Yet the Sufis did not build institutions, and they did not teach anyone who happened to claim interest. They taught, and teach, only those who have the capacity to learn. For such people, studies are individually prescribed. All the same, it is useful to try to sketch the general form of such a teaching, insofar as it can be addressed in language and from the outside. First, since at its core is an experience of revelation (rather than a notion, text, or set of rituals), the Sufis have no institution; they have no dogma, fixed theology, inflexible rules, holy scriptures, system of reward and punishments, clerics, or claims of a right to punish others for their beliefs. In place of all this, they have a teaching, and the teaching is carried out by any way that works; say, by stories, proverbs, conversation, the making of art or the design of a wall of tiles, an essay or an ecstatic utterance. It is even carried out by means of specially crafted jokes, which teach us something about the way our minds work.
The aim of the teaching is to transform the self, by means of love, so as to know a living reality present on earth in its full beauty and permanence. In such a transformation, love and knowledge come together, and a person can thereafter be of the most timely, secret, and fabulous help to others, and to life itself.
If the aim is self-transformation, then a student should have an idea of whether his mind, or her mind, is contaminated by pride, greed, or self-esteem. And so one straightforward approach of Sufi teaching is to provide the means to assess the state of one’s mind.
But rather than offer summary statements, it makes sense to offer some real examples of this teaching, so let’s begin with the jokes. How about this one, from the collection of stories about the legendary Nasrudin:
The king sent a private mission around the countryside to find a modest man who could be appointed as a judge. Nasrudin got wind of it.
When the delegation, posing as travelers, called on him, they found that he had a fishing net draped over his shoulders.
“Why, pray,” one of the them asked, “do you wear that net?”
“Merely to remind myself of my humble origins, for I was once a fisherman.”
Nasrudin was appointed judge on the strength of this noble sentiment.
Visiting his court one day, one of the officials who had first seen him asked, “What happened to your net, Nasrudin?”
“There is no need of a net, surely,” he replied, “once the fish has been caught.”
Many of the jokes in this tradition are like this, always ready to point out hypocrisy or manipulation, always ready to show events and people for what they are, rather than how they are imagined to be, and, especially, how they imagine themselves to be.
The history of Sufi proverbs and short declarations is the most surprising and useful that I have ever come across. These sayings are easily retained in the mind. Their range is remarkable. They delight us but also make us think by, for example, recommending virtues, like gratitude, that we take for granted, as in:
Call yourself unlucky only if you take up coffin making and people stop dying.
Or they refer with bemusement to something permanent in us, to a potential to do work which is at once practical and transcendent:
If you do not want to be dismissed, do not take over a post that will not always be yours.
Light is often a metaphor in this tradition: both the light of the earth, and another, animating light that sustains us beyond all explanations:
There is a light deposited in hearts that is nourished by the light coming from the treasuries of invisible realms.
And all such labors are meant to find what is essential in us, to turn back from our common idiocies, so that we may be ready for a living reality. It’s as if the world answers us to exactly the extent that we are prepared. When we are ready to understand, and only then, may our perceptions deepen and progress, and that reality show itself on earth:
How can the laws of nature be ruptured for you, so that miracles result, while you, for your part, have yet to rupture your bad habits?
But in the meantime, as we are learning, we can understand only with correct preparation and with the right timing and company. Without such advantages, we may focus only on ourselves, on reward and expectation, on our own gain. This need for another way of work is the subject of a beautiful declaration of an eighth-century Sufi, a woman named Rabia:
I will not serve God like a laborer, in expectation of my wages.
And if we do not learn, then what we seem to be, what we make of ourselves in this life, with all its adornments, customs, and demands, will take us over, until there is little left of us:
If you do not shave the beard, it will not be long before it is pretending to be your head.
This is a short tour of Sufi proverbs and is meant to give the merest savor of the rich materials on offer in the writings of this accomplished group.
