Tawaaf

Trying to follow up on my resolution to write fragments (see previous post), I wrote this down as it came, though my old intention was to write a more complete piece on my Umrah experiences. I posted it up in my other blog, as is. It might need footnotes, it might need an explanation of context, but I won't add those, I won't drag this out, I'll put it up as is. If you still need them, you can always ask.
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I don’t know how to explain what makes Tawaaf different from all other religious rites. You really have to be there to truly comprehend. Tawaaf is so raw, so stripped down, so simplified, so real that you can’t compare it, you just can’t compare it to anything else. You’re not singing, you’re not dancing, you’re not eating. You’re not ringing bells, you’re not lighting candles. You’re not garlanding a figure. You’re not meditating in seclusion in a manner that can only be mastered with long training. You, all of us, illiterate and elite, you’re doing the same thing you have been doing since you were born: you’re moving. You’re walking, maybe you’re running. You don’t need to be taught. You don’t need to be told. The Kaa’ba is there so you know where to go. The black stone is there so you know where to start. But in the end, it’s all you. You’re turning.

I’ve heard a lot of interpretations. We go anticlockwise to mirror the movement of the constellations. Or we circumambulate like the angels. They could be all correct, but that’s not the point. The point is what you feel. I can’t tell you that, because it’s what you feel. I’ll tell you about myself though. I felt like I was swept into a current. I knew I was moving but I wasn’t paying attention to my own inertia. I experienced something so unique it is rarely replicated in the world: conscious transcendent contentment. What the world tries to do is get you at this state by getting you out of your state: by getting you drunk, high, making you whirl and couple with spirits, giving you an andrenaline rush. But the strange thing about tawaaf is that you slip into it while being 100% conscious and in control of your senses, while being the same person you were seconds ago before starting, and yet feeling something that completely envelops you, something that is so rare to feel that you are confused about it initially, and only realize it after the fact. You’re not in a trance, you’re not inebriated – you’re completely aware, and yet you’re emotionally overwhelmed. I was praying, and I never wanted it to end. I felt that I belonged, for once, for ever. How can I explain it? I was at peace with myself, with what I was doing; I understood why I was there, I understood where I was going. Towards the end, I was terrified of leaving. I knew what the world was, I knew how quickly my heart could change from the piercing humility of that experience.

Unfortunately, due to my occupation as a reader, I had come across several pedantic, baseless articles – that were nevertheless being toted as true and widely circulated – by some caustic individuals trying hastily to mark the rites as some meaningless, despicable, cultist, pagan ritual. There’s no need to debunk this (any scholarly book would suffice), but I thought to myself: how I pity, how I wish any one of them would do a single tawaaf. There are seven tawaafs around the K’aaba; in any one of them – in all of them – , you could pray for whatever your heart desires. But when you are in the midst of all those people, old and crippled, young and beautiful – what do you hear? They’re praising God. They walk, they cry, they look up, and they praise God. This is the time to get your wants fulfilled! This is the time to ask! And they do ask, but more often than not, they gradually forget why they are asking. The urgency of the prayer of want they so meticulously crafted back home, dissolves into semi-significance and they are puzzled by it, why was it really that important? Because they understand something. Something clicks. You never want to tear yourself away from a tawaaf. You feel that, if I did just a few more, I would reach complete tranquility. Everything would make sense. Why, why did that material thing matter? Why didn’t I spend more time with my loved one? Why have I done all those senseless things? It’s as though you have been looking at life with severe myopia and someone just handed you a pair of glasses for the first time. Everything comes into perspective – your life comes into perspective – and you are dumbfounded that God has held onto you so long for all you are. And you are overwhelmed.

Fragments of this week

I like things to be pieced together well, particularly my own writing. I know when I'm satisfied with my Writ: words may seem strewn but I knew my purpose in scattering them, yes there was a blueprint for the chaos, method in the madness. I'm no Dostoevsky, but I know when I've got it down the way I wanted to.

Unfortunately, as I think I have explained quite sufficiently in the previous post (and even in this post), there is sometimes no time to be so thorough and so careful with it. No - I should correct the latter part of that statement: I think I have realized that I am so careful always - even when I force myself to spin out the words and throw caution - and the words themselves - to the wind...well, how uncanny, I find that I have imperceptibly been fitting those same words with tiny paper wings so that when launched, they would have a safe glide home. I've been doing it even now.

But I think that other part was right: sometimes, you just can't be so thorough. That's what held me down in the lab - I was being too meticulous, I was taking too much time. I was doubting my own precision. You know what? I was doubting that I could do it right the first time.

