The Simorgh is a bird—a big bird, a tremendous bird. We met it once. I met it. But before getting ahead of myself, maybe I should back up a tad—or maybe a few tads.
See, as you may have heard, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. There was a Spirit-Bird that brooded in her nest atop the Tree of Life. That tree took root deep under the face of the waters. And God said, Let it be. With that Be, there was light: there were two lights. You see, there was a light as was clear and bright. There was a light as was dark, subtle.
With that Be, she dives into the waters singing a melancholy note. Our world was born.
Simorgh.
Our bird is enormous. She’s fierce, with the claws of a lion. She’s larger than a grown bear, with the neck of a camel and the strength to snatch an elephant off its feet. She’s pretty, with wings brighter than a peacock’s and the crown of the hoopoe. Her beak is as long as a spear. She nests alone and takes no mate. The Simorgh feeds on music and has seen the creation and destruction of the world ninety-two times over. Her beak has a hundred holes, like the keys of a flute. Her mouth has a thousand tongues, each with a song: the voices of men. She knows all the mysteries and sciences. One time, she flew around the globe, letting a feather drop over Sinkiang, and it’s from then that came the saying, “Seek wisdom, even if it takes you to China.” The feather is still there in a museum to this day.
Simorgh—she knows the memories of time, the broken promises of the future. She knows the deepest recess of every adult and every child’s heart.
And we met it once. I met her.
We were travelling in the rainforests of Sylhet, hunting local legends. People said that within the forest lay someone or something that would teach the arcane secrets of music to only the boldest.
After a week searching the forest, we met the bird. She met us, rather. We were fearful at first, but her beauty was too much for us to repel, so we let her near. She would come and coo friendly songs at night, to keep our spirits and hearts warm, to help us last through the nights. We soon recognized the intelligence of this marvelous bird, and knowing that we had found our object, we asked it to teach us the sciences and secrets of music.
She sang to us.
With her thousand tongues, she owned every voice. With her hundred keys, she reached every pitch. Now she began a timeless song. It’s frame was the cosmos, and embedded in it was everyone, everything. It was sometimes plaintive, sometimes joyful. It sang an odd harmony: the soft prattling of lovers, the raspy sobriety of a hermit’s chant; a suitor’s plaint, a scoundrel’s curse; a child’s bliss.
There was another marvel about the song, too. The very elements seemed to respond to the music: the wind, the clouds, the sun, the very scent on the breeze—all responded to the song of the Simorgh. So we listened.
One, two, three, days; one, two, three nights… We listened.
Then the Simorgh started to sing about other passions: stations hidden in the coffers of the human breast. Passions the heart had never before divulged to mind or ear. And then we began to worry. Her thousand tongues were tied; the hundred flute-notes got mixed up in a violent cacophony, and the elements responded. There is no way to describe it. It was like a gentle summer rain—God’s own mercy—whipped up to a hurricane. She beat her wings in a violent craze that overtook her, and unfathomable horrors leached out of our hearts.
We couldn’t bear it. What we heard in our souls was too much to suffer, so in our need to silence the song we torched the Simorgh. We killed her.
In those last minutes of the Simorgh’s life, she kept on singing as long as there were voices still in her. Her thrashing wings were uncontainable, and the fire spread through the whole forest.
But then, just like that, it was over.
The Simorgh collapsed. The fires in obeisance all snuffed out like a candle.
And it was over.
At first, we were relieved by the calm stillness that we had regained, and we celebrated for a week. But very soon we opened our eyes to a new truth.
The world had no more melody. The winds would blow, but empty winds: they would not howl—no, or even make the slightest whistle. The forest had no smells. We were unsettled with the eerie mood, so we got out of the place. We went back to the villages, but found the same there. Instruments had stopped playing, drums wouldn’t beat. We were scared, so we got out of there. We travelled the world, looking for deliverance from our curse, but there was nowhere to go. Fires offered us no warmth; frost had no cold bite. We had a need to feel something. Even agonizing pain, the feeling of heartache would have been preferred compared with that empty sense of dullness—we needed something to show us that we are alive in this world. We were scared, but how could we get out of there? What had we to do but go back? We returned to the Simorgh; there was nowhere else for us to go. We erected a shrine and devoted ourselves morning and evening to her memory. By then, all that was left of the once-majestic bird was a rotting carcass. But we could not even smell the putrid gasses of decomposition.
One day, a tiny snake came. No animal had before approached the body of the Simorgh. But this snake came, and she fed on the charred meat of the bird. And then…
…You know, you are what you eat. Strangest to see, the small serpent grew feathers, grew a beak, grew larger. And in front of us, we saw the metamorphic rebirth of the Simorgh.
The music came back.
My narrative of the Simorgh is inspired partially by a bird of Persian folklore of the same name, as well as by the Albatross of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Both the birds are entwined with the elements of nature—with both the bitter and the pleasant elements thereof. The killing of the Albatross lifted the mists, but also stopped the winds from blowing. Likewise parallels are evident in the Simorgh’s song. In both cases, In the birds, I read a dualistic reality of the temporal world: if experience of bitterness is killed, the ability to taste joy also fades away.
The Albatross bears a close and perhaps grotesque tie with the spiritual world, and this is seen clearly in the poem when the Mariner’s cross is replaced by an Albatross. Mervyn Peake illustrates this well, depicting the Albatross hanging from the Mariner’s neck with wings held out in a posture reminiscent of a crucifix. The Simorgh’s depiction here as being linked to the spiritual world needs no explanation, as is clear through the Genesis retelling. An examination of this passage at the beginning shows that the Simorgh is isthmic in nature, spanning the fissure between sky and earth. Neither of the birds are recognizable symbols of mainstream orthodoxy, yet they are far from being heterodox or demonic. My portrait in this story represents them as the imminent but arcane side of the spiritual world, or dark light.
Below is Mervyn Peake’s depiction of the Albatross as the Ancient Mariner’s burden:
