writing (out) frustration

this will be my last post about the semester. it would’ve been nice to go out on a higher note, but maybe more honest this way. not a bang but a whimper, this is how ends now occur. “the hollow men” was post-”wasteland” – the rats’ alley (115) at least demonstrated a certain movement and a remedial grace. but rats’ feet over broken glass in a barren, arid cellar (9) – that is something different.

i told brian a couple of weeks ago that i can’t pinpoint what’s wrong. we commiserated briefly, and he said just to chalk it up to protracted senioritis. i don’t (and wouldn’t) know if that’s what it is, though. i’ve been through phases before when writing is difficult, when acts of literature (active participle) are definitively not possible because of various reasons. writing as memory and as encounter systematically dis-enabled, so i couldn’t put pen to paper even if i wanted to. though i didn’t want to, and i avoided that arrangement of memory, that encounter of memory, to avoid the memory of those arrangements, and the memory of such encounters. so do we “get by”, such are the conditions of our unknowing.

but this wasn’t that. i enjoyed writing (general term), this semester. my black book is near-full of scribblings, ideen, commentaries, notes toward a future. it was the moment i sat down in front of anything resembling a deadline that i froze, mid-sentence, mid-gesture, mid-day or mid-night, and sedimented into stone. anything involving that disciplinary regime, and i quit, kaput.

and again, it has little to do with curricula-content. my englisch course was pretty amazing. even discussion in my sociology seminar was occasionally stimulating, though not for reasons of the course itself. inter-d was something to get through, but i was glad to write the paper for it. art h had eureka-moments, as discussions from multiple contexts found place alongside each other. eas was math enough to hurt mein kopf, but i now appreciate landscapes like never before. the husserl/phil class was less dry than i’d anticipated, and was often great. and durkheim/RS class was generally interesting. classes haven’t been bad, by and large. i rarely fell asleep in the ones i went to. i kept up with most readings. though my expectations of a couple were disappointed and i did poorly in most courses this term, i had generally amicable relationships with the professors. which, usually, is more important. and i learned a lot, though often not for the reasons they wanted. i’m not freezing-up because of content, and i’ve known that all through.

so i tried everything to build momentum. i read around paper topics, i followed footnotes down the rabbithole, i sat in wonder. i rearranged my workspace and my headspace, tried writing in public (and there’s a whole set of interesting things we could say about that, eh) and on campus. i went running. i performed the pre-writing rituals (making coffee, updating lists). and near-every time it was the same sensation afterward, of hitting a rock-face.

i’ve whined about this ( = about myself) to those that’ll hear me out, even while they might secretly be saying to themselves “get over yourself, basit.” i’ve confessed this lack repeatedly, to lots of people, trying somehow to build from that an exculpation or search out an expiation.

by this time tomorrow evening i’ll have two essay-debts left(over), a 20 pager and a 30 pager. while i’ll be at a colloquium for most of the next few days, i hope to finish the first by the time i leave for southern alberrda on friday afternoon. but the second?

and so i remain astounded by my ability to muck things up. and kind of bewildered. and, just, taken aback.

but this will be my last post about undergraduate ness.

[this is] not primarily a confessional text. to confess is to overcome guilt and shame in the name of truth: it is an epistemological use of language in which ethical values of good and evil are superseded by values of truth and falsehood, one of the implications being that vices such as concupiscence, envy, greed, and the like are vices primarily because they compel one to lie. by stating things as they are, the economy of ethical balance is restored and redemption can start in the clarified atmosphere of a truth that does not hesitate to reveal the crime in all its horror. (…) confessions occur in the name of an absolute truth which is said to exist “for itself” (”pour elle seule,” [1028]) and of which particular truths are only derivative and secondary aspects.

(…)

…at first sight, there should be no conflict between confession and excuse. yet the language reveals the tension in the expression: craindre de m’excuser. the only thing one has to fear from the excuse is that it will indeed exculpate the confessor, thus making the confession (and the confessional text) redundant as it originates. qui s’accuse s’excuse; this sounds convincing and convenient enough, but, in terms of absolute truth, it ruins the seriousness of any confessional discourse by making it self-destructive. since confession is not a reparation in the realm of practical justice but exists only as a verbal utterance, how then are we to know that we are indeed dealing with a true confession, since the recognition of guilt implies its exoneration in the name of the same transcendental principle of truth that allowed for the certitude of guilt in the first place?

(…)

what seemed at first like irrational behavior bordering on insanity has, by the end of the passage, become comprehensible enough to be incorporated within a general economy of human affectivity, in a theory of desire, repression, and self-analyzing discourse in which excuse and knowledge converge.

- paul de man, allegories of reading (yale UP, 1979), 279-280, 287.

