The Poesis of Love

The Poesis of Love: An Exploration of Sufi Poetry

Here you can read notes on the theme I would like to write more about. I will update as often as I can, just keep checking back. All work here is my copyright. If you wish to cite anything then please contact me first for permission. Do not plagiarize.

Please note that these are only notes as yet without any formal referencing or clear chapter outline. That is all I have time for at present but, Insh’allah, I will be able to complete this project one day. Right now it feels important to jot down ideas as they arise and as this is very much a part of my activity as a writer it felt like a good idea to include these notes on my blog as part of my Writer’s Journal. I would appreciate any critical feedback. Many thanks.

Defining Sufi Poetry
In the whirling dance of the Mevlevi Sufis the position of the hands indicates the function of the ‘friend’ in connecting heaven and earth. One hand is raised with palm upwards and the other is lowered towards the earth. I believe this can also be the function of Sufi poetry. As the Sufi remembers God in her/his whirling, attaining a state of bliss, so the Sufi poet is expressing that bliss in words which in turn become a conduit of the divine. Poet and word are as one in the poem acting as a channel here, in the same way that dancer and dance are one in the whirling. This illustrates the ongoing task of the Sufi that has a metaphysical basis and is therefore timeless but which seeks to be anchored in the physical world. While the Sufi longs for union it is love that gives rise to this longing, and love that is the fuel for the journey, love is its destination, and love demands the return to the created world, and yet fana fi Allah, union with the divine, is the ineffable, the unspeakable, so how does the one who has returned deal with this paradox, and how does the one who has not yet attained speak about it? The attempt, even compulsion, to do so despite the inadequacy of any words is the defining factor of Sufi poetry.

A False Dichotomy and an Illusory Freedom
Very little contemporary Sufi poetry is published for a mainstream readership. At the same time the thirteenth century Sufi poet/mystic Jalaluddin Rumi is one of the most widely read poets in the United States today and yet there is little publishing interest in contemporary writing, either Sufi, or Muslim. I suggest that this curious dichotomy reflects a split in the modern social psyche between an obvious emotional and spiritual need for meaning and multi-dimensional experience in a fragmenting world that loses sight of wholeness, and a determination not to give credence to anything not proven by science. The ‘freedom’ that results from this world view begins to resemble the hanged man of tarot fame, without foothold, lacking any friendly hand. Yet many of those who seek, and experience, mystical union, like Sufis of old, still feel compelled to allow words to flow and the recent phenomenon of the blog provides a structure for that expression. If one-dimensional thinking, and a monolithic, fixed use of language are the tools of propaganda, fuelling governments and terrorist groups alike, then there is a case for promoting those arts that touch the heart, move the soul, and display the diversity of manifestations of that which unites all, whether ‘that’ is seen as an ever-present divine intelligence or simply our common humanity. Sufi poetry is one of these arts.

Rough notes for an essay on language as part of the thesis on the poesis of love on the mystical Sufi path

Three basic questions:

• What is language?
• What is the relationship between language and image?
• Translation as a pivotal concept/activity in relating gnosis to participation in community (the question might be ‘Where is the point of convergence of the Transcendent and the Immanent?’)

On the subject of translation I am reminded of the mystic poet-seers. What are these saints doing when they take pen to paper but translating the ineffable, the wordless, into a human language? Compelled to speak of the love that overflows any boundaries and to share through words that which can only be tasted (dhawq) how do they even dare to attempt the wild venture of translating the soul’s tasting of the Real (Al-Haqq) into a form that can transmit but an intimation of that experience to fellow strugglers on the path?

The image as a bridge between the pre-lingual moment and articulation
The internal image takes a more permanent form through linguistic description and is therefore interpreted, translated, and accorded meaning. But language can never fully reproduce the image or its prior moment. The imagination therefore serves as an intermediary between non-form and form, the image being the initial product of desire seeking form or embodiment. There is a tension between the pre-lingual moment and articulation; a tension that is bridged by the image (or even creates the image?) and that encourages strategies of creative negotiation with the signifying system. There is a creative tension oscillating between feeling/image and articulation/narrative where diverse possibilities of articulation seek to assign meaning to the pre-lingual moment. This is where uncertainty resides and the uncertainty remains implicit in the final choice of definition. There are those who cannot tolerate uncertainty and who demand an absolute definition in the service of their own ambitions. Institutions and political bodies are amongst those who pursue this illusory path of falsehood. In a system that demands reason as the only access to truth a statement demands closure to confirm its defining power. The alternative is to allow the statement its being as a player in a myriad of possibilities, no longer a statement as such, but a debating point, a dialectical partner. This might be terrifying for the worldly ambitious but I see it as essential for the spiritual seeker. I am proposing an ontological moment of imminent meaningfulness that is pregnant with uncertainty, an uncertainty that is born at the moment of articulation, for there were numerous other possibilities, and that this moment constitutes a gap between the image and the word that is vibrant with creative tension. With the term ‘pre-lingual moment’ I am seeking an ontological moment that pre-exists and precipitates the manifestation of an image and its pursuant articulation. The force of the pre-lingual moment does not fade after articulation but continues in a state of tension with language and demands the application of metaphor and creative imagining. Certainty lies somewhere in the space of this tension, ever illusive. Systems of power attempt to deny this tension and imagine certainty as situated in language itself, in its supposed defining power, making the word ‘safe’, and ‘authorizing’, rather than fluctuating, vibrant, and creative.