Let’s finish this sampling by quoting one of the most famous stories of the Sufis, one that turns up throughout Western culture, so that it has become a shorthand way to refer to a problem in thinking, and its solution. It is the story of the elephant in the dark, here quoted in the version published by the extraordinary Sufi scholar and writer Idries Shah.
THE BLIND ONES AND THE MATTER OF THE ELEPHANT
Beyond Ghor there was city. All its inhabitants were blind. A king with his entourage arrived nearby; he brought his army and camped in the desert. He had a mighty elephant, which he used in attack and to increase the people’s awe.
The populace became anxious to see the elephant, and some sightless from among this blind community ran like fools to find it.
As they did not even know the form or shape of the elephant, they groped sightlessly, gathering information by touching some part of it.
Each thought he knew something, because he could feel a part.
When they returned to their fellow citizens, eager groups clustered around them. Each of these was anxious, misguidedly, to learn the truth from those who were themselves astray.
They were asked about the form, the shape of the elephant, and listened to all they were told.
The man whose hand had reached an ear was asked about the elephant’s nature. He said: “It is a large, rough thing, wide and broad, like a rug.”
And the one who had felt the trunk said: “It is mighty and firm, like a pillar.”
Each had felt one part out of many. Each had perceived it wrongly. No mind knew all: Knowledge is not the companion of the blind. All imagined something, something incorrect.
The created is not informed about divinity. There is no Way in this science by means of the ordinary intellect.
This beautiful story, taken from a twelfth-century version by the Afghan poet Hakim Sanai, one finds in all kinds of forums today: in newspapers, in university studies, in books about the brain. It portrays the way we deal with the parts of a problem, rather than seeing it as an integrated whole, for what it really is. And the story has whole other ranges of meaning, like most of the stories in the Sufi tradition.
Once a person has completed the studies prescribed as being most useful to her, then she may go forth into a life that may be apparently unchanged but is fundamentally transformed. Any so-called school she might have attended as part of her learning is then disbanded: “The workshop is dismantled when the work is done.”
One central aim of Sufi work, then, as taught by Ibn El-Arabi, Idries Shah, and other men and women through the centuries, is to lead a student to meet herself, or himself, as in the saying: “He who knows himself knows his God.” Or as said one of Ibn El-Arabi’s teachers, a man who was accompanied by an angel: “Reckon with yourself before you are brought to the Reckoning.”
In all this, the Sufis insist, throughout the centuries, on the distinction between the literal and the figurative, between container and content, appearance and reality. It is a spiritual practice that sees literal-mindedness as a mortal failing akin to idolatry. Closely allied is their idea of virtue: rather than being the end point of spir
itual development, the development of personal virtues such as honesty, generosity, or humility is seen as the bare, modest beginning, the essential baby steps. Virtues are not valuable in themselves, and they are a mortal handicap when they become a basis for pride. Instead, they are instrumental, a means of traveling to the next stage of knowledge.
The same is true with beauty: it is not thought to be reality, but the beginning of reality, an experience meant as a pathway we follow to prepare ourselves for a much more powerful experience.
THIS BRIEF EXCURSION among the writings of the Sufis and their Andalusian champion Ibn El-Arabi takes us back to the walls of tiles in the Alhambra. For the work of the Sufis and the work of the tile design are at once practical and transcendental. They bring beauty into our days but open for us a way to another life that is, in the ancient phrase, “Undone from self but alive to love.” That is, we are called to a life in which treasures of understanding are offered to our hands the moment we can be entrusted with them. We live in a world today when such possibilities are discredited when they are not ridiculed, or just wholly dismissed out of hand. Love is sentiment now, and not a resurgence of soul that remakes a life.
But like Al-Andalus, the beauty and power of the ceramic tiles is being rediscovered. And so is the work of the Sufis. It makes one think that even in the darkness of our times, any of us might have a chance to discover that a secret and powerful labor of helpfulness and goodwill goes on all around us. It is a labor that speaks to us of light as a preternatural offering to life. It is a teaching that holds transfiguration to be a natural heritage of the mind.
