The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El Yezdi
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Richard F. Burton >> The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El Yezdi
“Be ye Good Boys, go seek for Heav’en,
come pay the priest that holds the key;”
So spake, and speaks, and aye shall speak
the last to enter Heaven,—he.
Are these the words for men to hear?
yet such the Church’s general tongue,
The horseleech-cry so strong so high
her heav’enward Psalms and Hymns among.
What? Faith a merit and a claim,
when with the brain ’tis born and bred?
Go, fool, thy foolish way and dip
in holy water burièd dead!
Yet follow not th’ unwisdom-path,
cleave not to this and that disclaim;
Believe in all that man believes;
here all and naught are both the same.
But is it so? How may we know?
Haply this Fate, this Law may be
A word, a sound, a breath; at most
the Zâhid’s moonstruck theory.
Yes Truth may be, but ’tis not Here;
mankind must seek and find it There,
But Where nor I nor you can tell,
nor aught earth-mother ever bare.
Enough to think that Truth can be:
come sit we where the roses glow,
Indeed he knows not how to know
who knows not also how to ’unknow.
VII
Man hath no Soul, a state of things,
a no-thing still, a sound, a word
Which so begets substantial thing
that eye shall see what ear hath heard.
Where was his Soul the savage beast
which in primeval forests strayed,
What shape had it, what dwelling-place,
what part in nature’s plan it played?
This Soul to ree a riddle made;
who wants the vain duality?
Is not myself enough for me?
what need of “I” within an “I”?
Words, words that gender things! The soul
is a new-comer on the scene;
Sufficeth not the breath of Life
to work the matter-born machine?
We know the Gen’esis of the Soul;
we trace the Soul to hour of birth;
We mark its growth as grew mankind
to boast himself sole Lord of Earth:
The race of Be’ing from dawn of Life
in an unbroken course was run;
What men are pleased to call their Souls
was in the hog and dog begun:
Life is a ladder infinite-stepped,
that hides its rungs from human eyes;
Planted its foot in chaos-gloom,
its head soars high above the skies:
No break the chain of Being bears;
all things began in unity;
And lie the links in regular line
though haply none the sequence see.
The Ghost, embodied natural Dread
of dreary death and foul decay,
Begat the Spirit, Soul and Shade
with Hades’ pale and wan array.
The Soul required a greater Soul,
a Soul of Souls, to rule the host;
Hence spirit-powers and hierarchies,
all gendered by the savage Ghost.
Not yours, ye Peoples of the Book,
these fairy visions fair and fond,
Got by the gods of Khemi-land*
and faring far the seas beyond!
* Egypt; Kam, Kem, Khem (hierogl.), in the Demotic Khemi.
“Th’ immortal mind of mortal man!”
we hear yon loud-lunged Zealot cry;
Whose mind but means his sum of thought,
an essence of atomic “I.”
Thought is the work of brain and nerve,
in small-skulled idiot poor and mean;
In sickness sick, in sleep asleep,
and dead when Death lets drop the scene.
“Tush!” quoth the Zâhid, “well we ken
the teaching of the school abhorr’d
“That maketh man automaton,
mind a secretion, soul a word.”
“Of molecules and protoplasm
you matter-mongers prompt to prate;
“Of jelly-speck development
and apes that grew to man’s estate.”
Vain cavil! all that is hath come
either by Mir’acle or by Law;—
Why waste on this your hate and fear,
why waste on that your love and awe?
Why heap such hatred on a word,
why “Prototype” to type assign,
Why upon matter spirit mass?
wants an appendix your design?
Is not the highest honour his
who from the worst hath drawn the best;
May not your Maker make the world
from matter, an it suit His hest?
Nay more, the sordider the stuff
the cunninger the workman’s hand:
Cease, then, your own Almighty Power
to bind, to bound, to understand.
“Reason and Instinct!” How we love
to play with words that please our pride;
Our noble race’s mean descent
by false forged titles seek to hide!
For “gift divine” I bid you read
the better work of higher brain,
From Instinct diff’ering in degree
as golden mine from leaden vein.
