Extravagant Beholding

Steven P.
Hopkins
E X T R AVAG A N T B EHOL DI NG : LOV E , I DE A L B ODI E S , A N D PA R T I C U L A R I T Y
i. introduction: dilemmas of desire In the recent documentary lm by Amy Kofman and Kirby Dick on Jacques Derrida, there is a strange and rather humorous exchange with Derrida on the subject of love (lamour), after the philosopher and the lmmaker/interviewer clear up a confusion about the exact topic at hand, at rst mistakenly taken as death (la mort).1 The pun in French here, due to mispronunciation, like the Derridean diffrance, is telling. Its a
Any comparative study such as this assumes a long list of colleagues who have helped to clarify arguments and rene comparisons across several traditions and languages. I am indebted, over a period of many years, to Moshe Idel, Charles Hallisey, John Strong, Nathaniel Deutsch, Michael Sells, Barbara Holdrege, Vasudha Narayanan, Yudit Kornberg Greenberg, Indira Peterson, and Scott Kugle for their support, suggestions, and encouragement along the way. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Prez and Stephanie Frank, editorial assistants for History of Religions, to the anonymous readers for the journal, and particularly to Daniel Boyarin, the outside reader, for his close and generous reading of the manuscript. 1 See Derrida, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Kofman, 84 minutes, English, French (United States: Jane Doe Films, 2002). The pun is of course obvious and predictable, and it is everywhere present in European literature. It makes one of its most memorable and funny appearances in a German book, in Thomas Manns The Magic Mountain, where the novels hero speaks passionately (in French, of course) about the body, love, and death as simply one and the same (le corps, lamour, la mort, ces trois ne font quun) to his erstwhile, indifferent beloved Clavdia Chauchat (hotcat) in a parody of Goethes Faustian Walpurgis Nacht. See Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Everymans Library, 1995), 4067. The punning is of course lost in the Woods translation, which renders the French of the original German text into English. For the French original, see the earlier classic (and sometimes confusing) English translation of H. T. Lowe-Porter or the original German text (1924; Berlin: Fischer, 1965), 31415.
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Extravagant Beholding
bad joke, but, as always with Derrida, its something more than a joke. At rst saying that he is incapable of generalities about love, that he has an empty head about it, Derrida poses a series of suggestive insights, some of which will guide our study of this vexed but crucial topic in religion and literature through the particularly vivid poetic motif of loving bodily description.
love: the who and the what
Derrida inquires about love since Plato: Is this love the love of someone or the love of something (quelquun, quelque chose)? Does one love someone for the absolute singularity of what they are, or does one love the qualities (the beauty, youth, intelligence, excellence) of that person, the way that person is? Does one love someone or does one love something about someone? At the heart of love, Derrida remarks, there is a difference between the who and the what (le qui et le quoi ), a difference that separates the heart. Love dies, he says, when the beloved falls short of the idea or ideals held by the lover: the other person, after all, is not like this or that. That is, he summarizes, the history of love, the heart of love, is divided between the who and the what. To love is to be true to someone, irreducibly, concretelybut love will ultimately die in that singular individuals inability to be the what. Love, ultimately, is about potentially unrealizable ideals, beautiful ideas, Truth and Beauty beyond individual objects of love. One might also think, in another context, of the savage prose poem of Baudelaire in The Spleen of Paris, Laquelle est la vraie? where, after the death of a certain Benedicta who lled the atmosphere with the ideal, a miraculous girl who was too beautiful to live long, the narrator is tormented by a little person who bore a singular resemblance to the miraculous but dead beloved, and who, as she tramples the still-loose and damp earth of the grave site with an hysterical and bizarre violence, cackles with laughter and says: Its me, the true Benedicta! Its me, a famous lousy bitch! And to punish your foolishness and your blindness you shall love me as I am! In despair, the narrator, one leg sinking into the damp ground, like a wolf caught in a trap, ends up literally with one foot in the grave of the ideal.2 Love, eros, lamour here, is corrosive and deeply ambivalent; far from simple union or loving presence, it speaks to us of unattainability (of the ideal) and dissatisfaction, a constant stretching forth; its goals are neither simple nor univocal. Love here is division, ssure, fracture, duality, vulnerability, and a horizontal asymmetry. To be in love is to become a victim
2 Le spleen de Paris 38 in Baudelaire: Oeuvres compltes, vol. 1, texte tabli, prsent, et annot par Claude Pichois (Paris: Bibliothque de la Pliade, 1975), 342.
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of ideals, in Baudelaires image, in the end, to be stuck in the mud, to have one foot in the grave of ones own ideal.
loves rising stairs and ickering lightning
Derridas remarks and Baudelaires prose poem allude to tensions in the theory and practice of love that indeed have deep roots in early Greek literatures, in Platos dialogues, particularly the Symposium and Phaedrus, and in the discourses of the later Stoa. Eros is sweetbitter (klukupikron), as Sappho would say; and to Pausanius in Platos Symposium eros is a poikilos nomos, a law that is dappled, spangled, devious, abstruse, subtle, of scintillating, destabilizing ambivalence.3 Greek sources speak about both division and idealized unity, of loves ambivalent and necessary powers. Socrates famous speech in the Symposium summarizing the doctrine of eros attributed to the Mantinean wise woman Diotima would seem to successfully domesticate the native unruliness of eros. There SocratesDiotima charts an ordered, stepwise, goal-focused ascent of eros, from earthly to heavenly forms of love, from love of the individual person, the individual body, the who of Derridaa love vulnerable to pain and attachment, to need and desireto love of his/her qualities, love of beautiful objects or ideas (logous kalous [210A]), the what, and nally, beyond, to a great sea of beauty and truth, a transcendental state that strips away all that is merely human in love (210A211C). There is no longer a particular boy, a particular lovely body, but one is grounded in loveliness itself, the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human esh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality.4 One is safe from Baudelaires little earthly Benedicta, the messy, and the foul. This is the orthodox love (we note as we read the repeated use of orthos in the text), a love that always leads, in an orderly manner, the lover upward for the sake of Beauty, starting out from beautiful things (the particular body of a particular beloved) and using them like rising stairs (hosper epanabasmois chromenon [211C]). But as Martha Nussbaum has shown quite powerfully in her studies of the Symposium and Phaedrus, this is hardly Platos nal word on eros. After the Diotima speech, Alcibiades, Socrates young errant lover, bursts into the drinking
3 See Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), 3, 2324. 4 ei to genoito auto to kalon idein eilikrives, katharon, amikton, alla me anapleon sarkon te anthropinon kai chromaton kai alles polles phlurias . . . [And the phrase goes on] all auto to theion kalon dunaito monoeides katidein [but if he could see the divine Beauty itself in its one form?] For the translation, see Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehmas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 5759. For the Greek text, I am using John Burnetts Platonis Opera, vol. 2 (1901; Oxford, 1986).
party and systematically answers back every point made by Socrates in his speech: he argues vulnerability and instability, what Nussbaum describes as the ickering lightning of the open and unstably moving body,5 to Socrates impassibility, his stony transcendence; he argues vivid particular material images (eidola of the Silenus statues [215B]) and concrete material beauty to Socrates shimmering invisible true virtue (de areten alethe [212A]); passions to irony, tormenting closeness to Socrates remote round gleaming; warmth to the cold impassible body; lack to sure possession; suddenness (Nussbaum comments much on the uses of the word exaiphnes throughout the dialogue) to Socrates studied intellectual trances. Plato reveals eros at the end of the Symposium in all its dividedness. On the one hand, we have the view of love as potentially ennobling, as a process of ascent that transcends its roots in the love of an individual person, an individual body in its sexual particularity, to any beautiful body, to beautiful ideas, and to beauty and virtue itself. The who is transcended, and the what of love internalized and made perfect in a selfpossessed state of virtue. On the other hand, Plato makes very powerful and concrete the argument about particularity, of love that ruins, renders vulnerable, and courts insanity, love that makes one a slave, love that is irreducibly about another person, the other who is impossible to encompass, transcend, turn into a universal idea, love and its disorder, its excess, its instability, its failure. As Socrates says of his fatal lover: I shudder at his madness and passion for love (213D). Nussbaum argues that this dilemma, this tension at the heart of eros, is resolved by Plato in the Phaedrusparticularly in Socrates recantation speech and defense of mania, loves crazy vulnerability to the particular and to madnessin the good life.6 Socrates has just listened to Phaedrus read to him a learned discourse on love by a certain Lysias, whom Phaedrus deeply admires, where the author recommends that the young man avoid accepting the service of one who loves him and seek out the one who does not love. After criticizing Lysias for his disingenuousness and arbitrariness, his lack of clear structure, and for his mere rhetorical treatment of this important theme, Socrates responds, his head covered, with a speech that faults love for its powerful jealousies and its lovers whose loves ultimately do more harm than good to their beloved boys, in mind, body, possessions, family, and friends. But after crossing the river, Socrates feels he has made offence; a daimonion, a familiar
5 The Speech of Alcibiades, in her The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 198. 6 See Martha Nussbaum, This Story Isnt True: Madness, Reason, and Recantation in the Phaedrus, in her The Fragility of Goodness, 200233.
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divine sign, comes to him like a voice on the air, and he recants his previous condemnation of eros and proceeds to formulate quite another kind of approach, one that neither condemns eros nor subsumes it, as in his Diotima speech in the Symposium, into some higher experience beyond the passions. This speech will defend eros and its mania undiluted as being at the very heart of the life of virtue. What is implied in this shift is that eros in its ascent ceases altogether to be eros as it gives up the particular (other person). The ladder of love is hardly a satisfactory answer to the real dilemmas of desire. Real erosthe particularity of its needs, its passions and interests and limits and vulnerabilitycritical to human ourishing (eudaimonia), demands that we descend the stairs, encounter again the world of concrete risk, of luck, to truly love, and ultimately to truly embark on the adventure of eudaimonia. In Nussbaums summary:
Unlike the life of the ascending person in the Symposium, this best human life is unstable, always prey to conict. The lovers have continually to struggle against inappropriate inclinations, to expend psychic effort in order to hit on what is appropriate. Unlike the ascending person, again, they risk, in the exclusivity of their attachment to a mutable object, the deep grief of departure, alteration, or inevitablydeath. This life, unlike Diotimas, seems to admit full-edged conict of values as well, since the lovers devotion to one another is so particular that it might in some circumstances pull against their political commitments or their pursuit of knowledge. . . . But Plato seems to believe that a life that lacks their passionate devotionwhether or not it had this at some former timeis lacking in beauty and value next to theirs.7
The Phaedrus ends with Socrates and the young Phaedrus (whose name means sparkling) discovering the mutual love of individuals based on character and aspiration,8 quite subtly and gradually, in a wild dangerous place outside the city gates, near the river and near the place where, according to a legend, a young girl was carried off by Boreas, the love-mad wind
7 Ibid., 221. Even the Stoics, as Nussbaum has argued elsewhere, famously attempt to somehow preserve eros at the heart of friendship (philia), as virtues bloom, beautys appearance that, puried, inspires reverence and gratitude and not merely divisive, possessive desire. But as Cicero remarked in his critique of what he perceived as inconsistencies in the Stoic theory of love: eros is never truly present without anxiety, longing, care sighing (Tusculan Disputations, 4:70). When the Stoics refer to the attempt to form a friendship on account of the appearing beauty of young men in their prime (epibole philopoiias dia kallos emphainomenon neon kai horaion), that is all well and good, but do not, says Cicero, call it eros. See Martha C. Nussbaum, Eros and Ethical Norms: Philosophers Respond to a Cultural Dilemma, in The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Julia Sihvola (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 56, 7681, 8182. Compare Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 8 Nussbaum, This Story Isnt True, 233.
