QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO:  The work of Dutch sound artist and activist Samuel Vriezen around Dutch and British colonialism, ecocide, and Shell Oil in southeast Nigeria’s Ogoniland surrounds, amongst many potent concerns, the role of obscurity as a tool for both exploitation and resistance. This is my first interaction with Vriezen, who I was told was unparalleled as composer and conceptualist in the field of geopolitics and art. In my ongoing work in Amsterdam, my colleague Joost Baars – Dutch poet, existential conceptualist, kind-ling, kind-ling, and intrepid intellect who presented my work Sonderbauten on multidisciplinary artmaking around rape-as-weapon-of-war at the kinetic Amsterdam hotspot Perdu –  thought it absurd that Samuel Vriezen and I were not in each others intersecting orbits, and created a nexus of fascination between the two of us that proved impossible to escape…not that escape was desirable.

But orbits being as they are, predictable yet enigmatic, Vriezen and I discovered commonalities of aesthetics, geopolitics, human rights activism, artistic conceptualism, and mathematics. He is a nuanced murmurator, and his ponderings about obscurity as a tool have transformed my approach to nearly everything. And our conversation about Ogoniland, African NGOs, the Niger Delta, and Royal Dutch Shell opened windows into commonalities of resources, and the value and precariousness of obscurity as a strategy, a tactic, and a source of potential energy for both repression and liberation.

Samuel Vriezen is an Amsterdam-based composer and insatiable thinker who has written many works for chamber ensembles that have been performed worldwide. Vriezen’s work shows an interest in non-standard ways of organizing performer coordination and interaction and in exploring the panoramic contrapuntal possibilities that such methods of ensemble playing give. His website is a listening vortex, so after reading this conversation, pull out a pair of headphones, close your eyes, and tune in to his works that expand horizons far past the vanishing point.

Vriezen is also a poet and a pianist. He has written many text compositions (or polyphonic poems), and his writing (including poetry, translations and essays) has been published in many literary journals including the Dutch Parmentier, the Flemish yang and the French Action Poétique. As a pianist, he is most known for his unique virtuoso rendition of Tom Johnson’s Chord Catalogue. Together with Dante Boon, Vriezen produced the CD recording of Johnson’s Symmetries on Karnatic Lab Records.

VRIEZEN: I love the idea of scrying, since it combines the notion of bringing forth of what is occluded with a sense of magic. So it’s natural to think in terms of the undervisible and the underdiscussed.

WIKSWO: Occlusion is one of the best words – afsluiting in Dutch, if I’m not mistaken? It fills the mouth differently. Occlusion is hard and sharply articulated, with tongue and teeth gnashing, and afsluiting seems entirely slippery, involving the lips and a lot of sneakiness. In dentistry, it refers to the “the bringing of the opposing surfaces of the teeth of the two jaws into contact.” For our purposes, generally, it means stopping, blocking, closing up, closing off.

Scrying is frictive. There is friction against the surface that prevents knowledge, sight, vision, information, and the friction causes the surface to shift in such a way that what is hidden is revealed.

VRIEZEN: One theme that has been on my mind recently was quite related to that but in an almost opposed way. I was planning an essay, that I ended up not managing to write, commissioned around the theme of media and the public. I had in fact just completed an extensive book of essays called ‘Netwerk in eclips’, which was organized around the theme of how network structures (such as in social media, but in many other forms as well) create poetics and ways of dealing with the world that can at one and the same time be emancipatory (non-hierarchical, etc), but also will always have to miss out on things – because you can’t see what the network technology you dispose of will not let you see. Thus, networks span entire worlds but they also always eclipse some (or are eclipsed by what they can’t know).

WIKSWO: You can’t see what […] you dispose of will not let you see. It’s fascinating to think of our own garbage being invisible to us, and furthermore that what our decision to throw something away is a decision to make something invisible. Because algorithms filter, and the people behind the coding of the algorithms filter, and the users filter, and time itself filters, commerce filters, analysts of our identities filter (“this is only of interest to Latinx men and we have decided you are not a Latinx man nor would you share his interests”), time filters (for every moment we are not consuming data, there is data that is not seen), space filters (if we do not have access to wireless or devices, we are excluded from the visible), our brains filter at many levels – the conscious mind, the subconscious mind, the unconscious mind, the deep brain, the root amygdala that filters threats and danger, pleasure and desire.

