Laughing

Laughing

 
Echo of my body

Tree of deserted houses

She who chooses among my words

The words i myself have chosen

When I hear her name I forget all words
She is my sorrow and my knowledge

Bride of spirit and instincts

Mother of desires

Mute cry

Stars of my night

She who carries my sword and its wreckage

She who knows how to tame

Who surpasses the flowers in the orchards

Who vanquishes the fruits of wilderness

Blue lily of melancholy

Laughing Laughing Laughing

 

Ounsi el-Hajj

 
- Born in 1937.
- Son of journalist and translator Louis El Hage, and of Marie Akl, from Kaitouli, Jezzine (South of Lebanon).
- Did his school studies in the "Lycée français", then in "La Sagesse" High School.
- Began to publish short stories, essays and poems in literary magazines since 1954, while he was still a high school student.
- Started exercising daily journalism professionally
in Al Hayat in 1956, as director of the cultural page. Then he moved to An Nahar
newspaper, where he edited for years the non political pages, and transformed
the daily cultural column into a daily cultural page.

- In 1964, he founded and published "Al Mulhaq", the weekly cultural supplement of An Nahar newspaper, until 1974, with the cooperation of Chawki Abi Chakra during the first half of the above-mentioned period.

- In 1957, he contributed with Youssef Khal and Adonis to the foundation of the poetry magazine "Shi'r", and in 1960 he published in the latter's editions his first poetry book, "Lan", the first compilation of poems in prose in Arabic language.
- Published six compilations of poetry: Lan (1960), The chopped head (1963), The past of forthcoming days (1965), What have you made with the gold what have you done with the rose (1970), The Messenger with her hair long until the sources (1975), The banquet (1994).
- Also published a book of essays in 3 volumes under the title of "Words, words, words", and a book of philosophical contemplations and aphorisms in two volumes: "Khawatem". The third volume of Khawatem is to appear soon, as well as a set of unpublished works.
- Was editor-in-chief of several magazines, simultaneously with his permanent work in An Nahar, among which "Al Hasna" magazine in 1966 and "Arab and international Nahar" between 1977 and 1989.
- Starting 1963, he translated more than ten plays of Shakespeare, Ionesco, Camus and Brecht into Arabic, plays that have been staged by the school of modern acting (Baalbek festival) as well as by directors Nidal Al Ashkar, Roger Assaf and Berge Vaslian.
- Married to Layla Daou (since 1957), father of Nada and Louis.
- Editor-in-chief of An Nahar newspaper from 1992 till September 30, 2003.
- A choice of his poems has been translated into French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Armenian and Finnish.
- An anthology of his poetry, "Flying eternity", was published in French by the publishing house "Actes Sud" in Paris in 1997, and another anthology entitled "Love and the fox, Love and the others", appeared in a bilingual German /Arabic edition in Berlin in 1998. The first was supervised and introduced by Abdel Kader Janabi, and the second translated by Khaled Al Maali and Herbert Becker.
-Summarizing his biography to answer a question by Professors Nabil Ayoub, Hind Adib d'Orléans and George Kallas in the setting of an interview edited by poet Elias Lahoud in the "contemporary writings" magazine (issue 38 - August / September 1999), Ounsi El Hage declared:
"I often told the same history. I don't believe that it is of any interest to anyone. I have more remorse than achievements, and all that I have done I did without my knowledge. When nobody used to ask me for my opinion on things, such as love and death, I willingly said the truth, but then I stopped saying it as soon as there was someone to ask".

Enculturation

Enculturation

Nowadays, in Third World countries, we talk a great deal about "enculturation."

What is this thing called "culture"?

I'm not very happy with the word.

Does it mean you'd like to do something because you were conditioned to do it?

That you'd like to feel something because you were conditioned to feel it?

Isn't that being mechanical?

Imagine an American baby that is adopted by a Russian couple and taken to Russia.

It has no notion that it was born American.

It's brought up talking Russian; it lives and dies for Mother Russia; it hates Americans.

The child is stamped with his own culture; it's steeped in its own literature.

It looks at the world through the eyes of its culture.

Now, if you want to wear your culture the way you wear your clothes, that's fine.

The Indian woman would wear a sari and the American woman would wear something else, the Japanese woman would wear her kimono.

But nobody identifies herself with the clothes.

But you do want to wear your culture more intently.

You become proud of your culture.

