Another World . . .

The abode of the beloved is there, and the abode of Hafez’s beloved—existence being a manifestation of the beauty of his face—lies in the heart of the poet. He is in the friend, and the friend is in him. The lover and the beloved reside in each other. The happiness of the poet, the freedom of his soaring heart, is in reaching this “nowhere land,” this friend and this alley of the friend. “The source of happiness is there.”¹

Here is the crypt of unconscious sleep, and there is the garden of conscious wakefulness; and once the gift of consciousness flashes and erases the darkness of sleep, the bud of the sun blossoms in the garden of the heart. No one goes from one place to some other place; rather, here changes into “there.” That is why my rose-colored elder tries to fling himself like an arrow from his own bow to get from one state or station to another, that perchance “the demon departs and the angel arrives,”² so that he would make another man of himself and another world in himself, because as long as this “clever bird”³ is here, he is a captive in his snare in this place.

Humans cannot be found in the terrestrial world

Another world must be built, and an Adam anew.⁴

The terrestrial world is this world of fate, need, and lack of free will, the world of revolving firmaments, passing time, the four basic elements,⁵ and chaotic order. The terrestrial world is the world of being forlorn, because forces such as rage, greed, and lust are restless in me; and they have blocked my way to my self. Many things are highway robbers; and as long as I am here, I am like Adam driven away from paradise. I am confined to the ground on earth, and like a storm, the savage law of time pushes me, tossing me in every direction, and I have no opportunity to sit in seclusion alone and think about what I am, who I am, where I am from, and where I am going. Time rushes by like a flood in the riverbed of my life, and I am so entangled in killing time that I no longer have any chance to be a “knower of my time”⁶ and understand it. In this condition, I remain far away not only from the world around me, but also from things and people. Nature is not my home and the focal point of my perspective, as though I will never sleep in the cradle of the earth. I do not see the carefree wandering of spring clouds, the playfulness of the light-winged wind, and the homelessness of the birds in secluded alleyways. The patient complaint of the mountain does not rest in the breast of the sky; the transparent stream does not run down the mountain slope; and the green whisper of the meadow cannot be heard in the caress of the breeze. The earth does not breathe, and the beating of the heart of the sun does not light the spirit and bestow sight on the eyes.

In the same way that humans are deprived of their natural dispositions, nature too loses its human dispositions and becomes merely possessions and the circus of our injustice, and we must gain victory over it as far as possible in order to acquire more. We are no better than this toward each other. We are a group of runners in the business arena of society. We are all running at the same time; but in this unrelenting competition in which any pause to look at a fellow runner results in falling behind, everyone runs for himself, and everyone gets out of breath in his own loneliness. In this way, I continually struggle with myself to run faster and arrive sooner. God only knows where!

In such a world, humans cannot be found. If a person wants to visit the truth of himself, like a seed made of stone, he must split the soil of his soul, and as light as air, reach free light. He must build another world within himself—a long difficult journey in the hazardous desert of the self. It is not that first another world is to be built and then another Adam created; one is not the rational consequence of the other. The creation of both occurs at the same time, because another world can only be built by another Adam, and as long as another world does not exist, an Adam cannot be found. Here the poet contemplates the simultaneous death and birth, the captivity and freedom of the soul, not the continuous journey of time and change of space. However, born at the same time as another world and another Adam, another time and space are created, another totally different space and moment that stem from the change in the quality of the soul.

The world and society have their own rules and ways. The firmament revolves and creates time, and time is the lord of our life and death. But our life and death occur within society, and as the firmament wishes. The laws of both flow in me. On a day I do not know, in a place I do not know, I was released, and I must grow “as they nurture me.”⁷ I am not the possessor of time and space. Life’s predestination in its own ways and customs will deliver me to my final resting place. This is a design in the warp and weft of which my life passes and takes its form. Now, if I want to hurl myself from this unfree terrestrial world, I must destroy this design in my self and tear apart the warp and weft of the world to “hurl myself to another kingdom.”⁸

Come, let us scatter flowers

and pour wine into goblets

Split the vault of the heavens

and make a new design.

If sorrow incites an army

to spill the blood of lovers,

The cupbearer and I will attack it together,

and uproot its very foundation.⁹

Now here is a sample state and mood of another world: spring scattering flowers and the light of wine in the sun of the cup and a beloved who offers wine that shows me “in the cup, the reflection of the beloved’s face,”¹⁰ so that the night assault of the army of sorrow is thwarted. And all this comes from the blessing of the crumbling of the firmament’s structure that has no foundation and the cruel design of the firmament that is the source that gives birth to sorrow. Nature and love, the rapture from wine, joy, and the gift of seeing the friend erase from my heart the inevitable revolving of the firmament in the sky and its tyrannical law and save me from the confinement of this place, which is the egotistical circus of religious police, the piety of hypocrites, and the injustice of the people. Our Hafez, of course, is not a so-called “social revolutionary” who seeks to turn the foundations of the society upside down. He is neither the angry spokesman of Yamakan¹¹ nor the lofty eagle of Alamut.¹² But in his time, as well, the pseudopious made a business of other people’s souls, and the lives of these others were playthings of petty princes and governors who came and went by way of killing and massacring; and in the course of these conflicts, injustice assaulted the life and heart of everyone. The city, which is both the center and the place of the crystallization of social life, was the most obvious scene of such unbridled chaos. The one who seeks another world must not only go beyond the world of nature, but must also split open such a cocoon.

The city is devoid of lovers

Would that from some direction

A man would emerge from his ego

and do something.¹³

To have another Adam and another world, one must come out from among the loveless, whose hearts are dead and who are captives in the beehive of the city and under the ceiling of the sky, and free himself from this wheel and that skein. But “the blight of the revolving of the firmament in the soul and body”¹⁴ and the calamity of the lies and injustices of the city are inside our hearts and souls. Hence, one must “emerge from his ego,” or make the rules of “the terrestrial world”¹⁵ within himself crumble and then rise from beneath his own rubble “pure and incorporeal.”¹⁶ Such a man will be liberated from the firmament of the moon, which is the first heaven, and from the evolving world, and from being annihilated, and from cause and effect, and from reason seeking cause; and like Christ, he will reach the fourth heaven, which is the firmament of the sun and the abode of light.

If you go to the heavens,

like Christ, pure and incorporeal

Your lamp will bestow

a hundred rays upon the sun.¹⁷

Like the sun and Christ, my rose-colored elder is in the fourth abode of the firmament, in the source of light and vision, in the “flower scattering”¹⁸ site of music and song and wine and happiness, “waving hands and dancing.”¹⁹ It is as though the longing for the paradise of light and song and oneness with “the Wise Lord”²⁰ as promised by old Zoroaster²¹ still continues to effervesce and stir in the depths of my elder. But the words of our Hafez, who says, “Come, let us throw the dust of our existence before the lord of beauties,”²² are not addressed to just anyone; his addressee is the lover in the city of no lovers. Even though “in every head, there is some mystery of God,”²³ until this mystery is revealed, the mystery of love will not blossom in the garden of the heart, and the city will remain devoid of lovers.

In any case, the wish to emerge from the self, to be rescued from the terrestrial world, and to build another world and another Adam in a city full of lovers is not merely the wish of our Hafez; it is his message. He calls us to this strange metamorphosis that is possible only through the blessing of love.

But love is “a hidden subtlety”²⁴ one cannot know, because knowledge deals with things in the external world and rational relationships between human beings. Reason measures such things and relationships, discovers the connection between their cause and effect and their laws in nature and society, and utilizes them. The domain of knowledge lies within the circle of reason, within the arena of common sense and self-consciousness. Reason deduces how things are. Through logical deduction, it tells us how the laws of the world interact and, hence, how things are in the world, and vis-à-vis them, how we should behave.

The worldly wise during the time of the poet—I am not speaking about the intelligent and the truly wise—the worldly wise at that time were the scholars of religion and of the world, that is, the Koranic exegetes, the theologians, the religious jurists, the preachers, and other superficial believers who knew that a wise and powerful creator is the cause of all causes, who based on his own wisdom wanted the world to be such and created it. His wisdom is aware of that which is right for us; but our rational faculty cannot understand his wisdom. Even though he knows everything from all eternity, and no leaf can fall to the ground without his will, he has created us in order to discern what we will do through our own free will. We have come into the world to be tested; and this world is a stopping place on the journey to the next. On this path, we must travel in the way that is shown to us; and we must refrain completely from asking why or how, because, otherwise, the result will be blasphemy. Satan did not refrain and saw the result.

Such people are the organizers of the society’s thoughts and beliefs, and with the organized, systematic, and limited conception that they have of the boundaries of existence, they know how human beings must organize their being to make it compatible with that conception. The answer of these worldly wise people to the human problem vis-à-vis the world and the self is easy, acceptable to the people, and practical. It frees the people from the tangled skein of inconclusive ideas and, nonetheless, shows the way to a little village, as it were. Because they solve “the puzzle of our existence,”²⁵ they have the prescription for our behavior in their pockets.

The worldly wise are the pivot of the compass of existence, but

Love knows that they are bewildered within this circle.²⁶

The worldly wise are at the center of the circle of existence, because they have drawn the circumference of it themselves, or they have placed themselves inside a prescribed circle, and because they begin with themselves, no matter where they go, they revolve around themselves and are unable to come out of their selves. They have one foot in the terrestrial world that turns the other leg around itself, even though it tries to run away and even though it refuses to go. Within closed boundaries, “they are static wanderers.”²⁷ These wanderers have one foot firmly on the ground, and they know where they are in this revolving and evolving system. They keep accounts of the revenues and expenditures of their actions, of heaven and hell, and of this and the next world, and their utilitarian prudence shows them the ways and behaviors needed to get through their lives day by day, simply this confinement of getting through their daily life! But the destiny of man is to exit this repetitive confinement and fly toward unknown horizons.

The why of things is an inherent question that arises from the hidden depths of the soul, and thus far, humans have been unable to escape it. “What is this simple high ceiling full of images?”²⁸ The involuntary inclination and will to know always draws us toward knowing, toward the darkness of a puzzle the answer to which “no sage in the world knows.”²⁹ Here, reason, which is the result of and the guide to our knowledge, is itself left bewildered.

