your bridge home
Saints and Poets
Everyone knew that dying in Kashi guaranteed liberation. So at the end of his life he left, deliberately, for the town where it supposedly did not work.
He made cloth for a living, and it is all over the poetry.
Kabir was a julaha, a weaver, in Banaras, raised, in the received account, by Niru and Nima, a Muslim weaving couple. He worked a loom. He is believed to have become a disciple of Ramananda, the Vaishnava teacher of the city.
The trade gave him his vocabulary, and he never went looking for another one. The body is a garment. The self is thread. Life is a length of cloth on the loom that somebody is going to ask for back. In his most famous image, the cloth was woven with great care. Warp and weft counted. Every thread laid true.
It is handed over at the end. And the question is what condition it is in.
The cloth I was given, I have kept as it came to me.
That is a weaver's boast, and a weaver's theology.
And it cannot be translated into the language of any institution at all.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.