“Collection of Auguries”: Stories by Annie Q. Syed–A Review

How does a writer stir the bubbling pot of collective memory? With associations, puzzles, and snatches of the remarkable intruding on the everyday.  With unexpected encounters, putting seers–the wise men and women around us who are usually overlooked–in her characters’ paths.  With signs and stories ‘carried on the wind.’  Annie Q. Syed brings all of these to her new book of stories, Collection of Auguries.  Reading these stories again and again gives me that “tip-of-the-tongue” sensation that some memory is about to surface.  And sometimes it does! The emotional tone of these stories is unmistakable, like a just-barely-forgotten dream that still leaves a trace of feeling.

Many of the stories in the first part of the book are about miscommunication, about  people sharing their stories, attempting to recover meaning, and either talking past each other or misunderstanding because of their inability to adopt another’s frame of reference.  The opening piece is called simply “Stories,” and concerns two friends discussing the enigma of a man who stands dressed all in white, his face painted white too, who stands in the market square–“furnishing a silent benediction for bystanders.”  One names him X.Y.Z.–the unknown variable–and they consider the implications of all the conversations he must overhear from casual passersby:

“But Franz,” Tariro spoke quietly, for the first time considering X.Y.Z as a man who could possibly hear them and not just a breathing statue for staring at, “People don’t really talk to him –they talk to each other while near him.”

So?!” Franz exclaimed.

“Well, so…”

“You know people don’t really listen to one another. They only hear half. Half what they want and half what is being said,” said Franz matter-of-factly.  Then continued, “So X.Y.Z. absorbs in the half that is not heard but needs to be.”

In her stories, Annie Q. Syed tries to show us that other half, the part of the story that went unheard. “Love: Making Music” is a vignette of a couple misunderstanding what drives the other, in either love or music.  “Illumination” tells about a widower and a café waitress who try to connect through grief and remembrance but fail to find the words to bring them closer.  In “Memory of Silence” a father’s memory of a fishing trip with his own father spurs him to speak to his son rather than be silent.  The motivations that lead someone to create art recur as a theme in “Inspiratus,” “Ferraris & Lamborghinis,” and “While Sleeping.” The last of these offers the healing thought that “art brings to light what we forget is beautiful.”

The centerpiece of the collection for me is a set of four stories under the heading “DaVinci Dreams.” Each story begins with a quote extracted from “Prophecies,” part of The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, and then the story itself illustrates the intrusion of some uncanny but very real phenomenon. These are not fantasy stories, but slices of reality permeated by prophetic signs–“auguries”–that the participants must grapple with and interpret for themselves, to be able to move on with their lives. “Phantom Heart” and “Quietus” both deal with memory disorders and how a medical mystery can turn into a spiritual longing and quest.  In “Phantom Heart” a man no longer recognizes his wife as his wife, believing she has been replaced by an impostor (a condition called Capgras delusion); this story is especially poignant because it considers not only the man’s affliction but the fallout for his wife and for his daughter, who is trying to be a caregiver of both parents.  Merrick, the protagonist in “Quietus,” suffers from the delusion that “he” is not actually alive but “just an observer.”  He and his friend Frank go in search of a neurobiologist who can save Merrick from losing his sanity by explaining to him this strange dissociation from himself.  Between these two stories are two others, “Cradle of Stories” and “Time Blur,” united by their characters’ encounters with unlikely seer figures: a filling station attendant named Noor Baba (in “Cradle”), and an aged neighbor named Sarband (in “Time Blur”). Although not about explicit memory disorders, these stories still concern tricks of memory and the slipperiness of truth and self-awareness.  Fog is a powerful symbol in “Cradle of Stories,” standing for unconscious memories that rise, like fog lifting, but still may be hard to make out clearly. As Noor Baba says, “All stories come from the fog. You can’t do much though, if you are afraid of what you can’t see.”

