Continuous Creation

The beauty of dawn models the presence shown in each moment of creation as the evanescent, uncapturable essence spins past too quickly to catch. This morning the luscious red tones first glimpsed had already turned orange -gold in the brief time it took to find and focus the camera—and in the thirty seconds needed to turn the Scene dial to “sunrise,” the spectrum shifted into purple-blues. This might be frustrating but perhaps instead can be tuned to reassurance. As we used to say about the “winter” weather in West Texas: just wait, it’ll change soon enough.

     When I searched my recent documents for “continuous creation,” several treasures showed up. A frequent source on God’s revelation through Nature is Ibn al-Arabi. From William Chittick’s rich commentary:

“The cosmos, made upon God’s form, is His unveiling, and He never repeats the manner in which He shows His Face, for He is infinite and unconstricted. The Divine Vastness forbids repetition. The evanescent and changing nature of existence, or the cosmos as ever-renewed creation and never-repeated divine self-disclosure, is evoked by one of Ibn al’Arabi’s best-known names for the substance of the universe, the ‘Breath of the All-merciful’ (nafas al-rahman).” (p. 19, Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination)

     Another reference to Ibn al-Arabi comes from an article by Ralph Austin on a poem of al-Arabi, one evoked by the death of a daughter of his. Line 3 of the poem is translated: “Bound to this moment we are in, caught between the yesterday that has gone and the tomorrow that is yet to come.” Austin comments on this line:

"Again, the sense in Ibn 'Arabi's thought of man's situation – man's being in between two enormous realities: the reality of creation and the reality of eternal essence. As a Sufi master once said, "The past is irretrievable – the future infinitely precious". Here is another state familiar to the Sufis of al-hayrah or perplexity, confusion – being in between two realities, being in a state where one doesn't know where one belongs, where to turn. Ibn 'Arabi is very conscious, in relation to the death of his daughter, of time – the way time cuts us down, the way time changes states, the way time often renders our hopes and ideals to nothing – he is addressing the pressure of the moment. Another Sufi idea suggested here is that of being the person of the moment, Ibn waqtihi. Implicit in this consideration of yesterday and tomorrow is the notion that the present moment is the only real time. The past is gone, the future is not yet here so if we don't enjoy or make full use of the present, then yesterday we will never have again and tomorrow perhaps we won't be here. This is the perplexity of time which is brought home to him by the death of his daughter." (Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society, Vol. VII, 1988.)

     And, while the references could go on and on, here’s one more. From my notes on Lewisohn’s Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry, there are wonderful passages from the chapter by Leili Anvar’s “The Radiance of Epiphany: The Vision of Beauty and Love in Hafiz’s Poem of Pre-Eternity.”

"Utter perplexity is part of the pleasure when reading a Persian ghazal in general, and a ghazal by Hafiz in particular. The apparent disparity of the distiches enhances this feeling of a kind of nuclear aesthetics that lacks unity, giving the deceptive impression that these lines are but ‘orient pearls at random strung.’ [quoting A.J. Arberry] And yet there is unity, but in a very oblique way. In the same way as the primordial vision of beauty and the all-encompassing experience of love constitute the founding metaphysical principles of creation and the secret of the unity of being, aesthetically the same structure presides over the design of the ghazal: it seems complicated to the extreme, upside down, discombobulated, even chaotic like the visible world of multiplicity, but the underlying unifying thread to the paradoxical reality of love and beauty is always there." (p. 133)