Nights of Rumi
These Rumi poems are immensely long and copying them onto
here are essentially a labour of love.
IF...
If you don't have enough madness in you
go and rehabilitate yourself
If you've lost a 100 times the chess game of this life
be prepared to lose one more
If you're the wounded string of a harp on this stage
play once more then resonate no more.
If you're that exhausted bird fighting a falcon for too long
make a comeback and be strong.
You've carved a wooden horse
riding and calling it real
Fooling yourself in life
though only a wooden horse
Ride it again my friend
And gallop to the next post
You've never really listened
to what God has always tried to tell you
Yet you keep hoping
after your mock prayers
salvation will arrive.
Mevlana Celaludin Rumi
I associate Rumi with love poetry and the sufi strain of
thought. Although very much associated with the mystical Islamic sect, Rumi
transcends religious barriers and speaks to generations centuries after him,
being the most widely-read poet in America(or so editions of Coleman Barks;
touted as the best translator of Rumi, claims).
When a madman smiles at you
Galen, the great physician,asked one of his assistants
to give him a certain medicine.
"Master, that medicine
is for crazy people! You're far from needing that!"
Galen: "Yesterday a madman turned and smiled at me,
did his eyebrows up and down and touched my sleeve.
He wouldnt have done that if he hadn't recognised
in me someone congenial."
Anyone that feels drawn,
for however short a time, to anyone else,
those two share a common consciousness.
It's only in the grave that unlike beings associate.
A wise man once remarked, "I saw a crow and a stork
flying together, and I couldn't understand it,
until I investigated and found what they shared.
They were both lame."
There's a reason why the beetle
leaves the rose garden. He can't stand
all that loveliness.
He wants to live in rotten dung,
not with nightingales and flowers.
Watch who avoids you.
That, too, reveals your inner qualities.
The mark of eternity in Adam was not only
that the angels bowed to him,
but that Satan wouldn't.
Sexual Urgency, What a Woman's Laughter Can Do, and the
Nature of True Virility
Someone offhand to the Caliph of Egypt:
"The King of Mosul
has a concubine like no other,
more beautiful than I can describe.
She looks like this."
He draws her likeness on paper.
The caliph drops his cup.
Immediately he sends his Captains to Mosul
with an army of thousands. The siege goes on for a week, with many casualties,
the walls and the towers unsteady, as soft as wax.
The King of Mosul sends an envoy:
"Why this killing?If you want the city, i will leave
and you can have it!
If you want more wealth, that's even easier."
The captain takes out the piece of paper
with the girl's picture on it. This.
The strong King of Mosul is quick to reply,
"Lead her out. The idol belongs with the idolater."
When the Captain sees her, he falls in love
like the Caliph. Don't laugh at this.
This loving is also part of infinite Love,
without which the world does not evolve.
Objects move from inorganic to vegetation
to selves endowed with spirit through the urgency
of every love that wants to come to perfection.
This Captain thinks the soil is fertile,
so he sows his seed Sleeping, he sees the girl
in a dream. He makes love to her image,
and his semen spurts out.
After a while he begins to wake.
Slowly he senses the girl is not there.
"I have given my seed into nothing.
I shall out this tricky woman to a test."
A leader who is not captain of his body is not one to be honoured, with his
semen spilled so in the sand.
Now he loses all control. He doesn't care
about the Caliph, or about dying.
"I am in love,"he says.
Do not act in such heat.
Take counsel with a Master.
But the captain couldn't.
His infatuation is a blackwater wave carrying him away.
Something that doesn't exist makes a phantom
appear in the darkness of a well,
and the phantom itself becomes strong enough
to throw actual lions into the hole.
More advice: It is dangerous to let other men
have intimate connections with women in your care.
Cotton and fire-sparks, those are, together,
Difficult, almost impossible to quench.
The Captain does return straight to the Caliph,
but instead camps in a secluded meadow.
Blazing, he can't tell ground from sky.
His reason is lost in a drumming sound,
worthless radish and son of a radish.
The Caliph himself a gnat, nothing.
But just as this Cultivator tears off this woman's pants and lays down between
her legs, his penis
moving straight to the mark, there's a great tumult
and a rising cry of soldiers outside the tent.
He leaps up with his bare bottom shining
and runs out, scimitar in hand.
A black lion from a nearby swamp
has gotten in among the horses. Chaos.
The lion jumping twenty feet in the air,
tents billowing like an ocean.
The Captaind quickly approaches the lion,
splits his head with one blow,
and now he's running back to the woman's tent.
When he stretches out her beauty again,
his penis goes even more erect.
The engagement, the coming together, is as with the lion.
His penis stays erect all through it,
and it does not scatter semen feebly.
The beautiful one is amazed at his virility.
Immediately, with great energy she joins with his energy,
and their two spirits go out from them as one.
Whenever two are linked this way,there comes another
from the Unseen world.It may be through birth,
if nothing prevents conception,
but a third does come,when two unite in love,
or in hate. The intense qualities born
of such joining appears in the spiritual world.
You will recognise them when you go there.
Your associations bear progeny.
Be careful, therefore. Wait, and be conscious,
before you go to meet anyone.
Remember there are children to consider!
