Vocation Of The Poet

One of the most potent images from the Book Of J is that of Jacob wrestling with the Stranger. It is clearly a tale appropriated from lost oral traditions and may have referred originally to the dangers associated with travel by night in the desert--when jinn are active and the local spirits that haunt significant geographic features (in this case, "Jabbok's Ford") emerge to defend their territory.

The J-writer wove this image into a fragment about the patriarch Jacob, his wounding, and his assumption of a new name: Isra-El (one who travels by night into the realm of the High God). The Stranger bestows this name upon Jacob after wounding him in the dark. With the rising of the sun, the Stranger departs and Jacob is irrevocably changed.

Few images could be more Heideggerian, for critical to the German thinker's project was "developing a manner of thinking through language, that is, thinking that opens up new avenues and discovers unexpected insights less by way of concepts or arguments than by a specific way of listening to and being guided by language and its intrinsic ingenuity." ~ Krzysztof Ziarek, Language After Heidegger (2013), 1.

The agon with language that we find spread across the thousands of pages of prose he produced in his long and productive life puts one in touch with the lisan al-ghaib--the "other-worldly voice" (an epithet of Hafez appropriated by Frank Herbert for his Dune novels) that can be heard only when one "listens to and is guided by the intrinsic ingenuity of language" at work and at play.

Heidegger might have objected to the wrestling metaphor, preferring instead something more irenic (attunement cannot be acquired by force). And yet it strikes me that effort is expended, struggle entered, either way; and that is the point of the story.

Attending to lisan al-ghaib is the true vocation of the poet.


Image: Ken Katzen

Literary Intelligence Redeems The World

A Nod To Trilling

Not the "last great critic" (one hopes) but unquestionably a very good one.

How To Await The Arrival Of The Barbarians

Seneca's epistles.


A lovely pinot.


Mozart's Sonata for violin and piano in G major, K.301/293a (No.18).

Dervish Piety And Religion

Piety, as I practice it, is nothing more than an acknowledgment that every human life occupies a place in the food chain.

Religion, as I practice it, is nothing more than an insistence that every human life be regarded as possessing greater significance than the place it occupies in the food chain.

Piety has to do with submitting one's intellect to the sheer contingency of human life.

Religion involves worth-ship of the possible: it is ek-static, the product of the passional self oriented towards love and justice.

As the Roman Stoics understood, piety is the product of the rational self.

Why, what else can I, a lame old man, do but sing hymns to God? If, indeed, I were a nightingale, I should be singing as a nightingale; if a swan, as a swan. But as it is, I am a rational being, therefore I must be singing hymns of praise to God. This is my task; I do it, and will not desert this post, as long as it may be given me to fill it; and I exhort you to join me in this same song.

~ Epictetus, Discourses, I:16. Tr. W. A. Oldfather.

The Polyglot Heart

From a wide variety of sources, the Dervish cobbles together the languages of the polyglot heart.

The Ahl al-Suffa (Spiritual Elite) - Abdal Hakim Murad

Song Of The Dervish

Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path that never will be trod again. Wanderer, there is no road--Only wakes upon the sea.

Caminante, son tus huellas el camino, y nada más; caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Al andar se hace camino, y al volver la vista atrás se ve la senda que nunca se ha de volver a pisar. Caminante, no hay camino, sino estelas en la mar.

― Antonio Machado, Campos de Castilla

Staunchly Into The Ineluctable!

~ Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI, first notebook # 94.

Mevlana Muses On The Story Of 'Umar And The Minstrel

Mevlana picks up the tale of 'Umar and the minstrel in the graveyard at Masnavi Bk. I: 2161-2198.

Here,'Umar is startled by the minstrel's strange reaction to the good news of God's favor and bids him to stop weeping. "Your regrets about the past," he tells him, "are not healthy. You seek to repent for the years in which you were preoccupied with yourself; but when will you repent from your repentance? First it was the harp that beguiled you, now you are beguiled by regret for your past beguilement."

At that moment,'Umar became for the minstrel a mirror into which he could look and see himself embedded in mystery. He stopped weeping over his past and fell into bewilderment.

In Nicholson's translation, Mevlana muses:

A seeking and searching beyond (all) seeking and search: I know not (how to describe it); (if) you know, tell!
Words and feelings beyond (all) feelings and words--he had become drowned in the beauty of the Lord of majesty...
Now that the story of the old man's (spiritual) experiences has come to this point, the old man and his experiences have withdrawn behind the veil.
The old man has shaken his skirt free from talk and speech: half of the tale has remained in our mouth (has not been told)...
In chase of the spiritual forest be (as) a falcon, be one who gambles his soul (life) away, like the sun [Shams] of this world...

The Last God

The last god is not the end; the last god is the other beginning of the immeasurable possibilities of our history.

~ Martin Heidegger, Contributions, 326.



It follows, then, that with each new beginning we signal the passing by of the last god.



The moment of decision, the Hour of Judgment, is not reached at the end of a line, nor by a predestined cycle of cosmic recurrence; eschatology can break out at any moment.

~ Norman O. Brown, "The Apocalypse of Islam."

The World Remade

Deliberately, moment by moment...

Masnavi

Suleyman Dede, 1976.

Dervish teaching tales defy single interpretations. Stories are told and then discussed in sohbet (the gathering of the dervishes for conversation). There are three (stock) characters in the story found at Masnavi, Bk. I, 2161-2198: God, God’s Caliph, and a wandering troubadour of love. The scene (a graveyard) is also quite common. Some of the themes for contemplation include: the relation between the lover and the Beloved; wealth and poverty; power and weakness; insight (gnosis); mortality; faithfulness and infidelity; mindfulness and distraction.

The Masnavi is one tale like this after another, continually interrupted with digressions, asides, songs of praise, open-ended questions, admonitions to silence, and more. It is known throughout the world as “the Qur’an in Persian.” It is sung and sets people to whirling counterclockwise—the great unraveling.

God bless Coleman Barks, but he does not do Mevlana justice.