The Grim, Deeper: Rumi-nations (Patreon)

I said that I might do a personal blog so don’t say that I didn’t warn you!

Please feel free to ignore this blog if the inane/insane ramblings of a kinky smut writer is not your thing.  Trust me, I don’t blame you.  And when I say rambling I do mean rambling.  My plan with these is just to write an unformed stream of consciousness without a filter.  These are not essays but musings.  I just hope anything written here does not turn anybody against me or my fiction.  Anything in these blogs are simply my own opinions/observations/struggles.  I do not claim to be an authority, moral or otherwise, on anything.  I am not an academic or scholar or philosopher.  I have no formal training or advanced education in poetry.  And I am not standing in judgment of anybody or their beliefs.  I am just some dude trying to figure things out and have a good time in this ride called life.

Alright, with that out of the way, what is Grim thinking about today?

The answer to that today is Rumi, the Sufi poet.  More specifically the famous opening to The Masnavi known as the The Song of the Reed.  I will include the piece I am thinking about here and riff on it as I go.  I am not enlightened in the ways of Sufism or the writings of Rufi and I intend no offense to that tradition.  I am not claiming any special insight and I am definitely way off in any sort of proper interpretation.  I am simply responding to the poem itself in the ways it touched my ignorant ass on this particular Tuesday.

The Song of the Reed by Rumi

Listen to the reed and the tale it tells, how it sings of separation.

Ever since they cut me off from the reed bed, my wail has caused men and women to weep.

I long for a heart that is torn open with longing so that I might share the pain of this love.

Whoever has been parted from his source longs to return to that state of union.

These four lines have lived with me from the moment I read them years ago.  For whatever reason I have always been a backward looking person.  Despite my playful nature I’ve often been called an ‘old soul’ by those who know me.  I listen to old music, watch old movies, seek out old things, take to heart the wisdom of elders (if not always the values) and venerate antiquity.  For me there is a magic in the past and there is something in looking backward that speaks to me more profoundly than looking to the future.  I feel that pull back to my source.

I believe these opening lines are supposed to tell the story of a soul being separated from the divine but I think it can be interpreted less spiritually.  (Not that it should be interpreted less spiritually, just that it can be.)  I wonder if this ‘longing’ to return can be sensed temporally and in degrees.  I think of the yearning I feel to get back to nature or even simply to get out into the country.  There is a sense of belonging that grows inside of me the further I get from the city and I wonder if the distance traveled in miles fools my mind into believing it is also a distance traveled in years.  In the nearby towns I catch glimpses of an existence twenty years ago, in the villages fifty, in the country roads and old farms a hundred, in the abandoned remnants of bygone eras hundreds, and as I push into the wild the scale of time opens out past the horizon of history.  Staring into a campfire I feel a real connection to the hunters and gatherers from which we evolved and as I look out over a mountain valley or feel the dwarfing scale of a vast prairie under an even vaster sky or witness the humbling power of the ocean or stand in awe under the endless starry heavens I feel a kinship to those pre-sapien ancestors that explored the wild Earth for so many thousands of years.

Is this draw of the past a call back my source?  Am I hearing the echos of the closing notes of a seven million year old melody that I ache to hear in its entirety?  Is my DNA the sheet music of this song?  And if the melody could be revealed to me would I only find that there is more of it to discover?  To find this state of union must I go back to the origin of life?  The big bang?  Would I find God?  Can the reed ever find its bed again?  Should it do so?  Can it help but try?  Is this the restlessness Augustine spoke of?  For those of you who are ‘young souls’, or those who are forward looking, is there another song that you hear?  Does it eventually lead to the same place?  Is it as urgent and as beautiful?  I am sure it must be.  And for those who are rooted in the present, are you the most wise among us?  Are the rest of us fools?  I wonder, but the answer is probably yes.

At every gathering I play my lament, I am a friend to both happy and sad.

Each befriended me for his own reasons, but none sort out the secrets I contain.

My secret is not different from my lament, but this is not for anyone to see.

