half a loaf
and a jug of wine
Wide Ocean
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including the paperback edition, please visit:
www.vividpublishing.com.au/halfaloaf
Copyright © 2020 Wide Ocean
Edited by Ian Wilson
ISBN: 978-1-922409-17-1 (ebook edition)
Published by Vivid Publishing
A division of Fontaine Publishing Group
P.O. Box 948, Fremantle
Western Australia 6959
www.vividpublishing.com.au
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.
la ilaha illa llah1
Contents
Preface
Introduction
The Text
Verses
Part I: Message from the Wine Shop
1. Invitation
2. The Flower of Joy
3. Eternity Is Now
4. The Sound of Everything
5. The Gift
Part II: The Wheel of Time
6. A Thing Never Heard Of
7. The Wheel
8. The Caravan
9. One Arrives and Another Leaves
10. The Seasons
11. The Fly
Part III: The World
12. Listen
13. The Empty Space
14. Like a Chinese Lantern
15. Marionettes
16. Upside Down World
17. Look at Me!
Part IV: Dreams and Illusions
18. A Bubble on the Face of Infinity
19. Painted to Catch the Eye
20. Pleasure Gardens
21. Many Bedchambers
22. Travelling the World
23. Captivated
24. Cherished Dreams
25. What Will You Take?
Part V: Between What’s Gone and What Hasn’t Yet Arrived
26. Preparedness to Receive
27. Do You Have Time?
28. This Is Where You Find It
29. The Music of Now
30. Can You Hear the Music Playing?
31. Hold the Cup Still
32. Don’t Listen to the Small-minded
33. No Need to Make a Show of It
34. Wine is the Best Cure
35. Unable to Attend
Part VI: Basket Weaving
36. Who’s Who?
37. The Veil of Separation
38. The Lover and the Beloved
39. The Good and the Bad
40. Joy and Sorrow
41. To Live in This World
42. No Man’s Master and No Man’s Slave
43. Acceptance of Things
44. Days Rush By
45. Invitation to Nobody’s Banquet
46. The Pearl Forms Slowly
47. Go Lightly
Part VII: Made of Stars
48. The Story of the Pot
49. Once a Dashing Figure
50. In Every Pleasure Garden
51. Across the Green Grass
52. The Universe in Motion
53. Drink Wine While You Can
Part VIII: Knowledge
54. Understanding
55. Truth
56. Neither This nor That
57. Being and Non-being
58. The Four and the Seven
59. Created or Eternal?
60. The Many and the One
61. Learning
62. The Knot Not Untied
63. Certainty
64. The Nature of Existence
Part IX: Beards
65. The Man of Religion
66. Hollow as an Empty Drum
67. Selling Favours
68. On Show
69. No Shame
Part X: The Beloved
70. Like a Circle
71. Everybody Sees It in Something
72. Behind the Veil
73. An Unlocked Door
74. The Secret
Part XI: Recognition
75. A Thoroughly Useless Man
76. If You Would Be Free
77. The Face of the Beloved
78. Freedom and Joy
79. Nothing to Fear
80. Free Yourself from Yourself
81. Only One Rule
82. That I Am
83. With Me All Along
84. Your Beard and My Moustache
Part XII: Love
85. Without Love
86. Promises Promises
87. All the Same to Love
88. Like a Feather Floating in Space
89. Why Keep It in the Cellar?
Part XIII: Beauty
90. A Cosmos of Flowers
91. Half a Loaf
92. The Lover of Beauty
93. Beauty’s Tresses
94. Throw Your Arms Around Her
95. It Surrounds You
Part XIV: Drunkenness
96. What Could Be Better Than Wine?
97. Just One Cup
98. Throw out Restraint
99. Intoxication
100. Can’t Stop Laughing
101. Down to the Last Drop
102. All the Wine Left in the Jug
Notes
Preface
There are three ways of presenting something to someone. The first way is to tell him the whole of it. The second way is to tell him what he wants to hear. And the third way is to tell him what he needs to hear.
If you tell a person the whole of it, it’ll be too much for him and he will be confused. If you tell a person what he wants to hear the result will be that it will be of no benefit to him. But if you tell him what he needs to hear he will either close his ears or he will tell you that you’re mistaken.
Sufi saying
Introduction
Why talk about god or not god? The Sufi mystic does not say god is like this or that or this is what he looks like. What would be the point in getting into arguments over these kinds of things? Talking about such things is like wearing a hat on top of a hat. What’s it going to do for you?2
There is a story that goes like this. A man approached a dervish and said in an antagonistic manner, “I don’t believe in god.” The dervish replied, “I don’t believe in the god that you don’t believe in either.”