god, and where the god Pan has his shrine. Socrates recantation speech, alluding in several images to Sapphos fragments, extols the power of a mad love that sends shudders, strange sweating, fever, and a tingling warmth inspired by the stream of beauty that enters in through the eyes of the lover at the sight of a godlike face of a beloved beautiful boy (251AB). The speech is memorable for its vivid image-rich evocation of sexual joy and the pains of separation, loves intense mad emotions, an exterior and interior jouissance and extravagant beholding that responds to the physical beauty of a beloved (and so godlike) body. And immediately after his lyrical evocation of the positive, life-giving power of eros that ows from the eyes, in a material stream of particles (images of desire herehimerosare of ow, of a liquid light that inundates the senses),9 Socrates sounds the register of eross inevitable (and seemingly immediate) decline; we have, sudden loss (exaiphnes in the Symposium), separation (choris), and the pain that simply drives it [the soul] wild. There are the temporary consolations of memory, though it is pain that dominates the soul when it is separated from the immediate physical presence of the beloved. So one is moved back and forth, from ecstatic joy, this sweetest of all pleasures (edonen d au tauten glukutaten [251E5]) to the stings of pain. In Socrates words, From the outlandish mix of these two feelingspain and joycomes anguish and helpless raving: in its madness the lovers soul cannot sleep at night or stay put by day; it rushes, yearning, wherever it expects to see the person who has that beauty. When it does see him, it opens the sluice-gates of desire and sets free the parts that were blocked up before (251DE).10 Socrates of the Phaedrus seems to understand well the emotions of his old wayward lover Alcibiades, his claims of particularity in love. And just as Alcibiades does in the Symposium, Socrates here claims to be speaking the truth about love in the form of a likeness. He uses images. At the very end of the dialogue, Socrates prays to Pan. In Nussbaums words, the philosopher, rejecting the simplicity of his former ideal (in the Symposium speech), prays to the mad erotic god, son of Hermes god of luck, and to the other gods of this wild place, asking for a beautiful inside and an outside that will be loved by that inside (279BC).11
9 Nehamas and Woodruff note that the word here used for desire, himeros, is fancifully derived from mere (particles), ienai (go), and rhein (ow): thus the parenthetical emphasis on the word. They also draw attention to a different but equally fanciful Platonic derivation of the same word in Cratylus 420A, where it is linked with images of ow (hrous) and eros from esron, owing in. Earlier, in 418 CD, himeros is derived from himeirousi, to long for light (in the darkness). Here Socrates works out from the words for day, himera or emera. See Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 40. 10 Ibid., 40 41. 11 Nussbaum, This Story Isnt True, 23233.
descending the stairs
At the heart of erotic love there lives a felt experience of difference, of unresolvable singularities, along with the most thoroughgoing visions of ideals and universal ennobling virtues. A source of loving bliss, of transcendental energies, eros also writes suffering and separation into our bodies. What goes up in love, what ascends, must, nally, inevitably, in spite of our philosophies, come down. One must descend the stairs. Ultimately, one might say that love, and certainly the beloved, loves ultimate object, is something, in its essential nal unattainability, yet to be, or perhaps something always about to be, l-venir, a process phrase that Derrida will use instead of the secure, already decided condent future (le futur).12 We have yet to arrive at the beloved. We languish in instability, uncertainty, division, openness, even destinerrance, another Derridean coinage.13 Love is foiled in its destination: eros the nonarriving, the everreaching. Like Sapphos apple:
As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch, high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot well, no they didnt forgetwere not able to reach.14 extravagant beholding: religious transformations of a lyric love motif
I argue here that various tensions in the life of eros outlined above are vividly present in a particular literary motif common to devotional literatures of four different religious traditionsJewish, Christian, Islamic, and Hinduand present in four different languages: Hebrew, the Greek of the Septuagint Bible, Arabic, and Sanskrit.15 This motif in Jewish and
12 For a central discussion of venir and venir, see Derridas essay, Psych: Inventions de lautre, trans. Catherine Porter in Reading Paul de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). See also a reading of this thematic in Derrida in John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), esp. 6976. 13 For an exhaustive study of images of nonarrival and, most specically, destinerrance throughout the work of Derrida, see Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida, Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), esp. 6063. 14 From Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, 105A, in Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, 26. 15 An early version of this article was given as a paper for the panel Erotic Figuring of Divine Love in Jewish and Hindu Traditions, Comparative Studies in Hinduisms and Judaisms Group, American Academic of Religion Annual Meeting, Atlanta, November 24, 2003. See also, for my early thinking on the Song of Songs and South Indian poetry, Steven Hopkins, In Love with the Body of God: Eros and the Praise of Icons in South Indian Devotion, Journal of Vaisnava Studies 2, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 1754.
Islamic literatures is called by the Arabic term wasf (pl. awsaf ), which literally means description, a poetic passage that describes in sequence, and by means of a series of exaggerated, sometimes articial images, the parts of a body (divine or human). In the medieval South Indian rivaisnava Hindu tradition, such a sequential description, most commonly reserved for deities, is called an anubhava, a relish or enjoyment experience of the body of the god Vishnu, from toe to head or head to toe, in his material form of a temple image. In rivaisnava anubhavas, like the wasfs of the early pre-Islamic Arabic odes and their later Su Islamic religious transformations, or the amboyant wasfs of the Hebrew Song of Songs, the body of the beloved dissembles itself into dozens of similes and metaphors, an excess that dazzles and expands in the lovers gaze to extraordinary, multiple forms, into cosmic and earthly landscapes, across historical and mythical time, taking on animal and cultic forms. Meanwhile, the lovers body remains, in varied degrees, simultaneously concrete and individualized, the beloved who stands before the lover, literally or in the elastic presence of memory, as his or her own. Through the anubhava and the wasf, respectively, we are able to glimpse a form of love language, what I am calling an extravagant beholding, that holds in tension together ideal visionary forms with the concrete, material reality of the individual object of love: we touch, all at once, particularity, presence, and transcendence, even the experience of absence and erotic deferral, in the charged horizontal space of the poem. I argue here that many of the unresolved, even willed, ambiguities of eros that we have alluded to through Derridas reluctant commentary on love and Nussbaums readings of Platos dialogues nd an elegant though sometimes fragile balance in the wasf and anubhava. In effect, this rather obscure motif of love poetry and its transformations in Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Hindu religious literatures rival the attempt equally rhetorical and lyrical, with its own store of extravagant images of Platos Socrates in the Phaedrus to provide a place in language for the blissful and tortuous excesses of eros, its ideal virtues and ideal beauty but also its passionate beholding of another person, its longing to possess a particular body, the awesome almost material infusion of beauty through the eyes in the concrete act of seeing and being seen:
First he shudders and a fear comes over him. . . . Then he gazes at him with the reverence due to a god, and if he werent afraid people would think him completely mad, hed even sacrice to his boy as if he were the image of a god. Once he has looked at him, his chill gives way to sweating and a high fever, because the stream of beauty that pours into him through his eyes warms him up and waters the growth of his wings. Meanwhile, the heat warms him and melts the places where the wings once grew, places that were long closed off with hard
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scabs to keep the sprouts from coming back; but as nourishment ows in, the feather shafts swell and rush to grow from their roots beneath every part of the soul (long ago, you see, the entire soul had wings). Now the whole soul seethes and throbs in this condition. Like a child whose teeth are just starting to grow in, and its gums are all aching and itchingthat is exactly how the soul feels when it begins to grow wings. It swells up and aches and tingles as it grows them. But when it looks upon the beauty of the boy and takes in the stream of particles owing into it from his beauty (that is why it is called desire), when it is watered and warmed by this, then all its pain subsides and is replaced by joy. (251AC)16
The issues that haunt Derrida and the Greeks draw their shadows across the wasf and anubhava in very different cultural and religious contexts. As we will see, it is through the wasf and the anubhava that love language, swelling and aching and itching, grows wings. Its metaphors and similes throw verbal bridges across empty space that serve both to connect and to separate lover from beloved; to touch and to preserve difference, at one and the same time: to defer nality and to prolong a certain insatiable desire. Through close readings of particular poetic texts in Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit, we will also see how the particular and the universal, Derridas who and what of love, loves crushing experience of separation, absence, defeat, and ssure, its one foot in the grave of the ideal and its visions of blissful presence, are expressed in exquisite literary forms that crosscut secular and religious forms of love. I will treat the motif in each tradition in turn, beginning with the Hebrew and Greek Song of Songs, noting in brief Jewish and Christian commentarial traditions, followed by the Arabic, qasidah in its Islamic and preIslamic forms, Greek Jewish texts, and the anubhava in the rivaisnava tradition in South India, with special focus on the poetry of the medieval saint-poet Vekatea. In the conclusion I will return to themes introduced at the beginning of the article, with the addition of Augustine and Dante on ladders of love, linking these insights on love, ideal bodies, and particularity with the study of the wasf and anubhava. ii. loves body in the song of songs and the arabic odes The wasf literary motif is only one of many striking characteristics of The Song of Songs, a text that remains unique and singularly obscure among all other texts of the Hebrew canon. Before we discuss in greater detail the signicance of this motif in the Song for the themes of love, ideal
16 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Nehamas and Woodruff, 40. For a gloss on the stream of particles and the word desire, see n. 9 above.
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bodies, and particularity, it is best to say a few words about the text itself, its provenance, and its place in the Bible. The Song of Songs is one of the most important root texts for Jewish and Christian spirituality. The Shir ha-Shirim, this strange, rich, evocative, late biblical textits cosmopolitan vocabulary points to post-Exilic, most likely the Hellenistic period in Palestine, around third century BCEhas long drawn to itself controversy and detailed commentary by Jewish and Christian scholastics, theologians, and mystics.17 It is a sequence of love poems, at its core a dialogue between a lover, the dark-skinned female Shulammite, and her male Beloved.18 The poem cycles origins are obscure and its particular provenance unknown. Reecting a variety of languages and traditionsHebrew, Aramaic, Greek, even South Indian (there are several Tamil loanwords in the Song)the Hebrew text is lled with unfamiliar terms, words of doubtful origin, striking lacunae, and many thorny locutions.19 It does not trace any linear movement in the lovers union and separation but ends rather abruptly with the Shulammite charging her Beloved to run away, my love, and be like a gazelle . . . on the
17 For a detailed treatment of the origins and provenance of the Song, see the introduction to Ariel Bloch and Chana Bloch, The Song of Songs: A New Translation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 18 As Bloch and Bloch note, ha-shulammit is of uncertain meaning. Medieval Jewish exegetes like Ibn Ezra understood the word as an epithet, the Jerusalemite [fem.], derived from shalem, a poetic term for Jerusalem, and one of the citys ancient names. See ibid., 19798. 19 I will not attempt here to enter into a discussion of The Song of Songs and ancient Tamil secular love poetry. Several years ago Chaim Rabin wrote what since has become an oftencited article on the sources of the Song in the classical Tamil literature of ancient South India (The Song of Songs and Tamil Poetry, Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 3, no. 3 [197374]: 20519). Basing his thesis on certain striking Tamil loanwords in Hebrew, he postulates that the Song of Songs was written in the heyday of Judean trade with South Arabia and beyond (and this may include the lifetime of King Solomon) by someone who had himself traveled to South Arabia and to South India and that had there become acquainted with Tamil poetry (216). This is a suggestive thesis that relies, particularly in the case of ancient Tamil love poetry, on dating that is highly questionable. The probable dates of the earliest Tamil texts themselves (ca. 100 BCE250 CE) are too late to t Rabins theory of South Indian inuence, a theory based almost entirely on the exaggerated claims of Tamil tradition that the poems go back millennia in time, though they more closely match the dates suggested in recent scholarly work on the Song (Hellenistic Palestine around the third century BCE). Compare the study by Abraham Mariaselvam, The Song of Songs and Ancient Tamil Love Poems: Poetry and Symbolism (Roma: Editrice Pontico Istituto Biblico, 1988), which takes up the comparison in much greater detail than Rabin. Though Mariaselvam brings to his comparative study an encyclopedic knowledge of the Tamil originals, as well as knowledge of Hebrew, there is still no evidence put forth as to genetic inuence. His ndings in Appendix I (27986), where he recounts in some detail the discussions on the possible dependence of the Song on Cakam Tamil poetry, are inconclusive, other than ruling out an a priori negative answer. Obviously, far more work needs to be done on this fascinating topic. For an exhaustive discussion of the problems of dating the corpus of classical Tamil poems, see Kamil Zvelebil, The Smile of Murugan: On Tamil Literature of South India (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 45, 42 43.