Reason is Life’s sole arbiter,
the magic Laby’rinth’s single clue:
Worlds lie above, beyond its ken;
what crosses it can ne’er be true.
“Fools rush where Angels fear to tread!”
Angels and Fools have equal claim
To do what Nature bids them do,
sans hope of praise, sans fear of blame!
VIII
There is no Heav’en, there is no Hell;
these be the dreams of baby minds;
Tools of the wily Fetisheer,
to ’fright the fools his cunning blinds.
Learn from the mighty Spi’rits of old
to set thy foot on Heav’en and Hell;
In Life to find thy hell and heav’en
as thou abuse or use it well.
So deemed the doughty Jew who dared
by studied silence low to lay
Orcus and Hades, lands of shades,
the gloomy night of human day.
Hard to the heart is final death:
fain would an Ens not end in Nil;
Love made the senti’ment kindly good:
the Priest perverted all to ill.
While Reason sternly bids us die,
Love longs for life beyond the grave:
Our hearts, affections, hopes and fears
for Life-to-be shall ever crave.
Hence came the despot’s darling dream,
a Church to rule and sway the State;
Hence sprang the train of countless griefs
in priestly sway and rule innate.
For future Life who dares reply?
No witness at the bar have we;
Save what the brother Potsherd tells,—
old tales and novel jugglery.
Who e’er return’d to teach the Truth,
the things of Heaven and Hell to limn?
And all we hear is only fit
for grandam-talk and nursery-hymn.
“Have mercy, man!” the Zâhid cries,
“of our best visions rob us not!
“Mankind a future life must have
to balance life’s unequal lot.”
“Nay,” quoth the Magian, “’tis not so;
I draw my wine for one and all,
“A cup for this, a score for that,
e’en as his measure’s great or small:
“Who drinks one bowl hath scant delight;
to poorest passion he was born;
“Who drains the score must e’er expect
to rue the headache of the morn.”
Safely he jogs along the way
which ‘Golden Mean’ the sages call;
Who scales the brow of frowning Alp
must face full many a slip and fall.
Here èxtremes meet, anointed Kings
whose crownèd heads uneasy lie,
Whose cup of joy contains no more
than tramps that on the dunghill die.
To fate-doomed Sinner born and bred
for dangling from the gallows-tree;
To Saint who spends his holy days
in rapt’urous hope his God to see;
To all that breathe our upper air
the hands of Dest’iny ever deal,
In fixed and equal parts, their shares
of joy and sorrow, woe and weal.
“How comes it, then, our span of days
in hunting wealth and fame we spend
“Why strive we (and all humans strive)
for vain and visionary end?”
Reply: mankind obeys a law
that bids him labour, struggle, strain;
The Sage well knowing its unworth,
the Fool a-dreaming foolish gain.
And who, ’mid e’en the Fools, but feels
that half the joy is in the race
For wealth and fame and place, nor sighs
when comes success to crown the chase?
Again: in Hind, Chîn, Franguestân
that accident of birth befell,
Without our choice, our will, our voice:
Faith is an accident as well.
What to the Hindu saith the Frank:
“Denier of the Laws divine!
“However godly-good thy Life,
Hell is the home for thee and thine.”
“Go strain the draught before ’tis drunk,
and learn that breathing every breath,
“With every step, with every gest,
something of life thou do’est to death.”
Replies the Hindu: “Wend thy way
for foul and foolish Mlenchhas fit;
“Your Pariah-par’adise woo and win;
at such dog-Heav’en I laugh and spit.”
“Cannibals of the Holy Cow!
who make your rav’ening maws the grave
“Of Things with self-same right to live;—
what Fiend the filthy license gave?”
What to the Moslem cries the Frank?
“A polygamic Theist thou!
“From an imposter-Prophet turn;
Thy stubborn head to Jesus bow.”
Rejoins the Moslem: “Allah’s one
tho’ with four Moslemahs I wive,
“One-wife-men ye and (damnèd race!)
you split your God to Three and Five.”