Equally compelling, and perhaps even a little more mysterious, are the set of “Thais” stories that round out this collection. These are richly suggestive with Egyptian mythology, which seems to intersect with Thais’ lives (apparently she’s had quite a few of them!), throwing her back on ancient stories if she is to recover meaning and see “the dark matter within and without.” In “The Bridge” a seer figure named Gus leads Thais to stand on the bridge and peer down into the water, which both reveals and hides what she needs to see, as the fog did in “Cradle of Stories.” In “Maat” the Thais of ancient Egypt is a 12-year-old girl with recurring dreams of a tree and the goddess Maat. When these stories appeared in earlier form on Annie Q. Syed’s website, I posted a piece comparing “Maat” to “Phantom Heart,” exploring what I felt to be a deep symbolic connection between them.

In a “Note to the Reader,” the author shares her own love of storytelling and her reverence for stories as a pervasive binding force among people: “We are all storytellers.  We live our lives in and through stories as though this imaginary axis on which our planet rotates is made up of stories.” Some of the best stories seem to resurface in human consciousness again and again, appearing in a variety of forms, only to be lost again, leaving us puzzled about ourselves–a fundamental dis-ease.  Therefore, she says, “Anyone who feels compelled must write because people forget!” I’m so glad she did write these fascinating stories, and I hope to read many more from her.

Collection of Auguries by Annie Q. Syed is available at amazon.com and from McNally Jackson Books.

For more of her writings on many subjects, visit her blog “Trial of Words” at annieqsyed.com.

Related post:

• “Phantom Heart” and “Maat” by Annie Q Syed: Two Stories with a Deep Connection

“Phantom Heart” and “Maat” by Annie Q Syed: Two Stories with a Deep Connection

A few nights ago I read Phantom Heart and Maat, two stories from the luminous writings of Annie Q Syed. They are both part of her short-story series Tuesday’s Torrent, and I happened to read these two together. At the time, they seemed very different kinds of stories–which they are. “Maat” springs from the rich, fertile soil of Egyptian myth and psychological archetype, with many possible nuances of symbolism and meaning. It tells the story of a 12-year-old girl, named Thais, who dreams about a tree and a woman named Maat. Her recurring dreams set in motion a longing to understand this powerful intimation of the great lineage of mothers. Hovering just beyond view in the lives of the girl, her mother, and the Bedouin prophetess she meets is the Egyptian Goddess Maat, or Ma’at, who was said to participate in the weighing of souls after death. By contrast, “Phantom Heart” feels like a very “modern” story, a medical case-study almost, from the annals of neuropsychology (its manifestations are described very well). A man begins to think that his wife, Petka, is not his wife, that she has been replaced by an impostor. His daughter, Litiya, must try to make sense of his father’s delusional dissociation and her mother’s pain. Even with this clinical impetus, rather than the mythic underpinnings brought to the foreground in “Maat,” “Phantom Heart” likewise feels full of nuance and possibilities of meaning just out of view.

The next morning, it became very clear to me that these stories, rather disparate in content and tone, are actually deeply united by the heart as the seat of memory. For Litiya’s father, in “Phantom Heart,” his disorder of the memory is also a disorder of the heart–it “weighs less” without access to the true memory of his wife united to his experience of her now. He is suffering from a phantom heart. Yet, remarkably, this missing part of his heart is still beating in his dreams. That revelation took my breath away, as it did for Litiya in the story. I am still working out all the implications for Petka’s identity, and her faith in her husband’s love, however fragmented in memory. Even the boats that set the scene for the story suggest an Egyptian connection to me. In this life, Litiya’s father takes two boats out, but refuses to take with him the wife he no longer recognizes. Yet reading the story gives me the strong presentiment that their boats will cross together again in the afterlife.

If I were going to map out the underlying connection with words and arrows, then I shouldn’t be surprised that these two stories seem to inform each other–at least for me. The connections might go something like this:

(Phantom Heart) neuropsychology<–>psychology<—>dreams-<–>psyche<—>soul<—>psyche<–>archetype and myth<–>dreams<–>prophecy (Maat)

I was so excited by these connections, I wanted to learn more about Maat, so I pulled out the volume in the University of Chicago’s Mythologies series on Greek and Eyptian Mythologies.I found two very relevant articles by Philippe Derchaine, professor at the University of Cologne: “Egyptian Anthropology” (trans. by David White) and “Egyptian Rituals” (trans. by Gerald Honigsblum). What I got from these articles was how closely Maat is linked with memory, as the seat or sustainer of memory, and with creative imagination.

