The great mystic and the priestess

She was perturbed. She thought the only thing that could protect her was her prayers. He thought that her silly superstitions and worries would fade away. She had the ability to survive any circumstance, especially when left without a choice. She had the endurance and resilience of a good human being. She wanted to start filming a new life. She needed to tell a new story.

Her girlfriend was coarse and aggressive with a more loudly pitched voice than he would have expected, and an overly exuberant manner, much more than he could tolerate. She kept grabbing him and shouting into his ear like he was a deaf person. She had a magnetic beauty, yet she was terribly ugly. She was not a peasant and did not bear any affinity to a thoroughbred horse farm.

‎He stood in awe in her presence. She spoke as if she were talking to a room full of followers instead of just him. They formed an instant connection. And because she knew that he could “hear” her she shifted from the events surrounding her husband’s death to some seriously blasphemous social commentary putting her at the very edge of the movement. He reconstructed his vision of her.

Their inner ears were perfectly tuned. Their ecstatic heart beats were perfectly synchronized. The beats cleansed their brains and sharpened their spirits with a cosmic array of overtones, perfectly in tune with the^. tuning of the Universe. They knew the significance of intentions. And they also knew that purity of thought is needed to understand realities. They did not need to talk.

Some would call it forbidden love, but they did not care about right and wrong.  They simply let the mystery lead their hearts along the journey of their souls while listening intently to the buzz and throb of the bendir’s gut snares.  The little rattling cymbals hit their hearts removing all doubt and fear, setting up a wall of continuous punctuation, protecting the tongue of the heart and the soul.

They kidded around about spirituality for a while, but they were hungry. Their story came out in pieces. He reconstructed them into a whole piece. He suggested having fish for dinner. She directed them to a restaurant with a lovely view of the crowded square and the port from the seventh floor terrace. They did not serve grilled sardines or any other grilled fish. This must have been a blasphemy as far as he was concerned and perhaps it was at this moment that a little grain of doubt of religious beliefs entered his mind.

Her eyebrows arched high above impressive almond eyes, languid lashes slung down low over high, proud cheek bones. Her tanned skin pulled tight around the hollow of her jaw framing flawless, impossibly seductive lips. The contrast between the two of them was literally black and white.

An arcane contemplative mystery perched on the edge of his heart’s horizon where all Pandora’s abstractions are magnetized by Eros; a subtle magnetic force field of erotic fixation pulsed where the shadow of God is alchemically transmuted into a burnished and majestically smooth golden spectrum of lights. He beheld an inner vision of her irresistible heart.

Her voice started off soft and firm. She was a believer and might have had a Sufi lineage. Then as she grew more excited her voice became more focused and mystical, but somehow less personal. He was getting totally intoxicated with every cup of love he drank from hear breasts.

A sound diffused as light through Rain Forest trees at sunrise, as wide as the crater of the Jebel El Quamar – The Mountains of the Moon. They inhaled space, time, and continuum forming formless nothingness to exhale wholeness of love in each other.

His stillness attracted the artifacts to open a Moment of Truth for her. The first tropical wave of harmonic, quarter tone melismas hissed through his volcanic heart’s mouth piece inducing a hypnotic trance in her, with ears flushing with the most exquisite intimate warmth of a sleeping girl’s breath.

He asked her, did you know that the earliest credible evidence of coffee drinking appears in the middle of the 15th century, in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen? Coffee is misunderstood. In trade, it has matched The Spice Route for attention by travelling from the Muslim world to Italy, and then to the rest of world. But in attention, coffee has suffered in reputation. Although some have thought of coffee as a medicant, many considered strong coffee, in particular, to be mischievous, as the choice analeptic of heretics and rebels. For it seemed that adherents to coffee houses were instigators of rebellious activities in the Ottoman Empire and coffee was banned in the 17^th Century to stop rebellious activities. She did not hear him; she was asleep.

He pondered how fragments of hypnotic pianissimo artifacts hang suspended in articulated air like fluttering shards of five millennium year old dust hovering around the tomb of a mummy exhumed from the sarcophagus of Moses’ half-remembered dream.

He found a state of suspended animation, a muted transmutation taking place in his unconscious peripheral vision. And saw that subliminal warmth is a slowly revolving prism of subconscious desire; his voice could trace elliptical pathways through a galaxy of pantomime gestures with lover’s hands gracefully stroking strange boxes full of unfinished phrases.…………….like glitter from the stars.

In the arms of the Beloved, elemental particles seduce by psychic plasma as nano-overtones shatter fractiles at their highest octaves crystalline edge. The air is charged with the spirit of the lovers into infinite and undefinable beauty. The distilled essence of hovering beats what it means to be breathing love beyond the infatuated imagination of fictitious human beings.

He waits – his divinely charged lips vaporized by her love steaming lips, head facing down, eyes closed, eyebrows alert – he is at once insanely focused and insanely fragile – utterly open to what more is Possible – suspended above an invisible threshold of the man on a wire, totally aware, totally still.

Buzzing and rattling have long been used in Africa to chase-away unwanted, harmful spirits. Sometimes mirlitons are placed over an extra flute hole to create a high end vibration while magnetic –resonance type- vibrations wash over the sickened body. The beating vibrations create infinitesimal interdimensional cracks with magnetic properties that chase away the negative pole and open up the positive pole.

Light framed her glowing face and supernatural smile. They walked along the avenue to her residence near the ramparts lined with cannons where the unknown wicked mistress queen lived. Here, the great Buddhist mystic was thrown over the walls to his death. They were holding hands in the spiritual realm.

She was perfectly poised and her eyes were captivating. She was raised somewhere else. Every gesture, wink, smirk, glance, whisper, grimace, furlough of an eyebrow, and, yes, her laughter was like a blooming rose. She could still laugh after all those terrible experiences! She was like an electric jolt. Every thought was forming with ultra articulation but still home girlish nonchalance.

She did not like darkness. He thought about how amazing it was to be propelled once again into the dreamscape of flower stalks and of the many extraordinary things he had been through in this totally fucked up magic city over the last 20 years. He drifted off into a semi lucid sleep with shapes shifting at his will and intense colors merging into strange non-monolithic landscapes, animals and rituals.

She kept stopping to talk to her friends, the beggars, who would line up on the avenue. Many of whom she knew by their first name and they all seemed to love her for obvious opportunistic reasons. She gave them what she could. She stopped to pose. She looked quite composed. Then she gravitated to the arched doorway in front of the filthy bar.

The summer solstice moon shone down on them through the clouds. He looked like a pirate standing on the deck of some treacherous skull and cross-boned, vessel cursed to roam the seven seas till eternity. She was the distilled essence of a young archetype Sahara Mkadma priestess.

He took the most poignant photos of her, including the shadows from the arch crossing her thoughtful brow, her face turned down and inwardly observing her pain from above. They sat at a round artistically carved 19th century table in her courtyard. He was expert in connecting biblical references and stories to current events and fabricated theories.

Yilmaz Alimoglu
January 10th, 2012
Copyright © Yilmaz Alimoglu 2010-2015.

Turkish Translation: Ulu Sufi ve Rahibe