So there are are potentially unlimited nodes of filtration, yet extremely limited means to over-ride that filtration. Certainly, if the filters are to be created, altered, or eliminated, that requires a vast amount of effort, which means even more time and deliberate, conscious decision-making.

It also means that things can fall through cracks intentionally as well as unintentionally. Deliberate obscurity. I think of the erasure of any trace of the existence of certain intelligence operatives or special forces warfighters. Or a former employer of mine who engaged an anti-publicist to make sure our work went unnoticed. Obscurity can be a tactic that supports many different strategies – from the honorable to the dishonorable.

VRIEZEN: Absolutely, there’s all that! Maybe the paradox that I was most interested in, though, is that our very techniques of being open to the world – the networks we build up, completely open-structured and rhizomatic as the case may be, may also close things off. If I reach out to A, B, and C, and they again reach out to X, Y, Z and X’, Y’, Z’ and X’’, Y’’, Z’’, my extended network may end up so open as to touch the entire world.

But this precise process sets up hierarchies – in that D turns out to be on a far chain, for example, or not linked up at all. In other words, not even the extended network world can ever be entire.

WIKSWO: Exciting and frustrating…

VRIEZEN: After finishing the book, I started to get more interested in obscurity as such. I was trying to understand how the obscure, that which is undervisible, could actually at times condition what is public – but on condition of not being brought out in the open. As if lines of force are never really out there in the world, but subtend it, and condition it only on the basis of remaining not quite there.

WIKSWO: Lines of force are very potent whether they are visible or invisible – again, any strategy of force is only as strong as its tactics. And sometimes force wants to be seen: the crushed streets of Vilnius after the Soviet military parade tanks crushed them took nearly a year to repair, and during that time a very visible line of force was unobscurable. Today, the roads are re-paved and hence the line of force is obscured, but anyone who inhabits the Baltic states adjoining Russia are quite aware of these lines, regardless of whether they are hidden.

I love your use of the word subtend in this context – it derives from the Latin subtendere, from sub- ‘under’ + tendere ‘stretch.’  Like fascia that connects muscles to tendon and bone. We rarely think of it, but are constantly under its force or else we would separate into separated structural components. A leg would spontaneously fall off. Lines of force that stretch under us, and hold things in place that we may not ever be aware of. As you say, it’s not quite there. It’s there, but not quite.

I also think of my various processes of fieldwork in human rights violation zones, and exploring the ecology and topography of land will reveal certain things. I learned to look to see how trees are bent to see if roads were there. How variations in the soil elevation can indicate military earthworks, or graves. How certain plants are typically only found in iron-rich soil – that’s been a tactic for finding more than a few mass graves. You look for where the plants are clustered, and then notice if there is an absence of those plants in the surrounding vicinity.

VRIEZEN: Now, this is a really complicated theme to write about. Because the moment you bring something out, does it still work? Or does it become one more thing in the world, at the price of relinquishing some of its secret powers?

WIKSWO: To me, this is a function of time. There has to be a conscious strategy around time. Allowing something to be hidden on a timeline is critical in many situations – spilling secrets without a larger plan can endanger the overall goal of the mission by putting people into danger, and it can alert perpetrators to obscure evidence.

There is definitely power in secrecy – a sort of condensed energy that is contained and compressed into a small space. That’s tangible power. When the secret is released, it can be released in such a way that the power is dissipated and dissolves ineffectively, or without function or consequence. Or the secret can be released and its force, or power, be directed towards an intent. For example, whistleblowers who have to know the exact point at which the release of a secret’s power is most potent.

VRIEZEN: I wonder if that might mean that some part of the secret has to remain withdrawn. I guess even whistleblowers, in order to be effective, have to stage the leaking of their secret in the right way – which means providing it with a public front end, so to speak, which suggests that a less public rear end might somehow subsist, too. If only because it will incite a, hopefully productive, type of paranoia in the public. “If all this could have happened without our knowing the first thing about it, then what else is there?” At the very least, you can never know whether there’s more you don’t know. But this is perhaps primarily a metaphysical musing.

WIKSWO: Of course this brings to mind various fieldwork experiences, where I used secrets to draw attention to secrets. If I used Stalin-era cameras to photograph an unmarked KBG torture facility, the only people who would literally see what I was doing were people who knew (a) what a KBG standard issue camera looks like and (b) why I might be focusing on that particular building. Therefore, I could use secrecy and signs to attract a particular demographic of people I would otherwise be unable to find. Once the connections were made, information could be exchanged, and then the power of the secret increased so that later on, when revealed, it was done in a deliberate method within a deliberate strategy with deliberate consequences.