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mountains of spices.20 Its strangeness and difculty have marked it from the beginning as a text particularly sacred, one that, in the words of early rabbis, deles the hands; it is paradigmatic scripture hidden in the enigmatic sheaths of a love poem where Gods name is never mentioned. It sits on the page, just as it is, quietly compelling, issuing its disarming challenge to the religious imagination. According to one rabbinic tradition, it is precisely the pshat, the literal meaning of this love poem that is most esoteric (sod ).21 Its language, in Hebrew, Greek, or Latin, pushes the limits of physicality in its depiction of human love. Love in the Hebrew Song does not embrace only the generalized semantic registers of ahab , a word that holds a variety of meanings in the Bible, from lust in the story of Amnon and Tamar (2 Sam. 13:4, 15), to the love of parent, ones brother, or sister; to love of spouse; or to love of all humankind. The Song in Hebrew, in the very rst line, Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your loving is sweeter than wine, praises not ahab, general ized, universal love, but the plural form dodim (dodeyka, your dodim), literally loving, lovemaking, kisses, caresses, intercourse.22 The text celebrates, in idealized literary pastoral form, the intimate, individual, vulnerable, unstable, physical lovemaking and passionate desire of two bodies, and this sense of vivid physicality drives all the commentaries that attempt to show how these love poems speak about love of God. The text also plays with this rich term, punning with dudaim, the mandrake, a large-leaved, purple-owered aphrodisiac with juicy golden fruit. Love of God and Knesset Israel or the individual Jew is, inescapably, the love of two bodies.23 It is the same in Greek and Latin. Dodim in the Greek Azma (in the Septuagint) is translated, in a most wonderful misprision that reads dadayk for dodayk, mastoiin the Latin text of the Canticle it is ubera or mammaebreasts, an image that combines in a physical image both fertility and sensual immediacy.24 Gregory of Nyssa used this imagery of breasts to great sensual effect in his Canticle commentary, associating it
20 For commentary on this last cryptic phrase, see Bloch and Bloch, The Song of Songs, 22021. 21 See Shmuel Yerushalmi, The Book of Shir HaShirim: Meam Loez, trans. Zvi Faier (New York: Moznaim, 1988), 4. 22 See commentary in Bloch and Bloch, The Song of Songs, 137, where it is noted that the word love [for dodeyka] in most translations is too general and evasive. 23 This punning is lost in the Greek and Latin, where mandrake is simply mandragorae and dodim is mastoi/ubera. See below. 24 The Septuaginta reads hoti agathoi mastoi sou huper oinon, and the Vulgata reads quia meliora sunt ubera tua vino. I am grateful to Daniel Boyarin for pointing out to me the dadayk/dodayk misreading.
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with luminous warmth and milky ow; breasts of wine; fountains of the uid, moving, and fecund presence of God.25 Though the Greek text of the Song itself uses agape and its various verbal transformations for love and for being in love (2:4, 7), Greek Christian commentators such as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa often associate agapes actual pitch of meaning as equivalent to eros, a word that, as we have already noted, carries a semantic register of intense desire, inexplicable wounding, and unstable yearning. In Gregorys commentaries on the Song, eros, and not the more generalized agape, best describes love of God as innite insatiability, sharp yearning, at once painful and blissful, which leads one on the path to an eternal progress (epektasis) in God. At one point in his Canticle commentary, Gregory notes: For heightened agape is called eros (epitetamene gar agape eros legetai ).26 Latin commentators like Bernard of Clairvaux use the word amor, shared by troubadour traditions of southern France, and sometimes diligende, but rarely caritas, to describe the religious love that lies beneath or behind the lovers voices in the Song.27 The Vulgata text itself uses various terms interchangeably, mostly forms of caritas and dilectio, though Canticle 2:5, for I languish with love, is the vivid quia amore langueo, the single use of the word amor in the Latin Song.28 Eros and amor, religious eros and amor, stake a claim through the Song as the most appropriate words to describe love of God.29
25 See Martin Laird, Fountain of Presence, Breasts of Wine: The Flow of Knowledge in the In Canticum canticorum, in his Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 13153. 26 From Oratio 13 (5, 10), 1048C, in Gregorii Nysseni Opera, ed. W. Jaeger, vol. 6, Gregorii Nysseni in Canticum Canticorum, ed. Hermannus Langerbeck (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 383. See this text citation and an excellent discussion of the identication of agape with eros intensity and wounded love in Origen and Gregory in Catherine Osborne, Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love (Oxford: Clarenden, 1994), 7079. 27 For an excellent summary study of the Song of Songs commentaries in medieval Christianity (one that includes mention of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa in the Christian East, along with the Mariological commentaries), see E. Ann Matter. The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). For a general introduction by Jean Danielou and a ne selection of translated texts from Gregory of Nyssas commentary on the Canticle, see From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssas Mystical Writings, trans. and ed. Herbert Musurillo, SJ (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1995). 28 In Hebrew, holat ahabah, using here the word ahab in its sense of intense desire. 29 In medieval Latin amor suggests a basis more in the physical than in the intellectual: iecore amamus, we love with our livers, reports Isidore of Seville (Etymologiae XI, 1:27). Amor can sometimes be distinguished, as Isidore states, from dilectio, a word that refers to a love that comes from deliberate intellectual choice (Etymologiae VIII, 2:7). I am indebted to Robert Newlin for these references. See his rich and suggestive PhD thesis on Latin beast literatures, Cunning Ambassadors (Department of Comparative Literature, Rutgers University, 2004). See also, for the destinies of The Song in the Latin tradition, Peter Dronke, The Song of Songs and Medieval Love-Lyric, in his The Medieval Poet and His World (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984), 20936.
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The Shir ha-ShirimAsma in Greek, the Cantica canticorum in Latin inspires a rich tradition of what one might call religious transformations of the love lyric.
aunted guration: the waSf in the song How sweet is your love my sister my bride your loving is more fragrant than wine your perfumes sweeter than any spices Your lips drop sweetness like the honeycomb my bride honey and milk are under your tongue and your dress has the scent of Lebanon A garden locked is my sister my bride A hidden fountain a sealed spring Your branches are an orchard of pomegranates an orchard full of choice fruits spikenard and saffron aromatic cane and cinnamon with every frankincense tree myrrh and aloes with all the most exquisite spices30
Many have come across these curious lines in the Song, in various translations from various editions, with delight and not a little amazement. The lovers in the Hebrew Song of Songs describe the body of their beloved from foot to head or head to foot in hyperbole that at times seems to border on the comic and grotesque. The innovative metaphors and similes of the lovers leap across chasms of association in what Robert Alter has called a poetics of aunted guration.31 Yet in spite of its strangeness, their language is charged with feeling and presence; it expresses an alluring,
30 Translation adapted from the Jewish Publication Society edition from the Hebrew, Oxford Jewish Study Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); the Revised English Bible, with Apocrypha (Oxford/Cambridge: Oxford University Press/Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Bloch and Bloch, The Song of Songs. See the detailed philological notes in Bloch and Bloch, 17577: the translations are all somewhat inaccurate, based as they are upon a combination of sources, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and the root in each language contains many layers of meaning. 31 See his chapter on the Song: Robert Alter, The Garden of Metaphor, in his The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic, 1986), 196. Alter distinguishes in this chapter between stock, intensive, and innovative imagery (the latter strikingly apparent in Job and in the Song). See also page 193: It should be observed, to begin with, that in the Song of Songs the process of guration is frequently foregroundedwhich is to say, as the poet takes expressive advantage of representing something through an image that brings out a salient quality it shares with the referent, he calls our attention to his exploitation of similitude, to the artice of metaphorical representation.
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even disarming, erotic energy. In chapters 4:17 and 6:47 of this text of love songs that Rabbi Akiba in the second century is said to have praised as the Holy of Holies,32 the female beloveds eyes are doves behind a thicket of hair (sammah: locks, tresses, mass of hair);33 her hair a ock of goats streaming down Mount Gilead; her teeth a ock of newly shorn ewes, freshly come up from the dipping; all of them have twins and none has lost a lamb; her parted lips (or forehead, depending on the translation) behind her veil is like a pomegranate split open; her neck or nose a tower, Davids tower, which is built with encircling courses, a thousand bucklers hang upon it, and all are warriors shields; her two breasts are like two fawns, twin fawns of a gazelle grazing among the lilies. Here the body of the beloved becomes, within the scope of the lovers gaze, numbingly pluralit disseminates into landscapes, into gardens, orchards, and wilderness at once natural and cultural/pastoral; into shrines, sacred mountains, towers, walls, vineyards, and warriors hallswhile remaining a singular, individual, discrete other, a beloved (the dark-skinned Shulammite) who nally, and mysteriously, disappears. The poem sequence ends midstream, almost breathless, with a call, a longing, for return:
Run away my love and be like the gazelle or the young stag on the mountains of spices
The radical presence evoked in the charged language of loving description is combined in the Song with a sense of suspension, of a love (for the time being) lost and (perhaps) just about to be regained. Presence is linked to deferral, what is (always) yet to be.
32 This well-known palinode is from Mishnah Yadaim III:5: Said Rabbi Akiba: Heaven forbid that any man in Israel ever disputed that the Song of Songs renders the hands unclean, for the whole world is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Writings are holy, and the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies. Quoted in Francis Landy, Paradoxes of Paradise: Identity and Difference in the Song of Songs (Shefeld: Almond, 1983), 13. And this identication of the Song with the sanctuary of the Temple need not be merely metaphorical, if we keep in mind the very ancient Jewish tradition, recorded in the Talmud and reiterated by the Kabbalists, of the Holy of Holies as a bedroom where the cherubim lay in sexual embrace like a husband and wife. The divine presence (the Shekhinah) was said to dwell between the two cherubim in the Temple as it does now between the pious husband and wife. It is thus no wonder that a love poem would be seen by the tradition as central to its divine mystery. For a detailed account of the sexual symbolism and its theurgic meaning in Jewish mysticism, see Moshe Idel, Sexual Metaphors and Praxis in the Kabbalah, in The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory, ed. David Kraemer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 197224. For a detailed treatment of the place of the Song in Midrash, see Daniel Boyarin, The Song of Songs: Lock or Key? Intertextuality, Allegory as Midrash, in The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory, edited by Regina M. Schwartz (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 21430. 33 See commentary on this verse in Bloch and Bloch, The Song of Songs, 16668.
15
One of the most vivid of poetic sequences describes the dancing Shulammite from the feet up. I quote from Marcia Falks ne contemporary translation of the Song:
Dance for us, princess, dance as we watch and chant! What will you see as I move in the dance of love? Your graceful, sandaled feet, your thighstwo spinning jewels, your hipsa bowl of nectar brimming full Your bellygolden wheat adorned with daffodils, your breaststwo fawns, the twins of a gazelle Your neckan ivory tower, your eyestwo silent pools, your facea tower that overlooks the hills Your headmajestic mountain crowned with purple hair, captivating kings within its locks (7:26)34
But these descriptions do not concentrate only on the female body, the male lovers erotic enjoyment. In 5:1016 the girl describes her lover from head to foot. Again in Falks translation:
My love is radiant As gold or crimson, Hair in waves of black Like wings of ravens.
34 Quotations are from poems 15 and 22 in Marcia Falks edition of the Song, The Song of Songs. A New Translation and Interpretation (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990). See commentaries of Bloch and Bloch, The Song of Songs, 199206, for the many linguistic issues and choices involved in translating these rich and often ambiguous verses. A comparison of Falk with various Bible translations also helps to open the original text to readers in all its rich literal registers of meaning and begs the question on the inevitable limitation of every translation.
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Eyes like doves, aoat Upon the water, Bathed in milk, at rest On brimming pools. Cheeks like beds of spices, Banks of owers, Lips like lilies, sweet And wet with dew.
Studded with jewels, his arms Are round and golden, His belly smooth as ivory, Bright with gems. Set in gold, his legs, Two marble columns He stands as proud as cedars In the mountains. Man of pleasuresweet To taste his love! Friend and lover chosen For my love. (5:1016)35
The exact origin of this descriptive motif is unclear. It has only been since the last century, when similarities between the Song and pre-sixthcentury Arabic poetry were rst noticed, that critics and biblical scholars have referred to this genre of poetic description by the Arabic word wasf. There are analogous, though not as well-developed, limb-by-limb descriptions in the earlier secular love poetry of Egypt. The Egyptian songs, though they come down to us from a time remote from the current scholarly dates of the Songs composition (ca. 42 BCE), share with the Hebrew cycle of poems the provenance of Palestine and perhaps, as Michael V. Fox has argued, the same local literary tradition.36 Even though genetic links are impossible to prove, Fox contends that the Egyptian songs are one, if not the main, source for the imagery and poetics of the Hebrew Song.37 Whatever the cogency of this theory (it is one of many
35 This passage occurs in poem 19 of Falks edition: Falk, The Song of Songs. Again, see the detailed notes of Bloch and Bloch on these verses: Bloch and Bloch, The Song of Songs, 18488. 36 See Michael V. Fox, The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), esp. ixxvii. 37 See, in this regard, Foxs remarks: The Egyptian love songs give us an idea of what an ancient Israelite audience would have expected in a love song, thus helping ll out the
17
competing theories on the literary and religious origins of the Song),38 there are scattered among the Twentieth-Dynasty papyrae passages such as the following that bear some resemblance to the sequential descriptions of and by the Shulammite beloved:
One alone is (my) sister, having no peer: more gracious than all other women. Behold her, like Sothis rising at the beginning of a good year: shining, precious, white of skin, lovely of eyes when gazing. Sweet her lips (when) speaking: she has no excess of words. Long of neck, white of breast, her hair true lapis lazuli. Her arms surpass gold, her ngers are like lotuses. Her full buttocks, her narrow waist, her thighs carry on her beauties. Lovely when she strides on the ground. she has captured my heart in her embrace.39 jewish sources outside the song
As for the motif of the wasf in Jewish tradition, it is often said the only examples in all of ancient Hebrew literature of this convention are in the Song of Songs. But there is at least, as Shaye J. D. Cohen has argued, one exception to this rule.40 The genre reappeared in Jewish literature as early as the Genesis Apocryphon, one of the manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls
generic context lacking in extent Hebrew literature. . . . In my opinion the similarities justify a hypothesis of at least indirect dependence, that is to say, the supposition that the Song is a late offshoot of an ancient and continuous literary tradition, one whose roots we nd, in part at least, in the Egyptian love poetry. I do not assume that the author of the Song necessarily knew Egyptian or borrowed directly from Egyptian originals (though that is by no means impossible). It is more likely that Egyptian love poetry was sung in Palestine, where it became incorporated into the local literature and developed there in new ways (ibid., xxii, xxiv). 38 Along with the theories of Egyptian and South Indian origins, as well as the theories that the Song is made up of a collection of ancient Near Eastern wedding songs or fragments of the liturgy of a fertility cult, one of the more suggestive recent accounts is by Marvin H. Pope in his edition of the Song for the Anchor BibleThe Song of Songs: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible, vol. 7C (New York: Doubleday, 1977). Popes theory is that the Song is connected in some way to mortuary cults or funeral feasts of the ancient Near East that, according to some scholars, were ritually organized feasts of love. 39 From the P. Chester Beatty I papyrus, group A, no. 31, translated in Fox, The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs, 52. 40 See Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beauty of Flora and the Beauty of Sarai, Helios 8, no. 2 (1981): 4153. I am indebted to Moshe Idel for this reference.
