“Of that day and hour no one knows … ”: the Tailorite Sufi’s rapture

Tags

end of days, feminine, final hour, genesis, Kabbalah, rapture, reading, Sufism, tailorite, text, textuality, yawm al qiyamah

A recent sermon given by Dr. Immanuel G. Moon, that friendly faced High Reader-in-Residence with the Tailorite Temple of Imanetical Literacy, Qalbfordshire.

Not that we have ever been one to impinge upon the embodied piety of those who carry our Books, be they Christian, Muslim, Jewish or otherwise. But today we feel it appropriate to reflect on the meaning of the End of Days, the Tribulation and the event sometimes referred to as the Rapture.

From a Tailorite perspective, any attempt to guess the day and hour of these events is impermissible.

This ought to be accord with mainstream Islam and Christianity — see, for example,

But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only. (Mark 24:36)

With Allah is the Knowledge of the Hour and he sends down the rain and knows what is in the wombs. And no nafs knows what it will earn tomorrow nor the land in which it will perish. (Qur’an 31:34)

But we will go further, deviating from the mainstream in our reading of these passages. Because we see a difference between the unknowable and unguessable in relation to the Hour.

It’s not like the time of the Hour is the world’s best kept secret, one that we might be let in on, but aren’t. One that we could guess and be right or wrong, with only Allah actually knowing if we got it correct. That would mean that prediction of the Hour is at least an ontological possibility. But prediction of the Hour in any form is not possible: it is an impossibility by virtue of what the Hour itself.

Because knowledge of the Hour is a different kind of Knowledge to regular kinds of knowing. Your head can’t contain it: it never can. It is a different kind of Timing, only accessible to the Father. The train timetable for Shenfield to London might be concealed from you — but it is always possible you might learn it. But the timetable for the Hour is simply inexpressible, not even thinkable for a human being.

And so you see, in reading the passages quoted above, the mainstream sheikhs and priests of the religions are closer than you might think to the smaller groups who say “It’s happening May 21, for certain”. For example, I can recall hutbas given by Muslim sheikhs in which the signs of the Hour were enumerated and “ticked off” as already happening: that there will be false prophets (certainly a few), women will be walking about in the streets without many clothes (definitely), that people will hop between earth and clouds and what is far will become near (airplanes), a man will leave his house and his thigh will tell him what is in his house (beepers/mobile phones), people will dance with instruments upon their heads (headphones) and so on. The effect of these kinds of hutbas (and their Christian equivalent — found more in the American charismatic tradition than the more placid European modes of practice) is to instill in the listener a state of fear and reverence with respect to the immediacy and seriousness of impending day of Judgement, when their good deeds will be weighed against their bad.

They have produced an assemblage: fusing the machine of social, clockwork time to the Divine time machine of the Bible. This allows them to say either: “It will happen on the 21st of May 2011″ or “It is unguessable, but it could well happen on the 21st of May, given most of the signs seem to have been realised”.

But in doing so they relegate God’s Knowledge of the Hour to something if not human (the minority sects), then at least angelic (the majority/mainstream). Angels comprehend the logical entirety of what is possible and what is not possible: for they are beings occupying the space of forms, just as we occupy forms of space. Christ informs us that “not even the angels of heaven” know the hour: and so the Knowledge cannot even be contingency, cannot be a guessable possibility, because the space of forms is a logical space.

But regarding these sects: that’s their practice, and their particular treatment of the signs of the end is intrinsic to their habitus: we respect the sects’ cultural right to exist and continue.

We are not imperial colonists. We have no wish to colonially attack the embodied piety of the minority sects whose practice involves prediction of the Hour nor to damage the belief eco-system of the majority sects’ more common treatment of an unguessable “train timetable” Hour. We’re not out to get either group, with their shared consequent implication of a habitus of reverence/fear revolving around such reconstituted socio-divine temporality.

All the same, reciting outward from Tailorite position, any such attempt at prediction constitutes a literalist folly.

Or, more correctly, it is folly because it fails to literalise in a literary manner: a fusion of two time machines that fails to reference the situated textuality of that fusion. A failure to recognize the Impossible Father, the Impossible Father who alone possesses Impossible Knowledge of the Hour. Because to reference situated textuality is to reference the Impossible Father’s Wisdom.

The Song of Songs 2:12

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dove, Israel, Kabbalah, song of songs, Sufism

The blossoms appear on the earth, the time of singing/pruning (Z-M-R) is come and the Voice of the Dove is heard in our Land (Song of Songs 2:12)

The verse describes a kind of Divine-Human two phase commit protocol by which the meaning and realisation of life’s genesis and fulfillment is encoded and transmitted from the Godhead into the universe (up to and including the verse itself in enunciation).

