Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Three months were to pass before I received word from him again, on the only occasion I’ve heard from him since he left. I received a postcard, a card bearing no images. There was my address in Kensington, London, but there was no return address. The postage stamp was Jordanian, and it contained the image of a man’s head and shoulders, something that might have been extracted from something greater. When I searched Jordanian stamps on the Internet, I discovered that the image was of Avicenna, a Persian mathematician and philosopher of the tenth century, a name I remembered vaguely from years ago. And when I looked him up and read about his work, I found that Avicenna had considered ontological arguments for the existence of God some time before St. Anselm had.

On the reverse side of the postcard, there was a URL, written in his hand, a universal resource locator, a Web page address, one of those tiny abridging URLs that disclose none of the information the true address contains. That was all there was on the card. I typed it into the browser on my computer, and when I pressed Return, the URL called up a photograph.

* * *

There are many maps in my father’s house, and they all hang on one wall in the room we call the family room. Now that appellation, family room , seems a touch ambitious. A brother or a sister, one sibling, I think, would have made the name appropriate, brought the name home. I remember Zafar gazing at one map and, on another visit home, without Zafar, I spared a few moments to look at it. The map showed the far northeast corner of India under the Raj, the part of the world that today includes Bangladesh and the neighboring states of India, as well as strips of Bhutan and Burma. I imagine him now focused on a corner of that corner of the world — if a corner can have a corner. I imagine him enlarging in his mind’s eye the place of his birth. I know of course that he had lived in Dhaka in 2001 and 2002, but a remote village and the capital city are worlds apart. And though I have no hard ground on which to base my speculation, the thought pleases me that at some time in those years he disappeared, my friend might have paid a visit to that area of the world, to the place where he had been happiest, as he once said, to the woman who had loved him.

Zafar did not say anything about what he had been doing in those years, the years after he left Afghanistan and before reappearing at my door, so that I am ashamed to see that all that I have learned is what I could already have known, had I made the effort to reach out. I never, for instance, called him or sent a note when he was in hospital, nor went to see him when he came out. It hurts to say for instance.

My friend once told me something his friend Marcy, mother of Josie, had said to him. He had asked her, rather foolishly, he said, if it was hard bringing up Josie on her own. Marcy had replied that it would have been harder with Josie’s father around. It is what Marcy said next, as reported by Zafar, that now comes to my mind. What was hard, she explained, was not having someone to talk to about Josie, not having someone to make decisions with. Don’t get me wrong, she said (or something like that), I think on the whole I’ve made the right decisions and I’m pretty sure we would have come to the same decisions if I’d made them with someone else. And yet it’s not enough to know that. There’s something about doing it with someone else, she said, something in just talking about it, something about how it leaves you feeling afterward. Decisions seem lighter; everything is lighter.

There are those who do not talk because they have no one to talk to. And there are those who do not talk because they have nothing to say. To learn that I have been neither, that I held my own hand to my mouth, has been hard. Talking, as my father said to me, is easier said than done. I have been uncertain of so many things, but I never seized the uncertainty as the source of joy that I now believe it to be. I never owned my marriage, never owned my friendships, never owned my relationship to my mother, never owned any of those things that cannot be bought.

* * *

It is hard to grasp Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, I think. I never have, not really. I know this because although I have followed the proof — the one I found in the literature that on its face seemed most accessible — at the end I never had, to use Zafar’s words, that sensation of ecstatic relief, of turning a corner and seeing the mountains open up and the valley shine under a golden sky, when heaven lowers a ladder of angels to receive you. That, I think, is what some people have known, at least once: divinity for men.

This, however, I know about the theorem: that it takes us — to use words not all my own — to the point at which two roads diverge, that we have to choose and the choice is not a happy one. Both roads take us into mathematical realms of simple language stripped bare of human conceit. Down one road is unbearable inconsistency, a world in which black is white and white is black and there is no way to tell them apart, in which — without a hint of exaggeration, with not so much as a touch of hyperbole or melodrama — one equals zero. This leaves us looking down the other road, one no less daunting and hard but that has the merit if not of leading us to the mercy of understanding then at least of delivering us from the torment of contradictions. Along this other way lies another world, also one of simple language. But it is a twilight world, for in its manifold embrace are things that are true, crystal blue propositions, which are as true as a man could ever hope to feel something to be true, yet which things — irony of ironies — the man will never know to be true, not because they merely lie beyond the wit of the creature but because mathematics herself condemns men to ignorance. This is the strangest thing: mathematical truths for which there can never be proof. Zafar’s notes record the descent of hope, having once clung to a childlike dream; I know he knew that mathematics would never answer all or any of the questions of human life and suffering, but the dream was that in her own land, in her own fertile crescent, mathematics would at least yield answers to her own questions and never, instead, mock the traveler with barren wells, never deny him the proof of how those crystalline truths are true at all.

Zafar had set himself to the pursuit of knowledge, and it is apparent to me now, in a way it was not before, that he had done so not in order to “better himself,” as the expression goes, but in order to lay ground for his feet to stand upon; in order, that is, to go home, somewhere, and take root. I believe that he had failed in this mission and had come to see, as he himself said in so many words, that understanding is not what this life has given us, that answers can only beget questions, that honesty commands a declaration not of faith but of ignorance, and that the only mission available to us, one laid to our charge, if any hand was in it, is to let unfold the questions, to take to the river knowing not if it runs to the sea, and accept our place as servants of life.

The image my friend linked me to — thereby linking me to him, since he saw it also, like that moon which we all see — is of Kurt Gödel and Albert Einstein. The two men are walking in Princeton, New Jersey, on the path from Fuld Hall to Olden Farm. The photograph catches them some way off, two exiles in an alien land. It is a blustery day, the wind tugging at their coats, and we see only the backs of the figures, so that without further information we cannot tell which is the figure of Gödel and which of his friend.