Rumi’s Remarks On The Lovely And Dark And Deep Woods
In the tavern are many wines [writes poet Coleman Barks in ‘The Essential Rumi’], the wine of delight in colour and form and taste, the wine of the intellect’s agility, the fine port of stories, and the cabernet of soul singing. Being human means entering this place where entrancing varieties of desire are served. The grapeskin of ego breaks and a pouring begins. Fermentation is one of the oldest symbols of human transformation. When grapes combine their juice and are closed up together for a time in a dark place, the results are spectacular. This is what lets two drunks meet so that they don’t know who is who. Pronouns no longer apply in the tavern’s mud-world of excited confusion and half-articulated wantings.
But after some time in the tavern, a point comes, a memory of elsewhere, a longing for the source, and the drunks must set off from the tavern and begin the return. The Qur’an says, “We are all returning.” The tavern is a kind of glorious hell that human beings enjoy and suffer and then push off from in their search for truth. The tavern is a dangerous region where sometimes disguises are necessary, but never hide your heart, Rumi urges. Keep open there. A breaking apart, a crying out into the street, begins in the tavern, and the human soul turns to find its way home.
It’s 4am. Nasruddin leaves the tavern and walks the town aimlessly. A policeman stops him. “Why are you out wandering the streets in the middle of the night?” “Sir,” replies Nasruddin, “if I knew the answer to that question, I would have been home hours ago!”
ACT I: WHO SAYS WORDS WITH MY MOUTH?
All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.
This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I’ll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?
Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.
This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say.
I don’t plan it.
When I’m outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.
We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups.
That’s fine with us. Every morning
we glow and in the evening we glow again.
They say there’s no future for us. They’re right.
Which is fine with us.
ACT II: THE DRUNKARDS AND THE TAVERN
I’m drunk and you’re insane, who’s going to lead us home?
How many times did they say,
“Drink just a little, only two or three at most?”
In this city no one I see is conscious;
one is worse off than the next, frenzied and insane.
Dear one, come to the tavern of ruin
and experience the pleasures of the soul.
What happiness can there be apart
from this intimate conversation
with the Beloved, the Soul of souls?
In every corner there are drunkards, arm in arm,
while the Server pours the wine
from a royal decanter to every particle of being.
You belong to the tavern: your income is wine,
and wine is all you ever buy.
Don’t give even a second away
to the concerns of the merely sober.
O lute player, are you more drunk, or am I?
In the presence of one as drunk as you, my magic is a myth.
When I went outside the house,
some drunk approached me,
and in his eyes I saw
hundreds of hidden gardens and sanctuaries.
Like a ship without an anchor,
he rocked this way and that.
Hundreds of intellectuals and wise men
could die from a taste of this yearning.
I asked, “Where are you from?”
He laughed and said, “O soul,
half of me is from Turkestan and half from Farghana.
Half of me is water and mud, half heart and half soul;
half of me is the ocean’s shore, half is all pearl.
“Be my friend,” I pleaded. “I’m one of your family.”
“I know the difference between family and outsiders.”
I’ve neither a heart nor a turban,
and here in this house of hangovers
my breast is filled with unspoken words.
Shall I try to explain or not.
Have I lived among the lame for so long
that I’ve begun to limp myself?
And yet no slap of pain could disturb
a drunkenness like this.
Listen, can you hear a wail
arising from the pillar of grief?
Shams al-Haqq of Tabriz, where are you now,
after all the mischief you’ve stirred in our hearts?
ACT III: BURNT KABOB
Last year, I admired wines. This,
I’m wandering inside the red world.
Last year, I gazed at the fire.
This year I’m burnt kabob.
Thirst drove me down to the water
where I drank the moon’s reflection.
Now I am a lion staring up totally
lost in love with the thing itself.
Don’t ask questions about longing.
Look in my face.
Soul drunk, body ruined, these two
sit helpless in a wrecked wagon.
Neither knows how to fix it.
And my heart, I’d say it was more
like a donkey sunk in a mudhole,
struggling and miring deeper.
But listen to me: for one moment,
quit being sad. Hear blessings
dropping their blossoms
around you. God.
In making this short film I realized an artist’s statement/explanation would require me to write a novella length essay due to the fact that I made it as a collage piece of sorts deliberately inspired by remix culture and deliberately devoid of my own voice (my voice being the overall collage).
It draws inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in that the main character of the story, the viewer, is not necessarily in the story but watching (experiencing) it, and in that the main character is, unassumingly, the only character present from start to finish. And as 2001 is a somewhat circular storyline, so too is the short film (this aligned well with other inspirations from Buddhist teachings of reincarnation).
It draws inspiration from Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color in that it’s subtly split into two equal halves portraying the same thing from opposite ends (first half is portrayed through the eyes of the viewer as dead through the masculine, the second through them as being alive through the feminine [the glances I give the viewer at the beginning and end of the video footage in the second half are deliberate, it’s me remarking on the audience as seeable, alive; compared to the first half where I completely disregard them, as if they didn’t exist]). As Upstream Color portrays a continuous decline and 2001 a continuous melioration into chaos, so too does this; the songs (voices of the viewer) I chose for the piece become more obscure as the short film progresses from and into enlightenment and as the rhythm of the film speeds up and becomes more extreme in both highs and lows along the way. And as Upstream Color tries to use anything other than dialogue to convey emotion, I too decided to use a different form of communication (dance).