The Buddhist to Confucians thus:
“Like dogs ye live, like dogs ye die;
“Content ye rest with wretched earth;
God, Judgment, Hell ye fain defy.”
Retorts the Tartar: “Shall I lend
mine only ready-money ‘now,’
“For vain usurious ‘Then’ like thine,
avaunt, a triple idiot Thou!”
“With this poor life, with this mean world
I fain complete what in me lies;
“I strive to perfect this my me;
my sole ambition’s to be wise.”
When doctors differ who decides
amid the milliard-headed throng?
Who save the madman dares to cry:
“’Tis I am right, you all are wrong?”
“You all are right, you all are wrong,”
we hear the careless Soofi say,
“For each believes his glimm’ering lamp
to be the gorgeous light of day.”
“Thy faith why false, my faith why true?
’tis all the work of Thine and Mine,
“The fond and foolish love of self
that makes the Mine excel the Thine.”
Cease then to mumble rotten bones;
and strive to clothe with flesh and blood
The skel’eton; and to shape a Form
that all shall hail as fair and good.
“For gen’erous youth,” an Arab saith,
“Jahim’s* the only genial state;
“Give us the fire but not the shame
with the sad, sorry blest to mate.”
* Jehannum, Gehenna, Hell.
And if your Heav’en and Hell be true,
and Fate that forced me to be born
Force me to Heav’en or Hell—I go,
and hold Fate’s insolence in scorn.
I want not this, I want not that,
already sick of Me and Thee;
And if we’re both transform’d and changed,
what then becomes of Thee and Me?
Enough to think such things may be:
to say they are not or they are
Were folly: leave them all to Fate,
nor wage on shadows useless war.
Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
from none but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies
who makes and keeps his self-made laws.
All other Life is living Death,
a world where none but Phantoms dwell,
A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice,
a tinkling of the camel-bell.
IX
How then shall man so order life
that when his tale of years is told,
Like sated guest he wend his way;
how shall his even tenour hold?
Despite the Writ that stores the skull;
despite the Table and the Pen;*
Maugre the Fate that plays us down,
her board the world, her pieces men?
* Emblems of Kismet, or Destiny.
How when the light and glow of life
wax dim in thickly gath’ering gloom,
Shall mortal scoff at sting of Death,
shall scorn the victory of the Tomb?
One way, two paths, one end the grave.
This runs athwart the flow’ery plain,
That breasts the bush, the steep, the crag,
in sun and wind and snow and rain:
Who treads the first must look adown,
must deem his life an all in all;
Must see no heights where man may rise,
must sight no depths where man may fall.
Allah in Adam form must view;
adore the Maker in the made.
Content to bask in Mâyâ’s smile,*
in joys of pain, in lights of shade.
* Illusion.
He breaks the Law, he burns the Book,
he sends the Moolah back to school;
Laughs at the beards of Saintly men;
and dubs the Prophet dolt and fool,
Embraces Cypress’ taper-waist;
cools feet on wavy breast of rill;
Smiles in the Nargis’ love-lorn eyes,
and ’joys the dance of Daffodil;
Melts in the saffron light of Dawn
to hear the moaning of the Dove;
Delights in Sundown’s purpling hues
when Bulbul woos the Rose’s love.
Finds mirth and joy in Jamshid-bowl;
toys with the Daughter of the vine;
And bids the beauteous cup-boy say,
“Master I bring thee ruby wine!”*
* That all the senses, even the ear, may enjoy.
Sips from the maiden’s lips the dew;
brushes the bloom from virgin brow:—
Such is his fleshly bliss that strives
the Maker through the Made to know.
I’ve tried them all, I find them all
so same and tame, so drear, so dry;
My gorge ariseth at the thought;
I commune with myself and cry:—
Better the myriad toils and pains
that make the man to manhood true,
This be the rule that guideth life;
these be the laws for me and you:
With Ignor’ance wage eternal war,
to know thy self forever strain,
Thine ignorance of thine ignorance is
thy fiercest foe, thy deadliest bane;
That blunts thy sense, and dulls thy taste;
that deafs thine ears, and blinds thine eyes;
Creates the thing that never was,
the Thing that ever is defies.
