The Shah's Portable Gardens

Para Ana

Behind the glass box, lit dimly, the Ardabil carpet is exposed to squinting eyes, pressed against the Earth by gravity, the way it is supposed to be, like a butterfly to a windshield (even if it sometimes falsely levitates). It was likely crafted to dress the burial place of Shaykh Safi al-Din Ardabili in Ardabil, Iran, an important site of pilgrimage. This carpet summoned pilgrims, traveled with none. Now it attracts other tourists to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where they murmur around its transparent cabinet like moths to a soft tungsten-filament light bulb.

Although its field is lush, with vines and leaves in serpentine confusion, although its wavelengths of flowers and stems proliferate as if soaked by dense nightly rainfall, this is not properly a garden carpet, that kind of Persian rug that represents an enclosed paradise with quadripartite structures, water channels and fountains. And yet the Ardabil carpet is a garden, too, of sorts. Take its wool and the pasture that enabled the wool, the grass that fed the unshorn sheep. Take its colors: gold distilled from pomegranate rinds, or indigo fermented from basma leaves. The rug is now sealed from the outside world, from the droplets of awe-driven exclamations (mist on the windowpane) to the dust and soil of surrounding parks and pathways. Less than once a year, the vault is opened and inspected for the presence of insects. Curators look under the carpet (primarily for moths). Henry David Thoreau once said: "I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground."

Let us not forget Virginia Woolf as she imagines herself in A Room of One's Own, trying to grasp a slippery idea, which she compares to a little fish, and walking with extreme rapidity across an imagined grass plot:

Instantly a man's figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment.

But gravel is not like grass. The ankles hurt, the joints are made present, and there's that sound of crushed rock. And in our thoughts, a persistent intruder.

As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little fish into hiding.

It is a well-known fact that the female tread is bound to hurt the turf. To tear at its order and volatilize its perfume. (To squish its balm.) It is preferable, always, that no woman dare—

That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library.

That a famous turf is cursed by the sole of a woman is a matter of utmost importance to a turf, woven or otherwise. Therefore, it is preferable, always, that no woman dare—

The Ardabil carpet is a garden of sorts. Take the rumor that enabled the knotting. The fuel that fed the hands, the hour-long conversations. Although, maybe—yes—the silence. Take the silence, hands, the silence. Take the silence of the hands.

________

San José, Costa Rica, 3/12/2020, 6:31 a.m. Halfway through our vacation together, my sister and I set out on a day trip to La Paz Waterfalls from San José.

[Driver looks in the rearview mirror, catching my...