when you find the love, you find yourself

Some Tafsir from Sahl al-Tustari (d. 283/896)

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 04:07:39 GMT

Bismillah~
Translations taken/paraphrased from Böwering's truly tasty Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam. Sahl al-Tustari's hermeneutic was not textual, though it was systematic: moment by moment repentance, understood as fundamental turning of one's being toward source, that had succeeded many years of arduous asceticism, particularly fasting. He stopped extremes of fasting and continued in continual remembrance. The Qur'an for Tustari calls to the sirr, the secret of the soul where man is in colloquy with Lord and, deeper, Lord alone speaks wordlessly. The tafsir is a notebook of jottings by disciples of their master's responses to Qur'an recitations, possibly ecstatic utterances.

Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth The likeness of His light is as a niche wherein is a lamp the lamp in a glass the glass, as it were, a glittering star kindled from a blessed tree, an olive neither of the east or the west whose oil wellnigh would shine, even if no fire touched it Light upon light Allah guides to His light whom He will and Allah strikes similitudes for humanity and Allah has knowledge of everything	24:35 Ayat al-nur likeness of His light: Light of Muhammad the lamp and glass: his breast and heart like a star: with faith and wisdom shining of the oil: the prophecy of Muhammad would elucidate humanity even without speech or expression
By the white forenoon and the brooding night	93: Duha The spiritual self, and the natural self when it relies calmly on continuous remembrance
...the last shall be better for thee than the first	In the final world, the prais&egrav;d station and intercession is better than prophethood and apostleship in the lower world.
Did He not find thee an orphan and shelter thee?	You were alone, o Prophet, and he sheltered you with your companions.
Did He not find thee erring and guide thee?	He made you aware of the eminent value of your self. He found you erring --incomplete-- in your pure affection; He gave you drink of His affection with the cup of His love, and guided to intimate knowledge of Him.
Did He not find thee needy, and enrich thee?	Your self was bewildered in intimacy with Us; We strengthened it with teh Qur'an and wisdom

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:01:52 GMT

بسمه تعالى

anxieties and desires:

finding great employment, not settling for crap jobs, providing for my family, expanding the family to 3+, being able to work and do a phd program in less than 12 years, becoming a professional academic in the reasonable future.

actually, just finding a phd program, praying the UGA religion dept gets its act together & has a phd program for next year, looking at the handful of reasonable programs across the US & Canuckistan and feeling alternately elated, confident, terrified, and depressed. I know German, do I really need French, too?

without a community around me, a supportive community that is, I don't know what my spiritual practice is turning into. not writing my shaykh's teachings, not reading Arabic regularly, not learning more Qur'an, not not not. when can I just be. when can I just be real, alive, present, loved, loving, the love dissolves.

say 'allah' and leave them plunging in their playing

I can't believe I never saw this classic Onion article!

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 13:06:51 GMT

PROVO, UTAH team of physicists from Brigham Young University announced yesterday that they have succeeded in converting a tiny particle of matter into the truth and sanctity of the Book of Mormon.

According to BYU physicists, the new Joseph Smith Particle Accelerator may someday enable Mormons to proselytize "cheaply, cleanly and efficiently."

"This opens up a new world of possibilities for the Church," said Zebulon Calhoun, a particle physicist and Priest of the Melchizedek Order. "We can now conceive of a time in the near future when we will be able to proselytize cheaply, cleanly and efficiently."

The breakthrough occurred at the Joseph Smith Particle Accelerator, a giant, hollow tube buried 90 feet below the Bonneville Salt Flats. The tube was unearthed in 1986 by Mormon archaeologists after the President of the Church beheld a vision of a "splendiferous airy ring submerged by the Nephites as a final tabernacle before the great cataclysm."

To trigger the matter-to-Mormonism conversion, a microgram of the element strontium is ordained by the doctrine and arcana of the Urim and Thummim, then bombarded by a high-energy photon traveling at four-fifths the speed of light.

Strontium was chosen for the project because "of all the elements it is the most unstable and therefore the most likely to react strongly to common-sense teachings."

According to Calhoun, though the conversion was invisible to the naked eye, subatomic "fingerprints" left by the collision reveal that for a brief period, the neutrons and protons in the nuclei of the atoms were actually fused together by faith in Jesus Christ and his Gospel as restored through his latter-day prophet, Joseph Smith. Though the Mormon Church has acheived great success with its missionary work in the past, the Joseph Smith Particle Accelerator is expected to revolutionize its recruitment efforts.

"Within 50 years," Calhoun said, "the Mormonism contained in the atoms of just a single glass of water will be enough to convert a city the size of St. Louis."

Despite widespread enthusiasm, many Church Elders remain cautious.

"When you're dealing with a high-tech religious converter like this, you always run the risk of a terrible accident," Gadzekiel Foley said. "The last thing we need to worry about is a possible Mormon meltdown."

"I don't think we will ever find a replacement for good old-fashioned missionary work," agreed Gad Jones, Church Elder and president of BYU's Overseas Studies Program. "In terms of spreading goodwill and interest in our faith, all the atoms in the world still can't do what was once done by a little bit of country and a little bit of rock 'n' roll."

With its new converter, the Mormon Church should leap well ahead of its religious competitors. Catholic scientists are still experiencing technical problems with their guilt-fusion reactor, a device critics say requires such high levels of devotional prayer to reach operating temperature that it may never be cost effective.

