Second Matter

 

 

A word comes to life and grows when the meaning is clothed in a form and breathes speech into lifeless things through the power of imagination.

Coming into existence and becoming extinct, or birth and death, follow one upon the other. In this continuous cycle two things that exist side by side are usually perceived as the cause of the existence of the other. Any imagined or misconceived ideas that originate from that are generally the result of this perception (of the coincidence of the two things). Fantasies and the faults arising from fantasies are generally based on whims (proceeding from misunderstood perceptions). However, the magic of speech that originates in the imagination breathes life into dead forms and makes them speak to one another. It can enliven the words with either love or enmity. The magic of speech also clothes meanings in forms, giving them life, and puts the heat of vitality into them.

If you want an example, read the following lines, which can be described as a house full of sound:

Breaking one’s word veils the apparent reality and tells me not to be deceived;

So hope and despair, fighting with each other in my breast, destroy it.

 

See how the poet, whose words are like magic, clothes hope and despair in forms and breathes life into them, causing hostility and fighting between them because of the breaking one’s word, which is a scandalous thing. One feels as if one is watching this struggle in a dream or on a screen. Truly, a magical word causes one to sleep and dream.

As another example, turn to the earth’s love for rain and its lament:

The earth complains to the rain, asking why it is late;

It absorbs the moisture left from the last rain as if absorbing a lover’s lips.

 

Does this couplet not make one think of the earth as a Majnun and the clouds as a Layla?47

 

A REMINDER

What makes a couplet beautiful is how close the images it contains are to reality. For when it has not rained for a long time, the earth draws in the moisture, making a sound that is almost like a sigh. One who observes this thinks of the lack of the rain and the earth’s intense need for it, and considers the relationship between rain and earth. Then, one imagines the mutual love and conversation that might occur between them.

 

AN INDICATION

Every imagining should contain a seed of reality, like the one that exists in the couplet above.

 

Said Nursi

47 Majnun and Layla are legendary lovers in Oriental literature. (Trans.)