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Wrestling Wallace Stevens

Stevens's obscurities have kept me occupied, on and off, for over thirty years. In my early twenties, at night, at my desk in an insurance office (no less), I read and re-read The Collected Poems until my head ached and my sight blurred (I was supposed to be working on my accounts). If only I could cut my way through this forest of words! Stevens had set his traps for someone like me: young enough to believe that, by means of some magic--whether black or white did not matter--I could tame those poems, conquer them, and come, at the last, to know what they "truly meant." Fortunately, I never became so desperate in my desire to "master" the master as to consider returning to graduate school to study English literature. That would have been the end of reading. To this day, then, Stevens comes to me by night, at Jabbok's ford, and we wrestle until dawn. He has wounded me again and again and named me again and again. And when night falls, I continue to turn my eyes to the blackening sky and listen for his words:

A blue pigeon it is, that circles the blue sky,
On side-long wing, around and round and round.
A white pigeon it is, that flutters to the ground,
Grown tired of flight. Like a dark rabbi, I
Observed, when young, the nature of mankind,
In lordly study. Every day, I found
Man proved a gobbet in my mincing world.
Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued,
And still pursue, the origin and course
Of love, but until now I never knew
That fluttering things have so difficult a shade.

(Section XII of "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," from Harmonium).

Learning to see with both eyes (something I suspect Stevens was pointing us towards) is an important Akbarian trope. Stevens could not have known that, of course; it does not matter: he intuited it.

American Poets in the Kabir Karakhana

It may come as a surprise to many professors of English literature (though not, I reckon, to the American poet Robert Bly), that there is a significant American presence in the Kabir Karakhana. It is a remarkably central presence, as the poets involved belong to the Emersonian line. On this winter's day, we recall perhaps the strongest poet (after Whitman) in that line: Wallace Stevens.

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

("The Snow Man" from Harmonium).

Traditional Arts of the Persianate Cultural Sphere Redux

Welcome to the Kabir Karakhana

No customers for the word:
the price is high.
Without paying you can't get it,
so move on by.

Kabir, Sakhi 326, tr. Hess and Singh.

The Season of Silence

With the arrival of the Winter Solstice (December 21, 2013), we entered the Akbarian season of silence: a season dedicated to the conscientious attempt to wean oneself of the aimless chatter of the self.

According to Ibn 'Arabi, w'al-samt yawarith ma'rifat allah ta'alla ["silence bequeaths knowledge of god most high"], Hilyat al-Abdal.

The practitioner of this discipline strives during the winter months to speak less, listen more and, in the process, open the heart to new possibilities that the noise of the street drowns out.

The noise of the street (and of the flat screens that echo it) is unconsciously internalized and, along with it, the anxieties of those who have chosen busyness (business) over the peaceful stillness to be found in what Dante called "the deep lake of the heart."

The search for that lake is best pursued in silent moments stolen from the everyday--and wordlessly returned to it.

Take refuge in the Kabir Karakhana and work in silence:

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech...

Traditional Arts of the Persianate Cultural Sphere: Music of the Bakhshis of Khorasan

Traditional Arts of the Persianate Cultural Sphere: Carpets

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: A 1st Century CE Greek Description of Umm al-Dunya (from the Bay of Bengal to the Adriatic)

Beauty Will Save The World

Ecstatic Humanism

I confess that I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness--in a landscape selected at random--is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern--to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal...I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 139, 297.

The urge and impulse to worship ("worth-ship") arises not from a failure to understand the nature of things but from its successful apprehension. A healthy (i.e., creative) emotional response to that successful apprehension is an ecstatic awareness of the human condition; poetically articulated (i.e., evoked), such a response may yield an ecstatic humanism constructed upon a Nabokovian "thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern."

(Recall the poetic witness of Kabir).

Religion, on the other hand, is (as Feuerbach taught) a kind of projection outward of personal hopes and fears upon the blank screen of human destiny. Religion is organized magic, institutionalized wishful thinking, communal "whistling past the graveyard."

Poetry evokes; science explains. In making possible the scientific study of human religiosity, Feuerbach also made it possible to distinguish religion (the struggle to come to terms with fate) from ecstatic evocation. The ability to make this distinction does not support an inference that human religiosity and ecstatic awareness of the human condition are necessarily incompatible--far from it. Historically speaking, the two modes frequently coexist and even complement one another. Religious institutions and practices may underwrite ecstasy. But where poetry tends to evoke, religion tends to invoke. The former is a confession of helplessness in the face of natural facts; the latter is an assertion of the will-to-power over natural facts (magical/wishful thinking).

