Night Time Wandering in Inner City Streets

In the dream I walk through a nighttime city of signs and silence. I realize with a tiny shock that I am missing a green dossier. But this is my life. Surely we are all in a state of loss, big and small.



How about you, what have you lost and found today? How do you manage this time of information and disinformation, connection and disconnection? Perhaps you are beside me on the path. It may be me, and my loss, that I can see only the busy dream around us. You, reader, may play a more deliberate game—as others will be quick to remind us, worldly success is not forbidden. But it is also not guaranteed.



Economic Man has a social value, but the unemployed finds his face naked in a crowd, projecting misfortune and weakness. The path of loss is rich in reminders and one begins a process of unknowing and undoing. One begins to see a bit more beneath the surface of human interactions, fears, desires, and imaginings. This is disturbing to the status quo and others may resist or turn away from the question: “What meaning do I retain?” And what meaning does “I” retain?



I do not know. But power abhors a vacuum; and perhaps because our community lacks substance already, we cling to the mundane. Mosque leadership would be alarmed by individual spirituality that cannot be so easily manipulated or controlled. What if we all asked these questions of ourselves! Leaders might be forced to return phone calls and keep regular hours; our community might feel compelled to support services and take responsibilities seriously. But until that happens we will continue to live in a strange dream of Muslim identity. What is real? What works?



My inner reality seems no less dreamlike; a prison, a city of signs. Can I say that I love New York? Not any more than I can truly say I love myself. Instead, I flee bylaws for byways, for cave-like subway stations empty in ruined grandeur, for the song of the naked light bulb by the barbed wire coil in station after station in the outer boroughs.



I feel at home in this city of refugees, fleeing not only violence and oppression in many directions but Soul and God. There is danger in the air like an approaching storm as we flee though dream, towards forgetting, towards who knows what. Along with the Mexicans, the Mormons in their white shirts, the young women in their doll dresses of summer, the tourists still wearing “FBI” shirts, we are lost in dreams of self and success, flight and failure, minds inching though the moment. As Buddhists prostrate their way through space, and as we Muslims prostrate our way through time, as the tiny inchworm moves its sajda again and again along the branch of an enormous tree, we all move through times’ tunnel towards the unknown.



The mind is moved, unsettled, overthrown again and again-- by the immensity, mystery and madness of the current human enterprise. Surely I must look away, towards self and soul. Instead I find myself again in dream of the city, an empty street in Sheepshead Bay. Two immaculately dressed Russian men toss wrappers into the empty street. As I leave, I notice that an enormous, stretch limousine is following me. Turning the corner, I see a towering poster for the military, suspended before me among the liquor stores. Looming above me, a young marine of indeterminate ethnicity projects pride and power with jutting chin and hooded eyes. The ad’s message: “We Don’t Accept Applications-- We Accept Commitment.”



Perhaps this is a useful message for my inner job applicant, but this Marine looks capable of flattening an Iraqi nursery school in democracy’s name and I ask myself: “Commitment to what?” Add a turban and beard, and there’s not much difference in the militant mindset.



Commitment to the Real—what would that be like? Does that mean seeing beyond the rationalizing interpretations of religion and culture, those forces maintaining our prisons in their usual grandeur? How to free the mind? And how to free the heart, in order to see the masses with more compassion? See how they flee to the beaches to burn meat over a fire; the wretched refuse of our own teeming shore. One might see the massive display of human flesh as embodying human dignity as well as vulnerability. God bless the steerage class.



Still, there is something missing. As more and more of us are wired into our own tunes, wired to elsewhere, what is missing belongs to all of us. What is missing relates in some way to the shrinking American heart. So then: how do we collectively reconnect?



One starts within. I may not love my inner marine, my inner detainee, my nighttime traveler, and the refugee. But I would like to at least have a conversation with these shadows within my soul. Yet how?



Psychologist James Hillman has urged his readers to reconnect with their unconscious, their Dark Side, “which leads to a sense of soul, an experience of inner life, a place where meanings home. As those pieces and parts that before lived unconnected are laced together, are deepened and extended, that habitable dwelling place for religious life” can begin to come together.



We might say that this design of living is reality-based but Reality is always more than what we think it to be. Within the mirror are more mysterious signs and meanings, a continual revelation and renewal. One loses self sometimes but finds something else in the intimacy of the night. Like a mysterious green dossier?



May Allah guide us on this path, through self and in deeper communication with other souls. This city of nets, of webs, this prison holds many Muslims known and unknown.



There is a rumor of beauty in the New York night. Our collective dream awaits the light of dawn. How will it come for you? How will you wake up?