Mingling.

Boubat, Parc de Saint-Cloud, 1981

Some Claims About Poetry and Consciousness

Fana and Baqa: Two Streamings Across the Doorsill of Rumi’s Poetry

No one can say what the inner life is, but poetry tries to, and no one can say what poetry is, but let’s be bold and claim that there are two major streamings in consciousness, particularly in the ecstatic life, and in Rumi’s poetry: call the fana and baqa, Arabic words that refer to the play and intersection of human with devine.

Rumi’s poetry occurs in that opening, a dervish doorway these energies move through in either direction.  A movement out, a movement in.  Fana is the streaming that moves from the human out into mystery -- the annihilation, the orgasmic expansion, the dissolving swoon in the the all.  The gnat becomes buttermilk; a chickpea disappears into the flavor of the soup; a dead mule decays into salt flat, the infant turns to the breast.  These wild and boundaryless absorptions are the images and the kind poem Rumi is most well known for, a drunken clairvoyant tavern voice that announces, “Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.”

“What was in that candle’s light that opened and consumed me so quickly!”  That is the moth’s question after fana, after it becomes flame.  The king’s falcon circles in the empty sky.  There is an extravagance in the magnificent disintegration of fana.  In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.  Which is literally true: a single wheat seed can, after a few years, become thousands of stacks and sheaves.  But it’s that special praise for the natural abundance of existence that identifies this state.  Three hundred billion galaxies might seem a bit gaudy to some, but not to this awareness; in fana what is here can never be said extravagantly enough.

Fana is what opens our wings, what makes boredom and hurt disappear.  We break to pieces inside it, dancing and perfectly free.  We are the dreamer streaming into the loving nowhere of night.  Rapt, we are the devouring worm who, through grace becomes an entire orchard, the wholeness of the trunks, the leaves, the fruit, and the growing.  Fana is the dissolution just before our commotion and mad night prayers become silence.  Rumi often associates surrender with the joy of falling into the freedom of sleep.  It’s human-becoming-God, the Ana ‘l-Haqq (“I am the truth”) of Al-Hallaj Mansour.  The arms open outward.  This is the ocean with no shore into which the dewdrop falls.

My friend, the poet Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, scolds me for not saying outright that fana is annihilation in Allah.  I avoid God-words, not altogether, but whenever I can, because they seem to take away the freshness of experience and put it inside a specific system.  Rumi’s poetry belongs to everyone, and his impulse toward experience rather than any language or doctrine about it: our lives as text, rather than any book, be it Qur’an, Gospel, upanishad, or sutra.

There is a fierce desolation in fana, though, that I may not be communicating.  Abdal-Hayy is right.  The absence experienced in fana is complete.  There is no soft focus around anything.  It’s the hard-edged jelal (“majesty”) desert words of Shams.  I have much to learn in these matters.

Baqa goes the other way across the doorsill.  The Arabic word means “a living within:” it is the walk back down the Qaf Mountain, where the vision came; life lived with clarity and reason; the turning again toward what somehow always was.  The concentration of a night of stars into one needle’s eye.  A refinement, companionship, two people walking along some particular county road.  The absorbing work of this day.  The precise painting of a piece of trim.  The arms folding inward across the chest and the bow to one another.  Courtesy and craftsmanship. God-becoming-human.  The qualities associated with this motion are honesty, sobriety, carefulness, a clarity Rumi sometimes calls “reason,” compassion, and work within a community.  Baqa is also a return from expansion into each’s unique individuation work, into pain and effort, confusion and dark comedy: the end of a frayed rope, the deep knowing of absence.

Baqa is where animal and angel meet in an awkward but truly human dance.  It’s a breathtaking birth, the dying and then being born again that all religions know is the essence of soul growth.  It can be overheard in the poetry as a conversation between Julaluddin and the mystery.

Baqa might say:

Friend, our closeness is this:

Anywhere you put your foot feel me

In the firmness under you

while fana asks, in the same quatrain:

How is it with this love,

I see your world, but not you?

Baqa is felt in Rumi’s spring-morning poems, very present, green and alive with camaraderie of a picnic by the water.

Stay together, friends.

Don’t scatter and sleep.

Our friendship is made

Of being awake.

The waterwheel accepts water

And turns and gives it away, weeping.

That way it stays in the garden …

Stay here, quivering with each moment

Like a drop of mercury.

You feel a tremulous intensity within limits.  Bodhisattval service walking to the well.  The common joy of ducks riding a flooded river.  Kindness and acts of anonymous helping.  Baqa brings the next stage in the process of prayer: there’s the opening into annihilation, then the coming back to tend specific people.  A melody, the little German band coming up through Beethoven’s Ninth.  This is the ocean come to court the drop!  A fall to the knees, the frustrating satisfaction of the spoken word.

By letting these two conditions, fana and baqa, flow and exist simultaneously in his poetry, Rumi is saying that they are one thing, the core of one true human being, which he was and out of which these poems are spoken.  This is how alive his model of the human psyche is, where the secular and the sacred are always mingling, the mythic and the ordinary, dream vision and ordinary street life.

Coleman Barks, from the Preface to The Soul of Rumi