Music lessons for Rumi's birthday

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Trade your cleverness for abandonment. 

~ Rumi

Frederick Leighton’s painting of a music lesson (see note below), perhaps between mother and daughter, and the photograph below of John Coltrane giving piano tips to his wife Alice, offer a pretty, demure picture of music lessons. I am here to tell you that taking piano lessons from my mother was, at times, aggravating. She was so lovely, metaphorically like Leighton's silken mother above. But me, I had no diligence, where she had nothing but. I didn’t care enough about the piano, and I did not like to be told when I was doing something wrong, like when I didn't strike the keys with my fingertips as if they were the hammers on the strings inside the piano.

(Doesn't the porch these two are sitting on resemble a piano keyboard?)

I do care about poetry, with a passion. Because of this, diligence doesn’t feel like diligence. Discipline? Discipline is what you need for doing what you don’t want to do, or want to do but can't seem to find the time, or enough skill for. I am a lethargic procrastinator for nearly everything but writing. (As you witness, in part.)

This week to celebrate Jalalu'ddin Rumi’s 804th birthday (September 30) I’ve been swilling Rumi wine. (Normally I sip slowly.) There's a drunk donkey kicking down fences with all these words turning into wine. I wrote the two poems posted this week after guzzling his words. I don’t want to just imitate Rumi’s poems. I want to bust down mind fences, let the heart kick her way out of the pen of language, while putting my soul out there like fly paper.

Alice and John Coltrane

Rumi's way:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty

and frightened. Don't open the door to the study

and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks

Poetry should be heard. Listen to Coleman Barks read these lines for a couple of minutes, with musical accompaniment, introduced by Garrison Keillor. I can hardly separate Rumi from Barks' voice, in translation, and sonorous recitation. In this recording, you can feel, there are no fences.

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī
30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273

"Poems are rough notations for the music we are."

Notes:

Image of Rumi on an old book in the Mevlâna museum;
Konya, Turkey; Rumi's body was buried in Konya, but
his spirit lives here, eight centuries later.

Frederic Leighton's "The Music Lesson" at the top is in

the Guildhall Art Gallery of the City of London Corporation,
is oil on canvas, 104cm x 101cm, painted 1877. If the scene
seems to be well suited for a post about Persian Rumi, who
lived most of his life in Konya, Turkey, maybe it's because
it is one of the paintings inspired by Leighton's visit to the
Middle East. The Leighton House Museum in London
interprets the painting thus:

An older woman helps a girl to play a guitar, possibly of Syrian origin. Leighton developed a deep interest in Eastern art and architecture after his first trip to Algeria in 1857, and here we can see him introducing this into his art. The two figures are surrounded by and dressed in souvenirs from Damascus. The architectural setting for the painting shares an affinity with George Aitchinson's contemporary designs for the Arab Hall at Leighton House, although it has also been linked with the sixteenth century mosque of Suleiman Pasha at Damascus.

You can see more paintings inspired by the Middle East by Leighton here.

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Rumi: Beyond Love Stories

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Love comes with a knife,
not some shy question,
and not with fears for its reputation.

I say these things disinterestedly.
Accept them in kind.

Love is a madman,
working his wild schemes,
tearing off his clothes,
drinking poison, and now quietly
choosing annihilation.

A tiny spider tries to wrap
an enormous wasp. Think of the spiderweb
woven across the cave where Muhammed slept.

There are love stories,
and there is obliteration into love.

You have been walking the ocean's edge,
holding up your robes to keep them dry.

You must dive deeper under,
a thousand times deeper.

Love flows down. The ground
submits to the sky and suffers what comes.

Is the ground worse for giving like that?
Do not put blankets over the drum.
Open completely.

Let your spirit ear listen
to the green dome's passionate murmur.

Let the cords of your robe be untied.
Shiver in this new love
beyond all above and below.

The sun rises,
but which way does the night go?

I have no more words.
Let the soul speak
with the silent articulation of a face.

~ Rumi

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Mind walks

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The Norwegian Jøtul wood stove in the family room (where we spend most of our home awake time -- where I write, read, work on photographs, blog, paint and watch movies) radiates heat into much of the house, and the forced air propane furnace rarely kicks on. We feed the wood stove dead, seasoned wood from the fallen trees that stripe the back acre of the farm. Ash borers have defeated many tall, straight ash trees, and thanks to that tiny, mighty pest, we have some of the densest, longest burning firewood there is, for a long time to come.

