More Like a Flying Rug.

10 min readDec 3, 2020

The tale of IFRIT.

Physicists know the observable universe to exist in a continuum of space and time. Any tangible thing or event involving physical things exists in a certain place in all space at any time. To quote amateur historian Bill Wurtz: “Don’t like it? Try a different place — at a different time™.” While this holds for a world bound by science, what if there are unpredictable patterns that it can’t explain? When science, or God, or the gods, or whatever happened to give us free thought…did…did it do so in a precise way? Did it map out everything that could’ve ever happened from that point in our existence? Were the Neanderthals clever enough, could they have known my name?

For an essay about world literature, I realise this is a less-than-ideal introduction. But I promise it’ll make sense at the end. What I was getting at was the realm of the metaphysical, the intangible thoughts and pathways that free thought has given us. While one could argue that there’s a sliver of a chance that you could track down all the neurons in our ancestors’ ancestors’ ancestors’ brains, what separates the wonder of the human experience from rigidity, rules and robotics is what’s right. As in, the hemisphere within your skull. Our creativity, and our ability to interpret our experiences through a medium not bound by the stupid laws of physics. No offence, Einstein (or Mr Huysing), but physics is stupid here. It just is.

The wonderful thing about experiences shared through art is that their subjectivity can be interpreted by others and used to enrich their perspectives and understanding of the world. The Neanderthals may not know me, but they knew how to process the world around them and convey it through art. As they printed themselves hunting mammoths on the walls of their caves, they were conveying their experiences of being alive through a creative medium. Millenia later, and those drawings remain intact, giving us an insight as to the actions of our ancestors. In a sense, much like the progression of things in the physical realm, concepts and ideas can only be transmitted forward. Wall paintings, time capsules, Reddit threads — all of them transcend the annals of time to the present and allow us to interpret the experiences of humanity past.

I don’t doubt you’ve heard of the Thousand and One Nights. If not, I doubt even less that you’ve heard at least of Aladdin. The tale of the street rat precariously navigating up the ranks of Agrabahan society with the aid of a jinni? You know, the 1992 Disney film? Yeah. Its source material was originally not a part of its source material. Strange, I know. The tale stems from a French author by the name of Antoine Galland (pronounced “gallon”, I know, horrendous). According to recounts, he’d heard the tale from a Syrian storyteller acquaintance, Hanna Diyab. What made Galland forge a tale within the manuscripts of the Middle East? Well, the mobs begging him for more tales would have played a part. See, what shot Galland to popularity were his translations of mystical stories from a foreign place not many in Europe would have known. Foreignity’s allure made works based upon it popular. Once Galland had translated all he had, the demand for more pushed him to somewhat of a moral dilemma. Do you sacrifice the integrity of a historical artefact to appease a crowd fuelled by orientalism? Or, do you risk losing your fanbase and income because you upheld said integrity?

The Aladdin everyone knows…isn’t where people think it’s from.

What if, much like that one guy from The Matrix, I said that it wasn’t a dilemma at all? When Galland contributed to the Nights, what he was doing was artistically weaving a threaded needle through some sort of fabric. This fabric runs through time, joining all instances of the Nights to all instances that will ever be, back to those phenomena that inspired the frame tale. This fabric represents a sort of free domain, like what Creative Commons is to the internet. Given the multiple geographic avenues of evolution the Nights has undertaken outside of the Middle East, the fabric has been stretched sideways across space, too.

The fabric can also be weaved through another dimension — media. What began as a manuscript has inspired future creators to take the experiences of the original authors and meld them with their own. It is the essence of the Nights that is rebirthed within everything that draws on it. Take the song Three Wishes by Roger Waters (of Pink Floyd) off his 1992 album, Amused to Death. The song revolves around “the old three wishes story” (Waters, 1983), with an overarching theme about careless wishing without foresight. This parallels Aladdin’s initial profligate attitude towards the jinni in the manuscript version of the tale. However, as I broke the fourth wall to allude to you earlier, Mr Mahoney (or whoever finds this on Medium — hello there), the version of the story that most people know isn’t entirely true to the source material. The story Waters refers to in this interview has European origins, and involves a fairy instead. However, according to u/Tess237 on an r/AskHistorians thread, “[t]he wishing part arguably came from the 1001 Arabian Nights”. It’s worth noting that the original story didn’t have a limit on the number of wishes, demonstrating a deviation from the source material and the amalgamation between foreign (Aladdin) and familiar (the fairy).

“You can have three wishes…even though my source material states you get as many as you want…”

But back to Waters’ track. The song loosely draws from the fabric of the rug, simultaneously sewing itself into it. It is now a part of how the Nights have evolved. Waters has an undeniable metaphysical connection to the Nights’ author(s?), even despite the creative liberties he took. The same concept applies to films like Disney’s Aladdin(…s). As they drew from the source material, they drew themselves and their work closer to theirs. The fabric seems then to nullify differences, as though is was indifferent to a craving for oriental appeal. It’s like an accepting parent of sorts. “Come here, child,” it whispers.

