the tallest twin buildings on earth, completed in 1998 (just after the Asian financial crisis) to house the state oil and gas company and its subsidiaries, were beacons of prosperity, with the rest of the office space leased to Boeing, IBM, Microsoft, and other Fortune 500 companies, and all six levels of the shopping mall crowded on a weekday afternoon. The Petronas Group, one of the so-called “New Seven Sisters” of the petroleum industry (along with companies in Russia, Iran, China, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil), played a huge role in the national economy—exploring, refining, and distributing oil and natural gas; operating pipelines; manufacturing petrochemicals; trading and shipping and developing real estate—and was helping to integrate it into the international economy. It was fueling globalization, that is, as relentlessly as the financial service firms located in the World Trade Center in New York City had once moved capital around the globe.
Two pairs of towers celebrating economic might, two visions of modernity: a double-sided mirror of the international order.
What could not be seen in this mirror before 9/11, what remained in shadow, was the backlash against the forces of dislocation unleashed by globalization—the uncertainty that, for example, contributed to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Nor were those who walked the corridors of power and money (not to mention the majority of intellectuals and writers) always alert to the potentially violent link between dispossession and fervency: acts of terror in the service of the divine have shaped civilization sometimes as decisively as the ethical codes and ideals of justice vouchsafed to prophets. For faith and terror are inextricably linked, inspiring some to create works of genius and some to take up arms. It was no accident that al-Qaeda operatives finalized plans for their attack on the World Trade Center in the shadow of the Petronas Twin Towers. If only the import of their summit had not eluded the intelligence community—and yet how often we fail to comprehend the meaning of something until it is too late.
Ibrahim lifted the plastic cover off a table displaying a selection of his sketchbooks, every page of which seemed to burst with ideas—figures in every conceivable pose, with notes scrawled in the margins: a microcosm of a world in flux, I decided, caught in the act of disappearing. Ibrahim said that he was always drawing, and from a side pocket of his combatstyle trousers he pulled out a sketchbook filled with pictures of the visitors to his exhibition, all of them, men and women, rendered in the nude.
“I naked them,” he said with a smile, “because I love the body.”
This seemed to me to be a good definition of any work of the spirit.
On the road to Kota Bharu, at the sight of a policeman flagging down a pickup truck, Eddin took pleasure in describing the ritual about to unfold: the policeman would sidle up to the truck, demand to see the driver’s license, and say, How to solve this?—the signal for a bribe. The amount was negotiable, like everything in this crazy country, my friend said, including the proscription on traditional ceremonies in Kelantan. It turned out that performances could be arranged for educational and research purposes, a tourist version of shadow puppetry was put on every week in Kota Bharu, and the authorities knew that ritual healings like main puteri took place in some of the remotest villages. What was not negotiable, said Eddin, nodding at the driver and the policeman across the road, was the fact that until a certain sum traded hands the journey would not continue.
How to solve this? This is a question constantly posed to individuals and nations; our answers, personal and collective, determine how posterity judges us. After 9/11, the American body politic answered the question in dramatic fashion, with the vice president declaring that the government would now work “on the dark side,” Congress granting the White House license to devise its war on terror with minimal oversight, the media and the public largely acquiescing to the administration’s violations of international treaties, infringements on civil liberties, and so on. Utilitarian arguments acquired the patina of grandeur, at least in the eyes of their defenders, and as ad hoc arrangements hardened into permanent structures the worst excesses of human behavior emerged.
How to solve this? Abu Ghraib was one answer.
Eddin sped up, but soon had to pull over to the side of the road—not to pay off a policeman but to change a flat tire. We worked in the withering heat to jack up the car, the melting tar sticking to the soles of our shoes, the lug nuts almost instantly becoming too hot to touch, and my shirt was soaked with sweat by the time we resumed our journey. My heart sank when I learned that we were some distance from the next town, where we could stop for tea, and the watery quality of the light on the long stretch of road that took us through paddy fields and rubber plantations made me thirstier yet.
“Water, water everywhere,” Eddin said. “Nor any drop to drink.”
It was not unusual for him to invoke The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to describe a situation. Coleridge’s tale of an ill-fated sea voyage was a touchstone for Eddin, and there was something in his manner that reminded me of how the Mariner buttonholes the Wedding-Guest to tell his story of sailing on a ship toward the South Pole, through mist and snow and ice, until the Albatross appears, bearing good luck, it seems. For the ice entrapping the ship splits apart, the helmsmen finds a passage through, and a south wind pushes them onward, with the Albatross following—to the delight of the crew—until the day that the Mariner inexplicably shoots it with his crossbow, setting in motion a tragedy he is condemned to “teach” to strangers like the Wedding-Guest.
His shipmates all agree that killing the bird was “a hellish thing,” since it brought a fair breeze. Yet when the breeze keeps blowing they convince themselves that the Albatross actually brought the fog and mist, and so they justify its sacrifice until the ship enters the Pacific, where at once it is becalmed, the sun parching every tongue, the water burning “like a witch’s oils,” death-fires dancing in the rigging at night. The sailors hang the Albatross around the Mariner’s neck to ward off its avenging spirit. Then a ghost ship arrives bearing a Spectre-Woman and her Death-mate to slay the crew, two hundred men in all. Only the Mariner is spared, and for a full week he lies on deck surrounded by the dead: a ghastly scene capped by the appearance of weirdly beautiful water-snakes coiling and swimming, leaving tracks like flashes of golden fire. “A spring of love gushed from my heart,” he tells the Wedding-Guest, “and I blessed them unaware”—the prayer that frees him of the yoke of the Albatross, which sinks “Like lead into the sea.”
Into a deep sleep he sinks, and when he is roused from a dream of buckets filling with dew his thirst is slaked by rain, the wind rises, and his dead shipmates return to their positions, a ghostly crew to sail him home. Now he falls into a trance, in which he hears two voices discussing the penance that he has done—and his obligation to do more. He prays to wake, the ship enters the harbor, and at the sight of crimson shadows rising from the depths he turns to see the deck littered once more with corpses, atop each of which is a man in white: a band of seraphs signaling to the land. A boat approaches with three figures onboard, splitting the bay, and when the ship, like the Albatross, “went down like lead,” they fetch the Mariner from the water. His first words cause the Pilot to faint, and when he takes up the oars the Pilot’s boy concludes that he is the Devil. Only the praying Hermit possesses the wits to ask: “What manner of man art thou?”
The Mariner recounts the story of his crime and punishment, the telling of which frees him momentarily from the agony that in the future will periodically overcome him, forcing him to travel from land to land until he chances upon someone like the Wedding-Guest, who “cannot choose but hear.” It is true that the Wedding-Guest’s reactions to his story are like unto what many feel before the sublime: indifference gives way to impatience and anger, then to fear and fascination and finally, perhaps, to gratitude. Who can bear to hear such an awful tale? Yet we yearn for its truth with the desire of the parched sailors who dream of slaking their thirst, which is why The Rime of the Ancient Mariner endures in the imagination, like Coleridge’s other dream work, Kubla Khan.
The