However, if I had stood in front of the building with a sign that said THIS IS A FORMER KGB TORTURE FACILITY, that would have released the power of that secret into a rather diffused blast of knowledge that could quickly dissipate, could not be directed or controlled, and introduced more chaos.

I love your invocation of secret powers – your idea that making a secret into something mundane can remove its potency. There are ways of keeping things on a need-to-know basis, and I am fascinated beyond limit by how that can be done. There is a South Carolina Sea Island where a particular plantation was used for recreational sport hunting of enslaved Africans, and the killing of the slave typically happened when the white planters drove the slave towards the sea. So on this particular island, there is a bottle tree maintained at that site. In African-American sea island Gullah culture, a bottle tree is created specifically to capture evil in glass bottles. Most white people think they are decorative. So rather than endangering a community by protesting the site itself, activists in secret put up a tree that serves as a warning, a memorial, a means of protection, of witnessing, of remembering, of exposure. But it’s all still secret.

VRIEZEN: That’s a striking example, in that I would say that the capturing of evil, too, has a dynamic of working with what is occluded and what is out in the open. It’s very interesting that glass could have this function.

For me, one point of entry into all this was my research into the history and politics of ecocidal pollution by oil interests in the Niger Delta, which I have been working on for a radio play – but also, because my loved one was working for some years for an environmental activist organization that was trying to bring out the story of Niger Delta pollution in order to put legal pressure on Royal Dutch Shell for a lawsuit held in The Netherlands, on behalf of certain farmers from the Goi, Oruma and Ikot Ada Udo communities in Ogoniland. Researching this history, I became impressed with the many levels at which obscurity plays a vital role, in this particular case but also in its general historical background, to the extent that a lack of public transparency is the medium within which it seems to live at all.

WIKSWO: What was the strategy for bringing out this story? Or rather, stories? I can’t imagine that the complexities of Ogoniland contexts would be familiar to Dutch citizens – certainly not any kind of fully inclusive, prismatic, intersectional context that hasn’t already been filtered through a process of accessibility to white Europeans, or consumers of Shell Oil…

VRIEZEN: Well, the issues around Shell have been kept in the news diligently for decades – particularly since the murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the other “Ogoni Nine” in the 90s by dictator Sani Abacha, something that Shell may still be held co-accountable for. Here, I greatly admire Amnesty International, who have refused to close this case, and keep trying to bring it to court.

WIKSWO: One of my earliest employers in 1988 was Amnesty International, the International branch not the US branch. We accomplished so much in an era much like today when autocratic governments were committing some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. And yet I left in 1993 following a class-action lawsuit led by my colleague Bailey Grey and I surrounding rampant sexual harassment, discrimination, and sexual assault that went all the way up the chain of command to the international director.

We told stories that needed to be known, but AI as an NGO silenced at least fifty percent of its membership from talking about the abuses of its own predators. This was hugely enlightening about the role of international aid and human rights agencies to call out the demons of others, but not of themselves.

Because of our coalition, Amnesty International had to create one of the first legally binding international sexual harassment policies, under great internal protest.

Yet at the same time, we were publicizing crimes that would never otherwise have been known. It was tricky to live in that liminal space where we were helping and hurting. Talk about obscurity as both tactic for oppression and liberation…

At any rate, in your experience with Amnesty International and other efforts to resist these crimes in Nigeria, how successful do you think they were in keeping Shell, the Ogoni Nine, and Sani Abacha under pressure?

VRIEZEN: So quite a bit of the story is vaguely known to the public. But a lot is also practically unknowable, in that reliable knowledge infrastructures are very difficult to set up in a zone that is so deeply affected by strife, and where often even to gather information you’ll probably need some sort of protection from an interested party.

WIKSWO: It’s too bad that mercenaries aren’t more readily available to support the safety of people working against predators. We might get better data if we could hire predators to keep us safe from predators. How accurate or complete do you think is the information making its way to a global community?

VRIEZEN: I have noticed that scholarly work by local experts, too, has to rely on very incomplete data. Not to mention that I realized that there are also all sorts of complex dynamics happening within and among the local peoples themselves.