The finite Atom infinite
that forms thy circle’s centre-dot,
So full-sufficient for itself,
for other selves existing not,
Finds the world mighty as ’tis small;
yet must be fought the unequal fray;
A myriad giants here; and there
a pinch of dust, a clod of clay.
Yes! maugre all thy dreams of peace
still must the fight unfair be fought;
Where thou mayst learn the noblest lore,
to know that all we know is nought.
True to thy Nature, to Thy self,
Fame and Disfame nor hope nor fear:
Enough to thee the small still voice
aye thund’ering in thine inner ear.
From self-approval seek applause:
What ken not men thou kennest, thou!
Spurn ev’ry idol others raise:
Before thine own Ideal bow:
Be thine own Deus: Make self free,
liberal as the circling air:
Thy Thought to thee an Empire be;
break every prison’ing lock and bar:
Do thou the Ought to self aye owed;
here all the duties meet and blend,
In widest sense, withouten care
of what began, for what shall end.
Thus, as thou view the Phantom-forms
which in the misty Past were thine,
To be again the thing thou wast
with honest pride thou may’st decline;
And, glancing down the range of years,
fear not thy future self to see;
Resign’d to life, to death resign’d,
as though the choice were nought to thee.
On Thought itself feed not thy thought;
nor turn from Sun and Light to gaze,
At darkling cloisters paved with tombs,
where rot the bones of bygone days:
“Eat not thy heart,” the Sages said;
“nor mourn the Past, the buried Past;”
Do what thou dost, be strong, be brave;
and, like the Star, nor rest nor haste.
Pluck the old woman from thy breast:
Be stout in woe, be stark in weal;
Do good for Good is good to do:
Spurn bribe of Heav’en and threat of Hell.
To seek the True, to glad the heart,
such is of life the HIGHER LAW,
Whose differ’ence is the Man’s degree,
the Man of gold, the Man of straw.
See not that something in Mankind
that rouses hate or scorn or strife,
Better the worm of Izrâil*
than Death that walks in form of life.
* The Angel of Death.
Survey thy kind as One whose wants
in the great Human Whole unite;*
The Homo rising high from earth
to seek the Heav’ens of Life-in-Light;
* The “Great Man” of the Enochites and the Mormons.
And hold Humanity one man,
whose universal agony
Still strains and strives to gain the goal,
where agonies shall cease to be.
Believe in all things; none believe;
judge not nor warp by “Facts” the thought;
See clear, hear clear, tho’ life may seem
Mâyâ and Mirage, Dream and Naught.
Abjure the Why and seek the How:
the God and gods enthroned on high,
Are silent all, are silent still;
nor hear thy voice, nor deign reply.
The Now, that indivis’ible point
which studs the length of inf’inite line
Whose ends are nowhere, is thine all,
the puny all thou callest thine.
Perchance the law some Giver hath:
Let be! let be! what canst thou know?
A myriad races came and went;
this Sphinx hath seen them come and go.
Haply the Law that rules the world
allows to man the widest range;
And haply Fate’s a Theist-word,
subject to human chance and change.
This “I” may find a future Life,
a nobler copy of our own,
Where every riddle shall be ree’d,
where every knowledge shall be known;
Where ’twill be man’s to see the whole
of what on Earth he sees in part;
Where change shall ne’er surcharge the thought;
nor hope defer’d shall hurt the heart.
But!—faded flow’er and fallen leaf
no more shall deck the parent tree;
And man once dropt by Tree of Life
what hope of other life has he?
The shatter’d bowl shall know repair;
the riven lute shall sound once more;
But who shall mend the clay of man,
the stolen breath to man restore?
The shiver’d clock again shall strike;
the broken reed shall pipe again:
But we, we die, and Death is one,
the doom of brutes, the doom of men.
