Something Wonderful Will Happen

My God, It's Full Of Stars

Devotional Reading

Bloomian ruminations.

The Malamati Piety Of Melville's Father Mapple

Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour!

~Moby Dick, "The Sermon."

The Way Of Ishmael

With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.
~Ishmael

Call Me Ishmael

Ishmael was raised a Presbyterian, but by the time he set sail on the Pequod, his "everlasting itch for things remote" had converted him (if you will) into a staunch Contrarian.



Counter-clockwise circumambulation unwinds the world.

Claim Your Birthright

Acquire your tastes. But whatever you do, O Ishmaelites, do both.

The Sign Of Ishmael

The Book of J gives us an Ishmael who is a wild and contentious hunter; his importance in the unfolding of the Divine plan is suppressed. Perhaps this is to be expected from an author anxious to legitimize the younger son of Abraham (i.e., Isaac) at the elder's expense. In any case, to be born under the Sign of Ishmael is to be born under the Sign of Contradiction.



God bless the disenfranchised contrarians who insist upon Ishmaelite and Gnostic constructions of Biblical religion!

Hakim Bey/Peter Lamborn Wilson

Wisdom Is All In The Timing

Knowing when to be the Knight and when to be the Squire.



~ Ibn al-Waqt.

Khurasan

Wisdom's heartland.

A Classic

Harold Bloom on Jesus and Yahweh: the Charlie Rose interview.

Whither Europe?

That a moralist of Andre Malraux's stature could sink into near oblivion within a few decades of his death speaks volumes for the current state of European culture.

Hear Wittgenstein: "...the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current of European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any." (Culture & Value, 1930).



No worries, though; we can always blame these people for Europe's failures:

Anarchist Sufi Dervishes

Istanbul.

Sehnsucht

Independence Day

The veils cast upon us.



The chains that weigh us down.



Strength is acquired through struggle.

The Choice

Gnostic Advice

The Archons rule.



Trim your lamp.