What Enlightenment Looks Like

by

Nicki Leone

The thing that I love about reading is that every book requires the complicity and the participation of the reader. Words are just scratches on a page until the reader creates the story in his (or her) head. What that story looks like in our own minds is often fleeting, ephemeral—we are not usually self-disciplined enough to nail down our quicksilver thoughts and ideas into something more permanent. If we were, we’d be artists.

Peter Sis is an artist. And his The Conference of the Birds is a rather spectacular example of what happens when an artist seizes some of that quicksilver and hangs on.

The book is billed as his “first book for adults,” although anybody familiar with Sis’s many, many illustrated books will know that it is simplistic to label him a “children’s author.” His work has appeared everywhere from murals in subway stations to stage sets for the Joffrey Ballet. It is also often frequently seen on the pages of magazines like The New York Times Book Review and Atlantic Monthly.  The Conference of the Birds is his adaptation of a medieval epic poem of Sufi mysticism, Manteq aṭ-Ṭayr, which is sometimes translated at “The Conference of the Birds,” or “The Parliament of the Birds,” and was written by the thirteenth century Persian poet (and perfume-seller) Farid ud-Din Attar. (A nom de plume, think “attar” as in “attar of roses”).

It is one of the great overlooked pieces of literature to exist at the crossroads between eastern and western culture, a complex allegorical tale of spiritual enlightenment. In the poem, all the birds of the world have gathered together and wish to choose a king. One of the birds, the hoopoe, says they should seek out Simorgh, a fabled bird of wisdom who lives in the Tree of Science at the top of the mountain of Kaf—highest of the mountains that encircle the earth. The hoopoe leads the birds on a journey to seek their new king, but the way is long and arduous, and many of the birds fall by the wayside, frightened by the hardships or unwilling to leave the life they have always known. They are loathe to leave their ponds, their gilt cages or their masters, the hands that give them food, the things that they have always loved. They ask questions about this new king—is he just? Is he forgiving? Is he real? Those that persevere on the quest pass through seven valleys with names like “The Valley of Quest,” “The Valley of Love,” “The Valley of Death,” until they come to the mountain of Kaf, and to Simorgh. And there they discover that they are all Simorgh, and that he is within each and all of them.

Sis first discovered Farid ud-Din Attar’s magnificent poem when he agreed to do the illustrations for a new edition of Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings. The Simorgh, (the name means “thirty (si) birds (morgh)” which is how many survive the quest), is one of the mythical creatures in the book and something about it caught the imagination of the artist. (We are lucky that it was Simorgh that held him and not any of the other strange beings in the book—such as the Squonk, a creature that is covered in warts and moles, and weeps constantly. It lives in Pennsylvania.) Sis has always been drawn to birds. Born in a closed country, he has an appreciation for things that don’t need passports to cross borders. He decided he wanted to create a version of the story that would speak to modern audiences.

The thing that impresses one the most about Sis’s adaptation of The Conference of the Birds is what an incredibly personal, even intimate, vision it is. The original epic poem is an immensity—a treasure chest of stories and parables as the birds on their quest voice their fears and confusion and are answered by their leader in fairy tales and teaching stories. Sis of necessity passes over ninety-five percent of the ornament of the poem, its many side-paths and detours. But where he decides to include a story the interpretation is telling, such as his account of the gravedigger, which in the original goes like this:

A man who lived by digging graves survived
To a ripe old age. A neighbour said: “You've thrived
For years, digging away in one routine —
Tell us the strangest thing you’ve ever seen.”
He said: “All things considered, what’s most strange
Is that for seventy years without a change
That dog, my Self, has seem me digging graves,
Yet neither dies, nor alters, nor behaves!”

And here is how Sis read it:

Hoopoe: The ancient gravedigger
was asked if you can bury love.

He answered that he had buried
many corpses over many years but
had never once buried his desires.

Sis says in an NPR interview that he draws because English is not his native language. Maybe so, but he is no slouch with words, and shows an uncanny ability to condense the far-reaching message of Attar’s poem into ringing phrases. “Love loves difficult things” is the reason the hoopoe gives the other birds to start on their journey. It’s disconcerting to find how much of myself is reflected in the complaints and whining of these frightened, hopeful birds:

The obsessive bird, sifting the earth
through a sieve, says, I’m trying
to find my way, so I must look
everywhere.

That hits a little close to home, sitting here as I am surrounded by floor to ceiling book cases on every wall, shelves crammed to overflowing with the things I want to know about.

Hoopoe: When you feel empty,
you have to open up your heart and
let the wind sweep through it.

Ah, but I don’t want to look up and let those books go. If I were a bird on that journey to find Simorgh, I wouldn’t get out of the Valley of Knowledge.

This is an art book: the paper is heavy, textured weave, meant no doubt to evoke linen and vellum. In the opening scene, a crowd of birds encircling the hoopoe suddenly bursts from the black and white of a pen-and-ink sketch into full and joyful color when the page is turned. It is as if the word of the birds was suddenly “real.” The illustrations are spotted with painted-in water stains, faded stamped patterns, indistinct symbols, as if this were some ancient manuscript only just rediscovered. (Which is not so far from the truth). Mazes and labyrinths bloom across the pages, whether inviting contemplation or there to ensnare the unwary, it is hard to say.

Each of the seven valleys the birds pass through—representing the seven stages of life in Sufi mysticism, and no doubt in many other disciplines as well—is drawn according to Sis’s own inner eye. The first, the Valley of the Quest, a vast empty barren desert. The Valley of Love, burning hot under a red sun. The Valley of Knowledge (“Here we all choose a different way and different rules to disobey”) a place of erupting volcanoes, the Valley of Unity, where the hills are covered in green forests. As stages of life to be overcome, it’s a little frightening. No wonder so many birds fail to finish the journey.

I have to admit that when I turned from Peter Sis’s version and went to read Farid Ud-din Attar’s Conference of the Birds for myself, what I saw is not what Sis saw. Sis stayed with the quest, but I, I was continually distracted by the hundreds of small tales and stories in the poem. It is sometimes compared to The Canterbury Tales in its structure and the way that story tumbles after story: the Sheikh who rejected Islam for the love of a Christian girl’s black hair. The man from China who turned to stone and cried pebbles. The words of Socrates to a pupil before he dies on what to do with his body. The glorious descriptions of the majesty of heaven visible in the desert sky.

One moonlit night
Sheikh Bayazid, attracted by the sight
Of such refulgent brilliance, clear as day,
Across the sleeping city took his way
And thence into the desert, where he saw
Unnumbered stars adorning heaven’s floor.
He walked a little and became aware
That not a sound disturbed the desert air,
That no one moved in that immensity
Save him...

As a rule, I’m about as spiritually inclined as a left over slice of pizza (one without the image of the Virgin Mary in the dried cheese), but even I can appreciate the glory in those words.

An allegorical illustration of an allegorical poem, in his The Conference of the Birds Sis has created something like a gateway to Attar’s great vision that the rest of us can walk through, distilling the allegory down to what seemed most essential to him. “I wanted to condense it down to what I wanted to say about my own life,” Sis says in that same NPR interview.

It may be asking too much to expect that Sis’s book will make people wish to read the original, but one can hope. His vision—so strangely intimate and personal—almost whispers to the reader that there is more here, more to be heard, more to be learned. Like all great art, his invites the looker to look harder. But look inward, look for Simorgh.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Conference of the Birds by Peter Sis (Penguin HC, 2011)
The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar, translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis, (Penguin, 1984)
The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges, illustrated by Peter Sis and translated by Andrew Hurley (Viking, 2005)  

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.