Maybe a Year Without Hafiz

Well, I posted (link) recently about Ladinsky's book, A Year with Hafiz, and even posted (link) about his entry for November 20th. Reading further I came across this little bit of Islamophobia on his December 10th entry:

He was walking unnoticed past a mosque, and the shouts of God’s admirers happened to fill the air, saying, “Allah, Allah! Where are You? Reveal Thyself, Beautiful, Precious One.” 

 And the child in the womb of the Master could not remain silent, and sang back, in an astounding voice, 

“I Am Here! I Am Here—dear life!” 

The crowd in the mosque became frantic, and they picked up shoes, clubs and stones. You know what then happened—the story becomes grim. For most cannot bear the truth.

Reading on, it was this entry for December 14th that finally did me in:

Anyone you have made love with, it is because you were really looking for God.

If you have known hundreds of partners, God may not say this publicly, but I think He is proud of all your efforts. 

Don’t let the freedom in this truth get you in trouble. 

There are men out there who get lonely up in the hills and then take it out on their camels, sheep and goats. 

I think about the best I can do today along the lines of moral advice, in such a universe as we live, is to say, 

try to not hurt any living thing, ’cause your odds will then, probably, increase for happiness—and who doesn’t want some of that? 

I tend to side now with the critics who say that Ladinsky's poetry bears little semantic connection with Hafiz. I can't imagine a Perfect Master lauding promiscuity and tolerating bestiality. These imaginings have sprung from Ladinsky's mind and have little to do with spirituality. I'm afraid Ladinsky's poetry will not form part of my spiritual reading.

Figure 1

Ladinsky's father was Jewish and his mother Catholic but religion did not play an important role in his upbringing. Nonetheless, he was both circumcised and baptised. However, he seems to have inherited something of the "Jewish Revolutionary Spirit" from his father and has decided to "revolutionise" Hafiz to the dismay of many, myself included. I wonder what Meher Baba would have thought of Ladinsky's writings? I wonder what Baba Lovers think? I wonder what Francis Brabazon would have thought? Well, I know that I think he's too crass and crude.

I might be criticised for being too old and not open to new poetic approaches but Landinsky is a year older than me so it's just one old guy's reaction to another. My disappointment shouldn't put me off Hafiz. There are many other translations and interpretations of his work available. I should explore some of them. After all, Hafiz was Baba's favourite poet.

I have Hafez: Collected Poetical Works by Delphi Classics in my library so I should perhaps start with that, although I'm sure that there are many Internet sites that are suitable as well. Any Internet searches are bound to contain a lot of Ladinsky links so that's the only off-putting thing.

A Year with Hafiz: November 20th

Seeing that I discovered Ladinsky's A Year with Hafiz (read my previous post) on November 20th, I'll start with his entry for that day (I've preserved the original spacing):

NOVEMBER 20

ALL THE HEMISPHERES

Leave the familiar for a while. Let your senses and bodies stretch out

like a welcomed season onto meadows and shores and hills.

Open up to the roof. Make a new watermark on your excitement and love.

Like a blooming night flower, bestow your vital fragrance of happiness and giving upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day. All the hemispheres in existence lie beside an equator in your soul.

Greet yourself in your thousand other forms as you mount the hidden tide and travel back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven are sitting around a campfire chatting, while

stitching themselves together into the great circle inside of you.

I'm reminded of Walt Whitman's "Song of the Open Road" as I read this. The pivotal phrase for me is "equator in your soul' which is echoed in the last line as "the great circle inside of you", with "great circle" being place in italics for emphasis. A great circle is a circle on the surface of sphere which lies in a plane passing through the sphere's centre. An equator typically refers to a great circle whose plane is perpendicular to the axis of rotation of a spinning sphere. This is illustrated nicely in Figure 1 that shows an equator and meridian as special types of great circles and where the hemispheres that are created are emphasised a well.