(i’ll be back on campus in fall to take hebrew, a class on universalism and the particular, and either hagiography or nature, aesthetics, ethics; and to audit some others (things, contemporary canadian cultural texts). and then winter, to continue to take the hebrew, one on literary studies of the hebrew bible, and narratives&tropes in anthropology; and perhaps audit a couple (eg., religious thought in medieval europe).)

continental drift

or, “letting conservatism loose” before again schoolwriting, hoping against hope to be done on tuesday:

as distraction (dis-traction, except that i was barely making inroads as it was, driving a creaking diesel ford 5000 from the early 70s) – i’ll have to remember to file this post under ‘narcissism’ (the glowing laptop monitor my pool of shining water and this desk my grassy embankment, my hours before the screen spent staring into what is essentially mein own textual image evidence of grecian transfixment, even a drowning) – i turn to something else: that i have a disturbingly cavalier proclivity toward comparativist analyses across disciplines. i draw almost glib parallels and use them as points of humour or derision, playing off arbitrary points of reference to form arguments that adhere only because of the frenetic energy i pour into them, as though through sheer brashness i might forcefully impose (/, duct-tape) a centripetal logic.

no domain is preserved from this speculative enterprise, the seven earths or the heavens holding the sun. as example: in the weekly qur’an class today there was reference made to 31:34 (recitation, translation), the last ayah of surah luqman that reminds humanity that none but allah has knowledge of the Hour, of the descension of rain, of what is held in the womb, of what one shall receive tomorrow, and of where upon this earth we shall each meet death. to play (off) these five in the lit crit of the dilettant, then, we can begin by noting that the sa’ah, the Hour, is named with a word connoting a span of time…and yet it is precisely this (hour/Hour, span, point? this event) that ruptures the temporal order itself (therefore heralding the final recompense and that-which-follows, akhirah, the mishnah’s olam haba). we then consider rain, and remember it figures both as rahmah, lovingkindness and mercy, and as life-giving to a parched earth. indeed, it is for rahmah alone that we can hope; it is rahmah alone that gives us to hope for rahmah alone. martin lings writes further of the mercy of the rain as gnosis and as light, as the quenching drink of knowledge of the divine. the third item in the list, ‘what is in the wombs’, maintains this very semantic field, as the word invokes in semitic languages its etymological affine (rahmah); the womb (rahm) is a source of lovingkindness; it is also, at the most literal level, ‘life-giving’; it further recalls nourishment and tarbiyah, a nurturing and a growing-to-term. the womb holds forth promise of what is to come, knowledge of which remains hidden from our sight; it cultivates anticipation. the fourth item of the list explicitly continues this theme, marking what we receive on the morrow. the word used itself is from the trilateral root k-s-b and signifies what is earned or justly doled out, actions we acquire through kasab and iktisab. the seeds planted have grown to term and their fruits now taken; that which thou sowest that shallst thou reap. finally we are reminded that none of us know where (in what site, in which locale) we shall realize (our) mortality. our encounter with death is thus read spatially, even while we understand death as that which removes us from the spatial realm altogether. of course, death ends the logical (grammatical) chains of causality and responsibility constituted by kasab and iktisab, and so we are brought full circle to the sa’ah that convokes the final accounting.

each of these five is responsive to the others. they are interconnected at a number of levels. indeed, taken together they gather each other: the first, the sa’ah, a name from within the temporal order of which it is terminus, the evenement that finally ruptures its fabric. it separates the world from that-which-comes-after; it separates life before from life after. it is an ‘Hour’ only in the lexicon of sacred occasions figured as temporal events. the rahmah which is the precondition of the world, the guiding principle of that-which-comes-after, and the generative force of the event of the sa’ah is recalled by the image of rain, which sweeps in from the coast to wash the soiled earth; life. the womb is the pallindromic link between the rahmah of rain and the granting-forth of life and the notions of responsibility implicit in what we earn each day. finally we turn to death as an event in the (spatial) world but also as an echo of another order, as though through the traces of such quietus we might hear the thrumming of rain on the other side.

what we’re left with, now, is a basic fact of difference in ground, in metaphysics. the various emphases on the to-come, the promise held forth (of life, and of love), and the strict insistence that none knows what the morrow brings – each of these humble us in and indeed strip us of our knowledge; they tear from us our peculiarly modern apparatuses of knowledge and our technologies to manage the future. they put us on edge in a sort of passional ethics of anticipation, a resignation to the future as that which can only be totally unexpected, à-venir and l’avenir. the rain, rain-life, rain-mercy, womb-mercy, womb-promise, and the womb all bespeak an imperative only to recognize and honour such gift, and so we exist fundamentally in debt and under obligation, attempting only to fulfill the rights of the law = of others. lastly, the here and now cannot be taken as the absolute indexicals of either hegel or kant but must be approached with a nearly humean skepticism and a ghazalian certainty, that we can draw from these ayat the various doctrines of an islamic occasionalism. this configuration of space/time marks a fundamental shift away from the metaphysics of presence, for what that’s worth…and yet its divergent history at least in part autonomous from that of christianity become secularism also means that my first impulse (to equivalence with critiques of ontotheological metaphysics) necessarily reveals me as a hack. these parallelisms are only that: distantly isomorphic. good to think with, perhaps, and nothing less. a stepping-stone to speech. but more brutally, a suturing of one discourse to another on the basis of similar gestures. because these traditions are differentially structured within the academy, such suturing can then be read as the deep-structural fulfillment of a desire fraught with transference issues to gain place (and then our exile) among these others.

