The Jinn and the Scientist

"Two friends were discussing a mutual acquaintance," said Swara when she came, after saying Basmalah and Salaam.

"'I don’t think the woman really antisocial,' said one.

'Nah,' said the other. 'She just despises humans.'"

Swara then went on, "Man uses the spoken or written word to express the meaning of what he wants to convey. His language is full of symbols, but he also often employs signs or images that are not strictly descriptive. Some are—according to Carl Jung—mere abbreviations or strings of initials, such as UN, UNICEF, or UNESCO; others are familiar trade marks, the names of patent medicines, badges, or insignia.

Although these are meaningless in themselves, they have acquired a recognizable meaning through common usage or deliberate intent. Such things are not symbols. They are signs, and they do no more than denote the objects to which they are attached.

What we call a symbol, according to Jung, is a term, a name, or even a picture that may be familiar in daily life, yet that possesses specific connotations in addition to its conventional and obvious meaning. It implies something vague, unknown, or hidden from us. Many Cretan monuments, for instance, are marked with the design of the double adze. This is an object that we know, but we do not know its symbolic implications.

A word or an image, according to Jung, is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. It has a wider 'unconscious' aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained. Nor can one hope to define or explain it. As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason.

Because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend. This is one reason why most of all religions employ symbolic language or images. Whereas in prose, something beautiful, or it is suppose that there is a beauty in it, is personified in a feminine form. Justice, for example, was actually something beautiful, so it was depicted as a goddess, Lady Justice, originated from Justitia, in Roman mythology, or Themis, the Greek goddess of justice. Kwan Im, as a symbol of affection, is depicted as a feminine form. Early Arabs, who loved poetry in their association, often referred to the noun 'al-Shams' (the sun) as femina.  Isn't Sunset and Sunrise beautiful? Earth, in Sanskrit, depicted as Prithvi, a goddes.  And we all know, all the beauty that exists on Earth. However, sometimes the use of symbols can be misleading."

"And one day," said Swara, "Frog took a visit to his friend's house, Toad. Toad was peeling off the sticker on the back of his car. And when he saw Frog coming, he rushed to close it. Frog called out, 'What are you doing Toad?'

'Nothing!' Toad replied, 'just peeling this sticker out of my car.'

'Let me see!' and without Toad noticing, Frog opened the cover, and the sticker that had been torn off, partially read, 'MADE IN CH'

'What is this Toad?' asked Frog. 'Nothing!' said Toad. 'I just want to rebrand my car.' Then he took another sticker, and hurriedly put it on. Frog watched, and a few moments later, he said, 'You installed it in a hurry Toad, look...!'

Toad looked at the sticker he had put on, and it read, 'MADE IN CHINDONESIA.'

'Ah never mind!' said Toad, 'do you know why I don't like to cook?'

'I don't know,' said Frog.

'Because it takes longer than eating it,' said Toad.

'It's your problem Toad,' Frog responded, 'today, everybody enjoys cooking. Even though it's enough just to see the process, it's still feeling good.'

A Few moments later, they were sitting at veranda. Frog said, 'Toad, would you like to hear a story?'

'Yes, I'd like to,' Toad responded.

Then Frog started his story,

'In a country where their founding-parents agreed to embrace democratic government system, its Head of the State, was busy. But it was surprising, because even though he looked busy, his whole work was messed up. Apparently, he was busy endorsing products that didn't sell well. His people was neglected. As a result, if you want to talk about prosperity, according to a ballad singer, you don't need to talk about it, 'because prosperity is only for Mr. So-and-so's dog.' The people have no choice but finding their own way, took care of themselves. Many people, from scientists to generals, were all unemployed. All the employment opportunies had been filled by people from far far away land. In politics, there were only two choices, to become the government's buzzer or the opposition——prison doors was always welcomed for the latter..

I observed, that there were three men, or rather, three kind of men, a scientist, a general and a statistician, was still confused with the choices. They'd like to explore the country, to find something more meaningful.

Let me tell you about the scientist. With his classic Harley, he drove, on and on, until he reached a town. He parked his bike at a little shop. He walked in, and saw the narrow walls were entirely hung with pots, pans, lamps, bottles, leather objects, old tools whose purpose was unguessable, chased daggers and hunting knives, shadow-puppets made of skin, perfume flasks, curling tongs. He poked about on a bench and found a bottle, a very dusty bottle amongst an apparently unsorted pile of new, or probably old things. It was a flask with a high neck, that fitted comfortably into the palms of her hands, and had a glass stopper like a miniature dome. The whole was dark, with a regular whirling pattern of white stripes moving round it.

