The Longest Night: Be refreshed in the darkness
Night cancels out the business of day
Inertia recharges the mind
Then the day cancels the night
And inertia disappears in the light.
Though we sleep and rest in the dark,
Doesn’t the dark contain the water of life?
Be refreshed in the darkness.
Doesn’t a moment of silence
Restore beauty to the voice?
Opposites manifest through opposites:
In the black core of the heart
God created the eternal light of love
Rumi – Masnavi (1, 3861-65)
I have been struggling with dualities, everywhere. Appropriate as I am writing this in the early hours of Shabi Yalda – ‘The Longest Night’ in Iran, or the Winter Solstice round here (Lewes is full of rituals, druids etc). Yalda means ‘rebirth of the sun’ and what I remember most growing up was the image of having to jump over a fire to ensure I got a decent husband later in life, must have been somewhat off the mark from the original spirit of using fire to encourage the sun to rise and overcome the darkness of winter…
Yalda was a favourite tradition of my mums (after Nowruz, the Persian New Year). She made ‘ashe reshte’, a soup of noodles, beans, greens and soured dry yoghurt and when I went to Tehran in 1998 I recall sitting around with my cousin and his friends trying to make sense of their bemused translations of Hafiz (‘The Invisible Tongue’) one of my favourite Sufi poets whose work it is a tradition to use for bibliomancy (divining the future with books). Since I am not bi-lingual my main access to Hafiz, is through the renderings of his work by Daniel Ladinsky – in particular the collection The Gift, which contains poems I pulled out at random and conceived whole new projects from as a result –Including The Bibliomancer’s Dream (2009). So I owe him much, yet I know I only glimpse the shadow and not the object in not having Farsi as my mother tongue. (which incidentally is the title of one of my first and favourite sculptures in the show, and speaks of lost language itself).
I was wondering which diary entry would be relevant to today and found one which communicates the duality present in the Rumi poem at the top: it is both devastating and hopeful, as – 6 weeks after my mum went missing – I started to read my dreams in an almost sobering way, as if to talk myself into stepping into a new space. So here it goes:
Dreams all around us (II) (Diary entry 8.2.2005)
‘ I dreamt of my mum again. She was cooking in the next room in a house I wasn’t familiar with and I went in
quickly, in case she disappeared. She was in pink. I told her ‘I love you. Do you love me?’ and hugged her. She was detached but said yes – I think. I said ‘I miss you’. At that point she was in blue and just glided by, untouchable. Then she was at the stove again and turned on the gas flame, a high flame. I asked if she wanted us to set up a memorial fund in her name, and she just disappeared.
What was that saying (Buddhist?): ‘In the face of death, have no attachment or aversion’? – I guess it’s the only way to be free of this world, in the next world, whatever that really means. Also, she can’t answer my questions anymore – I have to find my own answers. This feels so sad, and I miss her so much. The second part of the dream I remember was in a house with a lot of people – the same people? Lots of them got gassed and died – by accident I think – but I survived along with a few others. I looked into the mirror to check I was alive; I wanted to live, to wake up and live. Today is a beautiful sunny day and its Leo’s birthday, my love. And Delia’s head has grown a bit overnight! ’