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written in Hellenized Palestine during the rst century BCE. The author of the Apocryphon adds to the Genesis 12:1020 account of Abram and Sarai among the Egyptians: his praise of Sarai includes a sequential headto-foot description of her beauty.41 But in this case his model, as Cohen argues, is not the Song, but one of the epigrams of his contemporary Philodemus, a Syrian of Gadara who around 70 BCE went to Italy to embark on a literary career and who was one of the rst to incorporate this literary device into the love poetry of the West. The Jewish writer, who, like Philodemus, ourished in a Hellenized environment, followed the pattern of the Syrian poet in blending descriptions of bodily beauty with a particularly Hellenistic emphasis on feminine wisdom, intelligence, and skill (an aspect absent from the Song).42 As Cohen suggests, Each independently Hellenized the Near Eastern descriptive song.43
a presentational poetics
With the genealogy of the genre and its many variations in mind, how might we interpret awsaf in the Song? What does this form of love language in the Song tell us about our theme of particular and ideal bodies? The literal meanings of awsaf simply provoke smileswe are forced to muse on the radically different notions of beauty held by an ancient people. We certainly cannot impose a self-conscious surrealist poetic of aesthetic shock on this ancient material. Perhaps we might take a more academic approach, viewing the awsaf not as descriptive love songs but as parodies or, more soberly, as learned allusions to sculptural or architectural forms. There may indeed be a cultic element in such sequential descriptions, particularly of the male body, where we read allusions to
41 The text describing Sarai more or less from the head to the feet (ibid., 46) is put into the mouth of the courtier Hirquanos, whose description is decidedly more chaste in imagery and diction than the one of the author of the Song: How splen[did] and beautiful the form of her face, and how . . . and how soft the hair of her head; how lovely are her eyes and how pleasant is her nose and all the radiance of her face . . . ; how lovely is her breast and how beautiful is all her whiteness! Her arms, how beautiful! And her hands, how perfect! And (how) [attrac]tive all the appearance of her hands! How lovely [are] her palms, and how long and dainty all the ngers of her hands. Her feet, how beautiful! How perfect her legs! There are no virgins or brides who enter a bridal chamber more beautiful than she. Indeed, her beauty surpasses that of all women: her beauty is high above all of them. Yet with all this beauty there is much wisdom in her; and whatever she has. Translated in Cohen, The Beauty of Flora, 45 46. 42 Philodemuss witty epigram is, like the praise of Hirquanos in the Apocryphon, more apostrophic than lyrical, as it is built upon a series of vocatives to the beloveds feet, legs, thighs, buttocks, sex (kteis), hips, shoulders, breasts, neck, etc. This lack of metaphoric texture also sets it apart from the densely gurative style of the Song. 43 Cohen, The Beauty of Flora, 48. Among the possible inuences on Philodemus other than the ancient Near Eastern song, one of the more fruitful seems to be the genre of ekphrasis (description), dened, as Cohen observes, by the ancient rhetoricians as an elaborate and embellished description of a person or an object, usually of a work of art (ibid., 43).
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ivory and marble.44 As Richard N. Soulen has observed, such a realist approach to this poetic of description, whether it be to point to its grotesqueries as an example of carnival or even to analyze it in terms of ancient Egyptian iconography, rather misses the point.45 The latter is a perfect example of what Alter calls misplaced concreteness.46 It is obvious from any detailed reading of these passages that neither a cultic nor a purely artistic context would entirely explain the exuberant, exaggerated similes and metaphors of the awsaf. The purpose of the wasf in the Song, Soulen suggests, is presentational rather than representational. Its purpose, Soulen observes, is not to provide a parallel to visual appearance or primarily to describe feminine or masculine qualities metaphorically.47 Rather, the images want to evoke feeling; they seek to create emotion, not critical or dispassionate comprehension; their goal is a total response, not simply a cognitive one.48 The lovers metaphorical hyperbole is, in Soulens words, the language of joy that seeks to overwhelm and delight the hearer.49 We are invited, even greatly coerced, to share a lovers awe, joy, and erotic delight in the physical beauty of the beloved and, beyond, in his or her qualities and virtues that create a rich imagistic world of their own, sometimes dissolving the original focus of gazing. As a physical response to the ood of beauty that enters the eyes, the lovers of the Song delight in recreating each others bodies through verbal art. The visual exaggerations of the wasf are related to other rhetorical extravagances of the text, which include tactile images of entering, eating, tasting, and feasting on the beloved and the olfactory eroticism of owers,
See Bloch and Bloch, The Song of Songs, 185. See Richard Soulens article The Wasfs of the Song of Songs and Hermeneutic, Journal of Biblical Literature 86, pt. 2 (June 1967): 18390. Soulen refers, on 18587, to M. H. Segals theory of literary parody, Morris Jastrow Jr.s notion of difference in aesthetic taste, and Gillis Gerlemans obsession with Egyptian art and ornamental gures in the awsaf. See also Foxs exegesis of the awsaf in The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs, 14065, which basically follows Gerleman and Popethough with some important misgivingsin its emphasis on the tropes origin in works of art, artifacts, icons, and sculpture. For a sense of his ambivalence on this, however, see the following remark: Some of the imagery in this section [5:1016] is drawn from the arts: the head of gold, the arms like cylinders of gold, thighs like marble pillars on gold sockets, the belly like an ivory bar. Only the gold head is taken from sculpture, so we cannot suppose that the boy is being described as if he were a statue (contrary to Gerleman) (Fox, The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs, 147). 46 Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, 196. 47 Soulen, The Wasfs of the Song of Songs, 187. 48 Ibid., 188. See Michael Sells, The Guises of the Ghul: Dissembling Simile and Semantic Overow in the Classic Arabic Nasib, in Reorientations/Arabic and Persian Poetry, ed. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevyah (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) 13064, for a similar argument with regard to the Arabic odes. 49 Soulen, The Wasfs of the Song of Songs, 190.
45
44
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fruits, spices, perfumes, and the many aromas of the hills, elds, and countryside. And the Song not only engages the senses one at a time but also often mingles them in a vivid synesthesia, as in one of its rst images, where the beloveds name is said to be a spreading perfume. Through such synesthesia and extravagance of rhetoric the awsaf of The Song of Songs create a charged eld of metaphoric energies between the particular other lover, her concrete presence for the lover who gazes at her (and recreates her, over and again, by that gazing), and a dissembling semantic overow that blurs boundaries, that defers nal possession of the other person but also draws out a certain erotic relish. Built into the structure of these elaborate descriptions is an afrmation both of physical possession, intimate delectation, and (immanent) loss, an endless oscillation between seeming arrival and separation, the beloveds discrete presence and at the same time her boundlessness, her innity of forms. We have here, in literary form, to return to Sapphos phrase, eros blissfully, even insatiably, nonarriving, the soul growing wings watered by streams of beauty that enter through the eyes in Socrates Phaedrus speech, verbal horripilation, afrming what Gregory of Nyssa called in his Song commentaries eternal progress (epektasis). Such nonarrival, however, never overly darkens the overarching sunny aspect of this cycle of love poems. The main register of the Song is joy and joyous anticipation, in spite of eross willed deferral. Though the Song itself seems to end with separation, a call and an absence, its rhetoric, deeply informed by the images of the wasf, is about an inevitable and reliable presence that overwhelms and delights and that multiplies delight. Deferral here is jouissance. The who and the what of love are held in elegant tension here, a tension that excites, withholds, releases, withdraws, but ultimately pleases. Here is language that raises the hairs at the back of the neck, that transforms ache and tingle into metaphor, simile, a network of symbols thrown across two bodies in love.50 This is not, however, always the case with the wasf and its rhetorical roles in a poem. With this in mind, we turn now to the very different context of the Arabic odes.
the waSf in arabic qaSIdah: memory of what is lostextravagant description and absence
As we have already noted, wasf, used by critics to refer to a motif in The Song of Songs, is an Arabic term that literally means description, a poetic passage that describes in sequence, and by means of a series of exagger50 For a discussion of the nature of the symbol as something that both unites and separates, putting into tension together sameness and difference in a way that matches similar tensions in the life of eros, see Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, 7076, 10910.
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ated, sometimes articial images, the parts of the human body.51 The term wasf refers most specically to a poetic form used by poets in the early pre-Islamic Arabic odes (pre-622 CE). Michael Sells has studied the poetry and poetics of the Arabic odes and their later religious transformations in the Su poetry of Ibn Arabi and has come to a conclusion about the uses of the wasf that differs from what we see in the Song. The balance, however precarious, between the who and the what does not seem to be present at all. In the Arabic and later the Islamic mystical context, the awsaf and their semantic extravagances serve to evoke not only an elusive erotic/divine presence but also, and perhaps most important, absence.52 The rich dissembling similes, imagery, and metaphors serve to evoke increasing distance and a continuous metamorphosis, nally, memory of what is lost: the beloved as a concrete individual presence evaporates in the dissembling semantic overows of the wasf. I quote a section of Sellss translation from a poem of Ghaylan Ibn Uqba, also called Dhu al-Rumma, one of the nest poets of the late classical period, where the narrator is in search of the elusive Beloved, Mayya:
Her buttocks like a dune over which a rain shower falls matting the sand as it sprinkles down Her hair-fall over the lower curve of her back soft as the moringas gossamer owers, curled with pins and combed, With long cheek hollows where tears ow, and a lengthened curve at the breast sash where it crosses and falls. You see her ear pendant along the exposed ridge of her neck, swaying out, dangling over the abyss.
See the section on awsaf in Falk, The Song of Songs, 21735. Michael Sells draws attention to the dissembling similes and semantic overow of the wasf in the classic pre-Islamic Arabic odes and in later Su poetry. Such semantic overow is part and parcel of head-to-foot descriptions of the alluring female beloved, the ghul, in this preseventh-century literature. See his Guises of the Ghul. See also, for translations of such poetry, Michael Sells, Desert Tracings: Six Classic Arabian Odes by Alqama, Shanfara, Labid, Antara, Al-A sha, and Dhu al-Rumna (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), esp. the poem To the Encampments of Mayya, 6776.
52 51
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With a red thornberry tooth-twig, Fragrant as musk and Indian ambergris brought in in the morning, she reveals Petals of a camomile cooled by the night to which the dew has arisen at evening from Rama oasis.53
Sells comments on this section:

In passages like that cited above, the beloved is evoked so powerfully that the reader or hearer is convinced that she has been described. But in fact the similes, so vivid in their imagery, tell us very little about the factual appearance of the beloved. They seem to be depicting the beloved, but in fact what they actually show (camomile blossoms, moringa trees, lush vegetation, owing water, and in other examples, wild animals giving birth or nursing in tranquility) is the symbolic analogue of the beloved: a lost garden. What occurs here is less a description of Mayya than it is a metamorphosis.54
The poets name, the epithet Dhu al-Rumma, literally means he-witha-cord-of-a-rope, and, as Sells in another context remarks, this nickname is an inversion of one of the beloveds epithets, dhatu alwanin, shewith-many-guises. We have here the poet-hero attempting to bind the many-guised and constantly changing into a stable and secure world.55 And it is this immense, boundless, ever-shape-shifting beloved that nds her way into the religious lyrics of one of the greatest Su mystical poets of medieval Islam, Ibn al-Arabi (11651240).
ibn al-arabI s religious transformations of the arabic qaSIdah
Such a literary evocation of absence and memory of an irretrievable past through sequential description is translated by the Su poet Ibn Arabi into a very complex theological discourse about love and the beloved. This discourse afrms the experience of concrete presence (now past) and the individual identity of the beloved, even as it turns apophatic, dramatizing the ultimate inability of religious language to nally and fully seize its referent, the beloved as the divine in the form of the Eternal Feminine. Again, in Sellss vivid translation:
53 Taken from Michael Sellss article Ibn Arabis Gentle Now, Doves of the Thornberry and Moringa Thicket, Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society 10 (1991): 23. 54 Ibid., 3 4. 55 Sells, Desert Traces, 68.