In the end, I chose not to bring out ‘the story’ so much as draw its outlines in a negative and speculative way. I do have one Ogoni character at the centre – a woman who was actually bearing witness about the oil leaks in her community for a Dutch TV audience. Unfortunately, the footage was never used, but I had her words spoken in the radio play. Around her voice, I have organized three other voices, who only ask ‘what if?’-questions. These questions are basically ever more historical variations on the primal question, ‘how could this have happened? and could it have been otherwise?’ These voices are not locals, but they enact my own distance from the story and try to construct the narrative space for it, though entirely out of a subjunctive mode of narrating. My wager is that this negative narrative space then implies thousands of actors across centuries of history for listeners. There aren’t quite filled in, but could be, maybe will be some day. Say, if groups like Amnesty keep going at their cases.

WIKSWO: I think this conjuring, or scrying of voices that you are doing – as a composer and as an activist – is quite compelling. Negative narrative space is at the core of work around obscured or silenced atrocities, because it is an accurate and tangible representation of the negative space that is left out of the official story.

VRIEZEN: As it is, the obscurity of the situation presents practical problems for activism, as it is precisely the intention of activists to ‘translate’ these histories into the public medium of transparency, which will allow them to get a handle on what happens over there, and fight towards justice.

Yet this at the same time requires molding the story to certain narrative formats (e.g. the television documentary) which can obscure the high level of complexity of these histories.

In a sense, they have to obscure the obscurity.

WIKSWO: This was my final blow in deciding to no longer work as a field writer and strategist for NGOs – non-governmental human rights organizations. It became agonizing to watch the filtration happen as I became immersed in such volatile and complex contexts – for one thing, I realized that reductivism was actually causing tremendous harm to all involved. Practical, tangible harm as well as ethical and moral harm. Secondly, there are always people behind everything, and any trust and reciprocity that I might build to work with both perpetrators and victims was entirely dependent upon how trustworthy my employers were. If they decided to “shape” a “story” in a certain way, I was powerless to control how my own work made its way into the media, into public policy, into military decisions, and so forth.

Obscuring the obscurity is a tool that should not be placed in the hands of anyone – institutionally or individually – who is not repelled by reductivism. I think reductivism is highly attractive for a myriad of reasons. Reduced means easily expressed, easily digested, easily distributed, easily argued, easily defended, easily used as a versatile tool, easily manipulated. And that’s profoundly attractive to agents of power who do not have the best interests of humanitarian justice at heart.

The primary reason behind forming SCRY is to pull apart the notion of obscurity, invisibility, and occlusion to see where the strategy is involved. What are the tactics and outcomes. How are these forces, or powers, actually activated? Is it always malevolent?

I think of the physics concept of potential energy. There is enormous potential energy in the state of obscurity. And I do think of it as a state, as well as an action, as well as a force, a tool, a tactic…

VRIEZEN: I also noticed that obscurity is in fact a generator of power mechanisms, both oppressive ones and, I find myself wondering, potentially liberating ones too?

For example, it is important for Shell to be able to cast doubt on the origins of oil leaks. They make essential use of the fact that there is such lack of clarity about precise events in the region in order to evade accountability.

Conversely, local resisting organizations also exist within an obscure region, where it is not always decidable whether they are ‘true’ emancipatory movements, gangs, mercenaries, ethnic interest groups, or anything in between (as actors may also shift allegiance in very fluid ways – which can also be understood as pure personal survival tactic).

WIKSWO: You bring up a very important fact of obscurity being a survival tactic. When I was in North Africa, Tunisian friends would sit in their fifty year old cars chatting at the impromtu gas stations, which were just large colorful plastic jugs of gasoline stacked up for sale to pour directly into your tank. Armored SUVs with Libyan plates would fly past, all shiny and expensive, and my friends would say, thank goodness we don’t have anything here that anyone wants. And they were talking about oil, uranium, and other resources that their neighbors Algeria and Libya had. Because the obscurity meant that they could be invisible to foreign and domestic powers who would exploit the citizens at any cost.

Yet the Magreb or North Africa, or Africa in general contains a network of parties that, as you say, have largely obscure missions and counter-missions, and sub-missions and cover-missions, filled with people who range from the most powerful in the world to the most powerless. This is true of any place that contains desirable and valuable exploitable resources. Reductivist humanitarian efforts that attempt any kind of deliberate revelation of secrets in that region seemed – and still seems – to me to be truly idiotic.