On Saturdays, just after sunrise, while snow falls and floats like ash outside the glass deck door, and chickadees, juncos, mourning doves, cardinals and blue jays rise and fall from the ground to the spruce and back again for scattered bird seed on the ground, I put our biggest pot on the radiant Jøtul. Into olive oil I drop chopped onions and celery that quickly begin to sizzle. Then what’s left of vegetables in the fridge, rough chopped, and scraps I’ve saved in the freezer, get added and filled almost to the brim with water. (My gourmand ex-brother-in-law Larry scolded me once for not saving every dear peel, rind, stem and shaving from vegetables in a freezer bag for a Saturday broth-fest; within the scraps are contained the same elements of vegetable goodness. I changed my ways.) For a few hours I cook this potful that’s almost as big as the cast iron heat-box itself, creating tasty veggie stock that I’ll use in cooking for the next week. Cabbage becomes fragrant (!), and the low winter sun shines on the spruce where at least a dozen red cardinals are tucked in the branches, looking like soft, exotic fruits.

Like birds picking up seeds, I have been flitting from pillar to post gathering ideas and thoughts. I feel as if I'm back in college classes, pushing myself to do close readings of the writers I read. They join in the pot of my head like scraps from the fridge. But what soup is being cooked up there? I read passages from Rilke and Rumi at the daily blogs. Synchronously they link arms and walk like twins separated only by centuries. See the parallel lines from the readings posted a couple of days ago:

Rumi: I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.  (~ from "The Price of Kissing")

Rilke: I would perish in the power of his being.
For beauty is but the beginning of terror. (~ from "If I Cried Out")

Each day friends come into the comment boxes and reflect on the passages posted in those blog salons, filtering them through their own separate experiences and patterns of thought. Paths emerge, merge, and sometimes lead into dense thickets where I have to focus hard, keep up and try not to get lost. I love mind walks, even when I'm in danger of losing my way. (Have you seen the wonderful 1990 film "Mind Walk" with Liv Ullman, Sam Waterston and John Heard? Nothing but stimulating conversation, while walking around Mont-St Michel . . . ahhhh.) I collect thoughts and words that smell good, and throw them into my pot-head ☺. Does this make me wishy-washy? Maybe. Like water, shaped by the vessel it's in. And what's inside the pot? Fragments of this and that . . . these, and all.
                                                                       
                                                                                       .
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                                                                            . . . .
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                                                                                  . . . . .
Steam rises from the pot, walking a ribboning path . . . . .

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See

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These eye sketches are from a page in the Andy Warhol Idea Book journal Inge gave me a couple years ago for my birthday. It's Inge's birthday today. Happy Birthday, my dear friend. In this journal there are blank pages for me to write or sketch on, and every so often there are translucent vellum pages of Warhol sketches and quotes. I truly love them. No one saw the way Andy Warhol saw. He's the one who said everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Everyone -- really?

The words below are sort of mine, if anyone's words "belong" to anyone (and then I made them into a text-rebus image at picnik.com). I think I am recycling these words from someone else, like G.I. Gurdjieff, Osho, Rumi, Rob Brezsny or Eckhart Tolle. Here, I give them to you, free of charge. If you believe them, use them wisely, and pass them on.

Here is a sketch I drew in that Warhol journal last October in response to reading a Rumi poem called "This Dove Here" (October 4 in A YEAR WITH RUMI, the book I post daily readings from on RUMI DAYS), when Inge and I had our writing retreat at the lake cottage. You would draw a dove in another way. You see differently than I do.

This Dove Here

Someone who does not run

toward the allure of love

walks a road where nothing lives.

But this dove here

senses the love-hawk floating above,

and waits, and will not be driven

or scared to safety. 

If love is annihilation, loving the unlovable as if you are in love with them is about as annihilating as it gets. There is no YOU left, no ego, but there is YOU-essence that appreciates THEIR-essence. See. Only you see as you see. Fortunate are the ones you are in love with, and the ones you see through loving eyes.