in the new york times a few months ago, noah feldman (whose work in general i like, don’t get me wrong) found the constitutional rule of law masquerading under the Sign of the shari’ah; i can, clumsily, find a heideggerian rejection of western metaphysics drawn from an ayah of scripture. these moves foster a politics i do consider positive. and yet, and yet. (this is one of the primary issues i had with peter rollins, as i would insist we have to recognize our own histories. to do otherwise is not only deeply irresponsible but makes a mockery of the traditions we suture. at the same time, this is a pretty steep demand, and i have no idea how to do so in a popular or quasipastoral context – and little enough otherwise.)(i went to see peter rollins perform a couple of times when he was in edmonton a few months ago. he called me his zizek friend.)

because then i step back and begin to see all this as a sort of pedestrian structuralist criticism that sometimes has far more to do with vain speech and petty amusement than it does with exegesis. it neither blasphemes nor gives cause for immediate offense, i do take care for that. but at the same time it sees me co-opting religious or cultural texts in order to (sometimes vulgarly) advance a specific imaginative practice as a (sometimes resentful) politics in a sort of puerile ressentiment, largely through suspect analogies (the cup is the shield of dionysis and the shield the cup of ares), equivocation. at best it sketches as though through a fog the barely-intelligible hybrid contours of an inarticulable task that now, for me, careless as i am even of the bodily pieties, remains definitively beyond my attentions. those paths are foreclosed at least till such time as i leave off these deep, banal betrayals and depart this field entire.

moreover, once reified these works of art, these comparisons, this discourse-stitching, all these become mantlepieces, figureheads worthy of comment by any aesthete worth her snuff…but also sloppy scholarship and uncareful thinking. to cross-reference the world seems a fairly common aim, given all the enthused verbiage over hybridity, fragments, mishmashed identities and textual echoes. but reconstructing this concordance, that is what i want to do, and learn to do well.

at the end of this post, all i’ve demonstrated (i who am widely read in no tradition, have basis to speak in no tradition, am entirely without ijaza), and handicapped as i am by four years of stumbling through the lexica of academe, is that discursive regimes are infinitely translatable, and that it is possible to reduce any text to a core set of platitudes.

and so i forward this as yet another of the abundant jeremiads concerning the betrayal and bankruptcy of the project of liberal education.

jeremiads abound concerning the “betrayal” and “bankruptcy” of the project of liberal education.

- bill readings, the university in ruins (harvard UP, 1996), 1.

070409

i’ve joked about this, confessing my commitment issues viz. this semester, that i’d jump at the opportunity to skip town or do important things that weren’t subordinate to that regime of exercises and disciplines. now it is april and the humour has evaporated. but knowing the incredibly foolish inevitable repercussions doesn’t help. nor does incurring them. nor does focussing on the two courses, englisch and phil, that i actually enjoyed. it’s not a lack of interest in the material so much as an allergic reaction, an inarticulate ressentiment.

also, i think it’s pretty funny that (given my last few years) in one of my last essays i argue for disciplinarity.

“on that note…”

the family and the daemon

in order to complete fulfill this turn in these writings, this cycling around and orbiting of the ibrahimic (”with the names of the abrahamic, and even within its silences, the ‘abrahamic phrase’, almost a formula, ‘judaism, christianity, islam’, recurs in proximity to names that recall so-called empirical regions and religions. thus, it is also of history, of autobiography, of literature, religion, and of politics that the abrahamic speaks…” [gil anidjar, the jew, the arab, 41] – the abrahimic speaks, it speaks to; it will exercise and excise language; attention granted the abrahimic will in the first instance be attentiveness to language and its speaking), i turn most methodically, most idiosyncratically, to judaism. i had wanted to write something about this multifoliate tradition to obliquely complement my last two posts, before this month ran out its course, before the moon had run its celestial course – a blessed lunar month named spring, which 1430 years ago witnessed the rising of the moon, the birth of the prophet, and this springing-forth (so our rabbis will say) of the final revelation. i had wanted to speak, that is, in order to fulfill the triad of traditions, each supplementing – separating! – their originary claims to language, to the shekinah at the sacred heart of language. i had wanted to speak about this relation and this agonism among those for whom their cousins are both forever minim or koferim, debarred, and ahl al-kitab, familiar and familial in their subjection to language, the word, scripture. and where better to turn than to the reb musa bin maymun, that most arabic of jews, salahuddin’s physician, in his relationship to an islam he simultaneously opposed and recognized as his neighbour? and then, moreover, to seek out from the corporate body of judaism and islam the traces of fundamental indebtedness to my neighbour, my symbolic affine, the home of whom is the site where language and death coincide? our contiguous existences provide for me ethics and politics, and my religious bind to this other is nothing less than a prickly livingtogetherness mirroring horizontally my implication, my investedness, my indebtedness, and my absolute poverty on the vertical axis. these relations give me sight to witness my fundamental heterogeneity.

but it is march, and “the march sky is grey,” and “this is what i know, as the smoke from the houses / rises”.

this will remain as trace of hope of a future writing, citing a future inscription. awaiting the future, the grey sky, the present-ing of what i do not know is to come.

