No One Like Hafez . . .

The sun is a flame of the fire hidden in the breast, an ever-wakeful fire, never dying, Magian, amorous. The sun is born from the breath of my rose-colored elder. It brightens the world with colorful light. “God is the light of the heavens and earth.”¹ The world becomes perceptible from the blessing of his light. The faces of things that were submerged in the uniformity and ambiguity of darkness blossom like morning. The body of darkness splits open, and dawn radiates like water, like the water lily, and like air from the skin of the night. As existence becomes visible, perception also occurs. Hence, light is the origin of images, of faces, because like a secret, it has them concealed within its core. Once it manifested itself, the faces appeared and the distinction of one entity from another—and the unveiling of their essence—became possible. Without light, creation would have remained chaotic and entangled, because nothing can be seen without it. Hence, the created can also be seen and perceived through the creator. God unveils the creation of the world through light.

The words of light, however, are thought, and its veils can be lifted. God said, “Let there be,” and it was. His thoughts for the creation of the world, as soon as he willed it, materialized in time, and beings came into existence. God’s words revealed his thought, the void of pre-existence overflowed with the world, and nothingness was filled with existence. The words of God open his thought, and the world is the face of his thought. That which the word does to thought is the same as that which light does to the world, because the thoughts of the friend are revealed in his divine word; and through the rays of this word, we observe the sun, and the original spring of knowledge opens within us.

The world is the face of God’s thought and the manifestation of the face of the friend; it is a mirror for seeing him and an image of his face, a timeless time; it is a place from nowhere and a trace of his untraceable sign that leaves within our shallow vision an image, a mirage, a memory, not the essence of his soul and the truth of his essence. Neither is it complete, nor do we completely perceive its incompleteness. That is why it has been said that the world is the house of slumber, the land of parting, and the realm of the invisible. It has uprooted me from the time of union and, like an exposed seed, abandoned me in the sown field of life and death, and the sky has descended like a blanket over the branches and leaves that rise toward the sun. After all, the world is the face of God’s thought, not God’s thought itself. The essence of his thought—like the soul in the body—rests in the heart of this face. Despite all perceptibility, the friend is hidden behind the mirror of his face and is a secret behind the labyrinth of the world’s veil. The function of poetry is to unveil the mystery:

since poets first used their pens

to comb the tresses of speech

no one like Hafez has unveiled

the complexion of our minds²

God revealed his thought with words, and this revelation is itself the creation of the world. My rose-colored elder, blessed with words, also draws aside the veil from the face of thought and releases it—like the turning orb of the sun in the field of the sky—on the green field³ of speech. The “bird of thought / that took off from the branches of words”⁴ sits on the walls and doors of the eagerly expectant.

Thought is thought with words, like the star in the sky, the green in the plant, and the Judas tree that unfolds in a blaze. Words are the place of thought. Morning is born in dawning, the rose in blooming, and thought in speech. In order for thought to come into existence, the thinker needs to speak it, internally or externally, to put it into words; otherwise, thought remains a buried seed and an invisible entity: sleep without dreaming. In the subtle imagination of our poet, the image is a thought that dawns from the invisible realm and comes into the world like a beloved with a this-worldly soul and body, those of a beautiful woman. With the comb of the pen, he untangles and arranges the tresses of the words that are thick, unkempt, and disheveled; that are black, entangled, and obscured; that are mysterious, ambiguous, and dark; and he braids them like a string of pearls and pushes them to one side for the bright face of thought to dawn. The bride of thought emerges from the nocturnal gallery of words, a spring from the heart of the earth and a secret from the invisible realm! And the poet is a luminous seeker searching for a secret along dark paths.

A person who through the mediation of a religion, a philosophical system, or a social theory—in other words, through an ideology—thinks that he knows the ins and outs of existence and the ups and downs of things is deprived of the poets’ gem of “ignorance,” and his “being a poet” is merely the repeat of what we have known and observed in his “knowing” tongue—in which also inevitably there is no secret or mystery, and that ultimately does not exceed the intricacies of esthetics. A godless poet who does not seek the secret of that friend also thinks about a secret to uncover: the mystery of man and the world, the mystery of existence and love! To him, being a poet also means revealing mysteries. However, for a poet like our elder, not only is the world a riddle that cannot be solved through philosophy, but our own existence, as well, is a puzzle, “the solving of which is the stuff of sorcery and fable.”⁵ Moreover, the mystery of God is hidden behind the invisible veil.

Poets are like prophets, because if “God places himself in the mouths of prophets” so that they can bring the message of the heavens to earth, the poet, too, from behind the mirror, says “that which the master of eternal beginning said.”⁶ He is the messenger angel of the invisible world, the sunwinged, sky-flying hoopoe of Solomon bringing good news. Moreover, the words of the poet, like divine words, open up the mystery of thought, and for this reason, he is a creator. Contemplating the world means “creating” the world, because by contemplating the world, man separates himself from it and places himself before it. In this separation and confrontation, the thinker can observe, measure, know, and perceive “that which has been contemplated” in order to be liberated from his inevitable dependence and enslavement, to become independent and free, to be able, of his own volition and knowingly, to reconnect with it, and for harmony to replace separation. The uncontemplated world is inconceivable, unknowable, and imperceptible, as though it did not exist at all.