‘What is this?’ he asked the shop owner, an old woman. She took the flask from him, and rubbed at the dust with a finger. ‘I’m not an expert in glass,’ she said. ‘It could be çesm-i bülbül. Or it could be fairly recent Venetian glass. 'çesm-i bülbül' means nightingale’s eye. There was a famous Turkish glass workshop at Incirköy-round about 1845, I think–made this famous Turkish glass, with this spiral pattern of opaque blue and white stripes, or red sometimes, I think. I don’t know why it is called eye of the nightingale. Perhaps nightingales have eyes that are transparent and opaque. In rural Turkey, they wre obsessed with nightingales. Their poetry is full of nightingales. Before pollution, before television, everyone came out and walked along the Bosphorus and in all the gardens, to hear the first nightingales of the year. It was very beautiful. Like the Japanese and the cherry blossom. A whole people, walking quietly in the spring weather, listening.’

'I must have this,' said the scientist. Then the nightingale’s-eye bottle was wrapped in scarlet tissue. He walked out from the store and gone with his Harley to find a motel.

At the hotel, he took a shower, then threw his body on the bed. However, a few moments later, he remembered the nightingale's bottle. He took it out of its wrappings—it was really very dusty, almost clay-encrusted—and carried it into the bathroom, where he turned on the mixer-tap in the basin, made the water warm, blood-heat, and held the bottle under the jet, turning it round and round. The glass became blue, threaded with opaque white canes, cobalt-blue, darkly bright, gleaming and wonderful. He turned it and turned it, rubbing the tenacious dust-spots with thumbs and fingers, and suddenly it gave a kind of warm leap in his hand, like a frog, like a still-beating heart in the hands of a surgeon. But the stopper, a faint glassy grinding, suddenly flew out of the neck of the flask and fell, tinkling but unbroken, into the basin. And out of the bottle in his hands came a swarming, an exhalation, a fast-moving dark stain which made a high-pitched buzzing sound and smelled of woodsmoke, of cinnamon, of sulphur, of something that might have been incense, of something that was not leather, but was? The dark cloud gathered and turned and flew in a great paisley or comma, out of the bathroom. I am seeing things, he thought, following, and found he could not follow, for the bathroom door was blocked by what he slowly made out to be an enormous foot, a foot with five toes as high as he was. 

The foot began to change shape. It was now the size of a large armchair. He came out and saw the djinn, who now took up half his large room, curled round on himself like a snake, with his huge head and shoulders pushing against the ceiling, his arms stretched round inside two walls, and his feet and body wound over his bed and trailing into the room. He seemed to be wearing a green silk tunic, not too clean, and not long enough, for he could see the complex heap of his private parts in the very centre of his rosy bed. Behind him was a great expanse of shimmering many-coloured feathers, peacock feathers, parrot feathers, feathers from birds of Paradise, which appeared to be part of a cloak that appeared to be part of him, but was not wings that sprouted in any conventional way from shoulder-blade or spine. His face was huge, oval, and completely hairless. He had huge bruised-green oval eyelids over eyes sea-green flecked with malachite. He had high cheekbones and an imperious hooked nose, and his mouth was wide and sculpted like Egyptian pharaohs’.

'I don't suppose you speak English.’ said he, 'Français? Deutsch? Español? Português? Latin?’ he hesitated. The jinn looked at him, 'I learn faster!' The Jinn was now curled on his bed, only one and a half times as large as he was. ‘I am beholden to you,’ said the jinn, ‘for this release. I am empowered, indeed required, to grant you three wishes on that account. If there is anything you desire.’

‘Are there limits,’ asked the scientist, ‘to what I may wish for?’ and he recalled Aladdin and the Wonder Lamp.

'There are laws of the praeternatural within which we work, all of us, which cannot be broken,' said the jinn. 'You may not, for instance, wish to have all your wishes granted in perpetuity. Three is three, a number of power. You may not wish for eternal life, for it is your nature to be mortal, as it is mine to be immortal.'

'And if I don't have a wish, what will happen to you?' asked the scientist. 'So I'm not completely free, I even have to go back into that cursed nightingale's bottle,' replied the jinn, hoping the scientist would proclaiming his wishes. 'But, why you have no wish? Could you describe it, for an instance, in a story?'

