I am reminded of this magnificent poem by Rumi, one of the chiefest of mystics, the wordplay doesn't really come out in translation. For instance, there is a verse:
Man too shudum too man shudi man tan shudum too jan shudi Ta kas na goyad badazi man digaram too digari
[I am you You are I - I am the body you are the soul So let none say evermore that I am someone you are someone]
There are others, several others (as the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ once said) 'But Hanzala! There are moments and moments' and there are 'Oft in the Stilly Night' other days around us.
There is definitely, in your work, the kind of deep silence that can constitute or trigger-rush what is termed (in the world of religion) as revelation. There is a story in Rumi's masterpiece The Masnavi in which a teenager has a night of soul-anguish though he drunkenly lounge against a rock in the moon 'Displaying his dildo. Wanking at the sun' from Auden's perspective or as in/from what John Hoppner thought of Blake, he:
"Represent a man sitting on the moon - Pissing the Sun out -"
(Bentley jnr, G. E. Blake Records. Oxford, 1969. 58).
Being actually inexpressible as I have explained elsewhere, revelation begins where (the potentialities/possibilities of) human language ends. Poetry is either in a no-man's-land between the 2 states or (the purest poetry is) a sort of revelation in itself.
It is the same whimper of the Kadosh, the mysterious and terrifying other of God, the Black Goddess. In Christianity it is known as the mysterium terrible et fascinans. The limestone harmony of poetic impossibility in the Valeryian sense (who said that 'The impossibility of defining the relation together with the impossibility of denying it, constitutes the essence of the poetic line') which vanishes away just as it is caught (like Keats' grape against one's 'palate fine') can give poetry its frivolous tone. Coming back to Rumi, the guy remained in this state until (as in the words of my friend and Hollace M. Metzger, herself a fine poet, singer, dancer, artist, architect, Muse):
Then, when the moon settled its battle against the sun's inevitable victory,
Asleep, he saw Abraham who reported God's hearing of his night-prayers and God's reply:
"Your calling my name is My reply. Your longing for Me is My message to you. All your attempts to reach Me Are in reality My attempts to reach you. Your fear and love are a noose to catch Me. In the silences surrounding all your calls of “Allah” Echoed my replies of "I Am Here."
Wonderful, John. The repetition of "I am" becomes something like a prayer but also an insistence of existing, of being in and of all things. Always thought-provoking.
2 comments:
I am reminded of this magnificent poem by Rumi, one of the chiefest of mystics, the wordplay doesn't really come out in translation. For instance, there is a verse:
Man too shudum too man shudi man tan shudum too jan shudi
Ta kas na goyad badazi man digaram too digari
[I am you You are I - I am the body you are the soul
So let none say evermore that I am someone you are someone]
There are others, several others (as the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ once said) 'But Hanzala! There are moments and moments' and there are 'Oft in the Stilly Night' other days around us.
There is definitely, in your work, the kind of deep silence that can constitute or trigger-rush what is termed (in the world of religion) as revelation. There is a story in Rumi's masterpiece The Masnavi in which a teenager has a night of soul-anguish though he drunkenly lounge against a rock in the moon 'Displaying his dildo. Wanking at the sun' from Auden's perspective or as in/from what John Hoppner thought of Blake, he:
"Represent a man sitting on the moon - Pissing the Sun out -"
(Bentley jnr, G. E. Blake Records. Oxford, 1969. 58).
Being actually inexpressible as I have explained elsewhere, revelation begins where (the potentialities/possibilities of) human language ends. Poetry is either in a no-man's-land between the 2 states or (the purest poetry is) a sort of revelation in itself.
It is the same whimper of the Kadosh, the mysterious and terrifying other of God, the Black Goddess. In Christianity it is known as the mysterium terrible et fascinans. The limestone harmony of poetic impossibility in the Valeryian sense (who said that 'The impossibility of defining the relation together with the impossibility of denying it, constitutes the essence of the poetic line') which vanishes away just as it is caught (like Keats' grape against one's 'palate fine') can give poetry its frivolous tone. Coming back to Rumi, the guy remained in this state until (as in the words of my friend and Hollace M. Metzger, herself a fine poet, singer, dancer, artist, architect, Muse):
Then, when the moon settled its battle
against the sun's inevitable victory,
Asleep, he saw Abraham who reported God's hearing of his night-prayers and God's reply:
"Your calling my name is My reply.
Your longing for Me is My message to you.
All your attempts to reach Me
Are in reality My attempts to reach you.
Your fear and love are a noose to catch Me.
In the silences surrounding all your calls of “Allah”
Echoed my replies of "I Am Here."
Wonderful, John. The repetition of "I am" becomes something like a prayer but also an insistence of existing, of being in and of all things. Always thought-provoking.
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