The poet contemplates the static concept of God, which is the hidden, potential, and possible essence of existence; and once the created contemplated the idea of the creator, he spurred it on, made it materialize, and brought it into existence; he brought it from the invisible world into the visible world. Our Hafez is the Tongue of the Invisible. Everyone’s thought, however, is concealed behind his veil of appearances. Even though the color of the face reveals some indication of the inner secret⁷ and some sign of God is evident in visible things, the spirit of his thought cannot be found in the world, which is a manifestation of his face or a form of his thought in the visible world. God is himself a mystery, and his thinking is the mystery of all mysteries, the invisible of the invisible world. And our Hafez, like a “droplet that dreams the impossible,”⁸ nurtures in his mind the dream of reaching the hidden of the hidden of this shoreless ocean:

Drunkenly, let us remove the veil

from the face of God’s secret,

secluded in the tent of the invisible.⁹

God’s secret is he himself. God’s attributes are not considered separate from his essence. He is one and the same as his thoughts, words, and deeds. Hence, the poet, by opening the tent of the invisible, simultaneously brings God and his thought out of isolation. God revealed his thoughts in the word, and the poet as well expresses his thought in words: in poetry. His creation, as well, like that of the creator, is in words, and creation is the uncovering, the removing of the veil from the face, the revealing of the invisible, and the bestowing of another ray of light to the world and the offering of another vision to the denizens of the world. And every uncovering is another creation. Hence, the work of such revealers as mystics, philosophers, and sages is similar to the incantation of poets.

Every time that the poet draws aside the veil from the face of thought, a new light of its brightness shines on the prism of the world and gives it another hue, a new dawn buds, and things like the water lily that rises from a marsh emerge from another slumber to see and to be seen. The magic of the imagination of my rose-colored elder creates a new image in the workshop of creation and awakens a more novel design—such as the anticipation of seasons within the heart of nature—that was dormant in the mind of God. The poet’s God is a more alert and more aware God; he thinks more about himself and his handiwork. As a result, he is a preoccupied thinker rather than being almighty and tranquil of heart. He continuously contemplates himself, constantly reveals another manifestation of himself, and in this way, creates a more complete world. In the bosom of such a God and world, such a human being is born in whose creative imagination lives a God who is aware of his heart: the God of poets. God, the world, and man shine on one another, and each bestows perfection on the image of the others in the mirror of his own existence.

In this manner, poetry creates a design of existence. At one time, a poet prophet contemplated the light of God’s goodness and brought it into the arena of visibility from behind the veil of invisibility, and the dark lamp of thought was lit. In the light of this newly appeared goodness, hope for the departure of evil dawned in man, hope for salvation dawned in the heart of the world, and man became a twin and companion of Ahura Mazda. At another time, a poet contemplated God’s friendship—or the friendship in God—and when friendship in God was contemplated, it reached another site and acquired divine dimensions: it became absolute and infinite. Hence, love wove together the warp and weft of existence and nonexistence. God, the lover, the beloved, and the world became a manifestation of his beautiful face. From the Koran to Hafez, the memorizer of the Koran, is a long way. Our Hafez removed the veil from the mystery, and in this way, creation, man, love, the world, ethics, and behavior acquired different meanings, and as a result, living and dying changed. He split open the azure shell of the firmament and created the image of a loftier sky, a more open earth, and a greater arena than the mirror of the eye; he steered the restive steed of destiny onto untrodden paths and created a new design.

But this new design is a masterful ruse, a mirage that appears to be an ocean, and a dream that appears to be reality; it is the soaring rainbow flung by the vagrant, wandering wind.

Hafez, talk of your delightfully deceptive magic

has reached as far as Egypt and China

and near to Rome and Rey.¹⁰

Poetry is the birthplace and the body of thought; together, they are like body and soul. In the poet, even though thought, words, and creation are not the same, they are born together. He creates a unique novel design with these three. And his creation is the poetry that is the face and expression of his thought; and because of its connection with thought, his poetry is “delightfully deceptive magic,” since the thought of magic, sleight of hand, is delightful, for it is done in the dark; but it is the source of light, for it is itself unknown yet the source of knowing—a bird that, even though in our cage, always makes us chase after it as it flies away. And poetry, in particular, makes this characteristic of thought pronounced, not in terms of systemizing, which is characteristic of philosophy, or its theoretical and practical necessity, which appears in logic, mathematics, and sciences. Contrary to these, thought in poetry constantly rips up its own laws, tears its own skin, and plants its own seed in order to grow with a different form in “a new design.” A self-witnessing destroyer and a dying newborn giving birth, a constant dawning and blooming, a nocturnal firework display in which suddenly a handful of lamps and luminous lights pour out like a bush aflame and sink into the forest of darkness. And poetry is a breath of light and an untimely morning, the clever game of an involuntary player and a chess-playing poet on the chessboard of the world of existence with chess pieces such as the galaxy of stars, the moon and the sun, the earth and the sky, spring and autumn, truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, and fortune and destiny. He not only scatters the prearranged chess pieces, but he also changes the rules and the arrangement and role of the pieces. The unarmed pawn is not the shield against calamity; the rook does not hide behind the scene of battle; the queen does not gallop in any direction she wants; and the knight and the bishop can be used for purposes other than attacking and killing.¹¹ In this manner, the poet turns the set upside down, and with this endless game of thought in time and space, he finds a new situation. Moreover, by changing the function of the pieces that help him and are his partners in the game, he also alters his own nature and destiny.

But poetry is deception because it is a game, not actual reality; it takes a trace of things that exist, then changes their laws and function and makes them pronouncedly displayed in a novel form. That which has occurred in the workshop of creation recurs in the workshop of the poet’s imagination. The world of poetry is a theatrical play of the world, however, with the script, the setting, and the players that the poet has chosen himself and processed in the world of his imagination; and then he has cast their roles on the screen of the actual world and bestowed on the reality of the world an appearance and luster of his own choosing. He has instilled the present but inaccessible imagined truth into the body of things and “physical perceptions”—perceptions such as blind faith and ignorant prejudice, which are so rooted and firmly planted in us that it seems as though they have infiltrated our body with their bodies—and he has toyed with their stern, firm physicality.

