“A poet’s job”

“My thoughts on poetry, for those who still read”.

 

1.How should poetry be read?

2.What is poetry?

3.What is a poet’s job?

The real question above is just one “what is poetry?” but you cannot ask what poetry is, because the question itself is plagued with a lot of problems, for me the word poetry is such a vast and broad term that it’s impossible to point towards one single book a poem or an event that describes poetry. So, a question of such magnitude cannot be answered without force, making room for ideology. Thus, it must be broken down into smaller parts. I also don’t want to answer the question with more poetry, the difficulty here is the difficulty I suppose the campers feel, those who want to climb the Himalayas, often baulk.

So, to avoid giving an exact, a concrete answer, they either write more poetries that poetry is a wound that can never be filled, it is the object à, a dialogue between two bewildered strangers, the unfolding of an event or the verses within some lost bottle at the sea, yeah yeah but what is it?  I’m also about to do something similar by breaking the question down into three parts to use them as conduits through which the answer may freely flow. It’s like that clever joke someone once told me or maybe it was even a true story but since I’m writing it from memory, you may find it a little strained. The story about a foreign student who after finishing his brilliant interview at the Oxford university, a little confused asks his interviewers “I toured around many buildings, rooms, libraries and I saw students in lecture halls and mess-rooms, but I was not once, shown at any point. Where this ‘Oxford’ university is?” Having read Ibn ‘Arabi, I like to imagine the clever interviewer noting here that a true intelligence may see many objects and without denying their individual existences it must be able to identify the single signifier. Thus, the perfect interviewer of my imagination based on this conclusion, rejects the student. I tried to use words, as few as possible but then I was afraid my message perhaps won’t get across, since times are changing. I thought I should at-least write an introduction. Am I saying craft is dead? It’s dying for sure, as the false change often does, hides its dead face, is this change better or worse? Reading Atwood whom I do not particularly like suggests the later but it’s not that simple and for me this actually is the only question that needs a serious answer but since there hasn’t been a significantly long time since the intervention of free sex, to give any just answer is not possible, any analysis at this point cannot be true, considering, the age and influence of the poets of the past and the long cool shadow their spellings cast on the pages in our deserted books where meaning is still lost to rest and reflect. The virgin worship is certainly dying in the west today, but there are still Plato’s who walk among us.  So, the appreciation of her (the Virgin’s) beauty has survived so far. It could be an overspill, nevertheless, I have hope that the neo-feminism can also share some responsibility for the death of poetry, this is obviously a sensitive subject for many, I don’t consider myself a political person, nostalgic as I might seem I’m also a being so, naturally I must stand with some views, I certainly haven’t thought enough but so far, I do find myself in support of the egalitarian west, self-sabotage after tall is the true nature of the poetry, but this shouldn’t even be a question one has to entertain, it’s like that Lacanian paradox about the cheating wife’s pathological husband. Feminism I’m with, from a purely biological, animalistic point of view, insofar as ideology and merchandising/politicising sex does not enter that view. The word (pigs or animals) can now safely be de-stigmatised and in a purely Freudian sense be replaced with the word human, as far as reproductive intent is concerned, pronounced-perversion is mostly a human concept, yes as Augustine argued there was sex in paradise. As an admirer of true poetry my definition of love is very broad, but the other is everywhere, when eating food, we talk about food or watch a video with food and in our most intimate hours, it’s always there. So, sex for humans reduces to as the philosopher said “mutual-masturbation”. My stance on love is very humane and almost poetic-ideological but like a star to an astrologist or Pfaller’s DVD sometimes I wonder if I write my poems just to store my ideas in them, like one of my favourite poet Ghalib I love reversing of the big ideas so today, allow us to just think. And when it comes to the purpose of intercourse, I hate the “animalistic views” that is vulgarity, pure materialism, I’m not saying turn your wife into your mother, I’m saying let us not separate love from sex and sex from love. “Love is a pebble laughing in the sun”, to love is to create a woman, the only thing a man is truly capable of creating is a woman, to love is to create from one’s own rib and that’s what I think Lacan meant by “Loving is to give what one does not have” so for Lacan Penia, the mother, stands for destitution, “Plato tells us, aporia, meaning that she is without resources” he says and Porus the father stands for resourcefulness, cleverness and that Poros himself is the son of Metis, which in turn Lacan translates as ingenuity. Love of course is an act of creation in a biblical sense and so I repeat from my book that the story of Eve’s creation is in fact the actual story of creation, from ‘Arabis’s point of view. Sex is the most spiritual act as there could be, it is the closest one can feel to God, the only way to make the two separated souls reunite, thus love is presented as a mysterious and extraordinary Event, arising as if from nothing. When it comes to empathy, I’m on god’s side until it comes to morality, then I see myself standing with the devil, I have to fight my temptations visibly. The devil “so cut him with stripes that he lay on the ground speechless from the excessive pain and “Here am I, Antony; I flee not from your stripes, for even if you inflict more nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ.”. So, I believe we can share the responsibility, for the death of poetry, as far as the Aion is concerned, until the goatfish becomes dominant in skies again, this will remain my opinion, however, also as pessimistic as I might be I think this is bull****. Well, It’s not what was written that is important in the end, it’s what stuck around, Eliot might agree. What was created and then just like a non-Rilkean creator, unsatisfied with its creation but of course even god too moved on to the next project. It’s only men like Ghalib or perhaps he’s the only one that dares ask “hai kahāñ tamannā kā dūsrā qadam yā rab?”.

