My Rose-Colored Elder . . .

After all these fears and hesitations, once I threw caution to the wind and took a few steps, again in vain and naked, and I am stuck where I was like a dried-up tree, an empty-handed man whose feet are in the chains of the earth. I see this garden, and I am bewildered as to how and on which path I should take an excursion into it. I see all its flowers with the colorful stories they compose, and all of them “no more than one tale,”¹ simultaneously calling to me; and from every image a flower garden grows in my imagination. Every ghazal is a living being whose heart beats with a mountain of memories and feelings and with colorful dreams, albeit in a cloud of ambiguity. The thoughts of the poet flow throughout this garden like a single stream with runaway branches and furrows, saturating every flower and plant. When you linger for a moment and gaze at some corner of the garden, the entire garden becomes visible in the mirror, because a halo of light and shadow surrounds every ghazal; and depending on the light that every reader shines on this crystal prism from his own thoughts and feelings, the surrounding vague halo provides a new color and aspect to the ghazal. No ghazal is an isolated, small flowerbed set aside from the magical garden of the bard’s Divan; rather, even though it is separate, it contains a mystery and an intimation of the entire garden. The mood and atmosphere of the entire Divan flows throughout most of the ghazals and soaks into them like fresh water. The images of a singular idea come to life each time within the skeletal frame of a ghazal, and each time, a corner of the nocturnal sky is reflected in a colorful pond. But the stars that are reflected in the water are themselves parts of the bodies of the firmament; and if we have the face of the sky in our memory, the reflection of a few stars awakens images of the sky in our hearts. And when we want to express what we see from the radiance of the stars that we see in the mirror of the water, we must speak all at once about all the images that are before our eyes and in our memory. This agitates the water of the pond and makes everything muddied. And if we only speak of the few stars that we see unrelated to the heavenly bodies, the fear is that we will spill the blood of the ghazal and be left with merely certain euphonious but lifeless words. Yet, if the Divan of the poet is a mirror as wide as an ocean that reflects the entire sky of his mind, then his thoughts are a sky, every part of which is the center and circumference, every part of which is the beginning and the end. No matter on which star you are, you are at the center, and all the other stars are around you, and from wherever you begin, that place can be the end.

There is no end to the story of me and the beloved

That which has no beginning has no end.²

For instance, in creation, man is separated from God, like a drop from the ocean; but before he is separated, he is in him and unaware that he is God. In order to contemplate and to see a ray of the sun, he must first be separated from his own source; otherwise, he will be submersed in it and unable to distinguish between himself and the spring of light. As long as man is in God, he is not himself and cannot have self-awareness. Hence, inevitably, he is not aware of his nonexisting self. Thus, the creation that separates man from God connects him to God and to himself. On the other hand, the God of the mystics is in man; and once the mystic attains himself, he has attained God. Hence, when man is separated from God, in that very moment, he rejoins him. Alienation and unity are but a single moment and “identical.” If thought begins with God, it reaches man and is imperceptible without imagining God; and if it begins with the created world—which is a manifestation of the face of God—it reaches the creator, who is imperceptible without man, because more than anything else, perception is a human concept, and if the perceiver does not exist, the connection between God and the world and man remains broken. In that case, the world is no more than a raw and meaningless substance, the existence of which is no different from nonexistence.

Now we will look at this “seemingly false” notion in another context.

In the continuous current of time, man is but a spark that flickers and fades. He is an instant in the eternity of God; but since the same swift meteor is a light from timeless God, he is present in the past that has no beginning and in the future that has no end; he is from preexistence and he exists for all eternity. Every timeless being, however, in order to contain all times, must be released like a “shot arrow” in time, such that as he passes through time, time also passes through him to become accepting of time and aware of time; and the knowledge of preexistence and eternity is awakened in him. Had man not fallen into the world, there would be timelessness without an awareness of time, and, therefore, he would not recognize that he is eternal, because outside the movement of the world, no time exists. Similarly, if God had not created the world with time, his eternity would not have any meaning. Hence, in order for man to be eternal, he must be mortal, and because he is mortal, he can be eternal and exist for all eternity.

Also, from a different perspective, “the worldly wise are the pivot of the compass of existence,”³ because they are bewildered lovers; and bewildered lovers, like the prudent, are the axis of the circle of existence and are in the center of it. They so overflow with the beloved that they are oblivious to their own selves. And the otherwise self-sufficient, coquettish beloveds need the lovers and exist because of them. The lover and the beloved are “dependent on the existence of love,”⁴ and in its free prison are static wanderers.

These few examples are indications of the interconnected beginning and end of the poet’s thoughts. Within this circle, every point is both the center and the circumference. The revolving movement of his thinking, like a skein as immense as the firmament, simultaneously turns around itself and around another truth, a conception of God, the friend; and its fluid warp and weft with colorful images continuously float in the heart of this firmament. It is an earth that itself revolves and also revolves around the sun; and the workshop of spring and autumn imprints fresh images on its water and soil through the hands of sunlight and moonlight and flowers and plants.

