and then our exile

driving home, the brilliance of sunlit hoarfrost on trees: beauty to cut hearts edged, sharp to the quick: you do not want to see this, because of the horror of the sublime etched clearly as the mark of cain, its force sweeps away hesitance yielding only a cringing, a shrinking, that how can such a perfect, perfect scene exist, how can it be, you want to turn away because of its utter and perhaps ultimate wonder. it defies response, exists only as a blazing Is. beauty/pain.

before these syllables (a general statement) release into publicity they demand a cutting back, a rendering palatable. an adequate disclaimer? one accounting for nothing.

spruce needles over labrador leaves

saturday after a slow tajweed class to a few sessions at an undergrad philosophy conference. the keynote i liked, architecture and city planning vs. attitudes and perspectives (urban/modern, post-urban/post-modern as "the calculated and ordered celebration of chaos", consumerism as "hell on earth"). the next had potential but was extreme disappointment: "iqbal's reconstruction of islamic philosophy". i didn't want to say anything then, not halfway familiar with the jargon they were using (pragmatist school? william james' spatial continuum conjuncture succession problematic? what?), but was actually angry about how he was badmouthing imam al-ghazali...calling his conclusions 'absurd' means you haven't understood them (he admitted he hadn't read him directly), and tying this in to contemporary "fundamentalist" politics is ironic if you understand what these same "fundamentalists" think of ghazali. also--what happened to context? responding to radical deists and naturalists, his view of causality makes sense as a reformulation, not destruction. as the professor sitting behind me pointed out, even that this reformulation isn't necessarily negative (spinoza?). you're browner than me, man, you should understand your own tradition, not be caught up in these white-man theoreticals.

finally a copy of the sami yusuf cd everyone was talking about a few months ago. reaction to that, and to some studio versions of nusrat fateh ali khan i tried listening to (expecting traditional qawwalis) – please, please, no more synthesizers. and thank you.

tonight a soccer game i am not at. sorry.

in my "muslim minute" artikel there are subliminal references to bruce cockburn, les cranes, joni mitchell, and raffi. if you pick them out i will give you a prize.

for some reason people i knew years ago are starting to appear everywhere i go. a silent return, the anonymity of the crowd.

today a powerful, moving speech by stephen lewis. as he finished the hundreds of people in the theatre rose, a standing ovation, many with tears in their eyes. others broke down completely at eloquence, the intensity of his message. swaying the crowd: pin-drop silence hanging in the air (anecdotes of children kidnapped by the LRA), or coaxed laughter (the US a nation "running on titular aggrandization"). taqa and i slipped in after they were already directing overflow to the live feed in dinwoodie, due to the pleasant auspices of my iweek volunteer badge, and sat in reserved seating.