So finally, what is poetry? Apart from expression or event which, it is mostly, “beauty is expression” in meaning or in form. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” Keats would say. So, what else is poetry? before I dare admit here, what I consider poetry or a poet’s job to me. Let me first write that this need to define or describe has come from years of reading bloodless poetry of the Age of Aquarius and everyone I know blatantly declaring they are poet’s and thinkers in these so-called poetry societies and communities I have become a part of. Where I shudder in my soul and in the deepest darkest hours of solitude, where there are no walls with ears to hear me, there I still never dare call myself a poet out loud. So, let me in my hour of meekness admit that I’m aware of my destitute in authority and then with humility dare describe what I think a Poet’s job is, by first writing a few words on poetry itself.

A work of poetry like all creative art is concerned with meaning and if meaning is sun, then word is light, thus, sun’s hell is to forever create. A create creates when he wearies of seeing the same materials available to him, so he creates a new form to look at. All art is an effort on man’s part to communicate to his fellow man whatever is lacking in language but just like light, no matter how significant the meaning is, once created the sun is not allowed to linger, this is also a Rilkean cry. Now, with more communication it turns out, more creation is required, so words never lose their virginity just like the sun. As, poetry is concerned with meaning, so it is like all intelligence concerned with imagery. A work of poetry needs to be a perfect combination of expression and perception. Poetry first of all is an aesthetic/decorative activity, as long as Rumi, Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Goethe or Hafez are considered poets, this cannot be rebutted, even if you bring Bedil, Iqbal, Neruda or throw N.M Rashid on the table, first and foremost poetry is an aesthetic activity, otherwise all speech is poetry and all poetry is speech, let it be a Nietzschean argument but, you can argue here that most work of poetry and or art since “god is dead and remains dead” is no longer concerned with beauty but absurdity or meaninglessness, writing or creating which in itself is a self-negation. Anyhow, as most neo-poets are not idealists, beauty in poetry then, one should know has a broader meaning, since poetry is concerned with expression, meaning-generation, and image-making. The beauty in a verse if it evokes a painful or vulgar emotion then is observed in the construction of the sentence itself and craftsmanship. Like Eliot when he takes his aesthetic language and eye for anti-aesthetic detail that nevertheless contributes to the overall beauty of the poem”. Meaning since poetry is directly concerned with it and the job of a Poet entirely stands on the claim I’ll now make, can in a very broad sense be of 4 kinds. If poetry is the bearer of meaning, word is its father and if expression is the body of beauty, perception is its conscious. IQRA comes to mind here, let’s not throw it in prematurely. First, let’s get back to the 4 dimensions of meaning. To the poet words are born with 4 dimensional meanings, the first dimension is understood by everyone, it’s the reflection of a word in human mind, art is not too concerned with this dimension. Second dimension is the imaginary meaning, this dimension is where poetry or the material for any creative art is found raw, this can never exhaust. In the Arab/Persian literature which I’m a student of the word Tajalli is used (divine self-manifestation) the Hegelian-Lacanian-Jungian process by which God the symbol first reveals Himself in concrete forms and what does this mean? Let’s briefly first touch at what THE poet means by religion here, for THE poet religion is but the collective effort on part of the humanity to find and craft the ideal the best possible world to live in and this is of course done with the word, thus, the biblical god is the word so where else possibly could this knowledge come from but god in a literal sense because in the beginning there was just god so to speak, he is the collective unconsciousness and this becomes much more complex but concrete once you read the works of true poets like Rumi and ‘Arabi of course not comparing the two, one is THE poet and the other is more as much as he pretended to hate them because of his master Ghazali, he is more or less a philosopher. So, after Tajalli then comes the interpretation IQRA (Read) or in the Quran it is clearly stated (“al-Lawhu ‘l-Mahfuz”) that the original Quran is in the