Editor’s note: During the month of ‘Ala’ a handful of writers collaborate to share one work for each day of the Fast.
The Beginning Purge
A grand fire fills me on the first day of the Fast: the fire of hunger and of the beginning purge. The headache comes, too. The headache comes and it razes me to the ground. But now my soil lives, once again; the flames sweep through me, any hope of a structured thought is gone, and the old brush and weeds are burnt away in the fire. Now my spirit-soil bestirs itself and is ready to act. Soil acts by pushing up the new.
*
The next day: I’m a few mouthfuls into my sunset quiche and already I miss the burnt-out feeling in my stomach and my chest. But ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says that we don’t fast for the sake of feeling weak—we fast to purify our souls. I feel close to death, today; perhaps it’s not that, perhaps I feel closer to the spirit world.
*
I find a photo of me with three friends. The photo was taken in Santiago, just now, in September; but already this is a past that’s slipping into myth. These people; I actually knew these amazing people. What right do I have to know them? The future often seems to be a time with a past from which it’s been severed. One day I may lose these friends; one day, I may lose myself, or the world may lose us all. But the old legends will live in this photo and for me it’ll be true. The Fast is a time of raw wires and open veins.
*
My tongue tastes the car fumes—more readily than on those long other days when there is no fast. There’s nothing in my mouth to distract from the taint of the world; no coffee aftertaste, no toothpaste, nothing. All the world’s taint is dancing in the air like belly dancers at the wrong end of a Marrakech souk. I try to wipe my tongue on the roof of my mouth—this doesn’t help. All this is a reminder. We see more during the Fast; we see the impurities, we try to spot our own, while in the trap of those long other months we might’ve just seen a donut.
*
Today is more workaday; no big headaches, no show-stopper emotions, no parables about air pollution. But my mind is wandering. I’ve lost myself online—from looking for a family link between the choreographer George Faison and the actor Donald Faison (there’s none) to stumbling across Rodrigo Alves. Let me tell you about Alves. He’s Brazilian, he lives in London, I live in London, and he’s had fifty plastic surgery procedures. Eight nose jobs alone. Six-pack implants. Lip inflations. All of it and more. He’s called the human Ken Doll. Two morning show presenters are interviewing him, in this clip, and in the shuffle of their looks I spot the second they ask themselves how their lives brought them to this moment. Alves explains that his grandparents left him assets—giving him the freedom to dedicate himself to “perfecting myself, physically.” He adds that “physically” with care, after a comma even in his speech, a deliberate point of emphasis; perhaps he felt the need to pin himself to his version of perfect. Who’d sleep with a human Ken Doll? How do you look for the soul of a man who insists on wearing neon-blue contacts over his eyes? And I spin around within myself, on that question of perfection, thinking of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. We’re asked, during the Fast, to move away from our physical selves; and now I’m faced with a man for whom there is nothing but the physical self. I feel so far away. He’s in London, so am I; but I feel far away, I hardly believe his choices can exist. How can his ideas break open and take root? And then I see it: the Fast is also a time to see the world as an alien place. A xenomorph is punching through from our insides, our lower selves; now it’s out, now it’s everywhere, it’s destroying us all. And it’s us. I guess that’s why the first Alien is so riveting and enduring: it’s because we know the truth. Alien isn’t a story about space monsters; it’s about our own hearts. Man is “is at the last degree of darkness, and at the beginning of light”—and all of us live in that dawn-land between the end and the beginning. None of us is home. Nowhere is home, not under these rules; only in this moment can we make a home, around us, in our loves, in our acts, in the too-short days of the Fast.
– Saleem Vaillancourt