Wednesday, March 21, 2018
Coleman Barks––on Rumi and His Poetry
Something brought me to my desk (my tabernacle, my shrine) early this morning and this is what I found on Marci Mattes' site (Brown Sparrow).
Coleman Barks on Rumi and his poetry..." the deeply kneeling man".....
"..... as described in the Heart Sutra, the central text of Zen, as having “no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, and no consciousness.” To get there you must die before you die. Buddha’s Heart Sutra draws one along to the understanding that in that dissolving nothing exists by itself. Everything interpenetrates in the ecstatic core where heart-vision begins.
A bowl falls from the roof. This is not theoretical. It is the practical and experiential love that annihilates, and the most ineffable of experiences, if there can be degrees of unsayableness...... The love way is not religious. It is rather the origin and the longing inside religiousness. Footprints disappear at the ocean’s edge. When we bow to each other, feet become head in a circle. No one could tell with Rumi and Shams who was teacher and who the student. Lover, beloved, and love became one thing with them. Images of transparency and particles, light upon light, the candle at noon, occur, images of breath merging with sky. We are sleeping and wake inside another sleep; we wake again, and on…as veils, the mist of language, the apparent limits, burn off. Each region of love leads to the unfolding. There may seem to be a kind of progress....., from spontaneous wandering to the lord of the heart, but it might just as easily be reversed, or put in any number of sequences. The heart with its many regions moves more like interpenetrating spheres, concurrent universes, than a linear path. Areas of energy in the poetry merge with one another as layers of ocean, or as the mysterious workings of soil in a field, or the draining slant of a mountainside. Rumi’s impulse feels earthward in its transformation, going down instead of up in the way one might aspire to the angelic.
There is no down or up in love, but if one had to say whether Rumi’s poetry goes more with the pure transcenders or more with the grief-gardeners, one would say he’s a ground-hugger and not so much a high-flyer, more jamal (feminine, receptive) than jalal (masculine, commanding). But as Rumi himself says hundreds of times, there is little one can say about love. It has to be lived, and it’s always in motion. When Rainer Maria Rilke, the great mystical poet of the twentieth century, saw the Mevlevi dervishes in Cairo in 1910, he said, “With Rumi the scale is shifted, for this is the mystery of the deeply kneeling man. In following the peculiar weight and strength in his knees, he belongs to that world in which height is depth. This is the night of radiant depth unfolded.” He was referring to the night of December 17, when Rumi died in 1273. It is celebrated as his union with the divine.
Barks, Coleman. "Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing ." HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
