Reflections

These are testing times indeed! This is a time for reflection; a time for understanding; a time for empathy; a time for a reassessment – about life and how it’s lived. More than anything I believe this is a time to put aside any differences, opinions and strongly held beliefs. 

We are all human beings trying to survive.

To put this into perspective, we are, all of us, members of the species Homo Sapiens crowded together on a small planet in a very average solar system circling around a very average star, amongst billions of stars, at the edge of an arm of a very average spiral galaxy among an unimaginable number of many billions of galaxies in an unimaginably large universe. 

I fully realize that what I’m about to write may be controversial, possibly inflammatory and most definitely blasphemous! But I still need to ask the question - why do we, puny beings that we are, think we are so special? That God (however He, She, It is determined) is “our” special God? 

Now, don’t get me wrong, I believe in a “higher force” – something that imbues objects (us, amongst others) with “life”. But what that “life” is has yet to be determined. Something that is alive is not “dead”. But what is absent or withdrawn to render what was alive, dead – has, as I say, yet to be determined. Personally I doubt that we will ever truly know. 

As always in moments of high drama or deep reflection, as now, at this time, I turn to poets and poetry. Poets seem to have a greater insight into the human condition than more down to earth mortals such as I.

I have always loved The Rubaiyat, the famous poem by Omar Khayyam (18 May 1048 – 4 December 1131) a Persian who followed the Sufi version of Islam. Khayyam was an astronomer, astrologer, physician, philosopher, and mathematician: he made outstanding contributions in algebra. In the year 1072 CE Omar Khayyam documented the most accurate year length ever calculated up to that date – a figure still accurate enough for most purposes in the modern world. But it is his poetry for which he is better known in the West than any other non-Western poet – in particular his Rubaiyat, translated (possibly somewhat loosely) by Edward Fitzgerald.

To follow on what I said about a “higher force”, I offer the following Quatrains (verses) from the Rubaiyat starting with:

 7

Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring

The Winter Garments of Repentance fling:

The Bird of Time has but a little way

To fly – and Lo! The Bird is on the Wing.

11

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,

A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness –

  And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

23

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,

                                               Before we too into Dust descend;

Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,

        Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and – sans End!

49

‘Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days

Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:

Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,

And one by one back in the Closet lays.

50

The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes,

But Right or Left, as strikes the Player goes;

And He that toss’d Thee down into the Field,

He knows about it all – He knows – HE knows!

51

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a word of it.

52

And that inverted Bowl we call the Sky,

Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die,

Lift not thy hands to It for help – for It

Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.

53

With Earth’s first Clay They did the Last Man’s Knead.

And then of the Last Harvest sow’d the Seed:

Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote

What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.

And so it goes on.

Khayyam must have been a cynic who liked his wine, and I certainly think he had, shall I say, a rather  “irreverent” relationship with God! 

I will also say that what I determine to be Khayyam’s beliefs are in line with mine. That we determine our own fate by what we do - good, bad or indifferent. We reap what we sow!