In contrast to the idea of creation in the mind of the worldly wise, regarding the divine wisdom for which we know nothing, in Hafez’s thinking, beauty is the motivation behind creation. God is beautiful, the world is a manifestation of God’s beauty, and love is the result of seeing this beauty: seeing with the heart’s eye. Here, as well, we are dealing with how and not with why, not the profiteering and limited why of practical reason. Why is God beautiful, and why is the manifestation of this beauty inevitable? Who knows? “Thus it was as long as it was.”³⁰ The sun is the spring of light, and a seeing eye, blessed by its light, sees the world. But why is the sun the house of light? Is it by the blessing of the sun that we see, or is it because of the gift of our vision that the sun becomes visible? God breathed in me and I became alive, or did I blow my lover’s soul into the world and bring this dead thing to life?

Speak to me of minstrels and wine

And less of the secret of life and fate

For no sage has solved this riddle with wisdom

And no sage ever will.³¹

If the why of the world is an unsolved mystery, the dispute about the why, and perhaps even the how, of the friend might be the futile war of the seventy-two factions.³²

Hafez might be for the most part speaking about his own moods rather than being in search of the secret of the existence of the friend, the why, and the friend’s work in this workshop. When the poet speaks of his moods, however, inevitably, the mystery of the other is also expressed.

In any case, in the poet’s thinking, the beauty of the creator cannot remain concealed and inevitably shines through. Existence is the manifestation of this beauty. In order to look at himself, he brings into being the already existing, albeit unseen, beauty, and that which has existed is seen; existence happens, and existence is a mirror that reflects the beauty of his face. Among all creatures of this existence, however, his breath is blown only into man. Hence, in order to look at himself, he longs for my existence, and now I exist. “We wanted him and he was filled with desire,”³³ but his longing for us is in order to observe his own face, because the created is a mirror in which the creator sees himself. Hence, he created me because he wanted himself. I am in love with a king, the possessor of the world who is self-sufficient, who is beautiful, and who loves beauty, and since he is absolute beauty himself, he is the absolute lover of himself, and he is no longer a helpless needy being in the thinking of one such as I, who am struggling in vain in the midst of all this.

How can one benefit from union with the beauty of a king

Who is in love with himself for all eternity?

The companion, the minstrel, and the cupbearer are all him.

The illusion of water and clay is an excuse along the way.³⁴

If, however, existence is a manifestation of his beauty, I too, a self-conscious being (aware of my existence), am the manifestation of the beauty of the friend, and when he expresses love for himself, he worships his own beauty, which is in me. He wants me because he sees his own beauty through me. Hence, the water and clay of my being are no more than a means and an excuse. My being is the mirror of his face and the place of the manifestation of his vision. Were there no Hafez, the friend would be a light without brightness, an unlit fire, and a soul in sleep. He would be an invisible being, without a manifestation, who could neither see nor be seen. He appears through the blessing of the existence of man. And as he can observe himself, man can also be inebriated by the pleasure of observing him. Since his manifestation, however, is not only in man but in the entire universe, the joy of seeing him profits the moon and the sun that “turn the same mirror.”³⁵ He is the sight of my eyes and the light of the world. And with that sight and under the rays of this light, I see myself and the world, both of which come from him.

Hitherto, he was an unfound beloved and I, a searching and seeking lover. And when I found him, I perceived myself and realized that Mansur³⁶ is God, and that he who is in the garb of Bayazid³⁷ is no other than the friend. And now, this I is a beloved lover, a lover who is beloved, “who is in love with himself for all eternity,”³⁸ but with a self that is in an embrace with the world and the soul of the world beyond these “four opposing unruly humors,”³⁹ like a drop with the sea and rain, a tree with the soil and the sun, and a man with existence and nonexistence. The world is born of love, and love is the only truth of the transient world:

I offered both worlds to my experienced heart

Other than love for you,

it regarded all the rest as transient.⁴⁰

Not only this transient world but also the everlasting world is something transient and does not have much value compared to the eternality of love.

And man has fallen from the realm of love—the safe meadows of paradise—to the hunting ground of this “old wolf,”⁴¹ and with empty hands and tired feet but an “experienced heart,”⁴² he travels in this strange desert, and his voice remains in the sky like a star in darkness, because in the same way that God was a hidden treasure who could not remain hidden, the poet as well holds a treasure of the sorrow of love in his breast that cannot remain hidden. And being in love is that which happened to man’s heart, and from the beginning, his heavenly destiny was to be on earth. And being on earth is like being a stalk of straw in the clamor of the wind, a twig in a roaring river; it means instability and change.

The lover’s heart, with rapturous and unconscious eagerness and leaping, yearns for the friend, so that he can fit the eternity of time within the hurricane of a short life. Obviously, any sane person would quietly laugh at such silly daydreaming. “Such false delusions, such an impossible dream!”⁴³ A practical intellect recognizes its limitations and would not nurture false delusions. The poet’s heart, however, accepts the “burden of trust”⁴⁴ in the inebriation of madness. Where the mountain is struck by fear, the madman—the prophet, the poet, or the lover—jumps into the arena and says: Yes, you are my God, and I am your messenger on earth. Then God puts “himself in the mouth of man,” and man’s voice resonates like “the most pleasant reminder in this revolving dome”⁴⁵ and says “that which the master of eternal beginning said.”⁴⁶ The terrestrial fate of this eloquent lover, however, is in the hands of the tribe of men of reason. During the waiting period that slowly counts the days of the poet before it robs his corpse, they drive him in whatever direction they want.

Dark night and the desert, where can one reach,

Unless the candle of your face lights my path?⁴⁷

Night is the realm of silence and sleep. Alongside the twilight of sunset, oblivion comes. Like a wounded animal, the wind creeps into the caves of darkness, and the sun, like a stone that has fallen into a well, is forgotten and alone. One cannot hear the sound of the day’s footsteps, and sluggishness, as heavy as the slumber of satiated sheep, approaches as slowly as a shadow. Sleep has arrived. It climbs up the toes; it comes up like the seeping out of the night from the eastern shore and the rising of water in a marsh. And the body surrenders, naked and limp like an inflamed wound, such that the closed eyes can no longer see and the tormented ears no longer hear. In the night of trying to find answers, which is so concerned about the rainy day that it has lost the now, sleep weighs heavily on the chest and sinks me into the river of darkness. Like a prison in the depths of the earth, night is closed and windowless. It is like thick congealed tar, an unfamiliar lonely dead end in the nightmares of which wolves are waiting in ambush. Grasses are bent under the burden of darkness; seeds have crawled into the heart of the soil from fear; and darkness, like oppression—heavier than lead and more unpleasant than carrion—has fallen upon the ground.

But the night of lovers is hidden wakefulness. The blades of grass stretch out through the skin of the earth looking for the lost sun; the plant sap sucks the root of the soil and comes toward the leaves; the wave of the blowing wind makes the massive hands of darkness shiver; and the night embraces the stretched-out body of the tree and runs its hands over the downslope and upslope of hills and ravines, over the bottom of the valley and the skyline of the mountain, and farther away. The wounded earth takes a breath and falls asleep to the murmuring of running water. In its sleep, the white boat of dawn sets sail, gliding toward the shore of the sky. The night has green dreams, and the forgotten stars awaken. The night of lovers is the night of stars, the night of light.

The candle that is the face of the friend turns the falling and sleeping night of the worldly wise into the night of lovers that has a sleepless heart, such that the mad traveler with his burden of trust or the treasure of love traverses the dark loneliness of this desert and finds his way to somewhere. Love for the friend—whether that eternal beloved or this one with “disheveled hair, smiling”⁴⁸—takes the lover from a dark night to a luminous night, and as long as he is on the path, he is immune to heavy inanimate sleep; he has a light in his eye and a light in his heart that at every moment guide him through external and internal darkness. The fiery-winged bird and the starry-eyed deer pass through the sleeping plain of night and the sluggishness of nocturnal sleep. Lovers are the travelers of this caravan, and the men of reason are those who remain behind in this caravanserai. The former are the stream and the sea, and the latter, stagnant water.

Whosoever is not alive through love in this circle,

even before he dies,

Perform the prayers for the dead for him,

on my religious decree.⁴⁹

Because those without love in this “dark night and the desert”⁵⁰ have no light on their path, they will not find any path. In darkness, they have no path to find. They remain where they were, their “arms and legs, lifeless”; otherwise, their bodies would be alive, rather than being dead corpses requiring the ritual prayers for the dead. In the view of our bard, a person who is not in love is dead, even if he is busy with his life. Conversing, socializing, working and business, and having a wife and children, these are not signs of being alive, because body and soul without love comprise an existence without purpose. The purpose of creation is love, and a created being that lives without love is both separated from the purpose of his being and also untroubled by this separation, because all else aside, a heart without love is mere water and clay, not the house of awareness.

Of course, the lover and the unaware are both separated from their source. But one knows and seeks the time of reunion, and the other does not know and wanders about aimlessly among the thieves in this chaotic bazaar. In the beginning, when there was nothing but love for the friend, everything began with love, because the friend’s enamored state of longing to see the face of the friend caused us to become the mirror. But as the mirror reflects the face of the friend, it sees both him and itself because of him. The result of this seeing is the gift of our love. Even though man’s heart is the most joyful house of love—in the same way that the sun is the most joyful house of light—the whole world is burning with love, in the same way that the whole world seeks the blaze of the sun.

In the time before time began

the rays of your beauty appeared

love was made manifest

and set the whole world on fire⁵¹

In this ghazal as well, imagining God is coupled with fire, lightning, and brilliance, and with flame and light, as though the face of the friend comes into existence in the formless light with which the universe is overflowing. Everything is seen in light and everything, even an insignificant particle, seeks light to take form and to again attain itself.