Another aspect of personality is the heart, which men as well as gods possess. According to the stela of Shabaka, which preserves a curious cosmogony, the heart is the seat of creative power–the imagination, in a sense–which becomes reality throught the mediation of language, as language transforms thought into word and thus into action. But the heart also functions as memory and in this way serves to characterize the person even in the hereafter, where hearts are weighed against Ma’at, the notion of social and cosmic order in which an equilibrium must be maintained. The heart thus occupies a central place in the conception of the judgment of the dead … But the heart does not play the role of conscience in this confrontations, as has sometimes been said, but simply plays the role of a witness, which assures us that its function was indeed that of being the seat of memory. (Philippe Derchain, “Egyptian Anthropology,” p. 221)

Not only in the judgment of the dead, but in this life, the offering of Ma’at was an essential part of Egyptian ritual and a duty of the king in his partnership to sustain the Gods, as they sustained Creation.

The culmination of the ritual was logically the offering of the symbol of Ma’at, the guarantor of both cosmic and social order in her capacity as guiding force of the universe. The ritual was usually performed deep inside the shrine as the final act of the celebrant in his progress toward the meeting with the god…. For if Ma’at were abstractly guaranteed by the gods whom she nourished, it was necessary for men, led by their king, to act daily in accordance with this order, each one himself and according to his rank, so that the gods could draw from this well-ordered reality the energy needed to sustain the process of creation. (Philippe Derchain, “Egyptian Rituals,” p. 231)

On p. 232 of this article there is an illustration of the offering of Ma’at on a relief from the temple of King Sethi I at Abydos. Photos of this tomb by Robert J Rothenflug show this detail very well

Derchain remarks in a footnote that “there are numerous examples of the offering of Ma’at since the New Empire” (p. 234). Here is another example: The photo below by Su Bayfield shows the king offering Ma’at and two vases to Osiris in a double scene at the Tomb of Seti II.

To me all of this information about the meaning and associations of Maat is very suggestive for dreams, identity, and the story of a life.  As with all of Annie Syed’s stories (all the ones I’ve read so far!), there is so much there, so much that could be developed even further. Yet they do stand alone as short, energetic frissons to shake up the mind, emotions, and senses out of their usual ruts. I love that about them. Webster’s defines frisson as a shudder that is disquieting but thrilling. Yes, indeed.

I am still meditating on one crucial aspect of  “Maat”–the connection to trees. Like many people, I have long felt a deep connection to trees, a friendship even. I was fascinated, therefore, to find that the friendship of young girls with trees figures in several important variants I had encountered in my research on the story of Cinderella. In “The Cat Cinderella” by Giambattista Basile (Il Pentamerone, 1634-36), the unscrupulous heroine, named Zezolla, kills her stepmother in order to install her seemingly friendly governess as her father’s new wife. The woman double-crosses Zezolla, however, and sends her to work in the kitchen in typical Cinderella fashion. Zezolla enlists help from a wish-fulfilling fairy housed in a date tree. In the Brothers’ Grimm’s “Aschenputtel” (1812), the much-abused Ash-girl, like Zezolla, found consolation from nature: She planted a hazel tree, watered it with her tears, and then caught a gold and silver dress thrown down by a white bird perched on one of its branches. She snuck off to the king’s festival and lost a shoe there. In each case, the tree stands in as a substitute for the girl’s natural mother or benevolent mother-figure. One other mother figure I’ll mention comes from “Yeh-Hsien,” the founding Ur-story of the Cinderella character from 9th-century China. Yeh-hsien (or Sheh Hsien) was a chief’s daughter, but she suffered under an evil stepmother who made her wear rags and do heavy housework. Worst of all, she killed the girl’s beloved pet fish, but Yeh-hsien buried the bones and learned that she could wish upon them. She obtained gold dresses from the bones’ magic, enabling her to attend a festival, where she lost one shoe. (The fact that tiny feet were prized in ancient China has continued to reverberate in the Cinderella tale ever since.) Both the trees and the buried bones are creative maternal symbols–bestowing gifts for the daughter and helping her realize her dreams. The deep roots of these stories also make me shudder: with the love of mothers and daughters, their connection in spirit beyond death, and the ways that help seems to arise when it looks impossible.

