The Blackberry Walk

Dear reader, I have an admission to make. A couple of articles ago, I made reference to the Whirling Dervishes, specifically that they span and span to achieve some kind of higher state of consciousness through their dizziness. My mistake starts with where I thought they were from: Sudan. I knew them by reference to the Mahdi's uprising, where that great English hero Chinese Gordon was slain, and where Lord Kitchener mathematically machine gunned down the followers of the Mahdi in revenge. I imagined those followers spinning in circles like a Beyblade, attempting to deflect bullets through speed like some kind of spinning top. Mental images are so often ridiculous when said aloud; it's why writing dreams down turns them from credible truths to nonsense. (How different man was prior to writing, let alone prior to speech!) So yes, my image of the Whirling Dervishes was wholly wrong. And on this trip to Constantinople, that image was corrected by a Dervish show where we watched a performance of their whirling. And this specific performance was authentic, by real Dervishes, a Sufi vocation, as opposed to the myriad of 'posers' allegedly around the city. Since the performance was by some kind of cultural non-profit, a man came on stage prior to the performance to give an overview explaining what we were to see. And then the performance began. For the first ten minutes or so, the four musicians played their instruments, a flute, a lute, a flat plucked stringed instrument, and a drum, and one of them sang. They were all men of course. Then after this introduction, the Dervishes came on stage. Four in total, they took it in turns to pray to Allah before they laid out little mats to kneel on. They each wore a white robe underneath with a black jacket over the top, and each had a very tall brown hat on. Honestly, they reminded me of onmyouji. Then the music continued as they sat and prayed. What the vaguely autistic introducer at the start had explained was that the performers were being moved through the music and through prayer into a deeper connection with God; and it was through this emptying, this kenosis, that they find bliss. Once the music and prayer took them, they shed their black veils, what I assume is a symbol of the flesh and of worldliness, leaving their white pleated robes beneath. These white robes, the man told us, were funeral robes. The dancers stood up, with their arms crossed across their body, and greeted each other, bowing. The crossed arms are also another sign of death. And after bowing like Minecraft villagers for a while, they began to whirl. The whirling of the Dervishes was honestly very beautiful. Dance communicates, and through their movements you could feel their weightlessness and levity of spirit, as if through their whirling and the pleated outfits they could lift up and float an inch above the ground. And this is the practice: they find an inner peace and an inner bliss by shedding off the flesh, as St Paul would put it, and, now dead to sin, float in their whirling, like spiritual beings. The Dervishes become dead to the world, and taste but a drop of paradise; and by watching their performance, you too can witness and feel their bliss. I had often wondered at the popularity of Sufism. There are the big names of the twentieth century like Evola and Guenon who resonated with Sufi practices, and perhaps in that era it was a fad. But themes of death in the present life are absent in modern Christian ritual and tradition. Odd it is, given how prevalent and poignant these themes are in both the gospels and St Paul. Man is a thumos-driven beast, but in denying that thumos, that motor of the passions, and shedding the will of the flesh, we instead find, by love, God's will; and instead we alter our fuel source from the fuel of the flesh to the fuel of the Spirit. Such an understanding is not a Christian one either. The ancient Egyptians and ancient Greek alike have rituals entailing a journey to the underworld. In the modern day too, the psychedelic movement seeks, however irresponsibly, ego-death, death of the self, to find truths beyond the realm of the living. All we can know is life and its drives, yet wisdom lives in depths of Hades. All that gold in hell, in Hades, in the Nether, that is all the wisdom of the dead. Dreams have, since time immemorial, been visions from the land of the dead. Perhaps that's why they make most sense whilst we are asleep and become nonsense once we awake. What I found in the Whirling Dervish performance was something beautiful. The performance was something alien to my culture yet parallel, a world understood similarly but differently, and it resonated with me. And it made me think about death. Life is mysterious, but, by the lamplight of consciousness, we learn and expand the domain of understanding. Death, however, is far more mysterious. There is no lamplight nor torch. Understanding there is opaque, and only comes by faith.