It’s the same with the world. In Sufi mysticism one doesn’t say that it’s like this or it’s like that or that it came from here or there or so and so made it or didn’t make it. What would be gained? I mean, my world and your world might well not be the same in any case. How will we ever know? You can’t step into my world and I can’t step into yours.
It’s the same with what you do with your life. No one says that you must believe this or believe that or you must not believe this or that. Nor does anyone say you must do this or you must not do that. On the contrary, you are free to do whatever you want. Everyone ties their own shoe-laces in their own way.
The only thing that is pointed out is that it is you who paints your world. Wherever your thoughts wander to and whatever you do with them, that’s what you will become and whatever you become will be your world. Your world is what you make it.
Each person sees things through his or her own eyes. It is in the way that you see things that you experience the world and your life. Accordingly the world that you experience is only limited by the way that you see. So the more one can escape the limitation of narrowness of vision, the more beautiful, remarkable and filled with light, the world becomes. In the end it is the heart that has to open. One must see with the eyes of love.
Jalal ad-Din Rumi3 explains this as follows:
When your heart is not open
the world appears to you as your own face looks.
The world mirrors your heart
and so your face appears cold, hard and sad.
Make peace with yourself –
take joy in being alive
the world will turn to gold
and every moment
will sing with delight.
Now as to drinking wine, there’s not much to be said except that no one can drink on behalf of another. Instinctively everyone already knows this. The most that one can do is to point to the jug that’s on the table. It’s up to you to take the jug in your own hands and pour the wine into your own cup.
Of course, all this is neither here nor there. After all, no one asked me anyway.
Wide Ocean
Spring
2020
The Text
The verses presented in this work are derived from a selection of the quatrains of Omar Khayyam (1048-1131 CE), an astronomer, mathematician, philosopher, poet and mystic who lived in Nishapur in Greater Khorasan.4
Nishapur was one of the main centres of Sufism5 in Eastern Khorasan along with other towns such as Shiraz, Isfahan and Konya to the west and Samarkand and Herat to the east.6 Omar Khayyam lived during the period when the Islamic orthodox Saljuq Sultans were extending their power over Persia (then known as Greater Khorasan). It was a time which saw the closing of the door on the openness and receptivity of earlier centuries wherein much of the learning, scientific enquiry and scholarship of classical Greece as well as that of India was sought out, translated and adapted under the Abbasid Empire (750-1258 CE).7 This was the so-called golden age of Islamic philosophical, religious and scientific enquiry, the fullest expression of which is probably found in the writings of the great polymath Ibn Sina (Avicenna).8
Omar Khayyam was an intellectual and scholar9 who enjoyed the patronage of the Saljuq Sultan and held an official appointment as astronomer. He was also a philosopher and a mystic. His metaphysical writings that survive display a close alignment with Avicenna and have an essentially Platonic outlook.
In total there are some one thousand five hundred or so verses that have been attributed to Omar Khayyam. Scholars are of the view that only a small number of these are authentic. Determining exactly which ones they are, however, is a matter of some conjecture.
The quatrains of Omar Khayyam first came to the attention of the west through the translation by Fitzgerald that was published in 1859. Since that time there have been numerous translations of selections of his verses, each of which display quite different interpretations of his work.
In this regard, it is perhaps worth mentioning the translation of his verses that was published in 1968 by the poet and classicist Robert Graves.10 Graves collaborated with the Sufi Omar Ali-Shah and gave a Sufi interpretation to the verses. It caused something of a stir in literary circles at the time.
Since that time scholars have speculated as to whether Omar Khayyam was a Sufi or not. It is not recorded anywhere that he belonged to any particular order or line of teaching. And there were certainly many Sufi religious orders11 that were active in Nishapur at the time. Probably the answer is to be found in the following verse by Khayyam himself:
If you say I’m drunk on wine
that I am that I am.
If you think I’m an idolater,
a heathen or an unbeliever so be it.
Each labels me
according to what he thinks I am –
but it is only I that knows
what I truly am.
There is a moving account recorded by a man named Nizami, who was one of Khayyam’s students. He says that when he was with him in Balkh in the year 1113 CE Khayyam mentioned that after his death his grave would be found under trees which would shed their blossoms on him twice a year. Four years after the death of his teacher, Nizami visited his grave in Nishapur to pay his respects. There he found the grave next to a garden wall over which peach and pear trees were leaning. There were so many blossoms covering Khayyam’s grave that it was almost hidden from sight. When Nizami saw this, he wept.
Verses
Part I:
Message from the Wine Shop
When a royal banquet is being prepared invitations are sent out around the land. No one knows exactly who will be on the guest list. Each invitation is personal to the invitee. Only when you receive the invitation do you know that you are invited.
