Across the River: On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar

2. Nobody Knows

2. Nobody Knows Where it might flow nobody knows Not much is known but this we know Absolute obscurity is such that it cannot even be known to itself—for if it were, it would not be absolute. But if it is absolute, can it be what it is without disclosing itself to itself? The absolute invariably demands both obscurity and disclosure, dissimilarity and similarity; it cannot be limited by its obscurity nor disallowed by its disclosure. When the poet says, ‘‘Where it might flow nobody knows,’’ he is saying that obscurity is absolute and that ‘‘there is naught’’ like the Being that substantiates this.1 And with the words, ‘‘not much is known but this we know,’’ the poet is asserting that this Being is ‘‘the All-hearing, the All-seeing.’’2 He is thus both like and unlike and can never be reduced to one or the other, to similarity or dissimilarity: ‘‘Glory be to thy Lord, the Lord of Glory, above that they describe! And peace be upon the Envoys; and praise belongs to God, the Lord of all Being.’’3 Obscurity is thus a name and, as such, a relationship between things manifest and God, in Whom all names are comprised: ‘‘I was 118 / Across Water: A Message on Realization a Treasure but was not known. So I loved to be known, and I created the creatures and made Myself known to them. Then they came to know Me.’’4 This saying of the Messenger’s is sometimes given in the present tense but more often in the past. ‘‘God is, and there is no god but He,’’ so He is past, present, and future; He is what He is, and was, and shall be: ‘‘All that dwells upon the earth is perishing, yet still abides the Face of thy Lord’’;5 ‘‘Like Him there is naught’’;6 He is near.7 But who is He? It is a human question. If one were to know oneself when asking the question, one would know Him, too. To ask what He is is thus to ask what we are ourselves, and vice versa; in asking what we are, we are asking what He is. Only God wholly knows Himself; we know ourselves only to the extent that we know God.8 He can say: I am what I know, but we cannot say that we know what we are. If we were to say what we should not, we would be making the same claim as Abu Yazid: ‘‘I am God.’’9 For this to be said, the eye of revelation must find God in all things and God alone, for there is nothing else to be found. Both the ability to reason and the impenetrability of habits and nature then cease to be, for there is no self but the Self: the Unity of those who love one another has been attained. And when one says it, there is no I, no self, for I am not; only He is. Thus everything returns to the Essence as the One and Only. But if, for all that, we say what we should not, our god is equivalent to what we know and what we are. Since we know so little, and what we know is constantly changing, our god is also ever different. We can never say that our knowledge encompasses all things: but God says this.10 We can thus be directed out of our confined knowledge only by bearing witness that there is no god but He. He is indeed God. He is known, because He discloses himself in the world, in humankind, and in the Book. He discloses himself to us through the world that He creates and the Revelation that He has sent down to us as His word in our language. In this Revelation, which reaches us in every language, He gives us His name—and that name is God. But the name and the named are one, and yet are not one. They are one, for there are no names if there is no named; and yet Nobody Knows / 119 they are not, for the named is always more than what the appellant knows of him. As a Name, God comes as a sound from the silence, the obscurity; and when It takes Its Slavic manifestation, Bog, the Name parts lips that were closed. The sound fills the...