That memory Ḥāfiẓ keeps in mind – or rather preserves ‘in heart’ – is not only the remembrance of the radiant beauty witnessed by mankind on that fateful day of pre-Eternity (Alast), not only the mystery of the Beloved’s epiphany and the retention of the covenant sealed then, it is the ready acceptance on the part of the lover to suffer for the sake of that primordial covenant the pain of alienation and exile in this lower realm, acquiescing to the sorrows and woes that will polish his heart and transform him into a perfect mirror reflecting the countenance of Beauty. Pain is the instrument of annihilation that burns up the ego of the lover and renders him selfless, and it is his selflessness that makes him susceptible to the ravishment of love. Hence pain and love are inseparable companions.39 Where Ḥāfiẓ quips that ‘At first Love appeared so simple but then hardships came up’ (ki ‘ishq āsūn namūd avval, valī āftād mushkilhā) in the very first opening line of the Dīvān, Taqī Purnāmdāriān wisely reminds us that:
The word ‘at first’ [avval], transports us back to a beginningless beginning into a meta-history and to the event of the covenant of pre-Eternity [mīthāq-i alast] that is at once the fons et origo of mankind’s love for God and the commencement of man’s never-ending exile from the beloved through separation and his bootless entanglement in all the gruelling pains and hardships borne of love.40
This, indeed, is exactly the gist of Ḥāfiẓ’s verse:
Though Ḥāfiẓ be lost and gone, he has
as yet an intimate tie of oneness
With grief and sufferance in love – soulmate,
By grace of that ancient covenant.41
Not incidentally, in the Savāniḥ this same dialectic of grief and love appears as an all-pervasive theme, where Ghazālī employs violent images to depict and justify the Beloved’s cruelty. In one place, Ghazālī remarks: ‘Love is a devourer of men; it consumes men, such that nothing else remains.’42 The function of love’s grief (gham) in the religion of love in Persian literature needs to be understood in exactly this sense, for gham serves not only to keep desire alive but also to burn away the selfhood of the lover, to ravish and deprive him of all that is not the Beloved.43 It is for this reason that the missive of love’s joy and delight can only be composed and dispatched to the poet when all the wherewithal of delight (all means by which the heart is delighted: asbāb-i dil-i khurram) had been crossed out and dissolved by the ravages of love’s grief (ghazal 148, v. 7). At that point, viewed from the higher standpoint of the Reality of love’s grief – ‘the Mt Rubwa of Love’ as Rūmī calls it44 – can he again reflect in his heart the lost image: the icon of beauty.
Beloved and Lover, Beauty and Love
Apparently, the addressee of Ḥāfiẓ’s Poem of Pre-Eternity is a ‘you’ that never appears as such, except in two possessive enclitics45 and in two pronouns used as possessives.46 ‘You’ is never the subject of any verb. But some aspects of this ‘you’ become active in a rather intensive way: to ‘you’ belongs ‘a ray of your beauty’, ‘love’, ‘face’, ‘the lightning bolt of jealous wrath’, and the invisible hand which from the Arcanum that lashes out. The end-rhyme phrase zad, repeated at the end of each couplet of this ghazal, is the third-person past tense singular of the verb zadan (to strike, to hit), and each time the verb is repeated, one senses from the rhyme word an element of violence either visual or physical. The anonymous ‘you’ of the poem manifests her- or himself in two different modes of action: either through dazzling radiance and light or through violence and rejection. The jealousy, exclusivity and cruelty of the Beloved are cast into relief by all the poem’s verbs. Of course, Ḥāfiẓ is here consciously playing on the classical theme of the cruelly aloof and exclusive Beloved, who rejects her lover and hides herself behind veils of fiery splendour or shadowy darkness. In the context of the theme of the psycho-spiritual polarity of Love and Reason (‘ishq va ‘aql) in the Sufi tradition, it may be argued that reason (‘aql) in v. 3a and the impostor (mudda’ī) in v. 4a are actually interior aspects of the lover’s personality. Deep within the soul lies the remembrance of a radiant beauty beheld on the day of pre-Eternity, but which, if beheld by the eyes of reason or with the pretension of a swollen ego, cannot be seen. That epiphany is simply too radiant to be grasped by the crude faculties of ratiocination, too sublime to be approached with a merely notional understanding typical of the empty humbug and vain claims made by the spiritually immature and undeveloped personality of the poseur – mudda’ī.
