1923

The world came to an end in 1923 - or so I'm told. This is the year that extremists march in Munich and the street stopped being a street, when a poet saw his ideal in the absurd dreams of Dali. The wastelands have been reached, they were prophesised; the philosopher concedes truth to science and vows silence; that first generation lives under a black sun, a dazzling dark, an earth black and heavy with the dead. A storm is on its way from somewhere and the birds of space shed their wings, anticipating the need for lightness, the need to keep oneself to a bare minimum, to find the quintessential once again.

"The fact, however, is that the inner turmoil which the nations of the world are going through today, and which we are unable to regard objectively in as much as we ourselves are affected by it, is the forerunner of a social and spiritual revolution of very great magnitude. The Great War of Europe was a catastrophe which has almost wholly destroyed the old world order. Out of the ashes of civilisation and culture nature is now building up a new humanity and a new world for that humanity to live in. We can catch a glimpse of the new world order in the works of Professor Einstein and Bergson. Europe has seen with its own eyes the dreadful consequences of its scientific, moral and economic pursuits....


There is, indeed, a danger that the minds of nations may not be subjugated by that time-worn and devitalizing escapist mentality which cannot differentiate between the thoughts of the head and the feelings of the heart.....

The East, and particularly the Muslim East, has opened its eyes after having slumbered for centuries. The Eastern people have, however, realised that life cannot effect a revolution in its environment before it has had, in the first instance, a revolution in the inner depths of its own being, nor can a new world assume external form until its existence takes shape in the hearts of men. That immutable law of the Universe which the Qur'an has enunciated in the simple but comprehensive verse:

God does not change the destiny of people unless they change themselves.

[Q: xiii. 11] "

---Allama Iqbal, Message From the East, 1923

The Allama was wrong, since now there is no "East" and there is no "West." Is China 'eastern' any more, is Japan, India? Who now would write an East-West Diwan?

Ghosts are the lives we do not lead, they follow me about everywhere...the roads not taken. Already I see in my mind's eye the dust accumulating on my books, I look for the underlined words and wonder why the swami has chosen one word and not another, why this page alone has its corner turned...so much will remain unread, unsaid.

I have lost the ability to name the trees. That is true, there is no denying it. But friends still point me there. The world is still the scattered tent of stars. More than that, there is a deep state, a way that always somehow remains open, beyond the tribulations of history, beyond the dissolutions...in exile one learns how to survive, how to cherish. This is the only world I know and I am grateful.

Ghosts are also the lives and thoughts of our ancestors that live on in us, reminding us that we were not the only ones to live in time:

If a wound hath befallen you , a wound like it hath already befallen others.
---Q: 3:140

We look in the mirror and see the shadows of a parent , of a grandparent. My hand gestures are those of my cousin, the surprise in my voice is my uncle's ..and these melancholy eyes..are they really mine? A way in which a word is pronounced, the intonation, a particular gesture, all that is fragile survives..miraculously. They abide beyond the vicissitudes of the times. Love is not lost, only forgotten.