Metaphysical Rebellion

Metaphysical rebellion is the movement by which man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation. It is metaphysical because it contests the ends of man and creation. The slave protests against the condition in which he finds himself within his state of slavery; the metaphysical rebel protests against the condition in which he finds himself as a man.

--Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower, 23.

That Peculiar Affliction

No one chooses to be afflicted by the Socratic daimonion--not Hafiz, Goethe, Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, Emerson, Wittgenstein, Camus, Norman O. Brown, and not even the Mazeppist Marabout Errant. But each, in his own way, has suffered its relentless goading so as never to know anything that approximates rest.

On his deathbed, we are told, that Goethe asked for the shutters of his room to be opened. The legend developed that he called for "More light!" Legend or not, it is that deathless desire for lucidity over all else that marks the victim of this peculiar affliction.

"They speak of my drinking," runs the Scottish proverb, "but never of my thirst." This is the Hafizean condition. Interpreters of Hafiz who fret over whether the wine of which he wrote was literal or metaphorical miss the point. As Northrop Frye might say, it was both metaphorical and literal.

Hafiz longed for moments of lucidity, and he was happy to take them through whatever means he could acquire them.

Because he knew--as so many of his interpreters apparently do not--that, in the end, lucidity is the best revenge.

The Holy Longing

Sagt es niemand, nur den Weisen,
Weil die Menge gleich verhöhnet,
Das Lebendge will ich preisen
Das nach Flammentod sich sehnet.
In der Liebesnachte Kühlung,
Die dich zeugte, wo du zeugtest,
Überfällt dich fremde Fühlung
Wenn die stille Kerze leuchtet.
Nicht mehr bleibest du umfangen
In der Finsternis Beschattung,
Und dich reisset neu Verlangen
Auf zu höherer Begattung.
Keine Ferne macht dich schwierig,
Kommst geflogen und gebannt,
Und zuletzt, des Lichts begierig,
Bist du Schmetterling verbrannt.
Und solang du das nich hast,
Dieses: Stirb und werde!
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde.

Translation:

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
Because the massman will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
What longs to be burned to death.
In the calm water of love nights,
Where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
A strange feeling comes over you
When you see the silent candle burning.
Now you are no longer caught
In the obsession with darkness,
And a desire for higher lovemaking
Sweeps you forward.
Distance does not make you falter
Now, arriving in magic, flying
And finally insane for the light,
You are the butterfly, and you are gone.
And so long as you haven’t experienced this:
To die, and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest
On the dark earth.

Goethe wrote these lines after Hafez in 1814 and included them in his Westöstliche Divan.

Gnostic Hafez

I'll say it openly, and be
Happy to speak my mind--
"I am the slave of love, and I
Have left both worlds behind."

I am a bird from paradise
And can't account for how
I fell into this trap of troubles
Where I must languish now.

I was an angel, the highest court
Of heaven was home to me--
Adam it was who brought me to
This ruined monastery.

But heavenly shade, the waters there,
The houris' proffered love
Are all forgotten now, and it's
Your street I'm dreaming of;

And on the tablets of my heart
My friend's tall stature's written;
What can I do? My master's lesson
Was this, and now I'm smitten.

No wise astrologer can tell
What star's assigned to me;
O God, when earth, my mother, bore me,
What did the heavens decree?

A slave before love's wine-shop door
Is where and how I live,
And every moment brings to me
The blessings sorrows give.

My eyes weep heart's blood--this is right
Given what I have done;
Why did I hand my heart to one
Beloved by everyone?

Oh, use your hair to wipe the tears
From your Hafez's face,
Or soon their flood will bear me off
And leave behind no trace.

Emerson On Hafiz

That hardihood and self-equality of every sound nature, which result from the feeling that the spirit in him is entire and as good as the world, which entitle the poet to speak with authority, and make him an object of interest and his every phrase and syllable significant, are in Hafiz, and abundantly fortify and ennoble his tone.

The other merit of Hafiz is his intellectual liberty, which is a certificate of profound thought. We accept the religions and politics into which we fall, and it is only a few delicate spirits who are sufficient to see that the whole web of convention is the imbecility of those whom it entangles,--that the mind suffers no religion and no empire but its own. It indicates this respect to absolute truth by the use it makes of the symbols that are most stable and reverend, and therefore is always provoking the accusation if irreligion.

His complete intellectual emancipation he communicates to the reader. There is no example of such facility of allusion, such use of all materials. Nothing is too high, nothing too low for his occasion. He fears nothing, he stops for nothing. Love is a leveller, and Allah becomes a groom, and heaven a closet, in his daring hymns to his mistress or to his cupbearer. This boundless charter is the right of genius.

