The Garden Party (Part IV): The (shocking) truth of the third answer exposed!

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bride, east, father, feminine, final hour, fire, fish, fish-liver, garden party, ibn salam, Islam, judgement, little face, long breath, marriage, mother, professor, tobias, tobit, water, west, women

Family resemblance: the answer to the third question. p = Prophecy (East), f = Speech, the feminine, the bride, j = Judgement (Fire) and l = Love (Water), s = submission, witnessing, question, matyrdom, m = mastery, answer, victory, O = the (m)Other, F = the Father.

CONTINUED FROM PART 3.

By now, the Professor had appeared, in the eyes of the Muslims, simply and utterly strange. Nevertheless, he continued on:

As for the child, if the man’s discharge precedes the woman’s discharge, the child attracts the similarity to the man, and if the woman’s discharge precedes the man’s, then the child attracts the similarity to the woman.

Narrated Abu Salama: Um Salaim said, “O Allah’s Apostle! Allah does not refrain from saying the truth! Is it obligatory for a woman to take a bath after she gets nocturnal discharge?” He said, “Yes, if she notices the water.” Um Salama smiled and said, “Does a woman get discharge?” Allah’s Apostle said. “Then why does a child resemble (its mother)?” (Sahih Bukhari, The Book of Prophets, 55:545)

Our Real is the sublimated Logos. It is a continuous plane that sustains our journey of differentiation. God’s breath becomes sublimated to form the Real, at which point the journey of differentiation begins. It becomes a dialectic stemming from the tawhid of God’s unity of Love. From love, breathing. From breathing, withdrawal and presence. And from withdrawal and presence, the field of differentiation, the field of the Symbolic, the field of our journey back to Love.

And this is what this question of family resemblance deals with: the relationship between the Real and the Symbolic.

The mother and father possess a threefold resemblance, contained within their singular tawhid: 1) there is a Real mother and father, 2) there are two symbolic functions, and 3) there are two signs of something Real.

This Real mother and father are felt by us, regulate and intrude upon our symbolic journey  necessarily in order for us to 1) be happy and free of pathologies and 2) to ascend into illuminated life and afterlife 3) realise these two things by recognizing how we are formed, the nature of our sexual components.

Let’s dim the lights and slow it down.

A Tailor’s family

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daughter, family life, father, language, mother, Sufism, trinkets

A picture of two daughters that somehow reminds me of my own.

I have two little daughters. Certainly too small to fast this Ramadan or even make shahada, although the older one, Alima (5 years) has recently started to discuss God. She told me yesterday she imagines him to have a beard, eyes and hands, which was interesting, given that I am currently working on a blog entry regarding the anthropomorphic traits of God. She might be picking up on some of the conversations I had with my wife, but the children also discuss stuff at school. (In East London there is a real mix of different religions and ethnicities, and the kids share everything: my daughter taught salat to her little Hindu, Sikh and Christian friends — in fact, sometimes I worry she can be a little bit untactful about it, particularly when their parents are around! — but they taught her their practices too — she knows all about Krishna and the baby Jesus. Their innocent and free exchanges gives me hope for humanity’s spiritual progress, actually. Although, of course, I send her to a pretty posh school!)

The Garden Party (Part I): The Three Questions of Prophecy

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bukhari, child, discharge, father, mother, progressive islam, resemblance, Sufism

The Professor and Builder had come for a barbeque, held at the house of their mutual friend, the Geography student (or rather, Geography doctorate, as he had recently passed his PhD in that subject at the Professor’s college).
The Geographer possessed an multiplicitous network of muslims of all backgrounds — from those who identified with the religion culturally but were ostensibly secular in outlook, to progressives, revivalists, adherents of Sufi tariqas and, of course, a majority who simply maintained the five pillars of the religion and neither deserved nor would desire another label. And this afternoon, presumably with the touchingly idealistic spirit of Islamic revival and common brotherhood and sisterhood in mind, the Geographer had devised this gathering as a sort of modern day Islamic salon, with beards and hijabs instead of wigs and port.

The Professor and Builder had agreed to meet and use the event as an excuse to continue their discussion of the Symbolic might be reconstrued to offer insight into the nature of our journey’s relationship to God and Prophecy and to, perhaps, gauge the potential response of their peers to the trajectory of their ideas. (The Symbolic here taken in both the senses of the Lacanian Symbolic and the Jungian notion of archetypical Symbolism within the collective unconscious.) They also agreed that it would be nice for their families to meet (this had not happened before): a particularly pleasant notion as both men were each recently blessed with the arrival of new baby daughters.

That sunny summer morning the two families made their separate ways out to the Geographer’s house. The Professor driving north, from his house in south London, the Builder driving westwards from his house in the East End.

The Primal Scene

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daughter, father, freud, Lacan, Luria, mother, primal scene, son

The Father and Mother constitute a primal scene of kissing and being kissed. This is the nature of the Breath of Love from the Great Face, as fantasized by the resulting dialectic inherent in the emergent subject’s Little Face

It is correct to say that souls are asexual. But they have sexual components, and this derives from their formation from the breath of the Divine, because this process of this breathing is sexuality itself.

To be brief, mythopoeic alchemy (borrowed from Issac Luria, mediated via Freud and Lacan) must suffice to make my point. To speak of breathing requires us to speak of the inner and the outer: breath flows from the inner to the outer. This distinction is sexual: for sexuality is nothing but distinction. So breathing is sexual. Let us call the inner the Father and the outer the Mother.

The Father breathes out Love to the Mother, who breathes in Love. But if the Divine is a unity, then the breath must be circular. And so the breath is a bijective dialectic: the Mother breathes back Love to the Father.

Similarly, the Father kisses the Mother actively and the Mother kisses the Father in receipt. Every kiss involves two simultaneous modes: of giving and receiving.

Finally, the Father speaks to the Mother, soothing words of Wisdom. In this case, the Mother listens in silence, because, while kissing and breathing is a two-way bijection, the distinction that underlies speech is one of active words and responsive silence. So the Mother is silence here.

Interestingly, the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan describe a similar grounding relationship, perhaps through the mechanism of some collective unconscious (Jung’s revenge on his former collaborator!), perhaps deliberately (Lacan did read Kabbalah, at least).