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A December 27, 2009
follow-up comment to William Irwin Thompson’s |
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Returning to this thread…what
with consciously modulating the imamite density of my current studies, last week a text hurriedly chose me
for bus-reading from the New Books section on the second floor of my foremost
winter temple (the Eugene Public Library, sister to ‘my cathedral’ of late, Black
Sun Books). It was The Book of
Dead Philosophers, by Simon
Critchley, Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the New School for Social
Research in NY and who is, I believe, an English expatriate. I like to think
Mr. Critchley’s provenance helps explain the character of his seriously
entertaining meditation on the lives and deaths of nearly 200 philosophers –
my funny bone twanged at first dip. Khezr is, of course, the patron saint of
England and in this regard I wonder whether Simon Critchley Esq. and I share
an atavistic affinity for addressing the question posed by N.O. Brown in Apocalypse
& Metamorphosis: “Who is
George?” The patron saint of militant comedy? Here’s Critchley on Polemo of
Laodicea: ‘Polemo loved to declaim and vowed, “Never shall the sun behold me
reduced to silence!” To make his point, he ordered his family to bury him
alive. As he was being walled into the sepulcher, he cried, “Make haste, make
haste!” When the job was done, his voice could be heard from inside the tomb:
“Give me a body and I will declaim.” ’ Ultimately prostrate stand-up? The closing chapter of
‘Dead Philosophers’ - book-reviewed as, “actually…an utterly serious, deeply
moving, cant-free attempt to return us to the gorgeousness of material
existence, to our creatureliness,
to our clownish bodies, to the only immortality available to us (immersion in
the moment)” - is titled, Last Words, and strikes me as strongly emblematic of a secular personification
of the ‘revealing function of the metaphysical intellect’, an implacable
truth to life referred to religiously as ‘the experience of prophesy’, which
Brown defines as “the essential mode of miraculous conjunction between the lahut and nasut, the divine nature and the human or created condition.” ‘Where the two seas meet’
in this way is where we project our own totality, anticipate our own
eternity, and experience ourselves in our own archetypal dimension. “The
guiding idea,” notes Henry Corbin, “is the idea of a recapitulation or, more
exactly, an integration or reintegration into the whole.” St. George or
Khezr, then, the prototype of prophetic experience, is not an abstract
mystical figure, but an archetype of something essential and ordinary about
us, a natural aspect of being with life where the worldly and spiritual,
earthly and celestial, mix and match. To follow the way of Khezr is therefore
to awaken to the ‘Revelatory Principle’ as Corbin describes it, the Verus
Propheta revealed to each soul in
the form in which each is able to receive it, the hidden concordance
mediating between interior and exterior worlds, all things and all religions. Compare Blake: “The
Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nation’s different reception
of the Poetic Genius, which is every where call’d the Spirit of Prophecy.” Nam et ipse
Verus Propheta ab initio mundi per saeculum currens festinat ad requiem. The prophet of truth, the one true prophet, from
age to age, from the beginning of the world, FW’s “the seim anew”. "Running through the ages since
the beginning of the world, he hastens toward the place of his repose." Christus
aeternus, verus propheta ab initio mundi per saeculum currens. And then, syncretically speaking, we have the
trans-cultural, cross-fertilizing hermeneutics of the contemporary
poet-translator, Clayton Eshleman: “the antiphonal traffic of translation,
for me, opens up a greater assimilative space than monolingual reading”;
George Steiner: “If, as blind poets can, we pass our fingers along the living
edge of words – Spanish words, Russian words, Aramaic words, the syllables of
a singer in Cathay – we shall feel in them the subtle beat of a great current
pulsing from a common center, the final word, made up of all letters and combinations
of letters in all tongues, that is the name of God”; and, Cheetham: “This
fundamental unity of the faculties of human cognition and the world to which
they give access is that
eternal pagan substrate of all religion.” In other words, our
quest for the greater world is a quest for a greater personal vision of the
world we already live in. “It is an apocalypse of mind and eye we need,”
asserts the gardener, John Moriarty, “an apocalypse
that opens the veils of mind and eye, not an apocalypse that pulls down the
stars, that obliterates the sea.” “To become Khezr,” Corbin concludes, “is to
pierce the ‘mystery of the Veil.’ ” Blake, then, is surely
correct when he insists that the distorting mirror of our modern, materialist
cosmologies and assumptions have their sources in the poverties and
impoverishments of single vision: the Fall is not a wandering downwards into
ever-darker and more impoverished realms of independently existing objective
reality but rather a state of perceptual contractedness, or Ulro as he called
it, in which we perceive reality to exist independently of our perceptions of
it, as something hard and rocky that we cannot pierce no matter how much we blitz
it with metaphors. “It would follow,” notes Moriarty, “that we shouldn't be
talking at all about an ontological hierarchy in reality but about a
perceptual hierarchy of occlusion and clarity [a Cycle of Occultation, dawr
al-satyr, and Cycle of Epiphany or
Unveiling, dawr al-kashf] in
how we see reality.” The Darkness is in our seeing. ‘For now we see through a
glass darkly’ (Cor. 1:13). "So the Otherworld is this world?" she
asks. "It's another way of seeing this world," he says. "It's
another way of being in it. The otherness isn't in the world. It is in our
seeing.” The Gospel of Thomas: “Know what is in
front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you.”