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.⁵²

In this falling and rising journey, which is the desired end of being, if I settle in my darkness, I am dead and my heart has no light for the particle that is me to seek my sun, and my sun no light to accept the particle that is me. There is no effort and attraction in me. It is as though my body is the coffin of my soul, and my legs with every step are dragging a corpse to the graveyard. Such a self-centered, self-absorbed being is so enamored with observing himself that he is unable to see anything unless he measures it by the touchstone of his own profit and loss. In this way alone, he has a connection with another. He who out of his egotism only loves himself and does not know any other love has arisen in opposition to everyone and claims to own the entire world. If it is as he wishes, so be it; otherwise, be it not so! Our Hafez says: Conceal the secret of love from this pretender, “Let those who are full of themselves / die in themselves,”⁵³ and then he warns:

Fall in love, for if not, some day

the affairs of this world will end

Before you are able to comprehend

the purpose in this workshop of existence.⁵⁴

Love is not only the motivation but also the goal of creation. The world is created from love and for love, and love is the beginning and the end. That which came “into the clime of existence from the frontier of nonexistence”⁵⁵ is setting out on the path of love, and longing for a mandrake, he does not take to heart the harshness of the thorn of the lote tree. On this love quest, this journey, if you are not of the same heart as the friend and you are not a companion of the world, you are dead in life; and if you are, in the end, you are one with the friend. Hence, you are alive even in death: “He who finds life through love will never die.”⁵⁶

Death is the offspring of time. Time—that is, the journey of time, the embodiment of this journey in the revolving of the heavens and the result of this journey and excursion—plucks the guests of the world from the banquet of the earth and hurls them into the abyss of oblivion. Hence, inevitably, the one who does not die must either be standing somewhere outside this time and space, which he is not, or if he is in the same circle, he must nonetheless hurl himself out of its circulation to uproot the undesirable fatalistic foundation and establish the foundation of a self-desired destiny: to change the natural and universal predestination to his own human free will. Union with the friend, oneness with him beyond time and space, is the elixir that saves the lover from nonexistence.

from the dawn of time until eternity’s evening

love and friendship are bound by one covenant⁵⁷

“Before that green roof and enamelled vault / were raised to the sky,”⁵⁸ the friend was the lord of my heart, and after the crumbling of this “enamelled vault,” he will continue to be. Our covenant is from the time when there was no time and there was no world for space to exist. Under this azure sky, nothing remains the same. The movement of time in space, birth and death, changes everything and then destroys it, with the exception of the covenant between the friend and the friend, the agreement that said, “Am I not your Lord?” to which I responded, “You are.” Then he entrusted the burden of trust to my hands and the treasure of love’s sorrow to my heart and let me go on earth to retell his word. This agreement is based on “one promise and covenant,” because the heart of the poet “has fallen in love for all eternity and has remained eternal in this.”⁵⁹ Beyond the time and space that come, deteriorate, and go, the covenant and those who made it will continue to be valid.

In contrast to the created world that is subject to change, the human being is of a different essence. His body is also the place where disease waits in ambush and the hibernation place of death, which all of a sudden awakens and engulfs him. But “the fire that never dies is in his heart,”⁶⁰ even though at every moment the wind of calamity destroys a crop and harvest in the world.

If the wind of calamity casts chaos into both worlds,

Our eyes shall light the path of waiting for the friend.⁶¹

For a human being who is both on the ever-moving path of time and also unable to give up the longing to be and stay, love is the antidote to all instability and nothingness. While the world steals a sheaf from the harvest of the poet’s life every day, in its place, love returns a spark of his inner fire to his sun every day.

In the darkness of the world, the lamp of his eyes is lit, and his eyes are watchful on the path of the friend. Blessed by this light, he splits that darkness. He remains neither in his own darkness nor in the darkness of the world. Hence, he remains neither alone nor without the friend. In the face of external darkness, internal light comes to the rescue. In the chaotic night of the world, the star of the eyes is the pathfinder and guide. The lamp of the lover’s eyes seeks a singular sun that is the source of darkness and light, and it resides beyond the open boundaries of these two in his soul and is farther and closer to him than anything else.

With such a bright light that gives birth to the sunlight of love, the worth of the borrowed transient “harvest of the moon and the cluster of the Pleiades” is no more than a grain of barley.⁶² The grandeur of the heavens and the world of existence and nonexistence is insignificant compared to a man in love, because blessed by love and unity with the beloved, he is the source of all existence. Now, the world is of man, not man of the world. “The world was created because of us, not we because of it.”⁶³ Man is free from the world, and the world is enslaved by man. “I am the slave of love and free from both worlds.”⁶⁴ Love is freedom, and it saves me from the misfortunes of both worlds, from the fear of nonexistence of the world and the yearning for the maidens of paradise in the cozy house of the next world or the painful punishment of hell, and it changes the dreaded God of the muftis and religious police to the friend of the mystics. That frowning, harsh God who, eager to punish his slaves, blew into the fire of hell is now sympathetic to human pain, is kind, and longs for man, in order to observe and find himself again in him.

in the beauty of your faceadmire God’s handiwork

in the mirror of my heartbehold the divine⁶⁵

A beautiful face is a mirror that reflects God, because not only is the handiwork of God visible in this garden but also he sees the manifestation of his own face in this garden. That hidden treasure that could not remain hidden was manifested in this spring of light, in this house of exile: the friend came to the alley of the friend, and “my eye became the manifestation of his face.”⁶⁶ Not only does such a garden and such a place of manifestation deserve the love of the world, but also humans and spirits are enamored by it. The lover who sought the friend now himself turns into a beloved who is being sought. A human who has lost his heart to God through him becomes a human who is a mirror that reflects God, a two-sided mirror that both reflects God’s face and also is a sign of the artistry of his hands. The lover turns into a beloved, and humans, too—like God—fall in love with humans. Hence, love for the created is not only not alien to love for the creator but it is also fused with it; and inevitably, both are born from each other. Hafez’s love is divine-worldly, Godly human, and celestial-terrestrial. Man and God are both lovers and beloveds.

Adam, who in supreme paradise was a cohabitant of angels, sold paradise for a grain of wheat and, in search of love, turned to this “flourishing monastery in ruins.”⁶⁷

We saw the fresh beauty of your face and came

From paradise in search of this mandrake.⁶⁸

This friend, whose mandrake the poet desires, is not the eternal beloved, because he resided beside him there, and he did not need to leave paradise to reach him. But the poet has no quietude in that “refuge of pleasure.”⁶⁹ His “celestial soul desires the dimple in a chin” and in order to become entangled “in the lock of the curly tresses”⁷⁰ of a beloved, he descends from that lofty height to this dirt pit, as though being with God and in God does not quench the thirst for love. Even though love for that omnipotent friend frees man from his terrestrial limitations, until it becomes physical in the being of this powerless friend, it seems to remain in the realm of imagination and does not become an actual reality. A person who has never lost his heart to one like himself, with such an afflicted body and soul, who has not experienced the suffering of waiting and has not succumbed to the hopelessness of separation and has not gained a new life in seeing someone, might know love, but he is not afflicted by it. This knowledge in him is a matter of thinking, not of living. He has thought about love and can speak about it, but since he has never been alive through love, he can never give life to love. “What pleasure can be drawn from the fruits of paradise / By anyone who has not bitten the apple of a beloved’s chin?”⁷¹ Even if everything else can be learned from a book or a teacher, love cannot be learned, because it is not learnable, like the soul of the tree, the bounteousness of the sky, the blessing of rain, the growing of the plant, like the freshness of spring, and the soul of the universe, which can neither be learned nor taught! Being-evolving-living love is love. It is the beating of the heart, the seeing of the eye, the flying of the wing, and the advancing of the foot, which, should it occur, does not remain concealed and inevitably shines through.

In theoretical mysticism, worldly love is a bridge to real love; in other words, human love is a path to divine love. But in Hafez, one is not the point of departure and the other the destination; one is not the road and the other the wayfarer’s stopping post. They are twins; they are both real. Even though divine love is the original source, human love is also such a truth that it pulls the lover from the happy arms of God without the fear of death and dying of this land of dust.

What is the heart’s purpose

in viewing the garden of the world?

To pick flowers from your face

as with the hand that is the pupil of the eye.⁷²

Now that I am separated from the friend and forlorn, I am by the side of this friend because of whose being the world is no longer the “ruined monastery”⁷³ but the “flourishing monastery in ruins.”⁷⁴ Love for a “seditious and inconstant”⁷⁵ beloved makes the ruined world flourish and transforms “this house of sleep”⁷⁶ into a garden to be viewed, from the observation of which the heart achieves its purpose.

Love makes the ruins prosper, turns ugliness to beauty, and saves the life of the lover from one lived tediously and meaninglessly. Now his heart has a purpose; it is beating intently for something: seeing the friend and having the flower of her face in the flower garden of the eye! Because the world that was created from love kept me away from that friend, it became my prison, and because it connected me with this friend, it became my house of hope. Hence, worldly love is not metaphorical in Hafez; it is a reality that transforms his view and perception of the world and gives it a different meaning. Blessed by this worldly love, the bitter hostile world becomes sweet and friendly.

Two gardens of love and friendship, in the heavens and on earth, are the abodes of the poet. Each garden is the reflection of the other, and it displays itself with the light and the mirror of the other. The two alleys of the friend are twin gardens in which the character of love is the same. And in both, love has a mysterious and unknowable nature. A spark leaps in the darkness of night from the depth of a puzzle and strikes a heart. A man imprisoned by the body and life becomes free, permeates the world, shares roots with water and soil, becomes the intimate companion of flowers and plants, and on the bed of night and day, embraces darkness and light, plunging into the soul of the universe, like a starfish in the spring of the “water of life”! He who, restless for union with the friend, says, “hoping to be hunted by the royal falcon”⁷⁷ I flew like a bird from the cage of the earth to be annihilated in him like Mansur⁷⁸ and for him to be eternal in me, now before this friend says:

Rise and display your stature, oh graceful idol,

And I will rise from my soul and the world, dancing.⁷⁹

In both states, my elder is eager to split open the cocoon of the body and join with another. For a person to wish for death a hundred times in order to move beyond himself and attain union with a friend or to fulfill a wish is a mysterious state and stage; for a person “to rise from his soul with the good news of a union,”⁸⁰ to get out of the trap of the world, and to soar to be a companion of and harmonious with existence and nonexistence, this freedom from time and space, and presence in the time from before the dawn of creation to eternity, which is the state of lovers, is unknowable. One may be able to describe the how of it, but the why of it is a problem that cannot be solved by reason. “Debating the how and why results in headache, oh heart.”⁸¹ A lover like our Hafez describes how he feels and his state of being in love, but he does not know why he has such feelings and is in such a state. No one knows this secret:

Along the path of love, indeed,

none truly grasp the mysteries

One and all make conjectures

based on their own fantasies.⁸²

Not only love, but also the beloved cannot be fully understood: a friend closer to one than one’s soul and yet farther, “in all conditions”⁸³ with me and I without him, invisible light and being outside existence, my created and creator! In the same way that everything can be seen by the light of the sun, but one cannot look at it due to the intensity of its brightness, everything can be understood because of the friend, except the one who is the original source of knowledge.

how can eyes see you as you truly are

everyone understands in proportion to their vision⁸⁴

Even though every eye, depending on its ability, sees some of his beauty, since the world is overflowing with it, the essence of the friend is out of reach of our intellect. And love for an unknowable beloved is mysterious and strange by its very nature.

