Aten't ded, also The Garden of Allah
-Still here. Although I haven't got much energy for writing, as they're (takes deep breath) screwing around with my medications again. And it's not been a success this time either; a new muscle relaxant ended up helping my chronic pain for a few days but ended up causing depression and sexual dysfunction, so fuck that. Why do so many drugs that work do that? I mean, especially anticholinergics? I need anticholinergics, technically, since parts of that system are in overdrive in my brain, but most of them end up depleting all the good stuff in my brain as well. And the fucking crotchnumb... sometimes I wonder if it isn't asexuals (actual "no sex drive" asexuals and not the autosexual "sit inside, wank to fanfic all day and have no social skills/desire to touch other people" thing Tumblr sells as asexuality) who reap the greatest benefits out of antideps. Because it won't be anything you'll miss. Now, to a hypersexual like me, for whom a day without wanking at least once is a sign of illness... not so good. So, now I'm exhausted and in pain without the meds, but have had a couple of amazing wanks, but I'm not sure about the payoff. Why can't I have energy and epic orgasms instead of having to pay the price of pain and fatigue for epic orgasms?
-It was horrible to hear about poor little Anton Yelchin. What a horrible way to go, for such a cute little boy with a life ahead of him. I had nightmares of the way he died; it must have been so long and painful... absolutely horrible. Poor kid:(.
-I did manage to finish The Garden of Allah (Gutenberg ebook version here) in a week or so. And I want to go back; I'm honestly this close to just starting it all over again just to bathe in the poetry of it (like the 1250 page-length of the ebook version, 500 pages in the printed version, wasn't enough)... The atmosphere in that book is glorious, the text absolutely beautiful--I do wonder if Hichens was on opiates when he wrote it, because everything he writes about Algeria has this ecstatic, joyous glow to it. I don't know if modern readers, unless they were super-religious in the sort of "submit all to God" sort of way, would appreciate the ending, though. If anything, today the voice that the runaway monk hears that tells him to leave his monastery and enjoy the world, the love of a woman and everything the world has to offer sounds like the voice of liberation more than anything, not like the voice of the Devil. But the book does open up an interesting line of thought into thinking of how different Western morals were only a hundred years ago--it was all "submit to your duty and to what is right" and fuck individualism, but now it's all individualism to the point where people stomp on others and/or lose others and become miserable. It was so incredibly different and yet it's not *that* long ago; this would have been the attitude hammered into the heads of my grandfather's generation (he was born in 1925, if memory serves correctly, and would have been 12 when the second movie version came to the cinemas here; old enough to see it).
But then you could also think that this, like many other Victorian novels, sneakily sold a grain of new thought, of new liberation even if normalcy was restored by the end. It's still established that now that Boris has known the love of Domini, he can say that "God is Love," and to him, he has felt it through Domini. And he says he can't regret what he did, that he found God and Love in the world--so even if he goes back into the monastery, we at least get a peek of this new radical idea of love in the body, of love in the world, of the Divine being found in the world and not in a monastery. And given that the book is this paean to the beauty of Africa, this palpable, almost pantheistic ecstasy singing through every page, you do end up bathing more in this pantheistic love/God-in-the-world kind of ecstasy than the actual repression and monastic existence. If anything, it's a stealthy way of selling the former versus the latter.
One thing that strikes me about the book is that, compared to Bella Donna (written five years later) and other books of Hichens's which I've glanced at--which are satirical and full of short, snappy sentences, in a completely different style--is that he's still in love with Africa. And/or he'd come off the drugs he was on, to put it bluntly. I remember finding Bella Donna way more racist and cynical, like he was embittered with the Egyptians even if he loved the place. There was more tension in there, like he'd been somehow betrayed in his love of Africa. But in TGOA this love is still new, singing and rejoicing and whirling and spraying everywhere, and you get swept up in it. It's what I'd definitely call positive Orientalism, the sort that's just absolutely in love with its subject and doesn't take too colonial/superior an attitude to everything, whereas in Bella Donna, you see him bitching about the laziness of the natives and such way more. There's more of a sense of *foreignness* in BD, a greater distance between the characters and the land they're in, whereas in this love song to Algeria, you get the feeling that the Westerners want to stay there, live there forever, and Anteoni--I'll get to Anteoni in a bit because I FUCKING LOVE ANTEONI--even converts to Islam and does stay forever.
Actually, I need to put this underneath a cut because I'm going on a bit, aren't I... it's a book I won't forget, because so many of the images stay with me, so many of the leitmotifs (the barking of the Kabyle dogs, the twittering of Larbi's flute, Anteoni's garden, the street of the Ouled Naïls, etc.) just keep haunting me.
Here's what they changed in the Dietrich movie, anyway:
In the film:
-Batouch is gay (he must be straight or bi in the book, as despite hints of effeminacy, he courts the dancing-girls). Oh, and he's built like an ox, and a mix of physical butchness and foppery. Whereas he's a skinny guy in the film and says that in [some place name I forget] they call him "the perfect little housewife." *Eyebrow*
-Domini and the native women: "I am interested in them" is not in the book. Subtextually, it's meant to underline Baz!Anteoni's interest in her, yeah, yeah, but there's another subtext because it's Marlene fuckin' Dietrich checking out dat ass.
-Anteoni has not had a romantic interest in Domini in the book; he's more like this wonderful magical old uncle to her (he's an older man in the book). And he is SO AWESOME AND LOVELY it hurts. He has a magical, beautiful garden in which he goes to meditate and it's garden porn that goes on for ages and ages and I WANT TO LIVE THERE.
-Anteoni isn't the guy who tells Domini about the liqueur. This is an entirely different guy who comes in, and it's not a climactic denouement (the realisation creeps on way more slowly). Hence, no jealousy from Anteoni, let alone that touch of sadism, even, when he goes Sherlock Holmes on them in the movie. He is a completely benign, sweet man. They shouldn't really have cast someone as villainous-looking as Baz as him, actually... another WTF thing about the movie.
