The Nights

By Lau Guzmán

“Many people are apt to think of real life on the one side, that means toothache, headache, traveling and so on, and then you have on the other side, you have imaginary life and fancy and that means the arts. But I don’t think that that distinction holds water. I think that everything is a part of life.” - Jorge Luis Borges, The Last Interview p. 35, Melville House, 2013.

Since my classes went remote on March 10, 2020, I’ve been living in a virtual simulacrum for 373 days and nights— not that I’m counting. Of those days and nights, I spent 167 of them in a months-long strict quarantine, as per the regulations of Bogotá, the hometown I am forever leaving and coming back to. That year, the air outside was toxic, filled with thousands of airborne enemies, so I spent my time cloistered in my parents’ attic. Up there, the air was stifling, and no matter how many windows I opened, I could not clear the haze of my unresolved grief and unanswered questions.

I wanted to leave, but I didn’t. Even if I had been allowed out, I had nowhere to go, and nothing to do once I had gone nowhere. And so, without the markers of days, nights, weeks, and months, time collapsed and expanded and condensed in strange ways, lending the memory of those days the sheen of unreality. Mostly, it felt like I was living in the 1001 Nights.

When the Nights opens, the queen has cheated on the king, so, naturally, the king kills the queen and vows to marry a new woman every night. Scheherazade, being a very shrewd kind of person, offers to marry the king and then tricks him into listening to a story to pass the night before he kills her in the morning. However, Scheherazade tells a story so compelling that when daybreak ends her story before she’s done telling it, the king agrees to let her live one more night to finish the story. And so, if Scheherazade is to live for one more day, she must trick the king into listening to her story for one more night.

I’ve always thought that Scheherazade deserved a happy ending, but unfortunately, there is no ending— happy or otherwise— for Scheherazade at the end of the Nights because her story never ends. Even though the number 1001 suggests an exact figure in English, “a thousand and one” turned out to be an Arabic idiom for an uncountable amount capacious enough to add one more. Incidentally, the idiom is also a paradox, because the uncountable number suggests completeness, but the addition of one more night suggests incompleteness, as if infinity were incomplete without the extra night.

And, to add mystery to the mysterious text, there is a superstition that whoever reads the book all the way to the 1001st night will die. I suspect this superstition is rooted in the history of the text. The earliest mention of the 1001 Nights is in the 10th century when Abū al-Faraj Muḥammad Ibn al-Nadīm writes in the encyclopedia Kitāb al-Fihrist that Abū ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbdūs al-Jahshiyārī began a collection of the Nights, but died when only 480 were added to the collection. Unfortunately, the 10th-century collection has been lost and the earliest collection is from the fourteenth or fifteenth-century Syrian manuscript in Arabic that contains approximately 280 stories.

Subsequent Western translations have added to the number of stories in the Syrian Manuscript. In the 18th century, the French translator Antoine Galland added seven stories to the Nights. To these, the English translator Sir Richard Francis Burton published a version that included 468 stories in the 19th century. In the 20th century, the Argentinian writer and literary critic Jorge Luis Borges added his own interpretation to the Nights.

According to Borges, on the non-existent 602nd night, Scheherazade tells the king the story from the first night word for word until she gets to the 1023rd night and starts over, endlessly, creating frame stories within the frame story, like when one uses a mirror to reflect a mirror and accidentally creates infinity.

The pandemic has been one such mirror for me. These days, when I attend everything via webcam and interact with the world via the tactile looking-glass of my screen, it feels like my sense of the world has been reduced to sight and hearing. Unable to touch anything outside my house, hanging out with friends without proprioception, eating without tasting, existing through the internet has blurred the lines between what I consider real and what I consider impossible.

Like in the Nights where the implausible happens as a matter of course, those days, the very news were implausible. They were fickle things, only existing for as long as the Djinns of the algorithm suffered them to live. And in this state, slowly, the dogmatic claims of the then-president that all news was fake news seemed less and less like the unfounded tweets of an irresponsible demagogue and more and more like Delphic utterances.

However, unlike the then-president, I did not blame the newsmakers for the news of those days. I thought they were doing their best, but not much can be done to boost credibility when assigned to report incredible news. Plagues, hosts of insects, fires, death, unrest, hurricanes; the front page of the Times was beginning to look more and more like the Nights.

I was clearly burned out and experiencing what is often called ‘media fatigue.’ I knew I couldn’t handle the news cycle. I knew I needed to get off my news feed, but I didn’t. I knew I was a consumer of the events that shaped that year, and if the consumer refuses to consume, who is she? Perhaps she will create a paradox that will erase her existence.

To avoid my fragmentation, I conjured dates, as if the return to ‘normal’ can be dated and will not be postponed endlessly. I had believed ‘normal’ would return two weeks after spring break, then during the summer, then during the fall, then the spring. Now, I’m expected to believe that normal will return on May Day, as if hope was infinitely plastic. Perhaps it is, but the skeptic in me tells me there will always be one more wave— if not of the current plague, or the next one— for as long as money acts as the gatekeeper of healthcare.

Instead, I consumed endlessly; books, news, articles, opinions, movies, baked goods, television series, coffee, tea, anything to keep me from gazing for too long at the mirrored video feed of myself on my screen and realize that I was slowly adjusting to my life as a simulacra. Mostly, I consumed novels. I borrowed books from the digital library and read them on my phone, like I did the news. After all, the distinction between fiction and nonfiction was starting to seem trivial.

Seeking comfort from simpler times, I re-read the Riordan books, The Sorcerer's Stone, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Great Gatsby. And when bored with the familiar, I plowed through the Crazy Rich Asians series, City of Girls, Normal People, A Man Called Ove, El Coronel No Tiene Quien Le Escriba, Pachinko, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, The Mountains Sing, The Bluest Eye, The Parable of the Sower, Sanctuary, La Casa de los Espíritus, Song of Solomon, The Testaments, among many, many others I can’t remember.

By escaping into fictions that made no pretense of reality, I borrowed the experience of others, momentarily forgetting my own. And fortunately, there is no shortage of stories to read. The 1001 ones and zeros of the internet make it possible to access more stories than I could ever hope to consume in a lifetime, to temporarily be anyone but the reflection of who I was when I lived in person.

What I found in all these stories were plots, character arcs, redemption narratives, arguments, counter-arguments; and, somehow, importantly, I found myself, embedding within me the rather quixotic notion that there is a story to be made through the act of narration.

Maybe after May Day, the strange contraction of time will end, and ‘normal’ will return, eliminating the necessity of narration. Or, maybe there’s just no story at all, and the thought that people are anything like fictional characters is a charming hoax. Maybe I will die presently consumed by my own self-delusion. Maybe like living in the Nights, living through the pandemic is a story with a beginning and no end. Maybe there isn’t anything behind tomorrow night except another story inserted within the one I told tonight. Maybe the whole point is just to live another day to tell another story to pass another night.

Or, maybe, just maybe, I’m adding my tale to the tradition of the Nights. In the same way that Borges believed Scheherazade is still telling the king tales, starting at the 602nd night, maybe I will read this essay to myself someday. Maybe I will hear it from the beginning and remember those days and nights, and remember the writing of the memory of those days and nights, that reminds me of that memory, and so on, ceaselessly, like when one uses a mirror to reflect a mirror and accidentally creates infinity.

EMBODIEDApril 2, 2021Comment