Peripheral Visions

and sweat and anger were gone. Barkev said afterward that he had felt the temperature had gone down ten degrees, his pulse slowed. Years later, when Vanni went on a whale-watch sail on a little boat full of pushy, impatient people, she described the way their fractiousness simply disappeared as soon as they saw and heard the whales, and Barkev compared those moments with the first time he walked in virgin forest in Mindanao, just before the loggers arrived.
    The next day when I came to the hotel to pick the monks up, I found that although they had agreed to allow an audiotape to be made the night before, for “archival purposes,” instead of a video, they were indeed being expelled from the country and their contract canceled. We had only a few hours before their flight, but they were unperturbed and still determined to come with me to meet the Sufi teacher, Dr. Nurbakhsh.
    Sufis are the mystics of Islam, the seekers of religious experience rather than the punctilious observance of rules, the lovers of paradox and play. The tension in which they live with orthodoxy replicates itself in many traditions, where a few go beyond or beneath the belief of the many, rejecting, reinterpreting, and seeking, often subject to persecution. I had once asked Dr. Nurbakhsh if he could teach me to be a Sufi, and he had responded that although a Christian could become a Sufi, he himself could not guide a Christian to Sufism because he only knew how to guide people through—and by implication beyond—Islam.
    Sufis use stories, humor, and poetry in their teaching, so I had invited a friend whose Persian was better and more literary than my own to come and translate. A religious dialogue took place between the Sufi teacher and the Tibetan abbot, sitting on Persian carpets and sipping tea, with the monks around them in a circle. The Sufi was small and wiry, with a dramatic mustache, flashing eyes, and staccato movements—an imp, a maker of divine mischief. The monks were big and serene and smooth muscled. They sat cross-legged, leaning forward, following each speaker carefully. First the abbot spoke, with measured courtesy, in Tibetan. Then the first translator translated into English. Then the second translator translated the English into Persian. Then the Sufi answered, sparks jumping. Back the translations went, the eyes of the monks going from one to the other as if they were watching a volleyball game.
    “What do you do here?” asked the abbot. Translator followed translator.
    “We try to become nothing,” said the Sufi.
    “Is that the nothingness which is death?” said the abbot.
    “The wave rises and falls and loses its separateness in the sea.” Back and forth.
    After scarcely a dozen exchanges, Nurbakhsh quoted a line of poetry, translated as “the fire of love did not burn so brightly in the beginning, but was fanned by those who passed by.”
    The abbot reflected for long moments. Then he said, “We have that too. We call it boddhisattva.”
    He looked at his watch and rose, satisfied. All the monks rose, gathering their robes, thanks were said, and I walked out and stood with them as they boarded their bus. There in a two-day period I had examples of total noncomprehension between cultures and of recognition that transcended style and place and language. As the bus drove away, I stood on the street corner, waving good-bye to that small group with whom I had no word in common, and I discovered that tears were running down my cheeks.
    The singing of whales has become for many people a paradigmatic experience of the sacred, an encounter with another species living in a totally different medium, suddenly known as kin rather than as stranger. The moment of recognition is a moment of self-knowledge as well. This is what I imagine happening to the first Christians after the execution of Jesus: bewildered and bereaved, their beloved teacher gone, they suddenly began to recognize him in the faces of strangers and in the very bread they ate. The Gospel stories do not tell us that in those days they looked at the sky and the grass as well, saying, Look, he is here, or that they recognized him in birds or insects. If they had, the history that followed might have been very different, but they were Jews, their visions of human interactions with the divine far removed from the insights of pantheism.
    St. John’s Gospel tells how Mary Magdalene went to the tomb on the second day after the crucifixion. Finding it open and