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Cameras can be pretty cool. And these CCTVs are even cooler. The whole Panopticon deal – where do you go, there are just everywhere, watchful, unblinking, just gazing with that steady, stolid, super-sharp sight. You cannot hide. And with Carl Zeiss it’s all got sharper. But there’s a limit. There are corners. There are frames. All sharpened edges that pretend to preserve the picture. And I said this couple of years ago – that an image is not creation. There is something very art-ificial about images. Quite simply, they are just not real enough. No matter how much I try to capture detail by zooming in, it gets blurred. The more you delve deeper, the more it distorts. After all, how fine can pixels be? Not finer than atoms I imagine. But then again, even the imagination has its limits. And you need to blink it out and enter your simple, inadequate blackout. The zulm of the Zulimaat.

Now enter passages. Or passageways. And you see these signs and symbols and so many arrows pointing in delirious directions. But you need to look up. And you see the ceiling stretching out above you. Like the Vault above. And there are seven of them. And then there is a Beyond. The ceiling is shrinking. How further can it go, you imagine. You see it merging, converging and then you see it – see what – what you can imagine: the point where the divergent directions become one into a single point. And then you see it sharply maybe. And that we are moving, moving a bit too fast, in the same direction, towards that one Point. In architecture and art, this mathematically technical concept is called the Vanishing Point. One of my momentary art teachers said that it’s “…the point where our vision ends, and His Vision Begins.” That stayed with me, and intrigued me quite a bit. And then I saw it, again. How small everything is. No matter how many CCTVs are watching, some man is still shot. Some woman is still mugged. Some kid is still run over. And it happens in a second. But guess what. Something Happened Once-Upon-a-Time, in less than a trillionth of a second, and galaxies, far, far away came rumbling through Passageways. And the Be became a Light so White and Powerful that many black-holes just stood gaping blindly in the dark. And the rest, as they say, is history. We all came stumbling through, sweeping through our rabbit-holes and are still somehow trying to reach that Light at the End of the Tunnel. We are moving there. Just like the ceiling that is trailing towards its own point, just like the skies (all 7 of them) are vaulting Up towards the same point. The sun will blink out. We all need to shed our loads as there is too much to transmit all the time to so many. We phase out. We burn out. We all will blink out, eventually.

And so the camera relies on the mechanism of the eye. Art is either plagiarism or revolution. I can’t agree with Gaugin more. It is that desperate attempt to capture, preserve, and to somehow make things somewhat understandable. Or meaningful. Or even possible. Plagiarism and revolution both need some form of inspiration to become either. An artist is always frustrated with this need and hope to be understood. So an expression gives embodiment to what an artist wants to articulate. But then how much (or how little?) can a camera capture? How far can the Panopticon reach? Bentham and Zeiss have excellent minds, and sharper visions, but every eye has its blunt, blind-spot. There is something going on the other side, outside the frame, behind the scenes, below the earth, inside the sea. The very limitation of our vision – and you don’t need to be a Gaugin, Bentham or Zeiss to see that – is enough to make us understand that something goes on even inside a pixel and an atom. Every ceiling, every floor is stretching out, away, into a speck of distance. And we are in between. The lens, the flash, the lights and action – it’s an enter-and-exit situation, down to the final curtain-call, to fadeout.

Now let’s see a bit more closely. First it was all dark. But then there was Light. And now there is Light upon Light. And all we see are metaphors around us – that approximating and asymptotically frustrating attempt to intend or extend our very limits to see, and so believe. One metaphor would suffice to illuminate the point. Take a look at stars for instance. The true and so, only functions of stars are that they guide the traveler (so they act as compass points), they adorn and they fortify the heavens (so even God has an aesthetic and a pragmatic sense that go together). So against the black-hole sky, the only heavenly evidence is that of those bright stars as they look down upon us (if we see them as specks, they don’t see us any differently). In a sense, it’s only the stars that pointedly remind us of our smallness, even pettiness before the heavens. But the function of the stars is not merely heavenly. They’re always Switched on – through night and day – for those who might lose their way – which we all do. Look up, and you just might find an answer there. Plus, they look pretty. And plus they act as missiles to keep the bad guys away. And later on, the fascination with stars developed into astronomy that furthered into astrology – all attempts to ‘figure out’ things, approximating calculations and decisions and revisions to map stuff out. We desperately try to see through these metaphors so that we can have some meaning. But we don’t see enough, or see closely. And perhaps we are not supposed to see so much. Astronomers and astrologers for sure are always talking tentatively. They are always speaking in signs. For over-explanation and over-simplification, “cheapens the mystery of the cosmos.” I don’t know if Delores Macuccho is a real author. But the woman is true about this. How much or far words can stretch themselves to make meaning possible (if not entirely meaningful) shows that words, like artists, need to explain, capture and preserve. And so metaphors can only attempt to make understanding possible. But without metaphors explanation would be impossible. You need a star to make you see that heavenly bodies exist. You need darkness to know that Light must exist. And the limitation of the metaphor to approximate the truth in itself is an explanation that there is a Bigger Truth Out there. Sitaron se aagey jahaan aur bhi hain… which could (possibly) mean, beyond the stars, Other Worlds exist. Or, beyond the stars Where Others also exist. Take your pick – the metaphor only suggests. Iqbal is long-gone to decode the verse.

