Al-Andalus

As I'd promised myself, I finished the article based on my recent conference paper about al-Andalus and I sent it to "Przegląd Orientalistyczny". Little thing as it is, the very process of writing gave me pleasure. It was enjoyable to delve in the qasida by al-Rundi that has been my favourite since many years. Yet I feel I still didn't reach the point, didn't manage to explain the lasting importance of al-Andalus as persuasively as it should be done. The Andalusian essence that should stay with us and that my duty is to preserve. So immeasurably beyond just writing yet another stupid article.
I think about Titus Burckardt and the Eremos book again. Yesterday, as I strolled through the University Library, I was trying to make my ideas crystallize. Indeed, over the last weeks, Portugal was present in my mind much more than the proposal I've made for Vienna. Gulbenkian's fellowship simply seems much more realistic, and somehow I couldn't charm myself into believing I might ever get the other opportunity. Even if more than one person I know got it before. Yet, as I have said, my thing is to fail while others succeed. Nonetheless, the gist of the problem remains. What to do about the Eremos, wherever I go or stay, how to push the whole thing through. And I start to feel I should do it, I must do it, no matter the support is given or denied to me. 
In the Library, I read a bit through the three enormous volumes of Malraux's The Metamorphosis of the Gods. It felt as if I'm back home, back to my intellectual origins, back to something that is deeply mine, beyond doubt or hesitation. My kind of things. Perhaps I'm anachronistic - the Agambenian kind of anachronism, letting me see straight into the darkness of my time. 

Perhaps I should write on Malraux and The Metamorphosis, and Metamorfoses by Jorge de Sena, and his poem about Cordoba, and al-Andalus, and the two concepts of universalism that had been there, at that time. The colonial one, that of "civilização portuguesa", and, on the other hand, the erudite one, the incessant communion of thinkers, the Andalusian one.
The one that survives in me and in my own Eremos.