And that's why Blake can say, if the doors of perception were cleansed everything
would appear to man as it is, infinite. Training our senses to
recognize such wholeness, even dimly, locates us within a dramatic psychology
where everything has the potential to speak through the agency of the
creative imagination. The mind altering, alters all. It is, then, as a
progressive integration of theophanic vision (what Robert Sardello describes
in Cheetham’s Green Man, Earth Angel as the “theophany of Sophia” - corresponding, I am guessing, to the majmu
' al-nuraynan (‘the confluence of
the two Lights’) of an Islamic ‘theophany of Fatima’) that we must conceive
the evolution of consciousness, a stance toward reality within the power of
each person to perceive, in which unity and totality are given progressive
coalesence (majma'). In Corbin’s
words, it is to begin to sense in “the cognitive function of sympathy,” the
“essential community between visible and invisible things”, the
correspondences or “balances” between the worlds visible to the eyes of flesh
and the worlds visible to the eye of the heart. “Because what else,” Moriarty
asks, “but our pristine faculties is the third eye that Orientals talk
about?” And so, where we had lost
our capacity to see our surroundings for the Paradise they once were and
still are, in a calamity that happened to us as perceivers, the ‘Revelatory
Principle’ now returns us to Paradise in a cognitive and perceptual
recalibration or reintegration in which world-oppositions conjoin in “a kind
of aesthetic state of consciousness” (Peter Lamborn
Wilson). “The rejected image,” Shaun McNieff observes, “…opens to the
unrealized spectrum of the soul’s compassion”, where the outer world and our
innermost depths, batin and zahir, Appearance and Reality, the worldly and the
spiritual, Deus Absconditus and
Deus Revelatus, epiphanic
Figure and Incarnation, mazhar
and hulul, God and humanity,
Bookworm and Emerson’s “Man Thinking”, letter and spirit, human language and
the Word, oriental and occidental, north and south,
‘internal-invisible-latent’ and ‘external-visible-patent’, subjective and
objective, the cycles of the seasons and the cycles of human culture, native
and foreigner, the waters of life and the waters of death, poetry and
politics, philosophy and theology, knowledge and ethics, Averroes and al-Ghazali,
imagination and knowledge, action and contemplation, nubuwwa and walaya, Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft, matter and spirit, works and grace - indeed all
dualism of “two cultures” however defined, are elegantly reconciled in a
reunion into a whole. In this manner, Redemption does not destroy the
terrestrial world (the Zoroastrian Mazdean getik) but re-couples or re-originates it with its
celestial reality (menok)
restoring it to its luminous state, its archetypal dimension. In Zarathustra
redivivus, Paradise in potentia of the da'wat becomes Paridaez Now.
The glorious idealism of Dante’s De Monarchia, Book I, realized, is pure Judeo-Christo-Islamo
eschatology immanentized: “Of all things ordained for our happiness, the
greatest is universal peace.” In a sense, the consuming
challenge of the Prophet, indeed of any authentic tutor, is to embody the
suffering paradox uniting the gift of autonomy with the gift of guidance.
