vaults of which the root of their deepest fears lied. He was nearly banned from the Islamic society around him as they began to suspect that he was not as interested in the religion he was supposed to conform to as he made himself out to be. To stay alive and not be indicted by the courts of Persia, he went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, the place in which Muhammed was born and first received the Quran and restored the trust of those around him.
Yet at the time none of this was in my immediate knowledge, I only knew Omar Khayyam, and still do only know him, by the words which are cursed into those pages that he wrote oh so long ago. We were staying for the weekend at my mom’s friend’s lake house. That night I stayed up to two o’clock reading his words, looking up all of the phrases he alluded to in those deeply encrypted lines, and feeling those deep resentments of which accompanied his grand vision of human morals. To live your life knowing that all the materials you have, the seconds you live, could all be gone for:
“The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon,
Turns Ashes- or it prospers, and anon,
Like Snow upon the Deserts dusty Face,
Lighting a little hour or two- is gone.”
It was during this time that I read this that I was getting over the death of a loved one. I was looking for a way out of the labyrinth of the phrase “what if.” Omar never gave me that answer, I still ask myself what if every single waking day, but he helped me to not tremble in its wake. I was looking for answers that weekend, not on my phone, not by talking to other people, but by looking for the solution to the problem from which it was born. Its birth was one that came from the world itself and the humanity that builds it to what it is, and fate that comes as a result of us being human.
I kept holding on so tightly to the things that bound me, afraid to go on living in the headspace that felt that it would soon succumb to the seemingly bleak world around it, unaware of any sort of escape, but what Omar did was give me a base to let go. To not have to worry about what I could not control, to understand that there were some things I could never understand, but only that I must hold on to what I have and know that I cannot keep it forever. No Sultan or servant, no man or woman, no one individual person can ever hold on to something for eternity. There are those, as he describes, that desire the Holy Cup of Jamshid, an elixir that gives you divineness and immortality as long you take as much as one sip, you will never be under the order of the Sultan’s Noose of Light.
Omar instilled in me something that no one else ever could, the idea that the only way to be free from everything, the pain you feel, the lives you lost, and the stress of materialism and wanting to be something- is to remember that one day everything will be gone. That you should live your life not in the fear of the end, or in the astonishment of the past, but of the now. And it wasn’t so much as there being a fear of death, but more so a misunderstanding of what it was. He explained to me that it was merely a process, one that begins and ends beautifully like when a butterfly flourishes from its cocoon, or when a wave begins to stumble upon another wave at the exact same point in time rushing up on the buttery shores of the land but then recedes back to where it came.
It was inexplicably when I was laying in an elevated bed, looking out to the windows that saw a frozen lake and dreadful meadows, that I realized that it was me who was holding on to the things I wanted for an everlasting amount of time. It was then that I saw that I could not have everything forever, and that what was lost had to remain lost, and that what was to be gone had to go. It was as he said to me on that desolate and needful night,
“Come fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring,
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way,
To flutter- and the Bird is on the Wing.”
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