{"id":16863,"date":"2013-03-02T06:00:23","date_gmt":"2013-03-02T14:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=16863"},"modified":"2013-02-23T11:54:49","modified_gmt":"2013-02-23T19:54:49","slug":"attar-in-progress-an-officer-falls-in-love-with-a-prince","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=16863","title":{"rendered":"Attar in Progress: An Officer Falls in Love with a Prince"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been making steady progress working on Ilahi Nama<\/a><\/em>, and I thought it might be interesting to post some of what I’ve done so far. The latest poem of which I have finished the first draft, for example–just about all of the poems in Ilahi Nama<\/em> are narrative–concerns a beautiful prince with whom an officer falls in love. Through a series of circumstances, the officer and the prince are taken captive by an enemy kingdom and put in the same cell, where they develop a relationship so intimate that, as the poem’s speaker puts it, “it\u2019s not [the] storyteller\u2019s place to reveal.” Eventually, the two kingdoms make peace, but one of the terms of that peace is that the prince should marry the daughter of his former captive, which he does.<\/p>\n

Absorbed in the pomp and circumstance of his marriage, the prince puts the officer out of his mind for a time, but he eventually remembers his former cellmate and summons him for an audience. The officer, however, is overwhelmed by the prince’s majesty. He cannot imagine himself worthy of that splendor, and he dies. As he explains to the prince:<\/p>\n

“In the prison cell we shared, my king,
\nI did not feel your majesty.
\nToday, after forty days and forty
\nnights of separation, I saw you
\nfor the first time, and all around you
\nfrom east to west, swirled the uproar
\nand confusion of the royal court.
\nBefore you parted from me, like that,
\nI was accustomed to you, like that
\nI was at peace; but this I can\u2019t
\nendure. Wear that lovely garment
\nand I will love you once again;
\nbut if these<\/i> robes are yours; if this
\nsplendor is where you will remain,
\nhow will I find the strength to embrace
\nthe truth of who you are?\u201d He had
\nno more to say. Then, with a hundred
\nlamentations, his soul ascended,
\npure, at his appointed time, to heaven.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The point of the story–though I am giving it here in a simplistic and reductive form–is that if you want to be worthy of enlightenment and union with God (which the prince’s majesty represents), you need to believe that you are worthy, which the officer clearly did not. What I most wanted to share with you, however, was my draft of the beginning of the poem, which describes the prince’s beauty. There are some rough spots still, but I thought people might find it intriguing, since the poem as a whole is clearly an example of a Sufi teaching poem which uses the occasion of a man falling in love with a man to explore what it means to achieve union with God:<\/p>\n

A certain prince, a shimmering piece
\nof moon, once graced this earth. Jealous
\nof his beauty, the sun left its place
\nto wander the sky in rags. Face-
\nto-face with him, the sun shook
\nuncontrollably, like an epileptic
\nat the new moon. Inscribed on his forehead,
\nas in musk on silver, the letters jim<\/i>
\nand mim,<\/i> and when those letters twisted
\nand curled, he captured the kingdom of Jam.
\nWith those eyebrows, he played the part
\nof the moon\u2019s chamberlain. The heart
\nhe hunted, and the liver, fell
\nprey to his eyelashes. A single
\nglance at the bay horse of his eyes
\nsent Temptation for its saddle\u2014
\nthe perfect rider for such a horse\u2014
\nand what good game their hunt brought in!
\nHis lips were honey and <\/i>sugar,
\nbut each lip was also sweeter
\nthan either of those. When the bee
\ngirded its loins to make the honey,
\nthe sugar cane did the same for the sugar.
\nTwo rows of thirty corals
\nshone between his carnelians like pearls.
\nFrom the seventh heaven, the stars gazed down,
\nand anyone who looked upon
\nhis face, if he had a life,
\nwould place that life before him, a sacrifice.
\nLove for this moon-like prince had turned
\nan officer\u2019s heart upside down
\nand led his mind astray. A pain
\nwithout cure, and so without end,
\nfilled him: his soul was not worthy
\nof his beloved. In agony,
\nhe nonetheless suffered secretly,
\nand no one ever knew he bled
\nmore under this grief\u2019s tyranny
\nthan any sufferer ever did.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cross-posted on my blog<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been making steady progress working on Ilahi Nama, and I thought it might be interesting to post some of what I’ve done so far. The latest poem of which I have finished the first draft, for example–just about all … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iran-international-issues","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16863"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16865,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16863\/revisions\/16865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}