If I sigh for the miraculous, for the beauty
that takes breath away in wonder, maybe it is because the sigh itself is a
miracle. And if it is not, if as the song says, a sigh is just a sigh, perhaps
that is the miracle, that a sigh, to
be miraculous, need not be anything other than itself.
The miracle of this
gathering is that we get to hear and speak the sighs of Dante and Hafiz
together, to have them, side by side, in the same room.
Dante died in 1321.
Hafiz was born in 1325. So this is something that could never have happened.
Or, in light of the mystery of reincarnation, properly identified by one
anonymous author as “in no way a theory which one has to believe or not believe
. . . a fact which is [to be] either known through experience or ignored” (Meditations on the Tarot), this may be something
that could never have not happened. Thus who knows, this gathering might be
both and something better than either, the miracle of a third thing, the event
of the presence of one in whose name two or three gather.
The impossible is
inevitable. And in this case, there is also lightning, a striking resemblance.
Above all, the greatness of these two poets, the height and depth of their sighs,
belongs to the sphere of intense experience, ecstatic and torturous, of the
intersection of human and divine love, more specifically, the noble love of a woman
and the love of God. For Dante, it was the death of Beatrice which marked the
center of his poetry’s turning toward the divine. Only from the abyss of sorrow
and the poet’s death to himself within it does there spring the miraculous
vision of the Commedia, the
potentiality of a truly new poetry, of a word that authentically writes itself
now, in light of the eternal present. As Dante states near the end of the Vita Nuova, “And to arrive at that, I
apply myself as much as I can, as she truly knows. So that, if it be pleasing
to Him for whom all things live that my life may last for some years, I hope to
say of her what was never said of any other woman.” For Hafiz, the death of his
beloved instead takes place virtually, in experience, upon the imminence of the
long-sought moment when he could finally realize his desire. Where the death of
Dante’s beloved is the ground of seeking her in God, Hafiz’s earthly love is
eclipsed by desire for the divinity that grants him the opportunity to fulfil that
love. With uncanny complementarity, the two poets’ experiences appear as
different as they are similar. Hafiz’s story is recounted by Meher Baba as
follows:
Once
in his youth, Hafiz encountered a very beautiful girl of a wealthy family. That
very instant he fell in love with her; it was not in the carnal way, but he
loved her beauty. At the same time, he was in contact with his Spiritual
Master, Attar, who himself was a great Persian poet. Hafiz, being Attar's
disciple, used to visit him daily for years. He used to compose a ghazal a day
and sing it to Attar. . . Twenty years passed and all this time Hafiz was full
of the fire of love for the beautiful woman, and he loved his Master, too.
Once, Attar asked him: “Tell me what you want.” Hafiz expressed how he longed
for the woman. Attar replied: “Wait, you will have her.” Ten more years passed
by, thirty in all, and Hafiz became desperate and disheartened. . . . Hafiz
blazed out: “What have I gained by being with you? Thirty years have gone by!”
Attar answered: “Wait, you will know one day.” . . . Hafiz performed chilla-nashini, that
is, he sat still within the radius of a drawn circle for 40 days to secure
fulfillment of his desire. It is virtually impossible for one to sit still for
40 days within the limits of a circle. But Hafiz’s love was so great that it
did not matter to him. On the fortieth day, an angel appeared before him and
looking at the angel’s beauty, Hafiz thought: “What is that woman’s beauty in
comparison with this heavenly splendor!” The angel asked what he desired. Hafiz
replied that he be able to wait on the pleasure of his Master’s wish. At four o’clock
on the morning of the last day, Hafiz . . . went to his Master who embraced
him. In that embrace, Hafiz became God-conscious. (Lord Meher)
Following love’s infinity in the face of
the finite, through the domain of death, the poetry of Dante and Hafiz fills
the space traversed by longing, the degree
or mode of love which moves between desire and surrender, the form of eros that
at once insists on satisfaction and grasps the futility of that insistence. As
the word of the word of love, the tongueless articulation of the heart before
and after speech, a murmuring of the heart as mouth around the spiritual limits
of language, the sigh is the proper expression of longing, of desire across
distance and the hopelessness of separation. Thus the sphere-piercing
spatiality of the sigh, its mapping of the paradoxical parameters of the heart as
something both excluded from and already established within its own home. Like
a breath at the edge of the universe which is no less one’s own, the sigh
traces the heart as no less exterior than interior, as both trapped within and
containing what holds it. Augustine defines the heart as “where I am whoever or
whatever I am [ubi ego sum quicumque sum]”
and love as “my weight [which] bears me wheresoever I am borne [pondus meum, amor meus; eo feror, quocumque
feror]” (Augustine, Confessions).
