Time Pressure...

III.

“And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before

The Tavern shouted – ‘Open then the Door!

You know how little while we have to stay,

And, once departed, may return no more.”

By verse number three we hit the central concern of the poem: time is short; don’t waste any of it. We also catch the brimstone tinge of heresy that dogged Omar all his adult life: the idea that there isn’t any life after this one; that this is all there is.

This is a topic that is possibly overstated somewhat by FitzGerald in his translation and may not have been quite so evident in the original Persian; still, there’s no smoke without fire, and so Omar may well have been treading a fine line.

We know that Omar was drawn to Sufism, the mystical interpretation of Islam which has been allowed to flourish and has then been persecuted, off and on, over the years. A central notion of the Sufi worldview is that one’s personal relationship with the divine (i.e., God) should be akin to being ecstatically in love. Given this, being alive is a gift from Allah, as is the miracle of Creation, and so the proper conduct of the Faithful should be joyful wonder and gratitude for the fact of being alive in the world.

Sufi literature (apart from Omar’s writings) is full of references to “the Beloved”, and to roses and to being intoxicated (something disallowed by Islamic law). This is all code for this notion of ecstatic love and is not to be taken as literal. Even in Omar’s rubaiyat, the concept of another beloved individual, to whom Omar addresses his thoughts, should not be taken at face value: the Beloved, is Allah, the God of the poet. Except, of course, when it’s not.

Again, reading the translation by FitzGerald (or anyone else), we need not necessarily read a divine symbolism into the work; certainly Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the rest of the Pre-Raphaelites didn’t read it anything other than literally.

Along with all this “passionate romance”, there is the dubious notion of intoxication. Islam frowns upon alcohol so the notion of wine and of drinking rings strangely in a Moslem text. Of course, wine and its effects were not unknown to Islamic cultures and certain dynasties, whilst nominally true to the Faith, condoned drinking wine regardless. Obviously not the society in which Omar was writing.

In his verse, wine is again a code for various intangibles: it is the spirit which animates the mortal frame; it is agency through which knowledge of the Divine is revealed; and it is the presence of Allah which promotes ecstatic love of God. Intoxication therefore, is equated with the passionate relationship which the faithful have with the Divine. Sufi dervishes in Turkey dance themselves into trance states to achieve this altered state of consciousness, and many Islamic texts claim that insanity is a result of direct action upon the afflicted by God – literally the touch of the Divine.

Throughout the Rubaiyat, there are references to railing Sufis, and drunken scholars seeking after wisdom. There is a tension between FitzGerald’s take on this imagery (and he was learned enough to know the symbolic nature of his sources) and what Omar intended. For the reader, this layering of meaning makes the whole poem that much more fascinating.