Rumi, The Big Red Book, page 34
No ending, no place to rest (“A road may end . . . ,”).
Language that comes in the moving-across is less like words
than it is like the wind or the nightingale’s song (“A light wind coming . . . ,”).
Identities blend: “My own lips open, and in whatever I say, I hear you” (“Your fragrance fills . . . ,”).
A new conversation (“I realize that the dawn . . . ,”).
No confining limits (“Are you jealous . . . ,”).
There is a new way of breathing (“There is a way . . . ,”).
Rumi often comes back to the mirror as an image of the lover, the enlightened consciousness. The mirror does not do anything. It just is a witness to whatever happens in front of it. Lover and worker become one as polisher melts into reflection. (“We are the mirror . . . ,”).
A music we are part of that we do not control (“All day and night . . . ,”).
One of the gifts from the friend, the mysterious you that is met in this shift, is that we can become a school with a greater presence nearby (“These gifts from the friend . . . ,”).
Power is no longer wanted, except as something to surrender to (“Here is a magnificent person . . . ,”).
This transition is about being truly alive, as a small stream enters a great river, or like suddenly discovering another dimension, as, inexplicably, oxen plodding in a flat circle around a millstone begin to move spherically (“If you want to live . . . ,”).
The new life is fluid, a spring, but separate drops too (“Life is
ending. . . ,”).
Ignorance seems to be a primary characteristic of this crossover region of consciousness. It is a very positive form of ignorance (“I thought I had self-control . . . ,”).
Here is one of his most precise images for the longing that drives this shift of awareness:
There is a path from me to you
that I am constantly looking for,
so I try to keep clear and still
as water does with the moon.
But any assertion about the transition into nonexistence is bound to be too formulaic to be true, too stiff. Rumi’s poetry is a living flow that comes out of his evolving consciousness. We must allow the poems to stay uninterpretable, as a whole human being is, in motion, ineffable. “Transition,” “shift,” “crossover”—the terms are misleading. The state from within which Rumi speaks is more wavering and less definable than those words imply. There is doubleness, and tripleness. Absence and presence and something else (“I am the soul . . . ,”),
revealing that enlightenment is a union and a unique separateness (individuality). Whatever it is is beyond language (“You are inside meaning, not words . . . ,”), full of wonder, in a surprising ecstasy, beyond time, losing interest in the createdness, yet feeling inside the beauty of the creator (“How long shall we delight . . . ,”). The main truth of enlightenment seems to be that the ego has dissolved, gone, poof. There is no shred of that, that I can detect, in Rumi’s poetry. If these translations have traces of ego, that is my doing. I hope to be forgiven.
These poems are shorter than the usual English lyrics, shorter than sonnets and a little longer than haiku. The poems are like musical phrases, a single dance step with a gesture at the end. One whirl, a long flute note, invitation and answer. You hardly know what happened. Did anything? Where are we? And the atmosphere seems to me to stay profoundly playful. This is key.
There is a story about the origin of the Persian quatrain. It was a country-fair day. A poet and his friends were watching some children play a game. A boy threw a walnut so that it started along a groove of the pavement, jumped out, then rolled back in to hit the aimed-at spot. He had put English on the nut, and he celebrated with a chant, “Rolling, rolling, off and back, then home to the bottom of the ditch.” The poet (some say it was Rudaki in the tenth century) heard a new rhythm in the boy’s elation, repeated it with variations three times, and the Persian quatrain was born. The knack of making the crossover into a surrendered world, which I hear as the subject of many of Rumi’s short poems, is full of playfulness and spontaneity. That is why they seem so fresh, and continuously refreshing, like cold springwater.
ORGANIZATIONAL NOTE
For symmetry with the first part of the book, I have divided the quatrains into twenty-seven groupings. Each is associated with a constellation or other celestial body. This is purely arbitrary. I felt they needed to be divided in some way, to make them more tasty and less dismaying to the eye, as is the sheer expanse of Emily Dickinson’s 1789 nameless short poems in the Harvard edition. For the creative play of it then, and to give them space, to put them in an emptiness teeming with interpenetrating beings—transformative, protective, and dangerous—I have thrown them out among the galaxies like sparks from a campfire into the nightsky, where the laws of gravity may not quite apply the way we thought. The new pictures coming in from the refurbished Hubble telescope are as ecstatic as any Sufi.
Chapter 28
Taurus: The Bull
Zeus transforms himself into a bull to abduct the princess Europa. He swims with her on his back to Crete. This constellation represents the front half of a bull, the part that would show above the waves of the Mediterranean as he swam.
Late, by myself, in the boat of myself,
no light and no land anywhere,
cloudcover thick.
I try to stay just above the surface,
yet I am already under
and living within the ocean.
I am crying, my tears tell me that much.
Last spring, they say, the new-green, how weak you felt.
Remember any night of all our nights,
but do not remember things I have said.
Friend, our closeness is this.
Anywhere you put your foot feel me
in the firmness under you.
How is it with this love,
I see your world and not you?
When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you are not here, I can’t go to sleep.
Praise God for these two insomnias,
and the difference between them.
When I die, lay out the corpse.
You may want to kiss my lips,
just beginning to decay.
Do not be frightened if I open my eyes.
This bleating eventually stops. The wolf appears.
We run off in all directions,
with always some thought of how lucky we are.
But nothing floats for long.
Death floods in at the mouth and the ear.
Every head goes under and away.
For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself.
From within, I could not decide what to do.
Unable to see, I heard my name being called.
Then I walked outside.
Today like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
Take someone who does not keep score,
who is not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing,
who has not the slightest interest even
in his own personality. He is free.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.
