I’ve always dreaded traveling. Don’t get me wrong though. I’m not some larded ass who prefers the familiarity of one place to another or some loon with a developed case of phobia for strangers. I’m way more ahead than any one of these fellows. I love the tingling serenity of the cabin, peering out through the plane’s window at the foaming clouds, my iPods plugged in my ears slowly building a mood of ethereal bliss. I love getting lost in the meandering streets of Rome or the perplexing Tokyo underground. I actually love being in another place complete with its various outlandish landscapes and idiosyncratic ways of life. I truly savor all that. It’s the idea of packing my luggage that gets me started anywhere south of excitement. Now, I’m not talking about puzzling over what clothes to put in to suit a certain climate. That never bothers me at all. It’s the thought of what books to bring with me that really gets me in a state of ineffable anxiety.
I read somewhere that Somerset Maugham had always lugged a suitcase full of books wherever he traveled. Lucky for him. He traveled in an age before air travel with the ground stewardess’s priggish glare fixedly at the scale for any sign of gross over limit of the twenty-kilos allowed on a hand-carry luggage. Recently, on a trip to the Byron Bay Writers Festival in NSW, Australia, I ran into such a fierce ground patrol virago. After a protracted exchange, in which I pleaded, begged and when nothing panned out well put down my weight only to be snubbed by her cool superior piercing indifference. I finally pulled out my laptop and my sweater and a couple of books and shoved my hand-carry luggage back on the scale. Smugly satisfied with what she saw on the scale, she issued me the boarding pass. To this day, I’m certain that she gave me a finger behind my back as I pulled my luggage away, with my laptop twisted in my left armpit and the jumble of sweater and books cradled in one hand. My spirits sagging, the next best thing I could think of to salvage any semblance of joy from the impending trip was to pretend to limp to the lavatory, take a leak and stuff everything back into the luggage and trundle it through the immigration and into the plane. That exactly was what I did. Unchecked. When the plane took off, my luggage safely locked away in the overheard luggage compartment and my iPod plugged in my ears, comfortably nestled in the anti static blanket, my mood air born, I began to open a page of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and read with priggish satisfaction.
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Quatrains of Rumi
Translated by John Moyne & Coleman Barks
83 Pages
Shambhala
Listen to presences inside poems.
Let them take you where they will.
Follow those private hints,
and never leave the premises. (p.37)
This Rubaiyat is one of the 166 quatrains in Unseen Rain. Written in the ecstatically spontaneous middle period after Rumi’s meeting with Shams, the mystic who upon seeing Rumi drowned all his books and asked him to learn from the experiences of real life. This short poem is very useful for those who wish to gain the most out of these quatrains.
It helps us uncover the mystique of Rumi’s search for the union of the soul with the spirit. It’s easy to be persuaded by the understanding of the union of the soul and the spirit as the vacuous state of a trance, but Rumi warns emphatically that we never leave the premises, which suggests that while we are in a flight for those private hints, those ecstatic emanations, the center of our being will nonetheless remain in place.
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Identitas bagi kebanyakan orang adalah selembar kartu nama yang mengukuhkan keberadaan mereka dengan sebuah nama, profesi dan kedudukan. Memperhatikan khaos yang terjadi selama sepuluh tahun terakhir, saya merasa ada perlunya untuk mendalami makna identitas. Karena identitas ternyata adalah biang yang memporakporanda berbagai negara, memecahbelahkan bangsa-bangsa, dan memposisikan manusia yang paling tidak politis sekali pun di satu sudut ruang berseberangan dengan berbagai perbedaan yang berpotensi konflik.
Apa yang membedakan kita atas nama kepercayaan, suku, dan bangsa, sudah terjadi sejak kita dilahirkan. Tanpa kita sadari ketika kita dilahirkan sebuah predikat langsung melekat pada keberadaan kita. Nama kita mengikat kita pada satu keluarga, satu kepercayaan, satu komunitas dan satu bangsa.
Identitas adalah sebentang Mobius yang melilit. Di satu sisi, ia mengukuhkan kebersamaan satu kelompok, keselarasan visi dan ambisi, namun atas atas nama kemajuan, prestasi dan kebersamaan, ia juga mampu secara brutal menghancurkan pihak yang dinilai mengancam azas-azas yang mengukuhkan kelompoknya. Tindakan anarkis dianggap sah karena ia membela kedaulatan kelompok. Tak ayal lagi, inilah insting survival purba yang kita wariskan dari leluhur kita sejak zaman Neolitik.
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The God Delusion
By Richard Dawkins
Bantam Press
406 pages
Richard Dawkins makes no bones about his intentions in his ninth book, The God Delusion: he wants to convert whomever that reads it into an atheist. He believes that it’s time atheists of the world unite and come out in the open. Being an evolutionist biologist, he would have no truck with scientists, intellectuals and atheists who seem to bend backward when dealing with the delicate matter of faith and God. In fact, according to him, since the twentieth century, the domination of the religious organizations is such that it’s often considered politically and ethically incorrect to talk openly about one’s creed, let alone question God’s existence. The God Delusion is written with the forceful intention of breaking down whatever misleading beliefs we might still have about God. He is a man with a mission. And in his arguments against theism, he culls from almost all conceivable scientific disciplines to make his case.
Every conceivable angle from which he might be attacked he covers with convincing showcases of studies. He even has an answer to his own rather fundamentalist approach in preaching atheism. He says that the difference between him and the fundamentalist is that he would say New Zealand is located in the Southern Hemisphere whereas the fundamentalist, when cornered for clear and unequivocal evidence, will ultimately point to the Almighty. His other reason is that he feels impelled to rescue men/women blinkered from seeing what they might be missing out from the rich world we live in. In essence, everything he brings up in his arguments has evidence, whereas the theologians and believers simply turn a blind eye to the evidence when it comes to their beliefs. This is to Dawkins simply unacceptable. Why should one invest so much faith in the One who is always elusively absent? He goes to great lengths to explain why religion as a meme, the variant of a cultural inheritance, persists throughout the ages. His conclusion is that in human’s brain there’s always a gap that needs to be filled in with God.
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