Preserved Tablet and this Quran is a copy or interpretation of the original, “with Him is the Mother Book” (13:39). Where “There is nothing left unrecorded in it” (6:59). “It is a register where there is the knowledge of everything that has happened and will happen” (50:4) or the Hindus know it as the “Akashic record”, you can think of it as the cloud where all information is stored but if you follow the school of Ibn’ Arabi and the Prophet then the right terms to use are Kashf (unveiling) and Mubash.irat (good dreams). It is in this dimension where virgin Marry remains a Virgin after giving birth to Christ (the word) because, in the universe of words, anything no matter how significant written, thought or uttered cannot make the word ever loose it’s virginity, youth or beauty. Thus, it is impossible to take craft out of any aesthetic imagination, as craft reforms and transforms any given formation which is why even men like Michelangelo needed poetry. Also, you cannot write the sonnet 18 and claim “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” is no longer available or these words can never have a fresh meaning again, you will as Wali Dakhani points out in one of his verses use, shall again, summer afresh and day anew, forever, and ever, which is why for the greatest poets like Mir something that limitless is pointless and unreal. For Mir “Mir the man” is a behr-e-be.teh (a bottomless sea) which he compares to a mirage “like”, not even a mirage “hai admi sarab” “sa” that’s negation of the negation, it’s the true silent event climaxed by means of repetition. A schizophrenic or a person with an identity disorder can live 15 personalities and play them on full scale, involuntarily. There are also people that do this voluntarily, this in fact is the highest paid profession, Johnny Depp is paid $90 million dollars per film to participate in collective delusions. For what is Stan but Eminem’s desire’s way to die on its own terms and why do we listen to this madness? Or better why did he desire to create him? And then why is this knowledge so precious? that “it is the desire of the organism to die in it’s on way and not according to the modification or pressure or something from without” because believes and desires can also live through and in the others, it does not have to be first person, desire is truly immortal in this sense, there is a hadith that “as long as the last believer stands on earth, the day of judgment shall not arrive” so there is also a distinction here between apocalypse and end. It is also because corrosion on a water tap allows itself to be perceived as a map and my 4 years old daughter sees human faces in clouds regularly, most impressive thing she ever said to me was that the paperweight was a lake full of frozen fishes. In-fact human brain is wired to recognise patterns, it’s a very important skill.

Then in the third dimension, words have emotional meanings, here pain is made felt so intensely and new that any of your own personal experiences with pain may seem pale in comparison to it, sunrays may never blind you again and a winter’s cold may start shivering your bones, pleasantly, this is the highest form of meaning in poetry, that poets like Mir and Shakespeare were champion at, objectifying truths and creating new dimensions of emotions and feelings, a task that is almost impossible. In the fourth and last dimension, it gets trickier when things are born with their opposites, happy is born sad and life dead, because true intelligence seeks fulfilment, it is incomplete until it can see things with their opposites before establishing truth, whether truth is true or not but establishing it is the last stage of fulfilment, which is never reached. Thus, rather than dying and born again anew, all consciousness is stretched across time, for psychology and semiotics. This dimension concerns body and its own unique-personal relationship with the word. Because words are idols thus, speaking itself is idol worship, this is the great Lacanian claim, “You believe in God the moment you speak” Ghalib says it better, also the Jungian (collective unconsciousness) or Arabi’s unity of being or as the atomic theory states that everything is fundamentally made of same material but is yet separate, so Ghalib says:

“Hai aadmi bajaye khud ik mehshar e khayal

Hum anju.man samajhte haen khalwat hi kyn na ho”

“That the (first) man is but a gathering of ideas”, I consider even his loneliness a gathering. Of course, this is a very poor translation, it’s not as simple as that, an entire essay can be written just about these two lines, so let’s break it down, at least a little, keep the Lacanian “mirror stage” in mind.