But then, perhaps idiocy is a deliberate tool of colonialism.

To ignore any kind of inherent complexity in indigenous contexts and then just plead ignorance or good intentions when the trail of destruction leaves generations of dead bodies in its wake? There are nearly as many casualties brought about by the reductivism of humanitarian agencies as the deliberate harm caused by other players. And this is tragic, because it also lets us know that humanitarian agencies have been almost entirely polluted by colonialist tactics, because we haven’t taken the time to sit down in complex context and refuse to use the familiar tools.

I think the French, Dutch, and British in Africa definitely exploited secrecy as well as willful ignorance, willful obscurity, willful occlusion. These are tactics refined over centuries. What’s concerning, as an American, is that the youthfulness of our nation means that our overlapping ignorance and innocent affords us more deniability, and it’s easier to evade accountability. I’m not sure I shared a single opinion during my time there, simply because I was unable to formulate any that I thought were accurate. It was impossible for me to navigate the secrets.

VRIEZEN: Besides willful occlusion there was also the colonial imposition of transparency! In South-East Nigeria, for instance, the British wreaked havoc on existing social structures by installing what they called ‘indirect rule’, creating local power hierarchies where none existed. This is of course a violent form of making-transparent to Empire.

WIKSWO: Making-transparent to Empire as violence. You are spot on.

VRIEZEN: On reading more about the history of the region, I became aware that social structures were often highly dependent on levels of secrecy – such as cults, playing important roles in social life, which today having become models for all sorts of informal power structures, including student organizations, gangs, as well as the use of magic.

WIKSWO: Levels of secrecy is intriguing – we can visualize this as a hierarchical structure, like a tower with multiple floors. But in truth, it’s a quantum topology. Or a quantum mechanics environment that is unfamiliar to what most people consider as a normal structure. But like a brane, or a wormhole, or  in which  we can visualize it as an n-dimensional matrix, in which the navigation is not lateral but rather highly dynamic. Like a brane, or a wormhole, or a Hilbert Space where the rules of navigation around the unknown are, well, largely unknown.

That’s certainly not dissimilar to the practice of magic. The search for dark matter architectures – seeing what we cannot see by noticing the light that is obscured by it. If you simply rip away the unseen, the darkness, then all that knowledge and information contained in the darkness is lost.

VRIEZEN: Reading the novels of Chinua Achebe, you can for instance see the vital role of masks of the ancestor cults as a social force in historical Igboland – and it is precisely when the mask is violently challenged that colonial Christianity gets to assert itself and its regimes of visibility over existing structure.

But I realized that power formations always seem to have this element of the hidden – the mask, the ritual, the code of communication, but also the deal, or the executive order that can be made public because it leaves lots of room for interpretation, but those for whom it is intended will decipher its true intent. This way obscurity can trump the transparency of the document.

WIKSWO: Somehow this reminds me of queer history as well, and of multi-racial history, where ideas of “passing” and “realness” were practiced in order to maintain secrecy of someone’s private identity. Being in a relationship with a female warfighter during don’t-ask-don’t-tell meant that she and I had to create a complicated set of secret identities, overlaid with masks, and then more masks. There was something incredibly romantic and intimate about that process: we shared a state of being together that was ours alone. Of course, it was also completely repressive. We had other couple friends who were queer and in active service, and the signaling that we sent to identify and protect each other would have been completely invisible to anyone outside the queer military underground.

Without romanticizing it, it was romantic – a kind of tryst that felt sacred. It contained a kind of power, even though the overriding elephant in the room was that we lacked a huge amount of power. We had to hide. Yet in that hiding, a culture emerged that I have never seen the equal of. A level of trust-building, tenderness, intimacy that was lost when we were, in essence, liberated.

This sounds like I’m romanticizing our own oppression. I just think for all the progressives who scolded me for not being “out of the closet,” they were not seeing everything I could see.

VRIEZEN: Which presents some intriguing conundrums. We on the left tend to like transparency, analysis, theorizing, bringing things to light. Then we’re real moderns. And this is maybe our best weapon, but it requires the public sphere to acknowledge our sense of justice and to have the power to express it in the first place. Which has to be established – another fight entirely, which, I think, might well have to make use of tactics that themselves make use of the powers of obscurity as a generative moment.