At Rama between White Sands and Hajir there is a shy-eyed girl in a howdah, Child beauty who lights the way, like a lamp for a man who walks the night, Pearl in a shell of hair as black as jet, Your mind dives to reach it never to emerge from the watery deep. Neck supple, gestures coquette bring to mind a gazelle of the sandy hills Like the forenoon sun in the constellation Aries cutting across the cosmic reaches. When she takes down her veil When she shows her face she veils the morning light with her shadow. I called to her between Hima and Rama: Who is here for a braveheart who halts at Sal in and hopes . . . Who for a braveheart drowned in his tears, drunk from the wine of her open mouth Who for a braveheart burned by his own sighs, led astray and abandoned in the beauty of the glow between her eyes.56
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Or, in another poem by Ibn Arabi that echoes images from Dhu al-Rumma:
Gentle now, doves of the thornberry and moringa thicket, dont add to my heart-ache your sighs. . . .
56 Selection from Michael Sells, Stations of Desire: Love Elegies from Ibn Arabi and New Poems (Jerusalem: IBIS, 2000), 13133.
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I echo back, in the evening, in the morning, echo, the longing of a love-sick lover, the moaning of the lost. In a grove of tamarisks spirits wrestled, bending the limbs down over me, passing me away.57 nizAm, daughter of a sheikh
Though Sells argues that Ibn Arabis love poems are about divine absence and essentially apophatic,58 it is important to remember that the poems in Ibn Arabis Diwan, those passionate verses lled with dissembling and visionary descriptions of a beloveds body, were originally composed for a very particular girl: as he writes in the original prologue to the collection he called Tarjuman al-ashwaq, or The Interpreter (Translator/Guide) of Ardent Desires, they were for Nizam, the daughter of a famous Iranian sheikh, Zahir Ibn Rustam, and the niece of the venerable ancient, the learned woman of Hijaz, Fakhr al-Nisa Bint Rustam, both of whom were staying for a time in Mecca. Long evenings spent with these two great sheikhs were lled with the most marvelous conversations and the most remarkable people, but the most compelling of persons Ibn Arabi met at that learned home was Nizam, a gure of pure light.59 Concrete references to this historical Nizam are spread throughout the lyric love odes (nasib-ghazals), Ibn Arabis transformation of the traditional qasidah of the Tarjuman. In one passage, mention of this princess from the land of Persia occurs after a litany of longing lovers, including Mayya and Ghaylan of the classical Arabic qasidah.
. . . and stop a while with me at the ruins, so we may try to weep, no, so that I can weep at what has become of me. Passion shoots me without arrows, slays without a spear: tell me, will you weep with me when I weep beside her?
From Sells, Ibn Arabis Gentle Now, 9. See above. For a detailed account of this meeting and its circumstances, see Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Susm of Ibn Arabi, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 13639.
58 59 57
Help me, help me to weep and tell me again the tale of Hind and Lubna, Sulayma and Zaynab and Inan, then tell me of Hajir and Zarud, give me news of the pastures of the gazelles and mourn for me with the love poems of Qays and Lubna, with Mayya and the aficted Ghaylan. Long have I yearned for that tender girl, gifted in prose and verse, with her pulpit, eloquent, a princess from the land of Persia, from the most shining of cities, Isfahan. She is the daughter of Iraq, the daughter of my teacher, and I her opposite, a child from Yemen. O my Lords, have you seen or heard that two things opposite are ever made one? Had you seen us at Rama, passing each other cups of desire without ngers, as our passion caused words of sweetness and joy to pass between us without a tongue you would have seen a state where all understanding vanishes: Yemen and Iraq in close embrace.60
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Another reference is embedded within a lyric that contains vivid awsaf of lithe women with dark hair who sway like boughs, whose lips are sweet to the kiss, with delicate bare arms, swelling breasts that offer choice gifts, luring ears and souls, taking captive the devout and fearing heart:
60 Translation adapted from Tarjuman XX:1022, in The Tarjuman al-ashwaq: A Collection of Mystical Odes by Muhyiddin ibn al-Arabi, ed. and trans. Reynold A. Nicholson (London: Theosophical Publishing, 1978), 87.
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. . . showing teeth like pearls healing with tongues moist with spit one weak and wasted; throwing glances from their eyes that pierce a heart grown used to wars and long combat. From their breasts new moons rise that suffer no eclipse on waxing full, causing tears to ow as if from dark rain clouds, sighs the sound of crushing thunder. O my two comrades, may my life-blood be the ransom of a slender girl who bestowed upon me favors and riches: she established the harmony of union, she is our very principle of harmony: both Arab and foreigner, she makes the gnostic forget: when she gazes, she draws against you long broad swords, her white teeth a dazzling lightning.61
Another lyric praises Nizam in the context of her home in Mecca:

. . . how should I not love the City of Peace, since there I have a teacher who is the guide of my religion, my reason, my faith? It is the home of a daughter of Persia, subtle in her gestures, her eyes languid: she greets and heals those whom she kills with her glances. After beauty and benecence, she gives the best gifts.62
61 62
Adapted from Tarjuman XXIX:915, in ibid., 107. Adapted from Tarjuman XXXVIII:2 4, in ibid., 122.
Two Lines Long
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A nal allusion describes this girl as someone who possesses a fearsome splendor, a beauty that kills:
Truly she is an Arab girl who belongs by birth to the daughters of Persia, yes, truly, beauty strung for her a row of ne pearl-white teeth, pure as crystal.63
The rst recension of these poems contains a prologue, describing his meeting with Nizam, and the poems, without commentary. The second recension takes out the references to the human Nizam and includes an autocommentary that emphasizes the esoteric, transcendental/theological meanings of the poems. The third recension is identical to the second, though it contains extra passages that depict the circumstances surrounding the writing of the commentary.64 In his later prologues and allegorical/ theological/mystical autocommentaries on these love lyrics, Ibn Arabi disabuses the reader of any idea that there is some kind of physical love in these erotic poems or that their original object was ever merely the physical, particular Nizam. Indeed, he comments, their subject is Nizam (i.e., Beauty, Artful Arrangement, Perfected Harmony, Fluency, from the Arabic root n/z /m), the Eternal Feminine, the very Eye of the Sun and of Beauty (ayn al-Shams wal-Baha), and not a merely human girl. These poems, he says in his commentary, allude enigmatically to the various kinds of mystical knowledge which are under the veil of an-Nizam, the maiden daughter of our Shaykh.65 This slender girl is the single, subtle, and essential knowledge of God,66 as a daughter of Persia, she is, allegorically, a form of foreign wisdom connected with Moses, Jesus, Abraham, and other foreigners of the same class.67 He was responding, in these commentaries, to criticisms of fellow sheikhs, particularly, as Henry Corbin remarks, those of a certain learned moralist of Aleppo,
63 Adapted from Tarjuman XLII:45, in ibid., 127. I have adapted all of the Nicholson translations used above. These poems of the Tarjuman not translated in Stations of Desire have yet to nd their Michael Sells. Ive done my best to make them read better as poems on the page in English, to better complement other translations in this article. 64 For a detailed genealogy of the various recensions, along with an account of the composite contents of the Leiden MS he is working with, see Nicholson, The Tarjuman al-ashwaq, 19. 65 From commentary on XX, in ibid., 109. 66 From commentary on XXIX, in ibid. 67 From commentary on XXXVIII, in ibid., 123.
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as to the appropriateness of this love and these erotic poems addressed to a young female.68
niZAm: the who and the what
But one cannot come away from the Tarjuman, from poems or commentary, without a sense of the concrete particularity of the object of these poems: she may be Wisdom, Harmony, a transcendental Truth of Divine Beauty, the what of love, but she is at the same time a particular human being, the who of love whose very particular beautyof soul and of bodyawakened in the sheikh-poet experiences of universal signicance. I quote sections from the original prologue of the Tarjuman, translated in Corbins seminal study of Ibn Arabi, Limagination creatrice:
Now this shaikh had a daughter, a lissome young girl who captivated the gaze of all who saw her, whose mere presence was the ornament of our gatherings and startled all those who contemplated it to the point of stupefaction. Her name was Nizam [Harmonica] and her surname Eye of the Sun and of Beauty [ayn al-Shams wal-Baha]. . . . The magic of her glance, the grace of her conversation were such an enchantment that when, on occasion, she was prolix, her words owed from the source; when she spoke concisely, she was a marvel of eloquence; when she expounded an argument, she was clear and transparent. . . . If not for the paltry souls who are ever ready for scandal and predisposed to malice, I should comment here on the beauties of her body as well as her soul, which was a garden of generosity. . . . At the time I frequented her, I observed with care the noble endowments that graced her person and those additional charms conferred by the society of her aunt and father. And I took her as model for the inspiration of the poems contained in the present book, which are love poems, composed in suave, elegant phrases, although I was unable to express so much as part of the emotion which my soul experienced and which the company of this young girl awakened in my heart, or of the generous love I felt, of the memory which her unwavering friendship left in my memory, or of the grace of her mind or the modesty of her bearing, since she is the object of my Quest and my hope, the Virgin Most Pure [al-Adhra al-batul ]. Nevertheless, I succeeded in putting into verse some of the thoughts connected with my yearning, as precious gifts and objects which I here offer. I let my enamored soul speak clearly, I tried to express the profound attachment I felt, the profound concern that tormented me in those days now past, the regret that still moves me at the memory of that noble society and that young girl.69
68 See Corbin, Creative Imagination, 138, also 32122. See also Sells, Stations of Desire, 3435, where he refers to a later rewrite of the original prologue. 69 See Corbin, Creative Imagination, 13637, 32132. Passage is taken from the Tarjuman, in Nicholson, The Tarjuman al-ashwaq, 10ff. This young Iranian girl is assimilated to the princess from among the daughters of the Greeks that he saw one night while circumambulating the Ka aba, and ultimately Christ (as Wisdom, Divine Sophia). See Corbin, Creative Imagination, 139 45, 32228.
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Ibn Arabi notes elsewhere, in his Fusus al-hikam (the bezels of wisdom), that women represent the concrete particular, like the Prophet Muhammad, the wisdom of singularity, and so awsaf in Ibn Arabis religious love poetry, addressed to the female beloved, describe the divine epiphanized in concrete particulars, afrming divine particularity and universality at one and the same time.70 As Ibn Arabi himself remarks, in the original preface:
Whatever name I may mention in this work, it is to her that I am alluding. Whatever the house whose elegy I sing, it is of her house that I am thinking. But that is not all. In the verses I have composed for the present book, I never cease to allude to the divine inspirations (waridat ilahiya), the spiritual visitations (tanazzulat ruhaniya), the correspondences [of our world] with the world of the angelic Intelligences; in this I conformed to my usual manner of thinking in symbols; this because the things of the invisible world attract me more than those of actual life, and because this young girl knew perfectly what I was alluding to [that is, the esoteric sense of my verses].71
The awsaf in Ibn Arabis nasib-ghazals, to use the still-crucial insights of Corbin, transgure the earthly gure of the woman by setting her against a light that brings out her superhuman virtualities and so anticipates something that is still absent in its totality, the full divine presence which is not yet, though it shimmers in metaphors and similes inspired by the memory of the particular Beloved body.72 The wasf here, as an act of loving beholding, is a transmutation of the sensible,73 the descent of the divine and an assumption of the sensible,74 what Ibn Arabi, in another context refers to, in Corbins translation, as a condescendence (munazala).75 We descend the stairs as Socrates did in his recantation speech on love, ideals, and particularity in the Phaedrus. This is hardly negative theology in a pure sense (if such a thing ever exists), but rather it joins a certain via negativa, a vivid sense of an endless yearning and innite search for the Beloved akin to Gregory of
70 See the last chapter of the Fusus on Muhammad and Ibn Arabis discussion of women, perfume, and prayer. Translation in Ibn al-Arabi: The Bezels of Wisdom, trans. R. W. J. Austin (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 27284. See also a translation from Titus Burckhardts French edition of the text with notes: Muhyi-d-din Ibn Arabi, The Wisdom of the Prophets (Fusus al-Hikam), trans. from Arabic to French Titus Burckhardt; trans. from French to English Angela Culme-Seymour (Gloucestershire: Beshara, 1975). I am indebted to Scott Kugle for suggesting I take a look at these passages in Ibn Arabis Fusus on women, particularly, and the Prophet. 71 From Corbin, Creative Imagination, 138. 72 Ibid., 154. 73 Ibid., 155. 74 Ibid., 15556. 75 Ibid.