Ghalib describes what a man is, he reimagines “man” like Mir has previously done, which is not an easy job at all. Then so creatively that I have no words to appreciate enough the beautiful couplet above. He opens with hai adami (a singular man is) (Bajaye khud) this has many meanings first meaning when paired with (A man is) could be that (a man) is (sahib-e-itlaq) it recognises itself by (it) self or where he is seated or instead of itself. The word ja (place) is very focused when internalised and boundless if externalised.

Now what is he? First of all, the word (ek) means one, here Ghlaib goes back to (unity of being) or one consciousness stretched across time, yet man is a universe that is constantly inflating which comes later in (hai kahan tamana ka) where Ghalib then asks the epistemological question quite like the Lacanian Object petit a, of course now this may seems obvious that no man is a free or complete man because what he wants exists outside of him and directly interferes with what someone else wants, that’s why a society needs language, even a wild animal is tied to the forest but then of course a wild horse does not have its own sense of direction, he who rides the horse must give it direction and in that sense intellect does not create a new rope but it ties you to the rope it is tied to, thus, the knowledge of form is not binding, consequently it cannot be trusted. Ghalib baffles me with his farsightedness and this although is a good couplet but in no way is this an example of the best of his works but let’s go back to the verse. He says man is a (Mehshar-e-khayal) Mahshar means gathering. Mehshar is a place where ideas stand and are continuously being born and by using the word Mehshar which in Islamic tradition is a “field/arena of doomsday”, where the dead will gather or where they’ll be resurrected. He also in a Jungian sense sheds light on another big idea. That a man in his stead is a place where ideas are continuously being born, dead and resurrecting anew and of course this happens silently in the background. That’s (repetition) for Ghalib.

Now the word (khayal) when paired with Mahshar needs to be separately examined as well. Because it has been placed in a gathering, an atmosphere of noise and agitation, Mahshar is not a quiet place, here the dead will be brought to life, they’ll come walking out of their graves, out of their peace and quiet into a crowd, into an environment of chaos, noise, toil, and hassle. So (khayal) which is related to imagination, fantasy, thinking-thought-intellection is paired with its complete opposite (shor) noise but thinking usually resembles or is associated with silence or signifies a silent-silence. Khayal, an idea, thought or imagination immediately is reflection of an object or a thing but then it is a practice or that faculty by which old things and ideas wear new clothes and colours. Because for a poet or any human being, who is truly a human being, the world within needs to be more complete than the world outside. Which is why a human-being needs poetry in the first place, all good poetry is an attempt to make somewhat whole or fuller the incomplete world within, but we are merely attempting to fill a void that is in magnitude a black hole. If you are a student of Lacan, you may agree. Because man especially that is genderless in his true nature, constantly changes his clothes he never has a binding dress that can define him from the outside, he is defined by what he feels like wearing that day from inside, when Brando will say “but you only have so many faces” Depp may reply “I still have more faces in my pocket”. So, this is the fourth dimension of meaning that is connected with body.

Now in the Arab literature you will find that things are revealed by their opposites, the word for that in Arabic is greatly connected with Quran, the constant duality of words in Quran, Al-Adhdad or the concept opposites, of chaos and order, which flows beautifully in Quran. Or even in Masnavi of Rumi, which is a considerably small piece of literature when compared to Quran but to avoid interpreting Quran wrong, let’s go to Masnavi. Where Molana would write something like:

“Dear God, show my soul to that garden,

where speech is born without the need of words”

where verses grow independently, without the seeds of words.

Or to quote the more famous saying by Muvlana “silence is the language of god”.

 

“Since the colours are hidden at night, you have therefore

found (that) the sight of colours is (necessarily) due to light.”

Or

“God created pain and (yearning) sorrow for this sake:

so that happiness may occur by (means of) this opposite”.