The blossoms constitute the triad of Love (Mecca) and Logic (Medina) mediated by Prophecy. There is a function of Love whose self-distillation follows into Logic (Law). This is called “hijrah”. As we have said before, the self-distillation of Mecca into Medina — of Love into Law — is necessary in order for the Muhammedean becoming (for human temporality, for the love story) to be enunciated:

But Allah would not punish them while you (Muhammed) were with them, nor will He punish them while they seek forgiveness.” (Qur’an 8:33)

Then there is a function of Logic whose output is Love: this is known as “hajj”, the return into the (Southern, Abrahamic) maqam of Love out of (Northern, Issacian/Ishmaelian) City of Logic.

And when We made the House a place of return for the people and security. And take from the standing place of Abraham a place of prayer. And We charged Abraham and Ishmael, “Purify My House for those who perform Tawaf and those who are staying  for worship and those who bow and prostrate.” (2:125)

Their interrelationship constitutes the first phase of the commit cycle: Love sends a request to distill into Logic, Logic reciprocates (through Life/Prophetic interface) back into Love.

Their bidirectional flow (of hijrah/hajj) is existence: specifically, Prophetic existence. And thus their bidirectional interface is the orb of Prophecy, Muhammedean becoming in its first form, 2/3s of which are us in the circuitry of speech (a circuitry also known as “the earth”), and 1/3 of whose skull is open, admitting the Light of God for transmission into that circuitry.

The upper triad is spoken of here, but still constitutes three obfuscated intermediary signs for something we cannot utter, truly, something self-obscured from us by virtue of its presence and our preservation. The upper triad, though the principle of the journey, is not yet enacted. And enactment dialectic. For in order for the triad to figure effectively in my enunciation, it must be encoded within a dialectic of speech: the feet of the human form, grown, apparent. The blossoms appear as feet, and the child learns to walk.

The blossoms in appearance are Martyrdom and Victory and Transmission, resembling the triadic formula of Love-Logic-Prophecy, but a resemblance through a refraction, a fragmentation of the upper signage, subsumption of these things into 1) crystallized, proxy (Judaic) archetypes that fantasize universality across what will eventually be settled as a particular plateau/earth  of immanence and 2) the molecular DNA of the human soul as it emerges as an identity in and of itself, the driving, life-giving/preserving “smell” and “scent” of the journey itself. The physical sensation of the blossoms, their encoding within the trace of walk (and their embodiment of the walk of the trace). Such that 1) and 2) themselves are in constant brotherly negotiation, of deconstruction and reconstruction, of reception and transmission, of undoing and redoing. A movement whose crystallization is the Transmission, the circuitry itself: the gesture of iqra, the gesture (still in potential) of Divinity reciting us reciting Divinity reciting us.

This appearance is still in potential: on the earth. The song is not yet complete.

Because the transmission itself demanded dialectic, we find ourselves in a fragmented space of political negotiation. One that is endless, multiplicitous, bificatory: a vine of parallel political implications. One in which we may have a state of war as well as of peace. And with a trillion underbellies to a trillion thought processes: the movement of brothers can transform from Moses and Aaron into Abel and Cain. And so there are deceit and lies, misguidance, traps and punishment as we begin the song.

That is the other side of the dialectic, which is nothing but the enunciation in psalm, a song (Z-M-R): hence the verse proceeds:

The blossoms appear on the earth, the time of pruning/singing (Z-M-R) is come (Song of Songs 2:12)

Through the fragmentary space of the lower dialectic, the negotiation of DNA dispersed as dust into space, a return into a purified space of Love (Kaba) is possible via purging of the tyrant/idolater principle:

And slay them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out, for tumult and oppression are worse than killing. But fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there. But if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward of those who suppress faith.  (2:191)

And so there is a bidirectional interface between the blossoms, but the interface and the blossoms are like a mold, a mapping, rendered microscopic, a DNA that must now be grown and realised via pruning/singing in the fragmented multiplicitous realities of the diamond dialectic. The interface is known as the “best of molds” (Qur’an 95:4) – but it is the pruning/singing that constitutes the filling of that mold with the clay of Adam.

Truth is destined to triumph over lies, as destiny is the journey into Truth through song/pruning. We can translate the 2:12 as “time of pruning” or “time of singing” interchangably. Because to sing the psalm is to prune the Vine.

The pruning/singing of the Vine by the dialectic becomes the second part of the 2 phase commit — by means of the psalm itself we enter into a a embodied, fully enunciated/encoded physicalized process that encompasses in its own individuated personal space (the space of this blog entry, as personal, unique and obscure as it may read) the 2 phase commit in totality. There was the form of a Love-Logic commit, now there is the realisation: we receive Love from above, we utter Love in return.