Poetry is the obverse albeit magical “mimesis” of phenomena, such that not only does it turn the imitation copy into the original, but it also makes us negligent of the “original,” of that which actually exists—and as it exists—and sends us in search of “another world and another Adam.”¹² Mimesis in poetry, however, is not for the purpose of imitation. The poet himself is in the midst of the predicament. He plays with his destiny in the gambling house of the world, and once he risks it, he is playing with his own fate. He does not go on stage like an actor to play a role for others who have come as spectators; rather, he pulls out the apparitions from within himself—from demons to spirits—and in them, he plays his role in the script of his own life. Children do not play for the purpose of imitation; rather, they live through playing, but they borrow the structure of the play from their surroundings and those around them. When they ride a stick or toss a piece of paper on water, they are not imitating horseback riding or sailing; rather, free from the limitations of horseback riding and captaincy, they are living as autonomous riders and captains. They are not testing land and water; rather, they are making their own land and water materialize and reconstructing the world in their own imagination. And when they fly a kite, they have the end of the string of the bird, the flight, and the sky in their hands. Through playing, life is repeated in children; the world enacts its script in them, and in this way evolves in them. A playful child is pregnant with the same world that the actor poet brings into the world.

In any case, in the same way that the thoughts and words of the poet reflect God’s thoughts and words, his novel creation is also an “imitation” of the building of the world and the flourishing ruins of existence.¹³ And playing, imitation, is deception, because it is the product of thought in the world of imagination, not a mountain, a sorrow, or an outcry standing there on the ground before us.

Poetry is deception; but it is delightful deception, since poetry is freedom, and man is eternally enamored with freedom. This freedom comes into existence in the game of poetry, and man flees from falsehood, oppression, and death, from the narrow confinement of space and the rapid velocity of time, from prison. The moth splits open the cocoon, and the star does not remain in the pit. Every time that man takes another look at his own existential condition, every time he tests his inabilities and his confined boundaries, he returns from unconsciousness to consciousness and from deception to reality, and he falls from the sky of freedom into the abyss of need. But this deception is delightful; it cannot be removed from one’s heart. By the blessing of poetry, this fallen enamored man rises every time from the hardship and travail of the actual world, from the salt desert of making a living and its ensnaring tedium, and begins another game on the world stage, with his own pieces, his own friends, and his own methods and rules. The creation of this scene changes the perspective of the previous scene and spreads another landscape before the eyes of the “enamored,” driving them toward another “snare of deception.” Hence, poetry is the constant vacillation between the abyss and the sky and the continuous relinquishment of the need for freedom.

But in order not to think that poetry is an easy and cheap deception, I say that it is not the same as the deception of the magician. In the case of sleight of hand, the game is based on the dexterousness and agility of one side and the gullibility and blindness of the other. If the latter knows and sees, the game is over and the magician’s hand is exposed. In this situation, all that occurs is in the appearance and “pretense” of things, not in their reality and “actuality.” There is neither a “novel design” nor is there any change in any destiny. The causes of necessity and the misery of the soul are stubbornly in place, and ultimately from the artfulness of the hands of the Samarian, there is nothing more than the “mooing of a calf.”¹⁴ This is not Moses’s “white hand.”¹⁵

Poetry is the white hand and the “true magic” that nullifies the magic and sorcery of the imposters, splits apart the sea and drowns the false claimant, observes God in the burning bush, and speaks to him. And this poetry, like the word of God, is “legitimate magic,”¹⁶ because like the season of spring that grows in the body of nature, its magic appears in the infinite expanse of language. And words are the link that connects the branch of mankind to the eternal tree, the link between mortality and immortality; they make God, with the words he speaks to us, human, and they make man, in the words we hear from him, divine. Words are the source of empathy and amity, since from the words of the friend, one can learn about his thoughts, and thus blessed, one can sing in unison with “the sound of the words of love.”¹⁷ A friend is not chosen without being known or recognized. The greatest of the prophets who have a book, in other words, those who have words, are like poets, because they too are kings of the realm of words, that is, gods of knowledge. And the magic of poetry, because it lights the lamp of thought and makes the “tree of knowledge” in the garden of words fruitful, is of the same foundation and nature as the miracles of the prophets.

I am that magical poet

who with his incantations

draws all the sweetness from the reed of his pen¹⁸

Whereas the sorcerers of the pharaoh turned staffs into serpents, the magic of the poet turns the reed into sugarcane, and whereas the magic of the former was to prove the divinity of the pharaoh, the magic of the latter is at least a sweetening.

Hence, poetry is the “delightfully deceptive magic”¹⁹ that “draws aside the veil of thought”²⁰ and reveals its face. The concept of poetry contains an assumption of uncovering, of removing veils and showing the face, of bringing forth and making visible some secret or mystery from its hiding place, an assumption of seeing. The idea of poetry is “seeing.” Unlike philosophy, logic, and mathematics—which, based on their necessary and inevitable rules, are self-processed and expand within their own systems and procedures—poetic thought is not nurtured merely in the mind. This thought is seen as an image in the mirror of the heart:

each night all night

I stand guard at the sanctuary of my heart

letting in only my thoughts of you²¹

In the nocturnal darkness, poetic thought is guarded in the sanctuary of the heart. The heart is the abode of love, that is, the place of the manifestation of beauty; and in the concept of beauty, an assumption of a form exists, because until beauty becomes manifest it does not exist, and once “manifestation” is located in something, a place or a condition, the “one that can be manifested” takes form. For this reason, in mysticism in which God is beauty, inevitably, he does not remain hidden and he has a manifestation, such as creation. In any case, beauty cannot escape form, and until thought finds its way into the heart, it remains at various levels of awareness, but it does not become “poetic.”

In awareness—in science, knowledge, and all that can be known—the “form” of thought is the same as the structure and skeleton, the linkage of laws and conventions and systems that connect the components together and rotate this skein like a wheel, or, at a higher level, turn it into life, like a body. In every case, conscious thought has “form,” since thinking is the same as giving form to thought. But in addition to this, as the warp and weft of poetic thought intertwine, they also weave an image into their texture. This thought is pictorial.

