The king and the corpse: Tales of the soul's conquest of evil - When words don't fail - Brief Article

The Lady works in mysterious ways, and the morning after the tragedy in New York, I unexpectedly found on the bedside table my ancient, dog-eared copy of Heinrich Zimmer's The King and the Corpse: Tales of the Soul's Conquest of Evil. I accepted this odd gift of chance and let the book fall open, which, with uncanny prescience, it did to page two of the tale called "Abu Kasem's Slippers."

Briefly, Abu Kasem is a miser who attempts to rid himself of a tattered pair of old slippers. But miraculously, the more times he throws them away, the more they return to wreak havoc in his life. A dog finds the slippers in the garbage and carries them, dripping and stinking, back into the house. Fishermen find the slippers entangled in their nets, the slippers' exposed nails ripping the cords, and angrily throw them through Abu Kasem's window. A neighbor catches sight of Abu Kasem burying the slippers and, assuming there must be something valuable in the hole, denounces him to the Khalif for evading taxes. And so on.

Zimmer makes a gentle case for his interpretation--for him, "Abu Kasem's mortification is the natural consequence of being forced to drag around... something that he refused to relinquish at the proper time, a mask, an idea about himself, that should have been shed."

On that particular morning of horror my own interpretation focused instead on the huge energy channeled into maintaining the separation between the mirror identities of the night and the day--energy that, so long as the twin aspects of the forces of life and death are not brought into productive dialogue, continues to fester and poison the mind and body within which it circulates. And just as the individual, prevented from affirming and reconciling the complexities and incompatibilities of its own tangled identity, cannot achieve the self-recognition that must precede true healing, so our collective will is sapped by our national organism's need to refuse to publicly acknowledge its own immensely destructive alter ego.

Unless and until that happens--unless and until the invertebrates who claim to speak for Right and Good evolve into beings that can publicly acknowledge that when we teach, encourage, and support killing then killing, inevitably returns to us--our national organism's dim and distorted self-knowledge will remain in its present crippled condition. No matter how vehemently we toss them, the slippers fly back.

Allucquere Rosanne Stone is associate professor and founding director of the AGTLab and the convergent Media program at the University of Texas at Austin.

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