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ART & LITERATURE
SHADOWS OF OF THE HEART
Michael Tobias articulates his love of Jain wisdom in the form of a unique poem which demands careful reading and reflection
When sudden death slams into the lives of those we know, or imagine, or might be ourselves, there is no description of pain that is appropriate. The tragedies of the world are endless, despite a single day, September 11th, which seems now to consolidate the agony within a setting, a timeframe and a global reference point. There have been tens-of-thousands of other reference points, by way of history, and context, and the human story. Not any one is less agonising than another. But that the human heart must find its compass reading amid such welters of despair, must acknowledge the horrors of past times, face up to contradiction in human nature, acknowledge the melancholy of this era and others, but then in full compliance with the whispering willows of naturecry, then sing.
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The song clings to the sadness of our age but also resurrects the truth which is the human heart, which sees the world as a holy staging ground for love, undying love among those of us who have survived,
for the hundreds of billions of awestruck beings bleating in the night, the raw nerve of beauty, living testimony to the righteous law, the law of life.
Never forget the many laws of life. But never ignore the possibilities resounding beneath the laws.
Brought back down, to the sidewalk and the angry mob in this tension between eternal hope and the harsh glare of death and bio terror, in that moment wherein what craves pure soul rubs shoulders with the gritty mundane, an ideal rises like a phoenix wearing a crown of bread crumbs, empowered beyond the sheer drama of itself to stare headlong into conflict and fathom all the rudiments of survival by other names than blood and tooth and claw.
This Jain historical phenomenon, as I would liken it, has been embraced by vivid breathing gentle souls, the least and the best, bedridden or free standing,
those who are silent, others quietly weeping, some with business-minded buzzing
Jain Spirit March May 2002
Jain Education International 2010_03
others lulled to sleep by fairy tales: monks and accountants, scholars and publishers, pharmacists, computer operators, clerks, countrymen and politicians, husbands and wives, their children, the straight and tall, the curved and low-to-the-ground, those in pain, others in delight, seeing clear sky, or perceiving only clouds, seasoned by the myriads of turmoils, or newly born to air scented in thyme wedded by every gumption known to the heart,
or patiently devout, no care, no worry, not a moment without, tycoons tying up the last deal of the day. a child saving chickens from a monsoon, endless prayer, and still more reflection no matter who, or by what means, each of them, these descendants of a dream have quietly striven across a stream and won a lasting triumph here on earth whose merits might be summarised in a breath: non-violence, yet by such a phraseconsider such a life which in these times may know no rest surrounded by the beast in man,
corrupted views, like ash on a window or acid eating out the battery,
karmic layers, they say, accumulating without end until this ahimsa, as it's called, has had its day in court which it will: it has, it does, it can,
the window cleansed, impurities erased, nature given a second chance, the nature of man, the nature of woman,
the nature of every living organism, this harmony of spheres resurrected so demonstrate the Jains.
Long ago a young man found himself amid a country strange and wild
and wilder still white pillars rising from the reddened earth and polished to a one, engraved minutely with not gods but men, one woman, twenty-four in all, a number small by contrast to the measureless immensity of this, this age of ignorance, fake bliss, complexity that wreaks a gigantism of pain
at every juncture.
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