So the sigh, echoing simultaneously one’s first and last breath, both the
spirit which animates you in the first place and the expiration which becomes no
longer yours, pertains to an essential openness and mobility, the unbounded wherever
and wheresoever of things.
This for me is the
sigh’s miracle—not anything supernatural, but that it marks the miracle of
reality itself as infinitely open, as spontaneously expanding without limit or
horizon into more and more of itself. Hear how, on the one hand, a sigh
resonates with the sense of the weight of facticity and necessity, the crushing
gravity of that (that things are as
they are, that anything is, that something is not) and hear, on the other hand,
how a sigh floats in the space between
the actual and the ideal, in the sky of its own indetermination and freedom.
The suspension of the sigh, its hovering, pertains to the paradox of freedom as
realizable yet unpossessable, the necessity of freeing oneself from oneself,
from one’s own freedom, in order to be free. As Meister Eckart says, “The just
man serves neither God nor creatures, for he is free, . . . and the closer he is to freedom . . .
the more he is freedom itself.” The sigh is the dialetheia of freedom and
necessity, the joy (and sorrow) of knowing that nothing is fixed and the sorrow
(and joy) of seeing that it everything is—that thank God there is absolutely
nothing and everything you can do
about it. As Vernon Howard said, referring to yourself, “you want to take that to Heaven?”
The admixture of
joy and sorrow found in the sigh reflects the miraculous fact, the light weight
and grave lightness, of reality’s paradoxical openness. As Agamben says in The Coming Community, “The root of all
pure joy and sadness is that the world is as it is.” The intimacy with
separation spoken in the sigh likewise manifests separation as a special order
of intimacy. As Mechthild of Magdeburg, a Beguine of the 13th
century says, “O blissful distance from God, how lovingly am I connected with
you!” Or as Meher Baba once spontaneously rhymed, “Oh, you ignorant, all-knowing
Soul / what a plight you are in! / Oh, you weak, all-powerful Soul / what a
plight you are in! / Oh, you miserable, all-happy Soul / what a plight you are
in! / What a plight! / What a sight! / What a delight!” (Lord Meher).
We are indeed in a fiX,
in a spot marked by a great, unfathomable X. Such is the order of the truth of
the sigh. That the mystery of the world is more than metaphysical. That not
only is there something rather than nothing, but that one is. That there is not
only eternity but time, not only good but evil, not only truth but illusion,
not only oneness but separation, not only the universe but the individual, not
only you but me. These are astonishing things, stupendous facts pointing to a
reality more stupendous still. All is somehow more infinite for being finite. In
other words, there is something about the sigh that turns everything inside
out. I hear Levinas sighing as he writes, “Time is not the limitation of being
but its relationship with infinity. Death is not annihilation but the question
that is necessary for this relationship with infinity, or time, to be produced.”
The opening of the
world, in both senses, is poetry, the miracle of the word which takes you aside
and makes one hear its silence and speak what one cannot say. Thus the singular
story in the Gospel of Mark of Jesus’s sigh: “And they brought to him a man who
was deaf and had an impediment in his speech; and they besought him to lay his
hand upon him. And taking him aside from the multitude private, he put his
fingers into his ears, and spat and touched his tongue; and looking up to
heaven, he sighed, and said to him, ‘Ephphatha,’ that is, ‘Be opened.’ And his
ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly” (Mark 7:31-4).
Therefore,
to close my opening of this gathering, to thank the sigh for making possible
our being side by side with these two poets, I will read a poem by a third poet,
one Pseudo-Leopardi, on the same theme:
Unable to swim
the ocean of each other’s eyes
We must sit side
by side, gazing at a blind world
Whose dumb mouth
has lost all taste for silence.
Heads dizzy as
ours naturally lean together,
Kept from falling
off only by the golden sighs
Suspending these
bodies like puppet strings.
The soft tautness
of the secret lines is thinning us,
Sweetly drawing
all life-feeling inward and up
Into something
pulling strongly from far above.
There is no doubt
that the sigh-threads will one day
Draw our hearts
right through the tops of our heads,
Eventually
turning everything totally inside out.
Already my body
is something much less my own,
As if the thought
of your form is my new skeleton
And your memory
of my flesh your new strength.
If I embrace you
my own power would crush me
And if you cling
to me I would surely evaporate.
Dying lovers do
not touch without touching suicide.
Side by side we
float and stand. It is our way of lying
Bound together
across space on this lost world
Whose eyes will
not survive seeing us face to face.