The fear always exists that if someone “dissects” this revolving, evolving, and fluid firmament, the delicate balance of which hangs by a hair, its wholeness would break apart, its colorful magic would fall asunder, and the harmony of the magical music of the words would crumble like a shattered cup. “You know that the mirror cannot withstand a sigh.”⁵ As soon as the surgical knife that would dissect an organ descends on the solid, interconnected body of this thinking, its blood is spilled; its living, active, and effective body is transformed into a dead corpse, a test subject that has no function of its own and is now an externally drawn, passive, receptive body ready for dissection and not for anatomical study. Who is the elder and what does being a clever free-spirited libertine mean? What are honesty and hypocrisy, drunkenness and sobriety, love and reason? Is the beloved an earthly sweetheart or a celestial god; and is wine the essence of grapes or the symbol of divine blessing? Is the world a ruined caravanserai or the workshop of God’s creation? What is a human being, a manifestation of Satan or the masterpiece of creation? There are many other questions. Separating each one of these concepts in the Divan from others and dissecting it might be useful in the study of its lexicon, but it will not constitute a way to understand the poet’s thinking. Rather, ultimately, it would present the Divan as something like Golshan-e Raz,⁶ which, although an excellent collection of verse for understanding theoretical mysticism, is not poetry, especially the poetry of Hafez. If the different places of rest for the travelers through the mind of the poet are separated from other places of rest, and the roads between them are cut off, each place of rest becomes a desert oasis, and the travelers lose their way and do not get anywhere.

The eager devotees of Hafez, of course, have always been satiated by his refreshing spring without the help of commentators and interpreters, even with those “inauthentic” manuscripts. A knowledge of rhetoric, prosody, meter and rhyme, and so forth is not the main requirement for experiencing and perceiving poetry. Great is the number of astronomers who are oblivious to the colorful beauty of the earth. Devoid of knowledge of the solar system, the relationship between the earth and the sun, and how and why seasons occur, no one is deprived of enjoying spring and autumn. To observe the outstretched wings of summer and the white silence of winter, one need not learn astronomy.

Of course, commentary on the terminology and interpretations of the concepts of the Divan undoubtedly help us understand the content of the poems; but they do not show us a way into the mystery of the insightful mind of the poet. This is not a mystery or an encryption for which someone can uncover its secret codification system, decipher it, and be done with it. Hafez’s thinking is a rainbow that in the light of the eyes of every clear-sighted person presents new details and chiaroscuros. It is the magic of colorful light in the sky of the eyes of the onlookers; and every eye, within the limits of its own vision, penetrates the changing spectra of the primary colors. In that case, setting the sights of one’s heart on a flight in the atmosphere of this rainbow and traveling with light might be a way into the interior of this sphere filled with images and an attempt at unraveling the mystery.

If we consider the poet’s thought processes to be like a living body, instead of dissecting each organ, we must find a path to the veins and run our blood through them; then we might travel throughout this body or like a moving star traverse the firmament of the poet’s thoughts. But how and via which path should we fly in the pleasant sky of this man’s imagination and take an excursion through the evergreen garden of his Divan to gain some insight? Should we, like a breeze, pass through the claws of the trees and the disheveled hair of the grass and become drenched in the scent and color of the flowers, or should we remain in place, like the ground, to nurture the roots of the flowers and plants in our hearts? How should we find and stroll along the green paths in the garden, such that we are not deprived of the joy of perceiving in our gazing?

Not knowing what to do is precisely the source of my fear and hesitation. Even so, since our friend’s rope had fallen around my neck and pulled me wherever he wished, neither could I let go and pass by, nor did I know if I stayed how to find a way to free myself from wandering. In the end, after my wanderings, I entrusted myself to the Tongue of the Invisible, Hafez, for he himself to perhaps resolve my dilemma. To undertake the task of Hafez, I made a divination of Hafez’s Divan:

