Notes: IV

focus on God, not on your despair.

what room is there for even a particle of arrogance from the one who is imprisoned in time, one who cannot even see the start or the end, has no agency over birth or demise? hence, they say that if you knew yourself, you would know God.

true tragedy prevents any philosophizing in the moment. yet, the saint can still do so.

you can find God in squalor while recognizing the need to leave it.

self-blame over self-hate, the spiritual answer.

the realization of the wish to produce beauty, to create into this world something of joy, without having the ability to do so, is hell.

modernity is a relativistic abstraction that makes sense, in an absolutist way, in the present moment. perhaps, in a few hundred years, “modernity,” despite its radical alteration of material existence, may be considered quite ancient. another leap of change outstripping sense perception’s ability to integrate it into its existential architecture is very possible, even likely. or, perhaps change will burn out on itself, a regression to stone and iron, that too is possible; with history, nothing is inevitable.

literary critique is often more dogmatic than it realizes; it is the opposite of anthropology’s self-hatred.

accepting that one’s incivility needs to be rectified is a precondition for a normal society; it is wildly dangerous to believe that acts of such incivility are in any sense a fixed and vital part of “culture.” it needs to be excised and burnt away to leave what is good in culture, like a tree fire line.

“God has to nearly kill us sometimes, to teach us lessons” says Muir, and he is right, but he discounts human nature for man immediately asks God “could you not have taught me such lessons without inducing such suffering?” there will always be a primal dislike towards pain, it is always that وعسى ان تكرهوا شيئا وهو خير لكم وعسى ان تحبوا شيئا وهو شر لكم والله يعلم وانتم لا تعلمون.

every act of justice, of love, care and calm, is freedom.

belief in agency, despite not having it, is free will.

the funeral is the only reality.

every age needs a new configuration of human, for the problems of the now differ, at least to some extent, and it is important that this new humanity that we discover be always rooted in a deepest optimism that things may be okay.

there is no erasure of the life already lived; like poorly erased pencil marks on paper, it can just fade enough to write something new.

the first real marks of grief on the human souls can never be erased, a grief that crosses the threshold of one’s capacity remains, it needs life to be built around it, nurturing it like a plant that refuses to live until forced through suitable conditions.

legitimate pride presumes immortality, and if one is mortal, pride only makes him an impostor.

however one defines happiness, as a feeling, a state, or an orientation, in its truest form, in its most honest expression, it is an exceedingly rare phenomenon. it would not be an exaggeration for someone of a sound mind to say that they have perhaps only been happy for an hour in their entire lifetime. then, to “be” or “feel” happy all the time or even most of the time, in this particular sense, is insulting.

the beauty of God’s existence is the unveilings with time that would have left a people of the past astounded.

moralizing is best done through beauty and love; how torrid is a regurgitated moralizing, how empty when it rejects pain, brushes it away as an inconvenient fact of life.

perception is a wondrous affair; if you could truly realize that animals exist, that a bird shares this world with you and looks upon you, it would shake your being.

the sub-continent is dead. it’s a feudal primitive hell, with primitivity having nothing to do with “modernity” or “development,” but with attitudes about law, order, beauty, right and wrong. there is no future because there is no plan for one; there is no regard for the trees, the animals, the air, or for man; only the beauty of the mountains remains, and that too man has had no part in. does God look upon with favor and pleasure? yes, it is perhaps true that men of God still reside here, but they are ineffectual and consigned to interiorities. besides, wherever the masses are moralizers, there is little room for the beauty of the spirit, as hypocrisy becomes the dominant orientation. in beautiful societies, morality flows as an outcome, not as a theoretical first principle. the question of fault is also a quagmire of the more pernicious sort: it is just hard to say at this juncture in historical time. yes, colonization and its remnant, nationalisms, and others are some common explanations, but there is a malaise, a pscyho-physical malaise that prevents civility, beauty, culture; now, hope itself is parasitical as it promotes the inertia that coddles. in fact, hope in its cruder understanding is fundamentally regressive. those cannot keep a street clean are not properly humans, just flesh masquerading as such. we have betrayed not only ourselves, but God, and all that is beautiful about the human experience. look at the dogs outside! they lie dying, their bones tearing through their emaciated decomposing flesh, majestic birds falling out the ruined grey skies; countless children, women, and men, abused and ended. what else is left? a cataclysm must be brought forth, for this state is simply untenable.

man can slowly acclimatize to the worst of conditions, which do not necessarily become “easier” from a perceptive sense, but rather simply not the unexpected anymore, which in itself reduces any sense of shock to one’s predicament.

the highest orientation towards God is love; when the world, its peoples and its structures, kick you to the curb, it is God who is the balm, his oneness dissolves the most desperate of situations.

the sky makes itself majestic over everything, making you minute, yet when it is rolled up, you will persist.

idol-worship has returned to Persia, and its great sages sob in the heavens.

