Darkness
has been given as
a nightshirt to sleep in.
Remember how human beings
were composed from water and dust
for blood and flesh with oily resins heated
in fire to make a skeleton. Then the soul, the divine
light, was breathed into human shapes. The work now is
to help our bodies become pure light. It may look like
this is not happening. But in a cocoon every bit
of worm-dissolving slime becomes silk.
As we take in light, each part
of us turns to
silk.
We
made the night
a darkness, but we bring
shining dawnlight out of that.
In the same way the mound of your
grave will bloom with resurrection. Sufis
and those on the path of the heart use darkness
to go within. During the night vigil the universe
is theirs. With all the kings and sultans and
their learned counselors asleep, everyone
is unemployed, except those wakeful
few and the divine
presence.
the source of light and darkness
One learns to understand
that there is a world in one’s self,
that in one’s mind there is a source of
happiness and unhappiness, the source of
health and illness, the source of light and darkness,
and that it can be awakened, either mechanically or at will,
if only one knew how to do it. Then one does not blame his
ill fortune nor complain of his fellow man. He becomes
more tolerant, more joyful, and more loving toward
his neighbor, because he knows the cause of
every thought and action, and he sees
it all as the effect of a
certain cause.
…Therefore, the work
of the mystic is to be able to read
the language of the mind. As the clerk
in the telegraph office reads letters from the
ticks, so the Sufi gets behind every word spoken to
him and discovers what has prompted the word to come out.
He therefore reads the lines which are behind man’s thought,
speech, and action. He also understands that every kind of
longing and craving in life, good or bad, has its source
in deep impression. By knowing this root of the
disease he is easily able to find out its cure.
No impression is such that it
cannot be erased.
onward through it all
Keep practicing even when
there seems no hope
of success.
love and faith and light
As my love
and my faith and my interest in
the inner grew, the darkness diminished,
within and without, and Lalla lost
herself in that light.
the immortal sinead o’connor
8 December 1966 – 26 July 2023
Someone went to a Sufi
with a question. He said, ‘I have been
puzzling for many, many years and reading books,
and I have not been able to find a definite answer.
Tell me what happens after death?’ The Sufi
replied, ‘Please ask this question of
someone who will die. I am
going to live.’
I came home from running errands two afternoons ago and picked my iPhone up off the counter where I’d left it, face down. As it was turning toward me, I saw among the notifications on the lock screen one from the New York Times that began with the words, “Sinead O’Connor…”. I put the phone straight back because I knew I needed to go talk to the contractor working on my lanai, and I knew that would be hard — and strange — to do through a river of tears. Notifications that begin like that are usually just one kind.
Since her death was announced, I have read tens or hundreds of thousands of words written about this lion of a woman, and mostly I’m struck by the river of quiet condescension which runs through them. “Struggled with her mental health for years”, they all say, often in the headline. They talk about how her career was never the same after she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. They jabber a bit about her dance with suicidal ideation and she is dismissed, by nearly every critic’s tone, to some pantheon in their minds of lesser, failed artists.
Sinead O’Connor was abused, sexually and physically and otherwise, in her early childhood by her mom. Not a little, a lot. People who’ve gone through something like that suffer things you and I don’t: borderline personality disorder, dissociative identity disorder, so on. They are colossal fragmentations of the mind and self which arise as a natural response to being savaged by a person of trust in a time of indescribable vulnerability. These have next to nothing to do with our fiercest moods, yours or mine, however full of darkness, struggle, and desperate grasping our troubles may be, however long they might go on.
Many people who’ve endured such things are permanently or regularly crippled by them at a level and in ways we cannot imagine or understand. Sinead O’Connor recorded ten albums, many of them outstanding, endured epic fame, which is no treat, collected Grammys and other awards by the wheelbarrow full, birthed and raised four children with tremendous love, fought off the hands and minds of record executives who imagined her a sexy bunny of a pop star when she understood herself to be a revolutionary and a protest singer, and carried on a lively, funny, occasionally heartbreaking, always substantive and intelligent and meaningful conversation with the world for nearly six decades. It included a very fine memoir, Rememberings (in which she refers to Prince as “Ol’ Fluffy Cuffs”, which gives you some measure of her wit). Her conversation with her creator, every bit as public as the rest of her life, was one of the most profound and wide-ranging I have ever witnessed.
Talking about how John Steinbeck was disrespected by critics after his death, the poet and novelist Jim Harrison said, “The Grapes of Wrath is a monstrously underrated novel, and Steinbeck has been neglected. But that’s okay, because he’s Steinbeck and they’re not. Where’s their Grapes of Wrath? They didn’t even write The Grapes of Goofy.”
Sinead O’Connor was as large as they come. She fenced and cleared the wilderness of her soul and her furiously difficult life, she toiled there with the dedication of an artist of the very first water, and she brought forth sweet grapes like few ever have or will. I trust that she is bringing them forth still, and I bow to this magnificent being for all eternity.