and i will, instead, make place for, as he turns to reach for his talith - he is in the presence of language -, the self-declared ‘last jew’, however you read that name. he

remains, wrapped in his private talith, oblivious as to whether or not it brings benediction, the talith of which he knows nothing, really. he is left with his talith, his undeciphered secret – like an additional bandage on his wound, the wound of his sacrifice that is his last way of drawing near to the absolute Otherness. cutting is for the purpose of reuniting. the talith enveloping a man, separating him from heaven, is what brings him closer to heaven. here is the talith that divides a man from his maker is that which also brings him nearer to his maker, on earth and in heaven. the fringe as additional visual sign, like language overall, whose substance is a reminder of the truth while drawing away from it to an abysmal distance. at the same time, like the humans condemned to language and blind acceptance of its promises (signified), here is the love of the talith and the duality of blessing-and-death that it bears. for like language, the talith equally is one feasible way (granted: infirm, lacking, injured) to converse with the silent, invisible Father. accordingly:

i would sing of the singular softness of my talith, a softness softer than soft, utterly singular, simultaneously sensible and insensible, calm, acquiescent, a stranger to sentimentality, to gushiness or pathos, in brief, to any “Passion”. compassion without limit, and simultaneously, compassion without idolatry, proximity and infinite distance. i love the peaceful passion, the distracted love that my talith inspires in me, i get the impression that it accords to me this distraction becasue it is sure, so sure of me, so little disquieted by my infidelities…i love it and bless it with a strange indifference, my talith, with a familiarity that is nameless and ageless. it is as if faith and knowledge, a different faith and a different knowledge, a knowledge without truth and without revelation, have woven themselves together…my white talith belongs to the night, to absolute night. ([veils] 79-80)

- gideon ofrat, the jewish derrida (syracuse UP, 2001),159.

metonymy intersecting augustine

another month-and-some left at this particular grindstone, in sha allah.

i refer metonymy a lot, over and above the other three master-tropes. i’ll leave aside the reasons for now and will instead post some comments largely drawn from a reading class i took last winter, when a professeur and i met every week to discuss the genealogy of the trope especially in its complex relation to augustinian sign theory and the saint’s conversion narrative. people’ve been talking a lot about augustinian temporality viz. ricoeur and husserl and so on, but that only figures obliquely in this discussion.

behold, O Lord God, yea, behold patiently as Thou art wont, how carefully the sons of men observe the covenanted rules of letters and syllables received from those who spake before them, neglecting the eternal covenant of everlasting salvation received from Thee.

- augustine of hippo

the early modern thinker giambattista vico notes four aspects of metonymy in his genealogy of imaginative metaphysics in the new science (book II. poetic wisdom, §404-411). the first poets, he writes (between his discussion of the golden age of greece and poetic monsters born of casual unions), implemented metonymy of agent for act, metonymy of subject for form and for accident, and metonymy of cause for effect, all in order to understand the world.  today metonymy is more commonly regarded as the replacement of part for whole, or, slipping against synecdoche, as reductive representation. in both these formulations, the functions of the trope are to reduce an unknown or an external event to the particular and sensible – that is, to render it in terms of the accessible, the tangible or corporeal  (corporeus, of the body) – and thereby to remake the material world. while metaphor casts the Other in the terms of the familiar (and therefore enacts a totalizing gesture in the attempt to combat alterity, bring all under the sway of the Same), metonymy seeks to realize the outside, to give form to its exteriority. the action of metonymy is thus that of in-carnation (in-carn-, into flesh): a rendering-flesh, an embodiment. the event of the Incarnation which is central to a soteriological metaphysics such as that expounded by augustine follows a similar logic: the “highest god lower[s] and submit[s] the authority of the divine intellect” into christ’s “very* human body”, embodying the absolutely Other. the bridging motion is similar at tropological and theological levels: the gesture of the Incarnation is metonymical, as it reduces to flesh the second person of the godhead, and it is metaphysical, as it spans the gap between human and divine.  it does not close this divide, nor does it separate the domains. it rather provides passage, it draws-forward. it draws christ earthward and draws humans heavenward. for augustine, this event both enables the truths of human spiritual life and reveals the “frailty” of classical metaphysics and human language.  as the rhetorical correlative to the Incarnation, metonymy is at once testament to the versatility of language and evidence of catachresis, the ‘abuse’ of language by which words from one context are misapplied and transported to another. and yet christian access to the divine is possible only through the violence performed through the embodiment of Christ. metonymy, as a tropological reduction, participates in the sacrifice performed by all figurative language, which de-emphasizes a principal subject for the associations of another; the Incarnation also necessarily follows a sacrificial logic, however redemptive or salvific its ultimate effect. of course, the correlations between metonymy and the In-carnation partially break down between the Christ’s birth and his sacrifice, as the various part/whole distinctions don’t maintain themselves among the persons of the godhead. the parallels are re-affirmed, however, at golgotha, as the violence of the separation – the rendering-flesh – is effected to the full. rhetoric and metaphysics here repeatedly implicate one another through their intersection – X – at metonymy.

