Via Negativa

I have the habit of starting my sentences with the word 'No'..."no, but..." or "no, not really." Perhaps there's a set of words or thoughts that one inherits from a particular place or from one's ancestors, a turn of phrase that encpasulates something about one's being and that is transmitted from one generation to the other, sometimes knowingly but mostly out of the reach of consciousness. Only in moments of pure stillness or exile does one "catch oneslef"- to take up that wonderfully evocative Buddhist way of speaking-using such words. Does one have to be estranged from oneself and one's times to see things clearly?

I rememeber speaking with my uncle and him saying, "I've just realised b, you're stuck in la ('negation) ". There was more truth in this than I cared to admit. And then he told me how the Allama had said that Nietzsche was only half a muslim since he had taken negation to be a final destination when it was only a stepping stone in the stream of life, a "station" that one passes through.

God is not God. God is not God. God is not God. He is. He is before the sign that signals him. Before designation. He is the void before the void, thought before thought; thus also the unthought before the unthought-as if there were a nothing before the nothing. He is the cry before the cry, the trembling before the trembling.
He is the night without night , the day without day. The look before the look, the listening before the listening.
He is the air before breathing..Not yet wind, but light air, indifferent in its
primitive infinity.
------Jabes, in Desert, Ethos, Abandonement.

But there are different things that we negate and different ways of doing so-some legitimate, some not so. No, even at the very least we can say that a complete 'nilling' is not possible since this too is our act and therefore an affirmation of existence (the more he blasphemes, the more he praises God).

But is there a way of freely praising? Rumi would say that free will itself is the ability to praise God for His Beneficence.

That singular command
I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing?
-----W.H. Auden

What is it that we moderns want to negate. God? That goes without saying.
Part of us wants to know for oneself, to know oneself and not have a witness to our being, an acknowledgement. Escape. The old story. But wither shall I flee?
To see the world as it is, in pure contingency, from a distance: the Fall. We land with a thump and rub our heads.

All philosophy, thinking, begins with awe and wonder. But to think is "to die a little" to the world so that one does not die completely. Put negatively, is thought anything but the staving off of death? Death is the point of all points.

The philosopher does not permit his wonder stand as it is, to be released into the flow of life. Of necessity, he must "hook" the problem from where he stands. He has forcibly extracted thought's "object" and "subject" from the flow of life and he entrenches himself within them. Wonder stagnates and is perpetuated in the motionless mirror of his meditation; that is in the subject. He has it well-hooked; it is securely fastened and it persists in his benumbed immobility. The stream of life has been replaced by something submissive, statuesque, subjugated."

The solution and dissolution of their wonder is at hand-the love which has befallen them. They are no longer a wonder to eachother; they are in the very heart of wonder. Life becomes numb in the face of death and dies. The wonder is unravelled . And it was life itself that brought the solution.
---Franz Rosenzweig.