Delight not yourselves in the things of the world and its vain ornaments, neither set your hopes on them. Let your reliance be on the remembrance of God, the Most Exalted, the Most Great. He will, erelong, bring to naught all the things ye possess. Let Him be your fear, and forget not His covenant with you, and be not of them that are shut out as by a veil from Him.
(Bahá-u-lláh from The Summons of the Lord of Hosts – pages 202-03)
Role Clashes
The previous post made it clear that for women there was, and almost certainly still is, definitely a clash between the socially acceptable roles that they could inhabit without criticism and the ones of artistic creativity that were frowned upon.
It’s not just women of course who have a clash of this nature, but the burden does fall more heavily on them for sure. TS Eliot, as explained by Lyndall Gordon in The Hyacinth Girl, was in a similar situation:[1]
. . .[the] moral issue that will haunt him through the next phase of his life, turned on one question and one only: had The Waste Land proved him to be the great poet of his age, who, by virtue of that, must grant priority to his gift? Because Eliot’s conscience was so scrupulous and his sense of responsibility for Vivienne [his wife ] so strong, the issue could not be resolved in any simple manner…
In the end at this point, the Woolfs[2] ‘proposed Eliot as editor of the Nation’:
It was a top literary post, what Eliot had dreamt of when he came to England, and it carried a higher salary than he had at the bank. Early in 1923 this presented an agonising temptation because Eliot had to recognise that it wouldn’t do for his wife: despite the salary and literary prestige, the position did not offer the bank’s guarantees of security nor a widow’s pension.
. . .In the end, Eliot turned the Nation down…
As my previous post indicates I also have had experienced similar difficulties, though of a far less prestigious nature, which is perhaps why I am drawn to examining this issue in so much detail.
My hearth dream, as I will briefly explore later, seemed to help me transcend that darkness, but even after that the humorous exploration of my Parliament of Selves suggests the tension between subpersonalities, and related values and roles, was by no means over, rooted as it was in my pretending at age five or less to be a priest, using the kitchen doorstep as my altar, as well as my struggling to write poems in my teens, most of which were sickeningly saccharine, rather like the only one some of whose words I can still remember: ‘Like envied autumn swallows seeking spring/The hours pass by on wings of weeping gold/And seeking joys that cannot be we cling/In tender sorrowing to those of old.’
What has proved intriguing is that the various competing values that were apparently pulling me in different directions through seemingly different desired roles turned out not to be as much in conflict as I had originally thought, which may be a result of my grasping their deeper common grounding at the level of basic principles.
Poetry as Revealer
Before I move onto to explain that a bit more clearly in a later post, I have to clarify also that to assume that all poetry dispels veils, as I might have implied in the previous post, is not in fact completely true: we have to keep all our faculties on the alert to prevent our mistaking obfuscation for a supposedly enlightening poem.
TS Eliot gives us a perfect example of that.
While he argues for poems finding what he calls an ‘objective correlative,’ which is allied to a continual extinction of the personality’,[3] Lyndall Gordon makes clear in her exploration of the relationship between his life and his poetry, based on the recently released stash of his letters to Emily Hale, that[4] ‘Eliot slides confession into his poetry.’ In using the example of the ‘Cooking Egg’ poem, she writes:[5]
The emotions of this poem are buried even more deeply than usual below an obscuring surface, with glittering shards of narrative in the Modernist manner.
This is also true of what is regarded as his Modernist masterpiece:[6]
‘Tom’s autobiography – a melancholy one’ is the way Mary Hutchinson, one of the first to know the poem, described The Waste Land. She could discern the substratum beneath the Modernist manner. His mother was given to understand the same: ‘Tom wrote to me before it was published that he had put so much of his own life into it.’ Most telling of all, Eliot’s unveilings to Emily Hale make it clear how much this poet needed an actual pulse shaking the heart to authenticate the experience he opens up to us. Unless these unveilings in his letters were preserved, he told her, ‘my life and work will be misunderstood to the end of time.’
So, it would be a complete mistake to interpret, as too many critics did, poems such as The Waste Land as purely objective, impersonal and relating to the state of the world rather than Eliot’s mental state.
According to Seymour-Jones in her biography of Vivienne Eliot, Eliot did drop a massive hint about the personal significance of the poem:[7]
The poet had thrown down the gauntlet to researchers when he admitted that The Waste Land, far from being an expression of horror at the fate of Western civilisation, ‘was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life.’