Moreover, poetry is the uncovering of thought through words, and as a result, it is the imitation of God’s work and a repetition of his creation. The poet, however, borrows the material for his creation from existing creation, from the world that is the manifestation of the face and the form of God’s thought. Hence, he recontemplates and re-creates the manifestation of the face and the form of thought, and the re-creation of the face and the form is necessarily not without form. That is why poetic thought is inevitably more formable than any other thought, to the point that the abstract soul has a face of its own, the seeing of which the poet longs for, provided his “body’s dust is not as a veil spread out to hide his soul.”²² Invisible things become visible in the light of this thought, and the poet is constantly involved in the workshop of the eyes and in the imagination that shines on the seven-colored canvas, the image of existence in the painting gallery of this prism.

Poetic thought forms in the realm of the imagination, which is the poet’s workshop of creation. In this place that can be contemplated and sensed but cannot be found, thought is sensed with its blowing breath, swaying body, and continuous flights in place, and things that are sensed open their shape and shell to thought and become thought. In poetry, one thinks with his heart and senses with his mind. In this case, when sense becomes thought, it opens its borders and becomes free within itself; and when thought is sensed, it “descends” into its own design and is established. In this way, on the site of the imagination, form becomes free, and freedom becomes formable, and poetic thought turns into the “form of imagination” or is imaged and comes into existence in this “body.”

From a different perspective, however, in the realm of imagination, thought, like a distorting mirror, reflects the substance of sense (or the subject of the sensory experience), and reprojects it outside in the form that it has nurtured and processed: thought embraces sense, forges it, and projects it; in other words, it places it before us as a topic of thought. Sense, as well, as it “forms” in the mirror, influences its luminousness and bestows upon it a different clarity and luster. Two impactors susceptible to impact are constantly involved in giving birth to themselves through believing in each other. In this process, sense and thought are an inseparable blend: lamp and light. In the realm of “imagination,” the separation and distinction between them fades away, like the dark and light of dawn that loses night and day in itself.

Sense and thought reflect themselves in each other. In this oneness, thought can contemplate its incongruous and nonsimultaneous senses congruently and simultaneously. And sense can perceive its varied thoughts as congruous. Like a two-sided mirror, thought simultaneously gives form to its past and future senses, in the same way that sense sees its various scattered thoughts all at once. In this way, “imagination” brings together not only senses and thoughts, but also various times and spaces, takes their distilled essence, and fuses them, such that the imaginer in a single instant possesses life and death, disbelief and faith, union and separation, laughter and weeping, and childhood and old age. It is as though a magical lens gathers together the dispersed and wandering rays of the world in a center, re-emits them in various colors through revolving prisms, playfully adorns the world with colorful tricks, with ugliness and beauty, with happiness and sorrow, and turns them into the shapes of the galloping arena of the enemy and the arena of utter obliteration, or the painting gallery of the friend and the abode of happiness, or both.

In logic and theoretical mathematics, thought responds to the questions that it poses to itself; and in science, it responds to the questions that the world poses. The original source of questions in philosophy, both in thought and in the world, lies in universal thought. In all these arenas, the answer must be based on evidence in the world, or it must interpret it; otherwise, thought spins within itself and does not go beyond illusion and supposition. Poetic thought, however, gives its own evidence or interpretation to the world; it interprets the world, and by doing so, it gives meaning to it, because such thought—similar to myth and religion—is “base building,” “design creating,”²³ or foundation creating.

The poet places the world he has created in the workshop of his imagination before the world that exists. Since this creation occurs within the realm of the imagination, it has its very own logic, function, and end; but since it selects its material from existing creation, since it does not remain within the realm of the imagination and necessarily comes into existence in words and joins the actual world, it cannot be totally alien to the laws and order of the world. In any case, the poet is a creation among all the created entities in the world! He places himself in the world, and in agreement or opposition, in any way imaginable, he takes a position vis-à-vis it, and he can in no instance remain detached from it. If so, he would speak in a language that cannot be known about something that cannot be thought: confused speaking in confused thinking. Hence, poetic creation in the unrestricted workshop of the imagination is not willful and whimsical.

On the other hand, however, mathematics and science are logical and “methodical” systems. If the response of thought to them lacks a methodology, it will be in contradiction to itself, and if it is not “orderly,” it will be incompatible with the function of the system and will be excluded from that system. Hence, in mathematics and science, thought drives onward toward the boundaries of the system, unless it expands it and moves the boundaries further. Of course, when science cannot answer the questions, it chooses another beginning and approach; in other words, through a “primary hypothesis” and new methodology, it designs another system. In this permanent process, a hypothesis that is not “scientific” frees science from its previous narrow confines, and “unscientific” imagination—which is nurtured by the known facts of science but is not accepted until it leaves them behind—comes to the aid of science. In this state, the scientist, like the poet, is also a creator of designs and a creator of foundations, and his “imaginative” mind functions like that of a poet. But in the new science, since inevitably a system—even though more comprehensive—is established, there is always a boundary like a horizon in front of it. Here, thought is not free and can only move methodically and systematically, and, based on the rules, develop new logical principles and rules from its own logical principles. This thought necessarily has a specific path ahead of it. In philosophy, however, thought can leave its horizon behind. Science is the system of knowing and philosophy, the system of thinking. Philosophical thought can logically (in other words, methodically and systematically) pass beyond the limitations of knowing how to reach “not knowing.” It can reason and “prove” that in a different arena, knowing is impossible, or in other words, contemplate “not knowing” and know that it cannot know. Also, it is possible within a philosophical system for thought to develop against the rules—to undo the contradictions—that it has established itself, and contemplate the contradiction in the rule.ⁱ The free, fluid, and boundless nature of thought emerges, including in this case.

