Farid al-Din Attar: A Reading Journal 2

February 10th, 2013 § 3 comments

I remem­ber once, when I was in col­lege, talk­ing about love with a man who was a kind of men­tor to me. He was an artist and we were stand­ing in his stu­dio look­ing at some of his recent paint­ings. He’d been telling me over the pre­vi­ous cou­ple of weeks about how unhappy he was in his mar­riage, and it was not hard to read the pain he was in on the can­vases we were look­ing at. Per­haps I asked him why he didn’t just divorce his wife, or maybe he felt like he’d already told me so much that he needed to explain him­self. What­ever his rea­sons, when I com­mented on what I saw as some auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal detail in one of the paint­ings, he said, “You want to know why I don’t divorce her? Because I love her, and by love I mean I still get an erec­tion when I’m near her. It’s like being in a kind of prison.” It was, I thought — and I still think it is — one of the sad­dest things I’ve ever heard, to feel your­self a pris­oner of love because you feel your­self a pris­oner of and in your own body. I did not want – actu­ally, it made me angry to think – that this might be what it meant to be in love, and as I drove home I found myself strug­gling to find a way to tell him that the sur­ren­der of self he seemed to be describ­ing was not love. I couldn’t do it. I could name what I was reject­ing, but I could not artic­u­late an alter­na­tive vision of love that felt right to me. I was too young and too inexperienced.

Read­ing Attar’s The Con­fer­ence of the Birds returned me to this con­ver­sa­tion from so long ago. As I explained in the pre­vi­ous post in this series, Attar’s Con­fer­ence is about the birds’ quest to find the Simorgh, their king, and achieve enlight­en­ment. They take as their guide the hoopoe, who defines their quest explic­itly in terms of love, “Who­ever can evade the Self transcends/This world and as a lover he ascends” (33). A lit­tle later on, the hoopoe restates his def­i­n­i­tion this way:

“A lover,” said the hoopoe, now their guide,
“Is one in whom all thoughts of Self have died;
Those who renounce the Self deserve that name;
Right­eous or sin­ful, they are all the same!” (57)

Once you renounce the Self, in other words, it no longer mat­ters whether you were right­eous or sin­ful. What mat­ters is that you have begun to live, self­lessly, in your love, burn­ing for the union that your beloved – in this case, God – will either grant or not, because the union you seek is not some­thing you can make hap­pen. It is some­thing that God gives to you if and when he chooses. The par­al­lel to my for­mer mentor’s sit­u­a­tion is hard to miss. The love he felt for his wife, embod­ied in the erec­tion he had when he was near her, ren­dered the prob­lems he was hav­ing with her, the anger, the resent­ment, all of it, null and void. Or, to put it another way, in order to ful­fill his love, he had to renounce those feel­ings, give up the self they rep­re­sented, so that he could, lit­er­ally and fig­u­ra­tively, stand there naked and hard, yearn­ing for the (in this case sex­ual) union his beloved could either grant or not. I remem­ber him describ­ing for me how painful it was, how humil­i­at­ing and shame­ful, to set aside who he thought he was, to pre­tend the self his wife and wronged did not even exist, so that he could go to her with the hope – because she might say no – that she would let him into her body. Attar’s hoopoe may be talk­ing about spir­i­tual love, but the pain it describes is remark­ably sim­i­lar to what my men­tor experienced:

Heart’s blood and bit­ter pain belong to love,
And tales of prob­lems no one can remove;
Cup­bearer, fill the bowl with blood, not wine—
And if you lack the heart’s rich blood take mine.
Love thrives on inex­tin­guish­able pain,
Which tears the soul, then knits the threads again.
A mote of love exceeds all bounds; it gives
the vital essence to what­ever lives.
But where love thrives, there pain is always found;
Angels alone escape this weary round—
They love with­out that sav­age agony
Which is reserved for vexed human­ity.
Islam and blas­phemy have both been passed
By those who set out on love’s path at last;
Love will direct you to Dame Poverty,
And she will show the way to Blas­phemy.
When nei­ther Blas­phemy nor Faith remain,
The body and the Self have both been slain;
Then the fierce for­ti­tude the Way will ask
Is yours, and you are wor­thy of our task. (57)

