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"Some Claims About Poetry and Consciousness"
No one can say what the inner life is, but poetry tries to, and no one can say what poetry is, but let’s be bold and claim that there are two major streamings in consciousness, particularly in the ecstatic life, and in Rumi’s poetry: call them
fana and baqa, Arabic words that refer to the play and intersection of human with divine.
Rumi’s poetry occurs in that opening, a dervish doorway these energies move through in either direction. A movement out, a movement in.
Fana is the streaming that moves from the human out into mystery -- the annihilation, the orgasmic expansion, the dissolving swoon into the all. The gnat becomes buttermilk; a chickpea disappears into the flavor of the soup; a dead mule decays into salt flat; the infant turns to the breast. These wild and boundaryless absorptions are the images and the kind of poem Rumi is most well known for, a drunken clairvoyant tavern voice that announces, "Whoever brought me here will have to take me home."
"What was in that candle’s light that opened and consumed me so quickly!" That is the moth’s question after
fana, after it becomes flame. The king’s falcon circles in the empty sky. There is an extravagance in the magnificent disintegration of
fana. In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks. Which is literally true: a single wheat seed can, after a few years, become thousands of stacks of sheaves. But it’s that special praise for the natural abundance of existence that identifies this state. Three hundred billion galaxies might seem a bit gaudy to some, but not to this awareness; in
fana what is here can never be said extravagantly enough.
Fana is what opens our wings, what makes boredom and hurt disappear. We break to pieces inside it, dancing and perfectly free. We are the dreamer streaming into the loving nowhere of night. Rapt, we are the devouring worm who, through grace, becomes an entire orchard, the wholeness of the trunks, the leaves, the fruit, and the growing.
Fana is that dissolution just before our commotion and mad night prayers become silence. Rumi often associates surrender with the joy of falling into the freedom of sleep. It’s human-becoming-God, the
Ana’l-Haqq ("I am the truth!") of Al-Hallaj Mansour. The arms open outward. This is the ocean with no shore into which the dewdrop falls.
My friend, the poet Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, scolds me for not saying outright that
fana is annihilation in Allah. I avoid God-words, not altogether, but wherever I can, because they seem to take away the freshness of experience and put it inside a specific system. Rumi’s poetry belongs to everyone, and his impulse was toward experience rather than any language or doctrine about it: our lives as text, rather than any book, be it Qur’an, Gospel, Upanishad, or sutra.
There is a fierce desolation in fana, though, that I may not be communicating. Abdal-Hayy is right. The absence experienced in
fana is complete. There is no soft focus around anything. It’s the hard-edged
jelal ("majesty") desert sword of Shams. I have much to learn in these matters.
Baqa goes the other way across the doorsill. The Arabic word means "a living within": it is the walk back down Qaf Mountain, where the vision came; life lived with clarity and reason; the turning again toward what somehow always was. The concentration of a night of stars into one needle’s eye. A refinement, companionship, two people walking along some
particular country road. The absorbing work of this
day. The precise painting of a piece of trim. The arms folding inward across the chest and the bow to one another. Courtesy and craftsmanship. God-becoming-human. The qualities associated with this motion are honesty, sobriety, carefulness, a clarity Rumi sometimes calls "reason," compassion and work within a community.
Baqa is also a return from expansion into each’s unique individuation work, into pain and effort, confusion and dark comedy: the end of a frayed rope, the deep knowing of absence.
Baqa is where animal and angel meet in an awkward but truly human dance. It’s a breathtaking birth, the dying and then being born again that all religions know is the essence of soul growth. It can be overheard in the poetry as a conversation between Jelaluddin and the mystery.
Baqa might say:
Friend, our closeness is this:
Anywhere you put your foot feel me
in the firmness under you.
while fana asks, in the same quatrain:
How is it with this love,
I see your world, but not you?
Baqa is felt in Rumi’s spring-morning poems, very present, green and alive with the camaraderie of a picnic by the water.
Stay together, friends.
Don’t scatter and sleep.
Our friendship is made
of being awake.
The waterwheel accepts water
and turns and gives it away, weeping.
That way it stays in the garden…
Stay here, quivering with each moment
like a drop of mercury.
You feel a tremulous intensity within limits. Bodhisattval service walking to the well. The common joy of ducks riding a flooded river. Kindness and acts of anonymous helping.
Baqa brings the next stage in the process of prayer: there’s the opening into annihilation, then the coming back to tend specific people. A melody, the little German band coming up through Beethoven’s Ninth. This is the ocean come to court the drop! A fall to the knees, the frustrating satisfaction of the spoken word.
By letting these two conditions, fana and baqa, flow and exist simultaneously in his poetry, Rumi is saying that they are one thing, the core of a true human being, which he was and out of which these poems are spoken. This is how alive his model of the human psyche is, where the secular and the sacred are always mingling, the mythic and the ordinary, dream vision and street life.
The Question of the Personal
Rumi’s poems are not personal in the way we’ve come to expect in the Western tradition of poetry and poetry readings. We do not learn who Rumi was as a personality from his poems. They are not subjective, but rather objective, or iconic. They conduct and transform energies. They do the work of icons: they connect us more deeply with our souls. When we look at an image of Christ or Dionysos, we feel the core of grief and compassion there. When we see the archaic torso of Apollo in the Vatican, we take in some of its graceful balance and power, and we do change our lives. The form of Kali transmits the force of making a clean cut with the past, the edge of focused rage. And try someday to walk into the Kwan Yin room of the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. Take in her high humor and grounded acceptance.
Neither of the conditions, fana or baqa, involves the false self of a personal ego. Rather, they are motions of the essence of a human-divine encounter. Rumi’s poetry means to take us beyond the personal into the mystery that is here, the source of dream vision, the spring of longing, into a presence that asks the question, "Who am I?" Ramana Maharshi and Rumi would agree: the joy of being human is in uncovering the core we already are, the treasure buried in the ruin…
I feel the source of the power of Rumi’s spontaneous poetic derives from his continual balance of surrender and discipline, his visionary radiance held in the level calm of ordinary sight. Splendor and practice, meditation and chore -- somewhere in the dynamic of those lies the vitality and validity, the knack of Mevlana.
The universe and the light of the stars come through me.
(fana)
I am the crescent moon put up over the gate to the festival.
(baqa)
The "crescent moon" is undoubtedly some plywood device nailed over the fairground entrance.
Baqa often includes a little joke about the grandeur.
-- Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi
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