-Anteoni goes way beyond just having been adopted by the Sahara; he converts to Islam at the end! And he is superbly happy and at peace. D'awwwww! Dude is glowing ❤ I was basically punching the air when that happened, because it was so right for him. "Now, I can pray in the desert."
-The sand diviner is basically someone they should've cast Connie as. I'm embittered about this. THEY SHOULD HAVE DONE THAT. There are further bits that go on about his piercing eyes and his thinness and how he looks through people and GODFUCKINGDAMMIT. "All this time the Diviner was standing on the sand, still smiling, but with downcast eyes. His thin body looked satirical and Domini felt a strong aversion from him, yet a strong interest in him too. Something in his appearance and manner suggested power and mystery as well as cunning. The Count said some words to him in Arabic, and at once he walked forward and disappeared among the trees, going so silently and smoothly that she seemed to watch a panther gliding into the depths of a jungle where its prey lay hid." And "His eyes seemed to rout out the secrets from every corner of her being, and to scatter them upon the ground as the sand was scattered."
-Domini is preggers by Androvsky by the end! And the epilogue, set several years after, shows her frolicking with the kid in Anteoni's garden (Anteoni isn't himself present). And she never tells Androvsky she's pregnant, because she knows that'd make him stay instead of going back to the monastery. But the ending is positive in that sense at least, that she gets to stay in the garden and that she isn't completely alone. Although I do wish she'd married Anteoni. And she probably would've converted to Islam as well and they would've brought the kid up in some sort of all-encompassing, universalist hippie mystical Sufism. I just know that. AND I WANT THAT AU. *cries into her hands* He isn't introduced as a love-rival to her at all, but oh, god, how I ship them--they're both so spiritual and Anteoni is just 100% good, unlike the Baz version with his hints of sadism and bitterness. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.
Anyway. Despite the ending being what it was, I'm still drunk with the book, drunk with the language, drunk with the poetry of it, and I was sad to let go of that magical world (that never existed in the first place). Have some quotes:
"She wanted freedom, a wide horizon, the great winds, the great sun, the terrible spaces, the glowing, shimmering radiance, the hot, entrancing moons and bloomy, purple nights of Africa. She wanted the nomad's fires and the acid voices of the Kabyle dogs. She wanted the roar of the tom-toms, the dash of the cymbals, the rattle of the negroes' castanets, the fluttering, painted figures of the dancers. She wanted-more than she could express, more than she knew. It was there, want, aching in her heart, as she drew into her nostrils this strange and wealthy atmosphere."
"When two lovers kiss their breath mingles, and, if they really love, each is conscious that in the breath of the loved one is the loved one's soul, coming forth from the temple of the body through the temple door."
"And as she sat there, while the darkness grew in the sky and spread secretly along the sandy rills among the trees, she wondered how much she held within her to give in answer to this cry to her of self-confident Nature. Was it only a little? She did not know. Perhaps she was too tired to know. But however much it was it must seem meagre. What is even a woman's heart given to the desert or a woman's soul to the sea? What is the worship of anyone to the sunset among the hills, or to the wind that lifts all the clouds from before the face of the moon?"
(On Anteoni:) "The timbre of his voice was harsh and grating, yet it was a very interesting, even a seductive, voice, and, Domini thought, peculiarly full of vivid life, though not of energy. His manner at once banished her momentary discomfort. There is a freemasonry between people born in the same social world. By the way in which Count Anteoni took off his hat and spoke she knew at once that all was right."
"With this last thought blended the still remote sound of the hautboy. It suggested anything rather than renunciation; mysterious melancholy-successor to passion-the cry of longing, the wail of the unknown that draws some men and women to splendid follies and to ardent pilgrimages whose goal is the mirage."
"The sound of the tomtoms and hautboys seemed suddenly much louder now that the moon began to shine, making a whiteness among the white houses of the village, the white robes of the inhabitants, a greater whiteness on the white road that lay before them. And she was thinking that the moon whiteness of Beni-Mora was more passionate than pure, more like the blanched face of a lover than the cool, pale cheek of a virgin. There was excitement in it, suggestion greater even than the suggestion of the tremendous coloured scenes of the evening that preceded such a night. And she mused of white heat and of what it means-the white heat of the brain blazing with thoughts that govern, the white heat of the heart blazing with emotions that make such thoughts seem cold. She had never known either. Was she incapable of knowing them? Could she imagine them till there was physical heat in her body if she was incapable of knowing them? Suzanne and the two Arabs were distant shadows to her when that first moon-ray touched their feet. The passion of the night began to burn her, and she thought she would like to take her soul and hold it out to the white flame."
"She looked and listened till she saw a grander procession troop by, garlanded with mystery and triumph: War as a shape with woman's eyes: Night, without poppies, leading the stars and moon and all the vigorous dreams that must come true: Love of woman that cannot be set aside, but will govern the world from Eden to the abyss into which the nations fall to the outstretched hands of God: Death as Life's leader, with a staff from which sprang blossoms red as the western sky: Savage Fecundity that crushes all barren things into the silent dust: and then the Desert."
"Genius, under whatever form, shows to the world at moments the face of Aphrodite."
"Sad things had no meaning here and grave things no place. For the blood was full of sunbeams dancing to a lilt of Apollo. "
"When she came to the long road that skirted the desert she met the breeze of dawn that blows out of the east across the flats, and drank in its celestial purity. Between the palms, far away towards Sidi-Zerzour, above the long indigo line of the Sahara, there rose a curve of deep red gold. The sun was coming up to take possession of his waiting world. She longed to ride out to meet him, to give him a passionate welcome in the sand, and the opening words of the Egyptian "Adoration of the Sun by the Perfect Souls" came to her lips: "Hommage a Toi. Dieu Soleil. Seigneur du Ciel, Roi sur la Terre! Lion du Soir! Grande Ame divine, vivante a toujours."
