The Crow's Eye: In Praise of Hassan-i-Sabbah

"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

May 2, 2011

In Praise of Hassan-i-Sabbah

So.

The man on a black horse above a background of flames (top right of the blog, mine avi) is from a portrait entitled Hassan-i-Sabbah. I've been using it for several years now, as an homage to a man whose legend and reality have long fascinated me. I instinctively enjoy the idea of a lecherous old bastard genius who, from mountaintop gardens in Syria, Lebanon and Iran, directs a campaign of terror waged upon invading crusaders, viziers, poombahs and potentates.

Hell, I sympathize. Especially with an antinomian cult from which comes the annunciation of the final revelation, the end of all law, the completion of all prophecy and a sacred and holy chaos.

So, I think it only fitting that today it be announced that from hereforward and forever always, the First of May shall be Hassan-i-Sabbah Day.

Oh, for a thousand thousand Alamuts...

2 comments:

senecal said...: I prefer the traditional May Day, celebration of brotherhood not hatred.; May 2, 2011 at 4:21 PM
Jack Crow said...: May Day has a hundred overlays. It was a pagan fertility fuckfest long before it was appropriated to celebrate brotherhood for European males.; May 2, 2011 at 6:53 PM

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This one took a while to put into words.

I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.

In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:

I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.

So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.

That is all.