I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my life is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain. Let’s buy it.
We have this way of talking, and we have another.
Apart from what we wish and what we fear may happen,
we are alive with other life,
as clear stones take form in the mountain.
Someone who goes with half a loaf of bread
to a small place that fits like a nest around him,
someone who wants no more, who is not himself
longed for by anyone else.
He is a letter to everyone. You open it.
It says, Live.
Who sees inside from outside?
Who finds hundreds of mysteries
even where minds are deranged?
See through his eyes what he sees.
Who then is looking out from his eyes?
Looking for the ocean,
I find a piece of shell with a piece of foam on it.
I taste the ocean in the foam. I turn,
and the steep trail opens onto a high plain.
Your eyes are the mystery,
with thousands of lives living in the edges.
Your hair full of forgetfulness,
your face pure praise.
So clarity is decorated with mistakes.
Chapter 29
Ursa Major: The Great Bear, the Big Dipper
The Big Dipper is part of the Great Bear. It fits along his back like a saddle. You can find the North Star (Polaris) by sighting along the two stars that form the end of the cup. In one configuration the bear is on his haunches with his head in the air, sniffing. In another he is ambling along, being guided by the Herdsman.
The clear bead at the center changes everything.
There are no edges to my loving now.
You have heard it said that there is a window
that opens from one mind to another.
But if there is no wall, there is no need
for fitting the window, or the latch.
We take long trips.
We puzzle over the meaning of a painting or a book,
when what we are wanting to see and understand in this world,
we are that.
Does sunset sometimes look like the sun is coming up?
Do you know what a faithful love is like?
You are crying. You say you have burned yourself.
But can you think of anyone who is not hazy with smoke?
Daylight, full of small dancing particles,
and the one great turning,
our souls are dancing with you.
Without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?
They try to say what you are, spiritual or sexual.
They wonder about Solomon and all his wives.
In the body of this world, they say,
there is a soul, and you are that.
But we have ways within each other
that will never be said by anyone.
This human shape is a ghost
made of distraction and pain.
Sometimes pure light, sometimes cruel,
trying wildly to open,
this image so tightly held within itself.
Stay in the company of lovers.
Those other kinds of people,
they each want to show you something.
A crow will lead you to an empty barn,
a parrot to sugar.
There is a light seed grain inside.
You fill it with yourself or it dies.
I am caught in this curling energy, your hair.
Whoever is calm and sensible is insane.
Do not think of good advice for me.
I have tasted the worst that can happen.
So they lock me somewhere, bound and gagged,
they cannot tie up this new love I have.
You don’t have bad days and good days.
You don’t feel sometimes brilliant and sometimes dumb.
There is no studying, no scholarly thinking
having to do with love,
but there is a great deal of plotting, and secret touching,
and nights you cannot remember at all.
The Sufi opens his hands to the universe
and gives away each instant, free.
Unlike someone on the street who begs for money to survive,
a dervish begs to give you his life.
There is a strange frenzy in my head,
of birds flying,
each particle circulating on its own.
Is the one I love everywhere?
Not until someone dissolves,
can he or she know what union is.
That descends only into emptiness.
A lie does not change to truth
with just talking about it.
Soul of this world,
no life, no world remain,
no beautiful men and women longing.
Only this ancient love
circling the holy black stone of nothing,
where the lover is the love,
the horizon and everything within it.
It may be sometimes noisy in the school of love,
but there is never any distinguishing past from present.
No judge decides a precedent here.
In matters of love, judges cannot speak.
Chapter 30
Corona Borealis: The Northern Crown
The Greeks saw this circlet of stars as Ariadne’s crown. Other Middle Eastern civilizations have seen it as a cracked dish. Australian aborigines call it the boomerang.
They say that paradise will be perfect
with lots of clear white wine and all the beautiful women.
We hold on to times like this then,
since this is how it is going to be.
Come to the orchard in spring.
There is light and wine and sweethearts
in the pomegranate flowers.
If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.
Poles apart, I am the color of dying.
You are the color of being born.
Unless we breathe into each other,
there can be no garden.
So that is why plants grow and laugh at our eyes,
which focus on distance.
Think that you are gliding out
from the face of a cliff like an eagle.
Think you are walking like a tiger walks by himself in the forest.
You are most handsome when you are after food.
Spend less time with nightingales and peacocks.
One is just a voice, the other just a color.
For a while we lived with people,
but we found in them no sign of the faithfulness we wanted.
It is better to hide completely within,
as water hides in metal, as fire hides in a rock.
The mystery does not get clearer by repeating the question,
nor is it bought with going to amazing places.
Until you have kept your eyes
and your wanting still for fifty years,
you do not begin to cross over from confusion.
The minute I am disappointed, I feel encouraged.
When I am ruined, I am healed.
When I am quiet and solid as the ground,
then I talk the low tones of thunder for everyone.
I drink streamwater,
and the air becomes clearer, and everything I do.
I become a waterwheel,
turning and tasting you,
as long as water moves.
In pain I breathe easier.
The scared child is running from the house, screaming.
I hear the gentleness.
Under nine layers of illusion, whatever the light,
on the face of any object, in the ground itself,
I see your face.
Today I am out wandering,
turning my skull into a cup for others to drink wine from.
In this town somewhere there sits a calm, intelligent man,
who does not know what he is about to do.
I asked for one kiss. You gave me six.
Who was teacher is now student.
Things good and generous take form in me,
and the air is clear.
I am insane, but they keep calling to me.
No one here knows me, but no one chases me off.
My job is to stay awake like the nightwatchman.