Last night the wine-seller,

A man of great experience,

Conversed with me (and here I share

With you his secret sense).⁷

I will not quote the entire ghazal here. You already know it, or if by chance you do not recall it, you can easily find it. You see that at the beginning, the Bard of Shiraz does not provide any answer. He only recounts the secret that his elder has revealed to him at night in private: regarding the affairs of the world, go easy on yourself, or else the world will be hard on you, will grapple with you, and you will get stuck in what you do. But what is there that this “bird of the celestial flower garden,”⁸ which has fallen into the snare of this “old wolf”⁹ and knows that his free heart is a slave to the world, can take easy, and how? The antidote for this wounded soul is in the healing hands of the Magian elder: wine from a cup, from the rapture of which the world—by the favor of the beauty of the beloved¹⁰—changes into the alley of the friend, and the stars share their cup with humans, a cup of light and truthfulness that both draws aside your dark veils before the eyes of the world and also reveals the secrets of the world before your eyes, in order for the world and man to observe each other, in order for Venus to shine from the light of your cup to say, “to your health,”¹¹ and for you who are drinking while watching the star of love to glow from her light. In this friendly reconciliation with the world, matters become easy for you, and you do not cry out because of life’s suffering and lie that you will not cry out. You are no longer a person without pains who cannot see, know, and pass by free of care; but because of that friendship, pain no longer possesses you. You are able to hide the moaning of the wounded heart beneath the singing of smiling lips, to pour your words and ghazals like wine into the cup of the reader’s soul. What a difficult albeit easy task to express darkness with the help of light, to speak joyfully about sorrow, and not to vex others. You conceal ill fortune within yourself and offer the smile of lofty aspirations to one or another, not in order not to vex others, but in order not to collapse under the burden of your own grief. If your wings for flight do not break, you will find a way to the heart of the friend, and he will not remain in his sorrowful sleep and will not wither in grief. In this way, your ear will become familiar with the whispering of the wind and the water and the sound of the sleep of the earth and the wakefulness of the sky, the internal whispering of life, and you will perceive the message. The world has something to say. When your heart becomes a mirror, observe the angel in it. He will read God’s message in you. Once you are ears from head to toe and you hear, you will become intimate with the world; you will learn its secret; and your difficult task will become easy.¹² At this point, the elder’s counsel with the poet concludes, and as though the poet knows that I have gone to my own Magian elder, in the tone of an elder, he says: “Heed my advice, son, be not sad about the world.”¹³ The poet is now speaking directly to me. He who sat listening like a follower, now, like an elder, conveys the truth to another follower; he is a link between truth and me, provided, of course, that I am not deprived of the gift of hearing and my hands deserve to care for the pearl of words.

The “world” in the language of the poet means those worries about one’s possessions—being the abject servant to one’s own greedy ego and being greedy to dominate the ego of others—being enamored with possessions and power. In contrast to contemplating the next world, the worldly man defends his life of “eating, sleeping, anger, and carnal desire,”¹⁴ and in doing so, he is at war with and hostile to not only the world and the people in it, but also himself. This termite involuntarily chews its insides and outside and everything else with its tired teeth, “slowly and continuously.” My elder says: Hey son, you unripe intellect, relinquish worrying about the amount of material possessions in this world, since beyond it is the realm of love. But passing from this restrictive confinement to the realm of flight is a difficult task that can be made easy if I have a cup of the wine of the wine-seller elder from which the poet drank and is now making me drink. But this ease is difficult, because here I must relinquish all my previous ways and habits and speaking and hearing, and totally devote my eyes and ears to the conversation of light. The ostentatiousness of tempting reason is to no avail and inconsequential. Face to face with an intractable, sagacious elder who disrupts the game of the imposter world if it is not to his liking, what can an empty-handed person such as I offer that would not cause me embarrassment? A wise man, even if he learns nothing from him, would not utter a word. But my gazing beauty with his open mind sees an empty-handed person like me and knows that if I drink the wine of his poem, I might speak with knowledge. That is why he does not leave me disappointed and says in the end:

Give me wine, oh cupbearer

For Asef, the imperial monarch,

Who conceals sins and faults,

Understood the libertine ways of Hafez.¹⁵

Hafez’s thoughts, which have differing and seemingly contradictory facets, do not provide a simple, straightforward, and clear answer. Here, in an equivocal language, he says slyly that my work with him is easy yet difficult and difficult yet easy, both this and that! If I do not entrust my heart to the bright cup of poetry and do not find my way into the sanctuary of love, an easy task would become difficult for me, and if I do and find my way, I would be a lover whose task is easy. Yet, even in this case, I have a calamitous journey ahead, because without love, no way to the friend exists, and love does not exist except in “the manner of clever libertines who can withstand calamity.”¹⁶ Happy am I who at the level of my own comprehension have perceived the cleverness of my poet. I do not know who Asef is, but now I myself am an imperial monarch,¹⁷ who has control over his good and ill fortune, and I am the ruler of my own fortune. Now I have had my divination, and my wakeful friend begins to speak from within his dark sleeping quarters to show me a clear way. In the same way that one day the Magian elder was his guide, today, he has become my “guiding star.”¹⁸

My guiding star is now in the seclusion of the earth. He is the color of light and truthfulness, the purple color of sunrise and sunset, and as bright as midday. When the fire in his heart shines on the garden of the world, the blue mountains rest on undulating plains; the plains crawl to the shores of the green sea; the sea constantly caresses the land; and the sky descends to settle down the tumultuous sea in the cradle of its breast. Nature, with its birds that rise at dawn, permeates me like early morning light. Morning awakens the memory of the friend and entrusts it to the wind, and the wind spreads the seeds, and the silent whisper of restless grass sprouts in my ear. Spring shivers in its green body with the memory of autumn, and the wings of autumn dry up, whisper, and fall, waiting for the spring that is yet to come. The heart of the wandering cloud is sorrowful, and raindrops fall to the ground like cold stars. The soil drinks the stars, and the naked stars that have come from far away are the light of the eyes of the dark soil. And the black eyes of that wild deer in the faraway meadow are the light of my heart. “My rose-colored elder” is a colorful sun under a rock beside a garden in the soil of Shiraz; and because his light shines on my heart from that depth, my world becomes a colorful garden with happy flowers and sad flowers and “many fruits, except for sorrow and happiness.”¹⁹ In the garden of his eyes, the world is of a different design, and my eyes are the mirror of his adorned eyes; and in the mirror, I observe the passage of time that runs like blood in the veins of nature, making it bloom and wither; and its children go to sleep; and death comes as silently as snow and covers them.