In this context, Khurramshāhī explains in his commentary on this ghazal that the word epiphany (tajallī) appears twice in the Qur’ān. In one, there is a reference to ‘Day of the Covenant’ (rūz-i i alast) in pre-Eternity (7:172), and in the other to the story about Moses and his quest for the beautific vision. Moses entreated God to show Himself to him. ‘Thou shalt not behold me’, came the reply, ‘but gaze upon the mountain and if it remain still, thou wilt see Me’. At which, God ‘manifested Himself’ in a blaze of epiphany (tajallī) to the mountain, which immediately ‘came crashing down’. Unable even through this indirect epiphany to tolerate the divine radiance – tajallī – ‘Moses fell down senseless’ (7:143).47 The key Qur’ānic term, which lends the poem its aesthetic tonality here, is tajallī. The term connotes a blinding light, a splendour and beauty that appears as pure omnipresent light. Just as the fiery nature of the experience of love dazzles the eye, so this light ravishes away the sight through its dazzling rays. The epiphany’s violence is a direct consequence of its intensity of being. The awe produced by this overwhelming, burning presence is perhaps one reason why Ḥāfiẓ does not address the ‘you’ directly in the poem – for other than the human soul who has attained to the higher degrees of love, direct access to Beauty and Love means annihilation for all mortal beings.
Nonetheless, so long as the soul inhabits the material realm, it senses the need to regain that lost vision of beauty, although this vision can only be absorbed and understood by stages, step by step. The role of poetry is to make possible such a gradual visionary ascension. Here we may recall the Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic, with its theory of intermediary luminosities and reflections intervening between the soul and vision of the Good. The soul’s eyes, which heretofore had been accustomed to sombre tenebrous shadows of the cave, can only behold the sunlight directly once they gradually divest and raise their benighted vision out from the surrounding murky chiaroscuro. Similarly, the beauty and the intricacies of love, as well as the beauty and subtleties of the poem itself,48 work as an introduction to the vision of beauty and the reality of love. The importance of vision is very often insisted upon by Ḥāfiẓ, who considers that beauty and love must be approached with the ‘right vision’ and ‘insight’ if their reality is to be contemplated, as he says:
Since you aren’t worthy of the side-glance
Of the Darling, don’t try for union. Looking directly
Into Jamshid’s cup doesn’t work for the blind.49
Jamshid’s cup (Jām-i Jam), a fabulous goblet which belonged to Jamshīd, a mythological king of the Pishdadian dynasty, was said to reflect the whole world, and in Persian poetry this cup symbolized the heart: a microcosm that reflects the macrocosm and the face of the Beloved. As such, it becomes the focus of contemplation. In another poem, the lover/poet relates an encounter with the ‘wise mage’ who ‘holds up a cup’ where, ‘full of joy and delight’, he contemplates ‘in that mirror, a hundred different kind of scenes’.50 In verses such as these, we apprehend that interior vision of the heart is the fundamental sense for the apprehension of truth and the acquisition of knowledge. Because the manifestation of truth is through beauty, the object of contemplation has to be the quintessence of beauty – that is, the Face of the Beloved, another microcosm which mirrors the macrocosm:
In Persian poetry, the Face is seen rightly only in the eye and spoken truly on the tongue of the poet through whom the lover discourses. The poet/lover seeks the Face, convinced that within him lies that �
��simple divine substance’. The search for the Face is then a penetration within the innermost self, through an outburst of ‘pure love’: the kind of love that witnesses the sign of the beauty of the Face outside the self.51
Juxtaposed to the lover/poet who possesses ‘inner vision’ and is thus capable of contemplation, as Aḥmad Ghazālī tells us,52 we have the ‘impostor’ (mudda‘ī, v. 4), who pretends to knowledge of things erotic, and though a stranger to love yet still wishes to witness the mystery of love and beauty. The term ‘scene of Mystery’ (tamāshāgah-i rāz) is literally the perspective from which the occult can be contemplated. Of course, not everybody is allowed access to that arcane locus of contemplation: neither the angels who are devoid of love, nor the false lover with his empty claims (mudda‘ī), who, according to Sufi tradition,53 is Satan himself, disregarding in his jealousy the apparition of the divine tajallī in Adam,54 yet still trying to gaze upon what is forbidden to him.
