About the "grey" thing

"Beware the darkness in the grey areas."

-Abdul Hakim Murad

What I think this aphorism of Shaykh Abdul-Hakim Murad refers to really is what Islam is all about. According to a hadith, it's Islam to abandon things of doubtful nature (of which we have no certainty of its being either halal or haram). It, on another plane, may be a criticism on the general notion of the Muslims that many things lie in the "grey," implying ,as I have observed in my society, that all such things that lie in the grey area between clear Truth and clear Falsehood are things too much complicated to decode that easily, and hence should be left to the 'reason' to suggest the final answer. Practically, the obedience to reason here is by and large nothing but the obedience to our lower self/desires. I have generalized this mental attitude on the basis of observation of only a handful of the brightest people of my society, who are most literate of worldly and religious affairs, well only knowers of the later domain, and may not be the doers necessarily. 'Masses follow the brightest'. (That's a principle I a brilliant friend of mine told me, who is a president of a student organization called ESEF.) Therefore, when truth is obscure we should not tend to overlook that it is darkness that veils light from our sight, which is not a positive element in the equation.

Upward Celestial Continuity

Good night, sweet prince,

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

Horatio's farewell prayer for Hamlet.

Hamlet V, 2, 37.

The suggestion expressed in the 'title' of the post is not self-explanatory. Till now, I've only mentioned Horatio bidding farewell to the dead prince Hamlet. However, it becomes very clear if one just knows the whole context and events happening simultaneoulsy in the background.

The moment Hamlet dies Fortinbras immediately enters as a prince. Thus it 'marks a continuity between the dead prince and the living one', interprets M. Lings. The thing that I felt too very intuitively has been well put in the following sentence by M. Lings 'that Hamlet is mysteriously reborn in Fortinbras'. Lings doesn't see this alchemy as 'an earthly horizontal succession, but on an upward celestial continuity'. This isn't actually fully indicated by Shakespeare, yet of which the reader somehow becomes aware of. Of continuity. Of cycle of life!

'An Art Which Conceals Art'

Reading short stories of Guy de maupassant imprints on its reader such 'natural' impressions and clear pictures that he is overcome by the mere words of the story. He feels watching things happening around him. He sees and 'feels' the events, the plot of the story as they are per se. I've rarely seen a talent unique in its quality as Guy de's. More than that we're intoxicated by the pictures he creates in which our nature is punctuated that we tend to forget if it were a piece of art! My intuitions were confirmed when I read a critic's, Arthur Symons, remarks on Maupassant, he says: 

"But his style is quite different from that of Flaubert (his mentor and teacher), of which it has none of the splendid, subdued richness, the harmonious movement; it is clear, precise, sharply cut, without ornament or elaboration; with much art, certainly in its deliberate plainness, and with the admirable skill of an art which conceals art…" [From “Studies in Prose and Verse” (1899).]

There is no point in his stories where you may come to praise the 'thought' in intellectual terms, A. Symons, the critic, points out. "What impresses you is the extreme ingenuity of its handling; the way in which this juggler keep his billiard-balls harmoniously rising and falling in the air." And, he further observes, "...it has just enough of ordinary human feeling." This is why I felt much closeness and nearness to what Guy de writes, and because of this quality of him, the same critic in 1899 remarked, "..an art which conceals art."!

A Bit of Poetic Symbolism

Umer: What is the difference between art and entertainment?

A Young Artist: A lot of.

Umer: But its too vague.

A Young Artist: Art can amuse others but ones own entertainment can't.

Umer: Art  for amusement, then entertainment is for what?

A Young Artist: Its just for putting ones own stress away.

Umer: Then what is the utilisation of art?

A Young Artist: Its actually for same purpose, but on social level.

A Young Artist:  For example.I can explain that:

                                  

                                  An actor is an artist and entertainer.                                

                                  A viewer is only one being entertained.

Umer: According to Herbert Read art may not be a serious intellectual activity as M. Arnold said [he said which M. Iqbal also quoted in his one book, "Art is the criticism of life."]; "Art is rather an expression of our deepest instincts and emotions; it is a serious activity whose end is not so much to divert as to vitalise," he is of the view.

A Young Artist: Its something we like to tell and others want to hear; its something we like to make and others like to see; its a move we want to move and others like to see it.

A Young Artist: Its bullet in the the heart that has its value when obtained by careful operation and expressed to the world.