Anteoni and Domini (spot the fateful phrase they used in Bella Donna):
"The Coran says: 'The fate of every man have We bound about his neck.' May yours be as serene, as beautiful, as a string of pearls."
"But I have never cared to wear pearls," she answered.
"No? What are your stones?"
"Rubies."
"Blood! No others?"
"Sapphires."
"The sky at night."
"And opals."
"Fires gleaming across the white of moonlit dunes. Do you remember?"
"I remember."
"The air was warm as in a hothouse, but light and faintly impregnated with perfume shed surely by the mystical garments of night as she glided on with Domini towards the desert."
And this is one of the bits where Hichens knows to an almost Anaïs level about female passion: "She loved Androvsky. Everything in her loved him; all that she had been, all that she was, all that she could ever be loved him; that which was physical in her, that which was spiritual, the brain, the heart, the soul, body and flame burning within it-all that made her the wonder that is woman, loved him. She was love for Androvsky. It seemed to her that she was nothing else, had never been anything else. The past years were nothing [...]. There was no room in her for anything but love of Androvsky. At this moment even her love of God seemed to have been expelled from her. [...] For her there was a universe with but one figure in it-Androvsky. She was unconscious of herself except as love for him. She was unconscious of any Creative Power to whom she owed the fact that he was there to be loved by her. She was passion, and he was that to which passion flowed."
And there's a bit where Domini is so happy she doesn't want to sleep (oddly, I experienced this twice during the time I was reading the book, so it was an interesting coincidence, considering how rarely that happens to me): "It was late in the night. Midnight had sounded yet she did not go to bed. She feared to sleep, to lose the consciousness of her joy of the glory which had come into her life. She was a miser of the golden hours of this black and howling night. To sleep would be to be robbed. A splendid avarice in her rebelled against the thought of sleep."
Domini and Androvsky:
"When you touched me that day it was as if you were giving me the world and the stars. It frightened me to receive so much. I felt as if I had no place to put my gift in."
"Did your heart seem so small?" she said.
"You make everything I have and am seem small-and yet great. What does it mean?"
"That you are great, as I am, because we love. No one is small who loves. No one is poor, no one is bad, who loves. Love burns up evil. It's the angel that destroys."
"He spoke as if he were jealous even of her thought of God, as if he did not understand that it was the very intensity of her love for him that made her, even in the midst of the passion of the body, connect their love of each other with God's love of them. In her heart this overpowering human love which, in the garden, when first she realised it fully, had seemed to leave no room in her for love of God, now in the moment when it was close to absolute satisfaction seemed almost to be one with her love of God. Perhaps no man could understand how, in a good woman, the two streams of the human love which implies the intense desire of the flesh, and the mystical love which is absolutely purged of that desire, can flow the one into the other and mingle their waters. She tried to think that, and then she ceased to try. Everything was forgotten as his arms held her fast in the night, everything except this great force of human love which was like iron, and yet soft about her, which was giving and wanting, which was concentrated upon her to the exclusion of all else, plunging the universe in darkness and setting her in light."
"He laid his lips upon hers in a desperate caress that almost suffocated her. Then he took his lips away from her lips and kissed her throat, holding her head back against his shoulder. She shut her eyes. He was indeed teaching her to forget. Even the memory of the day in the garden when she heard the church bell chime and the sound of Larbi's flute went from her. She remembered nothing any more. The past was lost or laid in sleep by the spell of sensation. Her nature galloped like an Arab horse across the sands towards the sun, towards the fire that sheds warmth afar but that devours all that draws near to it. At that moment she connected Androvsky with the tremendous fires eternally blazing in the sun. She had a desire that he should hurt her in the passionate intensity of his love for her. Her nature, which till now had been ever ready to spring into hostility at an accidental touch, which had shrunk instinctively from physical contact with other human beings, melted, was utterly transformed. She felt that she was now the opposite of all that she had been-more woman than any other woman who had ever lived. What had been an almost cold strength in her went to increase the completeness of this yielding to one stronger than herself. What had seemed boyish and almost hard in her died away utterly under the embrace of this fierce manhood."
This bit is probably a good example of how a text can include... oh, racism, sexism and ablism and whatnot that's not PC within itself, but still be so fucking beautiful and alluring that it has to be judged by its power to enchant rather than anything else:
"Domini and Androvsky rode towards Amara at a foot's pace, looking towards its distant towers. A quivering silence lay around them, yet already they seemed to hear the cries of the voices of a great multitude, to be aware of the movement of thronging crowds of men. This was the first Sahara city they had drawn near to, and their minds were full of memories of the stories of Batouch, told to them by the camp fire at night in the uninhabited places which, till now, had been their home: stories of the wealthy date merchants who trafficked here and dwelt in Oriental palaces, poor in aspect as seen from the dark and narrow streets, or zgags, in which they were situated, but within full of the splendours of Eastern luxury; of the Jew moneylenders who lived apart in their own quarter, rapacious as wolves, hoarding their gains, and practising the rites of their ancient and-according to the Arabs-detestable religion; of the marabouts, or sacred men, revered by the Mohammedans, who rode on white horses through the public ways, followed by adoring fanatics who sought to touch their garments and amulets, and demanded importunately miraculous blessings at their hands-the hedgehog's foot to protect their women in the peril of childbirth; the scroll, covered with verses of the Koran and enclosed in a sheaf of leather, that banishes ill dreams at night and stays the uncertain feet of the sleep-walker; the camel's skull that brings fruit to the palm trees; the red coral that stops the flow of blood from a knife-wound-of the dancing-girls glittering in an armour of golden pieces, their heads tied with purple and red and yellow handkerchiefs of silk, crowned with great bars of solid gold and tufted with ostrich feathers; of the dwarfs and jugglers who by night perform in the marketplace, contending for custom with the sorceresses who tell the fates from shells gathered by mirage seas; with the snake-charmers-who are immune from the poison of serpents and the acrobats who come from far-off Persia and Arabia to spread their carpets in the shadow of the Agha's dwelling and delight the eyes of negro and Kabyle, of Soudanese and Touareg with their feats of strength; of the haschish smokers who, assembled by night in an underground house whose ceiling and walls were black as ebony, gave themselves up to day-dreams of shifting glory, in which the things of earth and the joys and passions of men reappeared, but transformed by the magic influence of the drug, made monstrous or fairylike, intensified or turned to voluptuous languors, through which the Ouled Nail floated like a syren, promising ecstasies unknown even in Baghdad, where the pale Circassian lifts her lustrous eyes, in which the palms were heavy with dates of solid gold, and the streams were gliding silver."
