Enigmata

When we draw the card of the wandering eremite, we are obliged to ask ourselves if we have found a way out; if the answer is negative, the eremite urges us to look within...

There is value to studying enigmata: as Rimbaud advised George Izambard, one arrives at the unknown "through the disordering of all the senses" (Letter of May 13, 1871). Close the door to the city, as Suhrawardi would say, and open the door to the wilderness. The Suhrawardian wilderness welcomes us with its weird intensity, and we hesitate. Why? Because he was a Muslim who lived in Iran in the 12th century and we have been culturally conditioned (not to say indoctrinated) to think that nothing good could possibly come from (1) a Muslim, (2) an Iranian, and (3) the 12th century.

And yet we read Blake with only occasional flinching, or Thoreau's passing strange interjection in Walden, apropos of nothing obvious, that "I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail," and do not close the book then and there and flee the premises.

Enigmata challenge us to expand our otherwise narrow conceptions of what the world contains and of what may possibly contain the world. They are resources for living a life as Thoreau and Blake and Rimbaud and, yes, Suhrawardi lived: of "ecstatic witness" (see Alan Hodder's book of that name).

I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.

--Arthur Rimbaud, "Phrases," Illuminations, tr. Louise Varese.