A Young Artist: Its a bit poetic symbolism.

Do you agree with 'his' analysis on art? And, why?

Hafeez Jalandari

Sometimes, I am entranced by the way honest poets and writers live, true to what they do. (OK, one may have different levels of threshold, but truth is truth and falsehood, falsehood.) And, I often wonder that possibly what do they eat which make them so fearless and sublime in thought that they tend to become priceless?

They never stop committing the crimes of innocence. Are they childish? No, they don't look funny nor are they vindictive. Then what are they? What feed their hearts, which are like omnibus books of dreams and truths? And, they mean it, i.e, their outwardly 'fanciful' looking hopes. What is more worrying to me is the degree of their certainty and unshakable faith in good. They're my gladiators, whom pen's ink is more nobler than a martyr's blood. It may for one reason be so that their job is to decode the nature and the revelations it contains. Just as one such poet, Allama Iqbal, once wrote beautifully:

The world-spirit conceals the various phases of her inner life in symbols. The universe is nothing but a great symbol. But she never takes the trouble to interpret these symbols for us. It is the duty of the poets to interpret them and reveal their meaning to humanity. It would, therefore, appear that the poet and world spirit are opposed to each other; since the former reveals what the later conceals.

Today, it is said, Hafeez Jalandari died. And this post is a tribute to him. No matter what ideologies you may have. You may be critical of his writings in the first place that, you might like think, he took a wrong approach for reforming his decaying nation by singing the glories of past and deploring the present. Instead, you may be of the opinion, he should have been extracting lessons from the history which led to the downfall of his nation and not the other way around. Criticism accepted. But, for many reasons I will support the cause of this man who wrote "magnum opus Shah Nama Islam in four volumes" and created the National anthem of Pakistan. Even though I detest being a strict nationalist.

First, that the duty of poet is not conveying the rigorous 'logical truth(s)', rather he's yearning for beauty and imagination. Therefore, by appealing to emotion, his success lies in moving the hearts of his audience, and better be, stimulating them to reflect and act. He had a part in the creation of a nation. He had a dream. He went beyond the frustrated hopeless men. To quote again poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal from his Stray Reflections, he said:

Nations are born in the hearts of poets; they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.

But, what about a politican who is also a poet?

Panorama of Words & A Semantic Theory

How many meanings you think a word can have in a piece of literature? Well of course by now you would have guessed that a word used in a piece of literature gives a meaning, on one hand, and on the other hand its suggestion. Former gives us the literal meaning of the word and the latter represents 'interpretation under certain circumstances'. Or, you might say, 'the second meaning' which evolves from the 'network of expressions' of the literary work. Explains S. H. Olsen in The Struture of Literary Understanding.

"Fool."

Let's analyse this disgusting word (or not?) in a given context.

But thought's the slave of life, and time's fool;

And time, that makes survey of all the world,

Must have a stop. O, I could prophesy,

But that the earthly and cold hand of death

Lies on my tongue.
(1 Henry IV V, iv, 81)

Empson, in his The Structure of Complex Words, beautifully explains "the way in which the word 'fool' [in the preceding example] works, displaying not only the single meaning required by the immediate context, but also those meanings implicit in the word which fit the greater context of the play". To quote Empson:

'Hotspur means chiefly that life is cheated by time, because our apparently great opportunities all end in death; but this might be a comfort, since the same end would come even if he were not defeated. Life is made ridiculous by time; we are clowns because our pretensions make such a contrast with our end. But if time keeps us as clowns we in our turn mock at time; we criticise it, and know better. There was room here for a prophecy; he dies still ready to gibe [taunt] at the House of Lancaster.'

After analysing this paragraph, how different interpretations have you come accross of a single word fool in a little poem by Shakepeare? Interpreting possible suggestions that can be boxed is the job of a critic.
Back to my original question: How many different meaning gives Empson in his The Structure of Complex Words, p. 121? Following:

"1. person who is (a) stupid ( = mocked, brash, inexperienced, childish, duped, loved and pitied as a dependent)
(b) simpleminded
(c) lacking 'common sense'
2. clown, professional jester and mocker
3. knave, obstinately and viciously stupid person (Biblical)
4. weakminded or idiotic person."

Thus, now we can appreciate truly that literature is aesthetic by its features; such vastness and density it enjoys, which is well beyond the capacity of routine-use of language. Literature, I call it, the jewel of language.