And then we reach the conclusion, one of continuation:

… and the Voice of the Dove is heard in our Land (Song of Songs 2:12)

The Dove of Peace (SLM), of Submission, of iSLaM. The process described is one of movement, of negotiation toward/into Truth: but it is also one of recovery, of formation, of recitation and of pruning, of the Soul in transit. The Voice is the word (Kun)/”Be!”, generating the Soul of Man. And now it takes flight, in carriage of this process.

And so the Dove of Peace it is the Soul of Man in transmigration (over centuries, over millennia, over forms, over politics and over regimes and races) into a State of True Israel. Its voice “is heard in our Land” because it a Dove whose flight is request-response cycles, cycles that are Israel, hearing. And an Israel who truly hears is one who Truly exists, and whose Truth of existence is tawhid:

Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one (ehad).
(Deuteronomy 6:4)

You want to know the practical implications of all of this for the world of matter? By this Holy circuitry, by this sanctified curtailment and nurturing of the Vine, and by this enunciation, I tell you that the Dove of Peace will find her way — back — to that Land.

A King’s Wife: the Emergence of Esther

Tags

Deleuze, faciality, Kabbalah, Megillah, Sufism, Zeir Anpin

Esther is a Prophetess and the Jewish wife of the Persian King Ahasuerus. Her story is related within the Megillah (meaning “scroll” or “book”, with the connotation of “a detailed account of events”), a book of the Tanakh (“The Book of Esther” in the Old Testament).

Esther is an orphan, raised by her counsin, the Prophet Mordecai. The book relates how she is found as a replacement for the King’s previous wife, Vashti. Vashti fell into disfavour with the King because she refused to appear to his guests at his request. At first Esther’s Jewish background is kept hidden from the King. Haman, the King’s evil prime minister, councils Ahasuerus to genocide of the Jews — essentially because Esther’s foster parent (her cousin Mordecai) refused to prostrate himself to Haman. An amusing twist to the story leads Haman to accidentally promote Mordecai to a prominent position in King’s court and condemn himself to the gallows. The Jews gain their eventual salvation (after a rather bloody kind of fashion).

The book is worth studying alone: after all, it is of Divine origin. But we make the following observations regarding its opening chapter, which describes the nature of how we got to where we are.

On the revolutionary character of the Kalimah

Tags

Kabbalah, Sufism

Is the Word/Kalimah revolutionary?

There is no Love but Love and the subject is Its slave and messenger.

If we see slavery and messaging as a bidirectional (down and up/up and down) flow of Divine energy. Reception and Bestowal from the perspective of archetypical perturbation we think of as our own subjecthood.

Love Loving in Reception, withdrawal, the subject loving in slavery, offering itself in korban to what it perceives as a hidden, absent Beloved. Love from Aaron. Love Loving in Bestowal, through the Love speaking in presence, speaking (self-referentially) the Kalimah itself to heal and reconstruct the fractured true names that comprise the Face of the subject. Love to Moses.

Certainly is the kalimah is revolutionary. What we commonly think of as the Abrahamic prayer is a cycle, a cycle of recitation and prostration, a revolving revolution from creation to annihilation to re-construction, re-creation, rebooting — of the subject at its various levels, of universes and worlds and the entire cosmic framework itself, ultimately.

Passover

Tags

Kabbalah, passover

0.

The passover (pesach, the hovering/protection) marks the event of God’s hovering over the houses of the children of Israel, protecting them during the final, 10th plague upon Egypt, the punishment of the killing of the firstborn sons.

The narration of Exodus 7-12 begins with Moses and Aaron requesting of Pharoah the release of their people from Egypt (first to worship in the wilderness, then to complete emancipation). The episode of the snakes and the staff follows, but Pharoah is unmoved. Then a series of plagues are produced as further signs. With each affliction, Pharoah agrees to let Moses’ people go if the plague is stopped but once this happens, his heart becomes “hardened” again and he reneges. With the 10th plague, he finally allows the people to leave (but then gives chase to them later, eventually getting drowned in the process).

What might not be obvious is that the Passover event is the penultimate act of a battle that runs backwards in Time, backwards to our very genesis. Each of the 10 plagues, as enumerated in Torah’s succession, constitutes a rewinding temporal jump, each plague both a Time corridor and a Time weapon.

Communication links

Tags

Christianity, communication, grace, hajar, identity, Kabbalah, Sufism

Hey fellow space cadets, this is your friendly neighbourhood T. here, with a couple of methodology/experiential notes I thought I might share with you:

- Think that the teacher’s just “you” at a later date, metaphorically.
- Turns out it was the case, no metaphor, in reality. But what’s reality?
- I asked her a broader question relating to the language, missing the point, he asked me a broader question relating to my language, missing the point.
- Think that the student’s just “you” at an earlier date.
- Turns out it was metaphoric, not reality.
- Yes, it’s one line, but it became seven just then in my mind.
- I played it out just then like a Hajaric to-and-fro.