‘The stranger’ (nāmaḥram) in popular parlance is one who is not allowed to see a woman ‘unveiled’,55 who, if he does gaze upon her, deserves to be punished and spurned by society. The forbidden, veiled secret (rāz) referred to here is the beauty of the Beloved as it was once revealed to the human soul – before it was veiled and concealed from non-initiates.56 Beheld from this perspective, Ḥāfiẓ is not only merely he who remembers the secret of pre-Eternity, but also the custodian of that secret.57 As a faithful custodian, he knows that the secret cannot be divulged directly, but should be revealed only when suitably decked out in the veridical symbols and intricate subtleties of beautiful poetry. And, indeed, the reading of any of his ghazals is necessarily a mysterious process that brings up a myriad question. Who is speaking? To whom? Where? When? Which concepts do the images symbolize? Utter perplexity is part of the pleasure when reading a Persian ghazal in general, and a ghazal by Ḥāfiẓ in particular.58 The apparent disparity of the distiches enhances this feeling of a kind of nuclear aesthetics that lacks unity, giving the deceptive impression that these lines are but ‘orient pearls at random strung’.59 And yet there is unity, but in a very oblique way. In the same way as the primordial vision of beauty and the all-encompassing experience of love constitute the founding metaphysical principles of creation and the secret of the unity of being, aesthetically the same structure presides over the design of the ghazal: it seems complicated to the extreme, upside down, discombobulated, even chaotic like the visible world of multiplicity, but the underlying unifying thread to the paradoxical reality of love and beauty is always there. If, in the beginning, beauty was one, when it descended into this world it appeared in multiple forms:
On the day of Pre-Eternity, your Face in its glory
Broke through from behind the veil. All of these forms
Fell into the vast mirroring sea of imagination.60
Because of its multiple worldly forms, beauty cannot be contemplated as a unified whole, but has to be evoked in details: each detail of beauty in turn becomes an icon, a partial emblem indicative of its transcendent whole. The Beloved can actually never be described in totality (but can He/She be represented?), but only through classical and emblematic clichés such as the eye, the mole, the hair, the face, the lips... In the first chapter of his treatise on love, Aḥmad Ghazālī warns his reader that ‘the difference between objects of love is accidental and fortuitous’,61 and later he gives an essential clue to the understanding of the representation of beauty in the mystic ghazal:
In the realm of Imagination, sometimes Love manifests and reveals a sign of itself in some determined form, sometimes not. Sometimes it appears through the curl, sometimes through the down on the cheek, sometimes through the mole, sometimes through the stature, sometimes through the eye or through the eyebrow or through the coquettish glance, sometimes through the Beloved’s laugh and sometimes through His/Her rebuke. And each of these significations is a sign indicative of a different kind of quest within the lover’s soul.62
In our ghazal, though, Beauty is evoked mainly as a burning fire that is associated with pure light. The only physical details borrowed from the classical Persian poetic canon of beauty are the dimple (chāh-i zanakhdān-i tu: ‘the well within your sunken chin’) and the ‘tangled locks’, which suggest certain complications. Both these physical details stand in radical opposition to the theme of light, since the dimple-well and the tangled locks as images convey the idea of darkness and impenetrable gloom. In addition, the classical image is here reversed: usually the hair is used by the lover to pull himself out of the well,63 whereas here (uniquely in the whole Dīvān) it is used to descend into it, because ‘the higher celestial soul’, the very soul that had witnessed the apparition of beauty in the form of light, desires the sunken well, the dimple in the chin. Symbolically the soul then desires to descend so as to experience the dark side of beauty. Indeed, the beauty of the beloved can be classified into two major categories: luminescent and dark, corresponding to the polarity of divine attributes of Grace (luṭf) and Wrath (qahr).64 The opposition between these two is integral to the manifestation of human beauty, as in the poetic image juxtaposing the beloved’s ‘dark hair’ to her ‘shining face’, for example. The dark side of beauty in Persian poetry is associated with the night, and is represented by the hair, the mole (in certain cases) and the well-dimple, alluding to worldly complications and the material entanglements, the experience of which, nonetheless, causes the maturation of the lover’s personality on the path of love.65 In this verse (148, v. 6), the descent down to earth is presented as the higher soul’s hankering after contemplation of forms of beauty in the existential multiplicity of the world. One may also add that the image of the well in this verse immediately brings to mind the figure of Joseph of Egypt, exemplar par excellence of human beauty in Islam, whose imprisonment in the well at the hand of his jealous brothers symbolizes the terrestrial exile of the soul ‘too good and fair for the world’. Just as Joseph eventually emerges from the well and meets his brilliant destiny, so the higher soul, itself an expiration of the Creator’s breath of grace which has preserved something of its original divine beauty, after undergoing the long and painful journey of love, may come out of the well of the world and recover its memory. And, of course, this verse directly echoes the first line: for all started in time before time, in pre-Eternity (azal), at the time of the Covenant. Something happened then that caused the soul ‘to fall’ in love, that made it irrevocably decide to descend and acquiesce to its exile on earth and a life of pain and separation. So it came into the world, where it hankers after the forms of beauty that remind it of the formless beauty contemplated in azal and reflected in the forms of the ghazal.
The Book of The Joy of Love
Notwithstanding appearances, one of the major themes of the poem is the status of poetry in the process of remembrance. As we have already hinted, as is usually the case in ghazal poetry, the evocation of beauty is essentially visual. Beauty’s ‘ray’ and love’s ‘fire’ cannot by definition be directly grasped by reason or expressed in a discourse constructed according to the rules of logic. Any such attempt is doomed to be deconstructed by the powerful force of emotion. In matters of love, not only are reason and logic not teachers, but as ‘Aṭṭār says,66 following them leads to chaos. In order to contain the emotional tumult evoked by this experience and reflect the radiance of epiphany, another language must be found. If the purpose of the ghazal is to reflect and recreate the tumult raised by the experience of love,67 it is but natural that its expression should be highly visual because the source of the emotion of love is, from the beginning, a dazzling vision. It is then not surprising that one of the underlying principles of any lyric poetry is the visualization of reality, however abstract. According to Frye:
All poetic imagery seems to be founded on metaphor, but in the lyric, where the associative process is strongest and the ready-made descriptive phrases of ordinary prose furthest away, the unexpected or violent metaphor that is called catachresis has peculiar
importance. Much more frequently than any other genre does the lyric depend for its main effect on the fresh or surprising image, a fact which often gives rise to the illusion that such imagery is radically new or unconventional.68
The importance of catachresis in the ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ in general, and in this ghazal in particular, seems to be related to the violence of the experience of love. Actually, it is not just a way of putting things: the catachresis is here supposed to produce a vision and arouse a commotion that should provide a glimpse of what really happened on the day of alast and, thus, to liberate the memory of the soul. And yet, for all the vividness of the image, it always remains but an allusion.69 Each detail of beauty contributes to lift a veil, but, at the same time, the veil is never really lifted because the secret it conceals must not be told except by allusion.70 Images, visions and the words that relate them are used here with a specific sense as inner images mirrored in the poem, in the heart, in the soul. They are imaginal representations of a reality which can only be configured within the form and music of language. This is why the status of poetry is so paradoxical: it reveals and conceals, shows and hides at the same time:
This world and the next one too, are both
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 25