Here’s Brown, again: ‘ “Would to God that all the Lord’s people were Prophets”
– that agonized cry of Moses at the beginning of the prophetic tradition and
repeated by Blake toward its close. It would be wrong to imply that Islam has
resolved the tension between the authority of the past and authenticity of
present experience, between individual autonomy and authoritative guidance:
indeed these issues sustain the ever-living tension between Sunni and Sufi,
between Sunni and Shiite, between sharia (Law) and tariqah
(spiritual way). Islam is the boldest attempt to affirm both poles of this
dilemma inherent in the prophetic tradition, to remain radically open to
visionary experience. Ghazali, the supreme theologian of Islamic consensus,
recognizes a universal call to prophecy, each according to his ability;
prophetic authority can only be recognized by a touch of the prophetic spirit
(‘spiritus per spiritum intellegitur’). For the supreme Sufi poet Rumi
there is an angelic Christos in all of us, waiting to be born – “Nothing can
be accomplished without pain as the guide. The body is like our Lady Mariam
(on whom be peace), for everyone of us has a Jesus within himself who without
pain will never be born, but will return whence he came us, by the same
secret pathway, leaving us bereft.” New Nazareths in us’, and a
transfiguration requiring of us, as the grounded Mr. Critchley avers, “the
acceptance of necessity and the affirmation of the moving constraint of our
mortality.” On that note, I thought
I’d include his ostensibly-secular, concluding Georgics in its delicious
entirety, here. As
I savor this particular excerpt, what shines for me above all is the
spiritedness conspicuous in the author’s words and, as so very often happens
when I encounter ‘non-religious’ souls of all persuasions, I am reminded of
the exquisite ontological inclusiveness of Hazrat Pir-O-Murshid Inayat Khan’s
observation: “It is not belief in God which leads
us to the goal, nor is it the analysis and the knowledge of God that bring us
there. It is the friendship of God.” ‘Friendship with God’ - a
description of that deliberately courteous attunement to Life modeled so
demonstratively by so many friends and colleagues of mine (who are largely, I
suspect, ‘agnostic’ or ‘atheist’ although I have, in the wry sublimity of
Hume to Boswell, Pict sticking it to Angle, “known instances of some very
good men being religious”), whose ‘unconsciously-God-friendly’ irreligiosity
so very clearly manifests the perfection of God that is birthed, perhaps more
than anywhere, in the perfection of friendship. “The
divine path is nothing but courtesy,” affirms Khwaja Baqi Billah. “Courtesy
itself is compassionate action.” Just this morning,
accompanying one of my dearest pals on a check-cashing run, I asked her
whether she believed in God. With acute inner discomfort, I noted the
question felt rudely, preposterously incoherent to me. Attempting to gather
myself, I fumbled: “Actually, I’m not that interested whether you believe or not, but just
now I’m writing about the fact that I have absolutely no idea how many, or
whether or not, my friends ‘believe in God’…and…I suppose I’m curious.”
Concluding a thoughtful reply, she paused, then added, “God is an experience
for me, not an idea.” I couldn’t have stated it more clearly myself, except
to add that my experience of God evolves. For those among us who
are, for whatever legitimate reason, ill at ease with the G-word,
there’s always Shaykh Kabir Helminski’s clarification: “We must understand
that this word ‘God’ has the following synonyms: Reality, The Source of Life,
The Most Subtle State of Everything. The love of God is the love of the
greatest Truth. This quest concerns Reality, not religion. The ‘love of God’
is our essential relationship with what is most real.” And, in the
transcending insight of Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan: “Revisioning God as the
Universe has staggering implications for how we view reality,” and, for that
matter, how we relate to the art of friendship, a fundamentally
supra-religious quest which naturally places its most devoted practitioners
at the leading edge of Teilhard de Chardin’s “irresistible march of
evolution.” Thank goodness no one, and certainly not religion owns adab, nor personal experience, nor the revolutionary
transfiguration in the ontological status of the human being. I am thankful to ‘Dead
Philosophers’ for bringing new names into my world, and for adding to my
contextual understanding supporting the emphatically Mohammedan (peace be
upon him) clarification that anyone faithful to the
trust of God never interposes other objects of worship, be it the idolatry of
a prophet, Savior, Mammon or other things, between themselves and God – not
least because it is stupidly obvious this simply isn’t possible. And so we
have the Gift of the supreme Islamic declaration, the ‘shahadah’, “there is no God but God” - “that Islamic theological dialectic of negation,”
Brown says, “Beyond humanism. Beyond Prometheus…what the sublime as an ethic
and aesthetic can mean…Allah Akbar.” And where
Buddhist teaching similarly says, “Rely on the truth, not on personality,”
(Mahaparininirvana-sutra), and the Christian tradition, ”God was in Christ,
reconciling the world unto himself.” (2 Corinthians, 5:19), Heraclitus
offers: “Don’t listen to me but listen to Logos, and agree that all
things are one,” which is surely the unifying prophetic concordance of Qiyamat
al-Qiyamat, the Resurrection,
insurrection or uprising of Blake’s Jerusalem. I’ve no idea why the
tradition, but Blake’s Jerusalem