On Flamenco, Poetry, Genius, and Murder
OUR DAYS IN the Albayzín had many parts: our grapevine and books; the centuries of design intelligence within the layout of the streets; the play of light along the narrow lanes; the incorrigible good nature of our neighbors; Gabriella’s superb preschool in the barrio; the Arab bakery; the wonderful newsstands in Plaza Nueva, which even sell on occasion the books of Gabriel García Márquez and Dante; the persimmons and pomegranates and figs from our trees; and the tomatoes, basil, and rosemary from our vegetable garden. We even went so far as to cure our own olives. Our first year’s effort came out tasting like mildewed cardboard mush that would have disgraced a toxic waste dump. The second year’s batch was memorably delicious. It made us feel as if we might still be capable of learning.
Gradually, over the months and years, the parts of our experience gathered force and began to make a whole beauty, one with a strange spectrum of effects. It was more than the hot spring Andalusian light on the honeysuckle vine, or the waft of orange blossoms through the rooms of the house, or the soaring of the swifts every morning in their fantastical acrobatics. Such delights held the sensuality of the Albayzín at a high pitch. Beyond the sensuality, the history and poetry natural to the place, and the role of Granada as a magnetic center of events with the most far-reaching consequences, played upon our minds and became centermost in our musing. It was as if the neighborhood brought body and mind together, as if the each day formed a lens, and we could see before us a strange fortune. We were being drawn irrevocably into life in the Albayzín, and the joy of it was beyond anything I could have conjured. I simply had never been in a place of such tough, enveloping beauty, and I began to think that the Albayzín had some hidden power, that against all the odds it had been able to deflect the darkness and terror seething in the history of Granada, that it had suffered near devastation, but through some genius for survival, some singular life force, it had risen again with its hidden traditions and raucous energies.
We came to understand, in part, how such a thriving might be possible because of flamenco. It is the classic music of Granada and of Andalusia, and we had a lively interest in the art, though we in fact knew little of it. Less than little: to call us rank beginners would be to lavish praise upon us. But we devoutly wanted to hear some good flamenco, so we embarked upon our research using the time-honored method of asking questions in bars. One gentlemen, in the district of the Realejo, just near the centro, told us that at a certain theater that very night we might hear some flamenco puro. We straightaway bought tickets and sat down in a cavernous performance hall that was sparsely inhabited. Upon the stage was nothing but two chairs and microphones. Now and then a thickset man would come and go, repositioning the chairs, testing the microphones—obviously a technician. He was the very image of someone who, in the United States, would drive a big truck. He walked ponderously to and fro, as the time for the performance came and went. The stage was empty. The lights in the performance hall were brightly lit. We wondered what was going on. The same man appeared again, sat down on one of the chairs, and looked into the distance. We thought perhaps technical difficulties had overcome him, and the show as well.
Then the lights went down suddenly, and we realized the thickset gentleman had nothing to do with trucks. He began to sing. I remember the fine hair on Lucy’s arm standing on end, and my own shock at his unreserved, fierce, resonant voice. He sang one song, then another, each of them with scorching virtuosity, an independent, cut-loose ferocity. He was present with us but in a world of his own, made of his voice. We had never heard anything like it in our lives. We gripped tightly our chairs. The singer would hold a note until he had ripped it to pieces. There were prolonged and aggressive battles with single lines in the song. Sometimes a verse would be repeated until it was a rough, hypnotic induction, with singer and audience bound together in trance. The intonation was harsh, then melodious, sometimes a cry, sometimes a growl or snarl. There were notes of purest exaltation and of convulsive bitterness. I thought: a man soaring into a religious vision … then, two minutes later, no, a man slaughtered by anguish. Now and again I had the most absurd reflections, such as: Isn’t there supposed to be a dancer? A swarthy woman in a fluffy dress? What was going on? But such curiosities were blown straight out of my head by the unabated force of the songs. After four or five numbers, another man walked out with a guitar, took the remaining chair, and began to play for the next song. They performed together the rest of the evening. Their coordination was lively, subtle, precise, and beautiful. Some invisible communication, rich and life-giving, passed continuously between them. We tried to follow where they led us, and it was a rough territory of love and death, which could only be traversed with a music of deep remembrance and release. Then they were done and stood to acknowledge the audience and to salute one another, and they were gone, as if whisked away into shadows only they could see.