So in fact:[8]
. . . the longer I worked, the more sure I became that it was justified to view T.S.Eliot’s poetry and drama, bedrock of the modernist canon, through the lens of his life with Vivienne; that the autobiographical and confessional element in Eliot’s texts had been greatly underestimated, due at least in part to a paucity of information.
My own attempts to grapple with the evasive mysteries of that poem came to rely on the heavily disguised confessional component to decode many of its puzzling elements.
Veils
On the issue of veils I need to begin with two contrasting poetical visions of connecting with God, one using a literal veil as a vehicle for conveying her perspective, and one who uses veils purely metaphorically.
The two poets concerned are R.S.Thomas and Táhirih.
De Bellaigue’s account of Táhirih, aka Qurrat al-Ayn, in his book The Islamic Enlightenment, begins[9] by claiming she is ‘one of the most remarkable characters in nineteenth century Iranian history. She is both a feminist icon and the mediaeval saint.’
He recounts her early life and then focuses on perhaps the most famous incident in her entire life apart from her leaving of it – her appearing unveiled at the conference of Badasht.[10]
Qurrat al-Ayn’s removal of the veil was a blatant rejection of the Prophet Muhammad’s command to his followers, set down in a famous hadith, that ‘when you ask of them [the wives of the Prophet] anything, ask it of them from behind a curtain.’
He then explains a crucial ambiguity:
‘Curtain’ and ‘veil’ are the same word in Arabic, and this ambiguous hadith is the basis on which the practice of veiling women has been sanctified.
I think it important to mention here that, while noting the intensity of her religious faith, de Bellaigue, for obvious reasons given the theme of his book, looks particularly at the political legacy and inspiration of Qurrat al-Ayn. There is another important aspect of her life that needs to be included if we are to achieve anything life a complete sense of her contribution to our culture.
This can be accessed not just from Bahá’í sources. There is a book I discovered in the rich seams of Hay-on-Wye’s book mines: Veils and Words: the emerging voices of Iranian women writers by Farzaneh Milani.
The book explains that she was a poet and writer of considerable power:[11] ‘Tahereh’s contribution to the history of women’s writing in Iran is invaluable: she proves that women could think, write, and reason like men – in public and for the public. Such actions set her apart from her contemporaries and confer upon her an inalienable precedence.’
Sadly, this view was not yet widely shared outside the Bahá’í community at the time of her writing in 1992, 140 years after Tahirih’s murder, which, coincidentally, was also the anniversary of the death of Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith:
Whether because she has been deemed too offensive, too dangerous, or too minor a literary personage, no article, let alone a full-length book, has been written either on work, or on her life as a struggle for gaining a public voice.
(That is no longer true as Hatcher’s book, from which I shall be drawing quotes shortly, has with his co-author created a compilation of her poems with detailed commentary and English translations.) Her poetry is also challenging, something else that might militate against its wider acceptance:[12]
Some of Tahereh’s poems are difficult to understand. Their language is rich in abstractions. She not only mixes Arabic with Persian but also makes repeated allusions to Bábí jargon and codes. Her religious convictions saturate her poetry and set her verse on fire. They glow in her poetry like a flame that burns every obstacle away.
Her life and verse complemented and, in one way at least, seemingly contradicted each other:[13]
If self-assertion is a cardinal tenet of Tahereh’s life, self-denial and self-effacement are key elements of her poetry. The themes of love, union, and ecstasy relate to mystic and spiritual experience.
Táhirih’s unveiling was perhaps not just about the emancipation of women, though that is clearly a key part of its significance. It might also be symbolising the need for all of us, and perhaps men in particular, to face reality more fully. We live inextricably connected with an ecosystem while echo chambers interfere with our perception of that reality. As a minor illustration of that, on my walk the other day I felt guilty about leaving a distressed snail on the pavement rather than moving it to safety and comfort on the grass verge. As I walked on I noticed two lads walking by with ear phones on who clearly didn’t even see the snail.
The reality Táhirih was most concerned to connect with was mystical in character
And the translation on page 93 of Milani’s book of one of Táhirih’s poems gives a sense of her yearning for connection with the transcendent, though I suspect, as always, to translate a poem is to betray it (an old Italian saying about all translation goes: ‘Traduttore, traditore.’).
I would explain all my grief
Dot by dot, point by point
If heart to heart we talk
And face to face we meet.To catch a glimpse of thee
I am wandering like a breeze
From house to house, door to door
Place to place, street to street.In separation from thee
The blood of my heart gushes out of my eyes
In torrent after torrent, river after river
Wave after wave, stream after stream.This afflicted heart of mine
Has woven your love
To the stuff of life
Strand by strand, thread to thread.