What fanciful thoughts form in my elder’s heart, and what notes he plays on every scale! And what pictures his image and voice create in me, and what songs he composes in me! With the landscapes that he unfolds and the songs that he composes, he teaches me to see and to hear. He shows me a different world and humankind, and he changes my relationship with them. Once this happens, I become acquainted with a different self within me that has within it the roots of a new relationship with that which is other than myself. The invisible world that was inside me now becomes visible, and I see its good and bad faces. My elder, too, like the sun, works night and day to make colorful the light and darkness of the soul. He cries and roars “inside my wounded heart,”²⁰ and my calm and restless heart awaits his message, to perceive that which he surmises by surmising, imagining in imagining! And yet he himself says: “Our existence is a puzzle, the solving of which is the stuff of sorcery and fable.”²¹ I do not intend to solve it, but I cannot abandon my heartfelt desire for fables and creating fables. The distant world of fancy is closer to me than the actual world, because I build that one as I wish and adorn it with the sense I have of beauty; but I have fallen into this one without wishing it. There I am free, but here I am captive. Since I must live dependent on the repeated and annoying necessities of nature, involuntarily I escape from this monotony to the flight of my imagination. This escape is also necessary, because it is inevitable to me; but it is not beyond my free will, since I wish for it. Even though my wish is impossible and cannot materialize, because it was galvanized in me and conquered my being, it has become possible in some way, because it has taken up existence in me, and I in it. My reality has changed, and my life here passes with the longing for there, in the imagination! Not in daydreaming that toys with one in confusing shapeless clouds of illusion and conjectures, but rather, in an imagining that creates a new picture of the world, so that I can embrace the river of existence like a riverbed, and its ugliness and beauty and its sorrow and happiness can flow in me and not keep me from myself, rather than gush over me like a flood, roll me like a stone, and drown me. In any case, I have hurled myself from here to there, and I am totally “the story of longing.”²²

Am I merely a shrub on the course of time with the sap I suck from the soil, a trunk in the shackles of time, a body in the prison of the skeletal frame? I am the flight of the free bird of my soul, a forlorn star that is separated from its light but has not forgotten its brightness.

I am a bird,

from the flower garden of Paradise,

How can I describe separation,

when I fell into this trap of time?

I was an angel,

and supreme Paradise was my abode

It was Adam who brought me

to this flourishing, ruined monastery.²³

Still the friend contemplates within the heart of my elder, and the heart of my elder overflows with contemplation of the friend. Then my heart is the colorful garden of paradise and the enchanting beauty of the friend. He has taken up residence in me to see the manifestation of his beauty, and I take my place in the home of my heart, in the alley of the friend, to see the beauty of which I am the manifestation; and as I sit watching myself, from that lofty sight I view this place: my soul that grows on the bed of time, and death that is hidden like a seed in the soil of my body. But my body is not merely the hiding place of death and the windowless prison of darkness. This house is the home and the hippodrome of the bird of light. And as long as it has a ray of light, it is the manifestation of the creative power of that friend, and it is beautiful.

The tall stature of my friend grows like the cypress with its head toward the sun in the sky and eyes looking at remoter places, with nimble feet and happy, proud, youthful steps. A beloved who one night lit a lamp in my heart, who was my garden and gardener, and in the soil of whose body I sprouted and grew, and the tulip garden of my soul blossomed, and now like a Judas tree with bright fingers, I stand at her grave. Everyone grew from this very dustbin and took up residence in this very spring and autumn.

And now my body, the house of my soul, is right here. This spring land of autumn, the alley of the friend, is the resting place of the beloved friend, and even when I run away from it like the breeze at dawn, I yearn for it and seek it.²⁴ My fleeing light in that free country of the imagination is anxious about this very happy prison from which it is separated, and in these flourishing ruins,²⁵ seeks the happy reunion of that time and says to itself:

