Professor Martin Bidney

A Hundred Villanelles / A Hundred Blogatelles Professor Martin Bidney

A villanelle is a brief poem with a double refrain, suited for personal wisdom writing. A blogatelle is a hybrid word: blog + bagatelle (meaning a light, playful piece of music). The dialogues between casual blogatelle and focused villanelle offer a continuing conversation to engage the reader. My hundred colloquies have themes taken from the Sufi thinkers. (1) Each of us shares with the origin or cause of the universe an inmost Being or Essence that is unknowable. (2) So everything in yourself or in the surrounding world can be a metaphor of the Unmanifest, the Unknown in both you and the world. (3) Every myth, religion, creed or legend is a metaphor of that same twofold Unknown in the individual soul and the surrounding Boundless. Every formulation or imagining is a glass to hold the water of Spirit, giving it form and color. Your nature and your world - your personality and your individual sexuality - are each a spectrum, a continuum, where metaphors can blend, change, and switch form or meaning. Metaphoric disclosures of the Unknown are partial, oblique, and momentary. Their unboundedness of implication encourages alertness to each moment of your experience. A disclosure of the unknown can be an epiphany configured in the senses. It can also take on the nature of a summons by a potential arising in your awareness, a means to acquire fuller Being, greater nearness to your own depth of Unknown Being. So here's a final theme. (4) Be open to the summons of potential, as to the call of an angel, friend, mentor, companion, or other metaphoric Name of the Unnamable - each one of these uttering a call of the heart to become who you are.