was always the last song we would traditionally sing as young rugby players
returning home after an away game. Rugby was my chosen childhood religion
(School/away colors red and white: House/home colors black and green,
whatever that may mean) and perhaps still is. Perhaps that’s why Blake’s poem
is the only hymn I vaguely remember from a decade of daily, forced
churchgoing. Thomas Merton was, as it happens, raised like myself playing
rugby in an English boarding school and, in this formative regard, I sense
that he too was influenced by the Anglican spirit of
Elijah. Of course, somewhat unusually, this Mat Salleh also had the
double-play of sunny Sunni smiles
as initial Opener. As for close-in, formative Shi’ite influence, the father
of one of my mid-to-late 1970’s boarding school peers - a good friend and a
simply delightful gentleman-in-the-making - was, I recall being told, a
figure in SAVAK. The most cultured friend I have, through two decades,
remains an Iraqi, his mother once a senior permanent official with the Arab
League. In recently extending an invitation to visit him and his Lebanese
bride, ‘Insha’Allah,’ he tells me, in the palpably immense personal and
cultural warmth between us. At the end of his life,
Mohammed the Prophet (peace be upon him), in a Seal-setting gesture of
transcendent political genius, called upon the Roman emperor, the Persian or
Sassanian monarch in the east, the emperor of Abyssinia, all the emperors of
the world, to submit to Allah. In essence, this act was a closing wager that
the prophetic mission of his forebears to unify on earth as it is in heaven
had already floundered upon the catastrophic rupture between Judaism and Christianity,
the limitations already built into the emerging structure of Western
triumphalism (Hartmann’s ‘westering of spirit’), and its consequent
scandalous history of schism and persecution (duly noted in the Koran),
altogether compounded by the falling from the true meaning and urgency of
Christ’s example suffered in the forced Judeo-Christian Gnostic retreat from
messianic eschatology into quietistic mysticism. In an act charged with
overwhelming cosmological consequence, Mohammed gave the original Mosaic
theopolitical idea, the rejection of dualism between temporal and spiritual
regimen, novel evolutionary and revolutionary content, breaking once and for
all with Abrahamic ethnocentrism and reprojecting prophetic radicalism on a
new, trans-cultural, universal, world-historical plane. The Eternal Gospel,
or what Corbin describes as “the rigorous unity of the prophetic Revelatory
Principle in history,” (Qu’ran 2:136 “Say: We believe in God and that which
was revealed unto us, and that which was revealed unto Abraham, and Ismail,
and Isaac, and Jacob, and the tribes, and that which Moses and Jesus
received, and that which the Prophets received from their Lord. We make no
distinctions between any of them, and unto Him we surrender,”) is now
identified with a clear political objective; the concessions to Caesar (or
Constantine) are abrogated; prophetic revelation has to replace Roman law
with its own law (“The Revolution of the Saints”). Mohammed, the prophet
armed, commits Islam and its inclusive embrace of Ahl al-Kitab, the community of the Book, the consummation of
the positive religions, to the seizure of political power, globally. As friend and collaborator, Eugene-based Tom Atlee,
remarks of the return of spiritual sense to temporal concerns: “All deep dialogue
is essentially spiritual, whether participants know it or not. Implicitly
spiritual dialogue is as spiritual as explicitly spiritual dialogue. To
empower such dialogue politically is to bring spirit to politics and
governance in a very democratic way. It is to replace the power of special interests -
and even the power of poorly thought-out public opinion - with the power of Life at its deepest and best.” Between long walks,
visiting with friends, Iyengar yoga (in Yoga, my tastes, practice and
distinctions are strictly
orthodox), tai-chi, time in the garden, and associated horticultural
activities (the USDA, among others, has just formally committed to sponsor
and participate in our free, local, Spring Propagation fair) I have been
immersed this celebratory season in the study of Islamic prophetology,
imamology, and the miracle of the Book. “Properly,” says Ezra Pound, “we
should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book
should be a ball of light in one’s hand.” It occurs to me that the timeliness
of my relaxed but dedicated bookishness, especially as it relates to
Anglo-Islamic tricksterhood, is not unrelated to the captivity of Josh
Fattal, one of the three young American trekkers imprisoned by Iranian
authorities for some months now. Josh is not only a precocious, defining
talent in our local foods movement hereabouts, he is also a Friend: I helped
send Josh on his way, wishing him a safe journey and return. I have always
had consummate, if curious, faith in the wisdom of his imprisonment. I also
pray actively for his release. Allah ho Akbar, Allah ho
Akbar. La illaha illa ‘llah hu. As-salaam Aleikum, Aleikum
As-salaam. n (Wi-fied
from Tsunami Books, Eugene, December 27, 2009, in the company of a
shelf, book and page selected at random. ‘The Age of Dante: An Anthology of
Early Italian Poetry Translated into English Verse and with an Introduction
by Joseph Tusiani.’ Baroque Press, 1974. Page 90. “It is the Highest Wisdom
to be thought mad for the Love of Christ.” By Jacopone da Todi.) |
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December 27, 2009 |
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