(* though the heresies that thrived on readings of especially the markan gospel would quibble with this, and though the orthodox position continued to overcompensate for centuries in order to forget that it, too, was once called heresy)

for us readers, augustine’s actual conversion (converso, roundturn, transformation), “under a certain fig tree” , is infinitely mediated by his literary account. any apperceptions we gain of the event are appresented by the narrative. the conversion is retrieved and in a sense constituted by his reading of his own life. its symbolic  inscription into the Confessions we now read functions immediately as a conjuring, a making-text of the event. its writing, therefore, is a making-material of an immaterial sequence: it both reduces the historical experience to the new text and marks the emergence of an access-point; it gives written body (corpus) to the text that is augustine’s life. in this, the writing of conversion is a metonymic gesture, for it provides passage. it is a textual incarnation of the event, a precipitous text producing a concrete representation.

augustine’s making-text confesses his conversion to we other readers. his writing thus becomes a benefaction, a giving-outward, a granting of gift, his work in writing a labour requited by its every reading.

that conversion occurs through hearing words/the Word “is a common late antique topos”.  indeed, augustine’s confessions itself is replete with conversion stories.  however, simply hearing a collection of phonemes is not sufficient nor adequate to induce the trans-formation Augustine so desperately seeks outside himself.  a more complicated relationship is here insinuated between reader and text, between grace and logos, between identical causes and affects/effects. the process of conversion for augustine is in a sense isomorphic with his theory of reading, in which the reader’s purity of heart modulates the consequent understanding. it is a dialogic inter-action between one’s spiritual state and the specific scripture or text approached. the conditions of possibility depend, ultimately, on grace. augustine had been made ready for conversion by his long journey through platonism and manichaeism, through the ways of the bed and extreme incontinence. that augustine reaches for the epistles (romans 13:13—“but put ye on the lord jesus christ, and make not provision for the flesh”) upon hearing the child’s tolle lege is especially fitting, given that paul has been called the “great theorist of christian conversion”,  and the knowledge contained in those codices is “life-giving”.  equally important, however, is the fact augustine (or: christ, as his inner teacher ) interprets the voice “as a command that he will obey”.  his immediate “response is obedience, the trusting appropriation of the message as for him”.  he interpellates himself into the text, first as the child sings and again as paul speaks to the romans. he becomes a subject through this act; he is subject to the call.  he assumes, through metonymic displacement, an insertion along the diachronic axis, an overlap of contiguous bodies, that the address was for him.

all speech, for augustine, is catachrestic. the Fall from Eden mired humans in the “abyss of the world and the blindness of the flesh” and forever foreclosed possibilities for visual apprehension of thought; it became necessary “to make sounds in each other’s ears” in order to approximate communication. all speech is aphasia in a fallen world. verbal signs can never be complete; they are but poor stand-ins for the comprehension of things as they are. while this fundamental shortcoming of human discourse cannot be overcome, recognition of the metaphysical gap between human and divine leads to the understanding that humans must use their faulty language to allegorically represent the divine, “even as human ritual must use temporal and carnal signs to refer to spiritual realities”.  this understanding of the need for figurative language (metonymy and metaphor) then converts human discourse to the service of the Lord. words are so often misspent in vain pursuits but when properly employed are “choice and precious vessels”.  this seems to be the meta-discursive project attempted by augustine’s confessions: when the speaking subject is properly spiritually attuned, Christ becomes for him the “interior teacher dwelling in the mind”, the source both of “objects encountered and the light which illuminates them for our understanding”.  interpretive activity must be conducted attentive to spiritual realities.

augustine’s conversion, lyotard writes, is “the fissure in the grain of confession.”  his confessions are cut through by the conversion, the five-fold assault, points on the cross and its center.  the textual in-carnation of augustine’s conversion we know through his confession, then, is more properly a converfession, a trace of his metonymic action with stylus and dove. we read, he reminds us, because we do not know how to read the true book, because the skin of sky remains closed to us, because the firmament does not reveal its own signs.  the faulty signs we wield and brandish we should employ only to teach, to remind ourselves, to remind others of the divine, and it is in this cause that augustine wrenches his ‘conversion’ (his desperate moments with his companion in the garden, the angel, the book) from irredeemable time past, constitutes them textually within his work. we, on the other hand, read this avatar of his to drink from ornamented vessels.  he argues caution, however, in the use of words – how many celebrate the “covenanted use of syllables and letters” and all the while “neglec[t] the covenant of everlasting salvation”?  the inner teacher must orient discourse. christ the Son must found a semiotics.

receiving space

my rumination tonight with the al hikmah speaker series (”this earth was made for us a masjid?: an exercise in metaphor”) is about space and place. zainab asked for my notes. these instead some extended thoughts.

the title gains its first impulse from a fairly well-known tradition (cited in the sahihayn and various other collections of ahadith) in which the prophet recounts one of the bounties granted his ummah:

ju’ilat liy’l-ardu masjidan wa tahura. “the earth has been made for me a masjid and tahur”, a ‘place of prayer’ and a ‘means of purification’.

the hadith continues on to enjoin the ritual prayer upon the faithful wherever they are, in whatever circumstance. but it is that first segment of the tradition to which i’d like to return today, and not merely for its ramifications for the sacred law. the earth in its entirety is made a masjid. what does that mean? further, why is the word masjid and not musalla? if the meaning of this hadith were simply that it is legally permissible to perform salah anywhere in the world, one might reasonably expect the word used to denote the generic spatial occasion for the ritual prayer (musalla) and not the far more specific ‘place of sujud’ (masjid). the title for this reflexion, then, can be read in two ways: this earth was made for us a masjid? and, secondly, this earth was made for us a masjid? it also calls for at least brief thought on the symbolic architecture of the mosque proper.

