“Dance in Your Blood”: From the Anthropocentric to Organic in Rumi’s Poems

Almost about two centuries prior to the European Renaissance and preceding the Euro-centric assertion of an anthropocentric world-order, illustrated in the ideas of Humanism and the ‘homo universalis’, the view of a diversified earth where each sentient creature exists on the same plane and status as that of the human species was adopted by the falasifas (philosophers) of the Near East. In order to assess this prior emphasis on each living being and not only on the Anthropocene ― the ‘paragon of all animals’ and the supreme being created by the Almighty ― it is relevant that we re-read the works of Jelaluddin Rumi, [(1207 – 1273) name: Sufi saint, thinker, poet and founder of the Mevlevi sect, who was born in Balkh (modern Afghanistan) and who spent most of his life in Anatolia and Konya (modern Turkey). As reading entails a kind of travelling too, through cultures, places, world-views, times, spaces, identities, subjectivities, and trajectories of knowledge-systems which have either formed discourses 1 or have been absented and silenced by such discourses, the need now arises for critical theorists so influenced by the West-SMART constructed ‘omnipotent definitions’ 2 to travel through Rumi’s texts, namely Mathnawi and Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi .

Through, not a de-tour, but a re-tour, a kind of "metanarrative of different kinds of travelling through literary texts, theoretical domains …" (Behdad1) of Rumi's texts I try to discover how texts -which have remained outside the discourse that lent primacy to the supremacy of human race and its socio-political corollaries making Europe the center of power -are capable of subverting conventional/mainstream world-view, questioning paradigmatic trajectories of knowledge and even dislocating predominant arrangements of power by proposing an alternative ideology/world-view of seeing the earth with all its living organisms as important as or even more important than the homo-centric world. I critique Rumi's works through Giorgio Agamben's theory of the "open", as explained by him in The SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH e-ISSN: 2582-3574 p-ISSN: 2582-4406 VOL. 8, ISSUE 8, AUGUST 2020 www.ijellh.com 3 Open: Man and Animal. Hence,I engage with a "belated reading" (2) 3 , to use Ali Behdad's concept,first by attempting to rewrite"through a kind of philosophical decalagé" our approaches to non-Western literatures and,second, by being "oppositional" in the very belatedness of reading in the sense of becoming "inescapably late, lagging behind what it hopes to transform and write beyond" (2). Ali Behdad, in a very different context, however, has argued that every "belated reading is not an orthodox reiteration or a reapplication of a previous theory, rather, it is an interventionary articulation of a new problematic through a detour -or, perhaps more accurately, a retour -of an earlier practice" (3).
My "belated reading" of the two poems by Jalaluddin(often written as Jalal al-Din) Rumi unfolds those ruptures "where myths converge, clash and sometimes self-destroy, thereby laying bare their underlying strategies" (Král,77). Given this orientation towards our Choice' and/or Divine Will by being suspended between the lowly beasts and the higher angels, but of an equal plane on which all beings are created by an impartial Divinity.
Through a circular consciousness each being, human and non-human, is connected to another and each, in turn, can merge with the Divine. While his European contemporaries and later counterparts saw the earth as the terra nullius suitable for the penitence of Man's Primal Sin and utilizing it for His purpose alone, Rumi saw this world as a sanctuary in which all creatures are gifted with a divine spark. Such 'multi-consciousness' defines "not the essence but the actual existence of cultural diversity" (Král,25). It establishes an empathetic participation in the flow of the life-force, one in which the Natural environment, precisely Nature uncultivated by Man, plays a pivotal role. Thus, in Mathnawi Rumi says: Proximity to God is not to go up or down Proximity to God comes when you escape from the prison of existence.
What place is there for "up" and "down" in nonexistence? There is no "soon" or "far" or "late" in non-