"To the sad a great vision of human life brings sadness because they read into the hearts of others their own misery. But to the happy such a vision brings exultation, for everywhere they find dancing reflections of their own joy."
I can't even remember if this is Androvsky or Domini, but I've felt this thanks to a certain someone:
"It is as if I was not quite human before, and my love for you had made me completely human, had done something to me that even-even my love for God had not been able to do."
And the new Anteoni she meets later on in the book:
"My fate has come to pass. Do you not care to know what it is?"
"Yes, do tell me."
She spoke earnestly. She felt a change in him, a great change which as yet she did not understand fully. It was as if he had been a man in doubt and was now a man no longer in doubt, as if he had arrived at some goal and was more at peace with himself than he had been.
"I have become a Mohammedan," he said simply.
"A Mohammedan!"
She repeated the words as a person repeats words in surprise, but her voice did not sound surprised.
"You wonder?" he asked.
After a moment she answered:
"No. I never thought of such a thing, but I am not surprised. Now you have told me it seems to explain you, much that I noticed in you, wondered about in you."
"She looked at him steadily, but without curiosity.
"I feel that you are happy now."
"Yes, I am happy. The world I used to know, my world and yours, would laugh at me, would say that I was crazy, that it was a whim, that I wished for a new sensation. Simply it had to be. For years I have been tending towards it-who knows why? Who knows what obscure influences have been at work in me, whether there is not perhaps far back, some faint strain of Arab blood mingled with the Sicilian blood in my veins? I cannot understand why. What I can understand is that at last I have fulfilled my destiny! After years of unrest I am suddenly and completely at peace. It is a magical sensation. I have been wandering all my life and have come upon the open door of my home."
He spoke very quietly, but she heard the joy in his voice.
"I remember you saying, 'I like to see men praying in the desert.'"
"Yes. When I looked at them I was longing to be one of them. For years from my garden wall I watched them with a passion of envy, with bitterness, almost with hatred sometimes. They had something I had not, something that set them above me, something that made their lives plain through any complication, and that gave to death a meaning like the meaning at the close of a great story that is going to have a sequel. They had faith. And it was difficult not to hate them. But now I am one of them. I can pray in the desert."
"That was why you left Beni-Mora."
"Yes. I had long been wishing to become a Mohammedan. I came here to be with the marabout, to enter more fully into certain questions, to see if I had any lingering doubts."
"And you have none?"
"None."
"The light silence that floated airily away into the vast distances that breathed out the spirit of a pale eternity."
"Suddenly she felt again the oppression of spirit she had been momentarily conscious of in the afternoon. It was like a load descending upon her, and, almost instantly, communicated itself to her body. She was conscious of a sensation of unusual weariness, uneasiness, even dread, then again of an intensity of life that startled her. This intensity remained, grew in her. It was as if the principle of life, like a fluid, were being poured into her out of the vials of God, as if the little cup that was all she had were too small to contain the precious liquid. That seemed to her to be the cause of the pain of which she was conscious. She was being given more than she felt herself capable of possessing."
And last, some of the stuff Androvsky cites as his reasons for running out of the monastery:
"I compared union with God, such as I thought I had known, with that other union spoken of by my guest-union with the human being one loves. I set the two unions as it were in comparison. Night after night I did this. Night after night I told over the joys of union with God-joys which I dared to think I had known-and the joys of union with a loved human being. On the one side I thought of the drawing near to God in prayer, of the sensation of approach that comes with earnest prayer, of the feeling that ears are listening to you, that the great heart is loving you, the great heart that loves all living things, that you are being absolutely understood, that all you cannot say is comprehended, and all you say is received as something precious. I recalled the joy, the exaltation, that I had known when I prayed. That was union with God. In such union I had sometimes felt that the world, with all that it contained of wickedness, suffering and death, was utterly devoid of power to sadden or alarm the humblest human being who was able to draw near to God."
"Of this human love I thought at night, putting it in comparison with the love God's creature can have for God. And my sense of loneliness increased, and I felt as if I had always been lonely. Does this seem strange to you? In the love of God was calm, peace, rest, a lying down of the soul in the Almighty arms. In the other love described to me was restlessness, agitation, torture, the soul spinning like an atom driven by winds, the heart devoured as by a disease, a cancer. On the one hand was a beautiful trust, on the other a ceaseless agony of doubt and terror. And yet I came to feel as if the one were unreal in comparison with the other, as if in the one were a loneliness, in the other fierce companionship. I thought of the Almighty arms, Domini, and of the arms of a woman, and-Domini, I longed to have known, if only once, the pressure of a woman's arms about my neck, about my breast, the touch of a woman's hand upon my heart."
