New Message to Iqbal
Wallah, I don’t know.
I slowly slipped down the rabbit hole, and it took a long time to realize how insular leftist spaces are on social media. Anecdotally, my understanding, adoption, and implementation of materialism led me to see nihilistic scenarios and outcomes, as well as an antagonistic, authoritarian society. I wrote off entropy as an atheistic force, failing to consider it neutral or even enriching.
I was a head, swiveling in the shadow of yesterday’s worries, unwinding sinews of wounds that had long scarred. Disconnected from form, levitating over the limp limbs that had served my vessel, I was stressed, utterly exhausted. A dead man walking.
“Religious suffering is, at the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” — Karl Marx, Critique of the Philosophy of Right
“Religion is not an opium, it is a scream. It is not a lullaby sung to the oppressed so they sleep peacefully in their chains. It is the shout of the enslaved man who has suddenly discovered his chains and is reaching for his dignity.” — Ali Shariati, Religion vs Religion
In the name of collective action, I ironically commodified myself in what was essentially the rat race repackaged, albeit moralized as opposed to capitalized, this time around. “Now” was, again, no longer an inhabitable space. “Now” was unsafe, unstable, ever collapsing in on itself as I escaped to the safety of a solid future that would never arrive. Fleeing further and further from any moment in which I existed, I grew more exhausted the more I accomplished.
“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.” -- Friedrich Nietzsche
Without momentary ecstasy, martyrdom is without meaning, subverted to serve a self-loathing impulse. Actualized, martyrdom is life unbound to an end. The complex of the eternal martyr, however, is life lived in the looming shadow of an end.
So I remind myself:
Dance the day-to-day dance as the Dervish does. Live not life as the crow flies, in a line encased in time and space.
You delighted in delight’s denial, your desperation and demise. Then you lost the ability to laugh at yourself.
No longer will you allow yourself to live as both horse and whip, when even after the heart ceases beating, the whip ceases not.
As the pendulum swings, you, too, are prone to overcorrection, thrusting yourself from pole to pole until you are crucified at their intersection, seeking one certainty as a cure for its counter.
Faith without fear, fear without faith, loss without love, love without loss, worry without work, work without worry, all ultimately rendered futile and sadistic: work for work’s sake.
You have traveled far, I admit, yet you have arrived nowhere. How many expeditions to earth’s ends and extremes must it take to realize mysticism was the medium?
At the core is the One, the womb from which all emanates: silence, sound, serendipity, and suffering.
You open your eyes to yourself in all existence, sustained and awake in this very moment. Yet, I will not blame you if I come back to a blind man in a month’s time.
For what is this existence of ours except separation from a womb and one subsequent watershed after another, only to return?
You sterilize your soul, thinking it sublimation. Existing to be seen, explaining yourself to be understood and consumed.
And art is all that speaks to us without cause or utterance, what we adore as ineffable and spiritual.
What am I to make of you, self? An artist who wrote off the transcendent in search of the tangible. You, I, reduced writing to words.
Return to what we have always known: a metaphysical more solid than the physical, and a spiritual more substantial than the material. It is mysticism through which material action arises, the sublimation of self in the One; sight arises.
I tied the cloth around my eyes so I could be certain all I saw was black. In my search for certainty, only one absolute appeared: death, and in its comfort, I fanned the flames of my anxieties.
I wrote to live. I stopped. I write to remind myself I am alive.
“I wish children would be temporarily elevated to the skies until the war ends. Then they would return home safely, and when their parents asked them, ‘Where were you?’ They would say, we were playing in the clouds.” -- Ghassan Kanafani
I’ll never know other than that I do not know, and I am comforted and sublimated in that uncertain expanse,
Wallah.