existence. (M III: 4512-14)
Physical non-existence for Rumi is not representative corporeal 'death'. It is metaphoric in the sense that it signifies the complete effacement of the self or ego and can be well-defined by Alexander Kojeve's famous comment, quoted by Giorgio Agamben in his chapter entitled "Snob": "No animal can be a snob" (9). Rumi's refusal to climb "up" and "down" the hierarchical and vertical ladder in order to reach the Almighty reveals his denial to empower Man with the special status of being the 'Crown' in God's Paradise. For Rumi Paradise is situated in the dense forest and in the desert, in the oasis and on the mountain top and by the seaside, and in the heart of Nature which is also the human heart. Divinity is perceived in the fall of the leaves, in the movement of a camel, in the ripeness of dates and These lines are best explained by John Baldock: The Law (shariah) relates to the laws that govern the way we conduct ourselves in the outer world. It provides the outer framework with which both the individual and society may evolve towards inner awakening and higher consciousness. The Truth (haqiqah), from the same root as al-Haqq (one of the names of God), refers to an immutable inner reality. These two realitiesthe outer and the inner worldsaffect the way we both perceive and experience life. They are also related to our organs of sense perceptions: the outer world to the gross physical senses, the inner world to the subtle spiritual senses. If we approach the outer world from the view point of the inner, its meaning and spirit are immediately evident. If we approach the outer world from its own viewpoint, we remain in ignorance of its inner meaning. What we have is simply a literal interpretation of the outer reality. Hence the need for the spiritual He shares empathy with plants more than he does with humans: He who turns fire into trees and roses is able to make this world free from harm.
He who brings forth roses from among thorns is able to make winter turn into spring. (M VI: 1740-1) Even the inanimate objects of the Natural world engage in an empathic participation: www.ijellh.com 9 While the Natural world has its own spiritual loveliness and purity, the human society, reveling in its self-centredness, becomes a prison, for Rumi, one that entangles the ignorant: The world is a trap, and desire is its bait: He encapsulates the fact that by way of being a part-particle of the Universe each being (the human and non-human)has to reciprocate to its rhythm: Inside water, a waterwheel turns.
A star circulates with the moon.
We live in the night ocean wondering, What are these lights?
Head unaware of feet, and feet head. Neither cares.

They keep turning. (278)
Yet Rumi is also aware of the fact that "things become clear through their opposites".
It is for this reason that he tries to scrutinize the ambiguous duality inherent in human society and the Natural world, a view explained clearly byBaldock: This duality of opposites remains part of our everyday experience of the world until such time as our sense of 'self' dissolves, like a drop of water, in the Ocean of Unity. SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH e-ISSN: 2582-3574 p-ISSN: 2582-4406 VOL. 8, ISSUE 8, AUGUST 2020 www.ijellh.com 10 In the meantime, we can utilize our experience of the duality of everyday life to discern what is food for the lower self and what is food for our heart or soul. Rumi helps us in this by constantly drawing our attention to the world of opposites so that we may, like him, relinquish duality and experience the two worlds as one. (170) Baldock's argument also provides clarification for the following lines in Rumi' . The "footprints" that turn the "self" into "dust" also transform the anthropocentric earth into a part of the Natural earth, a place in which all matter originate from dust and return to dust.
Rumi's alternate vision, potent enough to replace the Euro-centric world-view of the primacy of the human, can best be explained through Giorgio Agamben's concept of the "anthropogenic and anthropological machine" that has, since times immemorial, constructed the dissection between the human and the non-human. The two variations of the machine are "the moderns"who "functions 'by isolating the nonhuman with the human' and … the ancients, where 'the non-human is produced by the humanization of the animal" (Edkins 82).
Arguing about the "intimate strife" between the human and the non-human, between civilization and Natural environment, between what he terms and the "world and earth" Agamben states: For similarly at issue in the work of artin conflict between the world and earthis a dialectic between concealedness and unconcealedness, between openness and closedness, … The earth appears only where it is guarded and preserved as the essentially Undisclosable, which withdraws from every opening and constantly keeps itself closed. In the work of art, this Undisclosable comes to light as such. "The work moves the earth itself into the open of a world and keeps it there." … World and earth, openness and closednessthough opposed in an essential conflictare, however, never separable:…" (71-72).
Building upon Heidegger's theory of this "inseparable opposition", Agamben affirmsthat this conflict between "concealedness and unconcelaledness", between Nurture and Nature, between human society and the Natural environment, is essentially a "political paradigm" (73). He also argues that keeping oneself closed to "animalitas" is another way of closing oneself to "humanitas" and, hence, he opens up an unsettling question: "If humanity has been obtained only through a suspension of the animality, and must thus keep itself open to the closedness of animality, in what sense does Heidegger's attempt to grasp the "existing essence of man" escape the metaphysical primacy of the animalitas?" (73) The answer, to this incalculably disturbing interrogation was, perhaps, provided, centuries earlier, by the medieval migrant poet of Konya. In a simple verse Rumi has said all: Dance, when you're broken open.