As a mother goddess, Maat is rooted in these things, as she embodies order and guards Truth through memory. As Annie Syed says so beautifully in her story, “Maat was a direct descendant of those who drank the sap of the most ancient tree.” Thais’s beautiful (but disturbing to her) dream of a tree and a woman named Maat seems to spring from the same source as these fairytale and mythic elements, but blended into a new whole. Thais has many mother figures around her: her mother who is present, the mother who wisely waits; the Bedouin woman who sees the future; and Maat, the mother who comes in her dreams, rooted in the wholeness of a Tree. This is echoed in the words of the Bedouin seer to Thais, to sustain her for the time of mourning ahead: “All those who carry any part of the Truth are mothers. You will find your mother again, even if she doesn’t look like how you remember her now.” Yet, Thais wasn’t ready for this and had to “spend years forgetting only to later search to remember.” Maat would be her guardian during all that time, holding her memories, keeping her heart whole for her, even when it felt like a phantom of itself. Similarly, in “Phantom Heart,” there is the hope that Litiya’s father, who cannot recognize his wife and connect her to his memories, will find his wife again in the future, and find himself restored.As seer of the future, the Bedouin woman is also Maat. Derchaine discusses how Maat is related to a God, Sia,  knowledge: her knowledge of Truth relates both memory of the past to creative imagination, reaching toward the future:

If we now attempt to find a connection between these two functions of the heart–creative imagination and memory–I believe it will suffice to recall that the heart is the seat of the god Sia, whose name simply means “knowledge.” Knowledge of the past is obviously “memory,” while the creative imagination is necessarily related to the future. (“Egyptian Anthropology,” p. 221, with a footnote crediting G. Wirz’s thesis for his discussion of the function of memory)

The story of Thais’s dream in “Maat” seems to me to resemble a true account of a flash of mystical experience, the kind that sets one on a path of searching and remembering for the duration of one’s life. Linda Johnson describes her own experience along these lines in her books on yoga and meditation, and says her whole life has been an attempt to understand, if possible to reproduce and sustain, that unexpected appearance of the Divine in her life. Sometimes dreams, or prophetic dreams, are the portal–to insight, to memory, to creativity. Both of these stories I have discussed, perhaps with some speculative license, ring with authenticity and show how determinedly such a dream wants to be understood and mined for usable meaning. It begs to transform the dreamer.

References

Annie Q Syed, “Phantom Heart” (Tuesday’s Torrent, No. 1 in the series Da Vinci’s Dreams), Feb. 22, 2011. http://annieqsyed.com/2011/02/phantom-heart/

Annie Q Syed, “Maat” (Tuesday’s Torrent No. 12), Sept. 21, 2010. http://annieqsyed.com/2010/09/maat/

Philippe Derchain, “Egyptian Anthropology” (trans. by David White), pp. 219-224, in Yves Bonnefoy, Ed., Greek and Egyptian Mythologies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Philippe Derchain, “Egyptian Rituals” (trans. by Gerald Honigsblum), pp. 230-235, in Yves Bonnefoy, Ed., Greek and Egyptian Mythologies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

For Cinderella, see my chapter in The Fictional 100 and:

Alan Dundes (Ed.), Cinderella: A Folklore Casebook (New York: Garland, 1982).

Neil Philip, The Cinderella Story (London: Penguin, 1989). [Includes a version of “Yeh-Hsien,” trans. by Arthur Waley]