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Nyssas eternal progression (epektasis), to a kind of spiritual messianism, a beholding of the transcendental visionary truth of the not yet in the object of love.76 In a nasib addressed to her as a male Beloved, Ibn Arabi expresses such innite insatiability in simple, stark words:
I am absent, and desire makes my soul die. I meet him, but am not cured: its just desire, whether I am absent or present. When we meet, something in me stirs that I could hardly imagine: the cures a second disease of passion because I behold a form whose beauty, as often as we meet, grows in splendor and majesty: there is no escape from passion that grows, on a predestined scale, with every growth in loveliness.77
Guises of loveliness beguile. One is so close, then far, then, in much of our literature, one discovers that the shape-shifting beloved has, all the time, dwelt in the heart, deep within, or in the gut, the innards, though it still sends out its bewildering array of images, odors, and sensations:
I am mad with love for Salma who dwells at Ajyad.
76 See Ibn Arabis Futuhat [Meccan revelations] II:327: It is certain that the beloved object is something that does not yet exist and that the love of an already existing object is in no wise possible. The only possibility is the attachment of the lover for a real being in whom there comes to be manifested the realization of the beloved object that does not yet exist. Compare II:334: Many sophisms occur in connection with love. The rst of all is one we have already mentioned: lovers imagine that the beloved object is a real thing, whereas it is a still unreal thing. The aspiration of love is to see this thing realized in a real person, and when love sees it realized, it then aspires to the perpetuation of this state, whose realization in the real person it has previously awaited. Thus the real beloved never ceases to be unreal [i.e., always transcendent], although most lovers are unaware of this, unless they have been initiated into the true science of love and its objects. Quoted in Corbin, Creative Imagination, 33435. 77 Adapted from Tarjuman LV, in Nicholson, The Tarjuman al-ashwaq, 141 42.
No, I am wrong. She lives in the black clot of blood in the membrane of my liver. Beauty is bewildered by her: odors of musk and saffron drift away on the air.78 love language of excess: the who and the what in the body
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Thus we have in Ibn Arabis limb-by-limb descriptions a distinctive coupling of the particular and the general, with an emphasis on absence and lack. The wasf here bewilders, confuses, confounds particularity; it loses at times the singular other in guises and disguises. Love here is, indeed, divided, and it divides the heart, to return to the phrase used by Derrida. But it is not only this. In a way certainly different from The Song of Songs, and less apparent, the wasf in Ibn Arabi also holds in its semantic registers the sense of the singular beloved, even if in a purely proleptic sense of something that is yet to (fully) be. She, as feminine, like the Prophet Muhammad, is the very cipher of particularity, and that fact haunts these image-rich poems of longing. As we have seen, in spite of the excessive semantic overow or surplus of extravagant metaphoric energies used to describe the beautiful body of the beloved, the concrete particular person never entirely evaporates or is wholly concealed, at least in the context of the Tarjuman as a whole. Though the ancient Arabic qasidah may emphasize absence and the memory of what is lost, its elaborate awsaf a systematic dissembling and not a literary act of presencing, we have also seen that the qasidah in the hands of a religious poet like Ibn Arabi combines visionary idealizationdivine otherness and the not yetwith a sense of a real object of desire, the assumption of the sensiblethe lovely scholar-girl in a household of scholars in Mecca who was also Wisdom, Harmony, and, nally, perhaps most strangely, Divine Love in the gut. We move now to an analogous motif in a religious poet and a religious tradition of medieval South India. This motif in the Sanskrit poetry of South Indian saint-poet Vekatea combines in a unique way many of the
78
Adapted from Tarjuman LXI:79, in ibid., 148.
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semantic and syntactic registers, the willed ambiguities, of the wasf in its praises of a protean, many-guised, boundless, though also (yet sometimes only potentially) powerfully present divine beloved. But there are also important differences. These Hindu verses house the most theologically self-conscious and elaborated form of extravagant description we have yet looked at, and so, in their systematic joining of the who and the what, the least ambiguous and most condent vision of the unity of particular and ideal forms of love. iii. anubhava: enjoying the body of god in south asian literature There are interesting analogues to the wasf in one of the most widespread, though little-studied, descriptive devices in South Asian literatures, the sequential description of a god or goddess, a hero or heroine, from foot to head or head to foot (padadikeah, apadacudanubhavam, or nakha-ikha, literally toenail-to-topknot for the Hindu god Krishna). As with the awsaf, the actual origin of such limb-by-limb descriptions is far from clear. One obvious textual and perhaps cultic sourcealluded to by some poetsmay well be the Vedic Purusa sukta (Rg Veda X:90), though some of the earliest literary examples come from Pali descriptions of the body of the Buddha in the Lakkhanasuttana of the Digha Nikaya (ca. third century BCE), inspired in part by ancient conventional accounts of the thirty-two auspicious marks of the great person (mahapurusa). By the third century CE, in the Buddhist stotras or hymns of Matrceta, we have fully developed examples of the adaptation of this form of sequential description to the body of the Buddha.79 By the seventh century, the Chinese pilgrim I-tsing attests to the fact that two of Matrcetas stotras, the Catuhataka stotra and the atapacaatika stotra, were widely chanted throughout India.80 In the Pali Therigatha (lyrics with commentaries and attached biographical narratives collected in fth-century Kacipuram), such descriptions are used ironically to satirize a love poets erotic descriptions of a human female beloved. The verses of Bhikkhuni Ambapali, a self-portrait of the nun-heroine from head to foot, are a parody of the erotic love tradition. They juxtapose conventional images of the young girls hair glossy
79 For a discussion of Matrcetas stotras, see Anthony Kennedy Warders Indian Kavya Literature, vol. 2, Origins and Formation of the Classical Kavya (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1974), 22830, 230. And this Buddhist notion of the great man (mahapurusa) obviously has its roots both in the royal notion of the cakravartin and in the ancient Vedic tradition of the cosmic person from whose sacriced body the cosmos and the social order was created. See Rg Veda X:90 (esp. verses 1214) for a sequential description of the mahapurusa. 80 This reference is taken from Nancy Nayars study of the poetry of the early Acayras: Poetry as Theology, 39.
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and black as the down of a bee, a casket of perfumes, her teeth like the opening buds of the plantain, her throat of mother-of-pearl, and her arms shining like twin pillars with the old womans body, wrinkled and wasted with years. The language of love is turned on its head and used in the service of a meditation on impermanence.81 Here extravagant sequential description is used precisely against particularity, in a way different from the dissembling motifs of the Arabic qasidah, and in the service of a transpersonal, general ideal of self and body.82 The irony is even more savage in the verses attributed to Bhikkhuni Subha of the Mango Grove, where the young male lovers hyperbolic praise of the beautiful nuns eyescompared to gazelles, enshrined in her face as in the calyx of the lotusis answered by the nun tearing out her eye in contempt and handing it to the young man.83 Here then, she says in disgust, take your eye! (handa te cakkhum harassu).84 Other early examples of this form directed not to human lovers, nuns, or holy men but to actual temple icons include Banas Candi ataka (ca. seventh century CE), which contains a detailed foot-to-head description of the loveliness of the goddess Candis body, with a distinctive focus on the toenails, and a work Winternitz claims as contemporary with Bana, Mukas Paca asti, a praise in ve hundred verses of the charming form of the goddess Kamaksi of Kacipuram. Also by the seventh century there are analogous Buddhist and Jain Sanskrit stotras that describe in elaborate detail the bodies of Buddhas or of the Jinas.85 In later centuries, limb-by-limb descriptions become widespread in pan-Indian cosmopolitan Sanskrit literature (kavya), as well as in various
81 For Ambapalis verses see Therigatha 25270 (in Oldenberg and Pischels Pali Text Society edition, The Thera- and Theri-gatha [London, 1883], 14750). For an English translation, see Rhys Davids, Psalms of the Early Buddhists, I: Psalms of the Sisters (London: Pali Text Society, 1909), 12025. See also K. R. Norman, trans., The Elders Verses II: Therigatha (London: Pali Text Society, 1966). For a contemporary translation and running commentary, see Susan Murcott, The First Buddhist Women: Translations and Commentary on the Therigatha (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1991), 12934. 82 The Therigatha material poses some important variations on the theme of ideal bodies and particularity, but detailed treatment exceeds the scope of this article. 83 Therigatha 36699, in Oldenberg and Pischel, 15852. 84 Ibid., no. 396. For an English translation and discussion, see Murcott, The First Buddhist Women, 17783. See also Kevin Trainor, In the Eye of the Beholder: Non-Attachment and the Body in Subhas Verse (Therigatha 71), Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 5779. 85 I am indebted to Nancy Nayar for these references. See her Poetry as Theology: The rivasmava Stotra in the Age of Ramanuja (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1992), 20, 38: See also M. Winternitz, A History of Indian Literature, trans. Subhadna Jha (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1963), 2:377. Other important poems include Harsa Vardhanas suprabhata stotra, a wake-up poem for the Buddha (in the style of shrine poems for the deity), and Jain poet Manatugas Bhaktamara Stotra and eulogy for the Jina Rsabha (Winternitz, History of Indian Literature, 2:548; Nayar, Poetry as Theology, 38).
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Prakrits and cosmopolitan vernaculars, such as Sri Lankan Buddhist kavya literature in Sinhaladeveloped from Sanskrit modelsbeginning in the thirteenth century. The important thirteenth-century Sinhala mahakavya, the Kavsilumina, contains, for instance, an elaborate foot-to-head description of the beauty of Queen Prabhavati, the wife of the Buddha in his birth as King Kusa.86 The Pujavaliya, another thirteenth-century Sinhala kavya, contains long passages describing, limb by limb, the beautiful bodies of women, along with an emotionally charged description of the beautiful body of the Buddha as seen by his lovesick wife Yaodhara upon his return to his fathers palace.87 Such Buddhist Sinhala texts, the exquisite products of a second wave of vernacularzation in Sri Lanka after the twelfth century, are imbued with a rich atmosphere of religious emotion that is deeply indebted to the aesthetic models of Sanskrit erotics. Such descriptions also play an important role in Agamic and tantric ritual texts such as the Pacaratra, where they form the basis of visualizations of a deity from foot to head. They also form part of iconometric texts for ilpins (icon makers) shared by Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains from a very early period. According to South Asian art historian Gustav Roth, the iconometric lists drafted by craftsmen in texts such as the sixthcentury Citralaksana begin from the top point of the head and proceed down to the foot, while early Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religious texts, miming the attitude of the worshipper, move from foot to head.88 Sanskrit kavya poets from the earliest periods marshal a considerable store of rhetorical gures (alamkaras), such as metaphor (rupaka or dipaka), simile (upama), fancy (utpreksa), and alliteration (anuprasa),
86 The mahakavya is based on a Jataka tale (no. 531), as its original title of Kusadavata indicates. See Canto V:224 44 in The Crest-Gem of Poetry: Kavsilumina, trans. W. R. McAlpine and M. B. Ariyapala (Colombo: Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka, 1990). For one of the few discussions in English of the Kavsilumina, see C. E. Godakumburas seminal study, Sinhalese Literature (Colombo: Colombo Apothecaries, 1955), 14852. I am indebted to Charles Hallisey for drawing my atttention to this remarkable text. 87 See excerpts from Mayurapada Buddhapatras Pujavaliya in An Anthology of Sinhalese Literature up to 1815, ed. C. H. B. Reynolds (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970), 168 91, esp. 18283, for a translation of passages describing Yaodharas ecstatic vision of the Buddha as the hairs on every part of her body stiffened with joy. 88 See Gustav Roth, Notes on the Citralaksana and Other Ancient Indian Works on Iconometry, in South Asian Archaeology 1987: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference of the Association of South Asian Archaeologists in Western Europe, held in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, pt. 2, ed. Maurizio Taddei and Pierfrancesco Callieri (Rome: Istituto Italiano Per Il Medio Ed Estremo Oriente, 1990), 1026. The above discussion is indebted to the discussion of bodily description in my full-length study of Vedantadeika: Steven Hopkins, Singing the Body of God: The Hymns of Vedantadeika in Their South Indian Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 13637.
