Reason...the pinnacle of mental prowess for millennia. And look at us now. We are overthought and overwrought. I guess Hafiz saw this coming so long ago as hearts were even then taking a beating. Our reason and our ambition have met and created immense civilizations and complex ideologies. We have mastered reason and continue to apply it to all that we do. Rightly so. We have groomed reason to show us what we are capable of. And reason, in this dimension, has created a shadow we now must contend with. In so many ways we have created a monster and it is one we love and identify with.
The things we do beyond reason are not, in general, valued as much as all these left brained machinations. This is changing though. It is changing in large part to how we have changed birthing and raising our children. Many children - though not all, of course - are chosen. In all of humanity before the advancement of empowering women and the advent of birth control pill, there was no choice in these matters. Parents became parents by default and manipulation. Women and children (at least to the European mindset) were considered property and if you were lucky, assets. Both were preferably seen and not heard.
Having children by choice advanced parenting from a default to an art form and this in turn placed the world of the child - the world outside of reason, the world of feelings - into a kind of new value. Suddenly what a child has to say about how it feels matters in the larger conversations of humanity. Now we have feelings in the mix where reason once ran the entire rodeo. Feelings be damned was the call for hundreds (thousands?) of years...and they were. Feelings were relegated to a tight set of reasonable doses that kept reason in control. That is until the chosen children born in the 1960's forward had their say...and then their own bairn have chimed in.
In this beautiful poem, Hafiz dances with reason then lets it go to create wild scenarios of song in his head that in turn creates more unreasonable joy that he can dissolve into. It is an ode to the earthly enchantment of feelings.
Than you for listening.
https://pixabay.com/music/ambient-a-flavour-of-india-5810/
Music: David Byrne with the Talking Heads on the album Stop Making Sense came to mind while writing this piece. I think that Byrne captured the zeitgeist of the overwrought rational mind in this offering in the 1980's. People were arriving by being chosen in this world and they have questions that require passionate answers. He begins asking some of these questions in this song, Once In A Lifetime.
The original post in this series of poems by Hafiz (including an addendum regarding the authenticity of these poems) can be found here. Also, my thoughts on this series a year into these poems, HERE.
The Gift: Poems by Hafiz and translated by Daniel Ladinsky can be purchased here.
My book can be purchased HERE. E-book HERE. My reading of the book excerpts in a mixed media format is Season Two of this blog. These recorded excerpts are outside the chronological order in which the book was written. The Season Two blogcasts with audio excerpts from my book begin HERE: in Behind The Lines . Podcasts with audio only beginning with episode 22 can be found HERE.
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