Ibn ʿArabi on water and divine lowness
Commentary on Ibn ʿArabi's The Bezels of Wisdom
I guess I just love this because I've been thinking about the directionality of the divine lately, feeling a bit of an aversion to the privileging of the heavenward direction above all else—which I associate with hierarchy, ascension, Plotinus. I've been thinking against Simone Weil's conception of grace as that which enables ascent against the force of gravity, a hoisting upward, which is often a kind of turning away from the created world, a disavowal of earthy existence. What can I say. I love the earth. I'll keep on loving the earth. I want to think with the low, the mineral, with water, which always finds the lowest point. Water is that which supports life from beneath.
How did I find my way to Islamic mysticism? In the Abrahamic traditions, it really does offer the most affirming view of creation. We're all the breath of God.
What would it mean to find God below?
If you let a rope fall down, it will fall on God.
As I wrote in my review of the experimental film Last Things by Deborah Stratman:
Why not found a religion based on fear and respect of the mineral kingdom? Death is not ascent but descent, a return to our mineral form, as Mallo and Cixous know.
From Agustín Fernández Mallo's The Book of All Loves: “The fact that teeth and bones are all that remains of us after death is proof that our ultimate identity is mineral. We do not ascend, we are not on some track towards that which the ancients formulated as spiritual; on the contrary, we sink down into the most durable physical matter. A kind of periodic table of elements is what we are; more of the earth even than earth itself.”
From Hélène Cixous’s Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing: “There is passage through the animal state, then through the vegetal state, and so we move away from humankind; from the vegetal we descend into the earth, by the stem, by the root, until we reach what doesn’t concern us, although it exists and inscribes itself, which is of the mineral order, although it doesn’t hold together since we are aiming toward disassembly, toward decomposition.”
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Ibn ‘Arabī, speaking of divine intention, writes in the Futūhāt:
"It is like water. Its station is that it descends or flows on the earth."