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to evoke the aesthetic experience of the erotic (rgara rasa) in their elaborately gured descriptions of beautiful women from head to toe and gods and goddesses from toe to head. For centuries Indian critics have focused their considerable critical and analytical faculties on the detailed analysis of such gurative language in poetry, prose, and the drama and its classication into types. In such poetryaccording to one of the early theorists of Indian poetics, Bhamaha (ca. fourthfth or seventh centuries CEhis dates are uncertain)hyperbole or exaggeration (atiayokti ) is quite acceptable, even inevitable, given a suitable poetic pretext (nimitta); it would not, strictly speaking, be seen as aunted at all but, rather, appropriate to the aesthetic enjoyment of the erotic. Moreover, again according to Bhamaha, elaborate guration (vakrokti ) is one of the dening characteristics of ornamentation in poetry.89
loving description and the devotional eye
From the eighth through the fourteenth centuries in South India, the trope of exaggerated sequential description is used in distinctive ways rst by Tamil saint-poets (Avars), and later by rivaisnava Acaryas composing in Sanskrit and Tamil, to describe the male bodies of temple images (vigraha, murti, mei): the various standing, seated, and reclining images of the god Vishnu in a growing network of shrines that dot the landscape of Tamil Nadu. I have already noted that rivaisnava commentators call such foot-to-head or head-to-foot descriptions anubhavas: experiences or enjoyments of the body of the god. Sanskrit and Tamil anubhavas in rivaisnava literature are visionary pictures of the deity meant as a tool for systematic tantric-style visualizations (dhyanani ) but, as devotional visions, also as inspirers of emotion, an atmosphere of divine passion, a direct experience of amorous feeling through a rened erotic language inherited from Sanskrit kavya. Like the awsaf of the Song, the rivaisnava anubhava is a language of overowing joy and one of the most potent vehicles of love language in the literature. In the rush of images, the concrete object of contemplation, the temple icon, expands before ones eyes. Like the awsaf of Ibn Arabi and the early Arabic odes, the poets similes, metaphors, and double entendres serve at times to dissolve the original object of gazinga jeweled belt, a toe, a thigh, earrings, crown or navel; this, along with mythic and cultic associations from Puranic or Pacaratra liturgical texts, natural imagery of earth, atmosphere, and the planets, creates a complex composite image of a vigorously protean god, where the starting point of
89 For a detailed account of the history of Indian poetics, see A. K. Warder, Indian Kavya Literature, vol. 1, Literary Criticism (1972; Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1989). For passages referred to here on gures of speech in Bhamaha, see 8289.
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contemplation, the particular limb or particular body form, tends to get obscured, deconstructed in the extravagant textures of the text.90 Yet in spite of their lyrical energies and dissembling metaphors, such descriptive texts are decidedly rooted in an individual experience of a particular beloved form of Vishnu, a cultic context where one is honoring the temple body of a deity. They represent perhaps the most elegant balancing act between the who and the what of love that we have yet encountered. Unlike in the Arabic odes, there is no imagery of absence or the apophatic here. The saint-poets experienceto use a phrase of Richard Davis, his devotional eyeis shaped by sanctum icons, by their individual liturgical service and ritual honor ( puja), always physically, materially present in the shrine.91 Even when Vishnu is seen to change form, to move about like a living being, or to be played with like a doll (as in the charming narrative of the Muslim princess who fell in love with the plundered temple image of Raganatha), the poets often simply oscillate in imaginative vision between the immobile standing or reclining stone mulabera and the bronze festival images (utsava murtis) that stand before them in the literal space of the temple sanctum or as booty in the palace storerooms of a Delhi Sultan.92 Vishnu in this southern Tamil and Sanskrit poetry is the god who once stood/dwelt here and still is standing/dwelling (the verb nilto dwell, abide, standas past participle and in the gerundive is used with elastic energy in the Tamil verses). This beloved god abides in the temple and its environs but most vividly stands/abides there right in front of the adoring poet, even while he has, simultaneously, become all things. The what of this beloved is impossibly immense, beyond metaphor, though the who remains present in spite of the full theanthropocosmic form. To the late poet and scholar A. K. Ramanujan the paradigmatic verse that describes this experience, drawing together in dynamic tension the universal and particular object of desire, appears in the work of Nammavar, one of the earliest and most treasured of Tamil saint-poets. Nammavars stanza reads almost like a grammatical paradigm, as Ramanujan notes, a breathless recital of Tamil pronouns. In his concise translation:
90 For The Song of Songs, see Soulen, The Wasfs of the Song of Songs, 188. See also Sells, The Guises of the Ghul. Sells, as we have seen, argues that the language of the Arabic odes expresses a language of unsaying, that it has an apophatic or negative sense (i.e., the Beloved disappears in the dissembling of semantic overow). 91 See Richard Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 1. 92 For versions of the story of the icon of Vishnu as Raganatha and the Muslim princess, see Davis, Lives of Indian Images, 13235. See also Vasudha Narayanan, Arcavatara: On Earth as He Is in Heaven, in Gods of Flesh, Gods of Stone: The Embodiment of the Divine in India, ed. Joanne Punzo Waghorne and Norman Cutler, in association with Vasudha Narayanan (Chambersburg, PA: Anima, 1985), 5366.
We here and that man, this man, and that other in-between, and that woman, this woman and that other, whoever, Those people, and these, and these others in-between, this thing, that thing, and this other in-between, whichever, All things dying, these things, those things, those others in-between, good things, bad things, things that were, that will be, being all of them, he stands there.93
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anubhavas in the theological visions of a south indian saint-poet
The anubhavas of Vekatanatha or Vekatea, a fourteenth-century South Indian rivaisnava saint-poet also known by his title Vedantadeika, Preceptor of the Vedanta, take this Tamil paradigm and play with it, toying endlessly with images of Vishnus terric forms, telescoping all times, past, present and future, myth and narrative history, the universal and the minute particular, layered similes and metaphors and the singular focus, in one complex and extravagant act of beholding. That god who performed so many exploits in so many remote ages, who took on so many different forms, who is, simultaneously, so many very different things, the manyguised: he is also, perhaps above all, out of individual love, here, in the shrine, before the loving gaze of the saint-poet. This telescoping pattern is vividly expressed in one of Vekateas Sanskrit poems that describe the icon-body of Vishnu at riragam in sensuous, erotically charged detail, from foot to head. Vekateas Sanskrit poem was modeled on an early Tamil poem by Tiruppanavar, which also described this same form of Vishnu from foot to head but without some of the extraordinary splendor of the Sanskrit saint-poets images. Verses from that poem read like this:
O Lord of Raga! I see the exquisite curves of your calves, the lustre of anklets
93 See A. K. Ramanujan, Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Visnu by Nammavar (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 12223.
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bathes them in color; swift runners between armies in time of war, long ladles to catch the liquid light of your beauty their loveliness doubled by the shade of your knees: seeing them, my soul stops running the paths of rebirth. They seem like rm stems of plantain growing in a pleasure garden; wrapped in the linen cloth, on re in the dazzle of the jeweled belt, they are pillows for his wives, Kamala, Bhumi, Nappiai:94 Ah! my mind plunges into the mysterious depths of Ragas young thighs as into a double stream of beauty. What can equal it? Its so deep that once all worlds were tucked away inside it; creator of all creators, its lotus ower spews out shining pollen. In its lustre, a whirlpool of beauty this ne navel of the Lord of Raga gives endless delight to my mind.
94 Napinnai, or our Pinnai, is Vishnus Tamil consort. In Tamil mythology she is one of Krishnas cowgirl (gopi) lovers.
His broad chest burns with a vermillion of shining jewels; blessed by the touch of goddess ris small feet, its lustre deepened by the mole with its curl of hair, rivatsa: with its long kings garland of victory, its shining pearls bright as the full moon strewn with the tender leaves of holy basil this cool shade between the long arms of the Lord of Raga soothes the fever of my mind. Below the tall crown of Ragas Lord, dappled with a ery light of owers and jewels, his dark wavy hair, with its ne garlands knotted with sweet spices and fragrant herbs, is graced by the touch of his wives slender ngers, and wild as the barbed words of angry Chola girls my minds mad wandering nds its rest on that good kings crown. So my mind touches the lotus feet of Ragas Lord, delights in his ne calves, clings to his twin thighs and, slowly rising, reaches the navel. It stops for a while on his chest,
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then, after climbing his broad shoulders, drinks the nectar of his lovely face before it rests at last at the crowns owery crest . . .
And after this dizzying itinerary of imagistic description that integrates specic attributes and iconographic details of the cult images with mythic exploits that go backward in time and an anthropomorphism that evokes the presence of a living, animated person, a penultimate verse places the reader back into the central temporal and special context of the praise poem, the temple sanctum itself and the temple icons of a particular god of a particular place that are the immediate focus of the poets gaze, and ultimately into the very bodyinto the gut, as Ibn Arabi would say of his belovedof the poet himself:
The noble beauty of his arms; his body scarred by a warriors bowstrings and womens bangles his chest belongs to Laksmi, goddess of luck. And the thick club studded with iron: his weapons show his fearlessness. He is here, asleep on the coiled serpent, where, just in front of himself, his very own self, his image, shines. Here, in the middle of riragam town, a king with his three queens here, in the middle of my heart!
These verses are from the Bhagavaddhyanasopanam (The ladder of meditation on the body of Bhagavan) and describe what for the twentiethcentury Sanskrit commentator Vekatagopaladasa is an experience (anubhava) of an astonishing otherworldly beauty (alaukikadbhutasaundaryam) and of sweet deep inner delight; it represents a continuous burning desire (nirantaraotkatakama), a ladder of love that has as
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its sole object the Lord (etadapi bhagavavisayakamasya sopanameva).95 This same commentator cites as the source for such sensual relish of the divine body a passage from one of the nest works of Sanskrit kavya, the limb-by-limb description of young Parvati in Kalidasas Kumarasambhava (1:32 49). The slow journey up the body of god is compared by Vekateas commentator to the erotic relish of the young girl and future consort of iva:
At her waist like an altar, curving and slender, there were three gentle folds of the skin, as if a woman in her youth could freshly grow steps for the God of Love to climb.96
Vekatea, the religious poet, like Kalidasa before him, uses in a creative way motifs from secular erotic literature to express emotions proper to love of a deity. Here bhakti, religious love, is continuous with kama, so-called secular erotic lovethe Sanskrit cousin of erosand concrete human emotions and literary conventions of erotic love are harnessed for religious purposes, with the anubhava as one of their most effective literary vehicles. There are anubhavas in every major poem by Vekatea that praise a specic particularized icon of Vishnu, and in each case these stepwise descriptions form the core of the long hymn of praise: a head-to-foot or foot-to-head delectation for the eyes, an extravagant beholding of the beautiful body of the god.97
the who and the what in cosmotheandric unity
I will conclude this section with selected verses from one of Vekateas Sanskrit anubhavas to Vishnu, this time in his form as Devanayaka Swami at Tiruvahindrapuram. This particular form of Vishnu calls forth some of the poets most passionate and seemingly personal poetry, in all three of his working languages, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Maharastri Prakrit. The verses express vividly and memorably the language of excess that is the mark of the wasf in its most general sense.
95 Verses are from Bhagavaddhyanasopanam 36, 911. See full translation and detailed discussion in Hopkins, Singing the Body of God, 15765. 96 Kumarasambhavam 1:39. Translation from The Origin of the Young God: Kalidasas Kumarasambhava, trans. Hank Heifetz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 27. See also discussion in Hopkins, Singing the Body of God, 16163. 97 Though traditionally foot-to-head description is reserved for divinities, and head-tofoot for the human beloved, Vekatea and the other poets in this tradition use both directions for Vishnu. Though the exact reasons for this are not clear, some scholars and rivaisnava commentators claim that in the head-to-foot descriptions the saint-poet assumes intimacy, a spontaneous familiarity with the divine beloved, as if he were human.
