1.19.6
When the Bag-man heard this, he decided that behind the words was a sly dog, so he exerted himself to save the Fāriyāq from the hands of the arrogant,308 thinking it best to send him to an island known as the Island of Scoundrels,309 believing it would make a safe haven for him. The Faryāq thus embarked on a small ship going to Alexandria, but before they had gone far, the sea rose and threw the ship about, and our friend became so dizzy he had to stick to his bunk, where he set to complaining of the dolors of the sea and to lamenting, as follows:
T
HE
F
ARYĀQ
’
S
L
AMENT AND
P
LAINT
1.19.7
“Alas for my traveling and alack for my travail! Why do I endure this painful distress to no avail? What good this bargain when this mighty affliction is all it earns? What tempted me to take on the traders when such low meddling could bring me no returns? I was born into this world and lived there many a year before, without giving a thought to the squabbles of every dolt and boor. Why did I enter these straits and get embroiled in these sterile debates? Why should the shouting matches engaged in by people west and east, with their corrupt thinking and low characters, concern me in the least? Ah how I miss the pen, however hard over its nib-notch I’ve toiled and even if the page onto which it spits its ink with fly shit’s soiled! Ah how I miss the donkey that brayed and kicked — who will bring me back that beast? He may be better off than me these days — he may be living a life of ease, while I, today, am cut off from all I once held dear. Who will bring me back the inn and brethren — each one a gracious and companionable peer? All I had to do then was sing, warble, and quaff—would that I’d gone along with all the rest and worshipped the golden calf!”310 (I seek refuge with God — our friend has blasphemed!). “Not every second has to be given over to wrangling and trying to grab your opponent by the collar. The metropolitan gave me sound advice when he said the senses deceive mighty and meek, stupid and wise, ignoramus and scholar. He knows the truth but says something different, fearing all who are ‘ignoble and, beside that, basely born,’311 for nothing pleases the ignorant more than to distract and suborn. Did he not tell me, ‘You cannot renew the old, or straighten what is bent?’ True, the senses deceive and alike in this are the murderer and the man of mercy, the vile and the benevolent.”
1.19.8
After pausing for a moment to marshal examples of the preceding, he resumed, “When an ugly, misshapen (shawhāʾ) woman looks at her face in the mirror, she says, ‘I may be ugly and misshapen to some but to others I am handsome,’ which is why the author of the Qāmūs says, ‘Shawhāʾ means both “a woman who frowns” and “a beautiful woman”; a word with two opposite meanings.’ When a man with a big nose looks at that crag on his face, he says, ‘It may well be that some good-looking women will desire it and see in it no crookedness or curve.’ Painters portray our ugly overlords, kings, queens, and any others on whom fortune has smiled as though they were comely and they, in their years of spinster- and bachelorhood, see themselves exactly as the painters have portrayed them. We see the sun as though it had risen, when according to the scientists it hasn’t yet done so, and we see a stick in water as though it were crooked, though ‘there is no therein no crookedness.’312 A mirage shows a person as though double and certain colors appear in two different forms. Magicians make observers think they are walking on water or going through fire without being burned. To a person in a ship plowing along opposite houses and property, the part of the land closest to him appears to be moving and mobile, when it is unmoving and fixed. A person who sits at a window opposite another at the same level sees the latter as though it were higher than his own. Maybe, then, the Bag-man’s tears were not for his goods but for some other cause, for I hear that the players in theaters weep and laugh at will. Maybe weeping is one of those arts that the Bag-men are instructed in when young. What benefit to me is the saddlebag now? I call on it, and it abandons me? I love it, and it hates me? I pick it up, and it spurns me?”
1.19.9
When he started in on this foolishness — which the Bag-men regard as blasphemy, the Market-men as glorification of the Lord, and those in between as generated by fear (for to this day people can agree only to disagree) — the ship gave him a violent shove, such as the Bag-men would consider to be the Lord’s revenge and the Market-men entirely incidental, and he began yelling, “Forgive me, Market Boss! By your beard, which is at the barber’s, save me! Bag! Goods! Price list! Traders! Undercapitalized parasites! You who weave the goods and you who dye them, you who warp and you who weft them, you who hem and you who embroider them, you who ornament and you who stripe them, you who darn and you who stitch them, you who sew and you who edge them, you who baste and you who unroll them, you who fold and you who crease them,(1) you who wrap and you who sew them edge to edge, catch me, by your lives, or I am done for!” This cry had barely left his lips before the ship gave a list to one side that sent his little head rolling like a watermelon, so he started yelling and calling for help, saying, “I’ll never cry goods for sale again! If this is what’s in store for us at the start of the road, where will it all lead?” Then he fainted and started raving, saying, “Sh…! Sh…!” which made a passenger who overheard him repeating it again and again think he must be complaining that there was one of “the two impure things” in his bed.313 Finding nothing, though, he said to himself, “He must be raving with pain” and left him.