scattered in his book and the fading memories of the few who were condemned to be his neighbors.
Wahid Abdul Masseih was a fragile, pale, and sickly man who, not unlike Kafka or Poe, led a miserable life and died prematurely. His whole life was an error, a burden on existence that only a blind god could permit. The mere fact of his existence shamed all those who knew him, as if they had a secret hand in it. An elder Greek neighbor described him to me: “At times his mind had exhausted his body and reduced him to a mere phantom. I remember how he went out hastily on moonless nights, cloaked with darkness, to buy some food. He never took off his old fashioned sunglasses, not even at night. At a few times I could catch sight of his protruding eyes from underneath the thick glasses, they were always glowing, echoing Paul’s prophetic assertion that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” He lived most of his life in strict seclusion. In one paragraph of his book he wondered whether he was a Gnostic soul that lost its way during its descent through the planetary spheres (8), eventually arriving at the right place (Alexandria) in the wrong time (the twentieth century instead of the second). In another chapter he admitted that he was tempted to believe in reincarnation for he felt that he was living the mirror opposite of an earlier life, perhaps that of Alexander the Sixth (an idea that once tempted Aleister Crowley (9)). He prefigured in rejection and solitude an exalted, though rarely trodden, road to purification. Of all the things that he detested two stood out the most: unrehearsed optimism and the belief that monotheism is more justified than idolatry: “At least Marduk could stop a well-aimed stone. Compete with that, Adonai!”
Of all the themes that run through Wahid’s book, the most prominent one is that of madness. Wahid recounts how he, at the tender age of five, had once eaten water colors, only to be quickly held back and rebuked by his mother. “It was a glorious moment,” he writes, “when I ‘discovered’ that I could eat these colors without harm. An ineffable feeling of jubilation stormed my soul. It was liberation from the undermining confinements of reason. A whole new array of experiences and delights was now possible and unspeakable adventures awaited me. I felt irritated for not having made this discovery earlier and desired to vindicate myself against a secret enemy who kept me from participating in this new world for all that time. I have been blessed by reliving this experience over and over again in those frequent dreams when I can, with due concentration, fly.”
Einstein’s General Relativity teaches us that massy objects bend light and distort the fabric of space and time. I couldn’t stop thinking of that as I examined certain paragraphs of Wahid’s book – the most important ones. As a skillful surrealist twists lines, Wahid deformed the structures of phrases around important words. As if those words had enough might to defy the laws of logic and, consequently, the laws of grammar. To Wahid those words and terms represented transcendental truths that couldn’t be reduced to human language save at a high price.
Far from being the beast of the Apocalypse or the Antichrist, some paragraphs of Wahid’s book suggest that he had his own radiant religious experience. “Schopenhauer once said that Christianizing India would be as useless as a bullet fired at a cliff. Now I place the statue of the revered Buddha at one extremity of my room and erect a Catholic crucifix opposed to it. On one side I have peace, prudence, unattachment and Nirvana. On the other side I have a juvenile god who fell immensely in love and suffered precisely because of that passion. He was caught in the trap of Maya, his flesh was entangled in the barbed net of Samsara that pervades the very fabric of existence. Yet it was here that the paradox shone. For I could see how that feeble god, with his bones protruding from beneath his pale skin, has purified himself from passion by passion; had bathed himself with pain until it lost every meaning. Neither was he intimidated by jeers and insults nor was he reluctant to mention them in his own gospels. Many are ashamed of participating in this world and when they do it they do it reluctantly. They hide behind masks and pennames. They limit themselves by their foolish desire to affect the world without being affected in return; to criticize without being criticized. The crucifix is the paradox of life sprouting out of death, of divinity and will shining from a consumed body that hangs resiliently in a last act of self-assertion. The crucifix is the paradoxical symbol that is designed for death but stands for life. On the other side of the room, I could still observe the Buddha as he serenely reposed, his golden skin as glittering as metals. In his ceaseless efforts to quit suffering, he has altogether ceased to be a human. He could no longer be a father or a saint… he was an unloving alien worthy only of the pity that he agreed to offer.”