The Lutheran Church has struggled as well, as its Missouri Synod Project, once touted as the forgiveness generator of tomorrow, has yet to produce its first high-energy, room-temperature Lutheran.

Only Hinduism has been able to keep pace with the Mormons, maintaining its longtime dominance in the field of Reincarnatronic technology.

curriculum of MA in Liberal Arts at St. John's College

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 14:10:33 GMT

Curriculum - Literature

Literature Seminar
Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Choephoroe, Eumenides
Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
Euripides: Hippolytus, Bacchae, Electra
Aristophanes: Frogs

Literature Tutorial
Chaucer: Canterbury Tales in Middle English*
Shakespeare: King Lear
Aristotle: Poetics
Selected English lyric poetry

Literature Preceptorial (samples)
Cervantes: Don Quixote
Joyce: Ulysses
Virgil: Aeneid
Eliot: Middlemarch
Dostoevski: The Brothers Karamazov

Curriculum - Politics and Society

...........................................................................

Politics and Society Seminar
Plutarch: Lives: Lycurgus and Solon
Plato: Republic
Aristotle: Politics*
Machiavelli: The Prince
Locke: Second Treatise of Civil Government
Rousseau: On the Origin and Foundations of Inequality
Marx: 1844 Manuscripts*
Tocqueville: Democracy in America*

Politics and Society Tutorial
Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics*
Thomas Aquinas: Treatise on Law
Hobbes: Leviathan*
Declaration of Independence
U.S. Constitution
Melville: Billy Budd
Federalist Papers*
Selected U.S. Supreme Court Decisions

Politics and Society Preceptorial (samples)
Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws
Shakespeare: The history plays
Smith: The Wealth of Nations
Rousseau: Emile
Hegel: The Philosophy of Right

Curriculum - Mathematics and Natural Science

...........................................................................

Mathematics and Natural Science Seminar
Plato: Timaeus *
Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
Aristotle: Physics *
Ptolemy: Almagest *
Galileo: Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems *
Darwin: The Origin of Species *
Freud: Selected Works *

Mathematics and Natural Science Tutorial
Euclid: Elements *
Lobachevsky: The Theory of Parallels *

Mathematics and Natural Science Preceptorial (samples)
On Light: Aristotle, Descartes, Huygens, and Newton
Lavoisier: Elements of Chemistry
Maxwell: Theory of Heat
Bacon: The Principles of Natural Philosophy
Galileo: Two New Sciences

Curriculum - History

...........................................................................

History Seminar
(First-semester students are not eligible to enroll in the history segment)
Herodotus: Histories *
Thucydides: Peloponnesian War *
Livy: Early History of Rome *
Polybius: Histories *
Plutarch: Lives *
Tacitus: Annals *
Tocqueville: The Old Regime and the French Revolution *

History Tutorial
Augustine: The City of God *
Vico: The New Science *
Kant: Idea of a Universal History
Herder: Ideas Toward the Philosophy of the History of Mankind *
Hegel: Philosophy of History *
Marx: The German Ideology
Nietzsche: Uses and Abuses of History for Life
Dilthey: Introduction to the Human Sciences *
Collingwood: The Idea of History *
Strauss: Political Philosophy and History *

History Preceptorial (samples)
Tolstoy: War and Peace
Machiavelli: The Florentine Histories
Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Arendt: The Origin of Totalitarianism

Words from the Guide on "We" and "I" in the Qur'an

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 19:58:13 GMT

Bismillah

Allah is everything; He is the single;
He is the many; He is the Royal We;
He is the We; He is the I;
He is the woman; He is the man.
He uses the language which is right
for each circumstance and for each
person. He does what we need.
Sidi went on to speak of Allah's
Greatness and His Qualities quite
extensively. Then Sidi said that
'Allah appeared for Musa one way, and
for Isa another, and to Ibrahim yet
another way.'

2) Then a chat with Amany (Sidi's
interpreter)...She added the following
'When Allah addresses His being in
singular form it is in intimate
conversation (as with his prophets
and messengers); when in the plural,
as in the 'Royal We' it is to the
people at large. When we find the
use of the word He, in Arabic Huwa
(pronounced Hu), it refers to the
most mystical dimensions of Allah,
those that we as mere mortals cannot
grasp. And the Name Allah includes and
encompasses them all.'

Part Time PhD

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 14:24:01 GMT

Typically part-time doctorates are spread over five or more years, which can be a long time to balance all the demands on your life.

It is important to think through all your own potential challenges with a part-time doctorate before you embark on it; the following suggestions come from the experience of others who chose the part-time route:

* Make a commitment with yourself to set aside particular chunks of time for your research; Consider setting aside a couple of evenings each week, every other week-end, specific bank holidays etc, when you are ‘unavailable’ for other activities. Some people find it helpful to plan in 6 month blocks, so that they can see ahead to specific time slots
* It can also be helpful to have longer blocks of time – say 3 consecutive days, rather than 1 day every three weeks, as it means you won’t waste time catching up with where you left off
* If possible, choose a research topic that is related to your work. In this way, the transition between the two will feel more natural, and each can feed the other
* Maintain regular contact with your supervisor and research department. It will keep you in touch and be a constant reminder for you
* Ensure that family and work colleagues are aware of your programme, and supportive of it, before you start out

You can't beat perfect

Minh Nguyen earned his Ph.D. last fall after an experience that challenges many common assumptions. He completed his coursework and dissertation on communications traffic analysis and interference cancellation for avionic systems in just three years — as a part-time graduate student holding down a full-time engineering job.

