Whatever Gets You through the Night by Andrei Codrescu

Author:Andrei Codrescu [Codrescu, Andrei]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-400-83801-1
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-10-16T04:00:00+00:00

sheherezade’s day

She passed before the door of the Hall of the Great Looms and listened to their never-ceasing clacking. This is where her morning usually ended, if she had done her spinning on time. She loved these rooms best of all, but before she could be there with the women, she had to see the Master-Teacher who oversaw her education and handed her different tasks each day. He scheduled her hours with astrologers, physicians, and holy persons who taught divination, explained humors, chanted stories, prayers, and sutras; and music teachers adept with stringed instruments, drums, and clappers. Since the age of six, between eight a.m. and noon Sheherezade had sleep-learned the epics and the sutras, and memorized the Koran and other holy texts; her fingers had followed obediently the sequences of holes, folds, and drum skins whence they drew competent sounds. One hour past noon, after her favorite lunch of one thin slice of lamb roast, ripe figs, and cold honey-water, she met again the Master-Teacher, who examined her about what she had learned in the morning, and she chanted for him the suras of the Koran and the poetry of Rumi,60 and tormented the instruments. The Master-Teacher then imparted his own wisdom, instructing her in Sufi dancing, the use of knives, and taquia, the art of disguise. Only then could she tend to the womanly arts of spinning and weaving.

For eight years, during the King’s long absence, she had been rigorously schooled in the morning but hadn’t been fully awake until three in the afternoon, when she joined her girlfriends in the Spinning Chamber and the Hall of the Great Looms. The young girls spun wool and wove carpets, and there, following the turning of spindles and the clacking of looms, other kinds of stories were told, very different from the morning’s instructive religious histories, because they were about women and their lives. They talked about men and the court, phantoms, fears, age, and, mostly, the body. The particular uses and limits of the body, male, female, or supernatural, were examined in the light of experience, through gossip dispensed with irony and worldly knowledge by the older women, who winked often, though their tales of childbirth, and other tragedies of the flesh, were not always comforting. Witchcraft and leechcraft were woven with the colored threads of wool into the carpets. Here she learned stories that were timed to the spindle and the loom, and could, if necessary, hide behind the clacking and the twisting like veils that shielded them from being overheard. Sheherezade learned here the art of storytelling: the shape of a story “thickening” and “thinning” was that of a spindle: it pulled in a single thread and spun itself out into a larger and larger shape, round in the middle like a pregnant woman. The cloud of wool from which the thread was spun made a body, the body of a woman full of child, but also a story. The tale-spinner and the spindle that was her body pulled the thread of words unto itself.

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