I don’t read enough poetry. There are too many demands, jostling each other for a seat in the front row. “Me, me” shouts the paperwork I brought home from the office. “No, me,” whines the stack of unread magazines, the unpaid bills. Yet how rewarded I felt when I put everything aside the other night to read these poems by Jalaluddin Rumi. All those other voices suddenly seemed stupid and shrill.
Rumi, the thirteenth century Sufi mystic, is one of the greatest poets of all time. A pure and wild love animates his words. In the Islamic tradition, he is considered not only a literary genius but a saint, whose personal example inspired the founding of a major religious order. He was, in the words of Edmund Helminski, “a figure of almost prophetic dimensions. He became for some Muslims almost a second Muhammed, for Christians a second Christ, and for Jews a second Moses. Among those present at his funeral procession were people of different religious traditions, each of whom claimed that Jalaluddin had brought him to a deeper understanding of his own faith.”
This Longing is the third volume of Rumi poems translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne, and published by Threshold Books. The poems in this book are drawn from the Mathnawi, Rumi’s masterwork, which runs to six volumes. Amazingly, the Mathnawi was spoken aloud. The 51,000 verses were taken down by Rumi’s scribe, Husam Chelebi.
Coleman Barks writes, “I have not tried, of course, to duplicate the music of the Persian. These versions of the Mathnawi are set in the free verse of American poetry, one of the strongest and most spiritually open and questing traditions in Western writing. But the majestic intricacy of the original, its reeflike porousness, cannot be brought over in free verse. The Mathnawi is a complex, mature work — like Shakespeare’s tragedies and late romances — which cannot, of course, be translated and yet must.”
There is “an enormous generosity and humor at play here, and at work,” Barks continues. “Fresh, wild moments within a profound peace. Drunken, lyric dissolvings within a starry clarity. Spontaneous pleasure within discipline. . . . It’s one of the most compelling texts, sacred or secular, that I know of. All I can do, really, is to point to it, like some unlikely visitor from Chattanooga faced with the Himalayas.”
— Ed.
Two Kinds Of Intelligence
There are two kinds of intelligence: One acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says, collecting information from the traditional sciences as well as from the new sciences. With such intelligence you rise in the world. You get ranked ahead or behind others in regard to your competence in retaining information. You stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more marks on your preserving tablets. There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you. A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid, and it doesn’t move from outside to inside through the conduits of plumbing-learning. This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you, moving out.
Send The Chaperones Away
Inside me a hundred beings are putting their fingers to their lips and saying, “That’s enough for now. Shhhhh.” Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river. When the Ocean is searching for you, don’t walk to the language-river. Listen to the Ocean, and bring your talky business to an end. Traditional words are just babbling in that Presence, and babbling is a substitute for sight. When you sit down beside your Beloved, send the chaperones away, the old women who brought you together. When you are mature and with your love, the love-letters and matchmakers seem irritating. You might read those letters, but only to teach beginners about love. One who sees grows silent. When you’re with one of those, be still and quiet, unless he asks you to talk. Then draw the words out as I do this poem with Husam, the Radiance of God. I try to stop talking, but he makes me continue. Husam, if you are in the Vision, why do you want me to say words? Maybe it’s like the poet Abu Nuwas, who said in Arabic, Pour me some wine, and talk to me about the wine. The Cup is at my mouth, but my ear interrupts, “I want some.” O Ear, what you get is the heat. You turn red with this wine. But the ear says, “I want more than that!”
When We Pray Alone
We are brought thick desserts, and we rarely refuse them. We worship devoutly when we’re with others. Hours we sit, though we get up quickly, after a few minutes, when we pray alone. We hurry down the gullet of our wantings. But these qualities can change, as minerals in the ground rise inside trees and become tree, as a plant faces an animal and enters the animal, so a human can put down the heavy body-baggage and be light.
The Lost Camel
You’ve lost your camel, my friend, and everyone’s giving you advice. You don’t know where your camel is, but you do know these casual directions are wrong. Even someone who hasn’t lost a camel, who’s never even owned a camel, gets in on the excitement, “Yes, I’ve lost my camel too. A big reward for whoever finds it.” He says this in order to be part-owner of your camel when you find it. If you say to anyone’s suggestion, “I don’t think so,” the imitator says the same thing immediately. When good information comes, you know it right away, but not the imitator. That bit of information is medicine to you. It gives color to your face and strength to your body. Your eyes brighten. Your feet get lively and agile. You say, “Thank You, my Friend, this Truth you give feels like freedom to me. Please go in front. Be the leader! You have the scent of my camel better than I do.” But the imitator doesn’t feel the intensity of those clues. He hears your wild outcries, though, and gets some inkling of what it might be like to be close to finding a lost camel. He has, indeed, lost a camel, but he doesn’t know it! Wanting and imitating someone else’s wanting has blinded him. But as he follows along in the searching, calling out what the others call out, suddenly he sees his own camel browsing there, the one he didn’t know he’d lost. Only then, does he become a seeker. He turns aside and goes by himself toward his camel. The sincere one asks, “Why have you left my search?” “Up until now I was a fake. I was flattering you, because I wanted to be part of your glory. Now that I’ve separated myself from you, I am more truly connected to you. I know what you’re doing. Before, I was stealing camel-descriptions from you. When my spirit saw its own camel, that seeing filled everything. Now all my insincerity and copycat words have changed to virtues. They brought me here! I was sowing my own seed, though I thought I was working for nothing. Like a thief I crept and entered a house, and it was my own home!” Be fiery, cold one, so heat can come. Endure rough surfaces that smooth you. The subject of all this is not two camels. There’s only one lost camel, but language has difficulty saying that. Muhammed said, “Whoever knows God, stammers.” Speaking is like an astrolabe pointing at the sky. How much, really, can such a device know? Especially of that Other Sky, to which this one is a piece of straw? That Other Sun, in which this is a fleck of dust?
