Nothing is Eternal

 Nothing Is Eternal

 

                                                To be recited at my departure

 

  I

 

Some people,

            in their seventies,

and many more in their eighties,

when,

         in a peaceful spring,

or in an invigorating summer,

they look at the blue sky

of a beatific,

                   entrancing

                                    sunny day,

they utter a tormented sigh

of sorrow and despair,

because they feel

   they are the victims

of a tyrannical design;

they find themselves merely made

of a handful of dust

         and a bucketful of water

to be used

               as living devices

to test the desirability of life

as a transient,

     sweet,

      beautiful illusion.

 

 

Their pain must be so great

that no deity of any religion,

in human form,

       with human soul,

can deeply suffer

and yet

   remain unchanged.

Once,

        when I was the age of their sons, 

one of them,

in the depth of his agony

in his last converse with me,

as always careful not to be heard

       by the mob,

whispered into my ear,

         saying:

“I hate this Absurd Tyranny,

and for it

I hate,

  I curse the Mystery!

Now the clay vessel is shattering 

        at last,

and all the wine

      of eighty years,

made by me,

drop by drop,

    moment by moment, 

as my soul,

        my mind,

             my very own self;

all my wine

made with my visionary

      awareness of history,

with the beauty of my thoughts,

of my ideals,

    my words,

    my meanings,

and the infinite universe of my heart,

will all be wasted,

        annihilated,

       forever.

Oh,

     how I hate to be created

by the will

       and the purpose

of some other one,

   whosoever It be!

 

 

Oh,

       I hate,

                 I hate and curse the Mystery!”

 

 

  II   

 

But there are some other people,

who have always been the majority

in every population,

   anywhere on Earth,

every one of whom is born

         with a certain destiny

the book of which is revealed to them,

page by page,

  one page a day only,

from the moment they wake up,

with or without dreams,

          in the morning,

until sleep comes

and puts them into unconscious rest

                             at night.

 

 

They have their divine faith.

They never fall in doubt

    about anything.

Everything in their world

     is just the way

            it should be;

So their minds and souls are free

from impious,

      futile

       questions.

 

 

If they are poor,

and all their time is spent

in a perpetual struggle

                                to survive,

they know that the Omniscient knows it all,

and with an innocent sigh

    they silently say:

 

“Thy will is our contentment!”

Because they are told

       by their holy ancients:

“He exalteth whomsoever He pleaseth,

and He abaseth whomsoever He pleaseth!”

And then,

      of course,

when they happen to see a glimpse

                                    of the luxurious life

the richest among the rich are living,

they do not fail to reproach their eyes

for looking with envy

       at the worldly wealth,

and their hearts for beating

     with the unfaithful desires,

reminding them of the divine order of things,

by reciting to them

   this ancient holy verse:

“He giveth sustenance

to whom he pleaseth without measure!”

 

 

The richest among the rich

who half-heartedly believe in anything

whenever something proves

to be highly profitable

     in their business of life,

both, in this and in the other world,

wholeheartedly thank

    the good Almighty One

who has chosen them and loves them

      as His favourites;

but they live unaware of the fact

that the poorest among the poor

receive the Angel of Death

with a smile of  relief and joy,

hearing the cherubim singing in Heaven:

“Hearken to the good tidings

O you who are the poor

             in the kingdom of earth,

the Kingdom of heaven will be yours!

And always remember,

with your unshakable faith,

        that

it is easier for a camel to go through

the eye of a needle

   than for someone

 who is rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven!”

  

 

  III

 

Among the faithless sceptics

who hate and curse

the Mystery of existence

            and of life,

and the faithful,

       both poor,

who wholeheartedly,

                               and rich,

who half-heartedly,

   believe

in the fulfilment

      of the promises 

of their good Almighty One,

made through the holy ancients,

regarding the freehold ownership

of a fully-furnished,

    luxurious villa

in the Kingdom of Heaven,

there must be a very small minority

who have never categorized themselves

                                                under any title,

but by others

they are called by many unpopular names,

names such as

     “agnostics”,

                            “sceptics”,

                       “unbelievers”,

Or even,

    in the eyes of the zealots,

                                            shameless “infidels”.

     

and only a few of the deists,

sometimes,

  with some due respect,

think him to be a “freethinker”,

without receiving his thoughts into their hearts.

 

These

  (let us call them “heretics”,

Or “I-don’t-know-ists”

                              without asking their consent)

These “Idontknowists”

do not want to know

        when and how

the Universe and Life on Earth began,

and by whose will and purpose.