Poetic thought as well—albeit of a different type—is unruly and cannot be constrained. The “realm of imagination” is the reflecting and re-reflecting of the sensing thought and thinking sense that—like an image in face-to-face mirrors—can be repeated infinitely. In this dawning and growing, sense hunts thought and encloses it in its cage. And thought causes sense to fly out of the cage. Each causes the other to come out of its own domain, a constant departure and return occurring and not remaining in any one place, unless the poet himself chooses that “place” of his own volition and brings this wayfarer down to reside at a certain stage. The beginning of this self-motivated process is within the poet, and its end is also of his own volition. Hence, even though poetic creation is not willful, it is free, unrestricted. This creation occurs in the imagination, which is the place where sense and thought connect.

In knowledge (philosophy, mathematics, science, and so on), where thought operates and expands based on its own laws, thought is only involved in its rational and logical aspects. But now, the emotional and “human” aspect of sense finds its way into the arena of thought and no longer leaves it alone in its cold house. It blows into it like a flame, like a candle, and brings it warmth and light, like spring and autumn that find their way into the unquestionable rotation of the earth and bestow on it another reason and purpose. In knowledge, the thinker—even when he thinks about mankind—tries to think devoid of human dispositions; he tries not to involve emotions and feelings in the workshop of reason. But in poetry, even lifeless things grow in the cultivated field of emotions and feelings and are contemplated with a human dimension. In the imagination, the world possesses the dispositions of the poet, a contemplating man of the heart, a pained, weeping, smiling man, with love and animosity. “Every leaf in the meadow is a book about a different disposition.”²⁴ Man is uprooted from the triviality and futility of the world and falls into the world in some disposition; the house of living and dying, the house of his soul, turns upside down. Even when it deals with our daily commonplace life, not only does poetry not fall into the whirlpool itself, but also it takes our hand, because it both blows its “imagination” like “fresh air” into the breast of our passing life of eating and sleeping and also takes us away to the strange realm of its imagination; and as a result, it opens to us the invisible inner gates.

All that is seen and known—the sleep of fortune and the wakefulness of the sun, the ascension of Christ and the lamp that man gives to the sun, and the nocturnal stars that deceitfully rob the crown of Kavus, and the game of the friend in the arena of beauty who checkmates a moon and a sun with the pawn of the mole of a faceⁱⁱ—all grow in the “green field” of the imagination.²⁵ Things that are known are seen, and things that are seen become known: The thought of fortune shows its face like a sleepy body, knowledge as a lamp, time as a star, and the moving star as a thief.²⁶ Thoughts become measuring cups,²⁷ and in exchange, measuring cups find their way into the freedom of thought: thief to star to time; lamp to knowledge; and sleeping body to the contemplation of fortune.²⁸

At times the poet—as mentioned before—speaks of his journey in the realm of the imagination, the “story” of that which he has seen in that wonderful realm. In this case, we are mostly dealing with the story in his imagination, not its “images.” But at other times—as it so happens—the poet projects the images that form on the canvas of his memory, and he speaks in the language of “images.” In this case, we are also dealing with the “image in his imagination,”ⁱⁱⁱ which, in remembering the beauty of the friend, he traces on water.^iv Thought (memory) with the mediation of the “substance” or the topic of sense (the line of down of the beloved) traces a fleeting “image,” an image on water. And the water itself is the “image” of the flood (another substance of sense) that blocks the path to sleep, the path that can only be imagined in thought, and “the image in the imagination” is itself a path that in the external world rests in the breast of the earth.

The beloved’s eyebrow (the topic of sense) within sight—in other words, in “insight,” in “imagination,”—guides the poet’s memory and thought to the prayer niche—which is itself an “image” of the same eyebrow.

The face of the beloved appears before his eyes (beauty in “imagination”), and the lover kisses the face of the moonlight—which is sensed—and such “kissing and embracing” is only possible in the realm of the imagination, and it is in the same “realm” in which moonlight is imagined as an “image” of the beloved’s face.

Hence, every bird of thought that flies off from the branches of speech falls into the trap of the beloved’s tresses; thought remains “within reach” and is embodied in the senses; and the poet divines his fortune through eyes and ears (through the senses) in the infinity of love.

and till dawn

I drew the image of your face

working in the attic of my sleepless eyes²⁹

Blessed by his senses, the poet gives form to his thought in the workshop of the imagination, and he views its image within himself. Images fly in thought, and thoughts reside in images and as a result become “visible.”

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 play³⁰

The realm of the imagination is not the state of understanding, it is the state of unveiling understanding, the state of insight. Our Hafez sees angels at the door of the tavern in nocturnal darkness, and he sees the workshop of his destiny in the green field of the sky. The realm of the imagination of the poet is similar to the allegorical realm of the mystics, and the poetic vision of one is similar to the mystic illumination of the other. Reason’s external vision and love’s internal vision, the eye of the head and the eye of the heart, appear at the center of the imagination that at every moment has a different hue, shape, disposition, and expression; and new and newer landscapes open wide before the mind’s eye. The poet’s vision is of magical “lovers’ exchange of glances” and a pleasant deception that bewilders those who do not know.

This imaginary vision of poetry is not always revealed in a visible composition and structure. The existence of the image in the imagination (the picture) is not inevitable, and the poem is also possible without it. But it is not possible without “imagination,” since without it, poetic vision fades away. In the heroic Book of Kings, man’s fate is expressed in a language as bare as the sky, with occasional “images” here and there—like the faces of the sky—but not such that it deprives the story of its rapid pace or slows down its movement on a rocky terrain. Despite all this, when, for example, Ferdowsi narrates the story of Rostam and Sohrab or Rostam and Esfandiar, it is perfect poetry throughout. Here, the organs of destiny, or the design of this “lofty palace,”³¹ the relationship and connection of the components, and the effect of the denizens of the world on each other, and their encounter with the world, and the creator are all nurtured and created by “imagination.” Even though the poet speaks in a language “devoid of images,” he is the traveler of the realm of imagination who draws the map, the highs and lows, and the landscapes of this inner realm. Hence, even when it is bereft of “imagined images” and seems devoid of “imagery,” its language has some element of imagination.^v

