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November 25, 2004
A scribbler’s notebook
Thoughts and phrases can be used to praise the complexities of nature. Miriam Habib muses over these thoughts and highlights them with some memorable quotes
A well-thumbed notebook contains a treasured miscellany of quotes, of favourite epigrams, passages of compelling thought rendered in poignant words.
A phrase can have haunting power, even though it is just “a black mark on white paper” as described by one professor of my acquaintance. The soul craves meaning and purpose, seeking the grandeur of nature and minds of the great, long buried or still living.
Shared here in random fashion are selected words from readings over some 12 months. Given that this world is a mere piece of rock with a molten interior that is being hauled by a life-giving flaming ball, which in turn is subject to some greater force around which it moves with its vassal planets threading its trajectory through a limitless void, and given that such a phenomenon staggers intellects of even Einsteinian calibre, then one’s only recourse is awe-filled praise.
Enclosed within this grandeur is terrestrial year 2004 now sailing to closing point, the illusion of beginnings and endings created by puny man as he measures days, months, years, centuries and millennia. This time-bound matrix contains small human-sized calculations of events, victories, defeats, successes, disappointments, gain and loss, and the arithmetic of micro-existence. A bondage which has no choice.
One recalls a West End musical of some quarter century back catchily titled Stop the World, I Want to Get Off. But you cannot get off, we are bound to endure or enjoy conditions not of our making in the brief allotted span on this spinning globe. The external becomes internal, the public impinges on the personal.
This city of Lahore was once an elegant provincial capital, it is now transformed into a frenetic, congested hive, splitting and bursting in all directions, the skyline made ugly by huge glass towers. Neither can you stop it to get off, nor can you shut out the noise and fumes. Urbanization is a text book term that one experiences in real life as a nightmare, assailing the senses. If you fly home at night the city glitters from above, but in the daytime as the plane noses its way towards the Ravi, Lahore is a brown smudge on the otherwise clear horizon. We return to our lives below the suspended dust and poison particles blanketing an urban conglomeration.
In my youth blue skies were just normal, in fact one considered them a birthright. After all, every morning is newly minted. Must one say with De La Mare; “Look thy last on all things lovely, every hour,” or can one hope to see the azure vault as a daily given once again, and echo the hymn, “Morning has broken, like the first morning.”
Humankind misuses the environment, mindlessly engaging in the destruction of nature, only to be forced into taking costly corrective measures when ruin has gone too far. Blue skies symbolize the renewal of the spirit, the infusion of life-bestowing oxygen. While holding to the proposition that one cannot wholly retreat into the personal, it is manifest that the two existences are inextricably intertwined.
In Mystical Islam, author Julian Baldwick describes the several worlds the soul negotiates. “Sufism works as a machine in the middle of an arrangement of other machines. Man is caught between sounds and images on the one hand and the imposing figures of God and the Prophet on the other. Around him function the machines of the state, of Islamic law, of armies and guilds, of the philosophers with their astronomy and medicine. But between God and the sensations of the outside world the sufi chooses a friend who will direct him from one to the other in measured alternation.”
I share the above passage as one I have found soothing amongst my miscellaneous readings during the past year. One may wish to exult in a private garden as Thomas Traherne in My Spirit:
“O Wondrous Self! O Sphere of Light
O Sphere of joy most fair!
O Act, O Power infinite;
O Subtle and unbounded Air!
O living Orb of Light!
Thou which within me art, Yet me!
Thou Eye,
And Temple of this whole Infinite!”
One can resonate with Rabindranath Tagore;
“... What I have seen is unsurpassable I have tasted of the hidden honey of this lotus yonder that expands on the ocean of light and thus I am blessed ...”
“In this playhouse of infinite forms I have had my play and here have I caught sight of him that eludes all forms....”
Tagore avers that the infinite is no distant scene:
“Here rolls the sea
And even here
Lies the other shore
Waiting to be reached
Yes here
Is the everlasting present
Not distant
Not anywhere else”
The interplay of self and surroundings, the symbiosis of man and nature brings about human creativity in constant flow.
Naturalist Rene Dubos observes in The God Within:
“Art is the product of a suggestive magic integrating subject and object and it always results from an intimate relationship between the artist and the external world.”
To return to earth time, we can look back on anniversaries, birthdays and little events that give pleasure. Some lucky ones have welcomed new babies, those exquisite beings. But the last quarter has been overshadowed by the most grotesque man-hunt in human history, a gory script enacted by men of dubious sanity, hunters and hunted.
One prays beauty has not been obliterated, that the suggestive magic of art will flourish, that the sphere of light will glow, that this millennium was not ushered in to witness only setbacks in mankind’s progress.
One must keep trying in this city of roses, if one cannot pick up the litter everywhere one can plant a rose bush somewhere. Mundane existence is an aggregate of interactive experiences with people and places, heard and seen. To this pot-pourri of thoughts one in parting from a local fitness buff! “He who exercises can never be unhappy.”
Finally, in case one becomes too opinionated a lighter reminder from the otherwise heart-wrenching Emily Dickinson, America’s foremost woman poet:
“I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody too?
Then there’s a pair of us-don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!”
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