this earth was made for us a masjid? i’m curious about the use of this word. musalla, as noted, would seem – from the legal, fiqhi perspective – to be a more immediate choice. musalla appears in the qur’an only once (2:125), and denotes simply a place in which prayers are performed. masjid, on the other hand, is the place of sujud, which is a part of the prayer. sujud names a movement in the prayer: dropping gently upon the knees, placing the palms of one’s hands on the ground, and putting nose and forehead on the ground. it is the stage in prayer when, the hadith tell us, we are closest to God; martin lings writes that it is when the body “pours itself out” and the self is humbled. indeed, sujud also means to humble oneself, with humility. sujud is an emblem, a sign, a metonymic icon for salah – commentators read ‘those constant in their sujud’ (9:112) as signifying those perseverent in their prayer – but involves other valences as well. that the earth is figured as a masjid does not simply mean that it is a place one might pray. sujud is not limited to human beings, but is performed by the rest of creation. wa’n-najmu wa’sh-shajaru yasjudan, [before the Divine] prostrate themselves the stars and the trees (55:6). the earth as masjid, i am suggesting, enters us – and the earth – into a different semantic domain than that invoked by musalla. all the earth is a place for prostration, as dawud wharnsby sings, which means too that all the earth is place for turning in humility. by bowing in prostration anywhere and everywhere we join the stars and the trees, the heavens and the earth.

masjid as ‘mosque’ proper (and not the more general ’site of sujud’) has been understood as any structure dedicated to regular, congregational worship. martin lings, again: “to enter the mosque is to be immediately and profoundly impressed by its emptiness, both as antidote to the ‘plenitude of the world’ and as symbol of the inner void of purity.” as the one constant architectural feature among variant domes, minarets, pulpits, calligraphies, and engravings, the niche is in a sense the defining element of the masjid, the limit of the mosque. the prayer-niche itself is open, empty; it “demands [worshippers] that they turn towards the All-Merciful, and it shows them how to turn. orientation always implies an activity for the sake of a passivity, a turning towards Heaven in order to be attracted by Heaven.” “the chief orison uttered in the islamic ritual prayer is guide us upon the straight path (1:6) and the arabic word for ’straight’, mustaqim, suggests not only directness but also vertical ascent. [orientation thus] points not simply from place to place on the same level but from periphery to center.” it is this center to which the niche points: “it must be remembered that primarily the niche is not an end in itself; it serves to indicate the direction towards something which is at a certain distance; and though that object, the ka’bah, is often named ‘the House of God’, this must not be understood as a localisation of the Divinity. wheresoever ye turn, there is the Face of God. verily God is Vast, All-Knowing (11:115). the mosque’s emptiness, then, is a receptacle for the Divine Omnipresence.”

the earth in its entirety is figured as a masjid: a site to prostrate, an occasion to turn in humility. the earth as masjid, however, also forces us to rethink the indexicals. space and time we understand as purely formal concepts, as framing the moment, the here-now; but also, and most eggregiously in the empiricist tradition, as empty, neutral, homogeneous, and uniform. conceptualizing space as formally empty doesn’t account for its ‘consecration’ or the theophany potent at every point. its emptiness is an emptiness-in-waiting, an emptiness-approaching, an emptiness-reaching. spatial relations are undergirded by the originary relation described in the hadith. an emptiness awaiting and respondent to the Divine.

this earth was made for us a masjid? under this inflection, the question gains a personal and indeed political dimension. seriously? this earth? to understand the earth in this way demands more than mere affirmation. in this i am taking seriously jonathan boyarin, as he writes

and i am one who be/comes there

- “death and the minyan”, cultural anthropology 9 (1994): 3-22, 4.

boyarin, if i remember correctly, is speaking of the shul he attended while young and not about a masjid, but something of the relation to place remains. something of that sense is carried over – through metaphor, the trope of tropes, a transfer of qualities between one abrahamic temple and its semitic affine. boyarin comes, he arrives: and through that he becomes. alternately, he becomes – and through that he arrives. the two gestures are distinct and inextricable. to become as you arrive / to arrive as you become: both involve a passage-from (both spatially, “coming”, and discursively or ontologically, “becoming”), but do not describe the destination. i am not, as i arrive, the self i was when i left, but i cannot describe this self except in terms of my location: i am, here, what i was not, there. i am newly here; i am, here; i am, here. my self has arrived in this space that is a site of sujud and, having arrived, has melted. i am, before the niche: and be/come, elsewhere. the niche is only a marker.

what would it mean to move through the world – to walk on the earth – and understand that motion itself as a turning? the turning as a humbling, in humility – the turning as sujud, on the earth-as-masjid – and too as a turning in expectation: because every spatial point is the site of sujud, and every niche is open, and every prostration is a melting of the self toward the Center, and every empty space is a receptacle of the Divine, a site of Omnipresence.

that this earth is a masjid levels a demand on us. an onus: we are accountable not only for the things that we do and the narratives we author but the very earth we walk upon. by how they walk ye shall know them, the psalm might well have sung. and the qur’an: the faithful servants of the Beneficent are they who tread gently upon the earth (25:63). to walk lightly (hawnan) is to respect this essential nature of space as named in the hadith, as the prophet called poet spoke in language learned from the god. another hadith tells us that everywhere one has bowed in prostration – each site of sujud – rejoices in the remembrance of God and will testify for us. that this earth is a masjid requires us to walk in such a way that our walking testifies for us, that it witnesses us turning, humbled and in humility.