Since the love of the poet for the created is of the same essence and root as his love for the creator, this worldly love, like that other love, has a subtlety and a mystery to it that cannot be discovered. The allure of the beloved “is not due to her hair and slender waist.”⁸⁵ “A beautiful face has no need for colors, rouges, and beauty marks.”⁸⁶ It is as though beauty, which does not need all these, is an essence that is and is not all these; and in addition to these, many things—which we do not see and do not know—may pass through the depths of the beloved’s soul and the privacy of her heart that make her deserving of love. In the sun, there is the fire of eagerness; in the soil, there is the pain of waiting; in the cloud, there is the weeping of rain; and in the wind, there is the restless wandering to make the earth deserving of spring.

There is an unknown but tangible magic in the friend of which our Hafez is so enamored, to the point that uncontrollably he says, “Without you, I say, I do not want life.”⁸⁷ At times, the poet calls this perceptible but unknowable mystery the “gentleness and kindness that can win over men of vision,”⁸⁸ and at times, “that certain something”⁸⁹ is neither a beautiful face nor a soft and delicate body, and by no means has a name that uncovers the mystery through which the hidden meaning is revealed.

Love arises from a hidden subtlety

Called neither ruby lips nor rust-colored down.⁹⁰

It defies the tongue and is unsayable. The lover is constantly in front of a window that is not fully opened, or if it is, before the eyes is a scene that extends farther and farther away the more we look. It is as though love is a foggy, unclear realm, a revolving sphere, and a changing landscape with dreamlike and colorful horizons and the rarest perception of purple, green, and blue that do not exist in the sky, land, and sea, but the image of which appears before the eyes of the imagination like the manifestation of musical melodies to a listener with closed eyes and open heart, in fluid mingled forms of innumerable colors, and in the oneness of the face, in sound, in that which is seen, and in that which is heard, in a totality of the same essence and harmony with the observer and listener. The beginning and the end of love, the lover, and the beloved are a single essence. And because love is not merely this stagnant, raw reality but, rather, is something more internal and more concealed and the substance of the soul of this external world, the person who finds his way to the city of love is he who hurls himself beyond this external world into another world, into the same place where the poet “endeavors to perhaps hurl himself.”⁹¹

And this flight to another place requires the far-flying wings of imagination. The lover and the beloved nurture the hidden subtlety of love on seven colorful canvases of the imagination; otherwise, this real world, this stone-hearted unbeautiful law, turns every lofty desire into dust and every unruly flame into ashes. How the realist that is reason sneers at and stares at mad love!

At any rate, love is nurtured by, rather than born from, a fertile fancy that does not remain the same, and, more of a player than the world, causes chaos in the world and builds another wheel and firmament of a different form and function for itself. Reality turns into a pleasant dream. The will, which was in the prison of necessity, is now free, and when this fancy that has fled captivity imagines the darkness of the world, due to the same freedom, it constructs it as much darker and even more painful. The vacillation between captivity and freedom is one of the expanding and contracting motivations of lovers and mystics. To be in one’s lofty star in the heavens at one moment and then to fall into the well of one’s depths, to be turned upside down and downside up on the constant waves of happiness and adversity, and to run in heaven and hell is the resurrection of the soul; but it is not within the power of endurance and ability of just anyone.

The joy and sorrow and the ugliness and beauty of love go beyond the truth of reality, and in heaven and hell, at times in light and at times in darkness, at two extremes, the lover’s condition is never the same. And so often, he might have both extremes within him at a single moment: a silent nightingale and a speaking lily that laughs in the midst of crying and wails at the moment of union. The imagination, which as fast as thought comes in new forms at every moment and passes, transforms love, like a patch of cloud in the hands of a hurricane, into another shape every time and does not leave the lover in one state: “at every moment the image of your face / blocks the road of my imaginings.”⁹² The essence of love has such a confusing and rapidly changing face that it constantly escapes recognition by the lover, because by the time he wants to set his heart on one face and explore it carefully, new faces come and bring about new states of mind in him. Moreover, recognition requires leisure, patience, and a little contemplation, which he lacks. The one to be recognized and the recognizer are both ever changing, and the lover only describes that which he sees, in other words, his dispositions while observing; and he knows that the unsayable and unhearable cannot be told: “to whom shall I tell the things / I see in this shadow play”?⁹³

Love is the individual experience of social man. By social man, I do not have its restricted meaning in mind, that is, someone at a particular time and place from a particular group or class! I mean a human being who comes into the world among others and leaves the world among others; and in relation to them, he builds, destroys, and gives meaning to his life. In encountering the world, such a person might lose his heart to the spirit that bestows existence on the universe. Also, in encountering other human beings, he might lose his heart to one like himself who is the abode of the spirit of the universe. A person disengaged from the universe and from man, one who does not contemplate these two and is enslaved to himself alone, is deprived of the light of love, and his path to join another remains obstructed in the heavens or on earth.

The love of social man, however, is not a universal experience or a personal experience that is placed at the service of everyone. Every person must test it with his own body and soul and plunge into it with his own heart. On the one hand, the characteristic of love is that it cannot remain within one person and must find its way to another. No one is a lover without a beloved. On the other hand, the nature of love is individual, personal; every person perceives it himself. Every tree in the forest has its own rain to drink, its own springtime to wear, and its own sky to watch; and every spring bubbles up through its own body from the darkness of the earth and presents its breast to sunlight and moonlight. This is not a possession or knowledge that one can give to another or have another enjoy, something he has accumulated or learned. Love is social-antisocial, something with a dual essence and with disorderly order; and to the point that it is social and is linked to the foundation, to the psyche, and to the culture of social man, it is transferable to another; and to the point that it is individual and internal, it is not transferable, only describable. For this reason, the poet in love who inevitably needs to speak drifts back and forth between speaking and not speaking. Because he does not know of any memory more pleasant than the sound of the words of love, he always praises love; but in the same state, he always remembers: “Talk of love is not that which is uttered by the tongue.”⁹⁴ Nevertheless, he cannot restrain the tongue.

The poet recreates his love through the mediation of language and thus makes his inner passion possible and brings it into the world; in this way, the painful force that was inside him and would not give him respite, that force that would explode like a storm in the air, an earthquake on land, and a volcano in the mountain, and like a seed would tear apart in the body of the soil and bloom like a rainbow in the sky and a bud into the petal of a flower, that mad and rupturing albeit beautiful force, quiets down. Every ghazal is the colorful bottle of a demon whose life depends on it. A demon is contained within the frame of an angel. In this way, my dexterous elder steals the amorous moments of life from the hands of the pilfering world and saves them from annihilation, because at least he leaves in place a memento of them under the revolving dome. Inevitably, he must come to terms with the fire he has in his breast; and the gift of poetry offers him this happy opportunity to hurl the fire outside of himself by composing the inner cries and roars.⁹⁵ That internal, mute, destructive, and destructible force turns into an external, perceptible, constructed, and polished phenomenon. In the course of this kind of creation, the poet comes out of the nocturnal whirlpool of the soul and steps onto the shore of the dawning of the soul.⁹⁶

In the course of this private and intimate give-and-take, the Bard of Shiraz also has a conversation with us. He is not merely addressing himself; but to the extent that he is involved with the world and with humans, he is also addressing you and me and our world. Even when he has chosen seclusion in some corner and has “moist eyes in a conversation with the self,”⁹⁷ he is speaking to me, so that I can split open my closed shell and try to perhaps hurl myself to where he is,⁹⁸ to come out of my circumstances and place myself in his frame of mind, such that his conversation with himself also becomes my own conversation with myself. Nevertheless, in both instances, the poet cannot transmit to me his feeling, temperament, and experience regarding love, because everyone must test love for himself, and be tested by love. But once my social man becomes familiar with the spirit and culture of the poet, he becomes aware of his feelings and experience. Of course, in this respect, the windfall that I gain is not merely awareness. If the essence of love is in my nature, and the ability to love has a place in my heart, I will be nurtured for life beyond my prison. If I have any seeds in my soil, blessed by the rain of love, a sapling may sprout, and my flower and thorn grow as he nurtures. This gardener does not plant a seed in me; he brings the existing seed to fruitfulness.

Through reading, even the poetry of Hafez, no one will become a lover. But the fortunate reader will become open to love, “for love is a journey that requires a guide.”⁹⁹ And guidance comes from the beloved who dawns like a star in the eye of the lover and shows him the alley of the friend.

one cannot find the precious pearl alone

it is an illusion to think this can be done

without another’s help¹⁰⁰

A ray of the beloved must be reflected in the inner mirror for the beauty of a love to be manifested. According to the poet, a person seeks love who has “pure essence.”¹⁰¹ The magic of poetry does not make such a person a lover; rather, it awakens in him the memory of multidimensional and multifaceted love.

Not only is love, like any living phenomenon, a twin of death, but, because it has a more ecstatic and more restless life, it also embodies a more tormenting and more untimely death, untimely no matter when it arrives. Poetry cannot give life to a dead love, nor bring back a departed beloved; yet, it always brings to mind the essence and substance of being in love, and it causes the heart that is accepting of love to recreate in his creative mind and to test past and even future experiences, one’s own and other people’s experiences, known and unknown, clear and unclear, as well as the meaning of love. The bard’s ghazals provoke the memory of the most authentic human experience, love, which is a gem with varying manifestations in every wayfarer and causes the most hidden and the deepest streams of existence to flow in the realm of the soul. The green memory of love sprouts from under the forgotten soil and spreads across our meadow before the eyes of our imagination. In us, that “pure essence” awakens, and the eye of the heart opens for us to view the garden of the universe. In this way, the reader with the light of the poem discovers an astonishing relationship with himself. His loving self emerges from between the light and dark shadows of unawareness, and he senses the truth of his own nature, a euphoric feeling that blows like fresh air in the branches and leaves of the tree of the heart. The magic of poetry that awakens an experience and the thought of love and makes us able to see it is a reminder of the path of wakefulness and insight. In the inner darkness, a sun has set and is invisible but rises and becomes visible through the blessing of poetry, emerging from the realm of darkness into light. Poetry makes of us poets of the hidden treasure we hold in our depths; and when I look inside me, I am reminded of myself.