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus proposition 4.1212

"What can be shown, cannot be said" [Was gezeigt werden kann, kann nicht gesagt werden].

And what "shows" itself es ist das Mystiche [is what we mean by "the mystical," T L-P prop. 6.522].

The "showing" [gezeigt] may be experienced as a "shining" [scheinen]. Hence the Pragmatist's need to abandon the "reality/appearance distinction".

Sing, Kabir!

Where's his doorway, dervish?
How does the great king dress?
Where does he travel?
Where does he camp?
What's this form
you bow to?
I'm asking you, Mr. Muslim,
with your red and yellow
rags and robes.

Now you, Mr. Qazi,
what kind of work is that,
going from house to house
chopping heads?
Who gave the order for chickens and goats?
Who told you to swing the knife?
Aren't you afraid to be called a sage
as you read your verses
and dupe the world?
Kabir says, this high-class Muslim
wants to force his way on the world.

Fast all day,
kill cows at night,
here prayers, there blood--
does this please God?

from The Bijak of Kabir, tr. Linda Hess and Shukdeo Singh (2002), pp. 87-88.

Join the Weavers' Guild (futuwwa julaha)

From The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition:

Kabīr was a North Indian mystic and poet (d. ca. 1448). Although ... regarded as one of the most influential saint-poets of medieval Northern India, there is very little authentic information concerning his life. We can reliably state that he was born in Benares to a family of low-caste Muslim weavers called d̲j̲ulāhās, probably in the opening years of the 9th/15th century. Beyond this, various hagiographies of Kabīr, depending on the authors’ sectarian affiliation, make competing claims that he was a Muslim Ṣūfī, a Hindu with liberal Vainava leanings or a champion of Hindu-Muslim unity who rejected institutionalised forms of both Islam and Hinduism.

Kabīr’s fame is based on the numerous couplets (dohās) and songs (padas) attributed to him and called Kabīrvāṇīs, or “words of Kabīr”. Written in a caustic colloquial style in a mediaeval Hindi dialect and sung in folk melodies, these compositions have been an integral part of oral religious literature in North India, being recited by Muslims and Hindus alike. Selections of Kabīr’s verses have been incorporated into the Ādi granth, the scripture of the Sikh community, as well as the Pāñčvāṇī, the hymnal of the Dādūpanthī sect. The Kabīr Panthīs, "the followers of the path of Kabīr", have a compilation of his poetry called the Bijāk. Since Kabīr’s verses, like most medieval Indian devotional poetry, were initially transmitted orally and recorded in writing only later, there are serious doubts concerning the authenticity of much of the corpus attributed to him.

Kabīr, who was influenced by various religious currents including forms of Ṣūfīsm and tantric yoga expounded by the Nāth yogis, is regarded as the pioneer poet of the sant movement that swept across North India in the 15th century. The sants, or poet-saints, were participants in a grass-roots religious reformation that rejected the worship of multiple deities in favour of an esoteric form of religious practice whose goal was union with the one attributeless (nirguṇa) God. They also questioned the efficacy of religious rituals and validity of scriptural authority. Expressing themselves in vernacular poems, the sants conceived of the human-divine relationship in terms of viraha, or yearning, longing love. Union with the Divine could be attained by anyone, regardless of caste, through meditation on the divine name and with the guidance of a guru.

In poems attributed to him, Kabīr is particularly harsh in his attacks on the representatives of institutionalised religion, the Hindu brāhmin and the Muslim mullā or ḳāḍī, whose bookish learning and rituals he considered entirely useless in the spiritual quest. After his death, some of Kabīr’s disciples organised themselves into a sect, the Kabīr Panth. Notwithstanding Kabīr’s anti-institutional and anti-ritualistic stance, at the sect’s central monastry in Benares, both monks and lay people engage in a ritualised recitation of Kabīr’s poems and make offerings to an image of their master.

(Ali S. Asani)

(Qur'an 48:4)

Kabir: Sant Mat Without the Cant

Saints, I see the world is mad.
If I tell the truth they rush to beat me,
if I lie they trust me.

Some modern commentators have tried to present Kabir as a synthesizer of Hinduism and Islam; but the picture is a false one. While drawing on various traditions as he saw fit, Kabir emphatically declared his independence from both major religions of his countrymen, vigorously attacked the follies of both, and tried to kindle the fire of a similar autonomy and courage in those who claimed to be his disciples. In a famous couplet he declares:

I've burned my own house down,
the torch is in my hand.
Now I'll burn down the house of anyone
who wants to follow me.

