Question me an Answer

She smiled at the questions, as if to say: 'And if I answered you, would you know me then?'
----Courtesy of Rinku

Verily towards God for the Lord is thy Limit.
(Q: 53:42)



The Sufi's book is not composed of ink and letters:
it is a heart white as snow.
The scholar's possession is pen-marks.
What does the Sufi's own?---- foot-marks.....

The Sufi stalks the game like a hunter:
he sees the musk-deer's footprints and follows.
For a while he traces these lines,
but then it is the musk that is his guide.
A hundred stages along the track,
years of aimless wandering,
are nothing to a single leap guided by the scent of love.
--After Rumi

Sat with Rinku and Sarmad for a while. Rinks told of her Buddhist friend who said: haven't you read enough. This struck me and reminded me of: only read as much as you can live. Not a putting away of books, no. But more like a question that is not a question, a kind of answer: what would it be like to have a practical wisdom, to not always look for fragments, or strive for completeness, answers?

At 'Readings' after that. Came across, surprisingly, W.S. Merwin's collected works, A.R. Ammons, Updike, Bellow's Ravelstein, and much more. But I didn't want to even pick up a book!
How good that felt. Even when a car crashed into the back of mine I was strangely calm.

Modern man wants to know everything, to see from God's point of view. He is compelled to reduce everything to his own terms of self-understanding on pains of admitting the possibility of the impossible, the existence of the ("ghayb")unknown, and a reality that he has not shaped. It is, as Levinas once said I think, a defence mechanism of bourgeois man. Nothing unsettles him more than the thought that truth is not of his making.

But how can I know? We ask all the wrong questions. Already we see the substitution of second-order questions for primary ones of ethics: how do we live a good life? It as if his questions are only posed to, and therefore answerable by, our mind. For all of his dazzling intelligence we have to say that it is, ultimately, only of a technical kind: dry, abstract, and formal. On the other hand, there is an integral intelligence that eludes us -and this requires the virtues (both moral and intellectual)....Hearts and minds.

Most importantly, there is an awareness that wisdom resides in understanding and intuition; that there is meaning and that there are values that cannot be captured by our conceptual frameworks. Ibn Arabi reminds us that God created us with two hands....Blake would say that we see the world through both eyes and in a sublimely profound phrase: he who sees ratio sees only himself.

What can science tell us of friendship or art or poetry and music ..and what of love? Even by its own lights it has nothing to say of the soul or God. That we have the freedom to act in a causally ordered world...is this not a miracle in itself ?

There is questioning and there is a quest from within faith (Anselm). A beautiful phrase from the late Pope in Fides et Ratio has it: Faith illuminates possible paths for reason. This is what Attar would call the 'trackless way'...

Living Thought vs the dead letter of philosophy:
(From Bachelard)

A shifting, striving style of soul that doesn't fix itself to any one identity or idea. A concept is an idol, a stepping stone. 'Reverie shatters old forms and frozen images', opens up vision to ever fresh vistas of the world, to ambivalence, wonder and freedom. De-cision is a new beginning. Unity is not given but is an 'asymptotic goal', a potentiality,a direction: Desert theology. (Which takes us back to Levinas: the city dreams of totality, not of infinity).

Concept is to image as mind is to soul. One cannot study an image, only admire it (mirablis, miraculous, wonder, admiratio).

G. Bataille: To seek sufficiency is the same mistake as to enclose being in some sort of point. We can enclose nothing, we can only find insufficiency.

Life will dissolve itself in death, rivers in the sea, and the known in the unknown.

It is the unknown that compels us to love. The key is not to look for a final solution-which is a death wish-or salvation, but to live one's soul
D.H.Lawrence.

God is in us at first the movement of spirit which consists-after having passed from finite knowledge to infinite knowledge-in us passing , as if through an extension of limits, to a different non-discursive mode of knowledge , in such a way that the illusion arises from a satisfaction-realized beyond us- of the thirst for knowledge which exists in us.'