which is odd because also in the text is the mention of Grasset D'Orcet's "language of the birds"... which reminded me immediately of a book i love, The Speech of the Birds (see below) & if you look down into the names, you'll see Mansur al-Hallaj who as all fans of Hakim Bey know is the heretic who was burned for the heresy "I am the Truth" (Ana l'haq).. It makes me wonder if there couldnt be a kind of unknown shadow sufism, an eblisian counter sufism of which the current fundamentalism is but a shell. Its quite silly to concieve of such a thing, but when you look at the structure of "I am the truth," or "I am God." you can see the echoes of the angelic "fall" which also echoes "The Angelic Society" in a fallen sense. And how Jihadi suicide is seemingly pretty mystical from the inside, although there are probably Sunni radical communists who have no real belief in the afterlife. If its possible to think of, its probably true! Its quite ridiculous, of course, but one wonders about weird calligraphy of human social coding, how it bulges in these diastolics.. Today I've been studying the Kerenyi's brilliant analysis of the origin of comedy as a kind of diastolic bulge, a primitive form of dialecticalism, or perhaps an unconscious dialectic, which brings up the whole notion of deep structure i guess, and "organic dialectic".. comedy's formlessness being older than tragedy but its formalization arising from a diastolic with tragedy.. anyhoo frontline had a pretty good Al Queda show on tonight.. I watched that, and I got this odd sensation when they had this tape which was telling the al queda listener, "My voice is entering your body.." How viral can you get? And then there was this member of a traditional sunni group who was talking about how many of these people were being radicalized (read virulized) in Europe instead of in the middle east http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/front/view/ which made me think of a kind of ressentiment. Nietzsche's genealogy of ressentiment as the moral perversion resulting from the ancient Roman/Palestinian cultural conflict and giving birth to the ascetic ideal affect/ or maybe some variant. And at one point one of the virulent anti-westerner muslims specifically called the west "Rome".. the whole thing was really evocative. But you know, its frontline, so what are you really getting, but well.. it made me think a few new things i suppose.. oddly, the piece alsmost makes you think these people are being radicalized because of cultural alienation, they called it homesickness in the show.. so they go to a mosque and get infected with radical islam..but they don't really address the engine of radicalized islam, they never do of course. i mean they put it almost like that, which sort of made me think, THEY are trying to portray this as a simplified virus vector, as a reductionism in the service of, as against what i concieve of as a memic complexity involving historical agency, at any rate, some weird spiralling fractals came out of that.. its a pretty decent blip.. the whole show is online too..
The Speech of the Birds Mantiqu't-Tair Presented and translated by: PETER AVERY Mantiqu't-Tair is one of the masterpieces of Persian literature of which a complete and annotated translation into English is here presented for the first time as The Speech of the Birds. The text revolves around the decision of the birds of the world to seek out a king. Their debilitating doubts and fears, the knowing counsel of their leader Hoopoe, and their choice of the Simurgh as a king, is in reality an allegory of the spiritual path of Sufism with its demands, its hazards and its infinite rewards. The poem contains many admonitory anecdotes and exemplary stories, including numerous references to some of the early Muslim mystics such as Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya, Abu Sa'id ibn Abi'l-Khair, Mansur al-Hallaj and Shibli, among others. In The Speech of the Birds, Peter Avery has not only given us a precise and moving translation, but also ample annotation providing much information to fill in what Attar would have expected his readers to know. The result is a fascinating insight into a remarkable aspect of Islam: the world of ecstatic love of the Persian mystics. The Speech of the Birds will be of interest to everyone who values great literature, as well as to all students of Persian and Sufism. Brought up in a Sufi ambiance, the author of this work, Faridu'd-Din Attar (1145-1221), was an apothecary who lived near Nishapur. Attar, whom legend describes as having taken to the Sufi path in earnest after he witnessed a dervish surrender his soul outside his shop, went on to become one of the most famous Sufi poets in history, best known for his classical work the Mantiqu't-Tair. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alan Sondheim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA> Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 9:12 PM Subject: Re: more PoS art conspiracy stuff
The Clouds is also the name of El Qaeda's media wing. - Alan For URLs, DVDs, CDs, books/etc. see http://www.asondheim.org/advert.txt . Contact: Alan Sondheim, [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] General directory of work: http://www.asondheim.org .