Everyone --- really? I have lists, just like you, of the ones everyone shouldn't include. Let's get annihilated. It'll be fun.

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"Don't think about getting off from work" (and I don't think he means my 9-5 job)

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my office window

The Sunrise Ruby


In the early morning hour,
just before dawn, lover and beloved wake
and take a drink of water.

She asks, Do you love me or yourself more?
Really, tell the absolute truth.

He says, There is nothing left of me.
I am like a ruby held up to the sunrise.
Is it still a stone, or a world
made of redness? It has no resistance
to sunlight. The ruby and the sunrise are one.
Be courageous and discipline yourself.

Work. Keep digging your well.
Don't think about getting off from work.
Submit to a daily practice.
Your loyalty to that is a ring on the door.

Keep knocking, and the joy inside
will eventually open a window
and look out to see who's there.


- Rumi

So. What is "the work"? Somehow (apologies to non-American friends who don't follow our political soap operas) I don't think it's trashing and bashing Martha Coakley for being an idiot or Scott Brown for being the male version of Sarah Palin or John Edwards for being a slimy bastard, or any other number of my responses to the frustrations of the last week. Maybe Haiti has brought out the work in a lot of us. But I think that work is far away - as good as it is and present in my heart - and still not what Rumi is talking about. How to bring it closer to home? When he talks about lovers, is he talking about sexual love? I don't think so, even though that's the language he uses. You have to get even closer than that intimacy. He's talking about quarrying out divine love inside, through the rock of the ego. When I manage to dig, listen, knock, and see the joy look out, that's when I stop seeing the difference between me and someone else, when I stop saying in my head, "Oh I would so not have done what you just did." I can think I am so much better than a lot of people. But when I stop saying and feeling that, tension and exhaustion just disappear - becoming one, like the physical act of lovers, but on the inside.

This digging isn't for sainthood. It's not applying for doormat status. It's not la·di·da·ing oblivious to evil and stupidity. I think it's realizing that I am capable of everything I see behaved by humans - from the top of the chain to the bottom - as the parade goes by. Not seeing someone else as the other. That's the work. If it weren't hard, we'd all be there. But when you see joy look out to see who's there, it's ecstasy, and worth digging for again.

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the color of water

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There have been countless messages of water in the last week. Garlic and sapphires in the mud (T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets), silence, or music, and the river - the Blue Nile, the Tigris, to name a few -

Every object and being in the universe is a jar
overfilled with wisdom and beauty, a drop of the Tigris
that cannot be contained by any skin. Every jarful
spills and makes the earth more shining,
as though covered in satin.

.................................................- Rumi, from The Gift of Water

I think we don't believe it, those words. Or many don't, and that's why we're in such trouble. But you know what? I believe.

It's just so hard to see sometimes. Like now, in a ravaged island in the Caribbean. Water water all around and not a drop to drink. But look how the water flows from every direction toward that point, to cover it with love and healing.

Anyway, the water flows, but still Nature and men rage, do wild and destructive things, we say stupid things.

GO WITH MUDDY FEET

When you hear dirty story
wash your ears.
When you see ugly stuff
wash your eyes.
When you get bad thoughts
wash your mind
and
Keep your feet muddy.

.....................................- Nanao Sakaki

I made a short slide show of water images. I took all the shots, except the last one - I don't have that capability.

Have a good weekend.

All images but the last "marble" image taken by the Galileo, courtesy NASA, are mine. Music in the video provided for free use by musopen.com - Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg performed by Free Tim with symphonic pieces on a professional Yamaha Midi board.

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the power of our rhetoric

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1
A blogger wrote what you
couldn't say -
do you know how it feels
to be empty
that way?

2
A photo at flickr shines light
on brown water
a silhouette of men in a boat -
fishing lines crisscross the
knob of the sun
do you know what it means
to be full
in that fun?

3
Across campus a stranger
talks venom and danger
about things
she does not know
and you - are you swallowed
by telephone and email
inside the hollow of her blow?

4
Around the world a friend
sends a photo
a fuchsia flower bent low
like a woman in veil
do you feel what she feels -
her essence inside
being fully
regaled?


Together we enter
the questions and answers
on our bridge
over ocean and reef -
our words art and photographs
publish the meanings
in the ongoing book of our life.