Moses And The Shepherd
Moses heard a shepherd on the road praying, “God, where are You? I want to help You, to fix Your shoes and comb Your hair. I want to wash Your clothes and pick the lice off. I want to bring You milk, to kiss Your little hands and feet when it’s time for You to go to bed. I want to sweep Your room and keep it neat. God, my sheep and goats are Yours. All I can say, remembering You, is ayyyy and ahhhhhhhhh.” Moses could stand it no longer. “Who are you talking to?” “The One who made us, and made the earth and made the sky.” “Don’t talk about shoes and socks with God! And what’s this with Your little hands and feet? Such blasphemous familiarity sounds like you’re chatting with your uncles. Only something that grows needs milk. Only someone with feet needs shoes. Not God! Even if you meant God’s human representatives, as when God said, ‘I was sick, and you did not visit me,’ even then this tone would be foolish and irreverent. Use appropriate terms. Fatima is a fine name for a woman, but if you call a man Fatima, it’s an insult. Body-and-birth language are right for us on this side of the river, but not for addressing the Origin, not for Allah.” The shepherd repented and tore his clothes and sighed and wandered out into the desert. A sudden revelation came then to Moses. God’s Voice: You have separated Me from one of my own. Did you come as a Prophet to unite, or to sever? I have given each being a separate and unique way of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge. What seems wrong to you is right for him. What is poison to one is honey to someone else. Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship, these mean nothing to Me. I am apart from all that. Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better or worse than one another. Hindus do Hindu things. The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do. It’s all praise, and it’s all right. It’s not Me that’s glorified in acts of worship. It’s the worshippers! I don’t hear the words they say. I look inside at the humility. That broken-open lowliness is the Reality, not the language! Forget phraseology. I want burning, burning. Be Friends with your burning. Burn up your thinking and your forms of expression! Moses, those who pay attention to ways of behaving and speaking are one sort. Lovers who burn are another. Don’t impose a property tax on a burned-out village. Don’t scold the Lover. The “wrong” way he talks is better than a hundred “right” ways of others. Inside the Kaaba it doesn’t matter which direction you point your prayer rug! The ocean diver doesn’t need snowshoes! The Love-Religion has no code or doctrine. Only God. So the ruby has nothing engraved on it! It doesn’t need markings. God began speaking deeper mysteries to Moses. Vision and words, which cannot be recorded here, poured into and through him. He left himself and came back. He went to Eternity and came back here. Many times this happened. It’s foolish of me to try and say this. If I did say it, it would uproot our human intelligences. It would shatter all writing pens. Moses ran after the shepherd. He followed the bewildered footprints, in one place moving straight like a castle across a chessboard. In another, sideways, like a bishop. Now surging like a wave cresting, now sliding down like a fish, with always his feet making geomancy symbols in the sand, recording his wandering state. Moses finally caught up with him. “I was wrong. God has revealed to me that there are no rules for worship. Say whatever and however your loving tells you to. Your sweet blasphemy is the truest devotion. Through you a whole world is freed. Loosen your tongue and don’t worry what comes out. It’s all the Light of the Spirit.” The shepherd replied, “Moses, Moses, I’ve gone beyond even that. You applied the whip and my horse shied and jumped out of itself. The Divine Nature and my human nature came together. Bless your scolding hand and your arm. I can’t say what has happened. What I’m saying now is not my real condition. It can’t be said.” The shepherd grew quiet. When you look in a mirror, you see yourself, not the state of the mirror. The fluteplayer puts breath into a flute, and who makes the music? Not the flute. The Fluteplayer! Whenever you speak praise or thanksgiving to God, it’s always like this dear shepherd’s simplicity. When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, “This is certainly not like we thought it was!”
We’re thankful for permission to reprint these poems. This Longing as well as the earlier Open Secret and Unseen Rain are available from Threshold Books, RD 4, Box 600, Putney, VT 05346.
— Ed.