Figure 1

For a spinning sphere, it only the two hemispheres created by an equator that have centres of gravity that lie on the rotational axis. If sliced as shown, the two hemispheres created by the equator would continue to spin as before whereas those created by a meridian or any other great circle would fly off on opposite trajectories. The only poise or balance is to found on the equator where the hemispheres still exist but they are perfectly balanced.

It is a great metaphor for a Perfect Master, especially in light of the fact that a Sufi term for such a God-realised being is a Qutub, meaning literally an axis. To quote from Wikipedia:

Qutb, Qutub, Kutb, Kutub or Kotb (Arabic: قطب‎), means 'axis', 'pivot' or 'pole'. Qutb can refer to celestial movements and used as an astronomical term or a spiritual symbol. In Sufism, a Qutub is the perfect human being, al-Insān al-Kāmil (The Universal Man), who leads the saintly hierarchy. The Qutub is the Sufi spiritual leader that has a divine connection with God and passes knowledge on which makes him central to, or the axis of, Sufism, but he is unknown to the world. There are five Qutubs per era and they are infallible and trusted spiritual leaders. They are only revealed to a select group of mystics because there is a "human need for direct knowledge of God".

On the other hand, the hemispheres created by great circles other than an equator typify our lives before Realisation: 

All the hemispheres in existence lie beside an equator in your soul. 

In all these lives (the thousand other forms) the opposites are not in balance. It seems to me that Hafiz is exhorting us to step off the current great circle we are on (leave the familiar for a while) and for a while at least be bigger than we imagine ourselves to be:

Let your senses and bodies stretch out like a welcomed season onto meadows and shores and hills. Open up to the roof. Make a new watermark on your excitement and love ... change rooms in your mind for a day

All that has happened, all that is happening and all that will ever happened exist in a configuration beyond time. We move on our great circles and that movement we interpret as time passing. Our attention is constantly shifting from one point on the circle to the next and that shift in attention registers as time passing. All the hemispheres that we have created as we travel along our great circles, life after life, exist simultaneously.

All the hemispheres in heaven are sitting around a campfire chatting, while stitching themselves together into the great circle inside of you.

These are just some of the thoughts that arose from the November 20th entry and it is in no way an exhaustive analysis but it has served its purpose of focusing my attention on spiritual matters. It is spiritual exercise to borrow a phrase used by Saint Ignatius Loyola.

Image taken from here

Hafiz

The thought struck me recently that it was time to get serious about spirituality. I realised that I spend most of my time: 

• working on mathematical or programming problems
• reading books or articles on history, geopolitics or about famous people
• walking and exercising
• eating, sleeping etc.

I asked myself how much time do I spend in "spiritual pursuits", a term that for me means reading material dictated by Meher Baba or about Meher Baba. The answer was simply: not much time at all. On the other hand, I know a Muslim who prays seven times a day, two more than the recommended five, and often for quite lengthy periods of time. This contrasts quite sharply with the meagre time that I allot to my own spiritual pursuits.

By way of addressing this deficiency, I was recently reading additional commentary added by Meher Baba to God Speaks (identified as God Speaks Supplement to Part 2 of God Speaks) where he spends a lot of time discussing Sufi terms and occasionally quoting from Kabir, Rumi and Hafiz. I checked my library and found I had a copy of The Purity of Desire by Daniel Landinsky (with Nancy Owen Barton) which contains a 100 poems of Rumi. A reviewer wrote of this book:

The first full-length volume of Rumi's cherished verse by bestselling poet Daniel Ladinsky. Renowned for his poignant renderings of Hafiz's mystical texts, Daniel Ladinsky captures the beauty, intimacy, and musicality of another of Islam's most beloved poets and spiritual thinkers. In collaboration here with Nancy Owen Barton, and with learned insight and a delicate touch, they explore the nuances of desire—that universal emotion—in verse inspired by Rumi's love and admiration for his companion and spiritual teacher, Shams-e Tabriz. These poems thoughtfully capture the compelling wisdom of one of Islam's most revered artistic and religious voices and one of the most widely read poets in the English language.