...Nguyen tried to weigh the economic cost and the benefits of getting a Ph.D. “Was the degree only for personal satisfaction, or would it help me thrive in my career? I had no answer to that.” The option of keeping his job and going to school part time was intriguing. “I talked to 10 people, however, who all said the same thing: that doing a part-time Ph.D. is impossible.”

...His biggest challenge in pursuing both activities simultaneously was “heavy-duty multi-tasking. I had to balance my workloads between work, school, and family — and each one could be considered a full-time commitment.” His advice for others considering a similar path: “Eliminate the word ‘procrastination’ from your dictionary! If you have a research idea in the middle of the night, get up and work on it immediately. Give it further thought or you might lose important ideas forever. There are many things to distract a part-time Ph.D. student and you must maintain focus.”

Scrytch writing from 1998-2001: III

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 12:51:56 GMT

Will & Wonderment

Golden Paths

All over Mars the terraforming crews cautiously tinker with new rhythms. Ravens and barrowrats, podrats and b-kats and mites, j-dogs and a hundred kinds of gaussian and non-gaussian humans. In only a few centuries no colonist can fully claim to have *adapted*; that's generational work.

Several among the postterrestrial daughter species hibernate each winter, sharing dreams along their webworked nervous systems. Their deep slow sleep, filled with shared locations and artefacts held in common, spreads across the months of cold like landscape. Congenetics of the Martian colonists, estranged in small bands and barrios across the solar system occasionally dip, too, into the homelanders' vision.

Each spring, the barrowrats emerge from their tunnels in the artic zone to attend to their waking affairs. They monitor the solar collectors and windtraps, play in the glacial revines, every spring a different landscape. While the barrowrats work above ground, migratory podrats extend the tunnel system. Both clades mingle after sunset in chambers at the interface between tunnels and surface ramparts.

J-dogs don't hibernate, but of course like all Martians can enter a protective trance by volitional hormone release, dropping oxygen consumption and body temperature to survive a night outside. What songs their indirect ancestors held over plains and valleys, j-dogs now howl planet wide across their equatorial range and into orbital habitats, a hundred thousand voices raised to union.

A Rainbow Behind the Lips

It took four months for my mouth to heal, almost a year before i could use my new tongue for everything the old one had been capable of. While i waited there was much to distract me from the pain, the silence and the entirely new approach to food. Lessons in dance and stillness with the Sisters Aeikinatai, observing those of the rites as i was permitted, training in and without weapons under the Sisters Eupsilikai, and much menial labor. Goats to milk, wool to spin, pilgrims to bless on the holy days (which duty seemed to me little different from caring for goats), and shifts in the kitchen and workshops.

As a novice, my primary exercise was that of self-restraint: i was a Glossariodas in physique alone, and trying the gifts of a full sister too soon is unpredictable. Some Sisters have early facility with their tongues, and understand its mysteries well before their second year. Once it has surely grown one with our own flesh, we may practice the hand, the serpent-lash, the arrow and other lower forms. I was not so blessed in that year, and wept at night for fear i could never speak again.

Sisters Arma and Baruthamba taught me truely to praise the Damiourgos for the blessing of time. Baruthamba, two grades above me and several years older, was a bit mad, given to visions and ecstasies. The lower forms came easily to her and while she slept we often heard her sing in the outer voice. In these iron days we seldom hear the outer voice even among the great Magai and Iriomateres, and indeed it has always been a rare blessing; in one so young, it was terrifying. For her own safety and ours as well, Baruthamba was put under the supervision of Maga Bronta the song-mistress. Long ill, Maga Bronta died of the waking-sickness within the year, but in that time Baruthamba built much art upon her talents. At the funeral she was suffered to intertwine a strand of her tutor's tongue into her own.

Poor Sister Arma of my own grade had no such fortune. Her acceptance into the Sisters Glossariodai had more to do with the wealth of her family than any spiritual gifts. Her mouth bled for months; "tongues of light do not lie," indeed! She lost use of her eyes. Her jaw flopped, the tongue often lolled out and shivered, and her head twisted horribly to the right. Rarely able to eat, Arma wasted away. We all pitied her and prayed, Baruthamba most of any of the novices.

Perhaps Baruthamba was a fool and prideful to try healing one so unsuitable for the Order as Arma, but with the permission of the Iriomateres she sang a hymn in the outer voice. I was there among those Sisters summoned to watch and pray. For half a night Arma knelt before Baruthamba, and for half a night Baruthamba intoned the voice of the Damiourgos through the starry gift of His Arkhons. When the sky grew rosy, Baruthamba bowed and embraced Arma, and Arma was able to untwist her neck, close her bruised mouth and open her eyes. They sat in silence for a moment, and how we praised the Damiourgos for His mercy!

As the first ray of the sun struck Arma's face, she opened again her mouth and uncoiled her tongue with control as she had never before possessed. Truly we were amazed! Those of the Sisters able to speak cried out in wonder and thanks. Shuddering, Arma then seized Baruthamba by the shoulders and drove the gleaming gift of the Stars deep into Baruthamba's left eye. The tip piereced through and out the back of her skull, then separated into its seven fibers and curved around the head and back into Arma's mouth. Both of them screamed, but Baruthamba's voice failed in a burst when the fibers constricted, crushing her skull.

