Why Write Mystical Poetry?

November 10, 2007

For the next week and a half I will be working through Rumi's Masnavi (book 1) with my Islam class. One point I look forward to making is the way Rumi caps so much of our earlier reading. His allegorical use of hadith and historical narrations, plus his creative inweaving of passages from the Qur'an, gives a sense of how the Islamic tradition was plastic in the hands of a creative master.

Re-reading the Masnavi I began to consider my standard query aimed at mystical poetry: why bother with poetry? If the ultimate goal in life is an ineffable experience.. the presence of God.. then why spend time writing or otherwise representing that experience?

Rumi's opinion on the value of the material world is pretty clear:

Physical senses are like muzzles too

    That keep the milk of mystic truth from you;

A jewel has dropped in your heart's deep core,

    Which neither seas nor heaven knew before,

So why worship form, an empty shape—

    Your soulless spirit must learn to escape! [65]

Form is to be shunned; the jewel deep inside should be sought. That is a prescription for turning away from art if I have ever heard one.

The supreme philosophy for the creation of art is a firm belief in the importance of the present life. With that recognized, there grows a need to pass the time in a pleasing manner, and this is the door for creative work. This creative work will have as its primary aim the alleviation of boredom and the causing of pleasure. This worldly art learns to manipulate form and audience expectations; it thrives on craft. Such art may also become fused with a myth of personal immortality bestowed by artistic accomplishment, thus spurring practitioners on to greater subtlety and formal excellence. This kind of worldly art has taken root in many religious environments, but it is fundamentally a secular art.

How can a mystic who wants nothing more than union with God or the One compete with a craftsman who spends all his time laboring over a few lines? The better poetry should come from the craftsman, obviously. For a mystic, poetry will have to be subsumed under didacticism. That is, art can best be justified by an appeal to the need to communicate the excellence of the mystical life to others. Mystical art slyly implies: "I really don't need to do this, but I want to help you out.. let you glimpse the deeper things.."

Didacticism is generally considered the kiss of death for poetry.. so what why do we still like mystic poetry? The mystical poetry of someone like Rumi represents an unexpected kind of didacticism. Take the following couplet:

Word, sound, and speech I strike relentlessly

    So I can talk to you without these three. [108]

The idea is that Rumi is pulling out all the verbal stops in order to get past verbal communication. His poetry is not a form of moral didacticism, expounding on rules to be followed, rather a kind of mystical modeling.. exemplifying through his language the way this world and its forms can be overcome. The best mystical poetry goes a step further: its recitation or audition can be considered a tool for reaching a further state. Mystic poetry thus can be thought of as doing something.. not simply sitting on a page for leisured enjoyment.

For every mystic artist such as Rumi there are probably a dozen who stick with a much sterner form of didacticism. Plotinus at times seems like he can barely write Greek.. so crabbed his sentences get. But obviously he cares nothing about the presentation—he wants us to get to the One. There are also plenty of Sufis who enumerate the stations of mystical advancement in dense prose. This is the natural mode of expression for mysticism. It takes a peculiar combination of circumstances for a mystical artist to arise.. and often such a development will be dependent on the presence of an art form that can actually be used to trigger mystical experience.