Overheard in the Dergah

[Mike MacLeod]

The dervish looked at his Shaykh uncertainly.

"O, my Shaykh, you know best. Can you tell us what is wrong with mankind in a single sentence?"

The Shaykh looked out the window into the November evening as the line of cars and their headlights disappeared into the smoggy evening murk.

"Yes, I can. Men are starving and they tear pictures of food out of magazines and eat them."

[Michael Larkin]

Hmm. Men are starving. It's not even that they can't recognise real food, because they can recognise its simulacrum. It seems more that they don't know where the real food is to be found.

Yes, I feel like this, but maybe I'm worse off in a way, because I know that the magazine food isn't nutritious and so don't even eat that. It seems like I just feel the hunger and have no pretend food to fool me. I rummage through the cupboards and drawers, look in every nook and cranny, but still can't find a crumb.

It is an apparently foodless landscape. Sometimes, the shaykhs seem insufferably smug. Do they in fact have full bellies, or are they eating even more illusory forms of food? No comfort there, then. No real comfort anywhere except in the luncheon voucher/promissory note scheme that we call faith: which is, as much as anything, a faith that our hope will one day materialise, that our caravan will in fact one day arrive.

It is also a faith that the hunger we feel is in fact of any significance whatsoever. Sure, many feel it, but then, many also feel phantom limbs. Just the mere fact of its existence as a genuine sensation doesn’t mean it signals the absence of something real.

What might it be like to have a full belly? It’s curiosity as much as hunger. It’s a life-long search for the answer to a question we can’t even express. Men are walking, unanswered questions; little tinkling bells beseeching an echo. They keep themselves busy with the magazines, distracting themselves from the unbearable and undeniable truth that they feel they are starving.

There’s a kind of heroism in this; heroism that they don’t simply dive in droves off the top of tall buildings. Some do of course, but most chew on a tough and stringy sliver of hope.