WIKSWO: Outing someone is a violent act. And yet the left will espouse nonviolence at every conceivable opportunity. And then commit violence, but because it is not with a gun… I can probably best illustrate this with an example. Earlham is a Quaker college in Indiana, with core values of transparency, honesty, truth, simplicity, and nonviolence. There were persistent issues of sexual violence on campus, and someone decided it would be a good idea in the name of transparency, honesty, truth, simplicity, and nonviolence to hold a gathering in which all survivors of sexual predation were asked to stand up and tell our stories. Wonderful, right? Presto – we are no longer suffering in silence.

Of course what happened is that the gathering drew perpetrators, who had a hit list of every student on campus who was especially vulnerable to predatory abuse. And so many students who stood up were targeted and selected and later attacked – some quite violently – because this simplistic view of transparency as a weapon against oppression was bullshit. The weapon was loaded and brandished about irresponsibly by untrained people who could not support our safety, our well-being, and had no sense of consequence.

The weapon would have been perhaps better used to ask all the predators to stand up. That would have achieved completely different outcomes and consequences. But it never occurred to them. So these tools we have, most of them are completely corrupted by the very people we are trying to fight. And so we simply perpetuate injustice, all the while telling ourselves that we are furthering justice.

VRIEZEN: After all, we want to influence the future, to make it more just. But it is precisely the future that cannot be precisely outlined, that must therefore be cut out of the stuff of obscurity.

Here is where I really like your magazine title. Scrying is not just the bringing to light of a hidden reality – though such documentary labor is definitely of vital importance – but it is also trying to glimpse a future – as well as the resonances of those pasts (or the timelines of what could have been) that are lost to documentary tactics.

WIKSWO:  So many lovely images – glimpsing a future out of the resonances of the past. Like the light from a supernova. Another lovely image, to cut the future out of the stuff of obscurity. The unknown that has no defined or contained shape, only partial glimpses of a curve here, an angle there, a glitter of shadow and light.

I chose to begin scrying with people who I believe can offer alternatives to fate, and guide us more towards a destiny. Fate is what happens when consequence follows consequence, a perpetuation of the past into the present into the future, a Möbius strip of repetition. Destiny is when we exercise agency – as you say, to influence the future and make it more just.

When we consider those who scry – shamans, prophets, seeresses, sibyls – there is a distinguishing line between those who “tell” the future because they have seen it, and those who speak to the present in such a way as to influence the future. And I am most interested in the second. It’s dynamic, and fluid, and permits free will as well as demands accountability.

Leaving the future obscure means leaving options open. Means the map is not yet made. The territory is as yet uncharted. It is unoccupied. It is uncolonized. It is in a state of liberation, but there is an event horizon where we can poison it with our ills, or we can let its obscurity inspire us to think of new alternatives. To call something that does not exist into being.

VRIEZEN: What I wonder is, can dealing with the secret, the obscure, and giving its powers their due respect, also somehow help us glimpse a more just future into being?

WIKSWO: I think respecting the unknown and pausing at its threshold to gain self-knowledge, context, and humility is critical to a more just future. Admitting ignorance but not celebrating it. Seeing secrets but not ripping them apart. There is a sacredness to the abyss, or the void, or the event horizon where one must prepare oneself to be honorable as one passes over the threshold. And rather than plowing forward with arrogance of incomplete knowledge, it would be an improvement to hesitate, give respect, express humility, and pay homage to the unknown as we unite with it.

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May your umbilical cord be the root of a life of substance and meaning, may you scry fruitfully, and may you  find comfort in looking up at the sky for the birds that are watching you reach reach reach, the stars who have sent their light to you from long ago, and the dark matter that reminds us of the beauty of what mysteries we cannot see.

HÁÁDĘ́Ę́ʼÍSH ÍIYISÍÍ NANINÁ?

háádą̀ą̀, hádą́ą́’ ałkʼidą́ą́ʼ

ੴ ਸਤਿ ਨਾਮੁ ਕਰਤਾ ਪੁਰਖੁ ਨਿਰਭਉ ਨਿਰਵੈਰੁ ਅਕਾਲ ਮੂਰਤਿ ਅਜੂਨੀ ਸੈਭੰ ਗੁਰ ਪ੍ਰਸਾਦਿ ॥

॥ ਜਪੁ ॥

ਆਦਿ ਸਚੁ ਜੁਗਾਦਿ ਸਚੁ ॥

ਹੈ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਹੋਸੀ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ॥੧॥

קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹש