Sarmad and Aurangzeb

William Irwin Thompson

Am I Christian, Hindu, Muslim, or Jew?
Is water river, sea, snow, rain, or dew?
Is life for the living and for the dead?
I'll know, not you, when you cut off my head!

Comments (2)

• On that note, Darakshan Farber’s description of a remark made during “The Promise of Judaism” sohbet(“Are all rabbis comedians?”) prompted a recollection of Bob Hope’s related wisecrack: “I do benefits for all religions. I’d hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality”, and Jiddu K’s:

  http://www.katinkahesselink.net/kr/jokes15.html

  Quips I now laugh at more than I once did. What next, deep-ecumenically speaking? Cosmic standup ushering in the religion-science synthesis? Pirsig: “Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry?”

  — Nick Routledge on November 2, 2009

• Returning to this thread…what with consciously modulating the ‘imamite’ density of my current studies, last week a text hurriedly chose me for bus-reading from the New Books section of my foremost winter temple (the Eugene Public Library, sister to ‘my cathedral’ of late, Black Sun Books). It was ‘The Book of Dead Philosophers’, by Simon Critchley, Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in NY and who is, I believe, an English expatriate. I like to think Mr. Critchley’s provenance helps explain the character of his seriously entertaining meditation on the lives and deaths of nearly 200 philosophers - my funny bone twanged at first dip. Khezr is, of course, the patron saint of England and in this regard I wonder whether Simon Critchley Esq. and I share an atavistic affinity for addressing the question posed by N.O. Brown in ‘Apocalypse & Metamorphosis’: “Who is George?” The patron saint of militant comedy? Here’s Critchley on Polemo of Laodicea: ‘Polemo loved to declaim and vowed, “Never shall the sun behold me reduced to silence!” To make his point, he ordered his family to bury him alive. As he was being walled into the sepulcher, he cried, “Make haste, make haste!” When the job was done, his voice could be heard from inside the tomb: “Give me a body and I will declaim.” ’ Ultimately prostrate stand-up?
  - The closing chapter of ‘Dead Philosophers’ - book-reviewed as, “actually…an utterly serious, deeply moving, cant-free attempt to return us to the gorgeousness of material existence, to our creatureliness, to our clownish bodies, to the only immortality available to us (immersion in the moment)” - is titled, ‘Last Words’, and strikes me as strongly emblematic of a secular personification of the ‘revealing function of the metaphysical intellect’, an implacable truth to life referred to religiously as ‘the experience of prophesy’, which Brown defines as “the essential mode of miraculous conjunction between the ‘lahut’ and ‘nasut’, the divine nature and the human or created condition.”...
  - ...continued at: http://www.seedambassadors.org/avalon/resurrection.htm

  — Nick Routledge on January 12, 2010

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