Across the River: On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar

13. About Its Length

13. About Its Length About its length don’t even dream The black the bleak cannot be healed If we want to travel up the river, we must pray: ‘‘Guide us in the upward path, the path of those whom Thou has blessed, not of those against whom Thou art wrathful, nor of those who are astray.’’1 This return along the River entails overcoming everything we experienced in the fall. The return is the upward path, the opposite of the path leading downwards. We are both Spirit and flesh. When they are understood and realized in Unity, they clearly reveal that they are the image of the heavens and the earth. This is why one can say that the world is humankind and we are the world. Our ascent is thus the same as the world’s ascent, for the faithful testify: ‘‘We hear, and obey. Our Lord, grant us Thy forgiveness; unto Thee is the homecoming.’’2 God sent down His Word through all seven heavens of existence by the selfsame path down which we fell from our primal perfection, from the place of praiseworthiness. To adopt the Word is to return to 184 / Across Water: A Message on Realization ascend along the River. The only successful crossing over the water is the one that saves us from duality and restores Unity to us as the Principle of all existence. The farther we advance along the upward path, the more dangerous it becomes: crags and ravines loom ever closer, thorn bushes grow ever denser, snakes lurk at every turn, shrieks and echoes increasingly press in upon us. The closer we are to the summit, the more enemies we encounter in our outward and inner struggles, the more dangerous our companions. Our path is an uphill one, and the farther we advance along it, the more hazardous the abyss behind us becomes. This is our flight from God to God. With each step along that bank of the River, we erase and demolish our previous notion of God, for there is no God but He. We know that He is in our direction but that no notion of the self is faithful to the original. He alone is the Faithful, disclosing Himself in a different image from one instant to the next. All things on earth and in the heavens and all that is between them surge in incessantly upon the human consciousness, where they nest and breed, re-form and disperse. All persist and perish, from disorder to order and back again. We attempt to find in them the highest and the deepest, often forgetting to wonder what is beyond them, whence they come, and whither they are returning. We are reminded of this, when forgetfulness threatens and is turned into an established image, by the merciful commandment: ‘‘Thou shalt have no other gods before Me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.’’3 All things in the outer and inner realms are none other than signs of God Who loves to be known, and each of them is a locus of this disclosure. None has reality in and with itself. When we travelers seek to pass beyond each locus, we find the speech of the One Who is both remote and near in all things. But as travelers, we want a speaker; and the pleasure we take in the conversation reinforces our yearning for union with the speaker. As we look upon His Face, we die as the locus in which He discloses Himself and become the one who satisfies and is satisfied. About Its Length / 185 In refusing consciously to adopt any one image of God, we discover and preserve our integrity, our health. But health is merely the manifestation of Peace, which is eternally beyond and yet also within all things in existence. Only Peace can satisfy those who surrender. Surrender is what we owe in every place and at every time, and we know that Peace accepts nothing but this as our debt toward it. The manifestation of the Hour in the uncertainty of recollections of the past and a conjectural future distances us from our center. The more distant we are, the deeper the shadows of illusion around us that...