JBRWKI

by Truman Capote

forward

There are words that come from far away and never forget it. You can hear the distance still in them, like sand in the shoes after a long march. Safari is one of those words. It means to go, to travel, to leave the place where you began. That is all a man ever does.

In this book, the writer goes after words the way some men go after game. He tracks them across languages and deserts, follows their prints in old dust, listens for the sound they make when they breathe. It is not a hunt for trophies. It is something quieter. He wants to see what is left of faith when the tongue itself becomes a landscape.

The Arabs built their words from bone and wind. The English filled theirs with air and sound. Between them there is a river. The writer rows it. You can hear the oars in every sentence—measured, steady, not fast. There are no tricks here. Just language, and the long work of trying to make it mean something again after the noise has passed.

If you read it right, you’ll feel the heat. You’ll hear the vowels opening like small wounds. You’ll see how a name can be a country and a word can be a kind of prayer. And maybe, when you close the book, you’ll understand that every journey worth taking begins with a sound that has forgotten its meaning.

That’s all there is to it. A man, a word, the road ahead. Everything else is dust and wind.

Ernest Hemingway

Paris, 1942

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prologue

The Creature of Words

It begins, as these things often do, at the opposite ends of a mirror.  On one side: the sacred consonants of Arabic, those ribs of language that hold the breath in place.  On the other: a nonsense beast named Jabberwocky, born in an English nursery and let loose upon the page.

Lewis Carroll wrote it in 1871, a poem that sounded right even when it meant nothing.  “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves…”  It’s grammar without gravity, syntax without sense — words that walk because they like the rhythm of their own steps.  Jabber, from the old English jabben, was once birdsong, chatter, the noise before meaning.  Wocky may have been walk or wacky, no one knows; perhaps Carroll simply liked the way it wobbled on the tongue.

What fascinates me is how opposite their faiths are.  Muṣṭafā compresses divinity until it shines — consonants like pillars holding up a temple of meaning, the vowels drifting through like incense.  Jabberwocky does the reverse: it lets the vowels riot, lets sound invent its own theology.  One is a desert prayer carved in bone; the other, a carnival of air.  Both, in their way, are revelations — the sacred root and the profane bloom, the silence that makes the word, and the word that forgets what silence ever was. 

The Dangerous Sum

What if Jabberwocky wasn’t nonsense at all, but the remnant of an old equation — the echo of a mathematics that outlived its own clarity?  Language sometimes remembers too much.  A formula overheard in a dream, repeated once too often, begins to turn feral.  You can feel it in the word itself: a rhythm that wants to calculate but keeps slipping its decimal, a melody that almost adds up.

There’s a kind of danger in such reception — when meaning collapses under the weight of its own precision.  Perhaps Jabberwocky is what remains after the proof explodes, after sense has been irradiated by too much order.  The letters keep walking, jabbering, trying to solve for the unknown long after the numbers have gone home.

The Monster of Reason

Suppose Jabberwocky isn’t nonsense at all, but aftermath—a kind of linguistic fallout left behind when mathematics went supernova.  By the late nineteenth century, the equations had begun to dream.  Geometry bent; numbers grew imaginary; infinity stopped behaving.  The world’s symbolic order, once so obedient, had slipped its leash.  Out of that tremor, a poem appeared—words that sounded sane but had lost their sanity.

Carroll, the mathematician hiding behind the children’s author, must have felt it first: the way logic, if overfed, begins to devour its own meaning.  Jabberwocky is that moment caught mid-bite—a syntax still standing, a vocabulary turned to glass.  Every word fits, yet nothing holds.  It is the dream a theorem might have after forgetting what it was meant to prove.

The danger is its beauty.  The music still works, even after the sense is gone.  Like an equation written in the dust after the numbers have fled, it continues to charm, to persuade.  You could almost believe it means something.  Perhaps that is the final warning of Jabberwocky: that when reason becomes too precise, it starts to rhyme.  And from that rhyme—sweet, perfect, hollow—the monster steps quietly out of the mirror.