The possessor of imagination in a single moment is the possessor of various emotions and thoughts and times and spaces, and he savors the essence of all of them. Contradictory dispositions—which emerge from one another at the dawning of imagination—come together in him, and they acquire the harmony and disharmony of their restless and effusive unity in him: A center from every point of the circumference surrounds the circular rays. The existence of various emotions and thoughts, and the perception of this variety, give the poet a frenzied and mad, “magical-playful” appearance. Even though the foundation of his thinking and worldview is the same, its turning and mechanism are such that they appear to be of various colors. All thoughts and thinking in general are the same, but the dispositions are neither harmonious nor the same. The consistency of sense and thought in “imagination” turns it into a multifaceted mirror that not only shows the top and bottom and the front and back of things but also their interior and exterior. The “imaginative” poet suddenly and in a single instant contemplates and experiences a thought and an emotion in various and opposing directions, and he has dispositions of every sort. With a mind that thinks in terms of opposites, he possesses an imagination that processes in terms of opposites, and as a result, often his words appear to be opposite of that which is customary.

Seek success under conditions that are contrary to custom,

For I collected my thoughts from disheveled tresses.³²

The world of plurality and disunity is chaotic and aimless; it is a mass of intertwined, disheveled, and disconnected things, and for this reason, it is demonic. “Renounce the thought of disunion to have union.”³³ The message at dawn from the messenger of the invisible will not be received by a distraught mind.³⁴ The poet gains victory over the thought of disunity and disunity of thought. Of course, consistency of thought in the imagination is of a different sort, and it is different from the system of thought in science or logic. In the imagination of poets, thought at times has a distraught and fleeting face; but at the core, all its components are interconnected by an invisible link. For this reason, the unity of poetry should be sought in the general system of its imagination, not in the trivial order of the couplets.

Consistency of thought in the realm of the imagination, or a collected mind like that of a messenger angel, is acquired at times, contrary to custom, precisely from its opposite, from distraction. Since imagination is the place of cultivation and connection and the start of unique single and multiple contradictory states, the sorrow of love is happy, and its happiness is sorrowful, and longing for the sorrow of love, the poet seeks happiness:

Since the sorrow of love for you

can only be found in a happy heart,

Hoping for the sorrow of love, I will seek a happy heart.³⁵

The sorrow of love for the friend nests in happy hearts. The mere existence of such sorrow—which is indicative of love—is itself the original source of happiness and turns its dwelling into the house of happiness. Sorrow and happiness become one and the same, indistinguishable. Although those unencumbered by love “are pleased and happy with merrymaking and glee,” for lovers, “sorrowful longing for the beloved is the source of happiness.”³⁶ Often in this “mirrorlike”³⁷ imagination, which absorbs in itself sunrise and sunset and light and darkness and reflects them in each other through its transparent surface, they appear to be one and the same; in this seven-times fermentation wine cellar, soberness and drunkenness, solitude and togetherness, pain and comfort, separation and union, and misfortune and fortune not only split open each other’s shell and seep through each other, but somewhere and under certain conditions, they become one soul and one body. This association and connectivity of opposites at times bestows contradiction and irony on the words of our Hafez, making his words appear upside down and twisted, which is not merely the magic of expression, but is born of the magical power of a mind that thinks in opposites and the reflection of an imagination that processes contraries.^vi The poet speaks “from the treasure of sorrow for the friend in the ruins of the heart,”³⁸ from a sorrow as precious as a treasure and a treasure as ruined as sorrow, from the heart that is a treasure house in ruins and a ruined house with precious treasure. The religious jurist at the seminary issues a religious decree in his drunkenness that “wine is prohibited, but better than religiously endowed property.”³⁹ In drunkenness, he is truthful; until he falls into the misguided path of intoxication, he cannot return to the straight path. Only by passing though the desert of transgression can he reach the right path; and still, he is a sinner in his deed worthy of reward, since he issues a just religious decree in an unjust situation. It is as though he who throws stones at the cup of another thus breaking the jug and subjecting the drunkards to the religious punishment of lashes becomes “wise and learned” once again “with one sip of wine” that causes “lack of reason” and stupor.⁴⁰ In his leaning toward expedient and utilitarian reason, the poet contemplates repentance, albeit repentance “at the hands of the wine-selling idol” and pledging “not to drink wine again unaccompanied by a face that adorns a festive gathering”;⁴¹ but because the wine seller is an idol, she is herself an adorner of feasts, and because she is a wine seller, she is a breaker of repentance. Hence, the poet does not repent except in the presence of “an idol who breaks repentances.”⁴² In this manner, his repentance is an impossibility. In other words, he repents of repenting. And besides, suppose that he does repent!

Come, for the flourishing of this workshop

will not decrease

From the piety of one like you,

or the debauchery of one like me.⁴³

Not that in the revolving of the world of existence and the destiny of the universe, the piety of one or the debauchery of the other would be ineffectual. If this were all there were, he would say, come, for the flourishing of this workshop will not increase from your piety nor decrease from my debauchery. It does not even cross the poet’s mind that the piety of the other would be able to make anything flourish. He considers such piety to be harmful by its very nature, albeit ineffectual, precisely like his own ineffectual debauchery. The distinction between good and bad is erased. But concealed here is the stinging sneer of derision: not merely that all piety and debauchery are the same; rather, the piety of one like you and the debauchery of one like me are the same. An unvoiced thought can be detected behind the transparent mirror of the words: there is hypocrisy in that piety, but not in this debauchery. Hence, the distinction between good and bad, which had been erased, continues to exist at the core: not in practicing piety and debauchery, not in one’s deeds, in appearances and display, but in contemplating hypocrisy and sincerity, in the work of the heart, in the invisible aspects of existence, between “being like you” and “being like me”! And yet, one like me who does not engage in hypocrisy is a debaucher, a doer of bad deeds. Then, how could one tell that I would be better than you, a hypocrite? And yet, suppose I were, in such a case; being better is not a source of happiness nor would it have any effect on the “flourishing of this workshop.”