It happened too quickly for anyone to act. Baruthamba lay dead, her blood pumping onto Arma, whose tongue strands now thrashed about as her wide eyes rolled. Baruthamba's tongue emerged from the shattered head and separated into its own eight fibers, which writhed for a moment before wrapping themselves into their waiting brothers. Arma screamed until well after her tongue ripped itself out of her throat to sway in the air above Baruthamba's neck, now a single limb pointing toward the heavens.

Arma's body was burned and her ashes taken to the sea. Baruthamba's body was placed in the Order's cemetary and an apple tree was planted over it. What was done with the tongues is a mystery i am not permitted to write.

Pharos

The Pharos could be seen halfway to Kupros: a mechanical star, a fire focused through the largest lenses ever cast. Sailors whispered that its beam could be directed down in a ship-smashing spear should invaders ever threaten Alexandreia's harbor. I saw no ships broken by the Pharos, only men: philosophers, castrated holy men, a hundred kinds of charlatan fluttered to the halls rooted at the base of the tower. Every text in every language of the civilized world was to be found there, or so it was said, and every kind of nonsense could be heard in the agora, old lies in new robes, new lies dancing naked, myriad whispers of secret techniques, jealous muttering after quick power.

The scholars of the Pharos produced mostly lists --the five greatest tragedies, biographies of the seven mightiest kings, collections the 10 noblest poets-- and these too found their places in the library. Every Ptolemaios lavished funds on the library, seeking to increase its holdings beyond those hoarded by his ancestors (but every Ptolemaios, too, had the shelves culled of materials he found offensive). Diadochs in Pergamon and Seleukeia, then republican nobles in Roma and Qrthdsht purchased copies to gild their cities.

Thieves had at the collection; rats made their nests in the works of the unread poets and playwrights; smaller, less public libraries appeared in the homes and lodges of the alchemists, contemplatives and yet stranger cultists come north and west. It was in the lodge of the Sidereokheiridon Adelphoi that plans for a certain mirror came under my gaze, and it was in a house of an older Brother that i began its construction.

Nutter

The plan was simple. Take the C train to the Village, visit my angelic-extraterrestrial brother, cry on his shoulder, pet his velvet douvet. He didn't want coffee or doughnuts ("What are you trying to do to me, Schwein?"), so i took a lego robot to observe his apartment. Got in, instantly regretted my hat, took it off & closed my eyes for some high bandwidth DCC chat. What's this noise from behind me though? A woman is crying. Can't make out what she's saying. Man's voice, equally low, aggressive, annoyed. Some kind of tense discussion. What's wrong? Subway protocol & their proximity --inches away-- forbids me from turning around & looking. Has he kidnapped her? Is she sick? In withdrawal? Massive distress vibes; he's trying to comfort her (only words i can make out: "This'll be over soon") & just scaring her more, pushing her around, i hear fabric sliding on the plastic seats. Oh God, what should i do? Should i say something? Call the police? Just pray? That's a start. What's going on? Reached my stop, got to peek at them before i got off, nearly fell over. One man, one bent-backed homeless man pressing his face & left hand against the plexiglass. Thick taped glasses, condensation on the window, a smile like a dying child.

Milk & Honey All the Way Down (a tafsir of Ayat al-Kursi)

What do you need your body doesn't produce? Does forgetfulness or sleep overtake you? Does your awareness stick on an object or two at a time? You only know what you've met, & that but slightly. What do you know of causes or effects when you just taste the slices you've chanced across? A great throne encompasses many realms & worlds, of which you cannot sustain even one mite by your own power.

Give me a gift entirely of your self. Make me something out of nothing you've received. Fill my lungs with breath, open my heart, fill my house with light. C'mon, try it!

You'd Never Guess

"Uh. Hello."

"Hi. You're asleep."

"No, i'm not. Not anymore, anyway."

"No, you're really still asleep. I'll try again some other night."

"No, i'll try to wake up. Your voice should do it."

"Why should my voice make you do anything you haven't already?"

"Because i have in the past, & it has in the past, & the remembering the past can send runners into the present. Though then you have to wonder if you're really in the present or just clinging to a vine hanging out of the past, to shift vegetable metaphors in mid thought."

"Hearing you laugh makes me want to see how you laugh. I don't think either of us were laughing much that one time we met. I want to know if you put your hand in front of your mouth --though i doubt you do, since it sounds so clear-- or some other hand gesture, like slapping your leg."

"You might learn soon enough. You might not be surprised, although you're not talking about wanting to be surprised."

"Surprise me."

"Okay. Writing this down, you're going to spend half an hour looking through books for something digressive or funny or all wise-sounding & sufic for me to say here. You won't find anything that's anything like anyhing i might say, & you'll wonder why it occured to you to try that kind of approach, and to wonder how well you understand us or me or you or you & me when we talk."

"Wow, gold star. I am surprised. Why would i write this down?"

"You tell me."

"Because sometimes i feel like all we have is words, distance, inference & a kind of desire to head the words off at the pass, to talk through them before we forget what each other looks like, before we remember there was never anything else."

"Really?"

"No, not really. There was always an 'else', otherwise the all the words wouldn't have stuck, there'd be nothing to stick to. It's just easy to get frustrated and blame a medium."

"I'll hold off on blaming for a while. Can you?"

