The works of Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) are a gift of immense value to the creative artist, for this prolific Sufi thinker tells of God the All-Imaginer, Poet of the Pluriverse. The inmost Being of the Real, the Infinite, not knowable by mortal minds, is symbolically shown in the worlds and creatures God imagines, which are metaphors. God is a poet, and only a poet can "taste" the Real via sensory emblems. The Real must be imagined. Is Ibn Arabi, then, the prose counterpart to Rumi (1207-1273), the world's greatest mystic poet? This might be true, except that Ibn Arabi's prose is so ingenious and heart-expanding in resourceful metaphor that even in a prose medium he, too, is a Great Imaginer. For Ibn Arabi, God is a longing Lover, whose breath of yearning was the origin of our world. Responding to His love, we increase His fullness of Being God's activity is one of partial, unrepeatable, extremely rapid poetic self-disclosures. He is vividly present in His Names, not Platonic "Forms" but rather Forces that call on us to embody them and so to actualize changingly the potentials in God's Mind. Three sources helped me with the dramatic monologue sonnets I wrote for Ibn Arabi to speak. In The Meccan Revelations we learn that beliefs are knots: they tie things together but can also tie you up. Religions are only cups giving color and shape to the water of spirit. Potential beings in God's Mind cry out to be created, and when given birth they are wedded to Him forever, so deep is their love of embodied Being. In The Bezels of Wisdom Moses tells of Pharaoh's compassionate wife who influenced her husband to turn to God before he died. Jesus thinks delay in answering a prayer may mean the Lord wants to hear again the voice of His beloved. In The Seven Days of the Heart we transcend the thinghood of things to feel the breath they bear of the Lover that had made them.
Author: Martin BidneyPublisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 05/18/2016
Pages: 210
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.69lbs
Size: 9.02h x 5.98w x 0.48d
ISBN13: 9781533344779
ISBN10: 1533344779
BISAC Categories:-
Poetry |
Subjects & Themes | Inspirational & ReligiousAbout the Author
God the All-Imaginer is the thirteenth book of poetry by Martin Bidney, Professor Emeritus at SUNY-Binghamton. He has also published "Blake and Goethe" and "Patterns of Epiphany." The present book is Volume VI in his series "East-West Bridge-Builders," which includes two books of dialogues with passages from the Qur'an, one with Goethe's "West-East Divan" (which includes Goethe's essays on the cultural history of Arabian and Persian poetry made available in English for the first time ever), a dialogue-book with Friedrich Rueckert's "Wisdom of the Brahman" Books 1-4, and a con-verse-ation with medieval pub poet Muhammad Shemseddin Hafiz called "Poems of Wine and Tavern Romance." Bidney creates form-faithful translations which, like his own lyrical comments or "replies," are in highly crafted, artisanal verse. He translates from Polish, Russian, and German; three of his translation-and-dialogue books have been published by SUNY Press. His dialogic book with Poland's greatest poet Adam Mickiewicz's "Crimean Sonnets" was issued by Bernstein Verlag Bonn, and his trilingual "Like a Fine Rug of Erivan: West-East Poems" of Russia's greatest poet Alexander Pushkin is available from Mommsen Foundation / Global Scholarly Publishing. Keep watching on his amazon author page!
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