the birth of the Prophet, may all the peace and be blessings upon him and his progeny, cracked the fabric of the universe, a schism in time itself; it is the reason that the imagination of many a muslim does not effectively conceive of time before him. still, wherever there has been excess, the specters of the time before him return: idol worship.

how can you depart this world without exerting yourself to bringing forward all the beauty that you can? how can you die as such?

there is a lack of Muslim thinkers in practice, most are exegetes at this point in time, and that is perhaps a consequence of material conditions — the poet has to be reborn, stitching the the antidote within the word rather than further footnotes. but naturally, the question that arises is whether he can emerge without the the necessary conditions of society that give birth to thought, which further invokes the question of the relationship, in the first place, between thought and material, which will always, unequivocally, not have a conclusive resolution. all the same, perhaps, there may yet be a kindling of spirits without the necessary preconditions, which would ultimately make them unnecessary: essentially, a miracle — a rupture in natural causalities. still, this search for the poet too can be dangerous, as it presumes a certain aesthetic requirement, or a specific perfection, for change, which may or may not be necessary.

you can be the ancestor you did not have.

doing “ethics” academically is akin to taking pictures of a burning man rather than lending an arm.

in the greatest of tragedies, there oft are no reasonable answers, nothing that comforts one’s sense of meaning; ask the mother that loses her young child, how do you get along now, mother? that, in itself, is a question only borne in the psyche of the unharmed person; what “good” answer would the mother have? she will say something, she has to, but it wouldn’t be what she truly feels, experiences every hour of the day, with brief guilty reprieves; the truth is that she does not get along, she perhaps never will, and yet, at the same time, she cannot just die, and hence, lives without answers, resigning in hope that she may yet again see the child, in dreams or after all that is solid becomes nothing.

there never is a good time to die, yet how to make sense of our almost innate anguish at seeing a life taken “too early,” one not permitted to take part in all the joys and catastrophes of life in contrast to an old woman passing away gently in her sleep, after a life “well-lived.” the infant that dies is viewed as an almost inanimate object, not yet conscious enough of the consequences of its own demise, not stripping away with itself decades of memories, tales, and love created. the man at the cusp of vigorous adulthood, of a particular psychological maturity, is mourned the most, not necessarily only from an emotional standpoint, but rather a sociological one for he represents an unfinished project, in whom we see shadows of our own lives, whose memory will linger on the longest. the grief unexpected is the grief that wrecks, these are the burdens of life, and there is no other option but to cultivate a love so cavernous, so deep, that sustains oneself, makes it slightly easier to breathe, until its time for one to follow whom they lost into the next world.

there are a good number of theodicies developed by the thinkers of the past, to make sense of the calamitous nature of misfortunes that befall men; some even reject these theodicies to protect their fellow men from ones that attribute blame to the afflicted. in either case, there is an impulse to ask the why. depending on one’s pre-existing beliefs some of them are movingly powerful: take perhaps the most powerful theodicy through which many a men have survived through the faith that God is to recompense one’s pain in the after-life, removing all memory of sorrow. yet, it will always still hurt in the present moment, no conceptualization of the after-life can in actuality mend what is broken in the now. even if it is mend in this world, until the moment it is not, there is the devastation of the now. man may very well be asked in the heavens if he suffered, and he may very well answer, no! لا والله يا رب ما مر بي بؤس قط ولا رأيت شدة قط! this is the human condition: he would forget even the most utterly excruciating of circumstances, but now, right now, he cannot, and hence the theodicy does not succeed in a full sense. this, too, is the human condition: no questions may be asked, no language possible, that solves the problem of pain as a temporal good; this, likewise, is nothing but the manifestation of God’s sovereignty that obstructs the very act of questioning for He is not asked what he does.

in repeat encounters, if you are unable to form fond memories with those in your vicinity, you are better served being in solitude.

through socialization, and perhaps also through innate dispositions, men adopt certain heuristics to evaluate whether they are extracting the maximum possible meaning from their lives, and they get anxious when the answer to that query is anything less than optimal; it is a frustration that festers as they try to amend the course of their lives, attempting to glance back in the past to ask the dreaded question of what-if, and then almost instinctively, the question of what now, and every so often rather than continuing to excavate newer possibilities of meaning making, they default to accepting “the way things are.”

government must be made to obey the common man; unquestioned subservience to man is a rejection of God.

it is a myth that only a petrostate deploying quasi-enslaved labour can effectively steward the Holy Lands; the devotion of the ordinary, of the wretched, in conserving their holy spaces is often dismissed.

the best philosopher has to be the best mathematician or, more contentiously, the best architect, for there are few disciplines in which ideas can be reproduced materially.

the death drive of our times: nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, technologies that disrupt historically stable economic systems, “developments” that seek to detach the human mind from nature and spirit, to deracinate man’s love for his land and his brother. there is in this drive a fundamental disrespect for life, or for life after death, which is a natural outcome of atheistic nihilism, found also in the most religious of psyches, and not “materialism,” indeed, a rightly ordered materialism is even needed for spiritual refinement.

keeping alive is a daily task.