I am the falcon on the wrist of the king

Lord how could they have forgotten

my fondness for my perch there.²⁶

At the time when the soaking wet scent of green wheat wafts in the sown fields of my body, I wish not to be deprived of the dream of imagination that bestows eternity in order to be immune to the fate of the abandoned earth. Both here and there, I am neither here nor there, and in both places I am separated from my self, and I seek it. The poet is forlorn in both worlds, in the terrestrial world and in the celestial world, because always inside him another “cries and roars,” and even though this other is his essence and truth, he is always unattainable and inconceivable. He always remains the “other,” someone, something, an alien state! The poet is both a stranger to himself and a stranger to the friend, because even while being one with him, he is aware that he is nothing other than him, and while being one with himself, he knows that his essence and truth is something else from somewhere else. The poet is eternally forlorn and wanders with a longing for the alley of the friend. When he is here, the alley of his friend is there, and when he is there, the alley of his friend is here. He always is and is not in the alley of the friend, because he is always with and without his self and is in a state of union and separation. He is a dual oneness in the field of his soul, where the fertile seeds of light and darkness have been spread; and with his eagerness for light, he constantly tears at the curtains of darkness to gain access to his harvest of light, and in that light, he is restlessly enchanted by this light and dark picture gallery of earth. Hoping for a self that is higher and closer to himself, he constantly relinquishes his self. “But you yourself, Hafez, must draw / The veil of Self aside.”²⁷

When my elder removes the veil of his self, he reaches the friend, who is the luminous source and his origin. He reaches his self when he relinquishes his self. Fortunately, however, our Hafez never reaches the end of this endless path, and he cannot completely remove his self. He is the to and fro movement of a light, one who, in his attempt at release and escape to light, cannot give up darkness, and before he leaves, his eyes that see beauty yearn to observe the garden of the world. Like a static wanderer, impatient and excited, he all at once sees his entire vast colorful landscape. Even when he is resting like a dream in the nest of God’s hands, the wings of this wandering swallow are spread, because precisely then, God also awakens spring from its winter sleep in the meadow of his heart: a flower garden and a stream, the smile of a cup, the shimmering of a flower, and the memory of a beloved! And a breeze brings “the fragrant scent of friendship”²⁸ to his soul’s sense of smell, making him “enchanted by the world,”²⁹ and he is both enchanted by the world and known in the world for being in love. “Love, youth, and being a clever libertine are all we desire / Perhaps in the meantime, one could strike the polo ball of some pleasure.”³⁰ Prosperous and flourishing, my elder is in search of “the bride of the world.”³¹ His ambitious soul, falling and rising, seeks the creator’s coiffeuse to the bride and is waiting in ambush for a sign of her hands in order to find his way into her concealed dreams. The poet travels simultaneously in two seemingly separate worlds, and these two separated ones, blessed by his internal journey, regain their oneness in him. The unity of existence takes up residence in a single house of existence. He has a single existence, but a dual appearance. Having a heart set on earth and a heart beyond the firmaments causes one to be of two minds. His soul is distant from beyond the horizons, as though it is out of his own reach as well; but the roots of his body that are deep in the soil have bound him to the earth.

The bountiful generosity of love draws down the bird of his soul to the point that he involuntarily gives up the open expanse of the sky.

The bird of my soul that sang from the Lote tree

Was in the end trapped by the seed that is your mole.³²

Love’s long vacillation draws the human soul down from its heavenly nest to the field of seeds and snares. It is here that complete beauty, formless and inclusive of celestial love in terrestrial love, becomes possible and achievable. One can hear the sound of the footsteps of the friend, touch the warmth of her body with one’s hands, and, blessed by love, forget the coldness of death. This lover-nurturing and beloved-caressing soil is more pleasing than any paradise.

Paradise, the shade of its Tuba tree,

and its palaces and maidens,

I would not exchange them all

for the dust of the alley of the friend.³³

Imaginary palaces with their beauties and the garden of fancy with its colorful trees and indescribable streams are from the tomorrow that is yet to come, and who knows what tricks the world will play tomorrow. Better that we “not put back today’s pleasures till tomorrow.”³⁴ If the beguiling promises would not rob me of the calmness of my heart, then why “shouldn’t I sell the garden of paradise for a grain of barley”³⁵ and vex my thirsty soul, which is satiated in the home of the friend, with the fear of the days to come? Love has brought me here to this blessed soil. How joyful is my beloved place of birth and slaughter! I want to stay here and to die here.

The beauty of the best creator sparked in the mirror of the face of the most beautiful created one a beloved, a companion of my heart, a good and a bad, like you, and the light of the friend descended into and is housed in a familiar body that is beside me and with me. Now, the creative power of God is in my arms; but alas, my arms cannot hold on. Would my provident eyes allow me to repose in today’s pleasure and leave tomorrow to tomorrow? They dream of nonexistence: no arms and no bosom, no sleep and no dream! The world warns, “Wake up, for the sleep of nonexistence is imminent.”³⁶ The time will come when my sun is no more and the spring cloud weeps for the transient life of flowers.

How joyfully and tenderly you strut, oh young spring branch,

May you not be disturbed by the turmoil of midwinter.