Love and pain, the hoopoe says, are insep­a­ra­ble; where you find the first, you will always find the sec­ond. Why? Because giv­ing up the self is painful. It doesn’t mat­ter whether that self is attached to money and com­fort or reli­gious faith. In order to achieve union with God, you have to give it up, and that means strip­ping your­self down to the most fun­da­men­tal level of your being, which the Sufis see — at least as I have come to under­stand it – as the spir­i­tual ver­sion of the lonely and uncer­tain desire for union rep­re­sented by my mentor’s erec­tion. Indeed, it’s not hard not to imag­ine one of these loves as the model for the other, though which you think is which will prob­a­bly depend on whether or not you believe in a god with whom we were all orig­i­nally as one and to whom, in that one­ness, we long to return. If you do, then you prob­a­bly see what my men­tor called love as a pale, lim­ited and lim­it­ing imi­ta­tion of the more authen­tic spir­i­tual love the hoopoe is talk­ing about. On the other hand, if you don’t believe in that kind of god, or in any god at all, then per­haps you see the hoopoe’s spir­i­tual love – indeed, the whole monothe­is­tic idea of return­ing, whole and pure, to our orig­i­nal place with God – as a pro­jec­tion onto the world of our desire to regain the one­ness we all knew with our moth­ers in the womb. Either way, you have still defined love as the desire for an essen­tially unat­tain­able union.

I have been think­ing about this def­i­n­i­tion of love a lot since I wrote the first post in this series, and I keep com­ing back to a ques­tion I have asked myself many times over years: Is the love you feel for your lover dif­fer­ent from the love you feel for your parent/child/sibling/friend? For most peo­ple, I think, the answer is obvi­ous. Of course there’s a dif­fer­ence. For as long as I can remem­ber, though, my answer has been no. Love for me is love. It is not divis­i­ble and it does not come in dif­fer­ent fla­vors. It makes as lit­tle sense to me to say I love you a lit­tle as it does to say I love you both, but dif­fer­ently. It may be true that what I want from and for my mother is dif­fer­ent than what I want from and for my son, which is, in turn, dif­fer­ent than what I want from and for my friends; and those are all dif­fer­ent from what I have wanted from and for the lovers I’ve had and what I cur­rently want from and for my wife. Nonethe­less, I love them all, even my ex-lovers; and I have not even men­tioned the peo­ple in my life whom I love but do not par­tic­u­larly like. My rela­tion­ship with them, cer­tainly, is dif­fer­ent from my rela­tion­ship with every­one else I’ve men­tioned, but do I love them differently?

I don’t think so, because I do not think that love is any­thing other than what it is. It is not sex and it is not desire; love is not the urge to pro­tect some­one from harm or build a life with them. Love may inform those and all the other feel­ings that arise in a rela­tion­ship; love may com­pel us towards those feel­ings; but, at its bot­tom, love is not those feel­ings. What, then, is love? What does it mean to love? In Eng­lish, love is a tran­si­tive verb; it takes an object, which means it is some­thing one per­son does to another.1 But what is it pre­cisely that we do when we love? For me, love is the full and active accep­tance in my life of the full inde­pen­dence from my life of the life of the per­son I love. This is why I so strongly desire, say, my mother’s approval, my son’s respect or my wife’s desire and the sex we have, because I know they have to be given freely, will­ingly, inde­pen­dently in order to be truly mean­ing­ful. This is why I want for my mother, my son, my lover what will truly make them happy, even if it isn’t what I would have cho­sen for them. This is why the idea that love is some­thing we fall into, or some­thing that over­comes us, or some­thing that dri­ves us crazy, some­thing before which we are help­less, to which we can only sur­ren­der, sim­ply does not make sense to me.

