Rumi The Big Red Book Page 2

  One last animal story. Rumi was giving a longer than usual discourse in the square. People wandered away. The sun was going down. All that was left was a line of seven dogs sitting on their haunches listening attentively. “These are my true students,” he said.

  For the last twelve years of his life Rumi wrote, or dictated, one long luminous poem, the Masnavi, sixty-four thousand lines of poetry divided into six books. There is nothing quite like it in world literature. It surges like an ocean (his image) around many subjects. It is a self-interrupting, visionary work, with sometimes humorous, even bawdy, commentary on the health of the soul. Passages from the Qur’an are discussed, along with folktales, jokes, and remarks to people physically present as the poetry is being composed. Rumi dictated this sublime work of art to his scribe, Husam Chelebi, as they walked around Konya, through the nearby gardens of Meram, during teaching sessions, and in the streets and public places. Husam was a student of Shams, so this long poem can be considered an extension of Rumi’s conversation, and union, with the friend. Perhaps the best image for the unified diversity of this wandering poem is the way that Rumi interacted with his community—sometimes tending to the growth of the group, sometimes addressing the needs of individuals. Readers of the Masnavi may enter it at any point.

  Rumi died at sunset on December 17, 1273. His tomb in Konya is still visited by thousands each month. I once had a dream in which I was inside the tomb, and Rumi was arriving from outside. As he came in the door, he was so surrounded by enthusiastic friends that I could not see him. He had become all those who love him. He disappeared into them. One of the inscriptions on his tomb is: “Do not look for him here, but rather in the hearts of those who love him.” It is said that representatives of all religions came to his funeral. When asked why, they each said that Rumi and his poetry had been a way of deepening their own faith. In this volume and in all my renderings of Rumi, I emphasize this universalist aspect. In bringing this great planetary poet over into the twenty-first century, it does not seem right to stress how we are divided into religions with mutually exclusive truths, but rather how we are moving along inside this Mystery like a family.3

  The anniversary of his death is called his urs, or wedding night. He felt that union with the presence of the one he calls the beloved, or the friend, was as natural as breathing. Union with that companion transpires throughout and animates the universe. Above the door of his tomb on the inside is the double hu (see the calligraphy at the beginning of chapter 18, Shams Tabriz).

  I belong to the beloved,

  have seen the two worlds as one,

  and that one call to and know,

  first, last, outer, inner,

  only that breath breathing human being.

  THE SOUL ESSENCE OF SHAMS TABRIZ

  In my brief biography of Rumi, I have focused on his relationship with Shams Tabriz. Out of their deep, spiritually intimate friendship came this book. Rumi called his “big red book,” the Divani Shamsi Tabriz (The Works of Shams Tabriz). It has come to be known as The Shams and is widely acknowledged as one of the great works of world literature. There are about three thousand poems in it, about six times as many as there are here.

  The poems arose out of the friendship of Rumi and Shams. Their blended presence was the source and energy of the poetry in the ghazals (odes) and rubai (quatrains). Perhaps if we are ever to meet the elusive Shams, it will be in Rumi’s book. Rumi often remarks in various ways that he does not know where his language comes from or who it belongs to. Shams in his Discourses (Maqalat) says this: Mevlana (Rumi) knows that the writer wrote in three scripts:

  One that he could read and only he,

  one that he and others could read,

  and one that neither he nor anyone else could read.

  I am that third script.

  So Shams himself is, in the words of the poem, an unknowable part of the script. Rumi is more accessible.

  Rumi is one of the great souls, and one of the great spiritual teachers. He shows us our glory. He wants us to be more alive, to wake up. Mevlana comes from the same root as “reveille”—a bugle call to lift us from our spiritual torpor. He wants us to see our beauty, in the mirror and in each other.

  Rumi’s message can be stated in many ways. It is the core of the core of every religion. It is the longing in a human being to live in unlimited freedom and joy, to move inside beauty, that most profound need of the human soul to flow with the namelessness that animates, luxuriates, burns, and transpires through form, enlivening what is as steam, mist, torrent, saliva, blood, ocean, cloud, coffee, wine, butterfly, tiger, hummingbird, energy, and delight.

  I feel blessed to have spent much of the second half of my life working on the poetry of Rumi. I am seventy-three now (2010). I began when I was thirty-nine in 1976 at Robert Bly’s Great Mother Conference in Ely, Minnesota. Robert brought a stack of A. J. Arberry’s translation of Rumi’s odes4 and proposed one afternoon that we do a writing exercise. We were to try rephrasing Arberry’s scholarly translations into lively American free verse in the lineage of Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Galway Kinnell. It was love at first sight for me, though I kept it mostly to myself.

  Back in Athens, Georgia, teaching three classes in the English Department, I would go up, after a day of explicating poetry, to the Bluebird Cafe, then at the corner of Hull and Washington, sit there with hot tea, and try to disappear into my newfound devotion. What a relief it was to leave the explicating mind behind. These poems could not be explained. They had to be entered, inhabited. I did that pretty much every day for eight years, before Threshold Books published my first Rumi translations, Open Secret, in 1984.5 The poetry remains an unfolding mystery. When I first began reading and rephrasing the Arberry translations in the fall of 1976, what I felt was a new freedom inside a wild presence. It was very soul-nourishing, a kind of practice for me.