"Sure, given the alternatives."

"Porridge! and boll-weevils!"

"Exactly. Now go back to bed. Good night, love."

"Good night; love!"

Perfectly Clear at the Time

"And was it ever that easy? I mean, you couldn't have known."

"Well no, of course not, nobody told me there was actually danger in it. You wait so long, hoping, knowing it'll never happen, hating any damn bump your fingers find over smooth skin--"

"What?"

"It stands out. Isolated points, not really relevant to the surface as a whole but hey, zits are made for pinching, right?"

"Oh sure. Zit-poppers quibble about spelling, too."

"Right, especially if they don't have the moral or intellectual flops to seriously argue. But damned if they won't splatter the mirror with what they got."

"So anyway, when you finally don't have to worry about it?"

"When you lose the fear, you lose your knives, and you forget about the roaming dogs. Or, in my case, nobody told me there were roaming dogs, and i didn't think to look."

"Hmm, i'm afraid that is a failure on your part. You can't hold an unnamed 'other' responsible."

"Now you're being inconsistent. You acknowledged i couldn't have known."

"No, you misunderstood me. You couldn't have known exactly what or who was waiting in the space of possible encounters, but as a spice-gobbler with serious mentattitude--"

"Haw!"

"You see?"

"And you know better than to give me open-ended questions. Run it through the [do]-transformation, add a tense marker, throw some referrance in there, bay-bee."

"Oh please, who's dogging Rome now? Come on, our paddle-boat's ready."

Contrast

You have light? Okay. Hey, what is that? That's cool, I'm into religion myself. Well, not so much religion but what is behind it. No, 'meat' is too crude word for me. I am interested in, how you call it, energy fields, I know hypnosis and chi. It is with and of same pattern as parts of body, brain, muscle, also like compass. People, they talk about finding God. Here, look at my hand. You see this? Firecracker made those marks. Peng! That moment I realized I am made of meat, no different than chicken you fry, no? That explosion it made me musician.

I ask my physics teacher, of course she is complete materialist, I put a compass on her desk and ask which way is north. She said, "It is the red one, of course!" and she thought I was very stupid. But I say to her, "Why is everyone else pointing *that* way?" You know?

Hey, just one minute please.

Okay. You see, I just paid that guy back. I owed him money for long time, and believe me it sucks to be in debt. I am owed so much money I will never see. Six months I worked at moving company, bumm, nothing. I am not paid by that fucking shit bastard. But you know, I will damage him. I know how. His college papers are fakes! Never finished college. Now he thinks he gets smart, goes to business school. He is idiot, just because you have fucking five thousand dollar suit they will not let you in business school. But if luckily he gets in, I will wait two years, let him spend twenty thousand, and then I will let them know he is fake! And at least I can blackmail him, you know? Best served cold, that's right!

Re: usedtobe

Take a deep breath. Tell me every story you know. Tell me what you thought you wanted before easy habits of thought took over. Tell me where you hid the peanut-butter-&-vassopressin cookies. Tell me why you spent all that time doodling band names on your middle school binders. Tell me about the fourth heaven where Hadrati Issa waits to return to the world in glory. Tell me not to be scared.

Oh them kids

Behind Lexington Christian Elementary was a dusty playground, grass torn bare with running kicking feet. Up a little rise grew a spruce with thick scratchy bark bleeding fat drops of sap. I'd sit and play with action figures under the shade of the spruce, and pry off sap with twigs -hold it up to the light, smell it, taste it, heh, stick it in other kids' hair. Usually the drops ended up smeared across Princess Leia's face or binding Cobra Commander's hands behind his back -sap become alien snot, bioarmor, the effects of poison gas. Later I'd wipe at her face, at his hands, but it always stuck in the plastic's pits and creases. Dirt, bits of dust and hair stuck to the traces.

Second grade became third; my toys grew more black fuzz as I kept up the games of wear and confinement. I stopped scrubbing and just wiped off the biggest clots when recess was over, keeping up the alien attacks. Four or five figures grew their coats so thick that what colored spots of plastic still sharped through stood out bright as wildflowers. When I couldn't bend the limbs anymore I burried them to the waist and forearms in the back of the compost pile, where they waited for the dog to find them.

Contrafirmazione

You are not your face. You are not your body. You are not your memories. You are not your operating system of choice. You are not your friends, your ancestors, nor yet your interactions. You are not the product of your environment. You are not your education. You are not an individual. You are not a society. You are not an immortal spirit. You are not breath. You are not a cell. You are not.

"You can say things which cannot be done. This is elementary. The trick is to keep attention focused on what is said and not on what can be done."

Submission

Eternal birther, sustainer, destroyer of all possible worlds

Your names be sung across the sphere of time
Your presence be known
Your love manifest in the Spectacle without as in the realms within

We rejoice in the abundance of your flesh
And your forgiveness for our false consciousness

Your light reveals our paths and dissolves our ignorance

Yours is the law, the will, the wonderment
Now and always

So be it

Elevator repair

"So i was tellin Jen about it and she's like, 'Wow, where'd he get the parts?'"

"Made most of em in the machine room; a few i got out of regular parts catalogs."

"It must have taken months! Years? And you never told nobody about it all this time."

"Well, i been kickin the idea around for a couple years. Just started buildin it in November, so yeah, it's been about a year."

"Huh. You're not worried about it gettin, like, infected or anything?"