In that time without beginning

the Sultan of Eternity

gave us the treasure-trove of sorrows of love

from the moment we turned our faces towards

this empty caravanserai¹⁰²

Love is a divine gift. Because the friend wanted me, he wanted me to also want him. Hence, by the blessing of love, he made me fall in love. He was a hidden treasure, a manifestation that appeared at creation, and existence is the visible manifestation of his invisible being. Love is a hidden treasure that cannot remain hidden, that manifests itself outside the wishes of one person or another, that conquers our being and takes us where it wishes. We are captives of liberating love. The gift of the friend is the treasure in the ruins: light in darkness, life in death, knowing in not knowing, happiness in sorrow, and freedom in captivity! In man, love signifies God in the universe. In the same way that God is inside the universe and outside the universe, love is also a gem inside the treasure of the human heart and outside the universe;¹⁰³ it is a being in nonexistence that was entrusted to man at the dawn of creation, and the lover in the realm of union became one with the beloved. Love is alienation from the self and oneness with another. The burning passion of longing for this other—like the eagerness of night for day, and day for light, and light for the sun, and the sun for the sky, and the sky for the earth, and the earth for the bosom of the concealed body of the night—is rapturous. In an involuntary journey, the lover is left without his self, separated from his internal and external self; in other words, he “would give up lordship over the earth”¹⁰⁴ to join the truth of himself and the universe—the friend and the alley of the friend—because only in this case will he rediscover his lost self, will the lost Joseph return to Canaan, and will order come to his distracted mind.¹⁰⁵

The lover who has returned to himself because of being blessed with the beloved in the state of union willingly and knowingly shares the destiny of the friend. He is with him from the dawn of creation to eternity and from shore to shore, in the same way that the path is with the star, the star with the water, and the water with the light. Two traveling companions pass through the empty desert of nonexistence and reach the tumultuous shore of existence. Man is with God in God’s sorrow and happiness, and man gains God’s sorrowful freedom and free will that are accountable for good and evil. Because he is with God, he is free, and because he is free, he is responsible, and because he is responsible, he has a painful destiny.

The fortune of union with the beloved is a sorrowful freedom that is gained by remembering the suffering in the world. The restless glance of a friend seeks refuge in the hands of a friend, like starlight seeks refuge in the eye and moonlight in the lake. A morning splits the shell of darkness and disappears in the eyes of day. In the perilous circumstances of union, the lover emerges from the darkness of his soul and offers his bright soul to the beloved, the dust and mass of his earthly confinement remains, and his bird flies to the home of the beloved. Something has died and something has joined another; and it is as if the lover has vanished and no longer exists. The feeling of this nonexistence causes the lover in complete union and ultimate joy to taste the bitterness of separation. The poison of loneliness runs through the veins of a person who has drunk the nectar of union. In the same way, without the tragic affliction of distance, the good fortune of closeness is not appreciated.

I shall not lament your absencesince without it

how would I know the pleasure of your presence¹⁰⁶

The rising and setting of the lover’s star of fortune passes through the twilight of dawn and sunset. The rising of the star awakens in the heart the memory of its setting, and in its setting, the memory of its rising. When the happy lover is jubilant upon seeing the beloved, his heart shudders at the days when seeing her would be impossible, because even when lovers have absolutely no anxiety of separation, “the stone thrower of separation is waiting in ambush,”¹⁰⁷ and one day, the pit of death will distance the hands from each other, and love will be lost in the salt desert like a dewdrop; the bird will not split the clear screen of the sky and will not make the pearly air of dawn tremble, and will not make the heavy indolent silence sit on the ground like the body of darkness; the bright smile of morning will not bloom and its early rising eyes will not open at dawn. The world is the house of the drowsy, with multitudes of sleepers. And loneliness blindly wanders on the face of the earth.

Even when a lover like our Hafez is a partner in the eternal destiny of God, he does not separate himself from his mortal fate. Some saints and spiritual people might be able to forget themselves like angels and perish in the spirit of God. The poet, however, cannot. In the ecstasy and rapture of love, he feels the river that runs rapidly and slowly through him, the untiring and incurable wayfarer. Every day, a sun from him falls into the abyss of nonexistence. Being in step with time always keeps awake the thought of tomorrow, the tomorrow when the autumn wind has blown and the green leaf of love has dried up because of the blight of fall, and no longer “is any sign left of the vine or the vine planter.”¹⁰⁸ The poet is aware of death and knows that the passage of time makes the high granite mountain low and pulls the peak from the sky down to the ground. Even when the existing although transient beauty of the beloved can be perceived, precisely then, the ear of his heart hears the sound of the footsteps of time, like the murmuring of running water. Beyond the pleasant dream of beauty in the distant night gallery of truth, a hazy apparition can be seen that makes the heart of the lover tremble. In the face of the eternal revolving of the spheres and the tireless movement of traveling stars and the undeniable future, he cannot do anything and is helpless. He must either flee from love, to be free of the dread of separation—which is the fate of lovers—or like a straw in the wind or a twig in a flood, let go of the brightness of his star in the darkness of the night, so that perhaps one day he may emerge from “this wave and storm.”¹⁰⁹

The sorrow of lovers, however, is not merely about the days that have not come, a future that is standing in our path with empty hands and vacant eyes; it is about right now, and the foundation-shattering joy of union.

A nightingale was holding in its beak

the petal of a brightly colored rose

but even with this beautiful token

in its possessionwas crying its heart out

I asked whyin the very eye of union

it lamented in such a way and it replied

it is precisely because of this manifestation

of my beloved that I am distraught¹¹⁰

The eyes of the lover do not have the fortitude to see. A sign of the beauty of the friend is a flame, a flash of light that burns. Beauty and goodness are two faces of one thing. Goodness is beautiful, and beauty is good. Perfection is harmony between goodness and beauty, the result of which facilitates creation, the ability to evolve and accept existence; and absolute perfection is absolute power: the alliance of light with light and the distraction of darkness.

In relationship to humans, as well, in the language of the poet, good is the same as beautiful; and when he speaks about the good, he is referring to the beautiful. In his delightful mind, power occurs coupled with goodness and beauty: The beloved is the sweet king, a ruler with the bow of eyebrows and arrows of eyelashes, the royal falcon of the heart of a dove in love, and the lord of his soul. The beautiful are monarchs, and the beloved is the “sovereign beauty without whom the heart begins to fail: Woe from the sorrow of loneliness!”¹¹¹

The celestial and terrestrial friends of our Hafez are perfect. One is absolute perfection that cannot even be contained in the imagination, and the other is a desired perfection that is not only a sign, a reflected ray of the sun, but an infinite and ultimate beloved that can be held in the arms, that can be seen with the eyes, and that can be desired by the heart.

To be face-to-face with the beauty of God is terrifying. The perfection that cannot even be contained in the imagination not only stops the mind’s endless wandering but also even paralyzes the power of imagination. What is godlier than God? The other side of this dead end is falling into nonexistence. Then, only the thought and illusion of his opposite and converse can cross the mind: evil, ugliness, and nonexistence, the alliance of darkness with darkness and the distraction of light.

I visit the friend with the light of a beautiful heart, but the grim face of the enemy is waiting in ambush in the dark chamber of the eye, in this dungeon of the mind. The inner eye is a pondering seer; when it sees God, it does not forget Satan, and in the bright hands of God, it takes refuge from the dark memory of Satan. Good and evil, beauty and ugliness, and life and death are runaways bound together, joined yet separated beings.

Observing the beauty of the beloved is also painful, because from extreme happiness and good fortune, the memory of suffering and misfortune is awakened in my heart, and my wakeful heart remains empty handed. How could an insignificant measuring cup drink the light of that great a sun? After all, this angry sluggish cup is as small as a bud, as thin as glass, and as fleeting as a breeze. But despite all its inability, the greedy heart wants the flowing gush of a spring that, like light, can neither be caught nor possessed; rather, like the sun, at the same time that it exists, it is transitory. The beloved has engulfed the internal and external reality and the unreal, actuality and dream, and presence and absence; and because she exists and does not exist, the lover is in her, he is and he is not. The lover who has given up his self and taken a plunge is not only defenseless in the face of the threat of an unkind future, but also, because in the happiness of the good fortune of the time of union he cannot obtain the entirety of the beloved and keep her to himself, he remains unhappy. While the greedy lover cannot contain himself due to the inebriation of beauty, he is distraught with the sorrow of the muteness of the heart. In Persian ghazals, the nightingale and the rose symbolize the lover and the beloved. One signifies lovesickness, restlessness, and the cheerful but needy sound and song of lovers, and the other signifies fleeting vulnerable beauty, the blossoming but coquettish coyness of the beloved. A nightingale with a rose petal in its beak is a happy lover who despite all things laments the manifestation of the beauty of the face of the beloved.¹¹²

Beauty is a painful thing, because it shows itself but for an instant and is gone; yet it robs its lover of all his being. Before this, if—like spring and nature—beauty would become perceptible in the beloved, now—like freshness, which is the nature of spring—beauty is the same as the beloved, and the beloved is the same as beauty, and this sameness creates another world in the lover and makes him a different person. It plucks him away from the world in which he is—the world of profit and loss and the good and evil of those who observe good manners and the ways and customs of the worldly wise—and hurls him beyond fame and infamy, such that he shuns fame and is famed for infamy. A human being who shares customs and habits, a tamed and trained horse in the herd, turns into a bird in the sky and a deer in the desert and becomes restive. The fact that it has been said from ancient times that some person in love with another took a plunge and became a wanderer in the desert and homeless in the mountains, that it has been said that because of his love for Shirin, Farhad complained to the silent mountain, and because of his love for Leyli, Majnun told his story to dumb animals, among other things, means that lovers do not follow the ways of others, are not one of many, and even though they are in society, they are alienated from everyday social life.¹¹³ Either they are away from others, or their hearts are elsewhere in the presence of others. In contrast to civilized social people, they have a strange nature and character, they are wild; and from the perspective of the worldly wise, they are mad. The one who considers the dust of the alley of the friend more precious than

the gardens of paradise

the shade of the Tuba tree

or the abode of the heavenly maidens¹¹⁴

is mad in the eyes of any faithful Muslim; and the one who considers his beloved to be “beyond comprehension”¹¹⁵ and says, “since all existence is alive from your scent,”¹¹⁶ do not take your shadow away from us, is mad in the eyes of any unfaithful atheist. To consider the one who himself like an ember shines but for a brief moment and fades in the night to be the one who gives life to all existence is pure madness. Indeed, if madness is the alteration of the mind and emotions, the disintegration of the intellect that creates order, and the loss of human self in the invisible and foggy desert of the unconsciousness of the self, then lovers are mad.