If Kabir insisted on anything, it was on the penetration of everything inessential, every layer of dishonesty and delusion. The individual must find the truth in his own body and mind, so simple, so direct, that the line between "him" and "it" disappears...he persistently evades our attempts to define or explain him. Was he a Hindu? A Muslim? Were his ancestors Buddhists? Did he practice yoga? Did he have a guru? Who was it? The impossibility of ascertaining these basic facts about Kabir's religious life is part of his legacy of teaching.

The Bijak of Kabir, Linda Hess (2002), 5-7.

Umm al-Dunya

Egyptians have historically endowed Cairo with this honorific title ("Mother of the World"). But, with all due respect to that great city, I think we need to expand our civilizational horizons a bit. Readers are invited to consult my post "A Tale of Three Cities (and Possibly Four)" to get a better idea of where I am going with this. Those who fail to locate Athens on the above map have forgotten Alexander (note that Alexandria is marked, whereas Cairo is not).

Here we see the heartland of pre-modern world theosophical invention--a perennial source of rich cultural fruit (flowering in art, science, and religion)--where hedgehog and fox eat from the same dish.

Bly On Kabir

Kabir mocks passivity toward holy texts, toward popular gurus, and the passive practice of Yoga, but we must understand that he himself is firmly in the guru tradition and that he followed an intricate path, with fierce meditative practices, guided by energetic visualizations of "sun" and "moon" energies...These labors have not been experienced yet in the West, or have been experienced, but discussed at length only in alchemy. He has, moreover, enigmatic or puzzle poems that no contemporary commentator fully understands. I love his poems, and am grateful every day for their gift.

Another Version of Kabir by Robert Bly

The Holy One disguised as an old person in a cheap hotel
goes out to ask for carfare.

But I never seem to catch sight of him.
If I did, what would I ask him for?

He has already experienced what is missing in my life.

Kabir says: I belong to this old person.
Now let the events about to come, come!

Robert Bly's Versions of Kabir

Friend, wake up! Why do you go on sleeping?
The night is over--do you want to lose the day the same way?
Other women who managed to get up early have already found an elephant or a jewel...
So much was lost already while you slept...
and that was so unnecessary!

The one who loves you understood, but you did not.
You forgot to make a place in your bed next to you.
Instead you spent your life playing.
In your twenties you did not grow
because you did not know who your Lord was.
Wake up! Wake up! There's no one in your bed--
He left you during the long night.

Kabir says: The only woman awake is the woman who has heard the flute!

Pir Dastgir Sahib, India

Kabir's "Simple State"

Absorption in the singular facticity of "something now is." Unmoved by all that obscures this singular facticity from concentrated view in the "mind's eye" (i.e., by the plural facticity Kabir called maya).

At rest, counting beads.

Mosque With Ten Doors

Broadcast, O mullah,
your merciful call to prayer--
you yourself are a mosque
with ten doors.



Make your mind your Mecca,
your body, the Ka'aba--
your Self itself
is the Supreme Master.

In the name of Allah, sacrifice
your anger, error, impurity--
chew up your senses,
become a patient man.

The lord of the Hindus and Turks
is one and the same--
why become a mullah,
why become a sheikh?

Kabir says, brother,
I've gone crazy--
quietly, quietly like a thief,
my mind has slipped into the simple state.

[Tr. Vinay Dharwadker].

Kabir At His Loom (1398-1448)

What's visible isn't real--
what's real is ineffable.

What can't be seen can't be known--
what hasn't been said can't be believed.

The man who knows uses words and signs--
an ignoramus gapes in astonishment.

Some concentrate on a god without a form--
some on a god who has an outward shape.

The man of knowledge understands--
the Creator's different from both of these.

The Creator's love remains invisible--
His syllables don't fall on human ears.

Kabir says, the man who comprehends
both love and renunciation--

he doesn't read the text of death,
the text of the world's extermination.

[Tr. Vinay Dharwadker].

Wherever You Are

There it is.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus propositions 6.41, 6.42, and 6.421

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value--and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world.

Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher.

It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental [Die Ethik ist transzendental]. (Ethics and aesthetics are one.)

Something Now Is [i.e., wujud]

Beyond that, there is only argument.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus propositions 6.371, 6.44, and 7

At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.

Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.