“Who the f@#! are you?” the estranged artist shrieks, having been transported to the void for this tangential and metaphorical dialogue.

“I am that which has always been, millions of millennia before your feeble mind was created. I am what stretched tenfold beyond the wildest of your imagination. I am the sum of all that has been, all there is, and all there will ever be. I am infinite in volume, yet finite in perception. You know not but what little you can see. You have been conditioned by all you grew around, and what could have been more was shrunk by those like-minded and intolerant. You yearned for more yet rejected all that came with it. You were the Porter.”

“From…the Nights?”

“As you know them.”

“Well, how do you know them?”

“I know these tales as a culmination of a series of experiences, tied together by a few authors, each with stories of their own.”

“What were their names?”

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to. If you were as wise as I believe you are, you would take my advice. But still, you ask anyway. You seek answers that will terrify you.”

“I’m…almost certain it couldn’t be any harm, knowing their names.”

“As did the Porter when he asked about the bitch. I am being channelled through an electronic essay, and I’m not as certain I should have used that word over others. It can be considered offe — ”

“Why the hell am I here?”

“Because you created something which inherited its creative spirit from a part of me, this process repeated endlessly.”

“…who…are…you?”

“They call me IFRIT.”

“Like…from the Nights?”

“Somewhat. The name I use for mortal creatures like you is a backronym. I hear you like them. WALL·E, for example. I am the “Intellectual Flying Rug of Infinite Topology”. That…just about sums me up. I am the spirit, wordplay intended, of all creative thought. All that derives and all that gives is me. One of the more infamous derivers from your realm, Thomas Edison, had his work described by pulling from my threads.”

“How so…?”

“His assistant, William Dickinson drew on images from the Nights in a description of the first film camera he’d made, decades before your parents were born. He described the apparatus like “the air-ship of some swart Afrite.”

“Like…a jinni?”

“Precisely. Well, at least how Marina Warner recalls it. Where do you think he got that description from, my child?”

“…the Nights…”

“Exactly! The Richard Burton translation, to be precise. As he wrote it down, knowingly or not. He drew from me. At that moment too, his journal became a part of me. Even if no one knew, that entry became a part of me, inseparably. And who knows how many other creations the pair went on to inspire? Well, I do, but for the sake of human conversation, I’ve no clue.”

“So, you’re like the internet?”

“The internet envies me, the poor thing. I know no bounds. I am entirely metaphysical.”

IFRIT was a concept I came up with on the way home from school one day. Whether it is (or they are) real, I think they’re a good representation of literature’s potential to inspire other derivative works. The idea is that once a piece of art is created, then it is instantaneously submitted to the scrutiny of the existing threads of this metaphysical rug. With the logic of each thread tying into another, you could make wild strings of connected media, based on tropes or themes or otherwise. The connections don’t all have to be as close as Waters’. For example, the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves was drawn into the Beastie Boys’ 1986 rap-rock track Rhymin’ & Stealin’. The reference is a simple chant of a double entendre, where “forty” refers to a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor; and thus, the “forty thieves” are instead thieves of the forty-ounces. Moving away from the Nights and into the rap scene, rapper Marshall Mathers (who was 14 when Rhymin’ & Stealin’ came out) paid homage to the Beastie Boys in the cover art for his 2018 album, Kamikaze. The cover depicts the tail end of a totalled plane, just like License to Ill (the album Rhymin’ & Stealin’ comes from) to represent the explosive anger featured on both records.

Above: a comparison of the album covers, with License to Ill (1986) and *Kamikaze* (2018). Also, because it’s funny, peep the “FU-2” on the tail in Em’s cover. His album was made as a response to critics. Get it? F you too? It…it was funnier in my head.

Next, in 2013, Mathers released Berzerk, a party anthem about…going exactly that. In the music video’s opening, he references Marty McFly of Robert Zemeckis’ 1985 blockbuster Back to the Future. Mathers introduces the song with this theme of anachronism too:

“Let’s take it back to straight hip-hop [the era of the Beastie Boys] and start it from scratch”

Finally, in 2012, comedians Peter Shukoff and Lloyd Alquist created an Epic Rap Battle between two timelords from wildly different franchises — Doctor Who and Back to the Future. This battle is where I got the title for this essay. While Shukoff as the Tenth Doctor refers to the “rug” of the space-time continuum, that description inspired me to start developing the IFRIT’s existence. This essay is a part of the IFRIT now. I’ve just been hopping between a series of different works (and sections of the rug) but know that it extends to every thought transferred to a medium. Or Medium.