This duality or the fourth dimension of meaning which is connected very uniquely to (Wujud) existence, the very human body itself is where all knowledge exists. If you are a follower of Ibn’ Arabi’s school, this can be found in the very introductions of Fusūs al-Hikam. Not even in the introduction but this is the first line of the introduction “praise be to God, who by the unity of the path of the peoples and from the most eternal station makes wisdom descend into the hearts of the Words”. Now, you can say that he was the father of Semiotics, but the wisdom of semiology was there before him, Ibn-AL-Arabi of course was the student of Al-Ghazali, he used to read his books in mataf e kaaba. Then within the very definitions of “ISMS” or the attributive names of God the real semiology begins with Arabi, and in a very Hegelian sense, what he saw was never seen again. He writes that “Divine knowledge is Old” then with these words he begins to write that within each name of God is caught a Real living god of a previous society, all of his possibilities and the limits of His existence in their totalities are governed by just the name of this fallen god. So, gods’ names are many because people are many, so are their personalities, well, now you can say I don’t believe in god but within the I, there’s room and reason enough for him to exist. Or you can believe what Ibn Al-’Arabi believed, and Lacan also thought this, although no one has said this before, since this is what I personally believe that the Christian thought that Eve was created from Adam’s rib is a small, beautiful metaphor for the best creation myth there is, it makes the man genderless. One of the attributes of Abrahamic God is that He is Truth, He is One “Sh’ma Yisra’eil Adonai echad” he’s The One. The Only truth, Al-Haqq, in Islam “The Truth”, The Ultimate Reality. Which means that there was nothing before Him. So, one ought to ask himself, where did He then find the materials to create everything? From his own rib, naturally. Which is confirmed in Al-Baqarah “Wherever you might turn, there is the Face of God” and many other places in the Quran state this but bear in mind this isn’t a pantheistic view. Arabi’ is much more complex than that, so much that he himself failed to translate his own work, properly. He was so popular and controversial in his own lifetime that he had to write translations of his own work, to avoid misunderstanding him. Wahdat ul Wujud or the essential oneness and perceptual diversity is better described by him in Fut. III.231, Chapter 351, where he urges his readers to “Pay attention to the Most High’s saying: “It is watered with one water” (Q. 13:4). The earth is one, but the tastes, fragrances, and colours differ. You say that honey is sweet and delicious; then you see that some temperaments are harmed by it, do not find it delicious, and find it bitter. Similar is the case with fragrances and colours, for we see that these differences go back to perceptions, not to the things [themselves]; so, we see them as relationships that have no reality in themselves except insofar as their substance is concerned.”

So, if the semantics to understand a particular text is lacking within the culture and for the people of the time a text is written for, then… which is why no one dares translate him properly and without hesitation, either he was too damn smart or overly complex, perhaps like Lacan or all semioticians. Anyway, back to what is meant by “Wherever you might turn, there is the Face of God”, something to have been born from a miracle needs to satisfy that it did not already exist. So, for god to have created something would mean it did not already exist too, so how can one be capable of everything and anything and then create something, it’s the problem of the Hegelian 1. That means that potential and infinity applies even to god. Now Ibn Al-’Arabi’s definition of infinity is that for something to be defined as infinite, it needs to satisfy spread and fold, which should be the definition of infinity anyhow. That when spread it cannot be measured and when folded it cannot be seen. Now to get rid of this duality and this is the fourth dimension from which true intelligence is born. According to Arabi to get rid of the duality of words and meanings the tool one needs to own is called (etebar) trust and this trust must be created through a process, he’s now describing a poet’s job, this is his definition not mine, I wouldn’t dare. So, a Poet is he who creates this etebar or trust after seeing a word unveiled and united with meaning and a poet’s job in this sense is to also create a new desire through witnessing the truth manifest in a form and then describing this event.

So again, who is this Poet and what does he do? A poet is he who gets rid of the duality between words and their meanings, though if he succeeds, he is no longer a poet but an Aarif and then the problem becomes the opposite, it becomes the problem of (Iqra) or describe what you saw in words, and of course whatever you might say now is the copy of the original. So Loh-e-Mehfoz is the prophet’s heart. Thus, the “Watered with One Water” is also a dangerous idea, for Arabi’s ideas can easily be distorted, misinterpreted, and misused. The water takes on the colour of the cup, so, intelligence even in a man like ‘Arabi too can be corruptive, when he writes something like I too drink from the same stream as the prophets or that where the prophet saw space for one brick, I saw space for two. As much as I pray that he didn’t write, these statements I know that he did. Because self-sabotage is the nature of intellect combined with poetry this is done through the hands of Narcissus.