Throughout, the Divan of our Hafez is filled with this kind of multifaceted, labyrinthine and colorful language that is not merely due to the unmatched power and mastery of speech and language. The poet certainly is a skillful “player” in the domain of language, because he brings into existence the deception of his creation. But the irony, figurative speech, sarcasm, and ambiguity that rises from it—saying something and meaning something else and giving the words multilayered, exposed, and hidden meanings—is rooted in the “upside-down functioning”⁴⁴ of imagination, his colorful imagination. The Tongue of the Invisible comes from the invisible realm, and the magic of expression, from the magic of imagination. For this reason, the poetry of our elder, like nature, is a concealed, perceptible phenomenon, and the deeper one delves into it, the more other-worldly one finds it. Once the thoughts that are sleeping in the “cage” of his words awaken, like migrating birds in a cloudy and windy sky, they fly away in song.

And the “wakefulness” of thought unveils the poem; and until we open the door of the cage of the poem, the birds of thought will not be released. In poetry, words must also be opened, like thought, because words are the arena of poetic creation and the keeper and concealer of its mystery.

When I bring the reed pen that is the fish to write,

You ask the N and the pen for interpretation.⁴⁵

“N and the pen and all that it writes.”^vii What has been written by that pen and what has Hafez read on the Preserved Tablet⁴⁶ on which we must find the interpretation of his words? The reed pen and nun,^viii both grow in water. Regarding this Koranic verse, interpreters of the Koran have stated that nun means the fish on the back of which the creator firmly placed earth,^ix hence, it means the base and foundation of the world. The pen referred to in the Koran, however, was created before anything else, and all that which occurs up to the Day of Resurrection is written with it: the pen of destiny of the master of eternal beginning! Now there is a relationship and a connection between the turning of the pen in the ocean of poetry and the turning of the pen of the creator in the world of creation. It is as though the pen of the poet says “that which the master of eternal beginning said,”⁴⁷ and emulating him, he “designs” the foundation of the earth and the ceiling of the sky, or rewrites the destiny of the world.

In the face of Hafez’s talented nature, which is as clear as water, the “water of life”⁴⁸ has crept behind the veil of darkness from embarrassment. This poetry itself is the water that remedies life.^x This water is hidden behind the veils of darkness, and only prophets and the chosen can gain access to this light in the heart of darkness.

Moreover, while the poet possesses the reed pen that is the fish, Jonah has also been called the possessor of the fish.^xi This prophet, as well, like the poet, found the water of life of deliverance in darkness, in the belly of the fish that was swimming in the darkness at the bottom of the sea, and he returned to the shore from there. Hence, behind the hidden heart of thought there is a veiled similarity between the two composers of words, the poet and the prophet. His poetry, which flows out from the depths of roots like a pleasant stream, is like the words of a prophet in whose soul the thoughts of God descend and on whose tongue they resonate to reveal the mysteries. Thus, the meaning of the poetry of one is found in the verses of the other. The reed pen that is the fish, as well, like the pen of eternity, creates; and the interpretation of the poetry must be sought in the prophet’s divine revelation and the tongue of the invisible, which is the “dawn” of speakers. Language rises from this dawn; and it is a divine matter that has been entrusted to the poet and prophet alike, like the eye that sees in the dark placed in the star, the patient pregnancy in soil, the growth in plants, and flight in the wing. These words are neither the form nor the clothing, but are the formable substance of thought. Such words unveil the veil in the veil, and in every unveiling, they remove a veil from the face of thought; and in removing every veil, they push aside a veil from speech, because these words, like thought, are mysterious themselves, since they are his water of life that flows in my stream. “The delightfulness and beauty of words is God-given.”⁴⁹ In the view of our Hafez, the words of the poet come from the words of the friend, and both are of the same essence. Hence, they are both ancient:

in the time of Adamin the garden of Eden

Hafez’ lines

illustrated the pages of the book of flowers.⁵⁰

Hence, they are both sacred:

At dawn a cry came from the heavens—

And Reason said, “I see

The very angels know by heart

Hafez’s poetry!”⁵¹

And they both, in “voyaging in time and space, traverse a hundred-year-long path overnight,”⁵² are victorious over the revolving universe. The “poems of Hafez, whose words are sweet,” can make the heavens dance,⁵³ and

Venus’s odes will not flourish

Once Hafez begins to sing.⁵⁴

But because the words of the poet are of man and not of the divine, they are of the senses and emotions, and they have an existential nature and quality. The burning of the fire of the heart can be recognized “from burning words.”⁵⁵ The deer of the poetry that comes from strange plains and whose musk is scattered by the breeze in the meadow of the soul is a weeping laugher. “How can a despondent heart compose a novel poem?”⁵⁶ But a “fresh sweet poem”⁵⁷ from a happy heart also drips with blood.

I don’t know who fired the arrow

into the poet’s heart

I know only that his blooddrips from every fresh line⁵⁸

God with his word opened the world to us; the poet, as well, with his words opens his world to us. Among our poets, rarely does anyone know this world of poetry as perfectly as he does, and is aware of himself as a poet:

When I bring the reed pen that is the fish to write,

You ask the N and the pen for interpretation.

I fused the soul with wisdom,

From the mix, I planted the resulting seed.

Delightfulness is apparent in this composition,

Thus is the marvel of poetry, the core of its components’ soul.

Come, and from the scent of this delightful hope,

Make the olfactory of the soul fragrant forever.

For this musk comes from the bosom of angels,

Not from the deer that flees the people.⁵⁹

“Being a poet” is the delightful combining and successful harmonizing of the truth of words and the essence of the soul, the planting of the seeds of the soul and of wisdom, the sprinkling of seeds by the hand of the wind, and the nurturing of the fresh scent of hope, a fragrant eternal soul and an ambergris musk from the covered neck and timid body of the fairy of paradise; it is from ideal beauty, not the scent of the deer that flees from the people.

