and then our exile

zaadi qaleelun wa ma arahu muballighee / alizzaadi abki, am litawlilmasaafah?

It is cold. It is cold not that oh dear wear another layer of clothes, it is cold that i can see my breath white and fleeting in the air in front of me--while sitting in my own house, an apartment oppressively hot in summer and this cold in winter. This is because it is not a building built in traditional ways, it is a structure made of concrete and hasty whitewash. This is metaphor and truth, and my hands and toes are cold.

Something i am trying to find out is whether the contrast between Arabic and any other language is so great. i am only in position to speak of Englisch (though James and i agreed to know French Spanish Chinese Russian and Arabic)--I am doing the Burdah with someone, and his explanation and backgrounders give each separate /word/ its own story, its own added layers of meaning, so that by the time you reach the end of the verse, you /believe/ it is al-Busairi's heart which is speaking. We overuse language, this is obvious, so that we no longer consider each word as separate, as holding its own meaning--we start to take whole phrases and even (God forgive us) sentences as single units...and no longer see how much is lost. To give every word its due. Here is the difference--in Arabic you can give each /letter/ its due (ask Hamza Y*suf), while in Englisch you must use words. This maybe why i was previously drawn to Manicom and Eliot, because their words are (sometimes) already steeped in layered myth. i think George Eliot Cl*rke said that. But there it is external, while with Arabic it is internal.

Even Descartes believed in God, did anyone know? And took His existence for granted, even within his framework, and then built logical proofs for this, as a necessary, perfect Being--impossibility of infinitely regressing causality and so on, even to the extent that 'we can know this truth with more certainty than we can know any other external substantial thing, because our perceptions of those things are necessarily limited, being sensory, while this truth is already inherent within the mind'. And so on. i do not want to go too extreme ("was Shakespeare a sufi? Here is my ta'weel"), but my ignorant and backward mind has been told he has stolen from Imam Ghazali. Anyways, i think it was also Imam Ghazali who said few people accept such truths because of rational arguments, they need their own personal revelations. I've argued so much with E. since i got here that i think if one has the gift of speech, one could turn things around that it does seem as though it is personal revelation--which it is, in a sense.
e: "i'm not enough of a sophist to do that."
b: "yes you are."
e: "not when i'm being sincere."

I haven't written much of substance lately, either here or otherwise, because i am busy with the things that make up life and because, i think it was L. who wrote it a long time ago, "joyful words are sacrilege": joy is not the right word now, but a sort of contentment. "Yesterday" plunged me through the darkest night, and "Tomorrow" may bring a new ice age, and even now my underbelly is lined with slime, but the day is clarity, it rests on my own shoulders.

We may go visit Shaikh Muhamm*d Ya'qoubi today.

my spine holds a chaos contained

Anyways, my question was this: what changed in the West, then, if even the socalled father of rationalism was taking this stand?