Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Haphazard Brilliant Thoughts

Haphazard Brilliant Thoughts

There are not many teachers 
in this world who can give you
as much enlightenment in one year -

as sitting all alone for three days
in your room would do. 

Stop musing for a while
and think
you are who you aren't. 

There is a ruby buried
in what I say,
grab it, and don't let it go,
'til your horizons expand. 

        Poets often bring us gems in the form of their beautiful manipulation of language. Gibran did not have much to say on other poets directly, other than he found the life of the poet to be a worthy pursuit and he had much respect for those choosing that path. Gibran once met Rabindranath Tagore, a wonderful Bengali poet who penned things such as, "Love is the ultimate meaning of everything around us. It is not a mere sentiment; it is truth; it is the joy that is at the root of all creation. Our heart ever changes its place till it finds love, and then it has its rest. But this rest itself is an intense form of activity where utter quiescence and unceasing energy meet at the same point."
      Interestingly enough, Gibran did not feel Tagore's poems had as much power when read by the poet himself. Perhaps it is because the words had become less real and more "recitable" to Tagore. Gibran met Tagore on December 19, 1916: "I met Tagore. He is beautiful to look at it and be with, but I was disappointed with his voice. It is bodyless, and it made his poems less real to me."
       The other poet Gibran ended up commenting on in his correspondance with Mary was Blake, writing on January 25, 1918: "Blake is mighty. The voice of God and the finger of God are in what he does. And how strangely remote he seems from even the very things he does! What he writes seems so often done in a foreign language - as if he were used to another speech, and were employing this one simply because it belongs to the land he finds himself in."
      That is such a beautiful thought, that Blake was one with this world for such a short time, learned its rules, inhabited its corridors, left behind his musings, and then returned to the Great Soul from which he came. Everyone knows the famous lines from Blake's Auguries of Innocence:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Worth a read is: 

Bengal Tiger at Night 
Photograph by Michael Nichols

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