...the love or the wine of Hafiz is not to be confounded with vulgar debauch. It is the spirit in which the song is written that imports, and not the topics. Hafiz praises wine, roses, maidens, boys, birds, mornings and music, to give vent to his immense hilarity and sympathy with every form of beauty and joy; and lays the emphasis on these to mark his scorn of sanctimony and base prudence. But it is the play of wit and the joy of song that he loves; and if you mistake him for a low rioter, he turns short on you with verses which express the poverty of sensual joys, and to ejaculate with equal fire the most unpalatable affirmations of heroic sentiment and contempt for the world.

From the essay Persian Poetry.

Hafez Is My Spirit Animal

The simple fact of the matter is that it is very difficult--and often unwise--to stare steadily into the sun without blinking.

Camus was among the few who could do so, and his The Myth of Sisyphus is a sustained meditation on how and why one should do it.

By my junior year in high school, I appreciated the problem: the lack of fit between our hopes and desires for our lives and the brute fact that the universe cares not a whit about us or them. That is when, quite by accident, I discovered Kierkegaard. And it was Kierkegaard who assured me that that very lack of fit (what Camus called the absurd) was to be embraced: for in its embrace one discovers what he called Eternity or the Infinite. "The reason that you find it so difficult to keep from blinking," he reasoned, "is that you long for the Truth and blinking is how you find it." SK's assurances were like a lifeline thrown to a drowning man and I clutched it, hoping to be pulled to shore.

In my senior year, I first read Camus's Sisyphus, where he coolly explained to me that the lifeline Kierkegaard had tossed my way was illusory or, as he put it, "philosophical suicide." For the next several years I read and re-read Camus, hoping to find the chink in his armor, the fallacy in his argument. I remember how I would pick up the book, read a few pages, and then put it down in frustration. Damn you, Camus!

A dozen years later, I read Wittgenstein's matter-of-fact description of philosophical suicide: how the chain of justifications eventually comes to an end, our spade hits bedrock and is turned, and we say, "This is simply what I do."

Unlike Kierkegaard's argument, Wittgenstein's account of the process by which one runs out of excuses was not a justification of that human, all-too-human, response: "This is simply what I do." It was coldly descriptive. He did not advise his reader to continue to behave in that way, nor to cease from doing so. The choice belonged to the individual.

This, too, is a form of staring into the sun; this, too, is difficult.

A few years later, I read Ghazali's spiritual autobiography in which he makes an argument that is similar to Kierkegaard's, only he knew better than to try to make a virtue out of necessity. Ghazali did not try to claim that anything can be gained by embracing the absurd--much less everything. He simply asserted that we must live with the absurd, hoping and praying that God would intervene with ma'rifa or divine insight (gnosis). When that day arrives (as, he claimed, it had arrived for him) then the heart knows with certainty that "my Redeemer liveth."

Camus would assent to Ghazali's reasoning; he would not, however, claim that he had been privileged with gnosis. His integrity resides in his essential honesty.

Even so, Hafez strikes me as the sanest of them all:

Ah, God forbid that I relinquish wine
When roses are in season;
How could I do this when I'm someone who
Makes such a show of Reason?

Where's a musician, so that I can give
The profit I once found
In self-control and knowledge for a flute's songs,
And a lute's sweet sound?

The endless arguments within the schools--
Whatever they might prove--
Sickened my heart; I'll give a little time
To wine now, and to love.

Where is the shining messenger of dawn
That I might now complain
To my good fortune's harbinger of this
Long night of lonely pain?

But when did time keep faith with anyone?
Bring wine, and I'll recall
The tales of kings, of Jamshid and Kavus,
And how time took them all.

I'm not afraid of sins recorded in
My name--I'll roll away
A hundred such accounts, by His benevolence
And grace, on Judgment Day.

This lent soul, that the Friend once gave into
Hafez's care, I'll place
Within His hands again, on that day when
I see Him face to face.

[Tr. Dick Davis].

Do Not Despair

Lost Joseph will return to Canaan's land again
--do not despair
His grieving father's house will fill with flowers again
--do not despair

O sorrow-stricken heart, your fortunes will revive,
Order will come to your distracted mind again
--do not despair

And if the heavens turn against us for two days
They turn, and will not stay forever in one place
--do not despair

Sweet singing bird, survive until the spring, and then
You'll tread on grass again, deep in the flowers' shade
--do not despair

Don't give up hope, you have no knowledge of Fate's lore;
Behind the veil who knows what hidden turns still wait?
--do not despair

When, if you long to tread the pilgrims' desert trail
To Mecca's distant shrine, sharp thorns beset your path
--do not despair

For God, who solves all sorrows, knows the sorrows of
Our absence and desire, the guardian's scornful rage
--do not despair

O heart, if nothingness should wash away the world,
Since Noah guides your craft, when you encounter storms
--do not despair