Anyway, that's just *half* of all the stuff I copypasted into my Notes while reading the book on my phone. Seriously beautiful and profound stuff, and now you can probably see why I want to go back to bathe in all of it? And I also want Domini/me to marry Anteoni, but defs the book version and not the movie version (sorry, Baz). Reading this was a spiritual experience, even if I can't say it brought me any revelations as such--more like the wonderful feeling of someone else experiencing all this beautiful, Romantic depth of feeling I can myself get about the world and things. Hichens gets it (and the sense of him getting women is wayyyy stronger in this one than it was in BD, too). Or at least he "got" it when he was still on morphine or whatever (he wrote a novel about morphine addiction, so I'm counting this as evidence of him having been off his tits when he wrote this book. And I don't count it against him, TBH, considering how beautiful the end result was. Waah! Now I just want more!
-It was horrible to hear about poor little Anton Yelchin. What a horrible way to go, for such a cute little boy with a life ahead of him. I had nightmares of the way he died; it must have been so long and painful... absolutely horrible. Poor kid:(.
-I did manage to finish The Garden of Allah (Gutenberg ebook version here) in a week or so. And I want to go back; I'm honestly this close to just starting it all over again just to bathe in the poetry of it (like the 1250 page-length of the ebook version, 500 pages in the printed version, wasn't enough)... The atmosphere in that book is glorious, the text absolutely beautiful--I do wonder if Hichens was on opiates when he wrote it, because everything he writes about Algeria has this ecstatic, joyous glow to it. I don't know if modern readers, unless they were super-religious in the sort of "submit all to God" sort of way, would appreciate the ending, though. If anything, today the voice that the runaway monk hears that tells him to leave his monastery and enjoy the world, the love of a woman and everything the world has to offer sounds like the voice of liberation more than anything, not like the voice of the Devil. But the book does open up an interesting line of thought into thinking of how different Western morals were only a hundred years ago--it was all "submit to your duty and to what is right" and fuck individualism, but now it's all individualism to the point where people stomp on others and/or lose others and become miserable. It was so incredibly different and yet it's not *that* long ago; this would have been the attitude hammered into the heads of my grandfather's generation (he was born in 1925, if memory serves correctly, and would have been 12 when the second movie version came to the cinemas here; old enough to see it).
But then you could also think that this, like many other Victorian novels, sneakily sold a grain of new thought, of new liberation even if normalcy was restored by the end. It's still established that now that Boris has known the love of Domini, he can say that "God is Love," and to him, he has felt it through Domini. And he says he can't regret what he did, that he found God and Love in the world--so even if he goes back into the monastery, we at least get a peek of this new radical idea of love in the body, of love in the world, of the Divine being found in the world and not in a monastery. And given that the book is this paean to the beauty of Africa, this palpable, almost pantheistic ecstasy singing through every page, you do end up bathing more in this pantheistic love/God-in-the-world kind of ecstasy than the actual repression and monastic existence. If anything, it's a stealthy way of selling the former versus the latter.
One thing that strikes me about the book is that, compared to Bella Donna (written five years later) and other books of Hichens's which I've glanced at--which are satirical and full of short, snappy sentences, in a completely different style--is that he's still in love with Africa. And/or he'd come off the drugs he was on, to put it bluntly. I remember finding Bella Donna way more racist and cynical, like he was embittered with the Egyptians even if he loved the place. There was more tension in there, like he'd been somehow betrayed in his love of Africa. But in TGOA this love is still new, singing and rejoicing and whirling and spraying everywhere, and you get swept up in it. It's what I'd definitely call positive Orientalism, the sort that's just absolutely in love with its subject and doesn't take too colonial/superior an attitude to everything, whereas in Bella Donna, you see him bitching about the laziness of the natives and such way more. There's more of a sense of *foreignness* in BD, a greater distance between the characters and the land they're in, whereas in this love song to Algeria, you get the feeling that the Westerners want to stay there, live there forever, and Anteoni--I'll get to Anteoni in a bit because I FUCKING LOVE ANTEONI--even converts to Islam and does stay forever.
Actually, I need to put this underneath a cut because I'm going on a bit, aren't I... it's a book I won't forget, because so many of the images stay with me, so many of the leitmotifs (the barking of the Kabyle dogs, the twittering of Larbi's flute, Anteoni's garden, the street of the Ouled Naïls, etc.) just keep haunting me.
Here's what they changed in the Dietrich movie, anyway:
In the film:
-Batouch is gay (he must be straight or bi in the book, as despite hints of effeminacy, he courts the dancing-girls). Oh, and he's built like an ox, and a mix of physical butchness and foppery. Whereas he's a skinny guy in the film and says that in [some place name I forget] they call him "the perfect little housewife." *Eyebrow*
-Domini and the native women: "I am interested in them" is not in the book. Subtextually, it's meant to underline Baz!Anteoni's interest in her, yeah, yeah, but there's another subtext because it's Marlene fuckin' Dietrich checking out dat ass.
-Anteoni has not had a romantic interest in Domini in the book; he's more like this wonderful magical old uncle to her (he's an older man in the book). And he is SO AWESOME AND LOVELY it hurts. He has a magical, beautiful garden in which he goes to meditate and it's garden porn that goes on for ages and ages and I WANT TO LIVE THERE.
-Anteoni isn't the guy who tells Domini about the liqueur. This is an entirely different guy who comes in, and it's not a climactic denouement (the realisation creeps on way more slowly). Hence, no jealousy from Anteoni, let alone that touch of sadism, even, when he goes Sherlock Holmes on them in the movie. He is a completely benign, sweet man. They shouldn't really have cast someone as villainous-looking as Baz as him, actually... another WTF thing about the movie.
-Anteoni goes way beyond just having been adopted by the Sahara; he converts to Islam at the end! And he is superbly happy and at peace. D'awwwww! Dude is glowing ❤ I was basically punching the air when that happened, because it was so right for him. "Now, I can pray in the desert."
