i used to think restoring measures existed. somewhere between catharsis and redemption, a saving grace would descend from on high and transport me toward light. less a latter-day rapture than the simple effects of staking a claim in the wilderness, clearing a homestead. erasing the pastoral to attempt a life with crimson geraniums in window-boxes and white curtains, and i would see this and find it Good.
it’s taken me a long time to reach this point, and i do not fundamentally regret the path. but there are no saving graces, there are no redeeming saviours, there are no cathartic acts. eliot: “if all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable.” and time is linear only in a cosmic sense, in that we will someday – today – pass from this earth just as we entered it. but the time itself is not redeemable, it layers and diffuses and we see each other through it and not in it. it – we – cannot be restored and never die. only when and if the world – the next world – is folded back into the Hashem, Elohim, Allah, Khoda will this too completely fall away.(*) “time lies,” fathima said, but i do not think it does. we do. we position it. for us, now, cavafy writes: “it is night, and the barbarians are coming.” it may or may not be night; we other barbarians gild these our meanings and find them Good.
instead time spirals down and we all shine on. on the boulevards and doorsteps, the times out of time and the stormy silences. taking the bus into the city on winter mornings i see the the pre-dawn motions of people. the lights on in the coffee shops on whyte, shift-workers wiping counters and setting out signs; homeless people in scuffed navy coveralls talking in the doorways of hat-stores and falafel take-outs; patients enjoying morning cigarettes outside the hospital in pale blue smocks and adjusting their IV sacs; newspapermen standing on corners and stamping their feet against the cold.
and we march on. we are always the end of paths taken; we are always the edge of the world. we pretend to supplant, pretend to order, and it gives us life. actualizing action. and we ask after dreams. they come out of my talking to alan, who works at the gas station nearest wuddistan, or laura’s interactions with the movie-store clerk, or daniel’s downward glance which saves a frog from lawnmower blades, or usman asking to read a story and me more often than not telling him to let me be. this is it, all. there is no outside.
and we march on, onward: the hillsides of swat and karimabad in northern pakistan, the apricot vales, are now occupied by the army and genetically modified seed. our every action creating and recreating the world – through kasab and iktisab, of course – in its own image. because here we have metonymic slippage: humanity and the world are not transcendental signifieds, centers and loci, but this is human-ity, ineffable and stupid and obscene and smiling and cooperating and scheming and reaching.
i am not, by this, outlining a new humanism, a self-congratulatory postmodern sensitivity glossed with religious and interesting ethnic tropes. nor is this a useless disclaimer. instead this does open space for anger and happiness and tragedy and comedy and romance and lyric, but with a shift. “the things that i have known i now can know no more,” wordsworth maybe said. and these are what come after theory, after youth, after and in the self. after the things said begin to cite each other in other ways. there are always other paths.
working. we are buffalo soldiers, we proclaim a war in the east and west which will not end until, and i say this with as much sincerity as i can muster, the buildings and bridges and trees and clouds which mark the horizon are seen, seen, seen. and again. noor saw the websites of a textile museum and the maiwa foundation and of cities of light and of umar abd-allah, and turned to me and said: people are doing good things in the world. they are /doing/.
i couldn’t list any others when lara asked about dreams of life (my first was moving to nashville and becoming a country singer under the moniker Eisegesis. i still think it is a good plan.). but i now think the few things that came to mind were united by this thread. we are all always-already doing, but we do not /do/. and in these projects we can reach, all, to each other, and to ourselves, alone, before the Alone.
one necessary consequence of doing is building and dwelling. and dwelling-with-others means compassion but also honesty. not as exclusive emphasis, to gloss ugliness, but as a question of approach. walking the high level bridge to see the current below, skiing in moonlight, snowtussling with cousins, riding toboggansigns down a steep hill to the sea. talking. and the people with whom one can engage have a tendency to move to kuwait, so there are no excuses, ever – there are no redemptive measures.
zacharia said i seemed sad. i don’t think i’m sad. but i cannot claim optimism. i can claim nothing except the necessity of words, the absolute requirement, for me, that inquisitional ink layer these voices and describe and order the horizons in which i now live. questioning the “i” split from itself.
and this, then, is what people have taught me. what G-d has taught me, given me to be taught, given to be known. how i have changed over the past few months. these are some learned articles of faith: the world is an incredibly big place ; people are just people ; mercy and love are found in the dark single spaces ; everything everywhere is connected for all time ; finding the i-Thou in everything – everything – everything – is the most important thing.
there it is.
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(*) tricky ground, i know. but i don’t say it lightly. drawn from ibn ‘arabi via abu bakr siraj al-din