And though the journey's filled with dangers, and its goal
Is all unknown, there is no road that has no end
--do not despair

O Hafez, in night's darkness, alone, in poverty,
While the Qur'an remains to you, and murmured prayer
--do not despair

[Tr. Dick Davis]

Camus's Humanism

The Algerian coast in the unrelenting sun:

Humanism as Camus envisions and lives it prizes lucidity rather than faith: facing the human situation in the world nakedly, without appeal to any of the overarching structures of meaning with which our faith-interpretations clothe the world. Lucidity is a decision, a choice, as is faith. But it is the only choice available to persons who can neither conscientiously invest themselves in what Nietzsche would have called our "human, all-too-human" attempts to go beyond tangible certainties and rationalize our life in the world, nor despair of that life by committing suicide.

James Woelfel, Camus: A Theological Perspective (1975), 60-61.

An Act of Lucidity Like An Act Of Faith

What can one say about Camus's conflicted relationship with Algeria? Books have been written on the subject, but some problems seem to defy analysis. His early essay, "Summer in Algiers," is as beautiful as it is, well, misleading. Who are these Algerians he describes? One assumes that Camus intended the Pied-Noirs--the working class French settlers that he came from. In some ways, they are like Tolstoy's peasants minus the inculcated superstitions of organized religion. Unselfconscious, at home in their bodies and in the sun-drenched land, content with the limited offerings of their lives. One can imagine that some of the Pied-Noirs fit that description. But all of the them? And what of the Muslim Arabs and Berbers--the indigenous people of the land? What were they like? It is frankly bizarre that Camus's descriptions of life in Algeria somehow escape the punctuating call of the muezzin. His "Arabs"--a term he appears to use simply to mean the non-settler "natives"--move like dumb shadows across the landscape. For all practical purposes, they do not exist.

And yet, I have often speculated that some sort of symbiosis must have occurred between the working class French and Algeria's dispossessed. How could it not? Even in the segregated southern states of the old Confederacy there was a degree of mixing among white and black sharecroppers. Occupation of the lower social rungs offers that minor freedom.

Camus's apparent silence on this count is deafening--and so I wonder if we have not misread him. Then again, perhaps not. In another essay published in the same collection with "Summer in Algiers," Camus wrote:

But it can happen that when he reaches a certain degree of lucidity a man feels his heart is closed, and without protest or rebellion turns his back on what up to then he had taken for his life, that is to say, his restlessness. If Rimbaud dies in Abyssinia without having written a single line, it is not because he prefers adventure or has renounced literature. It is because "that's how things are," and because when we reach a certain stage of awareness we finally acknowledge something which each of us, according to our particular vocation, seeks not to understand. (Albert Camus, "The Desert").

If these sentences apply to Camus's conflicted relationship with Algeria, they may supply us with a possible explanation for his relative silence on the daily lives of the indigenous people of the land: for once he had reached the level of lucidity he required to carry on his own daily life, he felt that he had gone as far as he could--or needed to. For him, his lucidity; for them, theirs. (Qur'an 109:6).

Back to Beauty...

You Have To See This Mesmerizing Town In Morocco Covered In Blue Paint

"Knowledge As Lucidity"

An essay on Camus's answer to Descartes.

We Come Here Seeking Refuge

We haven't traveled to this door
For wealth or mastery,
We come here seeking refuge from
Misfortune's misery.

And we have journeyed all this way,
Fleeing the confines of
Our Nothingness to seek out Being
Along the path of love;

From heaven's orchards we have seen
The springtime of your face,
We traveled here from paradise
To seek this herb of grace--

For all the treasures of Gabriel
Kept in store for us there,
We've traveled to our Sovereign's door
Like beggars in despair.

O Holy Ship of Blessings, where
Is Your strong anchor found?
In sinfulness, within this sea
Of mercy, we are drowned!

Our good name's gone...cover our sins,
Kind Cloud of Grace--we bring
A blackened record with us to
The precincts of our King.

Hafez, cast off this Sufi cloak
And all it signifies--
We've followed here the camel-train
With ardent, fiery sighs.

[Tr. Dick Davis].

I Saw the Green Fields of the Sky

I saw the green fields of the sky,
and there a sickle moon--
I reckoned what I'd sown, and thought,
"The harvest will come soon."

I said, "My luck, you've been asleep;
now dawn has brought the sun."
She said, "The past is past; do not
despair of all you've done;

The night you leave this world, go, climb
like Jesus through the skies--
Your lamp, a hundred times, will light
the sun as you arise.

Don't trust the shining moon, she is
the highway robber who
Stole Kay Kavus's throne, and then
the belt of Khosrow too.

Gold earrings set with rubies may
charm you, and lead you on,
But know this: Beauty's reign is brief,
and all too quickly gone."