So, a poet’s job is meaning-generation, perception making and constantly redefining meaning, she adds new dimensions to a pre-existing meaning directly inside your brain, she makes you experience meaning as well as new experiences. Because a creator constantly wishes to see things in other different newer forms rather than the world of meaning he has created. Because meaning is the pre-admitted reflection of an idea in your brain, whether subjective or objective, poets like Shakespeare and Mir are capable of objectifying truth and reality “mere rone ki haqiqat thi jis mein, ek mudat tak who kaghaz nam raha” (the letter which carries the truth of my misery, remains often, wet”.

Heavens were built by the prophets to compensate the poor. So, if you want to get in them, naturally you must please the prophets and not necessarily their gods. God for Arabi has no need to build the heavens or ask for your prayers or good deeds as he has no need for it. This isn’t a Melvillean “mouthing of microbes” sort of statement but more of a Kierkegaardian acknowledgment. Naturally you’re doing all those things for yourselves and for the prophets of your own religions to get into their heavens not gods’. No matter what you do, how much you pray you will not get in the heaven unless he who the heaven belongs to wants you in there. That’s the change of Qibla (direction for prayer) metaphorically speaking is in Islam, to separate the Muslim heaven from the Jewish heaven. Although, I can’t say certainly because the revelation order of Quran is lost to history, but Mehraj was probably the first ever vision prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.W) had maybe even before IQRA. Well, there was definitely something before, the excess without which the fall and the journey back to it cannot begin, that which frightened the prophet and a woman (his wife) about which I’ll make some commentary in the conclusion, quite fittingly tells Muhammad (S.A.W.W) that this event meant that He is a prophet, this is the same reason why it was Eve who passed Adam the fruit to eat, that is the fruit of consciousness. Bear in mind that it is this line of thinking that begins “The Satanic Verses”, because if asked Eve she would say “it was the serpent who passed her the apple”. What I mean is that when the angel visited Muhammad SAW for the first time in the cave where he went to seek solitude, Muhmmad SAW fled down the mountain in terror and the voice called after him “O Muhammad, you are the prophet of God, and I am the angel Gabriel”. This story confirms that what Muhammad encountered was an encounter with the real, because any encounter with the real must be traumatic and then when he told his wife about his traumatic experience, she took him to her elderly Christian cousin Nofil who told him that he was indeed the prophet of God and that the angel was Gabriel. Muhmmad SAW was in doubt, and he remained in doubt, in fact after his first experience with the angel he came back from the cave shaking and his wife covered him up as if he had ague. He told her of his experience, and he queried if he was subject to a phenomenon that was harmful to him. She assured him that given his character/personality and reputation in Mecca that he was not being fooled and that Allah would not hurt/deceive him. She believed him in his telling of his experience, and she was the first to accept Islam after Muhammad. This is what I mean by what I previously wrote that woman is the giver of consciousness in all situations, thus Lacan states that “there is no woman” or Badiou says something even better that there must be no god because there is woman. It’s what Lacan means when he says that man believes he creates; he creates-creates-creates woman.

And to go back to what I was saying, speaking of the pattern in which Quran was revealed, Mehraj as well as the first also must be the last thing done by the prophet, it’s the aftermath of a meeting with the Lacanian Real, the way Mehraj is described is how the consciousness must become complete, absolute. It is also why the addressee of revelation as Muhammad said was the man today but also the last man on earth. It is why he claimed to be the seal of the Prophets and ‘Arabi after him claimed to be the seal of the saints. But the reason why the prophet’s claim represents a completion of consciousness and the events that unfolded throughout all the revelation. From when Moses sees god to when Muhammad SAW sees God, and the manner of revelation from what is revealed to Moses to then what is revealed to Jesus and then to Muhammad SAWW is changed, it is the Lacanian freedom between the blind spots. A child is given commandments; a teenager is given reasons, but it is the adult that physically has to live the father’s life. If one consciousness is stretched across time, then Muhammad is the end of that conscious because of what happens at Mehraj that unlike Buddah the prophet sees God with waking eyes because “the unconscious is not about losing one’s memory but recalling what one knows” and may I add the as the whole, as the one. It is to take it back to one, thus, Abdul Quddus Gangohi writes that on the night of Mehraj “Muhammad takes flight to the heavens and comes back, by god, if it was me, I would never come back”. Thus, reanalysing my previous statement from (treasure of the youth) here, I re-conclude that Hero is obviously the one who comes back. So, Muhammad is the complete man separate from the Nietzschean Übermensch, in fact if there was ever an Übermensch it’d have to be Muhammad (S.A.W.W). Mehraj justifies His claim about the completion of prophet-hood. Mehraj marks the end of an era, the end of an Aion, a Lacanian training or a completion of a consciousness that has met with the Real, it’s deeply symbolic and I cannot forcefully summarise it here, it needs a separate book written about it.