010309

it\s been a busy past few weeks.

in other places, these recent days are made of lectures and seminars by tariq ramadan, a western amreeka tour by jeffreyfoucault and krisdelmhorst, the suhbah with shaykh nuh. or, here in edmonton, an interview and reading with george elliott clarke.

i can’t make it to all these things upcoming this week, but will aim to be at most. i’m endorsing them, anyway:

- tonight (sunday march 1): “product placement night”, poetry and prose (including by natalie!) at cafe leva at 8pm

- tonight (sunday march 1): trio voce, 8pm at convocation hall. the lineup includes pa:rt’s “mozart adagio” and pieces by dvorak.

- monday march 2: “a mother from gaza, surviving under siege”, laila el-haddad at 7pm in telus 150

- wednesday march 4: “from turtle island to palestine”, indigenous perspectives on colonialism and occupation, stanley milner at 7pm

- thursday march 5: the edmonton 09 poetry faceoff. joe’s one of the performers. 12pm in city centre mall (cbc stage)

- thursday march 5: al hikmah speaker series, 7.30pm in bus b-12, sana on “ironic idols: the destruction of the haramayn” and myself on “this earth was made for us a masjid?: an exercise in metaphor”

- thursday march 5: dany laferriere gives the annual kreisel lecture, “i write as i live / j’ecris comme je vis”, timms centre at 7.30

- saturday march 7: int’l women’s day celebration at the hideaway at 7pm. amy’s performing.

- sunday march 8: canadian premiere of “downstream”, oscar shortlisted film about the tar sands. 2pm or 4pm at metro cinema. ticket sales are going to the people of fort chip.

16

when-i-say-yalla-you-say-go! (yalla!)

adnan tagged me a few weeks ago. and so for his sake i break this silence that has begun to sediment. its broken shards have sharp edges – bad cleavage, rather conchoidal fracture – and so who knows, i might write here again soon. but for now, to recount sixteen things.

- i am not a pacifist. but military rhetoric makes my stomach turn, it makes me want to retch. and it is for those who support these operations that i reserve my most visceral anger. the discussion that so often results from this, though, follows a standard form: “under which circumstances would you feel justified…” which i can’t stand, because for me my antagonism toward the military, or against its actions, isn’t a question of justification. very little is, for me anymore, in the sense of accumulating different pros and cons until one side provides sufficient reasons. ultimately it becomes a matter of a decision, one way or the other, and of responsibility in the commitment to that decision. the question of violence isn’t a question to be calculated, and arguing the just war can continue till the end of time, intricately debating a politics outside history. in this it is similar to arguments over the existence of g-d. it is what it is, and that is all.

and so i will say that i am not a pacifist, and leave it at that. although i will say that pacifism, as the great polemicist gf.haddad announces, is closer to the spirit of islam than the other extremes.

on the wall above one of the bookshelves in our livingroom, i put up a poster i found from my mother’s cmbc days: menno simons referencing isaiah. i edited it (picture below), and so it becomes a proclamation sous rature.

on second thought, that picture could almost be a metonymic icon for my relationship with history en general. and tradition. and religion, for that matter.

- i have a very selective memory. to the extent that sometimes i think i am going senile. however, when i think about this and its probable reasons it is depressing. i then try forgetting this but this, of all things, doesn’t get forgot. this is problematic.

- on good days i have two cups of coffee and two cups of tea.

- i’m an academic dilettant. over the past four years i’ve dabbled in theory and method in half a dozen disciplines. but i don’t really have a solid grounding in any of them. i can also understand bits and pieces of half a dozen languages but am fluent in none of them. i’m starting to call this the grand reign of the Almost. (i’m almost responsible, i’m almost on time, i almost respect deadlines, i almost articulate myself, i almost live the way i’d like, i almost trust myself, i’m almost a good correspondent, i can almost see myself living those futures, et cetera. ‘we all long to want jesus,’ writes manicom.)

- last week i struck up conversations with strangers that lasted for four hours. i also encountered friends i’ve known well for years but had nothing to say and it was awkward. this is normal.

- someday i would like to follow fred eaglesmith’s summer tour across alberta.

- i (day)dream about going to jerusalem.

- i lived in damascus for a year after “highschool”. i love that city.

- one of the things that happened that year was i wrote poetry. prolifically. every few days or week i had a new draft ready. and then i came back from dimashq and found i couldn’t write anymore and also the final e-versions of the prior corpus got deleted by mistake by a family-member. and that was that.

- i suspect i am a conservative at heart, in that i distrust promises of change and am generally pessimistic about the future.

- a few years ago and for a long time i felt strongly that leonard cohen’s “famous blue raincoat” was the pinnacle of all musical achievement, ever. i don’t answer questions involving superlatives anymore but that song still holds a special place in my soundscape. i now listen most to jeffrey foucault and co (last.fm will confirm this.) and out on the darkling plain alone / they light up the sky… and am listening more and more to the the so-called ‘holy minimalist’ composers – arvo pärt and john tavener. i’ll try writing about this soon.