God keep the evil eye from your
sweet beauty, which can field
A pawn to make the sun and moon
precipitously yield.

Say to the heavens, "Don't boast of splendor!"
When love is matched with you,
The harvest of the moon's a grain,
and of the stars but two.

Hypocrisy will burn the harvest
religion reaped; and so,
Hafez, shrug off this sufi cloak--
just leave now, let it go.

[Tr. Dick Davis].

Alternative Modes of Piety

The Mazeppist has examined "Jobean Piety" in past installments and related it to what the mid-20th century Orientalist Hellmut Ritter termed "Muslim mystics' strife with God" (use the search feature to find those posts). A powerful expression of this mode of piety may be found in Montesquieu's Persian Letter # 161. The letter itself was not composed by Montesquieu to be read in this way, but he long ago passed into the Great Beyond and, as a result, is helpless to stop my appropriation of it.

Two paragraphs in particular stand out. Imagine, if you will, a Jobean (Ayoubean) Dervish addressing God:

How could you have thought me credulous enough to imagine that I was in the world only in order to worship your caprices? that while you allowed yourself everything, you had the right to thwart all my desires? No: I may have lived in servitude, but I have always been free. I have amended your laws according to the laws of nature, and my mind has always remained independent.

You should even be grateful to me for the sacrifice that I made on your account, for having demeaned myself so far as to seem faithful to you, for having had the cowardice to guard in my heart something that I ought to have revealed to the whole earth, and finally for having profaned the name of virtue by permitting it to be applied to my acceptance of your whims.

Yes, to conventional piety, these lines addressed to God would be viewed as the height of impudence and impiety. But Ayoubean Dervish piety is not conventional. It displays the Abrahamic intimacy with the Divine that permits such a lover's quarrel, not the slavish versions of Abrahamic religion that would forbid it.

Hafezian Piety

That you're a pious prig by nature
Doesn't mean you have to blame
Libertines for their faults; those sins
Won't be imputed to your name.

Each of us will reap the seeds
He sows, so what is it to you
Whether I'm good or bad? To work on who
You are should be your aim.

Everyone searches for the Friend,
Whether they're drunk or stone-cold sober.
And love's in every house--the mosque
And synagogue are just the same.

I bow my head in worship on the bricks
That form the wine-shop's threshold;
And if that blockhead doesn't get it, then
It's him who is to blame!

Don't sadden me with tales of providence
And God's eternal promise--
What do you know of who, behind the veil,
Can boast of beauty's name?

It's not just me who's wandered out
Of lonely Piety's front door;
My father let his chance of heaven's grace
Elude him; I'm the same.

If this is who you are, the nature
You were given, then bravo!
And good for you if your fine character's
Exactly as you claim!

O Hafez, on the last day, if you bear
A wine-cup in your hand,
You'll go straight into heaven from the street
Of drunkenness and shame.

[Tr. Dick Davis].

The Test of a First-Rate Intelligence

Even the best of Orientalists can be awfully tiresome. Here is Edward G. Browne writing on the challenge of interpreting Hafez:

"That many of the odes are to be taken in a symbolic and mystical sense few will deny; that others mean what they say, and celebrate a beauty not celestial and a wine not allegorical can hardly be questioned; that the spiritual and the material should...be thus mingled will not surprise any one who understands the character, psychology and Weltanschauung of the people of Persia, where it is common enough to meet with persons who in the course of a single day will alternately present themselves as pious Muslims, heedless libertines, confirmed sceptics and mystical pantheists, or even incarnations of the Diety" [Browne, A Literary History of Persia, vol. III (1902), 299].

Browne here succeeds in painting an entire people as...what? Inconsistent? Is that the charge? Or, perhaps, he means that they are "colorful"--as "Orientals" so often appear to be (in the eyes of Orientalists).

My first response is to quote Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." But even that does not quite capture my objection to Browne's ungracious (not to say bizarre) characterization of a people among whom he lived and from whom he benefited enormously.

The fact of the matter is that Browne, like so many of his Orientalist brethren, possessed a religious imagination stunted by Pauline Christianity: he simply could not conceive of the possibility that human beings might live fully in the flesh and in the spirit and that this sort of "well-rounded" existence constituted a perfectly legitimate life of piety. And since he was incapable of conceiving of piety in this way, it was necessarily exotic and just not right.

So, my second response is to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald: "...the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function" [Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, edited by Edmund Wilson, New York: New Directions Books (1945), 69].

Hafez passed that test; Edward Browne, despite his many scholarly skills and accomplishments, fell short--at least when it came to making sense of Hafezian Islam.

The World, the Flesh, and the Holy

Being That Can Be Understood Is Language

Rorty on Gadamer.