Of Love, Beauty, and Sadness

      And, of Love, what can we say or know or live? Moving daily further along, does it only swirl more mysterious, inner and outer? 

Reading from Henry Corbin’s Avicenna and the Visionary Recital:

“But what the Soul tenderly desires is precisely to assimilate itself with the Intelligence by becoming like it, as the disciple makes himself like his master, or the lover like the beloved. To do this, the Soul must ‘grasp the beauty of the object that it loves; the image of that beauty increases the ardor of its love, this ardor makes the soul look upward, and thence arises a motion by which it can apply itself to the object with which it desires to assimilate itself. Thus imagination of beauty causes ardor of love, love causes desire (inquisitio), and desire causes motion.’”

 

    Corbin continues into the next page commenting on Suhrawardi’s The Familiar of the Mystical Lovers with a discussion of “three beings who proceed from the threefold self-intellection of the Intelligence [who] bear three names that, despite appearances, are less abstractions than typifications, since they have correspondences in three names from Biblico-Koranic hagiography (Joseph, Zulaykha, Jacob). The three figures that proceed from the meditation of the First Archangel reflecting upon his being are named Beauty, Love, Sadness. Of these three dramatis personae, Sadness corresponds to the heaven whose subtle matter ‘materializes’ the thought of a nonbeing; it measures the zone of shadow, the distance that always intrudes between Love and the Beauty to which it aspires—that is, between the celestial Angel and the Angel-Cherub. But at the same time this heaven, this Sadness, is the instrument that allows the Soul, by the roundabout way of a long pilgrimage, to approach that Beauty, to attain the goal of its desire, just as, by moving its heaven, the Soul tends toward the Angel from which it emanates. Thus the same nostalgia that is close to the secret of the mystic’s heart is likewise the secret of celestial physics.” pp. 74-75

 

    So good to have guidance on the way that gives place and relationship among Sadness, Beauty, and Love; and all this encouragement for finding oneself on the pilgrimage of life with such fine companions.

The Ecstatic Blur

 

Sunset yesterday

     Sometimes a partial is all that’s given. Whisp of a dream… the unavailable you and the might-be beloved speak “You…” The words in the dream have slipped back across the veil. Right enough. Dreams and other ecstatic whiffs are just enough to draw the next step, into the blur…A-slant. 
Ex-stasis. Outside self. Not literal. 

Literal. Letter?  Word. Representation. Re-Present is not same as present (in its multiple meanings slip-sliding to push the edge of sense). This chain of associations brings to mind Epaminondas: the tragedy of literalism and fundamentalism; the risks yet critical necessity of imagery running into troubles of idolatry and idealism…
     All this points toward realization of “other.” The standing outside of one’s self. The Ecstatic. The Not. Nothingness. Not knowing as beginning of wisdom. Nishitani on going beyond emptiness. 

“It is only in breaking through to the field of ecstatic transcendence (or trans-descendence), then, that the awareness of birth-and-death as ’transmigration’ comes about. This ecstatic trans-descendence appears in the endlessness of finite life and in the totality of the horizon that embraces the mode of being of man along with that of the other species. Nihility opens up only in this transcendence.” (Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, pp. 174-5). 

Transcendence?  At least going outside. Ecstatic. “Non-knowledge communicates ecstasy,”  Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring, quoting Bataille, Inner Experience.
     Rosemarie Waldrop opens Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabes:

“Faced with an undecipherable world we set out to create language, a place where human discourse can arises, and we come to exist as human beings; where, at the same time, we can maintain a relation to what transcends us, the undecipherable, the ultimate otherness, and speak to it under the name of God.” (p. 1)