Anyway, wisdom if there is such thing as the true wisdom as the title “Fusus Al-Hikam” suggests is learned by seeing the words and their meanings in marriage without the veil of their duality. So, there is the god of the world the symbol, the real the Word and there is the God. Heaven should naturally be for the dwellers of this earth too, there is no physical need for a heaven beyond this world. So, get this straight, if you are following a metaphysical heaven, that is just a compensation, it is to say that come with us and what we cannot give you here, you shall receive in the next world. This is not the prophet Muhammad’s heaven his heaven is the heaven here and beyond. His claim was that come with me and see how we live, as we prosper here, so if you come with us, you shall in the next world prosper too, so for today’s Muslims I ask them, what do you have to offer to show here in this world? Something that is concrete and physical without the promise of a heaven in the next world. The heaven beyond earth in sooth is but a guest room. So, your heaven is built by whichever poet it is you follow, so obviously you get to it by pleasing the poet not the God. It should be clear enough by now that the wisdom descends into the hearts of words not the poets, so it should be clear enough that when you worship, you worship the word and surely enough if you follow the original poets and not the predecessors of Marx who popularised and reimagined these poet’s works, well in theory Jesus too was a Marxist but he was a practical man. So, if you follow the original poets you can get into their heavens.

If you follow Muhammad and not the “we just think it all”, poets, described in (Ash-Shu’ar ) you too may go to his heaven, by following them I mean following their path, to collapse the duality between mind and body. And not just to follow their words, as is clear enough in bible or Poetic Edda whichever poet found god, didn’t sit in his home afterwards eating cake all day, it was a call for adventure, god wants sacrifices, exiles and wars, that’s how the foundations of heaves are laid, it’s funny the modernists in the west should be the ones figuring this out not sissies like me, a man who shies away from hard-work but I guess they are busy sacrificing (working hard) and then (playing hard) enjoying their heavens, this is of course not the statement of a vulgar materialist but then again my favourite philosopher on the other hand say don’t act “just think”. I’m not promoting war either, the word war I’ve used is a translation of the word I have in mind, but there is also reason and room enough for war in it’s pure meaning to exist, in my vocabulary, you must stand somewhere, “be cold or hot” lest you be spewed. What I mean by the two types of poets is a distinction set by Quran and by now it should be clear that word has a separate identity from its writer or Poet. That’s why Muhammad or a prophet is not recognised as the author of His own work but God, the symbol, the real the Word, itself is the author of Word just like speech itself becomes the second speaker. There is an entire body of work about (Sukhan/word) in the poetry of Hafez, Rumi and Bedil which can be theorised separately from the western philosophy. But to get back to my point Quran states that “As for poets, they are followed ˹merely˺ by deviants. Do you not see how they rant in every field?” Or “As for those poets, only the perverse follow them.  Do you not see that they go too far in every direction and say things, which they cannot do?”. So, according to Arabi, God, has no need for prayers or to build heavens, no matter how much you try to figure Him out you just can’t, learn to live with that, if you want heaven or hell is all there is for you.

