Pierre
Joris
| Abdallah
Zrika: Mice of the Wheel of Loneliness 1. I don’t want to be the chair facing the body of the deceased nor the insect of emptiness between the legs of the words nor the pebble of the eye that breaks the surface of the glass not even the red that hasn’t seen the least drop of blood to lick 2. I do not understand the shape of the millstone when the wind throws me down nor the rain that runs away through the holes in my shoes I don’t know where I am when I see an earth marked off by the pillars of my death And I don’t understand the sky when the rain falls at the bottom of my head in the place of the pail that slightly shakes my bed 3. I understand fever when it grabs me scrambling everything I hear wiping away everything I see in the very sweat that drains from me until I wake up and open the world the way one opens an icebox finding nothing except the smell of white rotten because of the ice Casablanca, 2000
translated by Pierre Joris From Meditations on the 40 Stations of Mansour Alhallaj 28. Circumspection (hiyata) looks all around us. The inspector cometh, doffs his head carefully, the brainstem shows a hiatus: signs of overexposure. Morocco is brought up but not as a place. A first wave of paranoia boils the lobster half a careful red. Come back an hour later. When the cows come home I’ll act with circumspection. Swivel-eye on stalks stalk the intruder. A half-baked lobster bites through its leash despite the (poet’s) vigilance. But you can’t lead another one through hell without paying the price. That’s the curse of coherence, a thatched roof's monomania. You can’t look upon straw & find the dividend. Eager-beaver frees the silly association of straw & law. But it was something else a minute ago. Minute drift makes the eye tear. Despite trying hard I am out of circumspection. There’s a hiatus between. There is a between. There is is and eyes. Closed. Watch your step. You are a magnac, better than cognac not as fond as pinot white, grey or red — ça coule de source, the sauce, pour it on, more the sin & tax the seller — a deal is a deal unless you know a route to the moon. I do. Say good-bye to Paris. 31. consideration (tadabbur) is the other category of understanding. it signifies. try to find the full meaning of every word, Ayah, explore behind those words, metaphors & parables, discover the textual cohesion & underlying unity, determine the central ideas, delve into lexical intricacies, tanzil, & historical background, undertake a comparative study of different tafsir. Then discover all the implications for the relations between man, God, fellow humans, own self, world; derive laws & morals, rules for state & economy, principles for history & philosophy, implications for the current level of human knowledge. We are not entirely separate nor mutually exclusive categories of understanding, we overlap. >>>Alison Croggon
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