Wine, Lamp, And Witness

After a time of renunciation and humble devotion
it is time for wine, the lamp, and the Witness.

--Mahmud Shabistari, Garden of Mystery, tr. R. Darr, line 801.

The Challenge Of Islam

For those who are too Jewish to be Christian,

too Christian to be Jews, and too Gnostic to compromise...

there is the challenge of Islam.

Martin Heidegger's "Last God"

The god wholly other than
past ones and especially other than
the Christian one.

Contributions, p. 319.

Of The Event

The resonating

The interplay

The leap

The grounding

The future ones

The last god


--Martin Heidegger, Contributions, p. 10.

Valentinian Gnosis

What makes us free is the knowledge who we were, what we have become; where we were, wherein we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what is birth, and what rebirth.

--Clemens Alex., Exc. ex Theod., 78.2.

The Mantle Of The Dervish

Who should wear the mantle of the dervish?

None but those prepared to shrug it off.










Iranian dervish cloak, c. mid-19th century

The Issue

The issue then is neither to describe nor explain, neither to promulgate nor to teach.

--Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 6.

Ruba'iyat Of Omar Khayyam

220
One lot cogitates on the way of religion,
Another ponders on the path of mystical certainty;
But I fear one day the cry will go up,
'O you fools! Neither this nor that is the way!'

108
It is a flash from the stage of non-belief to faith,
There is no more than a syllable between doubt and certainty:
Prize this precious moment dearly,
It is our life's only fruit.

Tr., Avery and Heath-Stubbs.

Genius

The question of genius was a perpetual concern of Ralph Waldo Emerson...For Emerson, genius was the god within, the self of "Self-Reliance." That self, in Emerson, therefore is not constituted by history, by society, by languages. It is aboriginal...

Emerson and ancient Gnosticism agree that what is best and oldest in each of us is no part of the Creation, no part of Nature or the Not-Me. Each of us presumably can locate what is best in herself or himself, but how do we find what is oldest?

The ancient answer is that there is a god within us, and the god speaks. I think that a materialist definition of genius is impossible, which is why the idea of genius is so discredited in an age like our own, where materialist ideologies dominate. Genius, by necessity, invokes the transcendental and the extraordinary, because it is fully conscious of them. Consciousness is what defines genius: Shakespeare, like his Hamlet, exceeds us in consciousness, goes beyond the highest order of consciousness that we are capable of knowing without him.

Gnosticism, by definition, is a knowing rather than a believing. In Shakespeare, we have neither a knower nor a believer, but a consciousness so capacious that we cannot find its rival elsewhere: in Cervantes or Montaigne, in Freud or in Wittgenstein. Those who choose (or are chosen) by one of the world religions frequently posit a cosmic consciousness to which they assign supernatural origins. But Shakespearean consciousness, which transmutes matter into imagination, does not need to violate nature. Shakespeare's art is itself nature, and his consciousness can seem more the product of his art than its producer.

There, at the end of the mind, we are stationed by Shakespearean genius: a consciousness shaped by all the consciousnesses that he imagined. He remains, presumably forever, our largest instance of the use of literature for life, which is the work of augmenting awareness.

The question we need to put to any writer must be: does she or he augment our consciousness, and how is it done? I find this a rough but effectual test: however I have been entertained, has my awareness been intensified, my consciousness widened and clarified? If not, then I have encountered talent, not genius. What is best and oldest in myself has not been activated.

[Selections from Harold Bloom, Genius (2002), 11-12].

Heed The Longship's Swimming Tongue

It said, ‘Lie down
in the word-hoard, burrow
the coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.


Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.

Keep your eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known.’

--From Seamus Heaney, "North."

Lines From Hafez: Ghazal 49

Prudence and proper thoughts lie far from the dervish way;
Better to fill your breast with fire and your eye with tears.

--Tr. Elizabeth Gray.

Apprenticed To The Tentmaker

One learns to think, to write, to drink, to sing.

A Defense Of Poetry

Unacknowledged legislators of the world.

The Neo-Dark Age

Who could have anticipated that the Information Age would turn out to be an Age of Ignorance, or a new Dark Age?




The glut of information is so overwhelming, the noise to signal ratio so completely out of balance, that we are, all of us, adrift in a sea of senseless data.

Only those who can make a connection with their daimon have any hope of navigating the chaos, of finding ports of refuge in the Howling.

Blake taught that the Poetic Genius resides in every human being, but the Genius of most people sleeps in its tent of battered clay. Few hear the call to rise up.

Fewer still find their way to the House of Song.

David Whyte: On Belonging

How To Live. What To Do.

Last evening the moon rose above this rock
Impure upon a world unpurged.
The man and his companion stopped
To rest before the heroic height.

Coldly the wind fell upon them
In many majesties of sound:
They that had left the flame-freaked sun
To seek a sun of fuller fire.

Instead there was this tufted rock
Massively rising high and bare
Beyond all trees, the ridges thrown
Like giant arms among the clouds.

There was neither voice nor rested image,
No chorister, nor priest. There was
Only the great height of the rock
And the two of them standing still to rest.

There was the cold wind and the sound
It made, away from the muck of the land
That they had left, heroic sound
Joyous and jubilant and sure.

Wallace Stevens