The orange avian creature on the cover of 'The Pod' is not some oversight, that bird is a hoopoe and very important in the process of concocting my own piece of fiction. The hoopoe is the winged leader of the 'Mantiq Au Tayr'. This is the lasting creation of Attar, a sufi writer that roamed this Earth 800 years ago. The legends say that he was a pharmacist in his day and was well loved by the people of his birth city, Nishapur, in the Khorsan Valley of Persia. They say that he stopped to say hello to anyone he would pass and that the children of Nishapur would stop whatever they were doing and run to him if they caught sight of his face. He was the son of a father that enjoyed the teachings of Sufism and his father passed his love of Sufism onto his son. They say Attar left his home in Nishapur and traveled around the world to learn more about this belief system. When he returned home, he had the teaching in his heart and he poured them out into his masterpiece. Today that masterpiece is more widely know as 'The Conference Of The Birds'.
They say Attar was so well loved in his town that the people protected his identity even upon the threat of death. In 1220 AD, Attar was killed at the age of 78 by the invading Mongols. The Mongols had been looking for the famed man that led the heart of his people and after some time, a small group of soldiers found him after his identity was mistakenly said aloud. The soldiers were taking him back to their leaders when they crossed a wealthy woman who offered to buy Attar's freedom with a small sack of silver. Attar looked at the soldiers and asked them not to take such a small amount for him, that he was worth far more than this sack of silver. The soldiers listened to Attar's advice and continued their return trip to the command post. As they continued their journey home, they crossed paths with the most wealthy man in the region. The man had a highly valuable sack of gold on him and the man offered the entire amount to free Attar. Attar looked at the soldiers and told them that he was worth much much more than this so they continued on. Then as they approached their home base a poor man passed them with a donkey and sitting on the donkey was a large stack of firewood he had been collecting all day. The poor man offered his entire stack of firewood to the Mongolian soldiers and Attar said to them, take this man's offer, it is a very good price for the freedom of an old man. Enraged by his advice and being enraged that they lost out on silver and gold and were now sitting here negotiating his life for firewood, they killed him. This was Attar, I'm sure you can see why he was so widely valued by the common people and abhorred by rulers.
Not all of them, but this creation still lasts to this day. Over the years there have been many many creations of art that Attar inspired. One of my favorites is a carefully crafted art piece by Habiballah that hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It's a watercolor painting of the 'Birds' gathering that uses both actual gold and silver in the piece. Attar has inspired countless pieces of art around the world, but he's also inspired musicians and writers as well. The well known Persian poet, Rumi, was influenced by Attar, in fact, Attar's name appears in some verses. So, I would be remiss if I failed to tell you that his book has inspired me as well. 'The Conference Of The Birds' is told using couplets where each bird speaks or responds in couplet format. It has been 800 years and still Attar's words linger in our world today, but it is hardly the oldest epic to stand the test of time. 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey' punch holes into our society and creep in regularly. The television producers of 'Game of Thrones' mentioned Odysseus in the interviews following a recent episode. They mentioned how Arya Stark had been gone from Winterfell for so long that the guards patrolling the gates did not recognize her just like King Odysseus was not recognized after returning from his long journey. Poetry has a unique way of standing the test of time and an influence of Attar's used poetry as well as anyone in the history of writing.
"The Concourse of the Birds" by Hibiballah of Sava
(created somewhere between 1590-1610)
Attar wrote in couplet format where each couplet was twenty-two syllables and the eleventh and twenty-second syllable always rhymed. Amongst Attar's influences was a very well known man whose poetry and scientific discoveries are still prevalent today. The influential man was Omar Khayyam and both Attar and Khayyam were born in the same Persian city, Nishapur. While Attar wrote the beautiful and rhythmic couplets Khayyam wrote powerful quatrains that were meant to be read as single entities. I'll share my favorite one that Fitzgerald translated from Persian to English:
Why ponder the future to forsee,
and jade thy mind to perplexity
Cast off thy cares, leave Allah's plans to him-
He formed them all without consulting thee.
With so few words Khayyam could speak to the deepest thoughts in your mind and challenge all the layers of ideas you had previously stacked upon them. So what I have done is mix the two ideas of these poetic giants and pulled in elements of Homer's and Melville's to structure 'The Pod'. My whales speak to each other in quatrains that have eleven syllable lines where the last syllable in the line rhymes with next in an AABB rhyming format. I've been told that the rhythm this creates somewhat of a feel for the ebb and flow of the oceans.
In 'The Conference of the Birds' the birds come together in search of a leader. They were going to vote for the noble hoopoe to lead them, but instead the hoopoe tells them that the true leader would be the mythical firebird that we call the Phoenix. I knew my whales in 'The Pod' were going to need their Phoenix, but I wanted them to search for a religious character that almost every culture shares, so I have them searching for the Green Man instead of the mythical Phoenix. So, to find this Phoenix or 'Simorgh' in Persian, the birds have to travel through seven valleys.
First) The Valley of the Quest
Second) The Valley of Love
Third) The Valley of Insight Into Mystery
Fourth) The Valley of Detachment
Fifth) The Valley of Unity
Sixth) The Valley of Bewilderment
Seventh) The Valley of Poverty and Nothingness
The book is fantastic and certainly gets you thinking, but half the book is convincing the birds to go on this journey another huge section of it is about what to expect on the journey, then the journey itself lasts 3 or 4 pages after all the preparation. It works and I would suggest that you read it, but it's not a style westerners are used to absorbing. So in that sense, I felt like there was room for me to write my story and use Melville's whales, Homer's sense of facing trials, Khayyam's four line structure and Attar's valleys. However, whales cannot cross valleys so I instead I had my whales travel through the incredibly deep oceanic trenches. If you've seen my map from an earlier blog post, you might know that they cross seven trenches: The Aleutian Trench, the Arctic Trench, Kuril, Marianna, the Tonga Trench, The Java and the Indian Trench. All of the trenches are real places in our oceans except for the Arctic Trench. Due to the shape of the Earth, the spin of her and other scientific mumbo jumbo that could definitively explain it to you, the ocean surrounding the North Pole is pretty shallow and lacks a true trench. Perhaps it's all Saint Nick's doings but this is all to tell you that this journey was very very carefully plotted. Every scientific finding on these whales and places was put into the story if I could find a way to include it. Each species has characteristics that I tried to humanize so that you could relate to them. Each location has some element of reality tied to it even though the story seems so impossible. The whales face hunger, ice, changing arctic temperatures, hoards that want to kill them, tsunamis, a typhoon, a maze of coral and enemies that want to stop them at every turn. It's scientific, it's exciting, it has unexpected plot twists and it's philosophical. And I owe it all to my influences and to all of you who inspired me to write it because your future self has agreed to read it and I knew that while I was writing it for you. And maybe, just maybe one day, far into the future, a young lady or young man will pick up 'The Pod' and be just as inspired as I was when I read all these masterpieces. And maybe, if I've done my job right, that young lady or young man will say that 'The Pod' was my masterpiece. Maybe they tell people that this one work of art amongst all the pieces I've created, is the only work of art that could define me just like I believe that 'The Conference Of The Birds' defines Farid uddin Attar.
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