iamom: (steady)
Via today's issue of the Nondual Highlights, the following excerpt comes from the notes of American poet and translator Coleman Barks (website | full article text) during a State-sponsored trip to Afghanistan. Barks was surprised by how warmly he was received and by the interest generated by his translations of Rumi's poetry. Apparently Afghans are highly enamoured with poetry in general and they found were fascinated that a translation of Rumi's poetry into English could be so popular in the West.
This discovery, of course, is part of a blindness I have, that we have in this country, and in the West in general, to things Islamic. It is a long-standing and pervasive condition. Wherever possible I confessed our ignorance, my personal variety, and our general American species. And yet, it must be stressed, there I was, and for a reason. Their Afghan poet has been the most-read poet in the United States during the last ten years! My translations alone have sold over half a million copies. These facts astonished audiences, who inevitably asked why. No one knows, I said, but it feels like to me that a presence comes through the poetry, even in my American versions, the sense of an enlightened, compassionate, hilarious, very clear and sane, and deeply kind, human being. We have been lonely, I told them, in the United States, for what the Sufis call a true human being. In Rumi and his friend Shams Tabriz we have found two of them.
iamom: (suntrees)
The 1992 novel Dance At The Slaughterhouse (amazon.com | amazon.ca), authored by the eminent crime fiction writer Lawrence Block, features his series character Matt Scudder, a recovering alcoholic private eye living in NYC. This was my first Lawrence Block novel, though it certainly won't be my last -- he's an excellent author and Scudder as a character is also great.

Scudder's recovery from alcoholism [and his relationship with his AA sponsor] features prominently in this story. In fact, Scudder hits an AA meeting at least daily or every ten pages in the novel. I paid careful attention to this intriguing character trait, since I've always been interested in how addictions factor into literary characters and how closely those addictions may have been mirrored in the author's own life. (Robert B. Parker's private eye Spenser dances often with a deep love of whiskey, and Parker's police chief detective character Jesse Stone is an outright alcoholic who battles his addiction daily, and usually without success (Jesse Stone's character was first brought to the small screen by Tom Selleck in Stone Cold (and shot on the Nova Scotia coast, actually; B and I ate dinner next to Selleck at a local restaurant last month during filming of the most recent made-for-TV Stone novel)).

With all that in hand and taken with my personal interest in spirituality, the following excerpt from Slaughterhouse really popped out at me. It underlines what for me has been a motivation for my own petty past addictions. In this scene, Scudder is having an all-nighter with an Irish mobster named Mick. Mick has been pounding back the Irish whiskey all night while Scudder has limited himself to Cokes and coffee. After several hours of conversation, they start talking about a sort of aha moment that they've both experienced. A sort of glimpse into the ultimate reality of the universe. And in this case, the experience sounds like some sort of confession on the part of the author. I wonder if I wrote to Lawrence Block he would confirm it for me.
Not long before dawn he said, "Matt, would you say that I'm an alcoholic?"

"Oh, Jesus," I said. "How many years did it take me to say I was one myself? I'm not in a hurry to take anybody else's inventory."

Read more... )

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Dustin LindenSmith

January 2013

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