It draws a bit of inspiration from plays in that I wanted it to feel like a teleplay and a smooth playlist suggesting of our remix culture (note the dialogue/lyrics mention radio, newspaper, and song [mentioning film was unnecessary since that’s inherent in the work]), and it draws from music in that I wanted to give a nod to all those great songs with great musical pauses we’ve now become accustomed to. The addition of great pauses was key because in a hurried and time conscious culture there’s nothing quite as unnerving, enlightening, and reminiscent of death as sitting alone in a quiet room; all while I was drawing inspiration from one of my favourite chapters from one of my favourite books about time A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan in which an autistic character uses their fascination with pauses to portray feelings they have for their family that they have difficulty getting across through mere words. And amongst other things, colour wise I drew a ton of inspiration from Kahlil Joseph’s short film for Flying Lotus’ album Until the Quiet Comes.
Most of all I drew inspiration from poetry. I wanted to work with the idea all poets eventually stumble upon— the idea that words on paper will never be enough to convey complex emotions and thus words must be abandoned, while at the same time adhering to poetry by modernizing the oral/odyssey poem (this alluding to Kubrick’s work). I drew inspiration from St. John’s Dark Night of the Soul in that the overall storyline of the epic poem is one of a dark yet numinous self-reflection, and from Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening in that Frost basically gave St. John’s spiritual crisis a concrete setting. From their I wanted to give credit to Rumi’s work on relating the personal crisis, and emotional life itself, to being ‘eternally drunk in a soulful tavern of hidden gardens and sanctuaries.’ Being an atheist and the short film being personal I especially wanted to focus on Rumi because his poems speak of the drunken prison as being all their is, and so I concluded a Buddhist temple was the only quickly recognizable physical interpretation I could use settings wise to portray a spirituality that doesn’t concern itself with deities or anything beyond the world (a spirituality stuck in this prison).
2001 and Upstream Color both portray their respective decadence as being colourful, but in keeping with the Dark Night of the Soul theme I portrayed it as an eternal darkness, as Friedrich Nietzsche’s abyss. This worked well with ideas of self-reflection (I wanted the viewers’ breath and reflection to be a part of the experience and to be made more aware of by a lack of sound and/or video) and Rumi’s ideas of drunkenness in that I could use the notion of being blackout-drunk for the same purposes. Frost’s poem is most remembered for its repetitive line and with reincarnation being an idea of repetition I made sure to add repetition into the short film through key movements, direction, and the overall banshee effect of soul singing (thus referencing Rumi’s work again). Frost’s message of ‘disregarding a beautiful death’ worked well with Rumi’s message of ‘returning,’ and both were easily depictable through a reverse ordered storyline that stays uniform every which way you tell it (the main storyline is circular; imagine going around a clock-face, starting from 8 o’clock).
Supporting characters wise, as previously stated, I wanted them to speak without dialogue, so with me and my friends being professional krump dancers, dance as a language came to mind very quickly. A couple of us had been working on revolutionizing the idea of krump and of it being a Christian dance by adding contemporary, martial arts, and Eastern philosophies, so I chose to highlight our progress (I personally focused on a combination of krump inspired by / infused with lyrical contemporary and Muay Thai).
The context of the dance/dialogue is that of a regular day in a krumper’s life (with this being an independent short film I figured there was enough precedence of Kevin Smith-like simplicity to get away with it). And with krumpers being predominately of the ghetto culture, the idea that ‘you’ll most likely die young so fuck it’ is always present to a certain extent in the krump world (most say they dance to avoid dying on the streets) and once again Rumi beautifully portrayed this in his last lines of Who Says Words With My Mouth?. (I also tried alluding to this idea of ‘live fast die young’ by donning a Jimi Hendrix shirt.)
Refocusing on film inspiration, Donnie Darko‘s work with time and basic alchemic elements inspired me to use Rumi’s parallel references to the same and Frost’s allusion to Dante’s Inferno in the short film as portrayals of something more. Using Donnie Darko‘s ideas of helpers I decided to make the story a ghost story (with/through a subtle break in time) focusing on one main supporting character’s unavoidable death and to add two more supporting characters to the storyline later on (the ghost story working well with Rumi’s ideas of song as banshee wailing).
From there I realized the title of the piece had to somehow encompass the fact that this was a ghost story heavily infused with Rumi’s notion of life as a drunken affair, all while in keeping with St. John’s relation of it all to prayer. And so quietus spiritus was chosen (with an appended caution label that conveys that the overall message is one of warning while at the same time alluding, as all else has, to Rumi); it’s latin for final breath, resting spirit, and rectified alcohol, all while having a spiritual chant prayer-like air about it.
I drew from quite a number of inspirations. There are more, but that’s the gist of it:
What Franz Kafka’s stories have is a grotesque and gorgeous and thoroughly modern complexity. Kafka’s humour — not only not neurotic, but anti-neurotic, heroically sane — is, finally, a religious humour, but religious in the manner of Kierkegaard and Rilke and the Psalms, a harrowing spirituality against which even Ms. O’Connor’s bloody grace seems a little bit easy, the souls at stake pre-made.
And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance. It’s not that students don’t ‘get’ Kafka’s humour but that we’ve taught them to see humour as something you get — the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke — that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It’s hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it’s good that they don’t ‘get’ Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens… and it opens outward: we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch. // David Foster Wallace