The Tailor and the Exiles

Tags

apostates, exile, jack and jill, Kabbalah, Sufism

The Tailor would sometimes sell his garments in the lands north of the City, wherein resided wild men and women, nomads and tribes and communes, loosely conflated as self-governing collective.
He never made any sales, but would always get into heated debates with the wild men regarding difficult, obscure or superficially offensive verses of the Reading. They hated the Reading because they only saw confusion and hatred within: he loved the Reading because he saw clarity and love within, despite or, rather, because of its darker tropes. In the past, this “failed sales-pitch” (da’wah-as-failure he would say to his wife) afforded him the inspiration to design new garments, and sell them in the City.

While they painted their bodies in blue wode and walked on the earth in near nakedness, these people were not indigenously wild but, rather, exiles from that City. They were a disparate group — anarchists, political dissidents, Darwinists, homosexuals, converts to other religions — but what they had in common was their apostasy from the City, from its rules, its conflation of statehood and faith, its mindless body constraint, its denial of science (with a hypocritical embrace of pseudo scientific rational posturing when justified).

The Tailor still maintained business linkages within the City, but had some appreciation of the apostates: after all, his west end shop had recently had its window smashed in, his wares defaced and fabrics stolen by the so-called Enlightenment Defense League, a neo-fascist vigilante group formed with the sole objective of ridding the City of strangers (and strange clothing). The police of the City, at the command of the new Mayor, had turned a blind eye.

Nevertheless, the Tailor enjoyed sparring with the Exiled tribes, regarding the nature of the Reading. For he still clung to its words: despite the fact that the city lay in confusion and ruin, with forces such as the Enlightenment Defense League corrupting those words beyond any hope of recovery, so that its words were used to abuse the inhabitants into consent, into acceptance of starvation, to turn them into blind slaves of the new Mayor. Despite that abuse, the Reading continued to form the basis for his trade, his designs, his work, his life.

And so, sentimental and nostalgic fool that he was, by “defending” the Reading to the Exiles, he could position himself (for a moment at least) as a True City-dweller, a Reader with Civic Authority, a civilized man, rather than the endangered and despised stranger he was becoming. To position himself in defense of the Reading reminded him of the old days, when his wares were purchased by the Mayors themselves, by their families and wives. Days when business was sweet, when he had a position, when he was consulted, when people Read with him.

It might well be that by defending the Reading, by making the sales pitch this time, he could momentarily forget the fear he felt at the last EDL attack, to forget the darker night that was inevitably descending.

What follows is a transcript of their sparring, wherein the Tailor spoke of the Reading for the umpteenth time and consequently, selfishly, for an hour at least, felt like a respectable City businessman once more.

Two poets

Tags

Islam, Kabbalah, Pessoa, Sufism, Wordsworth

A few short notes on Pessoa’s “re-working” of Wordsworth’s “The Solidary Reaper”.

For reference, the Wordsworth poem is as follows:

BEHOLD her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;—
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for a vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
No nightingale did ever chant
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt
Among Arabian sands;
No sweeter voice was ever heard
In springtime from the cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Jihad: Divine Paradox

Tags

Deleuze, Gnosticism, Guattari, jihad, Kabbalah, line of flight, matronita minor, paradox, sign regimes, Sufism

A missive from the Verandah Vanguard on Jihad, developed by the marvelously mellifluent Matronita minor and your friendly neighbourhood Tailor. Film commissioned by Hamja Ahsan as part of the Redo Pakistan project within the Other Asias movement.

Ramadan Reading: a Few Notes on the Third Juz

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100, 4, 4x7, 7, abraham, al baqarah, anticipation, ark of the covenant, birds, conclusion, hajar, jihad, juz 3, Kabbalah, nafs, qalb, reading, ruh, sakina, samuel, saul, semiotics, shekhina, sirr, Sufism, third juz, two sisters

Note 1: Saul and Sakina (from Juz 2)

The second juz ends with the story of Saul’s Kingship and David’s conquest.

Verses (2:246-249) concerns the prescription of jihad given earlier in the surah in verse (2:216).

To comprehend the enjoining of jihad is the self-referential essence of waging jihad.

These verses predicate upon that verse, on our reading of that verse, “unpacking” our reader’s reaction to finding God command us to jihad and, as a consequence, enter us into jihad and from Poverty of Saul to the Kingdom of Saul, from the tension of the People’s call to the release of their distillation.