Originally posted by: Mucho
And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die,
Lift not your hands to It for help
--for It As impotently moves as you or I.
Omar Khayyam
Ooops sorry for the cut and paste
Hi
,
This is an example of a rubaiyat of Khayyam. Don't be so quick to place it under a label of "atheism" because the concepts of Spirit and Deity in his poetry aren't so easily uncovered. Compare to Crane's:
"A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
The idea of an inverted bowl speaks of a parabola, in which anything that goes away from us comes back to us, reflected. If we think anything we do within our physical realities matters, then we err, because that is like sending up requests for help to the sky. A sky that is constrained by ourselves and our reasonable understanding is deaf to us, because it is like speaking within ourselves. To use Crane?s words, we say to a God, to a universe, that looks upon us, because of our own understanding of it, and is silent, as well as deaf.
However, the denial of a God, or the absence of a theistic outlook, cannot be pinned to Khayyam?s quatrain here. He speaks of an inverted bowl, but does not speak of what is outside the bowl. That is, if one emptied the bowl, and saw a reality such that the self-reference of petitioning to an uncaring sky, perceived by us, and defined by us was absent, then this could be greater than conceptions of theism, or atheism.
To sum, the poem can be a testament to both atheism, and theism. So long as one is defined by one?s own thoughts, one becomes stuck in the idea, the bowl, without knowing what is outside. And this is like the sky we see, under which people have existed like this without change, and which, like Crane?s universe, remains uncaring.
hope that helps.
Cheers !
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