  I have a friend who works in prisons. She says the prisoners have a phrase they use among themselves for where they are: in medium. There is an old Sufi story about practices. A man is visited in prison by a friend who he hopes will help him escape by bringing a file or some tool for physically escaping, but all he brings is a prayer rug. He begins to do five-times prayer, and after a period he realizes that the place where his forehead touches the rug, the point called the qibla, is a diagram of the workings of the tumblers of the lock on his cell door. He escapes. I have been in the medium of this practice for thirty-four years.

  Rumi often speaks of the bird who sits in the cage even though the cage door is open. He does not fly off. I sometimes feel like that bird. I was told by a teacher once that these translations are beautiful (“They have to be, for they are coming out of Rumi’s love”), but that there is a danger in them for me, because they could become “ecstatic self-hypnosis.” So it has sometimes been. My love for the beauty of the poetry has felt like enough, but it is not enough.

  The poetry is meant to lead the listener into an experience, into a presence or presences. I have had a dream about this. I am being pointed into a cave by my friend the poet Galway Kinnell.6 His strong right arm extends toward the side of a mountain indicating the large entrance to a cave. Over the opening are words in fire, RASA SHAMSI. Rasa means “essence” in Hindi. I walk up and into the cave, along a passageway bending to the right, and come to a deep cylindrical shaft opening down and up. On the walls of the shaft are sages in meditation on ledge niches as though for giant candles. It is fire-lit and profoundly quiet. Maybe this internal cave community is the essence of Shams Tabriz. He is not physically there. A great square wooden chair, his seat, is empty. It faces out over the abyss. I am directed to sit on the left of the empty seat. Someone else will sit on the right. The feel of the great hall and the magnificence of the meditators are images that stay with me. I would claim that the presence of Shams was in the excitement I felt when I was first trying to bring Arberry’s scholarly translations over into the American free-verse tradition. It is a grandiose claim, and so be it.

  I want to try and say something about my sense of what it is like inside a Rumi poem. Plotinus has a wonderful metaphor for the predicament of human consciousness: a net thrown into the sea. This is what we are with our longings, our works of art, our loves. We are the net. Soul is the ocean we are in, but we cannot hold on to it. We cannot own any part of what we swim within, the mystery we love so. Yet the longing we feel is there because of soul. To some degree we are what we are longing for. Some part of the ocean swims inside the fish. In Plotinus’s view the visible universe—the entire cosmos, nature, ourselves, and all that we do—is a net thrown into the ocean of soul:

  The cosmos is like a net thrown into the sea, unable to make that in which it is its own. Already the sea is spread out, and the net spreads with it as far as it can, for no one of its parts can be anywhere else than where it is. But because it has no size, the Soul’s nature is sufficiently ample to contain the whole cosmic body in one and the same grasp.

  —Ennead IV, Section 97

  There is great poignancy and beauty and longing in the situation, and to paraphrase Plotinus again, as we begin to recognize that beauty, we become more beautiful ourselves.

  Say The Shams is floating in the Plotinian ocean, a deepening, widening place of soul. The poems are being spoken spontaneously, perhaps in response to soul-growth questions in Rumi’s community. When we enter these poems, we enter a conversation in progress on the deepest human level. Soul is all around us, nourishing, illuminating, encouraging, as fine as light, but grounded in a specific friendship with a particular human being, a man named “The Sun,” who grew up in Tabriz. Radiant soul intelligence.

  C. S. Lewis says that in reading great literature, we transcend ourselves, and we are never more ourselves than when we do that. We feel a buoyancy, an alchemical quintessence, a shimmering aliveness that is both still and in motion. Rumi’s originals have no titles in Persian, so the effect is even more watery. These are works in progress in a life in progress, oceanic living tissue, always reconfiguring itself. A music, in a dance around an enlightened being, or several enlightened friends, men and women. What a liveliness. You feel it coming through, even eight centuries later. The no-form joy of surrendered souls, playing. The poetry of The Shams is a connection to universal energy, the center itself. I feel that is true.

  There is an interesting synchronicity between Rumi and Whitman. A year before he died, Whitman published a poem called “A Persian Lesson.” In it, a “greybeard Sufi” is talking to students in a Persian rose garden. Whitman gives the Sufi his own voice:

  “Finally my children, to envelope each word, each part of the rest,

  Allah is all, all, all—is immanent in every life and object,

  May-be at many and many-a-more removes—yet Allah, Allah, Allah is there.

  “Has estray wander’d far? Is the reason-why strangely hidden?

  Would you sound below the restless ocean of the entire world?

  Would you know the dissatisfaction? The urge and spur of every life;

  The something never still’d—never entirely gone? The invisible need of every seed?

  “It is the central urge in every atom,

  (Often unconscious, often evil, downfallen,)

  To return to its divine source and origin, however distant,

  Latent the same in subject and in object, without one exception.”