Then, if Nirwânâ* round our life
with nothingness, ’tis haply best;
Thy toils and troubles, want and woe
at length have won their guerdon—Rest.
* Comparative annihilation.
Cease, Abdû, cease! Thy song is sung,
nor think the gain the singer’s prize;
Till men hold Ignor’ance deadly sin,
till man deserves his title “Wise:”*
* “Homo sapiens.”
In Days to come, Days slow to dawn,
when Wisdom deigns to dwell with men,
These echoes of a voice long stilled
haply shall wake responsive strain:
Wend now thy way with brow serene,
fear not thy humble tale to tell:—
The whispers of the Desert-wind;
the tinkling of the camel’s bell.
{Hebrew: ShLM}
NOTES
NOTE I
HÂJÎ ABDÛ, THE MAN
Hâjî Abdû has been known to me for more years than I care to
record. A native, it is believed, of Darâbghird in the Yezd
Province, he always preferred to style himself El-Hichmakâni, a
facetious “lackab” or surname, meaning “Of No-hall, Nowhere.” He
had travelled far and wide with his eyes open; as appears by his
“couplets.” To a natural facility, a knack of language learning,
he added a store of desultory various reading; scraps of Chinese
and old Egyptian; of Hebrew and Syriac; of Sanskrit and Prakrit;
of Slav, especially Lithuanian; of Latin and Greek, including
Romaic; of Berber, the Nubian dialect, and of Zend and Akkadian,
besides Persian, his mother-tongue, and Arabic, the classic of
the schools. Nor was he ignorant of “the -ologies” and the
triumphs of modern scientific discovery. Briefly, his memory was
well-stored; and he had every talent save that of using his
talents.
But no one thought that he “woo’d the Muse,” to speak in the
style of the last century. Even his intimates were ignorant of
the fact that he had a skeleton in his cupboard, his Kasîdah or
distichs. He confided to me his secret when we last met in
Western India—I am purposely vague in specifying the place. When
so doing he held in hand the long and hoary honours of his chin
with the points toward me, as if to say with the Island-King:
There is a touch of Winter in my beard,
A sign the Gods will guard me from imprudence.
And yet the piercing eye, clear as an onyx, seemed to protest
against the plea of age. The MS. was in the vilest “Shikastah” or
running-hand; and, as I carried it off, the writer declined to
take the trouble of copying out his cacograph.
We, his old friends, had long addressed Hâjî Abdû by the
sobriquet of _Nabbianâ_ (“our Prophet”); and the reader will see
that the Pilgrim has, or believes he has, a message to deliver.
He evidently aspires to preach a faith of his own; an Eastern
Version of Humanitarianism blended with the sceptical or, as we
now say, the scientific habit of mind. The religion, of which
Fetishism, Hinduism and Heathendom; Judæism, Christianity and
Islamism are mere fractions, may, methinks, be accepted by the
Philosopher: it worships with single-minded devotion the Holy
Cause of Truth, of Truth for its own sake, not for the goods it
may bring; and this belief is equally acceptable to honest
ignorance, and to the highest attainments in nature-study.
With Confucius, the Hâjî cultivates what Strauss has called the
“stern common-sense of mankind”; while the reign of order is a
paragraph of his “Higher Law.” He traces from its rudest
beginnings the all but absolute universality of some perception
by man, called “Faith”; that _sensus Numinis_ which, by
inheritance or communication, is now universal except in those
who force themselves to oppose it. And he evidently holds this
general consent of mankind to be so far divine that it primarily
discovered for itself, if it did not create, a divinity. He does
not cry with the Christ of Novalis, “Children, you have no
father”; and perhaps he would join Renan in exclaiming, _Un monde
sans Dieu est horrible!_
But he recognises the incompatibility of the Infinite with the
Definite; of a Being who loves, who thinks, who hates; of an
_Actus purus_ who is called jealous, wrathful and revengeful,
with an “Eternal that makes for righteousness.” In the presence
of the endless contradictions, which spring from the idea of a
Personal Deity, with the Synthesis, the _Begriff_ of Providence,
our Agnostic takes refuge in the sentiment of an unknown and an
unknowable. He objects to the countless variety of forms assumed
by the perception of a _Causa Causans_ (a misnomer), and to that
intellectual adoption of general propositions, capable of
distinct statement but incapable of proofs, which we term Belief.