Hatcher, in his introduction to a collection of Táhirih’s poems quotes Shelley as saying, in A Defence of Poetry that[14]‘Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world…’
He goes on to say that[15] ‘Great poetry, poetry with lasting merit, takes us from our present state of awareness to some place else, some place we may not have ever been before, some level of understanding we did not formerly have.’
In his view:[16]’The poet, the good poet, is attempting something beyond description.’ He feels that this often collates with their being poets ‘who are not always easy to understand.’ With Táhirih’s poems for English readers there is the additional challenge of her use of figurative language which is based in a very different culture from our own.
Mysticism
One of her main focuses is on seeking to achieve a connection with divine power, something that a Welsh priest, R.S.Thomas is also frequently concerned with. This is something that has always strained language to its limits, as the NDE experiencer, quoted by Bruce Greyson, testified when they said that describing their experience was like trying to paint a smell.
It is not just the intensity of Táhirih’s faith that gives her a sense of greater closeness to the divine: she was also blessed to live at the same time as two Manifestations of God, the Báb and Bahá-u-lláh. This is what, I feel, enables her to write such lines as:[17]
From behind the veils of grandeur
The face of God is suddenly manifest!
O, believers, you need no longer heed:
‘You shall not see me!’
There are moments where the exact sense of her closeness is less clear, for example:[18]
My life derives not from my soul,
nor does my dying come from my death;
Union with you is my life,
and separation from you is my death.
At the moment of death you moved
your sweet lips to enquire about me,
so that I would remain a life newly fashioned
by the breath of God.
In his notes Hatcher explains:[19]
It is not clear whether she is here referring to her own death or to the death of the Báb (which precedes her own martyrdom by two years). Either makes sense, though since she is speaking of separation and the sorrow she feels at that separation, it would seem logical that her longing for nearness to her beloved (the Báb in this case) is coupled with her longing for death that she might once again attain that nearness.
As Hatcher puts it:[20]
The point is that writing poetry, like any art, is not easy or simple or a matter of an inherent gift, and … neither is the art of the reading of poetry… With almost any art, the audience must be trained to understand the depth of thought underlying the beguiling surface of expression.
R.S.Thomas is less challenging for the reader of English, but perhaps more challenging in terms of the frustration implicit in the experience he seeks to convey:[21]
The distinction he draws between ‘place’ and ‘state’ is crucial to understanding the difference between his quest and Táhirih’s. The focus of her yearning seems to be very much outside of herself: his focus seems to be part of what he calls ‘the best journey to make’, which is ‘inward’ into the ‘interior that calls.’[22]
This may relate to the distinction sometimes made between extroverted and introverted mysticism. Main quotes Walter Stace’s position:[1]
Stace identifies two main types of mystical experience: extrovertive (‘outward-turning’) and introvertive (‘inward-turning’). ‘The essential difference between them,’ he writes, ‘is that the extrovertive experience looks outward through the senses, while the introvert looks inward into the mind’ (page 61 [of Mysticism and Philosophy])
Thomas defines a key problem[24] as being ‘in everyday life/it is the plain facts and natural happenings that conceal God.’ Basically the ‘things of the world’ are too often our veil.
My own felt experience is more like his than Táhirih’s.
So how far have I got with dispelling my veils and accessing a deeper reality where discord is reduced if not eliminated? More on that next time.
References
[1]. The Hyacinth Girl – page 103.
[2]. Op. cit. – page 105.
[3]. The Waste Land: a Biography of a Poem – page 130.
[4]. The Hyacinth Girl – page 88.
[5]. Op. cit. – page 85.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 92.
[7]. Painted Shadow – page xix.
[8]. Op. cit. – page xviii.
[9]. The Islamic Enlightenment – page 147.
[10]. Op. cit. – page 151.
[11]. Veils and Words – page 90.
[12]. Op. cit. – page 91.
[13]. Op. cit. – page 93.
[14]. The Poetry of Táhirih – page 16.
[15]. Op. cit. – page 16.
[16]. Op. cit. – page 17.
[17]. Op. cit. – page 95.
[18]. Op. cit. – page 105.
[19]. Op. cit. – page 268.
[20]. Op. cit. – page 18.
[21]. No Truce with the Furies – page 26.
[22]. Collected Poems: 1945-1990 – page 328.
[23]. Consciousness Unbound – page 145
[24]. Op. cit. – page 355.
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