- my top lifeplans include learning hebrew (especially to read the psalms) and learning how to juggle.

- i’m too easily impatient or frustrated with the common themes of muslim discourse.

- a couple of days after hariri was assassinated (four years ago this week), emad and i crossed into beirut and wandered the strangely deserted streets of that city. we passed by his mourning-tent but managed to just miss the demonstrations thousands strong.

- someday, in sha allah, i’ll ski the birkebeiner in norway. 55k through the mountains. (my list of somedays is very long.)

- that’s it.

as for tagging other people, i’d tag safiyyah and  javed and taka and the salrooqs if they still wrote online, zainab and noor if they did at all, lara and fathima and adnan except they’ve already done this sort of thing. and other people except i can’t think anymore. c’est tout.

that was a lot of the first person singular.

gaza – day 4

also see “war in context”.

from “israelity bites” -

Gaza Today

I’ve never seen anything like this. It all happened so fast but the amount of death and destruction is inconceivable, even to me and I’m in the middle of it and a few hours have already passed. I think 15 locations were hit during the air raid on Gaza City. [some Israelis sources said 150 targets were struck] The images are probably not broadcast in US media. There are piles and piles of bodies in the locations that were hit. As you look at them you can see that a few of the young men are still alive, someone lifts a hand here, and another raise his head there. They probably died within moments because their bodies are burned, most have lost limbs, some have their guts hanging out and they’re all lying in pools of blood. Outside my home, (which is close to the universities) a bomb fell on a large group of young men, university students, they’d been warned not to stand in groups, it makes them an easy target, but they were waiting for buses to take them home. This was about 3 hours ago 7 were killed, 4 students and 3 of our neighbors kids, teenagers who were from the same family (Rayes) and were best friends. As I’m writing this I heard a funeral procession go by outside, I looked out the window and it was the 3 Rayes boys, They spent all their time together when they were alive, and now their sharing the same funeral together. Nothing could stop my 14 year old brother from rushing out to see the bodies of his friends laying in the street after they were killed. He hasn’t spoken a word since.
A little further down the street about an hour earlier 3 girls happened to be passing by one of the locations when a bomb fell. The girls bodies were torn into pieces and covered the street from one side to the other.

These are just a couple of images that I’ve witnessed. In all the locations people are going through the dead terrified of recognizing a family member among them. The city is in a state of alarm, panic and confusion, cell phones aren’t working, hospitals and morgues are backed up and some of the dead are still lying in the streets with their families gathered around them, kissing their faces, holding on to them. Outside the destroyed buildings old men are kneeling on the floor weeping. Their slim hopes of finding their sons still alive vanished after taking one look at what had become of their office buildings. 

At least 160 people dead in today’s air raid. That means 160 funeral processions, a few today, most of them tomorrow probably. To think that yesterday these families were worried about food and heat and electricity. At this point I think they -actually all of us- would gladly have Hamas sign off every last basic right we’ve been calling for the last few months forever if it could have stopped this from ever having happened. 

The bombing was very close to my home. Most of my extended family live in the area. My family is ok, but 2 of my uncles’ homes were damaged, another relative was injured.
I don’t know why I’m sending this. It doesn’t even begin to tell the story on any level. Just flashes of thing that happened today that are going through my head.

–

and this:

Statement by Minister Cannon on the Situation in Israel and the Gaza Strip

December 27, 2008

No. 252

The Honourable Lawrence Cannon, Minister of Foreign Affairs, today issued the following statement regarding the situation in Israel and the Gaza Strip:

“Canada is deeply concerned by the escalation of violence in Southern Israel and the Gaza Strip and by the loss of life and the suffering sustained by all sides.

“Israel has a clear right to defend itself against the continued rocket attacks by Palestinian militant groups which have deliberately targeted civilians. First and foremost, those rocket attacks must stop. At the same time, we urge both sides to use all efforts to avoid civilian casualties and to create the conditions to allow safe and unhindered humanitarian access to those in need in Gaza.

“In addition to calling for immediate calm, we urge renewed efforts to reach a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel and for Israeli and Palestinian leaders to remain committed to finding a comprehensive peace settlement.”

- 30 -

dis-pel

there is something about movement that for me is intimately linked with the act of writing. i mean specifically physical, spatial movement, not the cycling of temporal stages or the leaping between maqams and darajahs or the banal, profane drift that so characterizes the (my) lack in the face of daily hisab. each of these, of course, are equally inscriptions (if only eschatologically, in that we inscribe though do not author the letters into our final Books). no, i mean specifically spatial difference: the criss-crossing of continents, the finely drawn web that is our passage through the plains, from foothills through valleys into boreal forest, among the mountain passes, the southern deserts, the drought-hit prairie, up to touch tundra and even to graze gray canadian shield. but i find more and more that there is less i can or even want to say about the winter fields of stubble whited with snow as again we reach saskatchewan and again learn to live that sky.

and so i can turn only to something else, and ask, shaking-furious tonight, what the hell israel is doing, as i watch the news at oma’s condominium in gaping amazement.