1. Invitation
One day
a message from
the wine shop came saying:
“Wake up!
The wine shop doors are open –
come and drink wine.”
Commentary
Entry to the wine shop is by invitation only. Everyone is invited.
When the desire for truth
ignites in a soul
nothing stays the same
as it was before.
From The Walled Garden of Truth by Sanai12
2. The Flower of Joy
Wake up! Wake up!
The flower of joy
does not bloom for those who are asleep.
To be asleep is as good as dead –
and once you’re gone
you won’t be back.
Commentary
Have you noticed yet that you are alive? It is a miracle of the impossible.13
The Beloved
disguised as the million things
kisses your eyes
and says:
“Do you see me?”
Hafez14
3. Eternity Is Now
Wake up friend, morning is here!
It’s time for you
to pour wine from the jug.
Don’t sleep away your precious time,
for long will you look for
this moment of eternity
and not find it again.
Commentary
Where is eternity to be found? It is imagined that eternity is elsewhere. But if it were not here now, where would it be found?
They don’t see you here
so they look for you in the sky.
You see them looking at you
but they don’t see you.
Mansur Hallaj15
4. The Sound of Everything
So awake my friend,
the day is here.
It’s time to tune the harp
and pour wine –
for of those here now none will remain
and of those gone none will be back.
Commentary
A man presented himself to a dervish and said: “I’m after truth. Please teach me.”
The dervish said: “Listen! Do you hear it?”
“Hear what? I don’t hear anything,” said the man.
“That’s because you are not listening,” replied the dervish.16
5. The Gift
Listen my friend,
tomorrow is not within your grasp,
you only have today.
Don’t throw away your time,
be awake now –
for who can say
if tomorrow for you will come or not.
Commentary
Life is a gift. Each moment of life is precious.
A man once received an inheritance worth ten thousand gold coins. He then started to doubt that he had received the full amount. Believing he was one coin short, he became very unhappy and started to haggle about the one coin.
Unfortunate is he
who looks for another door,
for other than this door
there is no door to be found.
Saadi Shirazi17
Part II:
The Wheel of Time
No two things are the same and nothing is ever repeated in exactly the same way. Each moment is the meeting point of an infinite number of relationships that add up to the totality of the entire universe. And so each moment is completely unique. No moment is ever repeated twice.
6. A Thing Never Heard Of
I have travelled the world
from east to west
and discussed important things
with the high and the low.
Yet there’s one thing
of which I’ve never heard,
and that’s the person
who went down this road
and came back again.
Commentary
You can never return to stand in the same place twice. You think you can but you can’t. It’s all moving away from you.18
They say that this is a road that goes nowhere.
That’s right.
Didn’t you know?
That’s exactly where all roads go.
Rumi
7. The Wheel
The wheel of time
keeps on turning.
Princes and paupers,
rich and the poor alike,
all it’s sent on their merry way.
Commentary
All are treated as equal by the wheel of time. The wheel of time is always rolling downhill. Wheels don’t roll uphill.
Don’t look for something
solid here
and don’t be after promotions –
you’ll only be here a few days
so don’t break anything.
Abu Sa’id19
8. The Caravan
The caravan of life
passes swiftly by
so seize the jug firmly by the neck.
Why fear for what tomorrow may bring?
Fill the cup full
before the night is gone.
Commentary
Where is the caravan going? Transience is what you surmise after the caravan has passed by. But if you’re awake, ephemerality is what you experience as it passes.20
You were given life
to fall in love with mystery –
not to chase unhappiness.
Abu Sa’id
9. One Arrives and Another Leaves
Just as one arrives
another leaves.
Each plays out a small part
and is called away.
Commentary
In an orchestra each instrument plays its part. You can’t say that one instrument is any more important than another. All playing together there’s a symphony.21
When you know there’s only
half a glass and no more –
it always tastes
that much sweeter.
Rumi
10. The Seasons
Spring turns to summer
and summer to autumn:
the four seasons melt
one into the other.
So turn the pages of your life –
drinking wine from the jug
stops time.
Commentary
If there wasn’t spring how could there be summer? If there wasn’t autumn how could there be winter? If there wasn’t winter how could there be spring? Each season paints the other. You’re looking at perfection.22
Come into the orchard in spring –
there’s cherry wine,
flowers and song.
Rumi
11. The Fly
Just as a drop of water
eventually finds its way to the ocean
and dust settles back to the earth
your coming and going
is no different –
a fly appears in the morning
and is gone by nightfall.23
Commentary
You look at a fly and you think he’s insignificant. But that’s just from your perspective. Do you think that you are more important than he is?
Love
rides on the back
of the elephant
who is careful
of the ant.
Hafez