They teach you to be proud of it.

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

Words value

Cultural conditioning

Something more about words.

I said to you earlier that words are limited.

There is more I have to add.

There are some words that correspond to nothing.

For instance, I'm an Indian.

Now, let's suppose that I'm a prisoner of war in Pakistan, and they say to me, "Well, today we're going to take you to the frontier, and you're going to take a look at your country."

So they bring me to the frontier, and I look across the border, and I think,

"Oh, my country, my beautiful country.

I see villages and trees and hills. This is my own, my native land!"

After a while one of the guards says,

"Excuse me, we've made a mistake here.

We have to move up another ten miles."

What was I reacting to?

Nothing.

I kept focusing on a word, India.

But trees are not India; trees are trees.

In fact, there are no frontiers or boundaries.

They were put there by the human mind; generally by stupid, avaricious politicians.

My country was one country once upon a time; it's four now.

If we don't watch out it might be six.

Then we'll have six flags, six armies.

That's why you'll never catch me saluting a flag.

I abhor all national flags because they are idols.

What are we saluting?

I salute humanity, not a flag with an army around it.

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

The right note

I've found it!

One day Nasr-ed-Din was strumming a guitar, playing just one note.

After a while a crowd collected around him (this was in a marketplace) and one of the men sitting on the ground there said,

That's a nice note you're playing,

Mullah, but why don't you vary it a bit the way other musicians do?"

"Those fools," Nasr-ed-Din said,

"they're searching for the right note.

I've found it.

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

Divine love

Divine love

I have two loves for you

That of passion and that of your merits

For the passion

I need bring to mind only you

But for the love of your merits

The universe goes unseen

While you are not before me

It is not to myself

That I must give thanks

But to you in this manifold love

Rabiah Al-Adawiyyah

(717–801)

Rābiʻa al-ʻAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya (Arabic: رابعة العدوية القيسية‎) or simply Rābiʻa al-Basrī (Arabic: رابعة البصري‎) (717–801 C.E.) was a female Muslim Sufi saint.

She was born between 95 and 99 Hijri in Basra, Iraq.

She was the fourth daughter of her family and therefore named Rabia, meaning "fourth". Although not born into slavery, her family were poor yet respected in the community.

According to Farid al-Din Attar, Rabia's parents were so poor that there was no oil in house to light a lamp, nor a cloth even to wrap her with. Her mother asked her husband to borrow some oil from a neighbor, but he had resolved in his life never to ask for anything from anyone except the Creator. He pretended to go to the neighbor's door and returned home empty-handed.

In the night, Prophet Muhammad appeared to him in a dream and told him, "Your newly born daughter is a favorite of the Lord, and shall lead many Muslims to the right path. You should approach the Amir of Basra and present him with a letter in which should be written this message: 'You offer Durood to the Holy Prophet one hundred times every night and four hundred times every Thursday night. However, since you failed to observe the rule last Thursday, as a penalty you must pay the bearer four hundred dinars '.

Rabia's father got up and went straight to the Amir with tears of joy rolling down his cheeks. The Amir was delighted on receiving the message, knowing that he was in the eyes of Prophet. He distributed 1000 dinars to the poor and joyously paid 400 dinars to Rabia's father. The Amir then asked Rabia's father to come to him whenever he required anything, as the Amir would benefit very much by the visit of such a soul dear to the Lord.

After the death of her father, a famine overtook Basra and Rabia parted from her sisters. Legend has it that she was accompanying a caravan, which fell into the hands of robbers. The chief of the robbers took Rabia captive, and sold her in the market as a slave. The new master of Rabia used to take hard service from her.

She would pass the whole night in prayer, after she had finished her household jobs. She spent many of her days observing fast.

Once the master of the house got up in the middle of the night, and was attracted by the voice in which Rabia was praying to her Lord. She was entreating in these terms:

"Lord! You know well that my keen desire is to carry out Your commandments and to serve Thee with all my heart, O light of my eyes. If I were free I would pass the whole day and night in prayers. But what should I do when you have made me a slave of a human being?"

At once the master felt that it was sacrilegious to keep such a saint in his service. He decided to serve her instead. In the morning he called her and told her his decision; he would serve her and she should dwell there as the mistress of the house. If she insisted on leaving the house he was willing to free her from bondage.

She told him that she was willing to leave the house to carry on her worship in solitude. This the master granted and she left the house.