*- epigraph quote from Rumi's poem A Voice Through the Door

statue

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photo "Statue" used with permission of photographer Carl C

Move Within

Keep walking, though there's no place to get to.
Don't try to see through the distances.
That's not for human beings. Move within,
but don't move the way fear makes you move.

.............................................................- Rumi
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these meadowsounds: sumac

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. . . We are here again with the beloved. This air,
a shout. These meadowsounds, an astonishing myth . . .

- read the whole short poem: Ode 3079 - Meadowsounds, by Rumi


beloved Sumac:

(please click to enlarge)

For Julia, who after a long hot summer in Texas especially requested a post with warm autumn colors in cool Michigan.
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open air

Almost every day I read a few lines of Rumi. His words inspire me to be the authority of my own life. Remember when you wrote in school "I think" and your teacher told you to remove that phrase and just say what you think? I tried writing this poem that way, and in the manner of Rumi. I don't mean to compare myself to him, he's incomparable. But I'm happy to be a copyist of what inspires me, like painting students who copy masterpieces in the Louvre. Amazing! I'm not comparing myself to them either.


Open Air


Go outside at night
somewhere with trees.
See how the branches open to the moon.

There is love that is not hot.
Even on the coldest nights
its arms are open.

It is the warmth inside
that keeps you alive.
The sun in your blood as in a leaf
and in the branch
after the leaf turns red
and falls.

Close your eyes. Feel how like love
are the cool fingers of the wind
on your face.


- Ruth M.


Happy Thanksgiving Thursday.

power

Glen Velez and Coleman Barks at the November Rumi event

I just read about the 47-minute film called "Rant" that came out in 2006. I watched the 7-minute YouTube video, below, and added the film to my Netflix queue. Here's the summary:

In this intoxicating blend of words and images, the observations of great poets mingle with the images of cinematography's masters to bring seven poems alive to viewers. Footage ranges from the front seat of the Cyclone roller coaster in 1940s Coney Island to present-day gun battles in Iraq. The film's visual underpinning gives an immediacy to the poets' words, touching on a wide range of social, political and spiritual issues.

Yesterday Don and I watched the new Batman movie: "The Dark Knight." It was splendid, in spite of the times I wanted to walk out, sick from disturbing scenes. It reflects what I feel from this video: that power is a frightening intoxication; a very few have gotten drunk with it and nearly ruined the world; we need to tap our power and change it, even if the change is only in the world in ourselves.

See what I'm huffing about . . .

Some song or something

another Rumi poem, translated by Coleman Barks. It's how I feel today.

Some Song or Something

Birdsong brings relief
to my longing.

I am just as ecstatic as they are,
but with nothing to say.

Please, universal soul, practice
some song, or something, through me.

the uses of fear

a Rumi poem, translated by Coleman Barks

The Uses of Fear

A donkey turning a millstone is not trying
to press oil from sesame seed. He is fleeing the blow
that was just struck and hoping to avoid the next.

For the same reason, the ox takes a load
of baggage wherever you want him to.
Shopkeepers work for themselves,
not for the flow of communal exchange.

We look to ease our pain, and this keeps civilization
moving along. Fear is the architect here.
Fear keeps us working near the ark.

Some human beings are safe havens.
Be companions with them. Others may seem to be friends,
but they are really consuming your essence
like donkeys lapping sherbet. Detach from them,
and feel your flexibility returning.
The inner moisture that lets you bend
into a basket handle is a quickening inside
that no one is ever afraid of.

Sometimes though, it is fear, a contracting,
that brings you into the presence.

the music, the dance

Rumi quotes in bold arabesque (orange).

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Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, or just Rumi. I met his writing a couple of years ago. You can find a link to his poems on my sidebar. I had heard about him in Istanbul when we lived there in the late 1980s.

You picked up a handful of earth, I was in that handful.


Rumi was born in present day Afghanistan September 30, 1207. Apparently 2007 is the year of Rumi, celebrating his birth year 800 years ago. He died in Konya, Turkey, December 17, 1273. This carpet in our guest room is from Konya, where Rumi died and is buried.





Not until a person dissolves, can
he or she know what union is.

There is a descent into emptiness.
A lie will not change to truth

with just talking about it.


