A Mirror Floating in Water

I am in an impassioned mood, so the reader may please forgive me if I hurridly speed in my retelling, to the great height of my day which occurred this night at Barnes and Nobles.

First, let me begin with this morning.

Okay, I go to the library. Bloody connection is weak. Grrrr. I leave Toni waiting for me on msn. Grrr. The translation of Tao Te Ching I was reading is checked out. Grrr!

Soon enough I get over my frustration and lack of Lao Tzu and get to work (after having to deal with Toni's "being difficult" ). I get back to the essay that I've been working on for school. It concerns the semiotic relations of Baudrillian object-values and their relations to national boundaries. I read Baudrillard, Barthes and Marx so that I can write freshly. Spend a couple hours doing that until the library closes.. . .. .

With sociology jargon still in my head, I drive to Barnes and Nobles and read some more Das Kapital. Marx is one of those philosophers who actually knows how to write and write well, and to be able to be profound and at the same time lucid. Reading him at times feels like a rebirth of perspective within oneself (though ironically enough, when he begins to write passionately does he begin to sound outdated and a product of history).

No, but that was not the height of my day, not yet, in fact, not even close.

I then got up and idiosyncratically collected my twenty or so poetry and philosophy books that I was to read (and though I may not get to reading them all, I feel safe in a wall of books).

I go to the Eastern Religions section and lo and behold! the right translation of Tao Te Ching is there! no, not the obliviously modernized Stephen Mitchell translation, but the sublime Jonathan Star translation!

Oh how Lao Tzu's book of poems are unlike any religious text, or for that matter, any text I've read. It's deliberate paradoxes and consistent wisdom is just so much considering the fact that they exist between less than one-hundred pages. It is perhaps the only text I've ever read that reads like the equivalent to my daily meditation practices, it is all together transcendent of words, and yet it describes this transcendence with words.

Nope, not even that, not even the subtle greatness of Tzu reached the all together blissful heights of my day.

In my "gathering-up" of poetry books to bring to my table, I looked specifically for Middle-Eastern and Indian poets. One of them happened to be a Persian poet from the 13th century. That poet's name was Rumi, and my reaction to him can only be described in this post I had made earlier in a thread about him:

I just discovered him today. Oh how it was like a great epiphany from Heaven itself! Not since my first reading of The Waste Land have I been so utterly enchanted and entranced by the introduction of one poet. His emotion and power and insight transcends at most times even the great Romantic poets of the West. He possesses the human insight and power of Shakespeare, and yet he posesses the religious and natural subtly of classical Chinese poetry. He is truly universal and speaks for all human souls. Tonight I read at least one-hundred pages of him and I still have yet to read a poem of his that I was indifferent towards.

I could drown myself in his words.

That is all.