My whole heart and being became so filled with the friend

That thought of the self was erased from my consciousness.¹¹⁷

Not only do they not think about themselves, but thinking about themselves or their thoughts is erased from their memory and consciousness, and because they have lost themselves in themselves, they are self-alienated; they are mad!

The awareness of such lovers and poets, like that of prophets, lies in their ecstatic lack of awareness of the self, their reality in their dreams, and their truth in their imaginations. Their physical eyes are not asleep, but the eye of their heart is also awake. While on this side of seeing, they see things that are visible, they also keep an eye on the evolution of things that exist. They observe that which is standing before them, and they also contemplate that fluid essence that is occurring and evolving in that which “stands before them,” that inner composer that appears in its external form. They observe the warm activity of spring in the depths of the sleeping autumn roots and the sprouting of the bud of love on the other side of the flower garden. In the hiding place of every actuality and phenomenon, another sometimes incompatible reality is hidden that longs to create its own reality: love is an ailment that has no remedy; the lover dies from the Christlike breaths of the beloved that bring the dead back to life; and one not in love who falls in love with peace of mind is a clever bird that has fallen into a trap. This is that which it appears to be; but behind this actual incident, a seemingly contradictory reality can be seen: the remedy for the lovesick heart of the lover lies in that ailment,¹¹⁸ and his life is in that very death, such that by following the scent of the beloved, he splits the breast of the earth, and in poverty gains the kingdom of Solomon, and in captivity, the freedom of the sky; and he creates the truth of his own reality.

Compared to reason, which measures human behavior on the scale of prudence, those who say, “I’ve lined up with the libertines now, come what may,”¹¹⁹ are far removed from prudence; they are mad. But the human being of lovers, poets, and prophets is not merely a rational phenomenon. Essentially, he is not one of the phenomena of nature that is merely at a higher level and a higher boundary. The human being of our Hafez is of a different creation and a different category. He is an essence in love who, when he joined the soul of the universe, became one with existence and nonexistence and rejoined himself. Reason has no path to this state, the characteristics of which I do not know. This state is out of reach of ordinary human logic; and our elder, as well, can only speak about his dispositions in this state, and pass over its why, since why does not apply, since prudent reason in the face of love “is like a dewdrop that draws a shape on an ocean.”¹²⁰

Nonetheless, the eager lovers of the alley of the friend seek another world and a different human being, and are themselves of a different essence: of the essence of not wanting the world and the human beings that exist, of the essence of wanting a world and human beings more similar to my rose-colored elder and closer to the image that he has of the friend. What he has, however, is the ability to see the beauty of an invisible friend in the world of imagination; it is a revelation by the blessing of the light of the heart’s eye.

at every moment the image of your face

blocks the road of my imaginings

to whom shall I tell the things

I see in this shadow play¹²¹

The painter in the workshop of imagination draws a new image at every moment and brings the invisible before our eyes. The image and the painter as well are the distraught mind of the lover. Now if this changing, capricious image, this imagining of the creator, this contemplative dream in the poet’s soul, finds a light greater than the sun in the sky and a darkness greater than the depths of the earth, a truth greater than life and death, if it finds a grace more pleasant than “the memory of the kind friend,”¹²² more pleasant than the memory of fleeing in the mind of the captive deer, more pleasant than the memory of spring in the sleep of autumn, and a physicality more solid than the heavy height of mountains, then I, as a man of reason, would say that this elder, with a lover’s temperament, is mad. And he himself apparently hears my taunting proclamation:

Might I go mad in this passion, since from night to day

I speak to the moon and dream of spirits?¹²³

The memory of the beloved so overcomes the lover’s soul that a spiritual matter (being in love) becomes more real than an external matter (the beloved), to the extent that it is as though the poet is more in harmony with the perceptible internal world than the tangible external world. For him who has reconstructed and erected in the free workshop of yearning an ugly and beautiful beloved with the most beautiful conception of beauty, the memory and imagining of the body of the real, what he has in his mind gains a more formidable gravity and reality.

Hence, there is also a deception, among other things, in love, since the lover—wittingly and unwittingly, but also by choice—worships that which he has created in his own imagination. In other words, the truth that he is seeking he has created himself. The greater the “deception” of love, the more imaginary and remote and subsequently the more unattainable will be the beloved, and the more crazed the lover. He creates and remains separated from the created. The more perfect the created one, the more complete the separation of the creator from her! The lover is powerlessly powerful and sorrowfully happy. To be emptied of oneself and to be overflowing with another, to lose one’s own persona and disposition, and to live with the hope and hopelessness of another is the same madness of passion in which the lover spends his nights and days and his sleep and wakefulness. The poet in love is anxious about this passion that nurtures madness.

And, incidentally, he is mad; but he is not a madman who has lost his reason, rather, a madman who has let go of reason and left it behind! The realm of reason is the domain of fate, with the perpetual time and place, unalterable causality, and the good and bad that distinguishes and separates acts worthy of reward from sinning. A man of reason travels with cautious feet along the roads of the world of dust and adheres to its unquestionable order; he believes in the transience of life, in the inability of the body and the demonic ability in it, and he fears the end. On the other side of these impassable boundaries, the seven cities of love¹²⁴—which I dream of—extend from horizon to horizon, and I yearn “to perhaps hurl myself there.”¹²⁵ But with the wooden legs of reason,¹²⁶ one cannot flee from the land of reason; men of reason are alone at every step, no matter where they go. I am liberated by love, the frenzied flight of which makes the walls of my being crumble, to relinquish my weary soul: lonely and forlorn love in search of the alley of the friend, love of the bird for the sky and the deer for the meadow, love of the meadow for the rider and the rider for the horse and the horse for the rider in the meadow, departing love, liberating love, love of love!

Your love will come to the rescue, if you, like Hafez,

Recite the Koran from memory in fourteen versions.¹²⁷

The love of the migrating bird for the times to come draws it to places worth seeing, and hoping for new lands, sends it ahead to welcome the seasons. Love demolishes time and space, such that one can pass through the dark and light curtain of night and day and be submersed in the depths of light in moonlight and sunlight.

The joy of love makes my time fly as well; it gathers together in the present the bygone pasts and the futures yet to come; and the memory of the amorous present surrounds the distant past and future and reaches the shores of eternity for a moment, as though death and life join together at their source before the dawn of creation, and the lover in an endless moment becomes one with his destiny, like one in haste who pauses in an unconscious wakefulness and conscious sleep.

The joy of love is such that the lover’s soul cannot contain it, unless the container expands as wide as the endless expanse of the content and extends to before the birth and after the death of the lover, to the point that it is as though he had been present in all times and spaces and had experienced everything in an eventful life. At the dawn of creation, when beginning and end come into existence and existence and nonexistence are twin brothers, in that unmarked alley of the friend, the garden of his soul blooms. The union of lovers is a garden that in its eagerness to blossom revives the silent autumn and dries up the seeds of death: “being with you / postponed my doom.”¹²⁸ For lovers, as well, like martyrs who are killed for love, leaving is a new return, and “death is not an end, it is the beginning,” since love neutralizes the ruse of death. But even when it cannot awaken the lover from his heavy sleep, at least it rejuvenates the world around him and returns spring to his sleeping soil.

if ever the breeze of union with you

blows over Hafez’ grave

from the earth of his corpsetulips in profusion will grow¹²⁹

The self of such a lover goes beyond his own reach in the expanse of time and space. This man in ecstasy lays down the burden of the sorrows of the wounded heart and the worries about having and not having more, or having less, and he lays down his contemptible narrowmindedness; he falls outside the boundaries of reason, and is plucked from limited reason. Now, the dawn of a new self overtakes the darkness of the previous self. In this amorous struggle, I, who like the morning star was observing the twilight of my existence, am now baptized in the white spring of morning.

Union with the friend makes me of the same heart as and harmonious with the world that is from him, in the same way that in my love for the universe, as well, I commingle with the eternity of he who is the eternal soul of the universe, and at the moment of immortality, I reject the hand of death! Self-desired destiny comes, and unwanted fate departs, for fatalism to turn into free will. Love is freedom from reason and death, freedom from self-consciousness, and reaches toward awareness of the heart. But the freedom of love is the “impossible dream,”¹³⁰ impossible fortune, and the untimely death of happiness.

To join the friend, one must leave one’s house of nature and be freed from its walls; one must release the bird of the soul, like a far-flying—but not tamed and trained—pigeon, to sit on the roof of love. Social life and its customs and habits are those walls that, as accomplices of the erosive pressures of the world, at every moment drive the lover to the confines of reason and life, making him aware of his time and space. With those customs and habits, the desire of the heart and the free longing for love diminish; the autocratic will of the society and the tyrannical necessities of the world cast their shadow; and the lover who imagined himself to be a king realizes that he is no more than a beggar.

Purely because of his love for you, Hafez became

As rich as Solomon; and from his longing for union with you,

Like Solomon, he has nothing but wind in his hands.¹³¹

Not only is the poet happier being a beggar rather than being rich, but he also considers “undiminishing riches”¹³² to be destitution akin to having only “wind in his hands.” He is happier in this very “kingdom of poverty,” the smallest domain of which is “from the moon to the fish,”¹³³ because the richness of my elder is not “in the form of being a master,” but “in manners, like a dervish.”¹³⁴ “The mark of the people of God is to be a lover,”¹³⁵ and he has the love of the friend, and the world, and the people. While the rich have a hand that is not in need and a heart that is in need, he who in the manner of dervishes possesses the world in his nature has a heart and hands less in need than the ocean. Even when he has nothing in his hands but the wind, even when he has failed in his quest, he is a Solomon, because in the same way that God had placed himself in the mouth of that king, he is also on the tongue of the poet; because this one, too, like Solomon, is the fellow traveler of the wind, shares the suffering of the deer in the desert and the bird in the sky, and speaks the same language as tongueless nature; because this one, too, like him, possesses the ring and the seal of prophets and is the messenger of the friend on earth; because this one, too, like him, has seen the light and possesses the vision, and when the darkness of separation takes over his being, still the vision of the sun flickers within his heart, and since he has “the emblem of being in love with him,”¹³⁶ when night engulfs him, still, like every night, he possesses his own morning. Hence, in the captivity of separation, as well, even though the freedom of love has been separated from the place of the manifestation of union, it has not been annihilated. The voice of the friend resonates in the ear of his heart, shows him the way, and calls him to himself.