-The sand diviner is basically someone they should've cast Connie as. I'm embittered about this. THEY SHOULD HAVE DONE THAT. There are further bits that go on about his piercing eyes and his thinness and how he looks through people and GODFUCKINGDAMMIT. "All this time the Diviner was standing on the sand, still smiling, but with downcast eyes. His thin body looked satirical and Domini felt a strong aversion from him, yet a strong interest in him too. Something in his appearance and manner suggested power and mystery as well as cunning. The Count said some words to him in Arabic, and at once he walked forward and disappeared among the trees, going so silently and smoothly that she seemed to watch a panther gliding into the depths of a jungle where its prey lay hid." And "His eyes seemed to rout out the secrets from every corner of her being, and to scatter them upon the ground as the sand was scattered."
-Domini is preggers by Androvsky by the end! And the epilogue, set several years after, shows her frolicking with the kid in Anteoni's garden (Anteoni isn't himself present). And she never tells Androvsky she's pregnant, because she knows that'd make him stay instead of going back to the monastery. But the ending is positive in that sense at least, that she gets to stay in the garden and that she isn't completely alone. Although I do wish she'd married Anteoni. And she probably would've converted to Islam as well and they would've brought the kid up in some sort of all-encompassing, universalist hippie mystical Sufism. I just know that. AND I WANT THAT AU. *cries into her hands* He isn't introduced as a love-rival to her at all, but oh, god, how I ship them--they're both so spiritual and Anteoni is just 100% good, unlike the Baz version with his hints of sadism and bitterness. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.
Anyway. Despite the ending being what it was, I'm still drunk with the book, drunk with the language, drunk with the poetry of it, and I was sad to let go of that magical world (that never existed in the first place). Have some quotes:
"She wanted freedom, a wide horizon, the great winds, the great sun, the terrible spaces, the glowing, shimmering radiance, the hot, entrancing moons and bloomy, purple nights of Africa. She wanted the nomad's fires and the acid voices of the Kabyle dogs. She wanted the roar of the tom-toms, the dash of the cymbals, the rattle of the negroes' castanets, the fluttering, painted figures of the dancers. She wanted-more than she could express, more than she knew. It was there, want, aching in her heart, as she drew into her nostrils this strange and wealthy atmosphere."
"When two lovers kiss their breath mingles, and, if they really love, each is conscious that in the breath of the loved one is the loved one's soul, coming forth from the temple of the body through the temple door."
"And as she sat there, while the darkness grew in the sky and spread secretly along the sandy rills among the trees, she wondered how much she held within her to give in answer to this cry to her of self-confident Nature. Was it only a little? She did not know. Perhaps she was too tired to know. But however much it was it must seem meagre. What is even a woman's heart given to the desert or a woman's soul to the sea? What is the worship of anyone to the sunset among the hills, or to the wind that lifts all the clouds from before the face of the moon?"
(On Anteoni:) "The timbre of his voice was harsh and grating, yet it was a very interesting, even a seductive, voice, and, Domini thought, peculiarly full of vivid life, though not of energy. His manner at once banished her momentary discomfort. There is a freemasonry between people born in the same social world. By the way in which Count Anteoni took off his hat and spoke she knew at once that all was right."
"With this last thought blended the still remote sound of the hautboy. It suggested anything rather than renunciation; mysterious melancholy-successor to passion-the cry of longing, the wail of the unknown that draws some men and women to splendid follies and to ardent pilgrimages whose goal is the mirage."
"The sound of the tomtoms and hautboys seemed suddenly much louder now that the moon began to shine, making a whiteness among the white houses of the village, the white robes of the inhabitants, a greater whiteness on the white road that lay before them. And she was thinking that the moon whiteness of Beni-Mora was more passionate than pure, more like the blanched face of a lover than the cool, pale cheek of a virgin. There was excitement in it, suggestion greater even than the suggestion of the tremendous coloured scenes of the evening that preceded such a night. And she mused of white heat and of what it means-the white heat of the brain blazing with thoughts that govern, the white heat of the heart blazing with emotions that make such thoughts seem cold. She had never known either. Was she incapable of knowing them? Could she imagine them till there was physical heat in her body if she was incapable of knowing them? Suzanne and the two Arabs were distant shadows to her when that first moon-ray touched their feet. The passion of the night began to burn her, and she thought she would like to take her soul and hold it out to the white flame."
"She looked and listened till she saw a grander procession troop by, garlanded with mystery and triumph: War as a shape with woman's eyes: Night, without poppies, leading the stars and moon and all the vigorous dreams that must come true: Love of woman that cannot be set aside, but will govern the world from Eden to the abyss into which the nations fall to the outstretched hands of God: Death as Life's leader, with a staff from which sprang blossoms red as the western sky: Savage Fecundity that crushes all barren things into the silent dust: and then the Desert."
"Genius, under whatever form, shows to the world at moments the face of Aphrodite."
"Sad things had no meaning here and grave things no place. For the blood was full of sunbeams dancing to a lilt of Apollo. "
"When she came to the long road that skirted the desert she met the breeze of dawn that blows out of the east across the flats, and drank in its celestial purity. Between the palms, far away towards Sidi-Zerzour, above the long indigo line of the Sahara, there rose a curve of deep red gold. The sun was coming up to take possession of his waiting world. She longed to ride out to meet him, to give him a passionate welcome in the sand, and the opening words of the Egyptian "Adoration of the Sun by the Perfect Souls" came to her lips: "Hommage a Toi. Dieu Soleil. Seigneur du Ciel, Roi sur la Terre! Lion du Soir! Grande Ame divine, vivante a toujours."
Anteoni and Domini (spot the fateful phrase they used in Bella Donna):
"The Coran says: 'The fate of every man have We bound about his neck.' May yours be as serene, as beautiful, as a string of pearls."
"But I have never cared to wear pearls," she answered.
"No? What are your stones?"
"Rubies."
"Blood! No others?"
"Sapphires."
"The sky at night."
"And opals."
