This is a story about a carpet I bought and how it led me, by pure chance, to a beautiful insight from one of Richard Wagner’s operas which gave me a paradigm shift in terms of my approach to work and life.
But first, the story about the carpet:
Recently, we were in Oman over the winter holiday. It was the last night of a magical stay and we went to the old town, where the souq is. The old town is situated within a calm and sheltered bay. Minarets poke out from within the endless sprawl of narrow streets. Nobody knows how many streets there are; it’s fractal. If you find another street, you’ll keep on finding more streets.
We entered via the main entrance to the souq. After about ten minutes of walking past spice mounds, pashmina scarves, ‘All I got was this T-shirt’, stuffed camels, antique British rifles, toy plastic guitars, swords, dried witchdoctor roots, and lavish gold jewellery, we eventually came into a carpet shop. Most of the carpets looked like grandma’s carpets: machine made with vivid synthetic colours. The salesman came over and asked what I was looking for. I didn’t really know what I was looking for… natural dyes, natural fabric. Something genuine?
‘You want Kilim’, he said. From his pocket, he took two phones and called someone on one of them. After waiting for a few minutes a skinny teenager appeared in the street wearing a tracksuit, a silver chain round his neck and baseball cap balanced on his head, and he was given orders to take us to the ‘other shop’. We then walked for at least another ten minutes, deeper into the souq, round one corner, round another, following the lazy shuffling steps of the teenager as we walked deeper into a labyrinth.
Eventually, we arrived at a small door and the teenager motioned towards it and then disappeared again. We entered through the small door into a huge room full of carpets draped from every inch of the walls. It was like a thief’s den. It took my breath away. Natural pure-dyed handmade Iranian carpets everywhere.
‘How did you find this place?’ the carpet seller asked interrupting my awe. – ‘Normally, this only for locals.’ he added. For locals only! What a find, I thought.
This salesman was too good to ask immediately what my budget was. Of course, any salesman needs to know what the budget is otherwise the rest of the conversation has no context. But we both knew that I made the cardinal error as soon as I walked in.
We sat down and we politely looked at various carpets. Lots of desirable carpets from Iran. But nothing that I was willing to pay for. After an hour of looking and nodding, I gathered my energy to get up off the floor. As I placed my hands on the floor to get up, a new carpet was flung into the air and carefully guided to the floor.
My eyes widened, and I breathed in the the wool-scented air that wafted out from underneath this carpet as it slowly hovered and landed softly. Admiringly, I thought, this is the one… no… No! – cannot show emotion! Too late. The salesman noticed that I liked it and, since I couldn’t help but ask, he gave me the price (a bit more than I hoped) which was followed by some obligatory but pointless haggling.
I paid up whilst the carpet was being carefully rolled up and pushed into a plastic bag and sellotaped closed. I took my goods and said the pleasantries: I bid him farewell and promised that I was coming back straight away for more carpets and he promised to give me more special prices. We walked out of the small door and then we remembered that we were in the depths of the souq, probably lost. I walked no more than twenty steps, looked out a little side street, and noticed that I had a direct view of the ocean.
Completely puzzled, I walked out the little side street onto the main corniche right next to the entrance of the souq. ‘Have I just been screwed?’ I asked out loud in the midst of the crowds, as my brain tried to catch up with the situation. Then, as an immediate knee jerk reaction, I said, ‘We need to get our money back before they shut the shop … ’. But I was calmly reassured that we paid a fair price based on all the other carpets we had seen during our stay and that the carpet was beautiful and unique.
The next day, we flew back to the UK with our luggage and our carpet. At home, I rolled out the carpet and was very happy with it, but I as I stood looking at it, I was still unsure about the price and I wanted to know more about oriental carpets. I went to the library and borrowed a book called ‘Oriental Carpets’.
I read about the patterns, historical motifs, the quality of dyes, types of knots, knot density per square inch, reputable carpet-making cities in Iran and central Asia. And after flicking through 300 pages of text and pictures, I came to no conclusions whatsoever. I had no idea what a good carpet was nor its value.
Ultimately, the author concluded, the value of a carpet is worth whatever the buyer will pay for it.
Regarding the beauty, authenticity and originality of any piece of creative work, he stated:
There are no ‘rules’.
Instead of elaborating on this point, the author simply offered, by way of metaphor, the following passage which is a summary from Richard Wagner’s opera, ‘Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’.
It goes like this:
In this portrait of renaissance Nuremberg the Knight Walther, a revolutionary innovative musician, is rejected by the traditionalist composers for not keeping the established rules. He is however persuaded by the poet Hans Sachs that it is possible to combine genius, originality and freedom of expression with the formal discipline and sound technical rules, and that the resulting work will be both more expressive and more enduring.
Walther: ‘How say the rules I must begin?’
Sachs: ‘You set them yourself and then follow them.’