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.
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.
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 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.’
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.
This article was first published on July 6, 2011 in the 'Daily News'
Malinda Seneviratne is
a freelance writer. Twitter: malindasene. Email: malindasenevi@gmail.com.
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