The body is not separate from the soul, nor is the soul hidden from the body, but the soul is not for anyone to see.

This flute is played with fire, not with wind, and without this fire you would not exist.

It is the fire of love that inspires the flute, it is the ferment of love that completes the wine.

The reed is a comfort to all estranged lovers, it's music tears our veils away.

GAH!  The flute is played with fire, not wind!  That is so fucking beautiful.  A flute might make sound as air is blown across the hole but it is not played if there is not a active will to do so.  The life of the player begets the life of the song and that lament reaches the ear of another life to remind them of truths deeper than what appears at the surface.  One reed to another, one soul to the next, they both feel that same burn/pain of love.  There is way too much here to get into.

And this metaphor of the reed (soul) turned to a flute is both beautiful and heartbreaking.  The flute is a miracle of design through which true genius can be expressed and yet it is a dead thing now that it is cut from its bed.  It wants to return to life.  I’m not sure what to do with that, perhaps I am misreading it, but it is fascinating.  Around me every day I hear the reed song in the people I meet.  Some melodious, some discordant, some in time with a rhythm that I will never understand, but all of them a miracle.  Miracles everywhere!  And each of them perfectly unique yet cut from that same bed at the source of the stream.

Have you ever seen a poison or antidote like the reed? Have you ever seen a more infinite companion and lover?

It sings of the path of blood, it relates the passion of Majnun.

Only to the senseless is this sense confided. Does the tongue have any patron but the ear?

Our days grow more unreasonable. These days which mix with grief and pain.

But if the days that remain are few, let them go; it doesn't matter. But You, You remain, for nothing is as pure as You are.

All but the fish quickly have their fill of His water, and the day is long without His daily bread.

The raw do not understand the state of the ripe, and so my words will be brief.

This last line reminds me of the ‘old’ and ‘young’ soul idea.  I have met people who are young yet cautious or wise.  I have met those who are old yet vivacious or naive.  This ‘raw’ and ‘ripe’ could be applied to these differences.  These might not refer to the age of the body but the state of the spirit.  Perhaps it is to do with the person being in a latter stage of reincarnation.  Perhaps a specific type of brain development, experience, and education is what ‘ripens’ one to certain concepts.  Or maybe it’s all bullshit and the interest in the numinous is just another frivolous interest like model train building, or worse a not so frivolous type of aggrandizing delusion.  There is nothing more dangerous than ignorance but how can we find our way except to probe out into the darkness as best we can?

The reference to the love of Majnun and Layla is beyond me.  The ‘path of blood’ imagery intrigues me though.  I should look into this.

Break your bonds, be free, my child! How long will silver and gold enslave you?

If you pour the whole sea into a jug, will it hold more than one day's store?

The greedy eye, like the jug, is never filled. Until content, the oyster holds no pearl.

Only one who has been undressed by love is free of defect and desire.

So much here.  The concept that money cannot satisfy one’s soul is such a well worn theme, and for good reason.  Greed cannot be satiated by money.  Something else must be valued for its own sake before money has real meaning.  I can say honestly that I was making a lot more money before I started sinking so much time into writing, but I am way more content now than I was then.  As long as the basics are covered this will always be a universal truth.  ‘Until content, the oyster holds no pearl.’  So cool and so true.

And that image of the jug only holding what it can no matter how much you pour into it is a potent one for me.  It brings to mind my own Deism, a topic for another time perhaps.

And that last line.  It is just a surface reading of what I know is meant to be mystical, but falling in love with another person really does feel like being undressed.  A revealing of your true self, warts and all, then realizing that the warts just don’t matter, neither theirs nor yours.

O Gladness, O Love, our partner in trade, healer of all our ills,

Our Plato and Galen, remedy for our pride and our vanity.

With love this earthly body could soar in the air, the mountain could arise and nimbly dance.

Love gave life to mount Sinai, O lover. Sinai was drunk; Moses lost consciousness.