I’ve read that he’s the most popular poet in the U.S. (best selling). I find this surprising. I’m guessing 10 years ago not many had heard of him here. Is it surprising to you that an 800-year-old Persian poet is the most popular in the United States of America, more popular than Robert Frost or Maya Angelou? But if you pay attention to the boom in Eastern philosophy in this country, maybe it isn’t too surprising.

A lover wants only to be in love’s presence, an ocean whose depth will never be known.

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Love’s work looks absurd, but trying to find a
meaning will hide it more. Silence.


And isn’t it a little ironic that a mystical Muslim is our poet, when our government has demonized Muslims? I am tired of being around such blindness. Oh, the beauty of poetry to bridge this gap.



Blessed is one who sees his weakness, and blessed is one who, when
he sees a flaw in someone

else, takes responsibility for it. Because, half of any person
is wrong and weak and off

the path. Half! The other half is dancing and swimming and
flying in the invisible joy.




Last night Coleman Barks, translator of Rumi in the volume I own, came to my University, and Inge and I went to hear him, and also to see the Whirling Dervishes after his reading.




Barks’ voice is deep and just a tad southern. (He was born in Tennessee and now lives in Atlanta.) For an hour and a half, he recited from memory or read Rumi on the mysteries and perplexities of love and life, accompanied by Glen Velez, drummer (please go to his link and see how amazing his playing is), and David Darling, cellist. Barks' strong voice supported by the beats of the drum and the pluck of the cello melded into a very easy-to-listen-to rhythmic cadence. Each artist alone would have forced my eyes closed in delight. But hearing the trio together, I simply sat in stunned bliss. Actually, it was a quartet, Rumi in the lead. Every moment the sunlight is totally empty and totally full.





Rumi asks, What is the heart? What is it to be a true human being? What is in the human exchange?

After Rumi’s death, the Mevlevi Sufi Order was founded, they are the Whirling Dervishes.


Following Barks’ reading, Velez’ drumming and Darling’s cello playing, two Whirling Dervishes whirled in a performance. Dervishes believe their ecstasy from union with God culminates in this dance.


I was a little troubled, even beforehand, by the prospect of watching this practice, because it felt as if I would be watching something intimate, and I wondered how this could be conjured for a show?


Be a clear and rational lunatic.


So mostly I just closed my eyes and listened to the Sufi musical foursome from Chicago play for the Dervishes. They too were earnest, and I appreciated their devotion, all of them.



The two dancers walked in ceremoniously, dressed in white gowns covered by black robes. It’s now time to live naked.

But the event for me was about listening to the words of a man who thought he

could find a way through fire, expressed through the artistry of three men whose gifts and skills match the depths of a poet’s words still alive after 800 years.

You’ve been walking the ocean’s edge,
holding up your robes to keep them dry. You

must dive naked under and deeper under, a thousand
times deeper! Love flows down. The ground

submits to the sky and suffers what comes. Tell
me, is the earth worse for giving in like that?

Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish writer and winner of awards. I first came across his work when I read about his 2001 novel, My Name is Red, after which I bought it and began reading it. I never finished it then, but I’ve started it up again.

Interestingly, and as these things sometimes go, Mr. Pamuk is in the news these days for telling the truth about how the Turks massacred Kurds and Armenians. It looked as though he would be drawn up in Turkish court for defaming "Turkishness," but in light of Turkey’s desire to be accepted as a member of the European Union and its sweeping changes toward a more tolerant society, the case was dropped today.

This post is about something Mr. Pamuk wrote, something I read this morning in My Name is Red. It’s in a chapter where a tree is speaking (!). It says,

“I don’t want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning” (p. 51).

As much as I get pleasure from this world -- nature, people, food, beauty-- I also want to find the meaning behind the surface.

I read in Rumi (another writer born in Turkey -- back in the 13th century) this morning:

"There is a happiness and a sadness

that are just figures on a bathhouse wall. Move through the
world naked, noticing the pictures

that live. Inner joy and grief are different from artful
appearance. Take off your

phenomena-clothes when you enter the soul’s steam bath: no
one comes in here with clothes on. "

(Rumi quote from Coleman Barks' translation of "Beggars" in a book of Rumi poems titled The Soul of Rumi)