Rumi
This Day I Cannot SayâQuatrains
Introduction: Rumi
TANDEM CREATION
What are the qualities of a deepening awareness? To some it feels right to call that the friend. For others, it is more like a spaciousness, an emptiness, or silence. Many of Rumiâs short poems circle around the delight, and the impossibility, of saying this blessed inwardness, the friendship. What is it to drop the ego? To let go, to surrender, to trust? All the quatrains of Rumi and all the sayings of Shams are trying, in their different and combining forms of soul fury and kindness, to help that happen in each reader. It often does not happen all at once, the final push of the ego over into the dissolution, or rebirth. It has many names, that process of transformation. Rumi says, âI have longevity, inside this dying I have so long desiredâ (#3).
Rumi always works in tandem, with a friend, or friends. Or, to say it another way, his poetry is communal, with very personal touches. It is difficult to describe the process, though we all have probably experienced it. Out of his deep friendship with Shams Tabriz came the overflowing creativity of the collection he calls The Works of Shams Tabriz, or the Divani Shamsi Tabriz, often now called just The Shams. At the end of the poem, where the poet traditionally signs the poem by mentioning his own name, you will never find Rumiâs name. Most often he mentions Shams, but sometimes another friend, Saladin Zarkub the goldsmith. Sometimes he gives the poem back into silence, sometimes into sunlight. And out of his friendship with Husam Chelebiâhis scribe and chief disciple, and his tandem-work friend after Shams and Saladin were goneâcame the ocean of the six books of the Masnavi. He calls the whole thing âThe Book of Husam.â Here is how the prelude to Book IV begins:
Husamuddin! Ziya-Haqq, Godâs light, you draw this Masnavi out
into the open again, your rope around its neck
leading God knows where!
Some have expressed gratitude for this poem; this poem itself
lifts hands in thanksgiving, glad as a vineyard in summer heat.
The caravan loads up and breaks camp. Patience leads the way
into joy. Face down, flat on the earth.
Husam, the sun-sword of one light, many wander in moonlight,
but when the sun comes up, the markets open.
Exchange gets clear. Buyers and sellers can tell false coins from true.
Thieves recede from the scene. Only counterfeiters
and those who need to hide avoid sunlight.
Let Book IV be part of the light!
That is what his tandem creativity sounds like in action with Husam Chelebi. It is clear evidence of Rumiâs kindness. The interior of a Rumi poem is friendship with a specific human being and with the mystery of Allah, which he calls the friend, or the unsayable absence, or daylight, or night, or the presence inside the growing springtime green, or many other things. Rumiâs poetry is very consciously engaged in collaborative listening and making, the friendships and the powerful conversational dynamic going on in and around it there in the moment of its making. The poems come out of his love, and perhaps we love them for the glimpses they give of that, as well as for the light and the griefâfor the taste of how it is to be, and how it is to be nothing at all.
I am not interested in placing these poems in a particular religious tradition. Rumi was a devout Muslim, a Sufi. Many of these poems are glosses on passages from the Qurâan. But he has also been heard as a more universal voice. This is what I try to bring forward. His poetry is honored and delighted in by many traditions and cultures. A great percentage of the worldâs people now are drawn to a sense of the sacred that is beyond belief and beyond a specific sacred text, beyond a church and a priesthood and beyond the bureaucracy of religious culture. This new and very ancient way is experiential, exploratory, and so has attracted the Sufis with their all-incl...