A Song Of Myself

To be part-Irish is to have an ancestral memory of the salty North Atlantic cutting black rock beneath brooding skies and to think, "I could live here, content, on this savage coast." It is to hear the old Irish tongue beating in that surf and pushing up through the green shoots that tenaciously root in those rocks and in the cry of gulls as they dive from the cliffs, headlong into the wind.

To be part-Dervish is to be perfectly at ease with religious inscrutability for, as the hare advises the other animals in Mevlana's tale, there are three things it is best never to mention: your departure, your gold, and your religion [Mesnavi, 1: 1047].

Moreover, it is to be aware of the fact that "religion" is a term of administrative convenience first encountered in the history of Imperial Christianity. Its survival in scholarly circles and among government bureaucrats does little to recommend it. Ontologically speaking, the word "religion" means nothing at all.

Every Dervish is a pilgrim and a stranger, traveling through this wearisome land...

To be a liberal ironist is to disavow any claim to possess "final truth," to recognize that we inhabit endless realms of interpretation, to affirm that literary intelligence redeems the world in the eyes of a capacious consciousness, and that, to those same eyes, cruelty is worse than death.

To be a latent Existentialist is to regard life as a "project" and to accept the responsibility to invent and re-invent one's "self" as long as you have the strength to draw another breath.

It is to read and re-read the so-called "Existentialists" in order to experience the sweet suffering that continuous confrontation with their call to "authentic" living inevitably brings.

A liberal ironist is necessarily a radical hermeneut; to sharpen that posture with a Du Boisian edge is merely to insist that, as far as possible, power relations must be critically examined from the standpoint of the weak, the oppressed, the disenfranchised, and history told from the standpoint of its "losers."

It is also to acknowledge that race, though a social construction in its essence, remains a key signifier for many and, therefore, cannot be discounted in hermeneutical practice.