The Dream

Stephen Sangirardi    The Dream           Bard715@aol.com
 
   The other night I had a vivid and disturbing dream. I was the muezzin in a Moslem country, atop the tower of a minaret, giving notice to those below that it was time to worship. But I was ignored. I cried, I moaned, I bellowed, I cajoled, I practically executed a dithyramb, and seriously considered boxing the Jesuit in an Islamic land. All to no avail. Those below gave me a passing glance, as though vaguely reminded of something they were meant to do, before ignoring me and walking on, and I could not understand the direction of their feet. Again I cried, moaned, bellowed, cajoled, and this time did perform my dithyramb with the passion of a dervish. I balanced myself along the edge of the minaret while I chanted, perhaps reminding a Buddhist or two in the crowd of the many-limbed Shiva. Still no one headed for the mosque, but opted instead for the marketing, haggling, gaming, hashish-smoking, pimping, and whoring there in the dust below.
   It is embarrassing, even Kafkaesque, to be the muezzin no one listens to. One is apt to get a complex and accept his pay with remorse. I threatened to pour down the wrath of Allah, but no seemed to care. I found myself, curiously enough, speaking in English, and apparently that was the language of the land because the signs and billboards along the street and in the square reeked of late-nineties American commercial lingo: words like ‘rebate’ and ‘Bud Light’ and ‘Drive a Ford Escort Today’ and even a ‘Nobody Beats the Wiz’ display. (We all know how dreams are.) I simply knew I was being understood; that was also obvious from the scornful glance that now and then came my way. A costermonger even threw a rotten apple at me, and were it not for the lack of strength in his arm, my face would have been smeared with fruit.
   I decided to try another approach. As you can well imagine, a muezzin must possess an array of rhetorical devices for the job. So I launched into ‘anadiplosis,’ where the speaker ends a sentence with a key word and then begins his next sentence with the same word.  
   For example, I shouted as loudly as I could,
   “One cannot escape the wrath of Allah. Allah is not mocked!” But no one was moved by that tactic. ‘Allusion’ didn’t work either: “What is to be done with this perverse generation? Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do…”
   A donkey brayed, and a couple of pigs grunted. Nothing more. Then an old man fainted, but I was rather sure that it was because of the blazing sun, and not my words. I must admit that I felt somewhat vindicated when the old man passed out and no one rushed to help him, as the hum of conversation resumed and the desert ships sailed calmly on. At least I wasn’t the only person being ignored. Soon, though, this octogenarian was being trampled by the crowd who neither watched nor cared where they were going to and from the bazaar. O dizzying world! I suddenly recalled the words of my mentor—the exalted muezzin Al-Hallaj—who once said that from a certain viewpoint there was nothing to laugh at under the sun. At any given moment, someone in the world was undergoing acute pain. For whatever reason, I did not repeat this apothegm for all to hear perhaps because they, the words, were too close to my heart, and I had been at the job too long.
   A job, ah yes, men must work. ‘Transumption’ was my next tactic: “Give me the Koran, or give me death!” Another blank. At my wit’s end, I pulled from my bag the last rhetorical trick—’aposiopesis,’ you know, when you suddenly cut off a thought as though you were unwilling or incapable of completing it:
   “If you do not heed my call…”
   With that, I put both hands over my heart to enhance my appeal, but I could have saved my breath and the effort. Those below would not pray. They would not even go through the motions of polished lip service. They wanted no part of the mosque. They were more concerned with the fakir and the peddler, and those merchants who did wonders for the flesh. Even when I abandoned all rhetoric and spiced up my plea with the famous Tarzan cry, I felt like a man inside a vacuum or a bell-jar which reminded me of my friend Giovanni who was a ringer in the tower very far from here. I was at a loss. Nothing could rally these people, nothing could stifle the unabashed yawns that a muezzin hates seeing as much as any teacher does. Oh yes, this is quite true. Ask any muezzin worth his weight which he would prefer, a piece of rotten fruit flung in his direction, or a deadly yawn in response to his call, and he will always choose the former. It is the lesser of two insults, the Scylla over Charybdis. In fact, just a single yawn out of a thousand enthralled faces will dismay the conscientious muezzin. The exalted Al-Hallaj once sought out the sole person who did not heed the call to prayer during my mentor’s illustrious career. After scurrying through the town square to find this dissident, the Exalted One discovered that the man was both blind and deaf, but by a miraculous stroke my master happened to have his card in Braille, and faster than you could say Ali Baba the blind man was at prayer. And here I was enduring what now seemed like a thousand yawns among hoi polloi, even though I had acquired over the years a certain reputation as a worthy crier myself.
   I grew angrier by the minute. With their indifferent heads absorbed in secular coifs as they turned from my call, they needed no prodding to enter the big tent or to pluck the seraglio or to purchase the nostrums of the quack. Finally, I had my moment of inspiration and, believe me, these precious moments are different for every muezzin. I had become so furious that, short of boxing the said Jesuit, I urinated from the minaret upon the throng below, for the sine qua non of any crier is his ingenuity and determination. Yes, that is exactly what I did. Ah, I had found something new under the sun for as far as I gathered, no muezzin had ever performed such a feat before. I laughed loudly before turning serious again. I should also add, in passing, that my urine appropriately forked in two for a noticeable length of time, much like the Tigris/Euphrates River that the people of this region are very familiar with. I have written elsewhere about this Tigris/Euphrates phenomenon as it relates to micturition, and how and when this rift occurs. I mention it here only to let the reader know that my forking piss indicated divine intervention, like one of the plagues that Moses conveniently found proceeding from the tip of his staff. I had my own staff to work with, sort to speak, and it served me well as this unexpected flow riveted their eyes upon me. (It is difficult to say, however, if the distance between us allowed anyone on the ground to see the actual forking route I have just described.) Still, isn’t it strange how something like urine is easily recognized by a distracted people? The color, the smell, etc. has a peculiar, galvanizing effect upon us, especially when it is not our own…much like a foul-smelling fart that was described by the Exalted One as delightful to your own nostrils but disgusting to everyone else’s.
   Meanwhile, the crowd started yelling furiously and shaking their fists at me. They bared their teeth like piranhas eager to skeletonize. I could plainly hear what they had in mind. With a collective, ox-bow grimace, they had decided to climb the steep stairs of the minaret and castrate me for exposing myself upon holy height in broad daylight. Ha, what a whited sepulcher that was! Of all the hypocritical things—why, as far as these fakers were concerned, I might as well have been screaming in the middle of the Sahara desert or proving in some forest that old chestnut about the sound of a falling tree with no human ear to perceive the sound. It was only now that they had chosen to become outraged—O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often, etc.—simply because of the sprinkling I had provided them on a very hot day. In one sense, I suppose, they should have been grateful for the precipitation. Or maybe not. In any event, I wasn’t going to stick around to argue with them, for they had become a mob, and quite sure that Allah would have understood, I spontaneously made my hegira from the dream and dashed to the bathroom.
   As I did so, I understood the etiology of Noah’s Flood.