The kindness of the wheel of time and its ways cannot be trusted;

Woe to him who feels secure with its ruses.³⁷

Time is a strange housemate who spares me the sun, takes me away from my self, and brings the debris of the earth down on my head. The revolving of days disposes not only of me but even of my children in the abyss of nonexistence. In this revolving, as it gives birth to the days, it deprives yesterdays of seeing the sun and buries them in the oblivion of the past. I abhor this dark house that devours the lover and the beloved. “Happy the day I move on from this desolate staging-post” in ruins.³⁸ Otherwise, soon I will be ruined, nothing will remain in the empty hands of the earth but my dead corpse, and nothing will be in my hands but the wind; and the dominion of love will be no more than an imagining.

You are from the lofty heavens and from the beloved soul of God. You do not want such an end, any end, and you cannot consent to the death of any friend.

They call you from the empyrean pinnacle

I know not what ensnares you here.³⁹

Your lofty longing for ascension once again draws your high-flying ambition to the sky, so that, like Christ, you bestow light upon the sun. Then a light splits the darkness of this appealing snare, and without ever giving up the love of the earth and terrestrial friends, hastens toward the friend. In order to stop “revolving like a compass,” he hurls himself outside “the cycle of days.”⁴⁰

Like a bird, I flew out of the terrestrial cage

Hoping to be hunted by the royal falcon.⁴¹

Not that I would flee from love and leave the beloved in death’s cage. Love drives me toward the eternal beauty of the one from whom I am and toward whom the erosion of time and the tightness of space have no path, and since the friendship of friends is from him, I reside in the house of his heart for the love of all there is to be mine.

You are not less than an atom

Do not debase yourself, make love

So that you may reach the private residence of the sun, whirling.⁴²

And when I reach the sun, once again, “the seed that is the mole”⁴³ of a beloved, the enchanting coquettishness of a friend, draws me to the breast of the earth. My elder is vacillating between two friends, two worlds. A ray is freed from the confinement of a particle and reaches the freedom of light, and then, like a sun, it falls into the trap of a seed. The dual movement of a singular light is the lowly and lofty fate of our Hafez. He is two souls, at every moment relinquishing his self to once again attain his self. His consistency is in this constant search that binds together, like warp and weft, the texture of his thinking.

But often the poet cries out because of this constant vacillation and wishes himself not to be, so that all would be the friend and naught else.

My body’s dust is as a veil

Spread out to hide

My soul—happy that moment when

It’s drawn aside!⁴⁴

If a body and heart into which eternal light has descended is not there to intervene, that light is released and rejoins the “private residence of the sun,” and the bird—a fellow traveler of his internal light—takes its place in the light of light. The essence of his being reaches the essence of existence and nonexistence and becomes a timeless universality. He sets aside the burden of the prison of the body, the injustice of the world, the battle of the ego, and the hurting of others and perches on the tree branches of freedom. But how could such a nightingale open the closed doors of the cage and spread the broken wings of flight? Alas, he is grounded in this forgotten corner. What is he doing here anyway? Why has he come, and why will he go? Why does he not know, and why is he unable to break open “the shackled frame of the body” and open his wings in the celestial air?⁴⁵ If only they would remove his this-worldly existence so he would be all: “the companion, the minstrel, and the cupbearer.”⁴⁶ To join with the sun is the impossible dream of our simorgh.

It is not, then, surprising for this eager bird to lament and, despite his smile and eloquence, for a fire to burn inside him. His soul is distraught, and his heart is bleeding; and the blood of this longing heart wafts in the air of the soul more fragrant than the musk pod of the Tartary deer. Bird and deer! The images that my rose-colored elder has in his imagination are mostly those of a bird and a deer, two captive runaways, two sojourners on the run: “two lonely beings, two wanderers, two who have no one.”⁴⁷ Two strangers who have come from faraway lands and have ended up in the narrow alleys of lovely Shiraz. And now the bird and the deer of the poem, having just arrived, desire to leave. Each wants both; each wants this confined place of joy and pain. And a restless longing to see its place of birth reverberates in the wings in flight and the legs that run. Because it is a deer, the plain of the earth is its alley of the friend; and because it is a bird, the bosom of the sky is its alley of the friend. This dual oneness traverses the rainbow of the world like a zephyr: in the white of dawn and the red of sunset, in the darkness of night and the light of day, and in green spring and golden autumn! This colorful one is not merely the pleasant color of sight, of which we would become tired in any case after some time. He is the combination of various spiritual states and stages, and his crystal is a prism of colors the constant flowing of which is an astonishing and unending spectacle. Ugliness and beauty, fear and hope, and honesty and hypocrisy simmer together and ferment in this wine cellar. And this human-divine and two-worldly fusion is an involuntary but self-conscious tendency toward truth and light.

You said that our Hafez reeks of hypocrisy,

Bravo to your breathing, for you have sniffed well.⁴⁸

Thus this enemy of hypocrites is himself a hypocrite; the lie also robs the light of his heart and tosses him from God’s lap into Satan’s trap. Yes, my ideal elder is not merely the pure manifestation of divine light and the unalterable albeit unattainable truth of the sky. That dear one is an amalgamation of truth and falsehood; and as he travels, he falls and rises in the twists and turns of the path. But he is not a liar; yet, if you say, oh friend, you speak with the same tongue as the lie, he will kiss your truth-telling lips. His blasphemy is not concealed under the color and glaze of piety. He says: If in one gathering I am the memorizer of the Koran, in another, I am an insatiably thirsty drinker who would not even shun the dregs. Behold me, how I dupe the creatures of God with my ruses. To tell you the truth, I, too, like that ascetic of the altar and the pulpit,⁴⁹ do the same in my secluded privacy.