The Boatman of Logic

Picture him: Lewis Carroll, waistcoat damp with river mist, the oars whispering through the Isis.  Three little girls leaning over the side, their reflections breaking into ripples.  It’s afternoon in Oxford, that honeyed hour when time itself seems to pause for tea.  The logician is rowing, but he’s also drifting—away from proofs and propositions, into a current of words that obey no geometry.

He tells them stories, makes up creatures, strings syllables together like beads that don’t quite match.  It is play, yes, but also experiment.  The mathematician, that most disciplined of minds, is testing what happens when order loosens its collar.  Each invented word is a theorem in reverse: not the discovery of structure, but the discovery that meaning can survive without one.

Perhaps that was the real revelation of those summer voyages—that the imagination, once freed from logic’s shore, doesn’t drown.  It floats.  And in its wake trails the faint music of a new mathematics, one measured not in numbers but in nonsense, not in certainty but in wonder.  The river carries them home, but something in the language has changed forever.

Here’s that passage refracted through Capote’s voice—his cool, mercurial precision, the lilt of an evening sentence that can hold both wonder and danger in the same breath:

The Precision of Nonsense

That was always the paradox of Lewis Carroll: a man who used fantasy not to flee reason, but to test its temperature.  Those slow afternoons on the Isis with the Liddell girls were less idyll than experiment—a mathematician lowering logic into water to see if it would float.  He called it play, but it was play in the same way a laboratory flame is play: something bright that can burn if you lean too close.

At Oxford he lectured in symbolic logic, his real name, Charles Dodgson, printed on treatises about syllogisms and algebraic thought.  Yet in Alice and Jabberwocky he performs the most elegant inversion imaginable: rigor turned inside out, form preserved, sense dissolved.  “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves…”—the grammar perfect, the meaning gone.  It’s a skeleton of syntax walking beautifully without flesh.

That’s the modern condition, really.  The nineteenth century learning to speak in equations it no longer understood.  Carroll saw it coming: coherence without correspondence, form without faith.  His nonsense was mathematics dreaming, the proof turned to poetry, the theorem remembering childhood.  He wasn’t escaping logic; he was listening to it crack—very softly, like ice under oars.

The Mirror of Speech

Perhaps that’s where all language ends—at the edge of a river at dusk, where logic and lullaby share the same current.  Carroll knew it, and so did the Arabs before him: that every word is a mirror testing its own reflection, every grammar a cage that secretly dreams of music.  One writes equations, the other poems; both are searching for a way to speak what cannot be seen.

In the beginning, sound made sense.  Now sense makes sound.  Between them lies the long shimmer of human speech—its deserts and deltas, its alphabets of bone and perfume.  Safari, Safar, Jabberwocky, Muṣṭafā, Mostafa—each a migration of meaning, each a little experiment in how far the tongue can travel before it forgets its home.

The river keeps moving.  The oars rise and fall.  And the words, like small boats, drift into the mirror, carrying what’s left of us: our names, our numbers, our brief belief that sense and sound were ever the same thing.

Safari, A liquid essay

welcome to our small séance of sound and sense, where grammar becomes gossip and vowels turn to smoke:

There is a certain music to the word safari—the way it rolls out of the mouth like dust rising off a long, sunburnt road. It sounds like canvas tents snapping in a hot wind, like an afternoon spent watching heat-shimmer over the back of a lion. But the word, as it happens, began its journey not in Africa’s veldt but in the sand-worn syllables of Arabia: safar—to travel, to move, to depart. That’s the kind of verb that carries its own suitcase.

Then, in the slow migration of language, safar crossed the Indian Ocean, salt-streaked and sun-fatigued, to find new lodging in Swahili. There it unpacked and became safari, meaning a journey or expedition, and the word began to smell of rain and red clay and acacia bark. It was no longer the travel of caravans and prayer calls, but the travel of dawns and drums, of mosquito nets and mirrored lakes.

By the time the English picked it up, somewhere around 1859, safari had already dressed itself for the part: khaki trousers, polished boots, a notebook for recording what the heart cannot quite admit. We turned it into theater, of course—our grand adventure under another people’s sun. But the word still remembers where it came from. Safar. To move. To go. To be, forever, en route.

Mostafa

Names, like rooms one has left too long unvisited, have their own weather. Mine—Mustafa—is a kind of heat, a syllable both soft and ceremonial. Once, I was told it meant “chosen.” Later, I heard it meant “one who purifies.” But lately I have begun to suspect it’s something else entirely: a journey disguised as a person.

