The heart is deeper than the rivers and seas Who has fathomed the heart! Everything is there in it Ships and storms, oars and boatmen. There, in the heart, is the whole wide wold Vast like a tent outstretched He who learns the secrets of the heart come to know God

• Sultan Bahu, a 16th century mystical poet of Punjab.

I was talking to a friend earlier about Sufi Music and was making seemingly outrageous comments like there have been no sufi music concerts from which I have not walked away, without love bursting from my heart.

Anyway I want to put down my experiences of my brush with Sufi music. The first crack at Sufi Music came when Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan hit it big via some remix stuff on the Indian music charts. His voice was too powerful for the remix spin nonsense they tried to put on top of the real thing.

Then at a SPICMACAY festival I saw a full qawaali ensemble perform. It was sheer magic, in a hall where people were suppose to sit in a typical Indian style; cross legged without shoes on, as they listened to music. With no offense to the musicans in question, there were a few musicians who put large sections of the audience asleep previously. And this was an audience who was at a level dedicated to such music.

But at this performance, there was sheer rapture. The music went on all evening, hypnotic clapping mixed with, what to the very casual listener sounds as wailing, it's wailing but for the divine. And when I walked out into the night, I still remember how full I felt, as if some hunger had been satisfied.

The next encounter with Sufi music came while watching the movie, Dead Man Walking. I think what made that movie that extra powerful is the soundtrack, with Nusrath again doing the honors. Face of Love and the Long Road Home are simply two great songs. I have heard these two many times since and I have given them away on CDs I have made etc etc. The fundamental principle in Sufi Music is this mystical longing for Love. And then doing this using a very personal concept of the divine; usually apporaching it through the heart than the mind.

(to be contd)

Ah life! Does no one answer? His words rolled, bolts of lightning etched in years that were boulders and now are mist. Life never answers. It has no ears and doesn't hear us; it doesn't speak, it has no tongue. It neither goes nor stays; we are the ones who speak, the ones who go, while we hear from echo to echo, year to year, our words rolling through a tunnel with no end.

That which we call life hears itself within us, speaks with our tongues, and through us, knows itself. As we portray it, we become its mirror, we invent it. An invention of an invention: it creates us without knowing what it has created, we are an accident that thinks. It is a creature of reflections we create by thinking, and it hurls into fictitious abysses. The depths, the transparencies where it floats or sinks: not life, its idea. It is always on the other side and is always other, has a thousand bodies and none, never moves and never stops, it is born to die, and is born at death.

Is life immortal? Don't ask life, for it doesn't even know what life is. We are the ones who know that one day it too must die and return to the beginning, the inertia of the origin. The end of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the dissipation of time and of nothing, its opposite. Thenwill there be a then? will the primigenious spark light the matrix of the worlds, a perpetual re-beginning of a senseless whirling? No one answers, no one knows. We only know that to live is to live for.

II.

Sudden spring, a girl who wakes on a green bed guarded by thorns; tree of noon, heavy with oranges: your tiny suns, fruits of cool fire, summer gathers them in transparent baskets; the fall is severe, its cold light sharpens its knife against the red maples; Januaries and Februaries: their beards are ice, and their eyes sapphires that April liquefies; the wave that rises, the wave that stretches out, appearances-disappearances on the circular road of the year.

All that we see, all that we forget, the harp of the rain, the inscription of the lightning, the hurried thoughts, reflections turned to birds, the doubts of the path as it meanders, the wailing of the wind as it carves the faces of the mountains, the moon on tiptoe over the lake, the breezes in gardens, the throbbing of night, the camps of stars on the burnt field, the battle of reflections on the white salt flats, the fountain and its monologue, the held breath of outstretched night and the river that entwines it, the pine under the evening star and the waves, instant statues, on the sea, the flock of clouds that the wind herds through drowsy valleys, the peaks, the chasms, time turned to rock, frozen eras, time maker of roses and plutonium, time that makes as it razes.

The ant, the elephant, the spider, and the sheep, our strange world of terrestrial creatures that are born, eat, kill, sleep, play, couple, and somehow know that they die; our world of humanity, far and near, the animal with eyes in its hands that tunnels through the past and examines the future, with its histories and uncertainties, the ecstasy of the saint, the sophisms of the evil, the elation of lovers, their meetings, their contentions, the insomnia of the old man counting his mistakes, the criminal and the just: a double enigma, the Father of the People, his crematory parks, his forests of gallows and obelisks of skulls, the victorious and the defeated, the long sufferings and the one happy moment, the builder of houses and the one who destroys them, this paper where I write, letter by letter, which you glance at with distracted eyes, all of them and all of it, all is the work of time that begins and ends,

III.

From birth to death time surrounds us with its intangible walls. We fall with the centuries, the years, the minutes. Is time only a falling, only a wall? For a moment, sometimes, we see not with our eyes but with our thoughts time resting in a pause. The world half-opens and we glimpse the immaculate kingdom, the pure forms, presences unmoving, floating on the hour, a river stopped: truth, beauty, numbers, ideas and goodness, a word buried in our century. A moment without weight or duration, a moment outside the moment: thought sees, our eyes think.

Triangles, cubes, the sphere, the pyramid and the other geometrical figures thought and drawn by mortal eyes but which have been here since the beginning, are, still legible, the world, its secret writing, the reason and the origin of the turning of things, the axis of the changes, the unsupported pivot that rests on itself, a reality without a shadow. The poem, the piece of music, the theorem, unpolluted presences born from the void, are delicate structures built over an abyss: infinities fit into their finite forms, and chaos too is ruled by their hidden symmetry.

Because we know it, we are not an accident: chance, redeemed, returns to order. Tied to the earth and to time, a light and weightless ether, thought supports the worlds and their weight, whirlwinds of suns turned into a handful of signs on a random piece of paper. Wheeling swarms of transparent evidence where the eyes of understanding drink a water simple as water. The universe rhymes with itself, it unfolds and is two and is many without ceasing to be one. Motion, a river that runs endlessly with open eyes through the countries of vertigo there is no above nor below, what is near is far returns to itself without returning, now turned into a fountain of stillness. Tree of blood, man feels, thinks, flowers, and bears strange fruits: words. What is thought and what is felt entwine, we touch ideas, they are bodies and they are numbers.

And while I say what I say time and space fall dizzyingly, restlessly. They fall in themselves. Man and the galaxy return to silence. Does it matter? Yes but it doesn't matter: we know that silence is music and that we are a chord in this concert.

I am a man. Little do I last. And the night is enormous. But I look up. The star is right. Unknowing, I understand. I too am written, and at this very moment, someone spells me out."