I've decided that, to stop me from falling back into the trap of procrastination, I'm going to write fragments. Yes in the other post, I resolved to write something at least a couple of times a week, and if I can that's great, but that's not the issue. What I need to do is get myself to write when I have something I feel needs to be written. I need to get it down when it comes, and then expand it, or else I'll probably never write it. Now, I may not get others to read those clipped thoughts, but I ought to write them for my own sake.

Of course I've come to this conclusion before. I think I've even posted some of those fragments here. I guess I just wanted a preamble.
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Fragment 1
Some statistics sink in deeper than others. You can hear 10 statistics in one news segment or read 20 in one article, and chances are that the odd one or two will embed themselves into your long term memory, the others you will forget tomorrow. For me it was the statistic: " 3 out of 4 Iraqis are without clean water" (BBC news broadcast, yesterday).Immediately, my mind converted the ratio into a fraction into a mental picture: 3 out of 4, three quarters, three quarters, that's 75%, that's you me and the kid next door, minus the girl down the lane. Clean water. To wash your hands with. To drink. To wash yourself with. Murky water in rusted pots to put on your face and clean your child with.
...
In the midst of this post (see ellipses), I go to the BBC website to make sure of the statistic, since I don't like regurgitating anything unvalidated. Hmm, is that part of my thoroughness - that I don't like posting without sources? How interesting; reflexive writing.In any case, I find what I believe to be the html page based on the broadcast (here: Iraq faces alarming humanitarian crisis, by David Loyn, Jul.29th). And the statistic is from a July Oxfam briefing report: "Rising to the humanitarian challenge in Iraq." So I really had a Statistic, not a perception, and it really could be validated.
The Oxfam report said 70% of Iraqis had an "inadequate" water supply and 80% of Iraqis "lack effective sanitation." I guess BBC put two and two together. At the end of this passage, I feel no better, rather worse - the sanitation statistic did the trick - though there was a brief glow at discovering I was not mistaken and this was credible. Which meant I had a right to feel that initial surprise, feel pity and sadness, feel indignant. Which meant there was a chance that I could get someone else to feel some of that too, because of the truth of it. So that the next time they saw a statistic, they would know what to do: imagine.

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I was going to write other fragments but I really did drag this out and I really am tired.

Write

I have this peculiar characteristic, which I know I’ve mentioned a couple of times before (like: in this post), but which strikes me as so particularly incompetent I find myself curiously revisiting it time and time again. Especially in those Time Agains where I feel it necessary to make excuses, such as now. I have found colourful ways to word this phenomenon of being, this sad habit, characteristic, blip in the mien, this trait I would like to paint as a shameful anomaly, not as a product of ill-wit and lethargy: in poetic terms, in sultry prose, in –
have I started again?
can you understand the game that causes me to heave up this vacuous carcass of a sigh and declare it:

When I really need to write, I have no words.

Hmmm, you see? Didn’t that come off poetically? I actually like that. I can say that and pretend that I am not ineffectual in my craft, not in the least a procrastinator wallowing in my own sloth, not even a sloth wallowing in the swamp of my own indecision. It comes off beautifully. It even – the blissful irony! – allows me to write something. I can produce something, I can prove my value by virtue of my own ill-proven state! It is unbelievable in its effectiveness, it is supreme.

But it doesn’t help.

Because I am kept restless by the thoughts which pressed me to word them, which depended on my supposed skills as a Conveyor of Thought, Distributor of Meaning, Purveyor of Words. Enlightenment, understanding, depression, contentment, confusion – I held them, scintillating and marvelous, and they said Tell! and I replied wait. They said express! and I said I’m busy. They said Help others know – and I complained I was distracted, I wanted watermelon, that seemed taxing, and I was tired. Those thoughts, those truths, those experiences that, voiceless, drew up a contract with me when we first met in an unspoken declaration of promise:

What you have been privileged to feel, you are obliged to share

To write. Too right. I have squandered time and health. I have been selfish. I have been frightened. I have suspected a revelation of my inadequacies as a writer when truly pushed to the pen, and used this unjustly to justify my inaction. I have also made a good long blog post of it. But I will snub the blog post and Do Right. I Will Write.

Luckily I have friends who write beautiful art without excuses, who I am startled to realize still read my misgivings despite the fact that the poems in their heads surpass the poems in my hand. Something awoken, the vivid russet soil they unearth in their mental excavations settles beside the dust of my dilapidated words. Luckily I have a sister who would think well of me were I to write drivel, coat it in syrup, and sprinkle it with nonsense. Every time I settle into this inept state, I am shaken out of it by the surprise that, they actually read. Then, I must write, for them I must write well, because they read.

