He who loves but remains chaste and died of longing, achieves the status of a martyr in the Jihad”,i.e., paradise — or so claims a popular but perhaps spurious tradition of the Prophet himself. The cracking tension of this paradox galvanizes a new category of emotion into life: romantic love, based on the unsatisfied desire, on “separation” rather than “union”… that is, on longing. The Hellenistic period supplied the genres for this convention — the “romance” itself as well as the idyll and the erotic lyric — but Islam set new fire to the old forms with its system of passional sublimation. The Greco-Egypto-Islamic ferment adds a pederastic element to the new style; moreover, the ideal woman of romance is neither wife nor concubine but someone in the forbidden category, certainly someone outside the category of mere reproduction. Romance appears therefor as a kind of gnosis, in which spirits and flesh occupy antithetical positions; also perhaps as a kind of advanced libertinage in which strong emotion is seen as more satisfactory than satisfaction itself. Viewed as “spiritual alchemy” the goal of the project would appear to involve the inculcation of non-ordinary consciousness. The Troubadours said the same of their lady-loves; Dante’s Vita Nuova represents the extreme example. Christians and Moslems alike walked a very treacherous precipice with this doctrine of sublime chastity, but the spiritual effects could sometimes prove tremendous, as with Fakhroddin ’Iraqi, or indeed Rumi and Dante themselves. But wasn’t it possible to view the question of desire from a “tantrik” perspective and admit that “union” is also a form of supreme enlightenment. Joseph Solomon Habib Lived Academy Basement Gold Ink #GOD #tv #earth #children #media #jsh #eljahelyon #livedacademy #nyc #globalunifiedsolutions #writing #poetry #music #photography #art #mind #body #spirit #heart #soul #nature #magic #love #creative #service
