I love the little cyclamen

I grow it in my own garden

The waxy flowers make colour glow

They are my prayer, it shall be so.

When I am gone and in the ground

Plant me flowers like these around

But now I live and sing my songs

In the end there’s nothing wrong.

Since the beginning of the human cultures, so far as we know, man has always experienced, known and felt his own being through the other. This other was always non-human: a fetish (as in the primitive African cultures); an idol (Buddha is the supreme example); anthropomorphic supra-human presences (the gods of the Greeks abundantly testify to that) or God, that unique invention of the monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). Sometime in the sixteenth century all this began to change (cf. Gay 1966). The most revolutionary characteristic of Modernism is the European man’s decision to be his own sole witness and exclude God, more and more, from his private relation to himself

Masud Khan

Hidden selves.