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.