Across the River: On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar

5. Across the Haws

5. Across the Haws Across the haws across the thorns Across the fires across the pliers How is the human self shaped in which so little is known? Jesus, the Anointed, Son of Mary, said: ‘‘Thou knowest it, knowing what is within my self, and I know not what is within Thy Self.’’1 In so saying, he was acknowledging that he knew God only in part, that God was ‘‘little known’’ to him. Jesus is thus with God and is God’s Word and His Spirit,2 even though he was a man. So it was, too, with Muhammad, the Praised. After Muhammad was transported from the Inviolable to the Further Place of Annihilation, only some of His signs were shown to him.3 His strong moral sense is to be seen in his constant appeal for God’s forgiveness: ‘‘By God! I ask for God’s forgiveness and turn to Him in repentance more than seventy times a day.’’4 The Messenger prays thus because he is the foremost of creation and praiseful light. His primal and ultimate nearness to the Light reveals him as the conscious recipient of everything by which God discloses Himself. The experience of the Messenger thus encompasses Across the Haws / 135 all human potential, but ever with Truth of creation Whose mercy embraces all things. But all human knowledge is ‘‘through a glass, darkly.’’ To dispel the darkness, we must fall deeply asleep so as to awaken face to Face, when we shall know fully and directly: ‘‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’’5 One of the Companions of the Messenger said: Then the people would be summoned along with their gods whom they worshipped, one after another. Then our Lord would come to us and say, ‘‘Whom are you waiting for?’’ They would say: ‘‘We are waiting for our Lord.’’ He would say: ‘‘I am your Lord!’’ They would say: ‘‘We are not sure till we gaze at Thee.’’ And He would manifest Himself to them smilingly.6 We discover our knowledge in relation to the world: we and the world are both separate and conjoined. Every contact with the world, be it sensory or in thought, becomes part of our treasury of knowledge . But since there is no creator but the Creator, Who creates both us and what we make,7 our existence in relation to the world is the discovery of His treasury within us; this we do by prevailing over the differentiation of our inner self, of which the concomitant is the disjunction of the world. The return to God is the discovery or revelation of all that the world is. When the barrier that maintained the Unity of human and Divine will in the Garden was broken down, it meant that we could no longer enjoy freely available fruit, shade, and ease. The fullness of bliss was lost in concealment. The path leading to the lost, by which we may find it, is ‘‘across the haws across the thorns.’’ It is a journey from one memory to another, but a journey that takes us ‘‘across the fires across the pliers.’’ There are signs in all things along that path of return: signs that are perpetual opposites, pain and pleasure, darkness and light, suffering and bliss, death and redemption. This is the human condition after the fall, after the boundary has been breached: 136 / Across Water: A Message on Realization For Sheba also there was a sign in their dwelling-place—two gardens, one on the right and one on the left: ‘‘Eat of your Lord’s provision, and give thanks to Him; a good land, and a Lord All-forgiving.’’ But they turned away; so We loosed on them the Flood of Arim, and We gave them, in exchange for their two gardens, two gardens bearing bitter produce and tamarisk -bushes, and here and there a few lote-trees.8 The rigors of the world after the boundary had been breached and humankind had sunk to the very depths of the self did not destroy the sweet taste of the Garden. There remained at the bottom of the Vale of Tears, in the self that incites to evil, a spark of Intellect, a scrap of what the Pen had recorded. In this wasteland...