Reading Rumi

It’s continually irritating: the presumption of a transcendent god, the imprecise spirituality, the false paradoxes of any self-promoting religious literature to make out its lies are truth.  There are glitterings of poetry.  The hashishins are the assassins ‘who come in the night’, unenlightened.  I do like ‘the thief among us …saying, “Yeah, where’s the thief?” but ‘everything is nothing but God’?  Get a grip!

‘You’re so obvious you’re hidden from sight,’ a common experience when you’re looking for something except what he’s not seeing is his Beloved, God obviously. ‘Who are you and what do you want?’ elicited a laugh, whereas at ‘your angelic nature will unfold in a world beyond this world’, “Balls!” was emitted. ‘Just as children embrace in fantasy intercourse,’ that’s not always fantasy, ‘this world is just play’. 

‘The body is the riverbed, and spirit, the rolling water’ is a not bad metaphor for the spirit informing the mind while the body can go its own way but listens in, as encapsulated in ‘the book’ after Johnny’s been hit on the head crossing the burn.  ‘People are tearing out their wings for the sake of an illusion’, sex, when they should keep them for what for him is not an illusion but a spiritual reality, paradise.  ‘When someone beats a rug, the blows are not against the rug, but against the dust in it’ is good, as is ‘if he answers back, the pearl of inner experience might fall out of his mouth.’  ‘Deliver me from this imprisonment of freewill,’ as Andrew who chose evil also said in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Rumi doesn’t recognise sex as the most common spiritual activity; ‘to follow one’s own desires is… to spill the blood of spirituality,’ much like Shakespeare’s ‘expense of spirit in a waste of shame,’ with the pun on ‘waste’, to avoid procreation.  Out of Control is really interesting because he knows consciousness isn’t in control yet wonders why its conceit it is persists.  He can’t realise his unconscious he does knows exists.  Neither could Iris Murdoch who said it did most of the work.  Just as Betty Clark projected her inner man onto her husband, so Rumi projects his unconscious out and calls it god, his filtering consciousness fitting it to the dogma of his belief. 

In the Tale of the Bedouin his wife inveighs against their poverty, ‘if any guest ever arrived here, I swear I’d go for his tattered coat in the middle of the night.’  As the guest reader I’m on her side, ‘You hypocrite.  I’ve had enough of your pretension and nonsense.  Your pompous words are unfortunately accompanied by your actions.’  I had to laugh at the idea that ‘God has arranged that the beauty of woman is decked out for man.’  It’s God’s fault man for all he seems to dominate is inwardly dominated.  In reason’s brain ‘is nothing but the love of God.’  Really?  Doris Lessing recommended Sufism to me, and Rumi is its poetic exponent.  Irritation after all is a legitimate aesthetic effect.  I’ll leave the last word to Rumi, ‘the jug is only improved by being shattered: every piece of it dances in ecstasy, though to the limited mind this sounds absurd.’