The root is Safa, the clear spring, the washing stone, and also Safar, the travel that changes you. And I wonder—doesn’t every pilgrimage begin as a stain that wants to be erased? Perhaps purification is not the end of the journey but its only direction: the endless attempt to arrive clean in a world made of dust.

To be Mustafa, then, is to be forever in transit between the soul’s departure and its return. The passport reads: one who travels toward clarity. And somewhere, along the border of silence and speech, the ink is still drying.

The Unveiling

There are words that seem to breathe even when no one is speaking them. Ṣafā. Safar. They sound like sand shifting underfoot, like something once veiled that now blinks in the sun.  In Arabic they are kin—cousins in a vast, wind-swept family of roots. One means purity, the other travel.  But what is the difference, really, between being cleansed and being gone?

In the grammar of the desert, to move is to uncover. The traveler doesn’t just pass through space; he peels it away, strip by strip, until the world turns bare.  At dawn they say asfara al-ṣubḥu—the morning has revealed itself.  And isn’t that what every soul tries to do? Reveal itself? The purer the light, the fewer the shadows it can tolerate.

Somewhere in the name Mustafa —a name that once belonged to prophets and now sits quietly on a driver’s license—there is this entire motion: the chosen one, yes, but chosen for what? For clarity. For the long, bleaching journey toward it.  He walks the same invisible road as all those who have left something behind—the pilgrim, the exile, the man who suddenly finds the city too loud for his heart.

And perhaps that’s all the unveiling ever was: a kind of travel so complete that the traveler himself grows transparent, becomes nothing but the road, the dust, the shimmer in the heat.  Every name hides that story, but only some are lucky—or lonely—enough to hear it.

The Riddle of the Vowel

Language, like people, has moods. A single vowel can shift the temperature of a name—the way a curtain’s color alters the entire room. In Mustafa, the U sits there like a low hum, a subterranean note, something devout and enclosed. Change it to an O—Mostafa—and suddenly the sound opens, round and worldly, like the mouth of someone about to ask a dangerous question. It’s the same name, yet the difference is felt in the bones, as though a window had been cracked in a house that had gone still.

In Arabic, of course, the vowels are only guests; the consonants own the home. The roots—those spare little triplets of letters—carry the real weight of meaning, while the vowels drift through like music in another room. SFR is one such root: travel, unveil, expose. But switch the S for a J, and you have JFR, the whisper of another mystery, the genealogy of revelation itself. Even God, they say, hides in those small exchanges of sound—between a hiss and a breath, a journey and a name.

And so these words—Safar, Mustafa, Jafar—begin to circle one another like planets in the same quiet orbit. Each contains a trace of movement, of unveiling, of something being chosen or sent forth. The difference between them is not of meaning but of weather, of light falling differently on the same terrain. A vowel shifts, and suddenly the desert hums with new intention. The names, like people, are still traveling toward what they mean.

The Secret Vowel

You wouldn’t think a vowel could change the weather of a name, but it can. In Mustafa there’s the tight, upright sound of obedience—the Qurʾānic formality, the script still wet with revelation. But when it opens into Mostafa, as it does in Cairo or Tehran, something human slips in: the vowel rounds, the name exhales. Suddenly, the Chosen One has taken off his shoes and stepped into the street.

Arabic doesn’t depend on vowels. They’re like perfume—evaporating, suggestive. The true bones of the word lie in its roots: three consonants, trussed together like the ribs of a tent. Ṣ-f-w means to refine, to choose, to make pure. S-f-r, to uncover, to journey. J-f-r, to dig, to hollow. It’s the same verb breathing through three masks. One travels across sand; one clarifies water; one opens the earth. Each an unveiling, each a kind of prayer.

The mystics knew this. They spoke of as-Safar ilā Allāh—the journey toward God—and of al-Jafr, the hidden book, the well of divine letters. Somewhere between those words, the vowel O bends the light differently, makes it more earthly, more incarnate. It is the same music played through another instrument: Mustafa as revelation, Mostafa as echo.

