Take rock and shatter the mirror we are both resident in
It is said that the poetry of Jelaluddin Rumi mirrors back to us an
ocean of woven speech too intricate and dynamic for any grammarian to
untangle. Reading this observation by Coleman Barks in a collection
titled ‘The Essential Rumi’ it occurred to me that perhaps I am
privileged in that I am happily oblivious to grammar rule out of sheer
ignorance and interrogative sloth.
This does not of course translate automatically to enhanced ability
to extract value from Rumi or, to put another way, to swim in more
exhilarating ways among the poet’s word-ways and silences. Rumi reads to
us, but we listen, talk back, get entangled and slip life-knots in
accordance with our readiness and ability to hear the music between
syllables and inhabit the miniscule spaces between intertwining thought
strings. We come to our own conclusions. We get lost and found to the
extent we subject ourselves to abandonment and suffering. Our end point
is a journey, if we really want to see things that way. Bliss involves a
willingness to unfetter from known comforts and securities, and the
insane sanity of seeking residence in a conversation-wave that is the
word and is not, affirms as it disavows and transcends all categories
and definitions.
Rumi has always intoxicated me with the logic-less but utterly lucid
sobriety of his intoxication. Each read gives insight. A random page of
a good translation (how I wish I had the language or perhaps the
ignorance to judge translation-fidelity!) makes me want to stop writing
even as it urges me never to stop.
Random page
Coleman Barks recounts an encounter, that of Rumi, born in the year
1207 in Balkh (in what is now known as Afghanistan) and then Shiek in
the dervish learning community in Konya, Turkey, and a dervish he met in
1244 by the name of Shams of Tabriz who had travelled what is now called
the Middle East looking for someone who could endure his company. Shams
asks Rumi who was greater, Muhammad or Bestami, the latter having said
‘how great is my glory’ while the former had mused in prayer (to God),
‘we do not know You as we should.’
The question had literally floored Rumi, Barks tells us, but he
finally asserted that Muhammad was the greater because ‘Bestami had
taken one gulp of the divine and stopped there whereas for Muhammad the
way was always unfolding’. Thereafter the two, Rumi and Shams became
inseparable even when circumstances forced the latter to ‘disappear’
creating a void that was filled with Rumi’s transformation into a poet
who began to listen to music and sang hour after hour, whirling around.
Unforgettable conversation
Shams returns and the reuniting kindles old jealousies in the
community which eventually leads to a second disappearance, this time
final, for Shams was (reportedly) murdered. Rumi went looking for his
beloved friend all the way to Damascus where he stopped in an
interminable moment of eternity: ‘Why should I seek? I am the same as
he. His essence speaks through me. I have been looking for myself!’
I remembered an unforgettable conversation that drove home the point.
A man knocks on a friend’s door. The friend within asks, ‘Who is it?’ He
hears the response, ‘It is I’ and is dismissive, ‘Go away!’ He does and
comes back a year later and is asked the same question. This time he
responds, ‘you’. The door opens: ‘Since we are one, there is room for
two of us’.
I have read many versions of this anecdote but the one in this
particular collection came with an elaboration: ‘The double end of the
thread is not what goes through the eye of the needle; it’s the
single-pointed, fined-down, thread end (and) not a big ego-beast with
baggage’.
Let Rumi elaborate further, for he is both master and slave of both
explication and confusion:
We are the mirror as well as the face in it
We are tasting the taste this minute
Of eternity. We are pain
And what cures pain, both. We are
The sweet cold water and the jar that pours.
Would you rather throw stones at the mirror, Rumi asks and answers
with mirror-shattering sublimity: ‘I am your mirror, and here are the
stones.’
Rumi’s poetry
The fascination with the false dichotomy of ‘you and I’ and of course
with ‘mirrors’ and the seeming contradiction of the constant disavowal
with word of their own utility (incessantly calling for silence) are
recurrent themes in Rumi’s poetry. The beloved is Shams and it is also
Rumi. God, as referred, is not an entity that is external but is one
that is resident within patiently awaiting acknowledgment. It is the
ultimate humanizing of the divine and the elevation to divinity of the
human, a concept that makes sense to theists and atheists both.
Perhaps I am both empowered and rendered incapacitated by my
grammar-lack, but I like to think that the beloved, even as he/she is I,
even as it is Shams or the particular name that torments and gives bliss
to heart at a given moment, is also that other impossible and
infuriating creature we raise arms against: the enemy (so-called) that
raises arm against us. It is someone else, and it is I. Self. We make
our own paradise and our personal hells. All because we believe ‘I’ is
tenable. True exhilaration, if I’ve understood Rumi correctly, arrives
through submission to truth (or god, if you like that idea). He spoke to
me this morning thus:
‘I saw you and became empty.
This emptiness, more beautiful than existence,
It obliterates existence, and yet when it comes,
Existence thrives and creates more existence!’
‘And also nothing, a beautiful nothing,’ I would add this morning
when I realized that I am a Sufi and that Rumi was a Buddhist.
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