Rabia went into the desert to pray and became an ascetic. Her murshid was Hazrat Hassan Basri.

Throughout her life, her Love of God, poverty and self-denial did not waver. They were her constant companions. She did not possess much other than a broken jug, a rush mat and a brick, which she used as a pillow. She spent all night in prayer and contemplation, chiding herself if she slept because it took her away from her active Love of God.

As her fame grew she had many disciples. She also had discussions with many of the renowned religious people of her time. Though she had many offers of marriage, and (tradition has it) one even from the Amir of Basra, she refused them as she had no time in her life for anything other than God.

More interesting than her absolute asceticism, however, is the actual concept of Divine Love that Rabia introduced. She was the first to introduce the idea that God should be loved for God's own sake, not out of fear—as earlier Sufis had done.

She taught that repentance was a gift from God because no one could repent unless God had already accepted him and given him this gift of repentance. She taught that sinners must fear the punishment they deserved for their sins, but she also offered such sinners far more hope of Paradise than most other ascetics did. For herself, she held to a higher ideal, worshipping God neither from fear of Hell nor from hope of Paradise, for she saw such self-interest as unworthy of God's servants; emotions like fear and hope were like veils—i.e. hindrances to the vision of God Himself.

Rabia was in her early to mid-eighties when she died, having followed the mystic Way to the end. She believed she was continually united with her Beloved. As she told her Sufi friends, "My Beloved is always with me" She died in Jerusalem in 185 AH.

She was the one who first set forth the doctrine of Divine Love and who is widely considered to be the most important of the early Sufi poets. The definitive work on her life and writing was a small treatise (written as a Master's Thesis) over 50 years ago by Margaret Smith .

Much of the poetry that is attributed to her is of unknown origin. After a life of hardship, she spontaneously achieved a state of self-realization. When asked by Sheikh Hasan al-Basri how she discovered the secret, she responded by stating:

"You know of the how, but I know of the how-less."

She remained celibate and died of old age, an ascetic, her only care from the disciples who followed her. She was the first in a long line of female Sufi mystics.

Literature and human destiny

In praise of reading and fiction

Literature is a false representation of life that nevertheless helps us to understand life better,
to orient ourselves in the labyrinth where we are born, pass by, and die.
It compensates for the reverses and frustrations real life inflicts on us,
and because of it we can decipher, at least partially,
the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings,
principally those of us who generate more doubts than certainties and confess our perplexity before subjects like
transcendence, individual and collective destiny,
the soul, the sense or senselessness of history, the to and fro of rational knowledge.

Mario Vargas Llosa

In praise of reading and fiction

Nobel Lecture

December 7, 2010

© THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2010
General permission is granted for the
publication in newspapers in any language
after December 7, 2010, 5:30 p.m. (Swedish time).
Publication in periodicals or books otherwise
than in summary requires the consent
of the Foundation.
On all publications in full or in major parts
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must be applied.

Blind dispute!

Blind dispute!

A man born blind comes to me and asks, "What is this thing called green?"

How does one describe the color green to someone who was born blind?

One uses analogies.

So I say, "The color green is something like soft music."

"Oh," he says, "like soft music."

"Yes," I say, "soothing and soft music.''

So a second blind man comes to me and asks, "What is the color green?"

I tell him it's something like soft satin, very soft and soothing to the touch.

So the next day I notice that the two blind men are bashing each other over the head with bottles.

One is saying, "It's soft like music";

the other is saying, "It's soft like satin."

And on it goes.

Neither of them knows what they're talking about, because if they did, they'd shut up.

It's as bad as that.

It's even worse, because one day, say, you give sight to this blind man,

and he's sitting there in the garden and he's looking all around him, and you say to him,

"Well, now you know what the color green is."

And he answers, "That's true.

I heard some of it this morning!"

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

The missing scrap of paper

The missing scrap of paper

There is the story about a soldier on the battlefield who would simply drop his rifle to the ground, pick up a scrap of paper lying there, and look at it.

Then he would let it flutter from his hands to the ground.

And then he'd move somewhere else and do the same thing.

So others said, "This man is exposing himself to death.

He needs help."

So they put him in the hospital and got the best psychiatrist to work on him.

But it seemed to have no effect.

He wandered around the wards picking up scraps of paper, looking at them idly, and letting them flutter to the ground.

In the end they said, "We've got to discharge this man from the army."

So they call him in and give him a discharge certificate

and he idly picks it up, looks at it, and shouts, "This is it? This is it." He finally got it.

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

He finally got it!

He finally got it!

There's a story of a disciple who told his guru that he was going to a far place to meditate and hopefully attain enlightenment.
So he sent the guru a note every six months to report the progress he was making.
The first report said, "Now I understand what it means to lose the self."
The guru tore up the note and threw it in the wastepaper basket.
After six months he got another report, which said, "Now I have attained sensitivity to all beings."
He tore it up. Then a third report said, "Now I understand the secret of the one and the many."
It too was torn up. And so it went on for years, until finally no reports came in.
After a time the guru became curious and one day there was a traveler going to that far place.
The guru said, "Why don't you find what happened to that fellow."
Finally, he got a note from his disciple.
It said, "What does it matter?"
And when the guru read that, he said, "He made it!
He made it! He finally got it! He got it!"

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

Laughter

Laughter

Philip Roth: In your last book, though, something else is involved. In a little parable you compare the laughter of angels with the laughter of the devil.

The devil laughs because God's world seems senseless to him; the angels laugh with joy because everything in God's world has its meaning. 


Milan Kundera: Yes, man uses the same physiologic manifestations- laughter- to express two different metaphysical attitudes.

Someone's hat drops on a coffin in a freshly dug grave, the funeral loses its meaning and laughter is born.

Two lovers race through the meadow, holding hands, laughing. Their laughter has nothing to do with jokes or humor, it is the serious laughter of angels expressing their joy of being.

Both kinds of laughter belong among life's pleasures, but when it also denotes a dual apocalypse:

the enthusiastic laughter of angel-fanatics, who are so convinced of their world's significance that they are ready to hang anyone not sharing their joy.

And the other laughter, sounding from the opposite side, which proclaims that everything has become meaningless, that even funerals are ridiculous and group sex a mere comical pantomime.

Human life is bounded by two chasms: fanaticism on one side, absolute skepticism on the other.

The Most Original Book of the Season

Philip Roth interviews Milan Kundera (30/11/1980)

Belief

Belief

Protean, my heart henceforth assumes all forms: at once

Meadow of gazelles and cloister of the Christians monk

Temple of idols and the pilgrim's Kaaba

The Thora's tablets tantamount

To the Holy Koran's leaves

Religion of love, my allegiance

Wherever its caravans may lead

Just as love is my final faith

Ibn Arabi

Ibn 'Arabī (Arabic: ابن عربي‎) (July 28, 1165 – November 10, 1240) was an Andalusian [Moorish]] Sufi
mystic and philosopher. His full name was Abū 'Abdullāh Muḥammad ibn 'Alī ibn Muḥammad ibn al-`Arabī ('أبو عبد الله محمد بن علي بن محمد بن عربي ).

Born in the Spanish township of Murcia on 17th of Ramaḍān 561 AH (27th or 28 July 1165 AD) with respectable family roots, this unique MOORISH mystic, Muḥammad ibn 'Alī ibn Muḥammad ibn al-'Arabī is universally known as al-Shaykh al-Akbar (The Greatest Master OT DOCTORUS MAXIMUS in medieval europe). According to some other sources, his birthday was cited as 27th of Ramadan 560 (AH) or in other words August 7, 1165.

People identity

People identity

Most people are other people.
Their thoughts are someone else's opinions,
their lives a mimicry,
their passions a quotation.

De Profundis

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer, poet, and prominent aesthete; who, after writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and the tragedy of his imprisonment and early death.

The Dream Contract

68

THE DREAM CONTRACT

Nasruddin was fast asleep at nine in the morning.

The sun was in the sky, the birds were singing in the trees and his breakfast was getting cold.

So his wife decided to wake him.

He woke up in a rage.

"Why did you wake me up just now?" he yelled.

"The sun has risen in the sky," said she,

"the birds are singing in the trees and your breakfast is getting cold."

"Breakfast be damned," he said,

"I was about to sign a contract worth a million grammes of gold!"

With that he closed his eyes to recapture his shattered dream and those million grammes of gold.

Now Nasruddin was cheating in that contract and his business partner was a tyrant.

If, on recapturing the dream, he stops his cheating, he will become a saint.

If he struggles to free the people from the oppression of the tyrant he will be a freedom fighter.

If, in the middle of it all,

he suddenly realizes he is dreaming,

he will become Awakened. Enlightened.

What kind of saint or freedom fighter are you if you are still asleep?

THE SONG OF THE BIRD

Anthony de Mello

Ignorance

Speaking to ignorant people

Once Nasreddin was invited to deliver a sermon.

When he got on the pulpit, he asked,

"Do you know what I am going to say?"

The audience replied "no",

so he announced,

"I have no desire to speak to people who don't even know what I will be talking about!"

And left.

The people felt embarrassed and called him back again the next day.

This time, when he asked the same question, the people replied "yes".

So Nasreddin said, "Well, since you already know what I am going to say, I won't waste any more of your time!" and left.

Now the people were really perplexed.

They decided to try one more time and once again invited the Mullah to speak the following week.

Once again he asked the same question –

"Do you know what I am going to say?"

Now the people were prepared and so half of them answered "yes" while the other half replied "no".

So Nasreddin said "Let the half who know what I am going to say, tell it to the half who don't," and left.



Climate

Weather

This is lovely climate.

I don't order the weather; it just happened.



Traveller; "What kind of weather are we going to have today?"

Shepherd: "The kind of weather I like."

"How do you know it will be the kind of weather you like?"

"Having found out, sir, that I cannot always get what I like, I have learnt always to like what I get.

So I am quite sure we will have the kind of weather I like."



Happiness and unhappiness are in the way we meet events, not in the nature of those events themselves.

PRAYER OF THE FROG PART 2

Anthony de Mello

To you and for you!

To you and for you!

If only you were aware… o moon

You, who are you…?

You…

You… are all humans!

Education

Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire

W.B.Yeats

(13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939)

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).
Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. Over the years, Yeats adopted many different ideological positions, including, in the words of the critic Michael Valdez Moses, "those of [the] radical nationalist, classical liberal, reactionary
conservative and millenarian
nihilist".

Between friendship and solitude

Between solitude and friendship

It will never be my view that solitude is disturbed by the presence of a friend,

but that it is enriched.

If I had the choice of doing without one or the other,

I should prefer to be deprived of solitude rather than of my friend.

On the solitary life

Petrarch

Francesco Petrarca
(July 20, 1304 – July 19, 1374)

Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest Renaissance humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism". In the 16th century, Pietro Bembo created the model for the modern Italian language based on Petrarch's works, as well as those of Giovanni Boccaccio and, especially, Dante Alighieri. This would be later endorsed by the Accademia della Crusca. His sonnets were admired and imitated throughout Europe during the Renaissance and became a model for lyrical poetry. Petrarch was also known for being one of the first people to refer to the Dark Ages.

Bring Me the Flute and Sing!

Bring me the flute and sing

Bring me the flute and sing

for song is the secret of eternity...

And the wailing of the flute remains

even after the end of existence...

Have you taken the forest

rather than the palace

to be your home?

Have you climbed up the creeks and the rocks?

Have you bathed in perfume

and then dried yourself with sunlight?

Have you tasted the wine of the early morning

from goblets of ether?

Bring me the flute and sing

that is the secret of eternity...

And the wailing of the flute remains

even after the end of life...

Have you sat alone at dusk among the grapevines...

Among their clusters hanging like chandeliers of gold...?

Have you made the grass your night-time bed?

Have you wrapped yourself in the evening air

with the sky for a blanket?

So that you can allow the future to come

and let go of the past?

Bring me the flute and sing

so our hearts may be in balance...

And the wailing of the flute remains

even after the end of all sins...

Bring me the flute and sing

forget maladies and their cures…

For people are but lines of poetry

written, but with water.

Kahlil Gibran

(1883-1931)

Khalil Gibran (born Gubran Khalil Gubran bin Mikhā'īl bin Sa'ad; Arabic

جبران خليل

جبران بن ميخائيل بن سعد, January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931) also known as Kahlil Gibran, was a Lebanese American

artist, poet, and writer. Born in the town of Bsharri in modern-day Lebanon (then part of the Ottoman Mount Lebanon mutasarrifate), as a young man he emigrated with his family to the United States where he studied art and began his literary career. He is chiefly known for his 1923 book The Prophet, a series of philosophical essays written in English prose. An early example of Inspirational fiction, the book sold well despite a cool critical reception, and became extremely popular in the 1960s counterculture. Gibran is considered to be the third most widely read poet in history, behind Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu.