Know Ye Now, Bulkington?

Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington.

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God--so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing--straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

Van Morrison - Astral Weeks

Light In The Darkness

Two books to be read in tandem.

First: Walter Brueggemann's The Prophetic Imagination. Although it is more homiletic than scholarly and Biblical exegesis is conflated with history and sociology, it still manages to provide a foundational understanding of Biblical religion's place within the Ancient Near Eastern Prophetic tradition. And, as homily, it is terrific.



Next: If one wishes to complete the circle rather than remain a Know-Nothing in the dark, Norman O. Brown's The Challenge of Islam: The Prophetic Tradition is the perfect complement to Brueggemann's book. As a scholar of Islam, Brown was an autodidact and makes occasional errors of fact to which autodidacts are prone. Moreover, he was completely dependent upon translations from Arabic and Persian. Nevertheless, being Norman O. Brown, he was also capable of deep insights that scholars trained in the field rarely acquire.



Both books are based upon lectures. Brueggemann re-worked his lecture notes into chapters and the book, originally published in 1978, is now in a second edition. Brown gave his lectures around 1980 but did not re-work his typescripts into book chapters and so the editor (Jerome Neu) essentially published transcripts. Even so, both books are light in the darkness.

The Man Of God

The man of god is born under the sign of contradiction, O Shamsi-Din!

The man of god lives in the Fourfold but belongs only to the god beyond it.

He rides his pony out of the Void in stately procession, a king beneath his tattered dervish cloak.

Drunk without wine, sated without meat, the man of god needs neither food nor sleep.

He subsists in a state of blessed bewilderment.

A sea without a shore, scholar without a book, he is beyond both faith and infidelity.

No one knows the man of god, O Shamsi-Din!

It is up to you to find him.



~ Lines from Mevlana's Diwan, rendered from the original Persian.

Dorothy Day

Our Problems Stem From Our Acceptance of This Filthy, Rotten System.

Modernity

She Gives Me Religion

Fly, O Bird Of The Heart!

Fly, O Bird of the Heart! Fly! Hasten straight into the deep recesses of the Divine Self.
You have escaped from the cage of your body; now finish the journey home on outspread wing.



From the bitter water travel with ease to the water of life; with ease, return to your soul’s seat of honor,
from the low station of the entranceway, where shoes are removed with the dust of the street.



~ A translation of lines from Mevlana's Diwan.

Mariners, Renegades & Castaways

What Melville did was to place within the covers of one book a presentation of a whole civilization so that any ordinary human being today can read it in a few days and grasp the essentials of the world he lived in. To do this a man must contain within his single self, at one and the same time, the whole history of the past, the most significant experiences of the world around him, and a clear vision of the future. Of all this he creates an ordered whole. No philosopher, statesman, scientist or soldier exceeds him in creative effort.

~ C.L.R. James, M,R & C, 115.



Such is the Divine spark. Story-tellers find a way to fan that spark into flame.

Weapons Of The Weak

In the never-ending war against banality, sentimentality, and cant, what weapons has the dervish at her disposal?



Complex fictions.

Cards On The Table

Don Quixote is my Old Testament. Moby Dick, my New. The Arabic Qur’an (for there is no other, nothing can compare) my Book of Common Prayer and Meditation. From it flows the classical Persian literature that set Emerson’s mind on fire (not to mention Thoreau’s and Whitman’s).

Although properly tamed in the writings of dutiful white literary critics, Cervantes and Melville were subversives. Cervantes tells us that the "true" author of his history of the Knight of the Rueful Countenance was one Sidi Hamid Benengeli, an Arab Muslim sage. And, of course, Melville’s opening line: Call me Ishmael. Herman was in earnest when he named his narrator.

Modern Western civilization has been built upon the suppression of the Muslim Other. Emblematic of this tendency is the appropriation of the J-Writer's exile of Ishmael in favor of Isaac (in the Hebrew Bible). This is where the cover-up of the primal crime—the stolen patrimony—began. Norman O. Brown was right: the only way to come to terms with the world that Euro-America has built is by psychoanalyzing it.

Anyone who still wonders how it is that Ahab has taken the helm has not been reading the right stuff—or has been drinking the Kool-Aid served up in school and so mistakes the shadows on the wall for reality.



Sic transit gloria mundi.

Mahmoud Shabestari

Enter Here

The Lee Shore

Know ye now, Bulkington?

The Madness Of San Miguel

Unamuno, old friend, I will never understand why I return to you again and again. If anyone took seriously the Emersonian adage that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," it was Unamuno. He is a source, therefore, of perpetual frustration but also of delight. He belongs among the mad Friends of God, if only he knew...

To believe in God is to long for his existence, and, furthermore, to act as if God did exist; it is to live by this longing and to make it the inner wellspring of our action. This longing or hunger for divinity begets hope; hope begets faith, and faith and hope together beget charity. Out of this longing is born our sense of beauty, finality, goodness.

~ The Tragic Sense of Life, Kerrigan trans., 202-203.

The mad Friends of God (al-majdhub) were honored in classical Islamic society. Some even founded "schools" of divine madness for those whose longing for the divine rendered them unfit for polite society.

Unamuno found no such place in the Spanish Catholicism that he defended with so much vigor in his writings. The title of Margaret Thomas Rudd's 1963 biography of Unamuno, The Lone Heretic, says it all.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Forty Years In The Wilderness

Part Irish, part dervish...



Liberal ironist, latent Existentialist...



Radical hermeneut.



Let flowers bloom where least expected...



Beyond faith and infidelity, here's to 40 more!

The Ungraspable Phantom Of Life