The House of Words: A Poetic Interlude

The Qur'an reminds us that those who hope to find a Strong [Protective] Friend in something other than al-Haq [Reality] are like the spider: building for themselves a fortress of the flimsiest material (Q. 29:41).

Such is the House of Words. It is an elaborate fiction, yet it is the fiction we are driven to produce by none other than the Socratic god within--or, taking the liberty of another metaphor, by "the nightingale singing in the Shirazi garden of the great Sufi poet Hafiz [which] becomes the elusive bird of the heart of the Baul, trapped within the rib cage of his body, yet unknown. And it becomes again the bird of God of Rabindranath Tagore:

Even though slow and sluggish
evening comes,
and stops as with a gesture
your song;
even though you are alone
in the infinite sky,
and your body weary,
and in terror you utter
a silent mantra
to horizons hidden by the veil--
bird, O my bird,
though it is darkening,
do not fold your wings."

[Edward C. Dimock, Jr., The Place of the Hidden Moon, University of Chicago Press, 1989, 256-257].



Philology arises from the same spiderly instinct that we typically associate with human religiosity: the impulse to construct what J. Z. Smith terms "a place in which to meaningfully dwell."

Religion, Harold Bloom reminds us, is "spilled poetry."

It is a witness to our longings and, as such, to the human tragi-comedy.