This review alerted me to the fact that he had also done some "renderings of Hafiz's mystical texts" and so I managed to get hold of a copy of his book A Year with Hafiz. As I began to read the Acknowledgements, I was in for a surprise. It begins:

I thank my teacher, Eruch Jessawala, with whom I spent a lot of time over a twenty-year period. I think he knew Hafiz intrinsically, more truly and deeply than anyone I have ever met. Not one poem of mine would ever have been published without his extraordinary sanction and a profound, rare insight he revealed to me about my work. And I thank his decades-old little bamboo walking stick—that Zen’s master’s baton—that I journeyed next to for hundreds of miles in India. It lays across my computer as I write. I think my every word leans against it and upon Eruch, in many ways. For he is now the hub of me, and I a spoke he moves.

He concludes his foreward by saying:

What can I say to my dear Master, Meher Baba, for all his help and guidance? Whatever truth, beauty, laughter and charm you may find here, I would say is a gift from him, the Avatar. 

So the person that I had more or less randomly chosen to render Hafiz turns out to be a Baba-Lover who was mentored by Eruch. How amazing! This confirmed to me that I was on the right track in my choice of elevating spiritual literature because Hafiz was Baba's favourite poet and who better to render the spirit of Hafiz's writing in English than Landinsky.

Daniel at Sheriar Press, Myrtle Beach, S.C.
https://www.meherbabatravels.com/books/authors-of-baba-contents/daniel-ladinsky

I was prompted to find out a little about him and found some biographical details on Wikipedia from which I've extracted the following quote about his early life and background:

Ladinsky was born and brought up in suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri, where his father was a wealthy developer. He grew up with two brothers, and had a Jewish upbring as his father was Jewish, though he was also baptized as a Catholic, as his mother was Christian. After studying in small colleges, at age 20, he enrolled at the University of Arizona. During this period he came across the book God Speaks, by Meher Baba, and poetry by Rumi, both of which had a deep impact on him. At the back of the Meher Baba book, he found the address of the five centers dedicated to the spiritual master. 

Some time later, as Ladinsky recounted in an interview, intending to drive towards the Andes mountain, he took a detour of a thousand miles, and stopped the Meher Baba Center at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. There, he met the disciple Kitty Davy, then in her seventies, who had spent twenty years in India with Meher Baba. He stayed at the Center for a few months, when Davy advised him to go back to his family, and to find a job that would let him work with his hands. Back home, his father helped him join a carpentry school. 

He worked for a few years at a carpentry job, and thereafter joined his father's investment company. Unable to find fulfillment, he visited the Meher Baba Center in South Carolina again. Then, in 1978, Davy advised him to visit the Meher Baba ashram, at Meherabad, near Ahmednagar, India. There he met Meher Baba's sister Mani Irani, and his close disciple, Eruch Jessawala. Though Ladinsky's first visit lasted only two weeks, it started a process which continued with regular visits for the next two decades, and Jessawala became his spiritual teacher. He even lived in a nearby spiritual community at Meherazad for six years, working at the local free clinic and spending time with Jessawala.

His work is not without controversy as the following quote from Wikipedia illustrates:

Scholars and critics point out that Ladinsky's poems are originals, and not translations or interpretations of Hafez. Christopher Shackle describes The Gift as "not so much a paraphrase as a parody of the wondrously wrought style of the greatest master of Persian art-poetry" and Aria Fanil describes his contribution thusly "Ladinsky does not know Persian while his poems bear little or no resemblance to what Hafez has composed". That his poems are neither written nor intended to fall under the purview of literal and/or scholarly translations of Hafiz' work, Ladinsky states in each of his volumes.

He was born in 1948 so he is a year older than me. There is a detailed interview with him to be found on this site. Anyway, I've very little of his poetry and haven't formed any opinion of it whatsoever. I may like it, I may not. Let's see how things unfold.