Bring wine! Qur’an reciters, clerics,

religious spies—

Look well at each of them, and see a man

who lives by lies.⁵⁰

So, be kind and “cover the eyes of cynicism, oh charitable one who covers faults,”⁵¹ because I am no better than I am. My cunning elder comes to me with open arms and straightforward colors. He is one of us, the difference being that I am shifty and I steal and conceal my tricks and ruses, while he does not. Good and bad, he is what he is; and with his barefaced honesty, he escapes the trap of two-faced hypocrisy. He is truthful in his hypocrisy, and in darkness, he speaks the language of light.

The duality of my elder also robs him of his faith. A man who is in a covenant with and shares the cup of the celestial denizens, a man whose heart is the cup that reveals the universe and has the friend in him, “trembles like the willow tree over his faith,”⁵² because in his heart, he yearns for her heathen coloration, and even though her mesmerizing beauty is a glimmer of his beauty, it makes the poet negligent in remembering God, calling to mind anything and any recollection, and grounds him in “the house of nature.”⁵³ In “the prayer niche of the eyebrow” of the beloved, one’s “presence of mind for prayers” is forgotten.⁵⁴ It would not be surprising for the bird of a soul yearning for the seed that is the mole on a face to give up the lofty garden of the sky and nest in the dustbin of the earth, if he is enamored with a “tall, coquettish, cunning beloved,”⁵⁵ to pursue the ogling eyes and capricious heart, to break his pledge of repentance and yearning for a beloved soul, to forget the beloved soul of souls, or, similar to those who “laugh at the dreg-drainers,” to sacrifice his faith on the path to the tavern.⁵⁶ Rare wine, love of the body, the face of spring, and naught else! But my elder is distraught with the sorrow of separation and fears captivity in the pleasing cage of the earth. His heart’s eye is worried about lost precious freedom. This perpetual preoccupation that was born with him does not release him, and the memory of companionship and amity with that king of faith rages and swells.

I am the falcon on the wrist of the king

Lord how could they have forgotten

my fondness for my perch there⁵⁷

Now this ambitious man has reached from the absence of disbelief to the presence of faith and sits on the king’s hand that sets faith into flight, once again yearning for some seed that is the mole, to seek refuge in a trap. “As they call Hafez to this threshold, they drive him away.”⁵⁸

Need and needlessness call out to our elder and also drive him away. As he gives advice to others, he also gives himself the warning that he “be not sad about the world.”⁵⁹ Jamshid and Croesus do not even have one fistful of dirt from the world and their worldly possessions, since they themselves are but a fistful of dirt.

Why let the world upset you? Why, and for how long?

Drink wine, since sorrow in a wise man’s heart is wrong.⁶⁰

He yearns for the kingdom of poverty, needing God and needing nothing else. Companionship with the mendicants is gold, their wealth without decline, and the seclusion of their hearts is the flower garden of paradise. And if a man who has aspirations acquires such wealth, he is the richest of the rich, because the one whose ailment is the desire for worldly possessions, like a scorched salt desert, grows thirstier the more he drinks. Thirst does not give him respite to the point that he forgets everything, even himself. A bad state to be in, may it never happen to our Hafez! Yet after all, like everyone else, this man needs a meager piece of bread and a sip of water in order to live his frugal life, a commission from a minor prince or an unimportant vizier to provide him with a rose and some wine. Having the richness of God does not result in being absolutely without need of God’s creatures. And it is this very need that, coupled with a degree of greed and excessive demands, had turned our eulogists into flattering and pretentious beggars who pompously boast of panhandling. In the same way that ineptitude and helplessness are the tools of the abject beggar’s trade, being a poet is capital in the hands of these ignoble people: requests to a wealthy notable for wine and a horse and cash and credit! Our Hafez confronts a tradition of several hundred years of these eulogists of the past and the abjectness of the contemporary destitute people, and he disdains any resemblance to this beggarly crowd.

Even though covered in the dust of poverty,

I will not shame myself,

Tarnishing my integrity by begging for the generosity

of the spring of the sun.⁶¹

But the chains of need bind the owner of this celestial aspiration to the earth. After all, he as well—of course, not in their manner—is an associate of prominent notables with status and wealth, so that he can in the meantime receive some stipend. Life’s necessities enslave the longing for freedom, and the light of richness is tarnished by the darkness of need. Even though he does not require much, since he must occasionally ask someone for a few dirhams and dinars for his meager living, he chides himself:

O selfishness! Leave me, you greedy thing;

Though a mendicant, I will live like a king.⁶²

At the core of the soaring soul of the poet crouches something obstinate and hungry. The hunting claw of the greedy self has sunk into the heart of the bird, but this dagger has not immobilized him and made his enemy happy. The eyes of the bird continue to gaze anxiously at the spring of the sun, and his heart longs to fly.