"I use a little rubbing alcohol every morning, every night, round the edges, where it rubs up gainst the cut. See how the mountings got all these little indentations? That's so the skull tissue'll grow back in around it & bond. Not takin this thing out, not ever."

"Whoa. And you didn't tell anybody."

"No... if i told anybody, they would have been all 'Hey Rich, when's the cut? Can i come over? Hey Rich, what's it *for*?' Fuck that, man."

"Whoa."

Mystery's histories

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 06:12:09 GMT

Bismillah!
I went through my previous journal and snagged all the entries of interest. These have now been retconned into this journal.

The new, old entries (calendar years 2002-2005) include entries from my *first* LJ, when I did an exercise like this in 2005! Much shorter, and I may look at that journal again to see if there's more that 2007-me would like to salvage.

2002-me wrote more elaborately, synaesthetic weavings and meanderings of a life in turmoil.

2003, 04, 05-me wrote with lots of exclamation points, alhamdulillah, and pious exclamations! I got married! I was in healing school! I was way into the walking, and still shared my heart on the internet.

I miss some of that. These last two years in grad school, away from tariqah beloveds, have not been great for my deen and my walking. The love, the intensity, the earnestness has dried up. What will I do to regain it?

Writing is projected-self, refracted-self, and I don't want to idealize the first years of my marriage over now. Sh. & I have grown together, I'm smoother, more capable; things were always broken at the Land, I was always mad at somebody for cavalier treatment of Islam in favor of some illusion, and I was just as poor then!

Where is growth, and where is stasis, and where is memory, and where is truth?

Class & da'wa resources

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 17:46:12 GMT

Awesome site on women & art in Islam, veils, veiling, the western gaze, orientalism, etc. It seems like undergrad-readable postcolonialism and Muslimah-positive without the chauvinist smugness of a lot of observant male-written material. "The Qur'an freed women. Things today are exactly like they were in the first generation! Hooray for them! Now bring me some tea, habibi."

http://hudson2.skidmore.edu/academics/arthistory/ah369/finalveil.htm

IT MUST BE MINE

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:17:35 GMT

Manufacturer.

US importer.

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 15:30:43 GMT

Bismillah

The Shamstastic Acupuncturific Wife-o-dex 9,000 has a new blog to document her study & exploration of healing.

Chekkitout:

http://five-elements.org/blog/

_The Marrakech Report_. A New Academo-Thriller. By the author of _The End-Times End-Notes_

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 20:44:34 GMT

Bismillah~

"The mission's not over til the reports are written." So it was written in one of my scifi thrillers; so it was this summer.

I organized and facilitated discussion groups between American and Moroccan students at the American Language Center in Marrakech on a University of Georgia "Scholarship of Engagement" grant, as applied for and overseen by my advisor, A. G., Ph.D. The talks were for the purpose of getting to know each other, following a paradigm of "dialogue, not debate." The talks were a success and lead to long conversations among the students after the groups let out.

Right after the last of the five sessions, Dr. G told me to get started on the report. Well, I was right there with the giddy undergrads abroad in wonderland as far as wanting to sit down & write a paper, but I made some notes. That was as far as it went until a couple of weeks ago.

Most of the summer I've been alternating between bouts of good energy in looking for work and days of depression, feeling like an unskilled loser for anything outside of the academy. When I was on, I looked for jobs. When I was not on, I did not feel like writing the report!

Finally, I started to work on it. I talked to Dr. G. and arranged, then broke, a deadline. It was terrible trying to write it. What did I have to say? It happened, it was a success, but now there was this weight of distance upon me. Finally, I got it done and sent it to Dr. G.

He loved it! He told me it would be a big help in getting a bigger grant for a much bigger program, which might mean a job for me down the line. I heard second hand that he couldn't stop talking about the report for three days after I handed it in! I never heard THAT about any of my essays.

Stand back! I am an EDUCATOR!

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 04:33:33 GMT

Bismillah~

My two night classes (Intro to Western Religions) are going swimmingly. The first seventh, or two weeks, I went over religious patterns & groups in the ancient & classical near east, with special attention to mystery cults & Zoroastrianism, and with side jaunts into Gnosis & Manichaeanism. I've woken up to the fact that I'm more interested in specifics about various such groups now that I'm not sweating over my own degree & have accordingly been charging through the books.

Current reading:

Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism in Talmudic Babylonia. Jacob Neusner, one of my favorite scholars, even though Rabbinical Judaism is really not my area. I'm amazed by any scholar who's written and edited close to 1,000 books. Anyway, his focus is on the history & social conditions of Jewry in the place that Rabbinical (i.e., Talmudic) Judaism really took off. It was a multi-ethnic society with immigrant Greeks, Babylonians, Aramaeans, Arabs, Jews, Persians, Kurds, and others, with the then-typical Hellenized upper-middle class. The sometimes-zealously Zoroastrian Sasanian empire alternated between bouts of viscious persecution of non-Zoros and heretical Zoros and bouts of coddlings various groups, like Jews and Nestorian Christians. You know those stories about the horrible infidel Persians stealing the Relics of the True Cross from Jerusalem? Well, the officer corps & bureaucracy were full of Nestorians in that war, and THEY did it! This and many other fascinating tidbits.