"Fires gleaming across the white of moonlit dunes. Do you remember?"
"I remember."
"The air was warm as in a hothouse, but light and faintly impregnated with perfume shed surely by the mystical garments of night as she glided on with Domini towards the desert."
And this is one of the bits where Hichens knows to an almost Anaïs level about female passion: "She loved Androvsky. Everything in her loved him; all that she had been, all that she was, all that she could ever be loved him; that which was physical in her, that which was spiritual, the brain, the heart, the soul, body and flame burning within it-all that made her the wonder that is woman, loved him. She was love for Androvsky. It seemed to her that she was nothing else, had never been anything else. The past years were nothing [...]. There was no room in her for anything but love of Androvsky. At this moment even her love of God seemed to have been expelled from her. [...] For her there was a universe with but one figure in it-Androvsky. She was unconscious of herself except as love for him. She was unconscious of any Creative Power to whom she owed the fact that he was there to be loved by her. She was passion, and he was that to which passion flowed."
And there's a bit where Domini is so happy she doesn't want to sleep (oddly, I experienced this twice during the time I was reading the book, so it was an interesting coincidence, considering how rarely that happens to me): "It was late in the night. Midnight had sounded yet she did not go to bed. She feared to sleep, to lose the consciousness of her joy of the glory which had come into her life. She was a miser of the golden hours of this black and howling night. To sleep would be to be robbed. A splendid avarice in her rebelled against the thought of sleep."
Domini and Androvsky:
"When you touched me that day it was as if you were giving me the world and the stars. It frightened me to receive so much. I felt as if I had no place to put my gift in."
"Did your heart seem so small?" she said.
"You make everything I have and am seem small-and yet great. What does it mean?"
"That you are great, as I am, because we love. No one is small who loves. No one is poor, no one is bad, who loves. Love burns up evil. It's the angel that destroys."
"He spoke as if he were jealous even of her thought of God, as if he did not understand that it was the very intensity of her love for him that made her, even in the midst of the passion of the body, connect their love of each other with God's love of them. In her heart this overpowering human love which, in the garden, when first she realised it fully, had seemed to leave no room in her for love of God, now in the moment when it was close to absolute satisfaction seemed almost to be one with her love of God. Perhaps no man could understand how, in a good woman, the two streams of the human love which implies the intense desire of the flesh, and the mystical love which is absolutely purged of that desire, can flow the one into the other and mingle their waters. She tried to think that, and then she ceased to try. Everything was forgotten as his arms held her fast in the night, everything except this great force of human love which was like iron, and yet soft about her, which was giving and wanting, which was concentrated upon her to the exclusion of all else, plunging the universe in darkness and setting her in light."
"He laid his lips upon hers in a desperate caress that almost suffocated her. Then he took his lips away from her lips and kissed her throat, holding her head back against his shoulder. She shut her eyes. He was indeed teaching her to forget. Even the memory of the day in the garden when she heard the church bell chime and the sound of Larbi's flute went from her. She remembered nothing any more. The past was lost or laid in sleep by the spell of sensation. Her nature galloped like an Arab horse across the sands towards the sun, towards the fire that sheds warmth afar but that devours all that draws near to it. At that moment she connected Androvsky with the tremendous fires eternally blazing in the sun. She had a desire that he should hurt her in the passionate intensity of his love for her. Her nature, which till now had been ever ready to spring into hostility at an accidental touch, which had shrunk instinctively from physical contact with other human beings, melted, was utterly transformed. She felt that she was now the opposite of all that she had been-more woman than any other woman who had ever lived. What had been an almost cold strength in her went to increase the completeness of this yielding to one stronger than herself. What had seemed boyish and almost hard in her died away utterly under the embrace of this fierce manhood."
This bit is probably a good example of how a text can include... oh, racism, sexism and ablism and whatnot that's not PC within itself, but still be so fucking beautiful and alluring that it has to be judged by its power to enchant rather than anything else:
"Domini and Androvsky rode towards Amara at a foot's pace, looking towards its distant towers. A quivering silence lay around them, yet already they seemed to hear the cries of the voices of a great multitude, to be aware of the movement of thronging crowds of men. This was the first Sahara city they had drawn near to, and their minds were full of memories of the stories of Batouch, told to them by the camp fire at night in the uninhabited places which, till now, had been their home: stories of the wealthy date merchants who trafficked here and dwelt in Oriental palaces, poor in aspect as seen from the dark and narrow streets, or zgags, in which they were situated, but within full of the splendours of Eastern luxury; of the Jew moneylenders who lived apart in their own quarter, rapacious as wolves, hoarding their gains, and practising the rites of their ancient and-according to the Arabs-detestable religion; of the marabouts, or sacred men, revered by the Mohammedans, who rode on white horses through the public ways, followed by adoring fanatics who sought to touch their garments and amulets, and demanded importunately miraculous blessings at their hands-the hedgehog's foot to protect their women in the peril of childbirth; the scroll, covered with verses of the Koran and enclosed in a sheaf of leather, that banishes ill dreams at night and stays the uncertain feet of the sleep-walker; the camel's skull that brings fruit to the palm trees; the red coral that stops the flow of blood from a knife-wound-of the dancing-girls glittering in an armour of golden pieces, their heads tied with purple and red and yellow handkerchiefs of silk, crowned with great bars of solid gold and tufted with ostrich feathers; of the dwarfs and jugglers who by night perform in the marketplace, contending for custom with the sorceresses who tell the fates from shells gathered by mirage seas; with the snake-charmers-who are immune from the poison of serpents and the acrobats who come from far-off Persia and Arabia to spread their carpets in the shadow of the Agha's dwelling and delight the eyes of negro and Kabyle, of Soudanese and Touareg with their feats of strength; of the haschish smokers who, assembled by night in an underground house whose ceiling and walls were black as ebony, gave themselves up to day-dreams of shifting glory, in which the things of earth and the joys and passions of men reappeared, but transformed by the magic influence of the drug, made monstrous or fairylike, intensified or turned to voluptuous languors, through which the Ouled Nail floated like a syren, promising ecstasies unknown even in Baghdad, where the pale Circassian lifts her lustrous eyes, in which the palms were heavy with dates of solid gold, and the streams were gliding silver."
