Our Ritual :Reading Khayyam
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The Persian philosopher and poet, Omar Khayyam was born in Neyshabur in 1048 CE. Neyshabur is the city that Jose Luis Borges once wrote about: "If I wanted to travel to a city in the world, I do not doubt that it would be the city of Neyshabur. I think all the secrets of the world are gathered in this city."
Khayyam’s fame in the West was due to the translation of his poetry by Edward Fitzgerald more than 150 years ago.
Khayyam was a genius, had many capabilities, and knew about everything. He made the most accurate calendar in the world when he was young. The Gregorian calendar was introduced 500 years later.
He was an astronomer, philosopher, musician, and poet. In his time, no one knew him well as a poet. Perhaps because of the beliefs in his poems, they even ignored him. In his quatrains, he raised fundamental doubt about religious beliefs and, at the same time, deep and complicated questions about the meaning of life. He wrote his poems at a time when everyone believed in religious certainties without thought or analysis and accepted all ecclesiastical laws.
He believed that there is no specific reason for our existence and there is no pre-planned purpose for life on Earth. Therefore, everybody must find his reason for being. We shouldn't wait for the next world. Everything exists here, and every man must fulfill his purpose.
He was into drinking and a pleasure seeker. He was attracted to science because he didn't find his answers in religion. He believed in living in the moment. He saw the world as unreliable and unstable. He echoed this idea.
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In my dream, I always invite Borges, Edward Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Martin Luther King, Mark Twain, and many others who love Khayyam, to our ritual of reading Khayyam.
I say to Borges: "You don't want to come to our villages or the city Bushehr? Khayyam has been living with us for centuries. We, as southern people, couldn't live without him. So you are right, Borges. The secret of Neyshabur is giving life to Khayyam and sending him here to the south of Iran in the Persian Gulf, very far from his birthplace."
He says: "Strange! How Come? How did you do it?"
I answer: "Life. Our life was always full of natural, social, and political disasters. Without him, we were nobody, and we were destroyed. You know what? He is not just special to educated people. All people -young, old, woman, man, black, or white- know his poetry by heart, even those who don't know how to read and write. He belongs to our life. He lives in our blood."
I don’t know anybody in my family who doesn't know Khayyam or doesn’t know his poetry. This ritual depends directly on Khayyam's quatrains.
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You might say that living in a remote village or small city is boring. But this is not true. People use their imagination there, and everyone is a fantastic storyteller. Rituals not only entertained us but also saved our lives. We survived drought, floods, lunar eclipses, diseases, and other natural disasters.
But we didn't know we could also survive political disasters.
The last Khayyam reading of my family was after the revolution. The revolutionaries had shown their real face. They forbade any singing and dancing. They prevented us from being happy, but crying and mourning were commonplace. They prohibited our rituals. My family moved to Shiraz after my brother's execution and they looted our house. It was a war. Every day they arrested young people on the street and put them in jail. We’d see bodies hanging in the squares every morning. They were also stoning women in town squares. My younger sister, then 13 years old, was put in jail and sentenced to death. We couldn't tolerate it anymore. Our strength and endurance were running out. We did not believe in anything anymore to help us, and we couldn't escape. We got help from Khayyam. We appealed to him.
In the house of a relative outside of Shiraz, we closed all the windows and covered them with blankets. After five years, my brother-in-law took out the bottles of vodka and whiskey he had hidden in the ground during the last days of Shah's rule. We sent a message to all our family in Bushehr and they gradually joined us. Our ritual began. It lasted twenty-three days. We sang, we danced, and we drank. For 23 days we read Khayyam's quatrains:
“Live in the moment, Do not think about tomorrow and yesterday, Nothing is permanent, We put grief in the ground, We gave sorrow to the wind.”
Two quatrains translated by Edward Fitzgerald :
Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and--sans End!”
And this reviving Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River-Lip on which we lean--
Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely Lip springs unseen!
Source: Substack