If my wounded heart has any aspirations,

It will not ask the hard-hearted for a panacea.⁶³

And the untiring aspirations of the same wounded heart and fighting the internal enemy—the greedy self—returns the soul to the “spring of the sun”⁶⁴ and washes away the dust of indigence from the wings of the bird.

The truthfulness, faith, and poverty of my rose-colored elder is of all colors, with a streak of the color of hypocrisy, blasphemy, and need running through them. But the twilight of his character has the nature of dawn, and light lifts the darkness without annihilating it. At the root of this sun that rises in the sky with every sunrise is an image of a sunset that sinks into the earth. Neither is he released into the air, nor does he remain sitting in the ashes of the earth. The revolving of this sun unifies light and darkness, high and low, and the created and the creator, and turns me within myself.

Two Hafezes, one the free bird of longing and the other the cage of life’s prison, are reflected in each other and read in each other the ugly, the beautiful, the good, and the bad, and tell stories and complain about the two realms; and then another Hafez emerges, who is himself the friend and the alley of the friend and the meeting place of God, the world, and man.

The story of longing as recorded in this book

Is the same story without error that Hafez taught me.⁶⁵

Now those two forlorn twins are of one voice, and the words of one are uttered by the other. One Hafez inculcates a true story in the other. That which either the messenger angel, the Holy Spirit, Gabriel, or Khezr tells him is the unmistakable truth, and the poet sings in harmony and at dawn shares the secrets with the messenger from the invisible and the voice of the friend. The truth of the man, the poet, was discovered by his nature, and he perceived the dust of the path of the cup that reveals the entire universe. The cup that reveals the entire universe, however, is all-seeing, all-knowing; and when my elder joins the friend, he knows that not only is he not all of him, but also when he looks with the eyes that reveal the universe from the earth to the heavens, he does not see himself as anything more than the twinkling of a star in this galaxy and a drop in the ocean.

Nurturing the thought of having the capacity of the sea, alas

What is in the mind of this droplet that dreams the impossible?⁶⁶

What a difference between a colorless light and the capacity of the sun, for a shooting star to draw boundless time into itself and an insignificant droplet to embrace the expanse of the sea! Alas, my elder is in search of the impossible, and once he regains his consciousness, the wings of his imagination break and he falls from the endless flight of longing to the dust of your house and mine, and since his hope is frustrated, he prays for others: “May no one be in search of an impossible dream.”⁶⁷

The ideal elder of our Hafez is also an impossible man. I am speaking of the Magian elder: a familiar stranger and a strange acquaintance who is and is not with and in me and whom one can and cannot find; a dweller of the tavern who possesses the world and a world in the hiding place of a cave; a destitute man without needs, a fortunate indigent man, and a free captive; a man made of the essence of time, with death and nonexistence, and a man made of the timeless essence of the friend, an aspect of his thinking, eternal and the source of all beings; a secret that can be seen but not told and a riddle that can be solved but not found. This is the poet’s imagined depiction of “the perfect man,” a man who is infinite and hence powerful, since his heart is a companion of God’s heart; and since he has now fallen into the lowly little house of nature, he is finite, and as a result, incapable of chronic but pleasing entanglements. A finite time that comprises infinite time, a passing restriction and a traveling ray. How joyful to rejoin the spring of the sun; “should the Holy Spirit help once again,”⁶⁸ the sleeper will awake, the dead will be brought back to life, and everyone will become a Magian elder and an incorporeal Christ worthy of being a cohabitant of the sun. Otherwise, he will be as dust on a road, to be toyed with by the wind.

And now this dust of the road seeks his own Holy Spirit. May Christ help and free him from the Antichrist. You are a truthful hypocrite, an innocent sinner, and a rich mendicant with delightful sorrows and worthy pains, one who tastes the bitterness of the world; but instead of drowning in the invasion of its continuous waves, like the sea, in the mirror of your breast, you look at the sky and the sun. The smile on your face is the remedy for the bleeding heart, because your pains, as they come like a breeze and blow in me, shake off the dust of decayed sorrows from my branches and leaves and entrust me to happy sorrows. With the light of your thinking, I make excursions into the garden of my emotions. I find the obscure narrow paths and the crossroads. I find my colorful flowers and poisonous weeds, the sleepers and the invisible within my being. I see and set in order the image and the design of my inner self. And with your various emotions and states, I irrigate the seeds of my thoughts. My stammering tongue yearns for the Tongue of the Invisible, Hafez, to find the mystery of your words, to reach the invisible world, the what and how of another world that is within me and that is at war with this world of mine that is all about how much I have and how much I do not, and anger and avarice. “I will endeavor to perhaps hurl myself there.”⁶⁹