The Pigeon Wars of Damascus by Marius Kociejowski

Author:Marius Kociejowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRV015000, TRV026090, TRV000000
ISBN: 9781926845227
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2010-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Abed spoke always of occurrences, those events which, coming when they do, demand of us that we interpret them. It was what made him a street philosopher par excellence. The world becomes, when one allows signs to guide one, a place of wonders and also a place of terrors. What happened that day on the road from Damascus to Aleppo, why had it been reserved for me? What were the chances of my coming back just in the nick of time to witness an act so vile? Synchronicity is one of my themes: the air is full of connections simply waiting to be made. If sufficiently attuned, one might even produce a decent simile. There are times, though, when it seems something more, akin to what Schiller meant when he wrote, ‘There is no such thing as chance, and what seems to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny.’ I know what Abed and Sulaymn would say – what all good Muslims say – that God is the cause of all things. I’m not equipped with those certainties. The random is for me a surer guide. It wouldn’t have been quite the same had I not seen the dog the first time round, horrible, yes, but I wouldn’t have felt as if I’d been implicated in a demonic cycle. It was almost as if what took place required my presence. A broken bridge in my mouth took me there. What would I take from this? What lessons here for a student of the human condition? Such were the thoughts that ran through my head on the bus to Aleppo, and then, quite unbidden, another image came to me, which, some years earlier, had been the focus of my poetical enquiries.

At the British Museum, in the Assyrian section, there are several rooms of bas-relief carvings taken from the palace of Ashurbanipal, at Nineveh, in what is now Iraq. They did not seem then of such appropriate provenance. Those carvings, separated as they are, into panels, may comprise the earliest cartoon-strip – the action that begins in one panel continues through into the next or sometimes even two or three panels further on, and nowhere is this more vividly conveyed than in the section devoted to the royal lion hunt. One may watch its progression from the beginning, when a naked slave boy perched on the roof of the lions’ cage, pulling up a trapdoor, releases them into what will be sure death. Flanks of bearded soldiers with shields create a moving field blocking their escape, while a couple of horsemen with spears prick the lions towards the chariot that carries the king with his terrible beard, Ashurbanipal, who was the last of his line, apparently the first to be able to read and write. A civilisation he may have helped to make, but it was not one that I could ever love. What strikes me is the sameness of the human figures, characterless, most of them functionaries. And then there was the action itself, which is rendered with some brilliance.

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