"To the sad a great vision of human life brings sadness because they read into the hearts of others their own misery. But to the happy such a vision brings exultation, for everywhere they find dancing reflections of their own joy."
I can't even remember if this is Androvsky or Domini, but I've felt this thanks to a certain someone:
"It is as if I was not quite human before, and my love for you had made me completely human, had done something to me that even-even my love for God had not been able to do."
And the new Anteoni she meets later on in the book:
"My fate has come to pass. Do you not care to know what it is?"
"Yes, do tell me."
She spoke earnestly. She felt a change in him, a great change which as yet she did not understand fully. It was as if he had been a man in doubt and was now a man no longer in doubt, as if he had arrived at some goal and was more at peace with himself than he had been.
"I have become a Mohammedan," he said simply.
"A Mohammedan!"
She repeated the words as a person repeats words in surprise, but her voice did not sound surprised.
"You wonder?" he asked.
After a moment she answered:
"No. I never thought of such a thing, but I am not surprised. Now you have told me it seems to explain you, much that I noticed in you, wondered about in you."
"She looked at him steadily, but without curiosity.
"I feel that you are happy now."
"Yes, I am happy. The world I used to know, my world and yours, would laugh at me, would say that I was crazy, that it was a whim, that I wished for a new sensation. Simply it had to be. For years I have been tending towards it-who knows why? Who knows what obscure influences have been at work in me, whether there is not perhaps far back, some faint strain of Arab blood mingled with the Sicilian blood in my veins? I cannot understand why. What I can understand is that at last I have fulfilled my destiny! After years of unrest I am suddenly and completely at peace. It is a magical sensation. I have been wandering all my life and have come upon the open door of my home."
He spoke very quietly, but she heard the joy in his voice.
"I remember you saying, 'I like to see men praying in the desert.'"
"Yes. When I looked at them I was longing to be one of them. For years from my garden wall I watched them with a passion of envy, with bitterness, almost with hatred sometimes. They had something I had not, something that set them above me, something that made their lives plain through any complication, and that gave to death a meaning like the meaning at the close of a great story that is going to have a sequel. They had faith. And it was difficult not to hate them. But now I am one of them. I can pray in the desert."
"That was why you left Beni-Mora."
"Yes. I had long been wishing to become a Mohammedan. I came here to be with the marabout, to enter more fully into certain questions, to see if I had any lingering doubts."
"And you have none?"
"None."
"The light silence that floated airily away into the vast distances that breathed out the spirit of a pale eternity."
"Suddenly she felt again the oppression of spirit she had been momentarily conscious of in the afternoon. It was like a load descending upon her, and, almost instantly, communicated itself to her body. She was conscious of a sensation of unusual weariness, uneasiness, even dread, then again of an intensity of life that startled her. This intensity remained, grew in her. It was as if the principle of life, like a fluid, were being poured into her out of the vials of God, as if the little cup that was all she had were too small to contain the precious liquid. That seemed to her to be the cause of the pain of which she was conscious. She was being given more than she felt herself capable of possessing."
And last, some of the stuff Androvsky cites as his reasons for running out of the monastery:
"I compared union with God, such as I thought I had known, with that other union spoken of by my guest-union with the human being one loves. I set the two unions as it were in comparison. Night after night I did this. Night after night I told over the joys of union with God-joys which I dared to think I had known-and the joys of union with a loved human being. On the one side I thought of the drawing near to God in prayer, of the sensation of approach that comes with earnest prayer, of the feeling that ears are listening to you, that the great heart is loving you, the great heart that loves all living things, that you are being absolutely understood, that all you cannot say is comprehended, and all you say is received as something precious. I recalled the joy, the exaltation, that I had known when I prayed. That was union with God. In such union I had sometimes felt that the world, with all that it contained of wickedness, suffering and death, was utterly devoid of power to sadden or alarm the humblest human being who was able to draw near to God."
"Of this human love I thought at night, putting it in comparison with the love God's creature can have for God. And my sense of loneliness increased, and I felt as if I had always been lonely. Does this seem strange to you? In the love of God was calm, peace, rest, a lying down of the soul in the Almighty arms. In the other love described to me was restlessness, agitation, torture, the soul spinning like an atom driven by winds, the heart devoured as by a disease, a cancer. On the one hand was a beautiful trust, on the other a ceaseless agony of doubt and terror. And yet I came to feel as if the one were unreal in comparison with the other, as if in the one were a loneliness, in the other fierce companionship. I thought of the Almighty arms, Domini, and of the arms of a woman, and-Domini, I longed to have known, if only once, the pressure of a woman's arms about my neck, about my breast, the touch of a woman's hand upon my heart."
Anyway, that's just *half* of all the stuff I copypasted into my Notes while reading the book on my phone. Seriously beautiful and profound stuff, and now you can probably see why I want to go back to bathe in all of it? And I also want Domini/me to marry Anteoni, but defs the book version and not the movie version (sorry, Baz). Reading this was a spiritual experience, even if I can't say it brought me any revelations as such--more like the wonderful feeling of someone else experiencing all this beautiful, Romantic depth of feeling I can myself get about the world and things. Hichens gets it (and the sense of him getting women is wayyyy stronger in this one than it was in BD, too). Or at least he "got" it when he was still on morphine or whatever (he wrote a novel about morphine addiction, so I'm counting this as evidence of him having been off his tits when he wrote this book. And I don't count it against him, TBH, considering how beautiful the end result was. Waah! Now I just want more!