Now the voice of the friend comes from the bottom of ancient roots, from within the expanse of the face of the earth, from distant roads, from high mountain peaks and open plains, and reaches me, like the hidden beating of the heart of the star. She names me with a silent voice, and I see her voice in her moist eyes and open lips. An invisible wave comes from the ocean of silence, and before it reaches the shore, it pours into itself; it is anxious and sad, and it speaks in the tongue of no tongues. Words grow within me, like the sprouting of green buds in the heart of the seed beneath the cold of winter, like the scent of spring! The voice of the friend, the voice of love from the distant land of forgetfulness, from between the sown fields of suffering, blowing on the sheaves of sorrow! A voice from the heart of loneliness, from empty depths, and from the settling of massive shadows, a voice that—like water from stone—springs from the depths of the heart of the friend, runs in the warp and weft of night and day, and disappears like the resonance of the ocean under the azure cup of the sky. The wakeful voice of a silent friend who is sleeping on the bed of my heart. And as I was sleeping, with her voice, I opened my eyes and looked at her hands. She named me, and I came to myself among the beings. I saw that I had risen from the body of the dust and was standing on the earth. Above my head, the eagle of longing was flying in the open wings of the sky, and under my feet, the deer of fortune had fallen asleep. My heart became acquainted with sorrow and happiness; I found my star in the heart of the night; and in darkness, I recognized my destiny. The voice of the friend was my beginning. It was the dawning and blooming, it was the whispering of the pregnant earth, the sleepy murmuring of dawn and the splitting of the horizon, and the lamp of the sun. The voice of the friend was compensation for the cold silence and the heedless absence of God, the remedy for my distraught loneliness. It was the voice of a kindred spirit that said, you are the light of my eyes, and I gave her my glance like I gave my hands and said, you are the patient earth and captive sun, you are my friend. And, oh friend, I love you in your various manifestations, because you are that friendly truth in me that has various manifestations. At times, you are Christ and Mansur,¹³⁷ at times the universe full of colorful images, at times a heart-stealing beloved, and at times, like my rose-colored elder, you are this and that, and in all cases, you are my mother, the one who gave birth to me and nurtured me. Even though you have innumerable manifestations, in your essence, you are one! In you, the essence of love is a concrete and complete oneness, like the singular sun in the sky. The flame of that hidden fire that is in your breast makes possible the manifestation of the mesmerizing beauty of the friends; and because all are seen in one light, a single light, they are all emanations from a single essence. “Since like the divine attributes / you are beyond comprehension.”¹³⁸

God was manifested in the work of his hands, in the image and character of the terrestrial Adam; and now, because this unmatched beauty is the place of the manifestation of such a creator, like him, it is beyond my ability to comprehend. The beautiful perfection of this beloved, who might be from my own alley and neighborhood and from my terrestrial family, reaches the point where it is out of reach of comprehension, because her face is the handiwork of the friend. Hence, her beauty possesses that “thing” that is beyond human limitations.

the angel kneeling before Adam

was in its own mind

kissing the ground beneath your feet

for in your beauty it found

something better than mankind¹³⁹

Divine beauty in human form! In the same way that, in order to pass beyond his invisible seclusion, God flees to mankind, now man, in order to pass beyond himself, has fled to God. The beloved is “a body / created of the spirit,”¹⁴⁰ a spiritual body and a physical spirit! The poet himself is astounded at seeing such a body, and he asks, “who ever saw”¹⁴¹ such a fine body, a body made of dust but more fluid than water, lighter than fire, and more transparent than light? Such a body is not made of water and dust; it is composed of the soul, of that rare ethereal breath of the world above, or of the water and clay that blossomed from the breath of God, celestial-terrestrial, beyond the level of water and clay, beyond comprehension! The existence of the friend is where man and God join.

Such a perception of the beloved makes the lover fly between the creator and the created and sometimes makes them interdependent and conjoined twins, each of whom carries the other. The friend of the poet is sometimes God and sometimes man, and even sometimes in a single ghazal, he reaches from one to the other and speaks about both. “Hitherto you were more considerate to lovers.”ⁱ The poet is addressing a terrestrial beloved from whose sweet lips at one time he had had nocturnal whisperings of amorous secrets. In this reminder of the past, the poet’s free imagination reaches to before creation and eternal love, and then in a turnabout and a turning, he goes back to the time after the end, the evening of eternity and the sameness of the pledge of love and the indestructability of the foundation of love! Physical love—mediated by the thought of time—calls to mind mystical love, and from thinking about humankind, the poet begins to think about God, from friend to friend, and the need and the longing of the lover and the beloved for each other—the characteristic of both of whom is love—are uttered. But after this, when he speaks about the kindness of nature and a good temperament, the “king and beggar,” and that God is the provider, the thread of the ghazal seemingly breaks and it falls apart like a broken string of beads. The poet knows this and apologizes for having his hand “on the lap of the smooth-legged cupbearer.” Longing for the warm body and the desirous breath of the beloved has broken his stream of consciousness and has drawn him down to earth once again, to spend the night until morning drinking with a tipsy beloved and “a cup in the wall niche.” But in the closing couplet of the ghazal, the poem of the transient, terrestrial poet reverts to being about the dawn of creation and paradise: a man from here with words from there; one love, two beloveds, and a lover in between!¹⁴²

At times, elsewhere on this grave, amorous journey, without being hindered from going toward the beloved, for the moment, this man from paradise is entangled in love for young beauties. The bird of the celestial flower garden, an angel from the high heavens who suffers from the pain of separation, in the meantime has given his heart to someone’s darling offspring and fallen for one or another. My elder calls God as his witness that he is with him everywhere he is, that he is with God, but at the same time, slyly, he has his eye on another, since following another couplet he says:

Excited by the intoxicated narcissus eyes

of a tall-statured beauty

Holding a cup, like a tulip,

I have fallen beside a stream.¹⁴³

Giving his heart to a coquettish, tall-statured beauty is not a sign of his taking his heart away from or even neglecting his creator, in the same way that it is not necessarily a sign of simultaneous attention to the other. Since the poet has seen and experienced a great deal and is a man of many colors, he has various states of mind. Sometimes his friend is God alone, and his words overflow with mystical ecstasy and rapture, and sometimes he only thinks about a friend made of Adam’s clay, and that is all. But yet, Hafez’s this-worldly love is not always the same. At one time, the longing for companionship with the soul of souls and observing his astonishing beauty, longing to be separated from his self and intending to reach the friend, and in this impossible dream, to be removed from his self and not find his way to the other, is expressed by the poet. Hoping for union and the reality of separation from an absent beloved who is always present in the lover—this absence and at the same time presence—is the basic substance of the magical sorrow of the love story that he tells, the story of a mood to which at times “the story of the fear of Resurrection Day”¹⁴⁴ is merely an allusion. This story of the joy of the sad heart, this song of happiness and suffering, is the origin and source of his love songs.

But at times, he is only eager for a beauty, “with her torn dress, singing a love song,”¹⁴⁵ and things that become alive and acquire a more pleasing meaning because of the presence of such a beloved: flowers, wine, and a song, a meadow and a stream! He is eager for the bounty of the world and the delightful joy of the body; he “longs to pierce a delicate pearl in the darkness of the night and to sleep with her till morning”!¹⁴⁶ In this case, his poetry is a delicate praise of physical pleasures, or as the poet puts it himself, “cleverly libertine poetry.”¹⁴⁷

Even when the divine love and the worldly love of the poet appear to be distant from each other, they are not alien to each other; rather, they dawn in the lover in two states and arenas. And when they become of the same blood and the same nature in the rapture of unity, they do not annihilate each other, or one does not necessarily cause the other to be forgotten; rather, they are reflected in each other, like one image in two mirrors, and create a new image that is both a new phenomenon and also what it was.

From one perspective, the lover has a dependent life; he lives through the beloved. Love has completely engulfed him. Filled with the memory of another and empty of the memory of himself, it appears as though he is diminished and not conscious, and that he perceives the brilliant song and dark lamentation of the universe with the memory of another, and her ears and eyes. His thoughts and feelings find their way into the world by passing through the transparent mirror of the friend, from beyond this colored glass, and he contemplates and experiences her. The world, as well, permeates the garden of his mind in the same way upon imagining the creator. “The lamp of our eyes is lit / by the breeze of our beauties’ hair.”¹⁴⁸ If a breeze blows from the direction of the friend, if her glance shines on my dark house and the memory of her revives my heart, the lamp of my eye lights up like a fire; otherwise, the lamp remains unlit, and the astonishing ability of the lover to observe does not change from potential to action. But when there is an attraction from that side and the lover is able to see, he sees the universe in the face of the friend, which is like a cup that reveals the universe. “Your mole is the pivotal point of my vision.”¹⁴⁹ The poet’s glance, like a ray directed to the world, shines on the most remote and most concealed places, travels in search of the truth of realities, and explores the phenomena on the other side of the invisible. This meteor that splits and sees that which is hidden dashes with pauses and with speed, wanders, stops, and goes, but it does not separate from its root that bestows light. This ray has branches and leaves everywhere, and its root and its foundation are in the mole of the face. On this orbit and from this perspective, it observes the universe. The face of the friend is the source and the eye of the lover, the stream of light. One is spring and the other a flower garden; one is the substance of life and the other the body. “May the evil eye spare you / who are both lover and beloved.”¹⁵⁰

The mere fact that in our Persian language the words janan and jananeh¹⁵¹ mean both “friend” and “beloved friend” shows that there is a connection between the concept of the “beloved” and the soul and life of the lover, and that the beloved is like the soul of the lover, the force that gives him life, and the meaning of his life:

although as a hafez I am well-known

to all and sundry in this town

I am not worth one barley-corn

unless out of loving-kindness

you consent to be mine¹⁵²

The lover is alive because of the beloved, and if he does not leave this lived-through-the-beloved life of his and is not annihilated, it is perhaps, among other things, because accepting the friend in the house of the soul does not mean the arrival of one and the departure of the other. It is the acceptance of light in the house of the sun. In the same way that a flower comes out of the sepal of the bud and opens in its own color, scent, and shape, also the barren garden of the soul—which is not a garden because it is barren—blooms in the presence, in the manifestation, of the beloved and becomes a garden, since it is no longer barren. Hence, the beloved does not gain access to the soul of the lover in order to invade it and for the lover who “has lost his soul” by the will of the ruler of his soul to live by the desire of someone else’s heart; rather, because the beloved is the embodiment of ideal perfection and the crystallization of what the lover longs for in both worlds, by having the beloved in his soul—like a wave in fusion with movement—he becomes fused with the ultimate desired object and purpose of his life without mediation. He is suddenly distanced from everything accidental, superficial and meaningless, incidental, relative, and transient; he is one with absolute and lasting necessity, with the truth of existence, and is now at the very core of life, and its essence flows in his veins; and he, as well, like the essence of life, flows in the veins of the universe.