Lucy and I had walked into the concert hall as one couple and left as another, transformed by the raw force of an art we hardly knew existed. It was as if a blasting cap had gone off in us, and the encounter with flamenco led us back to the Albayzín, which turned out to have a most lively flamenco tradition of its own. Though we did not know it at the time, flamenco would come to mark our months and years in Granada, to answer our questions, reshape our minds, and introduce us to an art whose survival was just like the survival of the Albayzín: the music, like the place, just could not be killed.
We sought out flamenco puro whenever we could. The commercial flamenco in Granada is like commercial adaptation everywhere: the current of life has been extinguished. But the authentic tradition holds its strength, and we had exultant evenings in Granada as the music wove itself into our lives. Every now and then, late in the night, listening to one of Andalusia’s prodigiously gifted singers, in the dark room the hair would rise on the back of our necks, and we would be caught up in some uncanny transport of mind, a riptide and release of emotion. A whisper would go around the room … “¡El duende, es el duende!” There is no way to talk about flamenco without talking about duende. This word, which has no equivalent in English, is bound up with music and poetry, with physical passion and incendiary soul, and, most of all, with Andalusia. It is so complex and marvelous a quality that early in the twentieth century, only one person was willing to take a crack at an extended definition. Of course he is
from Granada, and of course he is the poet Federico García Lorca.
In 1933, in Argentina, Lorca presented a lecture called “The Theory and Play of the Duende,” a title that must have baffled the audience, since duende, in the dictionary, means “an elf or mischievous goblin” or “a mysterious and ineffable charm.” Lorca, of course, had a different idea. He wanted to use the notion of duende to reorganize the aesthetics of the Western world. Perhaps of the whole world. To read the lecture is like riding a rocket of concepts; you have to hang on tight. But it is writing based on Lorca’s immersion in flamenco and his rich concord with the art. And it has all the poet’s dark, natural ebullience.
So let’s ride: Lorca wants to address the creation of art and the art of creation, principally in music, poetry, and dance. We have in our history, he says, counted on two sources of support and revelation: either an angel or a muse. The angel, messenger of heaven, is a guide and a gift-giver, a defender and savior, prophet and bearer of proclamation. He visits from another world, comes to dazzle the man or woman at work, and delivers a grace so trustworthy that the worker becomes the natural agent of an irresistible power. The art needed comes forth fully illuminated, in its beauties, with the savor of a divine visitation.
The muse is the ancient and traditional guide of the worker in the arts, and she appears to those with a readiness of mind and spirit, after long labor. She has an implacable and demanding beauty. Lorca tells us he has seen her twice, which qualifies him for a report and a critique. The muse can suggest, provoke, and inspire irrevocably. She fires the intelligence with a radiant and penetrating spirit. The risk is that she may dominate and devour the artist. But there is another grave risk, according to Lorca. The real risk is that such intelligence will restrict and distort poetry and lock poems in a style that is no more than “aristocratic finery.”
Having given us the angel and muse, Lorca turns to his real subject, the third great source of creation, the duende, which he finds throughout history but identifies with Spain and with Andalusia. Unlike the angel and muse, who come from without, duende lives within, a primordial force bound with blood and death and earth. Reject the angel, he recommends, and give the muse a boot out the door. And come to life in the struggle with duende, a struggle that will leave a wound that will never heal, a wound that opens onto creation itself. It frees a force of earth that surges in the blood, shakes us to the core, and acts upon us like wind on sand, like a storm on the sea. It is both incandescent sorrow and communion with God. It leads its possessor beyond form to the source of form, and beyond style and artifice to a suffering that bears us to clarity. And to a state of life where our senses become a work of the earth, where creation and action are the same. Late in his fierce essay, turning to the presence in poetry of duende, Lorca gives us this tender paragraph:
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