Well now, the scientist had no story. He was a scientist, right? All he knew were the real things. A story? He was not good enough. Then he thought and thought, and suddenly, something came up, without hesitated, he began a story,

'There was once a young sailor who had nothing but his courage and his bright eyes—but those were very bright—and the strength the gods gave him, which was sufficient.

He was not a good match for any girl in the village, for he was thought to be rash as well as poor, but the young girls liked to see him go by, you can believe, and they liked most particularly to see him dance, with his long, long legs and his clever feet and his laughing mouth.

And most of all one girl liked to see him, who was the miller’s daughter, beautiful and stately and proud, with three deep velvet ribbons to her skirt, who would by no means let him see that she liked to see him, but looked sideways with glimpy eyes, when he was not watching. And so did many another. It is always so. Some are looked at, and some may whistle for an admiring glance till the devil pounces on them, for so the holy spirit makes, crooked or straight, and naught to be done about it.

He came and went, the young man, for it was the long voyages he was drawn to, he went with the whales over the edge of the world and down to where the sea boils and the great fish move under it like drowned islands and the mermaids sing with their mirrors and their green scales and their winding hair, if tales are to be believed. He was first up the mast and sharpest with the harpoon but he made no money, for the profit was all the master’s, and so he came and went.

And when he came he sat in the square and told of what he had seen, and they all listened. And the miller’s daughter came, all clean and proud and proper, and he saw her listening at the edge and said he would bring her a silk ribbon from the East, if she liked. And she would not say if she liked, yes or no, but he saw that she would.

And he went again, and had the ribbon from a silk-merchant’s daughter in one of those countries where the women are golden with hair like black silk, but they like to see a man dance with long, long legs, and clever feet and a laughing mouth. And he told the silk-merchant’s daughter he would come again and brought back the ribbon, all laid up in a perfumed paper, and at the next village dance he gave it to the miller’s daughter and said, ‘Here is your ribbon.’

And her heart banged in her side, you may believe, but she mastered it, and asked coolly how much she was to pay him for it. It was a lovely ribbon, a rainbow-coloured silk ribbon, such as had never been seen in these parts.

And he was very angry at this insult to his gift, and said she must pay what it had cost her from whom he had it. And she said, ‘What was that?’ And he said, ‘Sleepless nights till I come again.’ And she said, ‘The price is too high.’ And he said, ‘The price is set, you must pay.’

And she paid, you may believe, for he saw how it was with her, and a man hurt in his pride will take what he may, and he took, for she had seen him dance, and she was all twisted and turned in her mind and herself by his pride and his dancing. Everything had a price, but bot at level of human dignity.'

'Wait!' said the jinn, 'I do not charge for all the wishes that, if you wish, I will grant. It's free!'

The scientist was silent, he then packed up and checked out of the motel, then spurred his Harley toward a creek. The jinn still continued to follow and kept asking about his wishes.

On the bank of the river, the scientist stopped his Harley and said, 'What if you grant all my wishes, jinn?

'Then I will be free as I will,' replied the jinn.

'Then what about me?'

'You've had what you want, but remember, nothing is mortal in men's life,' replied the jinn.

The scientist took a nightingale eye bottle out of his jacket pocket, opened the lid and said, 'You know jinn, that I am the one who doesn't believe the free shirt on Buy One Get One offer. Well, they are free, but they aren't free. Forgive me!' Instantly the jinn was surprised, 'No, don't!' and the jinn was sucked into the bottle. Instantly, the scientist closed the bottle, throwing it into the river, he said, 'Adios jinn! I will not trade my wishes for your promises,' then he raced his Harley, looking for something more meaningful.'

'Frog commented, 'Yeah, you may have a good life, but you achieved these by going through bad days. Everything you have or accomplished has a cost you have paid, or are paying, or will pay. Nothing is free.'

Then Frog said, 'Tomorrow, I'll tell you about the General.'"

"It's time to go,' said Swara, then she'd gone by chanting, 

Time stands still

Beauty in all she is

I will be brave

I will not let anything take away

What's standing in front of me

Every breath, every hour has come to this

One step closer *)

"And Allah knows best."

Citations & References:
- Carl Gustav Jung, Man and his Symbols, Anchor Press
- A.S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, Vintage
*) "A Thousand Years" written by Christina Perri & David Hodges

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