Sameul Lieu's Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China and M" in Mesopotamia and the Roman East. Manichae[an]ism was a big deal, the most successful world religion in terms of geographic spread & numbers of adherents after the Big Three Missionary Religions, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. It died out at last in China possibly as late as the 1600s. What have I known about it until now? Not a whole lot. More than I'll summarize here, but yikes, I didn't even know the founder Mani had the patronage of one Sassanid emperor, who hoped for a synthesizing religion to unify the diverse subject peoples; or that he was assassinated by Zoroastrian zealotz zhen he lozt the zatronage of za lazer zemperor. Until I read Neusner; I just got these & the ones bellow tonight & have only read the introductions & such. Learn to speed-read, folks, you've no idea how much you can suck down in one evening!

On the same front, Jason BeDuhn's The Manichaean Body in Discipline and Ritual means to deconstruct the scholarly consensus about Manichaean practices & attitudes. He argues that, while there's been huge progress on actual M. texts, they're still interpreted through the lens inherited from Christian polemicists like Iraenus and Augustine. This one has the feeling of the scholar in love with something dead and on the shelf, something unjustly crushed by the unsympathetic boot of time; it's for sure aimed at people who already have more background in this area than I do, so I'm going to read Lieu for a picture from that ol' scholarly consensus. Something about body-hating Manichaeans who believe a monster awakened from God's impersonated wisdom's nightmare and created the earth as a trap for God-reflecting spirits; who had a lowly Auditor grade who couldn't read the books and several layers of Elect who could and couldn't share the secrets with grades below them; etc.

Gnosticism in caveman speech: World bad. Flies, pain, bad smells! Spirit good. Spirit need magic to escape bad world. Seeeeeeecret magic. Must fast and punish body. Then get secrets from priests, go to next level, get more secrets.

Gnosis had a big presence in old Alexandria, as did the Christianity of Athanasius & his school which fed in a major way into the pre-schism Orthodox/Catholic church. Roelof van den Broek's Studies in Gnosticism and Alexandrian Christianity (he leaves out Hermetica, which he addresses at length, too) is supposed to study some of those connections. Obviously Gnosis was not just something from which Orthodox XP could distinguish itself, there are shades and shades and shades of grey in an intellectually-charged religious environment. I like the look of this one, and it's put out by Brill, a very high-caliber publisher I've come to respect.

***

I've got some nice ones on the table from before this evening's spree, but my laptop's about to die.

Long time with no updata

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:34:27 GMT

Bismillah:

This summer:

I have been looking for work, so far unsuccessfully. This is terribly depressing. My fall classes have now started and I have encouragement again from something I'm good at.

Sh. & I moved across town to a newly refurbished, smaller apartment --insha'allah lower power bills! It's darling, cozy, lots of natural light, and a safer neighborhood.

We have had lots of problems with the place, though: weak AC, toilets backing up, etc. The landlord has been helpful, nothing like one of my favorite NYC memories, the dreadful rumors that went around about our red-bearded Hasidic mobster slum-lord.

I breaked recently on only the front wheel of my bike, causing the wheel to stop and the rest of the bike to rotate around it, rotating my face into pavement hard enough to break open skin and subcutaneous fat under my chin. I got a dozen stiches in two layers, one of which is supposed to dissolve inside my body after 45 days.

domestic states & the foreign states whose gross domestic product they match

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 19:06:48 GMT

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:54:44 GMT

A Shadhili bibliography, inspired by ijtihad_alkitab's post.

***Danner, Victor and Thackston, Wheeler M. Ibn 'Ata' Illah: The Book of Wisdom / Kwaja Abdullah Ansari: Intimate Conversations. New York: Paulist Press, 1978 (& later).
A good translation of the core of Shadhili tariqa thought as expressed in literature, the Hikam have become one of the classics of Islamic literature. Anyone who's read my journal knows how highly I regard the Hikam, so I'll stop there. Danner first published his translation in an expensive academic edition; it's out of print but in libraries. The newer edition is revised, has fuller commentary drawn from the traditional secondary literature, and comes with another book by an earlier sufi, in this case an ecstatic Hanbali. Take that, Hanbali-haters!

Darqawi, Mawlay al-ʿArabi al-. The Darqawi Way: Letters from the Shaykh to the Fuqara. Translated by Aisha Bewley. Cambridge: Diwan Press, 1981.
This is not about Imam Abu al-Hassan al-Shadhili himself: these are the powerful letters of a major reviver of the way following in the tariqa. Mawlay al-Darqawi lived in Morocco two hundred years ago & had an enormous movement. Many current Shadhili lines all through the Arabic world come from his movement. Get it from here; it's expensive elsewhere. There's a more widely available, partial translation by Titus Burkhart, that I regard as inferior; some reviewer mentions 'intrusive Masonic vocabulary.'

Douglas, Elmer H. The Mystical Teachings of al-Shadhili: Including his Life, Prayers, Letters,a nd Followers; a translation from the Arabic of Ibn al-Sabbagh's Durrat al-Asrar wa Tuhfat al-Abrar. Albany: State University Press of New York, 1993.
A great resource on the Shaykh, though written in stilted Academickese: a hagiography from not long after his lifetime, with many supplications, sermons, letters, and annecdotes. Missing an index like almost every book in this field.