Bringing in both the philosopher and the physician here is really neat.  One a nurturer of the mind and the other the healer of body.  Here Love is both the teacher and healer, perhaps suggesting that through embracing love we will naturally bring mind and body into a proper orientation for good living.  Is love that contented oyster’s pearl?  And love making bodies fly and mountains dance?  Fantasy to be sure, but when you are in the grips of that amazing passion it certainly seems that even the impossible is possible.  Have you ever fallen in love so hard that very laws of physics seem to bend to its gravity?  I have, and it’s AWESOME!

Although I know I am missing the whole point here, the idea that Sinai was drunk and Moses passed out when the biblical commandments were handed down makes me chuckle.  “Thou shalt not…hic…”  “Go home Moses, you’re drunk!”  Moses face plants in the dirt.  😆  I am sure there is some profound meaning here but I’ll be content with my chuckle for now.  What do you think it means?

Pressed to the lips of one in harmony with myself, I might also tell all that can be told; but without a common tongue I am dumb, even if I have a hundred songs to sing.

When the rose is gone and the garden faded, you will no longer hear the nightingale's song.

The Beloved is all; the lover just a veil. The Beloved is living, the lover just a dead thing.

If love withholds it's strengthening care, the lover will be left like a bird without wings.

Again, so much, so much.  I really like that he uses poetry to describe his monotheistic belief system so that those of us who are non-believers can enjoy his insights as well.  I also believe it is the only real way of wrestling with such concepts.  I mean look at this language.  It is wonderful and evocative and challenging.  I can only imagine how good it must be in its original language.

I find that we get into trouble the moment we start to try to nail down deeper concepts such as love and truth and morality with strict interpretations or craft them into rigid rules to live by.  I believe that on some level everybody can understand what it is to love or experience freedom or discover a truth.  These are independent of beliefs concerning messiahs, prophets, or the edicts of tradition and authority.  These other things can help give us a grounding and a starting point to enrich our understanding but I think they often get in the way if we choose to make ourselves slaves to them.

I prefer poetry.  It forces me to engage with deeper topics using my own feeble resources to make of it what I will.  My conclusions might be wrong but the results are more meaningful, to me.  For some of us it will lead us on toward religion and all of the rich inheritances that brings.  For some of us it will bolster our independence from such mythologies and give us faith in our strength of intellect.  And for some, like me, it opens up the cosmos to even greater majesty and mystery at the price of eternal humility in never knowing for sure.

That first line blows me away.  I run up against this limitation of communication constantly when writing.  How to describe what simply cannot be summed up into words?  How do I find a common tongue when I am mute?  Even if I have a hundred tales to tell?  Poetic language and such devices allow me to at least gesture vaguely in the right direction and have faith that that which makes us human can fill in the blanks for me.  It also makes it more universal and personal.  What you read is a different thing from what I have written.  Those words and scenes and themes are colored and shaded differently through your experiences compared to mine.  I just love that idea that everybody is reading a slightly different version of A Simple Life, for example, and that the ‘truth’ of that story is some sort of crazy amalgam of the words along with all of our perspectives.  It is the rose and the garden and the nightingale.  It’s messy and it’s complicated but somehow it just works, just like life.

How will I be awake and aware if the light of the Beloved is absent?

Love wills that this Word be brought forth.

If you find the mirror of the heart dull, the rust has not been cleared from it's face.

O friends, listen to this tale, the marrow of our inward state.

Having exposed my ignorance enough for one day I am going to stop yapping now and just leave you with this image of the ‘mirror of the heart’.  Ain’t it grand?  I hope that I might one day clear the rust from mine.

So what poems have touched you recently?  Can you relate to the reed and the flute?  Is this blog thing a really terrible idea?  Did you prefer not knowing what a weirdo I am?  And what do think of the title?  It’s supposed to be a play on ‘The Grim Reaper’.  Ugh, I know.  Do you have a better suggestion?

Okay, enough of this shit.  I’ve got a futanari sex scene to write!  Take care out there.

Your pal,

Grim