The metaphor, then, is merely extending itself to intend a meaning. There is a limit to what we can see. And so, there must be a Truth in some Other World out there that is so vast that it has to elude meaning, for meaning would place a limit on it, make it human, and in doing so, would only be able to or would tend to offer a tentative approximation. There has to be a Light that is unlike everything that we have or can possibly see. That light has to be something, or Someone that can only be explained – for now – through metaphor for It is too brilliant to be relativized within the confines of human construction that can limit its Totality and Absoluteness. Yet, It has to be made known, whether that be shown through a Fire on a mountain that guided, or through clay sparrows that began to Fly, or a Tree that shines with that Light and other colors – the Tree that marks the utmost boundary of the furthest heaven.

And since a very long time I have been trying to unlock this metaphor of the analogy of His Light being a niche, within it, a lamp, which is enclosed in a glass, that shines as a brilliant star, and the star is lit from a tree, that of an olive, that neither is of the East or the West and its oil glows forth of itself, yet no fire has touched it. Switch on all the lights of your mind and imagination, and this Ayah to this very day eludes explanation although the metaphor is aesthetically absolute – light upon light five times over. And yet many of us look at many stars many times over and see nothing, more or less.

I remember once – when I wanted to be an art student – I went to meet my friend who had then taken a compulsory Islamic Studies course. We sat outside the library and we were grappling with the whole deal behind the As-Samiiy‘ and Al-Basiir Names. And we both concluded – through different metaphors of course – that He is the Hearer of All and the Seer of All and we merely hear and see.
“You see, you and I are sitting here outside this library, and we can hear each other. We can hear people around us. We can see each other. And see all this stuff around us. But only He can Hear and See what’s happening inside the library, what happening in the opposite building, what’s happening outside the university’s gate…” Basically – what’s happening everywhere. And suddenly we felt small. Very, very small.

I am finally beginning to understand why He Calls Himself Al-Latiif and Al-Khabiir, and why the two Attributes, together. Arabic is a multivalent language. Rahm technically might mean womb, but it means Mercy too – and of course an etymological link is easily traceable. But Latiif is a fairly elusive word. Some things are also lost in translation – translation being the poorest of metaphors – but one might fumble to say that Latiif means to have the decorum of being able to differentiate between the most delicate of subtleties. So if Al-Basiir means to See all, Latiif means to See through-and-through all, thoroughly. Khabiir is a bit easily comprehensible; it means to be acquainted. So Al-Khabiir would take Latiif to its utmost conclusion – to be Well-Acquainted. So here we are talking of the One, the only One, being Able to See through all things so comprehensively and completely that He is All-Aware of anything and everything, all the time. I am reminded of the phrase that one of my Literature Professors used to use almost enchantingly, “[one] speaks monosemantically of the polysemous.” Metaphors and the meanings are too narrow in their reach. They have to be, for transcendence cannot be tabulated. And these are just two Names that we are talking about that are usually understood as Attributes. An attribute is merely a quality; it’s only a part of the Whole – an element of entirety.

La tudrikuhu alabsaru wahuwa yudriku alabsara wahuwa al-Latiiful-Khabiir.
No Vision can grasp Him, but He grasps all Vision.

I think the ultimate unlocking of all points, then, would be beyond the furthest limit – beyond the ceilings and floors, heavens and horizons, lights and trees – and then we will finally be able to See all what we have never seen before, up close and personal, with no metaphors in between.

And cameras would finally be so unnecessary.