  Whitman, as the greybeard Sufi, and Rumi claim that there is a core impulse in all things to return to the source. Whitman and Rumi often speak with similar voices. It is appropriate to put Rumi into the Whitman free-verse lineage, which is the strongest strand of American poetry, and the most soul- and self-searching. But there are differences. Whitman, more often, is the beach-walking observer, whereas Rumi often proposes a risk. Danger is present:

  Love comes with a knife . . .

  You have been walking the ocean’s edge,

  holding up your robes to keep them dry.

  You must dive naked under and deeper under,

  a thousand times deeper. Love flows down.8

  The lover in Rumi is the conductor who carries universal energy from the center to the periphery. The you in this poetry is that center. “Anything anyone says is your voice,”9 says the one speaking this poetry. The pronouns are the greatest mystery. Someone knocks on a door. Someone answers. The two become each other, and four hundred thousand. This is true of Whitman too. His great identity poem, Song of Myself, begins with I:

  I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

  And what I assume you shall assume,

  and ends with you:

  Missing me one place search another,

  I stop somewhere waiting for you.

  This complex, lifelong process, the blending of soul essences, is the pervasive experiment of Rumi’s poetry.

  Part I

  Odes (Ghazals)

  Names for the Mystery

  Rumi did not give his poems titles, nor are they divided in the standard editions, as here, into thematic categories. I have chosen to give the odes titles to make them more accessible to modern readers. The twenty-seven categories are meant to open new depths and dimensions in the poems. Eighteen are from the Sufi Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of Allah, in Arabic.1 All of those are preceded by a form of Al, the Arabic equivalent of “The.” The calligraphy was done by Mohamed Zakariya in the celi sülüs script, specially commissioned for this volume. Two of the categories are teachers I have met during my life, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen and Osho. Shams Tabriz is also one of the names for Mystery, as is the great Indian saint Ramana Maharshi. The other categories, of my own devising, are: Dissolving the Concept of “God,” Playing, Tenderness Toward Existence, Everything and Everyone Else, and the one that is implied in every list of the ninety-nine names, The Name That Cannot Be Spoken or Written.

  Chapter 1

  Al-Fattah, The Opener

  I have come to love the sound of the names of God. Al-Fattah is my favorite. The homemade American mystic Joe Miller used to stand up and yell Ya Fattah! (“O Opener!”) in an audience whenever he heard something he liked. There is an opening that is beyond thought. In Rumi’s poetry it is often associated with spring. It is in the soul’s life, that natural opening where we stay fresh and young. When we act out of mean-spiritedness, the closing up of the ego, we feel locked out of life. Rumi suggests that we “put the head under the feet.” We must not be led by the mind, but by a spontaneity in the heart-center, the soul, which is always starting out, beginning again. It cannot be said with words. Music and song do better.

  JARS OF SPRINGWATER

  Jars of springwater are not enough anymore.

  Take us down to the river.

  The face of peace, the sun itself.

  No more the slippery cloudlike moon.

  Give us one clear morning after another,

  and the one whose work remains unfinished,

  who is our work as we diminish,

  idle, though occupied, empty, and open.

  GOD IN THE STEW

  Is there a human mouth that does not give out soul sound?

  Is there love, a drawing together of any kind,

  that is not sacred?

  Every natural dog sniffs God in the stew.

  The lion’s paw trembles like the rose petal.

  He senses the ultimate spear coming.

  In the shepherd’s majesty wolves and lambs tease each other.

  Look inside your mind. Do you hear the crowd gathering?

  Help coming, every second.

  Still you cover your eyes with mud.

  Watch the horned owl. Wash your face.

  Anyone who steps into an orchard

  walks inside the orchard keeper.

  Millions of love-tents bloom on the plain.

  A star in your chest says, None of this is outside you.

  Close your lips and let the maker of mouths talk,

  the one who says things.

  UNDRESSING

  Learn the alchemy true human beings know:

  the moment you accept what troubles you’ve been given,

  the door will open.

  Welcome difficulty as a familiar comrade.

  Joke with torment brought by the friend.

  Sorrows are the rags of old clothes and jackets

  that serve to cover, then are taken off.

  That undressing,

  and the naked body underneath,

  is the sweetness that comes after grief.

  FLIGHTPATHS

  Today I see Muhammad ascend.

  The friend is everywhere, in every action.

  Love, a lattice.

  Body, a fire.

  I say, Show me the way.

  You say, Put your head under your feet.

  That way you rise through the stars

  and see a hundred other ways to be with me.

  There are as many as there are

  flightpaths of prayer at dawn.

  MOUNTAINTOP TROUGH

  We are here like profligates,

  three camels with muzzles plunged in provender.

  Other camels rage with their lips stuck out,

  foaming, but they remain down below in the valley.

  This windy mountaintop trough is ours.

  It sustains and protects, and you do not arrive here

  by just straining your neck to look at the mountain.

  You must start out and continue on.

  You have to leave the place

  where everyone worries about rank and money,

  where dogs bark and stay home.

  Up here it is music and poetry and the divine wind.