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Vekatea uses a variety of dissembling similes and metaphors, from the natural world, the world of mythic narratives, and that of human bodies. To use the coinage of philosopher and comparative theologian Raimon Panikkar, these anubhavas are cosmotheandric, bringing together the worlds of nature, the divine, and the human in elegant balance.98 More self-consciously and systematically theological than either the verses in The Song of Songs or in the nasib-ghazals of Ibn Arabi, here the divine is directly invoked as the many-guised beloved, present in human, natural, and cosmic forms. And also, unlike the inherited tradition of the Arabic qasidahs, there is no imagery of absence here that the poet uses to evoke incommensurability or dissembling metamorphosis. It is here all about manifold, multiple, and simultaneous forms of presence, natural, divine, and human. In the following poetic description we have natural images in the cold darkness of the night, in stars, a cool moon, the sea, rivers, and the night skys asylum; ora and fauna in the bees, peacocks, the lotus, bimba fruit; the world of sacred narrative and myth in the birth of the god iva from Vishnus sweat, the exploits of the Love God Kama, Vishnu/Devanayakas form of the pastoral child-cowherder Krishna, the creation of the world from the god Brahma, who emerges from the lotus that grows from Vishnus navel, the gods swallowing of the entire universe at its periodic dissolution, and his freeing of the cursed wife of a sage, Ahalya, from a stone. Finally, we have the human world, in the erce and sensual anthropomorphism of the imagery common in the southern Tamil and Sanskrit literatures: the god whose bodys perfect beauty draws the envy of the jewels that adorn it; his lovemaking with his wife, Laksmi/Padmavati; his scuffed soiled knees as the child Krishna; his sea-creature (Makara) earrings; his curly black hair; the images of a mothers womb, the young cowgirls of Braj; the three folds of the gods belly; and the passionate emotions of the poets devotional eye. Roughly, from head to toe, in this religious and visionary art, the god is dissembled but not confused, not evoked in metaphors of absence; the whole here is unequivocally present in every part.
Seeing your lovely body whose splendor is made even more perfect by each perfect limb, enjoyed by your beloved wives with unblinking, astonished
98 See Raimon Panikkar, The Cosmotheadric Experience: Emerging Religious Consciousness (New York: Orbis, 1993), esp. Colligite Fragmenta: For an Integration of Reality, 177.
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eyes, and sought out by the jewels and weapons that adorn it to increase their own radiance, my sight, O Lord of Gods, is not sated with seeing! (14) . . . . . . O Lord of Gods, a night smeared with stars, the shining waves of your dark curly locks of hair join with the moon of your face that drips bright nectar of a tender smile: this is t object for our meditations to cool the burning fevers of births and deaths. (17) . . . . . . . That rare mark of auspicious grace half-dark, half-bright, worn by the moon for only a certain phase of it waxing, shines always on your brow where, long ago, O Lord of Gods, from the mere drop of a drop of sweat, was born three-eyed Purusa, Lord iva who wields the spear. (19) . . . . . . On your lovely ear, O Lord of Gods, that shines in owing waves of beauty, it takes the form
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of the Fish that marks the banner of the love god, enammer of desires: Makarika, this jeweled earring, sweet to behold by those who stand before you, plays frisky games, swimming against your current. (22) . . . . . . . O Lord of those who ride the aerial cars,
they are eager to play at the protection of the world, miming the simple charms of the lotus ower; sending streams of blissful perfumes, they call to us, breathless, with no words, as from the quiet of a mothers womb: the glances from the reddened corners of your eye drench me with sweetest nectar. (25) . . . . . . . . . . . O Lord of immortals, mad with love, my mind kisses your lower lip red as bimba fruit, as the tender young shoots from the coral tree of paradise: your lips enjoyed by young cowgirls, by your ute
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and by the prince of conch-shells. (27) . . . . . . . . . O Lord of Gods, like your long garland, Vanamalika, stirred into bright bloom, my mind, radiant with wonder becomes an ornament for your neck which wears ne tattoos from Padmavatis lovely bangles like a conch blueblack as the eye of a peacocks tail from the glow of your dark light. (28) . . . . . . . Cool and moist, pure luminous destroyer of darkness, bright asylum for stars; dripping sweet nectar for gods, desires passionate yes: O Lord of Gods, such a wondrous thing is this mind of yours, that gives birth to moons in every creation! (34) . . . . . . . Though it is so thin, O Lord of gods, it swallowed and spat out this entire universe;
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its three soft folds mark nothing less than the three-fold division of worlds; in its fragrant lotus navel a bee the shape of Virica, Lord Brahma, has its little house: like a waist band my mind
adorns your sweet belly. (35) . . . . . . . . . They are like surging whirlpools of light that quiver and play in a oodtide of beauty or beloved companions of Laksmis jeweled palace mirrors; yet they scuffed and crawled their way through crude cowherders courtyards: these two knees of yours will not let go of my mind! (39) . . . . . . . . With its touch the young wife of the forest sage emerged out of a stone; ashes from a womb became the handsome young prince; caressed by Lady Rama and Mahi,
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goddess Earth, they say this foot is the One God of all. (41) . . . . . . Even this heart of mine madly tossed here and there by force of its desire for every other thing clings to and of its own accord is held captive, O Lord of Gods, by your toes: owing downward in the liquid light of their own rays, they are petals of your divine lotus feet! (42)99
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iv. conclusion: love, ideal bodies, and particularity In a characteristically thoughtful essay on Augustine and Dante on the ascent of love, Martha Nussbaum argues that both Christian writers end up rejecting the Platonic Ascent of Love, a doctrine ostensibly based upon Socrates account of eros and the ascent up the ladder of truth in the Symposium. Platonist accounts of loves ascent claim, as we have already noted, that as one grows in love one moves up the scale of being, from earthly to heavenly forms of love, from love of the individual persona
99 From the Devanayakapacaat [Fifty verses in praise of Devanayaka], translated in full in my anthology of Vekateas Sanskrit, Tamil, and Prakrit poetry: Steven Hopkins, An Ornament for Jewels: Love Poems for the Lord of Gods by Vedantadeika (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Stanza numbers in original are noted in brackets at the end of each translated verse.
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love vulnerable to pain and attachment, to need and desireto love of his/her qualities, love of beautiful objects or ideas, and nally, beyond, to a great sea of beauty and truth, a transcendental state that strips away all that is merely human in love.100 Nussbaum points to Augustines moments of profound ambivalence on this point in the Confessions and ends up claiming that Augustine advances a picture of ascent (or ascent combined with descent) that gives a more substantial and more positive role to certain ingredients of ordinary human love.101 This valuation of the individual and of ordinary human love has more to do with Augustines critique of the perfectibility of the body, his awareness of the brokenness (the horizontality, as it were) of sin and of moral weakness, along with a vivid sense of the power of memory to draw one back down to the past, than with a pervasive idea about the religious power of human love. With Dante, however, it is a different matter. Dantes journey in the Commedia would seem at rst glance to be a kind of model of loves ascent. We begin, back in the Vita Nuova, with Dantes love for Beatrice when both of them were nine years old, when he rst caught sight of her in her red dress. In the process of reading the Commedia, particularly when we see Beatrice again in Purgatorio and Paradiso, and feel with Dante the deep emotion of this reunion after ten years thirst and the signs of the old ame (cognoso i segni de lantica amma; Purg. XXX:48), we witness the steady and sometimes precipitous transformations of Dantes beloved girl from Florence: she is Theology, Trinity (the numbers three and nine), Love, teacher, matronly admonisher, even a kind of gure of Christ, but for all those extraordinary transformations, and all the inconceivable rareed intensities of her growing physical and spiritual beauty as they ascend, right up to the upper reaches of Paradise, she remains that same Beatrice, his irreducible other. One can even argue that the body of Beatrice, almost in a physical way, beginning in the Vita Nuova, is the vehicle of the entire vision, ultimately forming the very framework of the
100 See Nussbaums brilliant essay on the Symposium, The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of the Symposium, 16599, where she argues that Plato himself, in his construction of the text, questions the ultimate authority of Socrates speech and its neat arrangement of the stages of eros, by including Alcibiades as an all-too-vulnerable foil, desperately and ultimately tragically in love with the very particular and irreducible Socrates, at the end of the dialogue. To interpret Alcibiades only as a kind of failure or a cautionary tale about the perils of false eros is to ignore important ironies of the text and the central dilemma of love placed before the reader by its author, Plato, at the close of this night of heavy drinking. 101 See Martha Nussbaum, Augustine and Dante on the Ascent of Love, in The Augustinian Tradition, ed. Gareth B. Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 63. We have seen this same ambivalence about concrete love of individuals in Ibn Arabi and his critics.
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literary edice of the Commedia.102 Even in the transcendental vision of the Rose at the very end of the journey, the heavenly Rose where all the saints gather into a unity that seems to swallow all particularity, her gaze meets Dante, in awless clarity, undimmed by great metaphysical and spiritual distance:
I, without answering, then looked on high and saw that round her now a crown took shape as she reected the eternal rays. No mortal eye, not even one that plunged into deep seas, would be so distant from that region where the highest thunder forms, astheremy sight was far from Beatrice; but distance was no hindrance, for her semblance reached meundimmed by anything between.103
As Nussbaum remarks: Her particularity transcends all barriers. In that full particularity he loves her.104 The awsaf in The Song of Songs, in Ibn Arabis nasib-ghazals of Nizams absent presence, and Vekateas anubhavas of the body of Vishnu, though they express different registers of the particular and the ideal, and different foci on the spectrum of the divine and the human, do this same thing for the beloved. Sometimes, like the lovely body of Parvati, daughter of Himalaya and goddess consort of Lord iva, they are called ladders of love; we are meant to climb, with the poet, up the body of god or of the human beloved, from the foot to the head, and grow in the intensity of our love or our awareness of the splendor . . . made even more perfect by each perfect limb. The great eleventh-century rabbi from Champagne, Schelomo Izhaqui, known as Rashi, in his commentary on the very rst verse of the Song speaks about various levels of the kiss: there is kissing of the shoulder, which calls for great exertion, there is kissing of the hand, where God helps; but then there is kissing of the mouth, when our prayers are sufcient to yield the desired results through divine intervention.105 But as we have seen, overall, in the wasf and in
102 See the fascinating study by Robert Pogue Harrison The Body of Beatrice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). It can be argued quite decisively, I believe, that the Paradiso in particular can be seen as an ascent of the body of Beatrice, that her body is the vehicle for Dantes vertical ight up and into the heavenly spheres. 103 Paradiso XXXI:7077, from the translation of Alan Mandelbaum ([New York: Bantam, 1986], 283). 104 Nussbaum, Augustine and Dante, 81. 105 See Yerushalmi, The Book of Shir HaShirim, 17. See also Matter, The Voice of My Beloved, 137.
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the anubhava there is really no ladder at all, no one particular direction that is privileged: we oscillate between the poles of the universal, transcendental attributes, loves beautiful ideas, and, ultimately, the irreducible individuality of the singular beloved, whether this is made present in the very texture of the text, as in the Song and in Vekatea, or is anticipated, as in Ibn Arabis nasib-qasidahs. Up or down, ascent or descent, its all the same, in that full particularity; we love each limb, its distinctive beauty, as if it were the whole.106 Here the who and the what of eros is in creative tension together, at one point dividing and at another healing the heart, but never absorbed into some higher abstract ascendant unity either. At times this literary device emphasizes presence, in a surplus of praise, as in The Song of Songs and especially in the theological praise poems of the South Indian saintpoet Vekatea; at other times, as in the Arabic Odes, there is confusion, the absence (for the time being) of the particular other in a profusion of imagistic dissemination, an emphasis on eternal progress and the beloved as something, to use the phrase of both Corbin (glossing Ibn Arabi) and Derrida, yet to be. But in all cases a central tension is maintained, a kind of willed ambiguity that preserves the particular and the idealor even more precisely, the particular in the idealand it is in this sense precisely that the wasf and anubhava contribute to the study of the literature of love cross-culturally. In these literary motifs of extravagant description, the irreducible who of love remains, particular among its ideal forms. What remains as well is the standing possibility of conict, duality, movement, and instability, along with a sense that what these two lovers have yet before them is not an end to the discourse, not a planned ordered telos of love but a continued pursuit of better questions. Eros is not a ladder here; it does not trace a vertical motion but rather creates a kind of charged horizontal space, an energetic arena of continual risky encounter, a permanent, sometimes blissful, sometimes anxious destinerrance, where lover and beloved waver in an endless liquid play of sensations, their bodies mingling with the landscape around them, then separating into distinct persons, at once transpersonal and utterly individual, each to the other, mutually. Love here, at once human and divine, draws together in one gaze the universal in the particular. Swarthmore College
106 Though it is of course beyond the scope of this article, one can argue that this emphasis on beauty and particularity is one of the most compelling ethical dimensions of eros. For an argument about the role of beauty (and the particular) in ethics and justice theory, with an implied connection to the eros of beholding the other person, see Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

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Steven P.

E X T R AVAG A N T B EHOL DI NG : LOV E , I DE A L B ODI E S , A N D PA R T I C U L A R I T Y

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Sells comments on this section:

Another lyric praises Nizam in the context of her home in Mecca:

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Adapted from Tarjuman LXI:79, in ibid., 148.

anubhavas in the theological visions of a south indian saint-poet

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