reflections on a night spent listening to Rumi

Saturday night my yin and I headed down to Miami to listen to Coleman Barks, the most well-known translator of the poems of Rumi into English.  For those as yet unblessed by Rumi's acquaintance, he is a dead Persian, a man who lived in the 13th Century and whose poems possess a beauty, depth, and deceptive simplicity. Some artists' renditions also see him wearing a disturbingly phallic headdress... 

But this is beside the point.

The point is that I was first introduced to Rumi sometime during the late 1990's when UNC- Chapel Hill hosted its annual Rumi Festival.  I was running sound for the show, and I will never forget how amazing it was to watch two people, a man and a woman, spinning themselves towards God realization on either side of the stage.  Rumi is associated with a branch of Sufism known as the "whirling dervishes," a sect recognizing that the human body in motion can reach states of divine ecstasy just as surely as those achieved by motionless Eastern masters sitting in full lotus:

note: the author is neither Eastern nor a master...
but Sedona is beautiful

What I noticed this night, though, was not just the cellist, or the percussionist, or the (sometimes) whirling dervish, or even Coleman Barks' delightful Southern drawl. (He, too, it turns out, is also an alumnus of UNC). No, instead what I noticed was the odd assortment of people at the Gusman Theater: hippies, intellectuals, women in high heels, would-be poets, and sorority girls dressing like prostitutes dressing like sorority girls.  These same girls were in turn accompanied by 20-something graphic designers wearing eye glasses with thick black frames and thin clear lenses. 

I noticed how many people out of the 900 or so patrons downstairs are texting, even asking the woman in front of us to shut her phone off when the second act began.  The woman said yes, but rather than flipping it shut, she hunched over the cell phone like some deformed 21st century Quasimodo in order to shield the bright white screen from those of us behind her.  This was fine by me, but I marveled at the fact that the woman fundamentally could not put the thing away, that whatever 160 character communique she was reading was so important that it couldn't wait another 45 minutes for the show to end. 

That's what much of the whole night was for me: observing how people engaged with the performance. As a society we are not used to such gatherings, where dance and music and poetry and silence and storytelling blend together into a single mixture.  This was most notable after each poem.  For much of the first act, these interludes were largely silent, but as the night progressed, the audience seemed to grow uncomfortable with these lulls.  The energy - the space - grew larger and larger with each set of verse, and I truly believe that it became too much for the audience, too much for a room full of people plugged into cell phones and 3-inch heels, to just sit there and take it all in, to allow the words - and the spaces between the words - to flow through them.

The capacity to sit with the enormousness of the poems, the imponderable depth of the things not spoken, is not a trivial thing.  And so people, faced with an emotion too large for 160 characters, and unable to squeeze into the latest set of pumps – we respond in the only way we know how, the same way we would at a football game or comedy act or variety show: filling the empty space of the Divine with the noise of our own emotion.