And the wild, startled gazelle of poetry is only tame to lovers. If what the poet says stems from the words of the friend, and if the words of the friend stem from his thought and creation, the purpose of creation is love, and the poet who emulates the game of the friend in a different state and rewrites what he has provided as a sample is the lover. To be a poet is to be in love. In the same way that the nightingale learns words through the blessing of the rose, the nightingale that “Hafez favors” also sings because of “the scent of the rosebush of union” with the beloved.⁶⁰ He is himself the anemone who has come, branded by love;⁶¹ he has lived in love and has departed longing for love. Love is his seed, his tree, and his season of spring. He sleeps in the soil of love, he burgeons under the rain of love, and he walks on the ground of love. The water of love runs in the stream of his soul and “opens his chest, makes the affairs easy for him, removes the knot from his tongue,” and opens the doors of the universe to him, so that he can traverse the world like a bird in flight or a running deer to find and create his own world.

God’s creation occurs in the arena of all that exists, in the reality of life and death; and for this reason, it is evolving and diminishing, it is imperfect and incomplete. It is what we see. But he is absolute. Hence, he does not yearn for more beauty and for something better, since the desire for perfection is a part of him, not beyond him. His work and purpose are “one and the same,” precisely the same. God does not have any desire or ideal.

But the poet is an incomplete creator with incomplete creation in the twilight of mystery, in the “deceptive magic” of words; and since they are magic, they never rejoin reality and do not become one with it; they do not reach perfection, and since they are deceptive, at every moment, they force the creator into another magical game; they do not end. In this state, aware of his incompleteness, the creator yearns for completeness and perfection, yearns to “be God,” and for that matter, not with a creation like this world, but a perfect and ideal world. The poet seeks the impossible, and for this reason, necessarily and undoubtedly, he does not succeed. Because of his awareness of the incompleteness of himself and of his poetry, he lives in the landscape of longing and the ideal. But longing moves horizontally and always flees ahead of those who yearn. He himself is here, and his unstable abode is there; hence, he is “in the wrong time and the wrong place,” because although he is now standing here, the bird of his heart takes flight in the air of a different time and space. It flies off a branch from this forest, but before it returns, it journeys in the air of longing. Poetry is the “story of longing.”⁶² Our Hafez consoles the “lost heart,”⁶³ telling it that it will in the end reach its Mecca and Canaan.⁶⁴ But “protect me from this desert, this road without end!”⁶⁵ In this “story of longing,” my elder is a wayfarer who will never arrive, a permanent traveler who on his way to his destination constantly passes beyond himself and his path, leaving both behind. He succeeds in going and is an unsuccessful wayfarer, not arriving. In such case, that “reed pen that is the fish,” which was as powerful as fate, often remains helpless in the hand.

The pen does not have the tongue to utter the secret of love

The story of longing is beyond all utterance.⁶⁶

i. Note Kant’s critique of judgement and his contradiction of principles (antinomies) in Kritik der reinen Vernunft [Critique of Pure Reason].

ii. See “I saw the green field of the sky, / and there a sickle moon.” [From ghazal 407; Dick Davis, trans. Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz (New York: Penguin, 2013), 36.]

iii. A ghazal such as “At dawn with a nocturnal hangover / I picked up the wine with the harp and chime” [ghazal 428]. Almost the entire tale is the “imaginary” story of the poet, but in most ghazals, the “story” and the image in the imagination are fused. The following ghazal is an example:

For years my heart inquired of me

Where Jamshid’s sacred cup might be,

And what was in its own possession

It asked from strangers, constantly”

[ghazal 143; Davis, Faces of Love, 42].

iv. [From ghazal 320:]

Last night the road to sleep

was flooded by my tears

remembering the line of your down

I traced a pattern on the water

with my gown consigned to the flames

and your eyebrow in mind

I raised a wine-cup to that place of prayer

my beloved appeared to meand from a distance

I placed a kiss upon that moonlike face

gazing at the serving-boy

and listening to the message of the harp

in these two ways

eye and ear told me of my destiny

each bird of thought

that took off from the branches of words

I caught again in the fine net of your curls

[Translation from Geoffrey Squires, trans. Hafez: Translations and Interpretations of the Ghazals (Miami: Miami University Press, 2014), 261. Since this translation is based on Khanlari’s edition, the order of the couplets is slightly different.]

v. In the historical part of Book of Kings, since the poet is uprooted from the world of imagination and narrates events, and instead of man’s destiny, he deals with his story, the “imagined images”—when they are used—cannot compensate for the lack of “imagination” and free the poem.

vi. For instance, see the following ghazal [194]: “When the jasmine-scented ones sit, they make the dust of sorrow settle / When fairy-faced beauties quarrel, they take away the tranquility of the heart.”

vii. Surah 68, verse 1 [of the Koran].

viii. Nun in Arabic means “fish.” [Nun is also the name of the letter n.]

ix. See the translation and interpretation of the same verse in Tabari’s commentary on the Koran, Kashf al-Asrar [translated as The Unveiling of Mysteries by William C. Chittick (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2016)] and the interpretation by Abolfotuh Razi.

x. “The veil of darkness concealed the water of life, since / It was embarrassed before the poetry of Hafez and his clear-as-water talented nature.” [From ghazal 305.] And also, “Hafez, your poetry gave me a drink from the water of life / Leave the physician, come and read the prescription of my drink.” [From ghazal 382.]

xi. Zo al-nun [of the fish] and saheb al-hut [the possessor of the fish] in surah 21, verse 86 [in some versions, verse 87] and surah 68, verse 48. Also see Qor’an-e Majid, vol. 2 (Tehran: Sazman-e Owqaf, 1975), translated, compiled, and interpreted by Zeynol’abedin Rahnema, 130.