#pilgrimmage

Public marches mingle the language of the pilgrimage, in which one walks to demonstrate one’s commitment, with the strike’s picket line, in which one demonstrates the strength of one’s group and one’s persistence by pacing back and forth, and the festival, in which the boundaries between strangers recede. Walking becomes testifying. Many marches arrive at rally points, but the rallies generally turn participants back into audiences for a few select speakers; I myself have often been deeply moved by walking through the streets en masse and deeply bored by the events after arrival. Most parades and processions are commemorative, and this moving through the space of the city to commemorate other times knits together time and place, memory and possibility, city and citizen, into a vital whole, a ceremonial space in which history can be made. The past becomes the foundation on which the future will be built, and those who honor no past may never make a future...

On ordinary days we each walk alone or with a companion or two on the sidewalks, and the streets are used for transit and for commerce. On extraordinary days—on the holidays that are anniversaries of historic and religious events and on the days we make history ourselves—we walk together, and the whole street is for stamping out the meaning of the day. Walking, which can be prayer, sex, communion with the land, or musing, becomes speech in these demonstrations and uprisings, and a lot of history has been written with the feet of citizens walking through their cities. Such walking is a bodily demonstration of political or cultural conviction and one of the most universally available forms of public expression. It could be called marching, in that it is common movement toward a common goal, but the participants have not surrendered their individuality as have those soldiers whose lockstep signifies that they have become interchangeable units under an absolute authority. Instead they signify the possibility of common ground between people who have not ceased to be different from each other, people who have at last become the public. When bodily movement becomes a form of speech, then the distinctions between words and deeds, between representations and actions, begin to blur, and so marches can themselves be liminal, another form of walking into the realm of the representational and symbolic—and sometimes, into history.

The last Sura of the Quran: [Sura 114,1] Say, "I seek refuge in the Lord of mankind.”

 The first ‘Sura’ of Enlightenment: [Novalis] “The full life bellows on like an endless sea. Just one night of [prophetic sic!] ecstasy - One eternal poem - And all our sun is god’s face." 

 It is Novalis insight into transcendental poetry: "poetry dissolves the being of others in its own”that fulfills the criteria of the first step of enlightenment critique against religion and overwrites the last Sura with the knowledge, that we seek refuge in ourselves, for we are the lord among the lords that constitute our common humanity. 

Saudia successfully concluded the first phase of Hajj operations for 1445H, transporting over 509,000 pilgrims on 3,400 flights from more than 150 destinations with an 88% On-Time Performance rate. The last arrival flight, carrying 445 pilgrims, landed in Jeddah from Riyadh on June 25, 2024. Read More Business News Clean Energy is Essential for Sustainable Development for…