He looks with impartial eye upon the endless variety of systems,
maintained with equal confidence and self-sufficiency, by men of
equal ability and honesty. He is weary of wandering over the
world, and of finding every petty race wedded to its own
opinions; claiming the monopoly of Truth; holding all others to
be in error, and raising disputes whose violence, acerbity and
virulence are in inverse ratio to the importance of the disputed
matter. A peculiarly active and acute observation taught him that
many of these jarring families, especially those of the same
blood, are par in the intellectual processes of perception and
reflection; that in the business of the visible working world
they are confessedly by no means superior to one another; whereas
in abstruse matters of mere Faith, not admitting direct and
sensual evidence, one in a hundred will claim to be right, and
immodestly charge the other ninety-nine with being wrong.
Thus he seeks to discover a system which will prove them all
right, and all wrong; which will reconcile their differences;
will unite past creeds; will account for the present, and will
anticipate the future with a continuous and uninterrupted
development; this, too, by a process, not negative and
distinctive, but, on the contrary, intensely positive and
constructive. I am not called upon to sit in the seat of
judgment; but I may say that it would be singular if the attempt
succeeded. Such a system would be all-comprehensive, because not
limited by space, time, or race; its principle would be extensive
as Matter itself, and, consequently, eternal. Meanwhile he
satisfies himself,—the main point.
Students of metaphysics have of late years defined the abuse of
their science as “the morphology of common opinion.” Contemporary
investigators, they say, have been too much occupied with
introspection; their labors have become merely
physiologico-biographical, and they have greatly neglected the
study of averages. For, says La Rochefoucauld, _Il est plus aisé
de connoître l’homme en général que de connoître un homme en
particulier_; and on so wide a subject all views must be
one-sided.
But this is not the fashion of Easterns. They have still to treat
great questions _ex analogiâ universi_, instead of _ex analogiâ
hominis_. They must learn the basis of sociology, the philosophic
conviction that mankind should be studied, not as a congeries of
individuals, but as an organic whole. Hence the _Zeitgeist_, or
historical evolution of the collective consciousness of the age,
despises the obsolete opinion that Society, the State, is bound
by the same moral duties as the simple citizen. Hence, too, it
holds that the “spirit of man, being of equal and uniform
substance, doth usually suppose and feign in nature a greater
equality and uniformity than is in Truth.”
Christianity and Islamism have been on their trial for the last
eighteen and twelve centuries. They have been ardent in
proselytizing, yet they embrace only one-tenth and one-twentieth
of the human race. Hâjî Abdû would account for the tardy and
unsatisfactory progress of what their votaries call “pure
truths,” by the innate imperfections of the same. Both propose a
reward for mere belief, and a penalty for simple unbelief;
rewards and punishments being, by the way, very disproportionate.
Thus they reduce everything to the scale of a somewhat unrefined
egotism; and their demoralizing effects become clearer to every
progressive age.
Hâjî Abdû seeks Truth only, truth as far as man, in the present
phase of his development, is able to comprehend it. He disdains
to associate utility, like Bacon (Nov. Org. I. Aph. 124), the
High Priest of the English Creed, _le gros bon sens_, with the
_lumen siccum ac purum notionum verarum_. He seems to see the
injury inflicted upon the sum of thought by the _â posteriori_
superstition, the worship of “facts,” and the deification of
synthesis. Lastly, came the reckless way in which Locke “freed
philosophy from the incubus of innate ideas.” Like Luther and the
leaders of the great French Revolution, he broke with the Past;
and he threw overboard the whole cargo of human tradition. The
result has been an immense movement of the mind which we love to
call Progress, when it has often been retrograde; together with a
mighty development of egotism resulting from the pampered
sentiment of personality.