But come, let’s dig a threepenny trail together. Only this time, we’re digging up.

Can I keep this promise? I may have to put it in writing.

[pathopoetry] things

There have been a lot of Things.
Small things. Big things. Things in between
we've stood on toes, cradling love
and hurled it - smash - at each other

we've picked it up
we've cocked our heads
analysed shards
discussed the mess

in the end the cracks pretty much
were invisible.

- I just want to tell you - it's ok I know -

so is it enough
not to say

End of a beta-Microbiologist

My brief stint as a beta-Microbiologist has ended, and it is only now beginning to settle into me – the meaning of the thing. I called myself a beta-Microbiologist because I wasn’t a Microbiologist, and though I was studying Microbiology, I still wouldn’t end up as a Microbiologist. I was then, just beta-testing– yes, I was there to work through it all, get all the bugs out, then leave.

So comes the purging. But I’ve been consciously avoiding the confrontation: between the self that embraces the end of a taxing experience and delves into the practicality that is to come, and the other, the hopelessly frightened other – frightened that this exquisite thing is now to be cast permanently away, frightened that what is to follow bears no relation it. Today, the practical self considered the selling of my old texts. Of course, this was the logical thing to do, the proper thing to do for bulky, expensive blocks of plasticized paper and card taking up much needed space – the thing to do quickly before they became outdated or unneeded and were not sought after again, the smart thing that will enable you to buy more texts later, for unrelated things. The thing – but this was impossible, said the other. My texts? Must I? I looked at them. Brock Biology of Microorganisms, Janeway’s Immunobiology in fuchsia; I have a dense primer on Genetics and a formidable treatise on Biochemistry. I have stiff unturned pages and glossy unsmeared pages and spines bent floppy in the frustration of research. Must I? But of course! Why not? I won’t look at them, I hardly did before when I ought to have. But, no, I will! Because otherwise…because without them… I won’t remember – I’ll… forget. How can this be? These four years of mine have been condensed to a crisp paper with a pretty stamp – a pretty glossy red stamp, which I would have admired with shining eyes as a child. Slowly every intricate detail I learned will dissolve, gradually every ray of understanding will dim into nothingness. I will be left with this triumphant page, while the pages of my mind turn blank.

So this is what education is? The painstaking attempt to prove that you know, the heartbreaking realization - that soon enough, you won’t.

I vant to suck your blahd

I wanted to do a bit of research on malaria (a disease I am particularly interested in, for both scientific and personal reasons), but before I hit the online journals, I did a quick Google search. High on the list was a page from the Nobel Prize website - stick me with some quick info, I thought. But when I got there, I was quite bemused, somewhat amused, and slightly disturbed to find: malaria games. Yep, have fun flying around as a mosquito looking for unsuspecting humans, and drain them of 10 microlitres of blood! Or, be a sneaky malaria parasite, infect someone, then multiply multiply multiply! If you're fast enough, you can make the high score!

How...morbidly amusing?

Ok, to their credit they do sneak in a ton of useful info about the disease within the game, which you might otherwise have scorned to read. The games are pretty in the usual Flash sort of way, and you actually get quizzed on what you learn. So I gradually lost some of my initial feelings of discomfort when I acknowledged the educational aspect of it. I still however, couldn't help feeling bemused throughout, though some things were quite funny. Like hearing the mosquito buzz for the first time (they captured that annoying noise a little too well for my liking). Or the karate-slap and ensuing "UHH!" when your poor parasite was engulfed by a macrophage :)

So if you're feeling decidedly vampirish or pathogenic, give it a go.
http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/medicine/malaria/

And thus, it begins again

Lately I've been feeling the obligation to blog - ah, how that perfectly lends itself to newly-coined corny term, the "oblogation." I don't really want to shake this oblagation mind you, since I have made a (rather poorly adhesive) mental note that this will be the Summer of Writing, where I will pen all those ponderous thoughts and amorphous short stories (a dozen or so, last time I checked the mental archives) that have been lurking around since oh, the last (unfortuitous) "Summer-of-Writing."

Mental note number 2: stick to resolutions.

I also have some things that are actually worth reading up in that brainspace - you know, accounts of visiting the best place on Earth, experiencing true spiritual calm, etc. - but it will take me some time before I present anything that will even marginally graze the surface of what that experience was like.

InshaAllah.(God-willing)