Friday, October 7, 2016

The Rubaiyat: Second Edition, Quatrain LXXII

This quatrain continues the theme of the nature of the afterlife, or at least the Poet's thoughts on what it is.  The theme, therefore, ties this quatrain to the previous quatrain's last line: " . . .Behold, Myself am Heav'n and Hell:".   Moreover, the last line of the previous quatrain ends with a colon, not a period, and thus this quatrain serves grammatically to amplify or extend or explain the previous one.



Second Edition:  Quatrain LXXII

Heav'n but the Vision of fulfill'd Desire,
And Hell the Shadow of a Soul on fire,
    Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,
So late emerged from, shall so soon expire. 




Fifth Edition:  Quatrain LXVII

Heav'n but the Vision of fulfill'd Desire,
And Hell the Shadow of a Soul on fire,
    Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,
So late emerged from, shall so soon expire.  

The quatrain is identical in the two editions.


As I mentioned above, this quatrain follows the colon of the previous quatrain

Quatrain LXXI. . ..Behold, Myself am Heav'n and Hell:"

Quatrain LXXII     Heav'n but the Vision of fulfill'd Desire,
                                 And Hell the Shadow of a Soul on fire,
                                      Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,
                                 So late emerged from, shall so soon expire.

and explains the nature of that  Heav'n and Hell.   The two states are portrayed as a Vision and a Shadow, and not, seemingly, a location.   This would conflict with the views of Heaven and Hell as actual places in for both Islamic and Christian traditions.   Furthermore, the Poet has consistently held that nobody knows if there is an afterlife and what it would be if it exists, and that those who describe Heaven and Hell are talking about their own present psychological states of mind: they are a Vision and a Shadow.  Heaven is where we will get everything we want and Hell a state of guilt for our sins.

This Vision and this Shadow then are put forth onto the Void or Darkness from we have just emerged at birth and will return to shortly.  The Void signifies the unknown, from which we emerged and to which we will return, a constant theme in previous quatrains.  As the Poet has expressed it earlier: we don't know where we came from and we are equally ignorant of our destination.



13 comments:

  1. sort of like sitting in an old fashioned movie theater and watching the action on the screen... in Zen, even this is regarded as illusory, as sensory data is static in nature and reality, like time, creeps on, like "this petty pace from day to day"... > one theory, anyway...

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    1. Mudpuddle,

      Sensory data--static? I think not. Buddhists, at least the little that Ive read, talk about the mind as a blooming, buzzing confusion, a team of runaway horses and so on. As what's in the mind, so they argue, is sensory data, that doesn't sound static to me.

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    2. static, because our senses extract data from the world in increments, visions, aural stimuli, etc. and then blend that information into an ongoing scenario. in meditation, noise pollutes the brain, distracting from the meditative intent, which is to attain the "still point": the place of calm in which the world as a whole passes through without disturbing the peace of satori... if that mades any sense...

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    3. If you are saying we can only be aware of the instantaneous without past or future, which is static and stasis, then I would tend to agree. Everything else is imagination and dynamic. Too abstract in my blathering without evidence? So it goes.

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    4. You are forgetting memory. It's because we can hold stimuli in active memory for 4-5 seconds or more that we can recognize change.

      Do you really hear music as individual notes and not as a part of a sequence? I hear music as a sequence of notes.

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    5. True or False? One can hear only one note but other notes at the same time are harmonic or dissonant supplements to the primary impression?

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    6. R.T.,

      What's "True or False?" I don't understand. Harmonic or dissonant supplements occur with the note. I'm not talking about that. When I hear a note, it is part of a pattern established by previous notes and their "Harmonic or dissonant supplements" if you insist.

      Tell me, do you listen to music? Is true that you only hear one note and it is in isolation, that there is no sequence or pattern created by past notes in your memory?

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    7. Fred, I'm engaging in speculation about what we can or cannot discern in instantaneous and discrete points in time. More accurately, I am probably annoyingly and wastefully blathering. Still, Mudpuddle has a way of thinking and writing about these things that intrigues and infects me. The abstractions exercise my Swiss cheese mind. I think I have latent infections from semiotics and deconstruction. I apologize for blathering.

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  2. There is that term again: soul. I guess I continue to wrestle with the definition of that word. I think Heaven and Hell as ineffable concept are easier to "explain" than the concept of the soul. Thank you for your posting. I must wrestle with that word "soul" now (again).

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    1. R.T.,

      It's interesting that the term "soul" keeps coming back. It must stand for something we consider significant, or it would have dropped out of our vocabulary long ago.

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    2. R.T.,

      I'm not sure of the connection to the Rubaiyat quatrain.

      I don't know about semiotics as I've never really looked into it, but, yes, deconstruction is a pernicious nihilistic infection that leads to despair and mental stasis.

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    3. haha... this is just a guess but i gather you (Fred) aren't a great fan of neocriticism... i was never smart enough to figure out what they were talking about; i just noticed that their work, the little i tried, was pretty much unreadable... semiotics probably has a point of some sort; Eco was a semioticist, but the meaning of meaning eludes me...

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    4. Mudpuddle,

      Chuckle. . .What makes you think so?

      I have formed the obviously erroneous opinion that all discussions of "meaning" end with that finger pointing at the moon.

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