I am the one I love, and the one I love is I
اللَّهُمَّ إِنَّكَ عُفُوٌّ كَرِيمٌ تُحِبُّ الْعَفْوَ فَاعْفُ عَنِّي
“O Allah, You are Most Forgiving, and you love to forgive. So forgive me.”
I have been thinking a lot about light. Of its refractions, of its movement, of its glare. Do you ever take a moment to think about how a certain set of framings, through a certain lens, through certain vision will produce an image? How that image will produce an affectual response, how that response will produce a memory? I have been thinking a lot about our collective memories.
How when the angels came down on Laylatul-Qadr, The Prophet looked at them and said, the sky, it is as if it has a full moon revealing its stars.
إِنَّ الْمَلَائِكَةَ تِلْكَ اللَّيْلَةَ فِي الْأَرْضِ أَكْثَرُ مِنْ عَدَدِ الْحَصَى
“Truly the angels on this night are as numerous as the pebbles upon the earth.”
How their descent marked a collective moment of brilliance and that brilliance marked a collective understanding of mercy. There is a quote by the Sufi philosopher Ibn al-ʿArabī that once paraphrased says the world was originated from absolute mercy, and to mercy it shall return.
It is said that “whoever spends the night of Laylat al-Qadr in prayer out of faith and in the hope of reward, his previous sins will be forgiven.”I can’t help but think of the relationship between angels and light, light and mercy, mercy and memory. How in a moment, a yearly tradition was consecrated to make way for descent, to make way for light, to make way for a collective yearning for freedom. That movement for redemption here is nonlinear and so is the opportunity.
Baldwin would say, ''Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” It reminds me of Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi, who in The Philosophy of Illumination will write, “If you wish to have a rule regarding light, let it be that light is that which is evident in its own reality and by essence makes another evident.”
In other words, the lesson here is in light of what we can now see and in revelations we may or may not bear witness to. There is a story here, somewhere, about hope as transcendence and light and memory.
I'm still looking for it. amidst the archive, amidst the imagery. There is another story here on the production of memory in search of safe passages, a descent, still, for mercy.
I'm thinking about Saidiya Hartman and her conversation on the Fugitive Dream of the Diaspora. How she grounds these ideas of collective memory within our current moment, within the insistences of time, within a concept of fugitivity and an understanding that our perceptions of light are refracted. “What does it mean to bear witness in the act of watching a retelling? What does it mean to carry cultural memory in the flesh?"
anyways, here are some other readings that touched my heart this week:Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman, Patricia J. Saunders
from The Black Maria, Aracelia Girmay
PRAYERS FOR RICHARD, David Ramsey
“THE FANTASTIC FOUR” (1980)
