Barely known two decades ago, Jalaluddin Rumi is currently one of the most widely read poets in America. His over 70,000 verses on divine love, ecstatic passion, contemplation and mystic union rank alongside the works of Shakespeare, Dante and the Davidic Psalmist. His verse is passionate, a clear and understanding voice in a turbulent confusing time. It strives to enlighten, entertain and explore. Yet, for all its striving to break free of constraint, it is firmly grounded in dirt and experience.
The fire behind Rumi’s poetry is Sufism. A precise definition of Sufi thought is difficult to make. Most scholars would agree that modern Sufism (and the Sufism of Rumi) is an inner, esoteric and mystical dimension of Islam, like Kabbalah for Judaism or Gnosticism for Christianity. However, like Kabbalah and Gnosticism, Sufism is alternately described as on the outside fringe and the deep-seated center of the religion.
Rumi’s life reads like a tale from “The Arabian Nights.” A charming and brilliant scholar, his chance meeting with Shams, a wandering, wild holy man, transformed his life. As if the history of the world revolves around this chance meeting, Rumi and Shams immerse themselves in each other. From that point on, nothing is the same. Rumi leaves his students behind and goes to merge with his spiritual soul mate.
Rumi’s poetry, like that of many mystics, revolves around a union with the beloved, a concept called Tahweed. Shams’ death, presumably at the hands of jealous students, begins Rumi’s unceasing search for the echoes of his spiritual soul mate in the world around him. He sees Shams in everything, from the sky to water to people around him. His life becomes infused with Shams, and through that infusion he reunites with the godhead.
Far from religious, Rumi’s verses are purely spiritual. Only the occasional reference to Allah mark his verse as different from that of a Christian, a Jew or a Hindu. In their incessant search, his lines are as universal as experience can be. Part mentor, part lover, he encapsulates the very best of the mystic experience.
Recently released in paperback, Coleman Barks’ “Rumi: The Book of Love” attempts to bring together some of the most poignant and striking verses that Rumi wrote on love. They are not typical love verses. Rumi’s concept of love is often foreign to the heart. His love is informed by the long days and nights of constant contemplation. His love isn’t the type of union that is most common in Western literature. It isn’t the union of two individuals, but rather Tahweed is the dissolution of two lovers into each other, annihilation of the self into a pure form of love. “Love comes with a knife, not some / shy question, and not with fears / for its reputation! I say / these things disinterestedly. Accept them / in kind. Love is a madman, / working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes, / running through the mountains, drinking poison, / and now quietly choosing annihilation.”
Union and annihilation, dissolution and immersion — when Rumi writes” I am a glass of wine with dark sediment / I pour it all in the river. / Love says to me, “Good, but you don’t see / your own beauty. I am the wind / that mixes in your fire, who stirs / and brightens, then makes you gutter out” it is not the “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach” of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Eschewing an easier love, the love that heightens the daily, he moves towards a love that makes the daily mystical.
In an attempt to represent this, Barks’ orders the poems based on “The Magnificent Region of the Heart.” Each section focuses on one aspect, whether wandering, jealousy, madness or silent wholeness. They are divisions that mark both the earthy nature of his verse while showing the transformation from daily to mystic.
These divisions are sometimes solid, sometimes arbitrary, but always based on Barks’ understanding of Rumi. A best-selling author and renowned poet, Barks gets inside the mind of Rumi more than most translators have been able to. His work on “The Essential Rumi” and “The Soul of Rumi” comes to bear in his remarkable working of Rumi’s verses. But Rumi is much too large of a presence to fit within Barks’ divisions. The poems often spread beyond their bounds, referencing each other and reminding the reader that true love, like true mystic experience, very rarely falls neatly into the expected.
Invariably, the experience of reading Rumi’s poetry, like the experience of love, is uncomfortable, exciting and devastating. It stirs up muddy experience and reminds us that a life easily understood is hardly a life at all.