The existence of the beloved is the renewed life of the soul; and the revived soul is “the same” as life itself, and one is in the place of the other: soul in place of the beloved. Hence, when the poet says, “May it be forbidden for me to choose my soul over the beloved,”¹⁵³ his words are in fact the repetition of the obvious, “saying the same thing,” since one can choose one thing in place of something else when they are different from each other; but when two things are “the same,” choosing one in place of the other is impossible. For the poet to shun himself is futile, because even if he should want to, he would not be able to choose the soul in place of the beloved.

The beloved is the lover’s soul, and everyone who possesses a soul has a length of life that is his particular time in endless time. The length of life is the movement of the soul on the bed of time in its changeable form. As life passes, the soul takes shape and changes. The beloved, who was the soul of the lover, with the passage of time becomes his life as well. The meanings of jan and omr in Persian,¹⁵⁴ at any rate, each call to mind the other, and the one who is the jan of the lover is also his omr.

Moreover, the lover lives within the beloved, who has engulfed all of him. In this sense, in the same way that everyone lives in his own span of life, the lover is also alive within the beloved. If the departed beloved returns, the past part of his life might return, “even though the spent arrow does not return.”¹⁵⁵ Time is a shot arrow that is gone when it is; and if the beloved is the life of the lover, her departure, “even if she returns,” is irreversible, because when the beloved is not there, it is as though life is not there: “Who counts the day of separation as a part of life?”¹⁵⁶ And the poet without life—without time—has an amazing life; he lives in timeless time.

The lover gains access to another concept of time that is not the “external” time that stems from the revolving of firmaments and the arrival of day and night, quantitative and measurable time—the stretched out time for us to travel and wear down its pathways like a planet or for it to travel and eat away at our fate like a termite—time stemming from young age and old age, being born and dying; it is an inner, emotional, qualitative, and immeasurable time. Compared to that independent time that has a perpetual and similar movement from present to future, this one, if one can say so, has a circular self-propelled rotation, sometimes jumbled and sometimes reversed, that stems from the disposition and mood of the lover and is dependent on the mystery and coquettishness of the beloved; it is a constant of two permanent variables.

When I am with you, a year seems a day,

When I am without you, a moment seems a year.¹⁵⁷

The measure of time is related to the beloved and the lover’s feeling for her. It becomes an actual issue external to the mind and loses its sequential order and continuity that stem from the movement of universal phenomena, and the lover whose eyes were enchanted by the beauty of the friend prior to the raising of “this green dome and azure ceiling” becomes present at the time when he was kneading and molding Adam’s clay.¹⁵⁸

Not only in relation to God but also in relation to humankind, the sequence and continuousness of time are reversed.

However old, incapable,

And heart-sick I may be,

The moment I recall your face

My youth’s restored to me.¹⁵⁹

In his memory, the poet returns from old age to youth, and his creative imagination travels contrary to that of the created world. In another mood, the poet runs out of patience: “I will draw a sigh from my despondent sinful heart / That will set ablaze the sin of Adam and Eve.”¹⁶⁰ His fiery sigh scorches something that occurred in the past, at the dawn of creation. He applies a current sigh to that time, or he brings a sin from the most distant past to his own time and sets it ablaze, and in both cases, he disturbs the course of time.

Sometimes a moment in time, because of its quality, has a timeless effect. If the friend one day were to remove the veil from her face, “the whole world forever”¹⁶¹ would be adorned, as though the phenomena of the universe at that very singular moment would forever take on the beauty of the face of the friend and bestow on time a new measure. In a ghazal in which from the start the topic is the curls of the tresses and the magical enchantment of the eyes of the beloved, suddenly the thought of the beauty of her face peaks to such a height, as if it is the beauty of the face of the eternal beloved.¹⁶² In the imagination of the poet, something internal and specific, the effect of the beauty of the beloved’s face, becomes external and universal and shines on the entire universe like the manifestation of the radiance of that friend. When the perception of the terrestrial beloved resembles the perception of the celestial beloved, the function of both those worlds also resembles a manifestation in a time, embellishing and giving meaning to the universe for all time, turning a moment into eternity! What God did at creation is now done by man in a different state.

The beloved is the soul and life of the lover. And this life is a time that only stems from human existence in which love also travels. When this existential time finds its way into universal time, the poet gains access to a new arena of the sense of time, an arena in which happiness and suffering, good and evil, the observing of existence and nonexistence, and the emergence of manifestations of nature assume another shape and meaning. Hence, when the internal and external worlds of the lover change, another human is made of the one who used to say, “another Adam must be created.”¹⁶³

The lover not only reaches another time but also another space, one apart from the land of those without love and ordinary people, and apart from geographical space in the natural world.

Why would one who has chosen seclusion need sights to see?

Who needs the meadow when the alley of the friend exists?¹⁶⁴

Because the lover has chosen seclusion, mountains and plains are of no interest to him, since in the seclusion of the workshop of his imagination, he envisions and sees the friend and his abode. It is as though seclusion and the alley of the friend are both evoked simultaneously.

In nature, no space is of value on its own, and one can easily give away the prosperous ancient cities of Samarqand and Bokhara for a mole on a face.¹⁶⁵ If a space is the place of the manifestation of the friend, that space is the residence of the soul, and anywhere else is “Alexander’s prison,”¹⁶⁶ and the poet recalls it because he is depressed by the pressure of its walls and despises its narrow dungeon.

A lover who lives within the beloved (in his own span of life and “time”) is always where she is. For the forlorn poet, his city—with its starry nights and blossom-covered gardens and local coquettish girls, this place that is the city of his loves, in which he learned to observe the world and experienced death and life, which is his place of birth and his final resting place—is the familiar place, the alley of the friend. He longs to leave the “desolate staging post” in exile and, “dancing like a particle,” go “to the door of the tavern, to the edge of the spring of the sun, to the kingdom of Solomon”:¹⁶⁷ “to go to my own city and be my own sovereign.”¹⁶⁸

to methe air of my beloved’s house

is the water of life itself

O send me a breeze from the good earth of Shiraz¹⁶⁹

Sometimes the imagination of the lover goes further, and the bird of his soul nests in the soul and body of the beloved. His heart continues to spin like a polo ball¹⁷⁰ between the tip of the beloved’s tresses¹⁷¹ and the curve of her eyebrow.¹⁷² On the other hand, the eyes of the lover who loves his home, the friend of the “eyes that see the world,”¹⁷³ is a lover who tries to remain close to his own vision, to the light of the world. “Happiness lies where the beloved is.”¹⁷⁴ But what place of the beloved is better than the heart of the lover? If the heart of the lover is her home and her place of rest, then the heart of the lover is itself the alley of the friend; in particular, when the friend is a departed friend, like Mansur,¹⁷⁵ or “the pearl that is outside the shell of time and space,”¹⁷⁶ he has no place other than this home, the reaching of which is the lover’s ascension to heaven. When such a lover rediscovers himself and resides inside himself, he is in the alley of the friend and united with the friend.

But when separation occurs, the soul of the lover no longer remains with him; it hovers in the air of the beloved who is away from him. He is in one place and his soul in another; he occupies a space that is of two parts: the helpless, empty physical cage and the bird of the soul seeking another nest!

Hence, space, similar to time, has a value that is dependent on the beloved and is an existential matter. In other words, the quality of it does not depend on external phenomena, on the season, perspective, and weather. Rather, it depends on the person who occupies it and the heartfelt connection of the lover with her, and the change that this connection makes in his nature; it depends on the change in his view and perception of existence and nonexistence. Space is also a constant of two permanent variables.

In the view of the faithful, paradise is the ideal place and the home of eternal happiness. The imagining of time and the disposition of time-bound humans is compatible with this space: eternity and happiness, deliverance from revolving time, and taking one’s place in endless happiness. The alley of the friend is also the lover’s ideal imagining of space, his soul in paradise or paradise in his soul; it is a lofty space in the external or internal world, and in both cases, its brightness, fluidity, pleasantness, and freshness effervesce from the highly fertile source of the lover’s imagination.

Our Hafez is a poet who possesses the alley of the friend. In other words, in this desert of bewilderment, in this eternal workshop of existence and nonexistence, he is not wind in the hands of the storm. In this circle, he is bewildered, but bewildered with his feet firmly on the ground. He stands in a solid place; and for this reason, he can gauge himself and understand himself in relation to existence and nonexistence. In some places, he positions himself in the essence of space; in this “flood of nothingness,”¹⁷⁷ he has a place for himself and he is from somewhere. But for Majnun, the home of Leyli is not a solid and easy space.¹⁷⁸ I had said that “the poet is forlorn and a wanderer in the alley of the friend,” because here is the land of being and not being, a nowhere land, nowhere and everywhere, the Canaan of the lost Joseph,¹⁷⁹ the homeland of forlorn strangers and the residence of wayfarers, the house of the beloved, and hence, the house of the heart of the lover; and since it passes beyond the paradise of the followers of religious law, it is itself the spring of the sun and the cup that reveals the universe, since if paradise is the place of the manifestation of God’s bounty, the alley of the friend is the manifestation of God himself, and the garden of paradise compared to it is no more than a myth: “Oh you from whose alley the story of paradise is but a tale,”¹⁸⁰ a distant, misty, and vague story that cannot make us neglect the beguiling earth, a space as bright as the sun. “With the dust of the alley of the friend, we would not even look at paradise.”¹⁸¹ In this arena, the dust of the threshold is good fortune and the source of good fortune; “it is collyrium for the eyes,¹⁸² it illuminates the eye of the heart,¹⁸³ and the illuminated eye fills with tears from ardent desire for it.”¹⁸⁴ “To choose begging in his alley over being a king”¹⁸⁵ is eternal wealth. This lofty place, or this lofty perception of timeless space, is the preferred place. In this state, when the lover leaps out of the trap of universal space, his self is freed from its engulfing surroundings, and he chooses his desired place in existential space. The alley of the friend is the place of freedom, the abode of the free bird of the soul that refuses to endure the confinement of any cage. The poet who said that to create another Adam, another world must be created,¹⁸⁶ in this “nowhere” place, achieves union with another world.

i. See the rest of the ghazal. [From ghazal 206; Geoffrey Squires, trans. Hafez: Translations and Interpretations of the Ghazals (Miami: Miami University Press, 2014), 253.]