Barber: Adagio For Strings

A Tale Of Odysseus

Al-Andalus Lives

Rilke in Ronda.

Wendell Berry

Spiritual Success

"Tasawwuf" means to assume the mantle of spiritual poverty. It is an admission of weakness, an embrace of defeat.

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

~ Matthew 5:3 (KJV)

Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.

~ Luke 17:33 (KJV).

A doctrine abandoned by most Christians long ago.

Abu Bakr al-Kalabadhi (10th century, CE) wrote a little book about this subject [Kitab al-Ta'arruf li-madhhab ahl al-tasawwuf] that continues to be read 1,000 years later.

Little is known of its author.

Such is the nature of spiritual "success."

Rilke In Cordoba

Since my visit to Cordoba I am of an almost violent anti-Christianity. I am reading the Koran, which in certain passages assumes a voice within me that I inhabit with as much force as the wind in a pipe organ. Here [in Spain] you think you are in a Christian country, but this is long over. It was Christian as long as one had the courage to commit murder a hundred steps outside of town where the countless modest stone crosses grow...Now boundless indifference reigns here: empty churches, forgotten churches, starving chapels--really one should no longer take a seat at this table after a meal's been finished and pretend that the finger bowls still lying about would contain nourishment. The fruit has been sucked dry; now it's time, to put it bluntly, to spit out the skins. And yet Protestants and American Christians always create a new brew with this tea that has been steeping for two millennia. Mohammad was certainly the closest alternative, bursting like a river through prehistoric mountains toward the one god with whom one can converse so magnificently every morning without the telephone "Christ" into which people continually call "Hello, who's there?" and there's no answer.

~ Rilke to Marie von Thurn und Taxis, December 17, 1921.



One wonders how Rilke could have visited Spain over four hundred years after the fall of Granada and continued to feel the vibrations of al-Andalus pulsing beneath the surface. Perhaps it was his disappointment with Catholic Christianity that shaped his sensibilities. Whatever it was, he minced no words.

Al-Musannif

Malamati Nikolayevich Renegado.



Lexicographer of the Lost Ancestral Languages of the Heart.

I Am That Poppy

Oh, dark-spotted flower, you endured pain all night,/Waiting for the wine of dawn; I am that poppy/That was born with the burning spot of suffering.

~ Hafez, tr. R. Bly and L. Lewisohn.

The Malamati Way

Those who subscribe to the Malamati Way love all of their righteous forebears: those who have known the sufferings and satisfactions of a pietistic discipline in which a reputation for personal piety is one of the chief obstacles to its realization.



The Malamatiyya trace their lineage to Adam's utter humanity.

To Father Abraham's rational rejection of his inherited gods.

To Jacob the Angel-Wrestler; Job the Questioner; and Jonah, the prophet who fled.



To Socrates's unrelenting search for knowledge and Diogenes's quest for an honest man.

To Jesus, who broke with the self-satisfied piety of the Scribes and the Pharisees.

To Bayazid who declared "Glory be to me!"



To Abol-Hasan al-Kharaqani who welcomed all who came to his Khanaqa without regard to their religious confession.

To Hafez of the wine-shop.

And, of course, to Muhammad who challenged the Meccan aristocracy's commodification of their city's ancient shrine.

Poetry And Prophecy

Poetically man dwells, but prophetically man shakes the foundations...

How much of our lives consists in nothing but attempts to look away from the end! We often succeed in forgetting the end. But ultimately we fail; for we always carry the end with us in our bodies and our souls. And often whole nations and cultures succeed in forgetting the end. But ultimately they fail too, for in their lives and growth they always carry the end with them. Often the whole earth succeeds in making its creatures forget its end, but sometimes these creatures feel that their earth is beginning to grow old, and that its foundations are beginning to shake. For the earth always carries its end within it.

~ Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations.

In The Neighborhood Of The Deeply Rooted

Deep within the figurative Forest of Divine Names, the Dervish takes refuge from the late modern madness of imperial Christendom and Islamdom's recent casualties.



Poetically man dwells, if he dwells at all, in the neighborhood of the deeply rooted.

The Contingency Of Selfhood

Richard Rorty, 1986.

Anarcho-Humanism