There is a swordsmith in a valley in eastern Afghanistan. When there is no war, he forges steel plows, and he shoes horses, but he is most known for his singing. People come from all over to listen to him, from the forests of the giant walnut trees, from Qataghan and Badakshan, from the snowbound Hindu Kush, from Khanabad and Kunat, from Herat and Paghman. Mostly they come to hear one song about the far valley of paradise. This particular song has a haunting lilt and the ability to make those who hear feel that they are in that place, the paradisal valley. Someone always asks when he finishes, Is that a real place? It is as real as real can be, is always his answer. Have you been there? Not in the ordinary way of traveling. The singer loves Aisha, a young woman in the valley. But she doubts that there is such a place as the one he sings of, and so does his rival for her love, Hasan, a swordsman of great strength and agility. He has full confidence that he will eventually win Aisha. He makes fun of the swordsmith-singer whenever he can. One day the villagers are sitting inside the blessed quiet that happens after that song. Hasan says, Why don’t you follow the blue haze that rises there from the mountains of Sangan, and actually go to the place you sing about? I feel it would not be right. Well, that is a convenient feeling. It keeps you from being revealed as a fraud and a sentimental dreamer. I propose a test to decide several things at once. You love Aisha, but she does not believe in your valley. You two could never be married in such a discord of trust. The swordsmith replies, You expect me then to set out for the valley and return with proof of its existence? Yes! call out Hasan and the crowd together. I will make this trip then, but will Aisha promise to marry me if I return successfully? I will, says Aisha quietly. He collects dried mulberries and scraps of bread in a sack and starts on the journey. His way is always up. He climbs until he comes to a sheer wall blocking the way. He scales that, and there is another, another, five walls in all. On the other side of the last wall he finds himself in a valley like his own. People come out of their houses to welcome him. It is so weirdly strange, this experience of the swordsmith-singer. Months later he walks back into the valley he started out from, an old man limping to his hut. Word spreads that he has returned. Hasan is spokesman for the crowd that comes. He calls the singer to the window. They gasp at how old he has become. Did you find the valley? I did. What was it like? He is quiet for a while in the weariness and confusion, in the difficulty of saying where he went, where he is now, and what has happened. I climbed until it seemed like no human habitation could be so high. But there was, a valley identical to this one. And the people there are not only like us, they are us. Hasan, Aisha, myself, you, you, everyone is there in his or her original form. We are the shadowy copies. Everyone turns and walks away, convinced that the singer has gone mad in his solitary search. Aisha marries Hasan. The singer rapidly grows old and dies. The people who heard the story as he told it also soon grow old. They lose interest in their lives. They feel some huge event is about to occur, one they have no control over. Vital energy drains away. Once in a thousand years such a secret is revealed to someone like the singer-swordsmith. But no one yet has quite been able to take in the truth that we are two selves, this one and one more real that lives in the valley a certain song makes us long for. That we are that being as well as this more familiar one, who is dubious, confused, reckless, and sad, whose sadness is a little solved when we hear the song that makes us remember essence. A friend says, There is another world, and this is it. That the two valleys are one living being cannot be said in language. That we already are the perfected one cannot be spoken of. But it can be felt inside, as the moment itself, and as the whole outdoors, the whole-around-us, that veiny animule. That is the heart, where we take our walks.
“Song of the Swordsmith” is part of a longer poem, “Central Asian Sufis and the Nature of the Heart,” which appears in Coleman Barks’s Scrapwood Man (Maypop Books). © 2007 by Coleman Barks.
— Ed.