In another chapter Wahid recounts a folk tale spun in Coptic circles as a real story: A renowned professor, tormented by the devils of doubt, secretly smuggles the Host of the Holy Communion in her purse to her home where she observes it under the microscope and, to her bewildering shock, distinguishes red blood corpuscles and other human tissues. The professor is blinded instantaneously because ‘no one may see God and live.’ After poking fun at the folktale and after emphasizing the role that fear plays in peppering such idiocies, Wahid shared with us his own interpretation of the Holy Communion. “One may question how the poor fellow who invented this miserable tale accepted that the professor could see wine really turned to blood under the microscope while it still retained its taste to the tongue and appearance to the naked eye. The mystery of communion, in effect, has deep roots that are unearthed only by a chosen few. First we can see bread and wine. The priest performs the rite. The bread and wine still look the same, but we are told that now they have changed. I dare question the resurrection of the Lord, the conversion of Paul, the inerrancy of the Bible, but I dare not dismiss this mystery as meaningless. For here shines the paradox; the bread is both bread and flesh; the wine is both wine and blood. Had the bread and wine really turned to flesh and blood we would have witnessed a miracle, but not a paradox. Miracles appeal to the psychics (10); they are cheap alternatives to the misunderstood paradoxes that are aimed to the pneumatic few… the wine that has turned to blood is not as holy as the wine that has turned to blood without ceasing to be wine.”
Sudden outbursts of nihilism must have been his sworn enemy. In one chapter he writes “Corpses are useless…carefully joined bones, elaborately woven networks of vessels, and finely-chiseled muscles that are of no use. Corpses are virtuous, for they recognize the futility of their existence and erase it with the most obscene of ways. With maggots and stench they purify themselves of the guilt of a purposeless existence in a blind world. Now my body is no more useful that a long-dead corpse, yet it takes blasphemous pride in its existence. I stare at my hands and they shamelessly stare back at me… no matter how hard I try to awaken them to their secret vice, I fail…they just refuse to decompose.” In another chapter, while elaborately contrasting Christian theosis with Greek henosis, Abdul Masseih abruptly stops and starts talking to himself “and it is in this sense, and in this sense alone, that one is apt to see how henosis is unfathomably [space] Sometimes I wonder whether what I have to write justifies my ceaseless defiling of white papers. My soul is restrained in the very paradigm that it’s trying to invalidate. If Heaven is a lie then I’d be pitied more than all men, for I can’t resist the belief that somehow God will reward me for showing him how absurd he and his world are. Sometimes I wonder who I am or what I have become… a sepulcher of archaic terms, a friend of the dead, a refutation of Hellenism that writes for a bunch of fools about a bunch of falsehoods. Every abouna leaves the church, even in a late hour, to go back to his wife and children [Coptic priests marry] but I have no place to lay my head. Some priests enjoy the sight of the moon and the stars while dining with their families in open air but my eyes are condemned to stare endlessly at the sacred body hanged on the cross. I live for the mere purpose of overthrowing Christianity but I am more Christian than any Coptic priest. Nay, I am more Christian than the Pope!”
Wahid's agony was probably reflected upon his artistic taste. He once discus
sed the case of a serial killer who staged the corpses of his victims in a religious manner, crowning their heads with halos and engraving occult talismans on their torsos. "Religious imagery is psychologically charged. Thus it should come to us as no surprise that it appeals to the psychologically disturbed. It is tricky to understand what makes it psychologically charged. It might have been created by psychotics who tried to project their madness upon their own followers or it might have been designed in order to exploit this noble, mad experience in humankind and make people vulnerable to faith and belief."
Abdul Masseih’s father abandoned his mother when he was three, fleeing to Poland where he settled down and married again. His ultra-orthodox mother, encouraged by the culture of sacrifice that unhealthily saturates the airs of the Coptic Church, decided to renounce any future marriage and dedicated her life in its entirety to her son. Her incredible insistence on bringing up her son within the confines of the religious institution availed to naught. “There