OUT of intellectual curiosity, I have always wondered what the Land of Nod might look like if it actually existed. Doing research on an ancient manuscript found in a monastery in Mount Lebanon, I realized that I might have had my wish granted without knowing it. Before going further, I will say that since I am writing in English, I need not explain my references.
In the main, the language of the manuscript is Arabic but there are many pages in Aramaic. In a lengthy Gnostic commentary on the story of Balaam’s Ass, it dawned on me that we might be actually living in the Land of Nod. In the ‘real’ world (i.e. the one we actually inhabit) you’d expect Balaam to make the decision and the ass to follow. In the story as we know it, however, it is the ass who makes the final decision and Balaam has to follow.
That realization sent me on a tangent that covered at least three millennia to the present. If you take the ass as a symbol of the laboring people in any nation and Balaam as the overpowering presence on its back, you’d realize that the world is inverted. While you watch the events from Ukraine to Beirut on television, you might think the ass has decided not to carry its load any further. That leads to the conclusion that until all the Balaam’s have dismounted, the inverted existence of the Land of Nod is actually within our realm of everyday reality. To my mind, this makes the exile more symbolically fruitful.
In ancient literature the ass figures prominently. The Golden Ass by Apuleius is one of the most beautiful stories of the ancient world. It is the story of Lucius who sees a witch rubbing herself with ointment and turns herself into a bird. Wishing to do likewise, he rubs himself with the ointment only to find himself turned into an ass. Before he could reach the antidote, a rose, he is stolen. The book is a record of his adventures.
In the first story, the real ass (in the classical sense) is Balaam. In the second, the human is running around in the shape of an ass while maintaining his human faculties of thought and action. Literature is nothing if it cannot reduce the complexity of life into a viable symbol; and here we have it working at its zenith. In both cases, Balaam and Apuleius, the ass has to shed either its rider or its outer form.
Today the multitudes chanting in open squares are either braying if you oppose them, or singing angelically if you support them. Either way, they are metamorphosing into something new, something different. Are we finally returning from the Land of Nod?
Having shared my thoughts on this matter with you, it is perhaps time to go back to my manuscript. It is safer there.