Children you must live with and tend to,
born of your emotions with another, entities
with a form, and speech, and a place to live.
They are crying for you even now.
"You have forgotten us. Come back".
Be aware of this. A man and woman together
always have a spiritual result.
The Captain was not so aware. He fell,
and stuck like a gnat in a pot of buttermilk,
totally absorbed in his love affair. Then,
just as suddenly, he's interested. He tells
the woman,"Don't say a word of this to the Caliph."
He takes her there, and the Caliph is smitten.
She's a hundred times more beautiful than he's imagined.
A certain man asks an eloquent teacher,
"What is true and what is false?""This sis false:
A bat hides from the sun, not from the idea of the sun.
It's the idea that puts fear in the bat and leads it
deeper into the cave. You have an idea
of an enemy that attaches you to certain companions.
Moses, the inner light of revelation,
lit up the top of Sinai, but the mountain
could not hold that light.
Don't deceive yourself that way!
Having the idea is not living
the reality, of anything.
There's no courage in the idea of battle.
The bathhouse wall is covered with pictures
and much talk of heroism. Try to make an idea move
from ear to eye. Then your woolly ears
become as subtle as fibres of light.
Your whole body becomes a mirror,
all eye and spiritual breathing.
Let your ear lead you to your lover"
So the Caliph is mightily in love with this girl.
His kingdom vanishes like lightning.
If your loving is numb, know this: When what you own
can vanish, it's only a dream, a vanity, breath
through a moustache. It would have killed you.
There are those that say," Nothing lasts."
They're wrong. Every moment they say,
"If there were some other reality.
I would have seen it. I would have known about it."
Because a child doesn't understand a chain of reasoning,
should adults give up being rational?
If reasonable people dont feel the presence of love,
within the universe, that doesnt mean it's not there.
Joseph's brothers did not see Joseph's beauty,
but Jacob never lost sight of it. Moses at first
saw only a wooden staff, but to his other seeing
it was a viper and a cause of panic.
Eye-sight is in conflict with inner knowing.
Moses' hand is a hand and a source of light.
These matters are as real as the inifite is real,
but they seem religious fantasies to some,
to those who believe only in the reality
of the sexual organs and the digestive tract.
Don't mention the Friend to those.
To others, sex and hunger fading images,
and the Friend is more constantly,solidly here.
Let the former go to their church, and we'll go to ours.
Don't talk long to skeptics or to those who claim to be atheists.
So the Caliph has the idea of entering the beautiful woman,
and he come to her to do his wanting.
Memory raises his penis, straining it in thought
toward the pushing down and the lifting up
which makes that member grow large with delight.
But as he actually lays down with the woman,
there comes to hima decree from God
to stop these voluptuous doings. A very tiny sound,
like a mouse might make. The penis droops
and desire slips away.
He thinks that whispering sound is a snake
rising off the straw mat. The girl sees his drooping
and sails into fits of laughing at the marvellous thing.
She remembers the Captain killing the lion
with his penis standing straight up.
Long and loud her laughter.
Anything she thinks of only increases it,
like the laughter of those who eat hashish.
Everything is funny.
Every emotion has a source and everything that opens it.
The Caliph is furious and draws his sword.
"What's so amusing? Tell me everything you're thinking.
Don't hold anything back.
At this moment I'm clairvoyant.
If you lie, I'll behead you.
If you tell the truth, I'll give you your freedom."
He stacks seven Qur'ans on top of each other
and swears to do as he says.
When she finally gets hold of each other
the girl tells all, in great detail. Of the camp
in the meadow, the killing of the lion,
the Captain's return to the tent with his penis
still hard as the horn of a rhino.
And the contrast with the Caliph's own member
sinking down because of one mouse-whisper.
Hidden things always come to light.
Do not so wbad seed. Be sure, they'll come up.
Rain and the sun's heat makes them rise into the air.
Spring comes after the fall of the leaves,
which is proof enough of the fact of resurrection.
Secrets come out in Spring, out from the earth-lips into leaf.
Worries become wine-headaches.
Bu where did the wine come from? Think.
A branch of blossoms does not look like seed.
A man does not resemble semen.Jesus came
from Gabriel's breath, but he is not in that form.
The grape doesnt look like the vine.
Loving actions are the seed of something
completely different, a living-place.
No origin is like where it leads to.
We cant know where our pain is from.
We dont know all that we've done.
Perhaps it's best that we don't.
Nevertheless we suffer for it.
The Caliph come back to his clarity. "In the pride
of my power I took this woman from another,
so of course, someone came to knock on my door.
Whoever commits adultery is a pimp for his own wife
If you cause injury to someone, you draw
that same injury toward yourself. My trachery
made my friend a traitor to me. This repetition
must stop somewhere. Here, in an act of mercy.
I'll send you back to the Captain,
saying another of my wives is jealous,
and since the Captain was brave enough
to bring you back from Mosul
he shall have you in marriage."
This is the virility of a prophet.
The Caliph was sexually impotent
but his manliness was most powerful.
The kernel of true manhood is the ability
to abandon sensual indulgences. The intensity
of the Captian's libido is less than a husk
compared to the Caliph's nobility in ending
the cycle of sowing lust and reaping
secrecy and vengefulness.