Arabi doesn’t consider the duality of subject and object to be real. He accepts it purely because of the imperfections of its mixing with human mind. And the cessation of this duality brings (aitibar) or trust in human mind and that trust brings forth knowledge or ilm. That for Ibn e Arabi is the process of gaining true wisdom. True wisdom is to see the object/subject word/meaning in its true oneness without the veil of duality, and this is the fourth dimension of meaning. The process through which true knowledge is received or revealed, since, knowledge in reality is the process of making obedient of consciousness a word and it’s meaning in it’s oneness. Which has been separated through error. This is pure semiology. His entire philosophy has basically been an attempt of getting rid of the human error of language. By God he meant the word and by word he meant God or Rooh/sprit as you can see that the words Kalam and Rooh have been used interchangibaly by him. That’s the question of Iqbal as well who in this dualistic anecdote is with and against Arabi (hain sifat e Zat he haq, haq Se juda ya ayn e zat) “I also intend to write a separate commentary on this verse later in the book” as for Arabi’s position on the matter, he’s been clear since his introduction of the book, Iqbal dare I say was not fully familiar with Arabi’s work, well perhaps more tha me, but according to him, he did not understand ‘Arabi, and let me make it clear here, no one understands Ibn-e-Arabi, he remains a complete mystery to all his students.

So now, I’ll very briefly add here that unlike Poet’s I don’t have the capacity over word. I don’t have a deeper understanding or knowledge of English language, so far, I don’t know or understand the English imagery or have a disposal of enough words to satisfy its true poetry. For me the word fork is a reflection of the physical fork in my brain, it’s not a word that I have lived through experience as I did not grow up eating with fork but my fingers. This is the duality I cannot rid, for my daughter the word fork is one in mind and body, it is the fork she has lived, she knows it by hand. For the words I use to write my poems, I have seen them in books and their meanings I have learned from dictionaries, their usage I have learned by reading poetries and novels of those who know these words from experiences. You can see this duality even in the works of Bedil and           Ghani, let alone someone like me, where Iraqi and Nizami have this natural flow and softness, Bedil or Ghalib has this unnecessary roughness and forced complexity, well let’s not say this about Bedil but Ghalib of-course has this unnatural forced complexity of ideas and imagery, which withdrew in his last age because he was no longer lets “bewitched by the language” or Bedil to be more precise. My Ustaad used to say that the begging’s of Ghalib are filled with the (Jinnati) alien language and imagery.

Secondly, my work, this (my previous two books) especially cannot be considered true works of poetry because not only does it fail these technical terms but it fails to satisfy the defining body of power. Since if it is even between the yes and no, I still think my work by being premeditated fails to satisfy kashf, we are the descendants of Kane not Abel, we need the emissary to weaken or be at least passive to create art, it’s like when Abraham started seeing things inside the Blakean circles and spirals, he looked around in awe and started praising everything, the sun as if he was seeing it for the first ever time. It’s merely an investigation into the work of music and poetry, I’ve adapted the poetic language out of my deep respect for Poets and love of poetry. Thus, it’s a fraudulent work (poetically speaking) and should only be read as an investigation into poetry rather than poetry itself. Since it involves non or very little kashf. So, as you can see by setting this clear distinction, I’ve tried to describe to you what is considered poetry in my eyes. Perhaps for I, as I stated, the most important job of a poet apart from satisfying the technicalities of poetry is to see meaning in its unveiled non-dualistic form, which can only be received through the medium of Kashf, my work starts becoming more poetic by at-least my 4^th book onwards, when the health of my words, my poetry and poetic understanding matures. It’s when I started to understand what plagued, what tainted and corrupted the health of my poetry, it was the rats of my philosophical curiosity, a word that then starts to enter my future poems a lot. Well, I hope to publish more work in future, you can be the judges. Perhaps it’d be unfair to say that, since a work of art has its own identity, some of the work, I wrote first and reflected upon it afterwards, I found it to be true and obviously, not everything in this book can be considered ideologically possessed, maybe between 30 to 35% of this work can be considered even true poetry. Some poems for example were revealed to me through the process of true unveiling and some subjects I found at heights of intense contemplation, those poems that concern dreams, and nightmares, especially. Because not all dreams have Freudian meanings, that not all dreams are about sex, although, Freud is an extremely hard man to rebut and by that, I mean that just because a termite can destroy timber, that doesn’t make termite better or more powerful than timber or a thousand-year-old Banyan tree. If you can prove Plato or Plotinus wrong after reading philosophy for two days, that doesn’t make you a more superior philosopher than Plato or a philosopher at all, otherwise every BA philosophy teacher would be a greater philosopher than Descartes. If merely understanding complex ideas and repeating patterns made intellects, all university professors should be Einstein’s and every art teacher would be Dali. Someone online who apparently has a PHD in psychology wrote in a paper that girls are imagining vampires sucking the fat out of them that’s why they have sexual desire for them” what the actual…?

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