The Human Condition

David Steindlin Rast quoted by Vincent Ross, Parabola, August 1983

"To be human means to be contemplative at heart."

"The only alternative to the ‘listening wisdom’ of obedience is absurdity from Absurdus, which literally means to be utterly deaf. ‘If I call a situation absurd I admit I am deaf to its meaning.’ Obedience then, is ‘the daily discipline of listening and responding to meaning.’ “

In describing the appeal of fantasy, David Gemmell, the author of Legend said, "Societies need heroes. So we travel to places where the revisionsists cannot dimmantle the great."

"Films are like dreams; they articulate the social subconscious."

John Shirley, Parabola, Winter 2007

"The narcissim of depression is a hole with very deep sides."

Mark Doty

“You see, language begins with the breath. It is the vocalization of the breath. This vocalization takes breath, which is ultimately pure and ineffable, and it configures it. That configuration gives meaning. It’s just like creation. Creation began with pure essence, a universal breath, but the universal breath reverberated and produced, through crystallization the manifest cosmos. The breath is crystallized as words and something ineffable and transcendent gets concretized. This concretization adds a definite value, though it runs the risk of concealing the vastness and freedom of pure being. The alphabet goes further in the direction of concretization, and communication is no longer exchanged directly, face to face, but rather through an intermediary—a clay tablet, and later a scroll.

Before the vowels were codified in the alphabet you had to breathe them into the text. Mind, breath, and script mutually interpenetrated. More and more, however text becomes autonomous. First there’s the scribal tradition. But then with the invention of the printing press text becomes linear and closed—a closed block of data. This shift was instrumental in energizing the scientific revolution, industrialization, and colonization. The apotheosis is the Internet. We’ve gone beyond the mass-produced printed text to the electronic text that exists everywhere and nowhere. It amounts to a kind o agnostic sublimation of pure information where the body is left behind. The consequence is people suffering from computer vision syndrome, staring before the glowing screen while the body goes numb. One of our primary purposes in the Sufi Order is to cultivate awareness of breath as it flows through the body. One of the early definitions of a Sufi is one who breathes well.’ So, yes, my concern is very much that the wholeness of the incarnate person is in danger of being severed by overindulgence in the new media technologies. What we are interested in here is not necessarily transcendence, but integration.”

A Reality Without A Name: An interview with Pir Zia Inayat Khan by Robert Doto in the Winter 2007 Parabola.

“Not only does the immanent state lack meaning in isolation—so too does the transcendent state. According to a sacred tradition (hadith qudsi) cherished by the Sufis, in the solitude of eternity God was a ‘hidden treasure’ that yearned to be known. The condition of manifestation is that of the One Being seeking to reveal and experience itself. There is on the one side the descending energy of creation, the emanation from the divine Essence of the natural world and of the human being. But then there is also a converse force, which is information that is not preordained at the dawn of time. Rather it is that which spontaneously unfolds in the course of the journey. It is discovered. And that which is discovered is then uploaded, you might say. I believe this is the process Rumi is speaking about. We are invited to serve as trusted channels for the furtherance of creation.

The Sufis say that there are two journeys. The first, the journey to God, has an end. But the second, the journey in God, is endless. That is when one realizes one’s own path is not about overcoming one’s personal limitations and attaining perfection, but rather about participation in the desire of the whole being to experience itself.”

A Reality Without A Name: An interview with Pir Zia Inayat Khan by Robert Doto in the Winter 2007 Parabola.

“There’s a wonderful passage in the Masnavi of Rumi in which he speaks of the heart as a womb. Through that womb a new world is born, and so each of us in our incarnate existence is consciously or unconsciously in the process of birthing a new universe There is a constant dialogue between eternity and this moment and between infinity and this place. If it were not so, if the physical plane merely ran on its own power, existence would be like a machine. That is the physics of the Enlightenment: the universe is a great cosmic clockwork. In that vision the world is a self-perpetuating series of accidents that are ultimately meaningless. Matter is assumed to be essentially inanimate, which is to say soulless. But the perception of the mystic is that anima exists: there is a living current, an evolutionary force, a providential but open ended destiny working itself out in this planetary sphere. And that is because this sphere is not isolated, but is in a dialogical rapport with eternity.”

A Reality Without A Name: An interview with Pir Zia Inayat Khan by Robert Doto in the Winter 2007 Parabola.

“Only poetry in this larger sense—only the art of language –makes possible a full understanding of an art work’s ‘world.’ Language, the distinctively human possession, was what allows” stone, plant and animal” to be fully perceived, in a way that they can’t perceive themselves. “Where there is no language…there is also openness of what is, “ Heidegger writes, “ Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance.” Only by talking and writing about something can we really understand what it is and what it means,

But just as Heidegger insists that the artwork has a double existence as both earth and world, so his own theory of poetry cuts two ways. If the poet is primarily concerned with earth—with displaying particular being and concrete reality—he will tend to conceive of poetry as a passive art, concerned with perception and preservation. The ideal of such poetry is naming: by finding the right name for every being, the poet functions as Adam did in the Garden of Eden, completing God’s creation by bringing it into the human realm of language.

And just as a language is not a language if it is spoken by only one person, so the naming poet can only exist if his names are conveyed to readers and embraced by them, As a result, he stands in a particularly intimate relationship to the reader, whom he regards as a kind of partner in the creation of the work. “preserving the work,” as Heidegger puts it, does not reduce people to their private experiences but brings them into affiliation with the truth happening in the work.

I, on the other hand, the poet is more concerned with world,--with the historical, myhthic, and spiritual context that the poem creates or invokes—he will tend to see poetry as an active art, and in some sense even a domineering one. The poet of world doesn’t just want to preserve an experience with the reader; he wants to interpret experience of the reader,. He goes beyond names to commandments. And Heidegger has a definite sympathy with this kind of poet, which we can see from the way he himself makes a poem out of his description of a Greek temple: “The temple, in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves,. This view remains open as long as the work is a work, as long as the god had fled from, it.”

Adam Kirsch, The Taste of Silence, Poetry January 2008

Of course one can discuss through and around these points, but I particularly like the naming and meaning concepts concepts.

I read poetry at Fantasia, a local coffee house on Monday nights. This was read this week.

READING ROBERT LAX

Coming toward this moment
My whole life,
Without waiting.
There was no expectation,
Just inexorable time,
Against this now,
I had been coming toward.
Not quickly, nor slowly,
Just coming, over the years,
Across cities, country sides.
Always on the move,
But never predestined.

Coming toward this moment
Watched by others,
Not curiously,
Nor compassionately.
Watched by corners of eyes,
In hotel lobbies,
Quiet dark bars,
Mornings, evenings,
Times of spring green,
Summer breezes,
Fall yellows,
Winter whites.

Years and years
Coming toward this moment.

Jeanette Winterson says, “Art does not imitate life. Art anticipates life.” We tend to be a society of things and consumption. Although art too can be consumed, it is intrinsically subversive because it is about ideas and states of being expressed in words, images and performance.

Americans are particularly fond of right and wrong, black and white. You are either for us or against us. Art is not about true and false; it is about insights into the human condition. Although it can support beliefs we already have, it also opens us up to possibilities outside of our current sense of who we are.