So what if love is not the desire for union; what if love is instead about rec­og­niz­ing, embrac­ing, cel­e­brat­ing the other as other, with all the com­pli­cated emo­tional and psy­cho­log­i­cal dynam­ics such cel­e­bra­tion entails? In 1994, Alain Danielou pub­lished a new tran­si­tion of the Kama Sutra called The Com­plete Kama Sutra. One of the rea­sons Danielou called it “com­plete” is that his trans­la­tion includes two of the com­men­taries on the orig­i­nal text that, as Danielou put it in his intro­duc­tion, “rep­re­sent [the] tradition…without which the text would be incom­plete” (5). One of those com­men­taries is by Deva­datta Shas­tri, and some­thing he wrote has stayed with me since I first read it nearly twenty years ago:

The Shaivas like the Shak­tas con­sider cre­ation as cop­u­la­tion. “Nada, pri­mor­dial sound, rep­re­sents the cop­u­la­tion of Shiva and Shakti. The idea is that dual­ity pre­cedes the birth of the Word (shabda) and that dual­ity implies a rela­tion, or cop­u­la­tion, between two prin­ci­ples. Respect, devo­tion, love, affec­tion, sym­pa­thy, friend­ship, courtship, embraces, kisses are all man­i­fes­ta­tions of attrac­tion, of rela­tions of an erotic kind. Eros inflames the mind. All philo­soph­i­cal sys­tems con­sider that “the prin­ci­ple of Kama [eros, eroti­cism, love] pre­cedes the cre­ative word” (Rig Veda). (18)

I know very lit­tle about Hin­duism, and so I am sure that my under­stand­ing of this pas­sage is really a pro­found mis­un­der­stand­ing. Nonethe­less, when I read it, some­thing clicked in me. The idea that dual­ity pre­cedes, must pre­cede, cre­ation and that cre­ation thus results from the “cop­u­la­tion” of two dis­tinct enti­ties who are, by def­i­n­i­tion, other to each other, and are there­fore immersed per­pet­u­ally in the com­plex net­work of desires and emo­tions that form all human rela­tion­ships, just seemed, I don’t know, so much more hope­ful than the view of cre­ation in which I had been raised, where every­thing emerges from the will of a sin­gle, tran­scen­dent deity. I did not under­stand why at the time, but now I think it’s because this way of under­stand­ing cre­ation jives so much more neatly with what I under­stand love to be, even though, as I said above, I am very aware that I don’t really under­stand what the ideas in this pas­sage mean in the con­text of the reli­gious tra­di­tion from which they come.

You may be won­der­ing why, since I don’t believe in a god, I insist on writ­ing about love in the con­text of reli­gious think­ing. One rea­son is that, when I was younger, I did believe, and I wanted very much to live a reli­gious life; I even thought for a while that I would become a rabbi. As a result, my world view was shaped very early on by a reli­gious sen­si­bil­ity and so that remains the frame­work within which I see things, even though I don’t accept the frame­work as an absolute truth of any kind. More than this, though, one way of under­stand­ing reli­gion, whether you believe in a god or not, is as a way of giv­ing struc­ture to our rela­tion­ship as human beings to that which is rad­i­cally other to us, whether the Other is another per­son, the nat­ural world, a god or gods; and so I think there is a great deal we can learn from the “sys­tems of being” that reli­gious and spir­i­tual thinkers have devel­oped over the mil­len­nia to solve the prob­lem of what it means to be human in the world. How we under­stand love is a big part of that solu­tion. I am still work­ing through mine.

  1. Since this is a blog post and not a philo­soph­i­cal dis­qui­si­tion, I hope you will, for the sake of argu­ment and con­ve­nience, agree that what we mean when we say I love Chi­nese food or I love ski­ing and maybe even I love my dog is not quite what we mean when we tell another human being I love you. [↩]

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