Durkee, ʿAbdullāh Nūr ad-Dīn. School of the Shādhdhuliyya: Orisons. Alexandria: Daru-l-Kutub, 1991.
Arabic, transliterations & translations of Abu al-Hasan's litanies (=orisons), visualization and energy flow exercises for those rooted in Qur'an and Sunnah, and other devotions of the later order, such as a Thursday night hadrah ceremony from an Egyptian branch. Introduced with 90-some pages of essays on the continuing place of Imam al-Shadhili & reflections on the meanings of his works. There is a newer edition I don't have, available from Shaykh Durkee's site.

Iskandarī, Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh al-. The Key to Salvation: A Sufi Manual of Invocation. Translated and edited by Mary Ann Koury Danner. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1996.
A manual of dhikr, with a long section of beautiful supplications from minor hadith collections.

***―――. The Subtle Blessings in the Saintly Lives of Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Mursī and His Master Abū al-Ḥasan: Kitāb latāʾif al-minan fī manāqib Abī ’l-ʿAbbās al-Mursī wa shaykhihi Abī ’l-Ḥasan. Translated and edited by Nancy Roberts. Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2005.
I love this book! The third Shadhili shaykh, Ibn Ata Allah, writes about his master Abu al-Abbas, and his master Abu al-Hassan. The love, wisdom, ma'rifah, and uprightness of these men comes through powerfully. An inspired, inspired translation, with interesting appendices on contemp. Egyptian sufi women the author has benefited from.

―――. The Book of Illumination: Kitāb al-tanwīr fī isqāṭ al-tadbīr. Translated by Scott Kugle. Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2005.
Isqat al-tadbir (destruction of self-direction) is Ibn Ata Allah's companion piece to the Hikam: very short, and judge by some commentators to be more worthwhile than many long classics. The title refers to the inclusive mystical virtue of turning away from the self, purifying awareness through the Name, and reliance on Allah; it is a key Shadhili concept. This translation is written in circumlocutions to avoid attaching the pronoun "he" to Allah, and other quirks I can't remember, but AFAIK it's the only version in a European language of a major work.

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 19:42:11 GMT

Conscience is the call from God

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 17:22:51 GMT

Doris Lessing's Idries Shah influenced science fiction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canopus_in_Argos

Shikasta - A secret history of Earth from the perspective of the advanced Canopus civilization.
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five - Depicts the influence of a series of cultures on the "zones" that are more or less advanced than their own.
The Sirian Experiments - Focuses, like Shikasta, on the history of Earth, but from the perspective of visitors from Sirius rather than Canopus.
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 - The story of the civilization on a planet that, due to interstellar changes, is slowly facing extinction, and Canopus's relationship with them.
The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire - A story of Canopian agents on a less advanced planet; explores hazards of rhetoric.

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 13:16:36 GMT

I am back from Morocco.

Library weirdness

Sat, 05 May 2007 17:47:52 GMT

Bismillah

I have spent two years at UGA haunting the main library. Up in the stacks, at interlibrary loan, making salah in unfrequented but remarkably dustless areas, and on the workstations. The circulation and ILL staff all know me by sight --of course with the hats, red beard and height I'm hard to miss, if not an eyesore, anywhere I go.

When I teach, I give assignments requiring use of library resources, not online shindigs. Cheap information is cheap. Of course there's great stuff online, I was largely an internet-based lifeform from 1994 (the End Times for amber monitors) to 2002 when I moved nearly off the grid. But for what I teach there's not a candle online to the contents of an academic library. At first I was surprised how many students didn't even know where the library was, much less how to make use of it.

Just drifting. Today as I came here to work, I found a contemporary Southern secessionist newspaper. It had articles on the plight of stateless nations --you know, Palestinians, Kurds, and Southerners-- and ads for books on "myths of slavery." It compared the federal government to the Nazi regime & to the pagan Roman empire, including references to Bush's Praetorian Guard.

19th century parallel universe automatons

Thu, 03 May 2007 15:56:05 GMT

NOW IT'S REALLY FINISHED

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 20:24:36 GMT

Defense passed. Thesis revised. Proof-read. Approved. Fiddled with. Paperwork turned in. File uploaded.

I'm set to graduate 12 May.

I'm kind of stunned.

http://ywnswsly.myweb.uga.edu/schwein_wesley_r_200705_MA.pdf

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 20:34:04 GMT

I wrote that I thought I'd find out on Monday about the Morocco trip. In fact Dr Godlas just told me we got the grant. He's checking with a travel agent to see about cheap tickets & expenses for Svend & me; what's left will be salary. If it's equal to my stipend & part time job now, it will be worth it professionally and for the experience, but not financially, and in either case, Sh. is at home for a month.

Bismillahi awalihi wa akhirihi

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:55:46 GMT

Bismillah

-In Austria I could go by "Magister Yunus" now.

-Final revisions to said thesis underway. Emphasis on transitions in certain places ("wait, he's jumping!") and more cohesive conclusions elsewhere.

-I've been offered one class for the fall (I had three this year, two in the fall & one still going on). I asked for a MWF 6:50-7:40 class in the hope that I can teach on top of another job, even an Atlanta-area job. I need to keep my iron in the fire, I like teaching, I want the continued experience, I want the income...

-Monday I should find out about the Scholarship of Engagement funding for me and Svend to accompany Drs Godlas and Honerkamp to Morocco, babysitting undergrads and doing Godlas' hermeneutical objectivity exercises with American and Moroccan students.

IT IS FINISHED

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 20:52:37 GMT

Bismillah

I passed my defense with congratulations and praise all around!!!

I am fit to burst!