  

*

 

 They think

that no one has ever been able

to decipher the secret

of the Great Mystery,

not ever since a pair of animals,

      male and female

somewhere

  in a jungle

became aware of their nakedness

and felt ashamed

        and lost

    and abandoned

and left the world of the wild

         with fear and fury,

until now

that they have become too fruitful

and have replenished the earth

                                         in a mad way,

and have subdued it

                        to the edge of its destruction

with a chaotic army

of seven-thousand-million

    mutinous personnel.

 

*

 

They think

that everything in the universe,

or, in another word,

the universe as one whole entity

is always in motion

     and changing,

 

and only

the never-changing law of change

                                                 is eternal.

*

 

They think

that only those who want to believe

in the existence of two worlds,

one temporal

    for the body with soul,

and the other eternal

       for the soul without body,

are the forces of destruction,

              without willing,

and the enemies of life on earth,

                                            without knowing,

and the worshippers of death

           with awe and hate,

their minds are museums of horror

with images of tombs and worms,

of skulls and bones,

of the damned souls,

of the hellish demons,

of scenes of punishment by fire,

fire, fire, flaming fire,

bodies burning,

eyes,

       and hearts,

      and hands burning,

mouths,

    and ears,

   and tongues burning,

pain, pain, pain,

                cries of pain,

all in anticipation of what?

of the eternal life in the gardens of heaven.

 

*

They think

that all those children of Adams and Eves

who have sound brains,

uninfected with the syphilis

of the ancestral unreasoned ideas,

        and superstitious beliefs,

              and miraculous expectations,

                     and answered prayers:

deeply,

           sincerely,

         uncompromisingly hate

to be regarded

                      as the identical members of a herd,

or to be patronised by someone

         of their own species

as their shepherd,

          their saviour,

                 their leader,

                        their earthly representative,

                                 their divine interceder,

because they think

that there are two realities:

one the Reality of the World,

             in the World,

                 for the World,

and the other,

the Reality in Man

   by Man,

    for Man,

but our life on Earth,

out of the Eden of the Wild,

         began 

when we taught ourselves,

by love and experience,

how to change

                   the irrational,

        enigmatic,

             callous reality of the World

into the meaningful,

       righteous,

             amusing, 

                                     imaginative reality of Man.

 

*

 

They think

that by creating an inner world

                   for ourselves

we have become

the outside observers of the universe,

a universe in which

   no one,

     nothing,

                                                   can be aware

of what we are in our individual selves;

and, therefore,

all the characters of our divine myths

have their familiar existences

                                    only in our inner world,

 

and by worshipping them

we worship our creative imagination,

we call to our help

our known human god,

not the god unknown

                         as the mystery of all mysteries.                

 

        IV

 

It is said that

only the never-changing law of change

                                                     is eternal.

It is the same if we say:

“Nothing is Eternal!”

 

But I,

as one of the believers of this creed,

also believe

that whatever is the status of things

between the beginning

and the end of one stage of change,

is eternal in itself.

 

 

Once,

 in a bright night,

in a sky full of shining stars,

suddenly I found myself

   talking to a faint star,

now appearing, now disappearing:

 

“O, the farthest star

In the blue dome,

What did you mean

When you said: “Stranger!”

I am your eyes

And you are the light of my heart;

In this night of primeval darkness

A friend sends you greetings.”

 

 

It was not a game

          of self-deception;

I was not talking to myself;

it seemed to me

that at the same moment

the Mystery

  was also looking at me

through the eye of that star,

and listening to me

through the ear

  of silence

      of Infinity.

 

 

Being so close to the Mystery of Mysteries

in a moment of cosmic ecstasy,

that blissful rare moment

becomes eternity:

Oh!

 

 

Yes,

I as one of the adherents of

                                    “Nothing-is-eternalism”,

having recently entered

the eighty-first year of my life,

on my way to hospital,

while waiting for the red light

                                           to change,

through the window of the ambulance

among the impatient pedestrians

I caught sight of a young woman

whose big bulging belly,

and the expression on her face,

were showing her to be

in the last few days of her pregnancy.

 

 

I put my hand

on my fast and irregular

                               beating heart,

and with a mysterious smile,

said in my voiceless mind

 

 

 “my tired heart,

thank you so much

for your three billion beats of life.

I don’t expect you to know

that nothing is eternal,

not the earth,

nor the sun,

nor the universe,

but I know that soon

you will retire and rest,

and surely you will have

your complete share of

   the human eternity.

 

Your relief,

as fresh and strong

        as you were eighty years ago,

has already begun

           passionately beating

in the wombs of all the young,

          pregnant women

who are waiting for the traffic lights to change,

to cross the street of habits,

to join their men

in the roofed oases of pleasure and pain,

at the clamorous coasts of wonderment.

Let there be

     no questions,

                               no complaints!

It was

 and it will be

    what it is!”

 

 

20 January 2015

poem by Mahmud Kianush

photo by Giles Goodland

poem shared with permission of Knives Forks and Spoons UK