Date: Sat, 5 Apr 1997 10:05:10 -0500 (EST) From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com> Subject: Re: Chance On the other hand, there is the chance of the "Arabian Nights"; for example, the story of the third one-eyed dervish within the Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies. The protagonist, Ajib, shoots down the brass horseman and then swims to an island, where he secretely watches a group of people escorting a young boy into an underground chamber. After they leave, he descends into the chamber and makes the boy's acquaintance. The boy tells Ajib that when he was born, his father was told: "Your son will live fifteen years, after which there will be a conjunction of stars, and if he can escape it, he will live. For there stands in the salty sea a mountain called the magnetic mountain, on top of which stands a brass horseman. Fifty days after this horseman falls from the horse, your son will die, and his killer will be the man who will have thrown the the horseman off the horse, a man named Ajib, son of King Khasib." So the boy reaches his fifteenth birthday and then his father hears the news that the brass horseman has indeed been thrown into the sea. So he builds the undergroung house and deposits his son in it to stay there until the fifty days have passed and the danger is over. When Ajib hears the boy's story, he says to himself: "I am the man who has overthrown the brass horseman, and I am Ajib, son of King Khasib, but by God, I will never kill him". So he stays with the boy in the underground house, and of course winds up, by accident, killing him. This is a mind-boggling story. The prophesy does not declare the boy's death as an inescapable fate: there will be a conjuction of stars, and the boy may or may not escape its influence. The father, in order supposedly to hide the boy, lovingly deposits him within swimming distance from the magnetic mountain, where -- given that his murderer is to be the man who unhorses the brass horseman -- he is in fact _more_ likely to be killed. Then Ajib seems to completely disregard the strikingness of the coincidence that it is he, of all people, who winds up finding the boy in the underground house, and instead of running away he just stays with him. One might say: they all act as if in a dream. They submit themselves to the seeming innocence of sleep, and in this "innocence" become complicitous of the boy's death. There is in the story a Nietzschen element of raising the stakes, but the agon seems inverted: it is almost as if chance here was being cornered -- challenged to try and work, against increased odds, so as to save the boy rather than kill him. -m
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