And so the triad—Safar, Mustafa, Jafr—forms a small theology of exposure: the way things become pure by being shown. God, perhaps, is not a name but an act of excavation—the dust brushed away, the spring revealed. A vowel shifts, and heaven changes its accent.

The Bone-Setter

In Arabic, the word jabr once meant something very small, very intimate: the setting of a broken bone.  A physician’s thumb pressing against the fracture, the quiet wince, the whisper of alignment returning.  From that gesture, an empire of meanings unfurled—restoration, compulsion, harmony enforced by tenderness.  God, they said, was al-Jabbār, the One who forces what is broken back into grace.

It’s an austere sort of mercy.  The same root gave us al-jabr in algebra—Al-Khwārizmī’s little revolution of balance and equation, bones of number reset beneath the skin of logic.  Every formula, every fraction solved for the unknown, is a miniature act of mending.  The mathematics of consolation.

But there’s another face to the word, darker and divine: the sovereignty that compels the world to keep its shape.  The stars don’t drift off because Someone insists they don’t.  Sufi writers said that al-Jabbār breaks only to mend, veils only to unveil.  It’s the hand that fractures the clay so the light can enter the crack.

And when you trace it beside its siblings—Ṣ-F-W for purity, S-F-R for journey—you begin to see a kind of grammar of creation.  Travel, clarify, restore.  The desert’s own syntax.  We are all, it seems, written in that tense: unveiled by motion, purified by loss, healed by force.  Even the universe, for all its elegance, is still a patient learning to walk on a mended leg.

The Frivolity of Vowels

In Arabic, vowels are shy creatures.  They appear only when necessary, a kind of modesty built into the script.  You have to imagine them, like perfume you can’t quite see but know is there.  The real architecture belongs to the consonants—those proud, standing stones that hold meaning in their shadow.  A vowel in Arabic is a ghost; in French, it’s a peacock.

The French spend their vowels with scandalous abandon, scattering them over words they scarcely pronounce.  Half of Paris vanishes between the tongue and the teeth, leaving behind a trail of silent letters like cigarette ash on marble.  Arabic, by contrast, hoards its sound—measured, economical, desert-wise.  Mustafa keeps its u like a water jar; Mostafa lets it spill a little.

There’s a whole philosophy in that difference.  One language whispers through consonants, the other sighs through vowels.  Perhaps that’s why Arabic seems carved from stone, and French from breath.  To change u to o is not to alter the meaning, only the mood.  The same name, seen at two hours of the day: one under the sun, the other under the lamp.

Bone and Perfume

In Arabic, the consonants do the living.  They’re the skeleton, the hard truth of the word—the body lying perfectly still.  The vowels are only breath, a pulse of life blown in for a moment, vanishing when the speaker stops.  Meaning there belongs to bone and marrow.  The desert doesn’t waste air on decoration.

French, though—French is all exhalation.  A language that lives in the mouth the way perfume lives on skin.  Its vowels rise and fall like silk caught in a draft.  They aren’t necessary, exactly; they’re indulgent, a kind of phonetic luxury.  You can hear it in the endings that dissolve to nothing, the consonants that step back politely, leaving a single vowel trembling in the air.

So when Muṣṭafā drifts west and becomes Mostafa, it isn’t corruption but translation of temperament.  The Arabic u was grammar—precise, functional, devout.  The French o is theater—rounded, human, glowing a little.  The same root, Ṣ–F–W, still beats beneath the surface, but the tone has changed: from invocation to aria.

It’s a difference of climate as much as of sound.  One language writes in stone; the other writes in vapor.  Muṣṭafā is the chosen vessel.  Mostafa—the chosen voice.  Both, in their way, are true: one the bone, the other the perfume.

epilogue

The Word That Travels

And perhaps that’s what all words are doing—traveling.  Each one a little safar, a journey through mouths and centuries, crossing from scripture to song, from bone to breath.  They change accents the way the sky changes color, but the dust clings to them; they remember every tongue that ever spoke them.  Safari. Safar. Ṣafā. Mustafa. Mostafa.  A whole atlas of sound, circling the same sun.  In the end, meaning is only motion—letters walking toward one another across the long desert of time.  And language, for all its beauty, is still trying to come home.

OPENDA