The Conference of the Birds

Then, as you burn, whatever pain you feel/ Remember God will recompense your zeal;/ When you perceive His hidden secrets, give/Your life to God’s affairs and truly live— / At least, made perfect in Reality,/ You will be gone, and only God will be.” 

Attar uses fire and burning as metaphors for religious exaltation. The sacrifice of Sufism is painful, but will be redeemed in the afterlife. This also references the dissolution of the Self into the divine. 

The Simorgh lives, the sovereign whom you seek,/ And He is always near to us, though we/ Live far from His transcendent majesty./ A hundred thousand veils of dark and light/Withdraw His presence from our mortal sight,/And in both words no being shares the throne/ That marks the Simorgh’s power and His alone” 

This is the first reference to the Simorgh and presents a paradox that is fulfilled at the end of the poem: he is always near to us and yet we are far away from him. This establishes that the birds are far away from the Simorgh spiritually, rather than physically, and must go on an inward journey. 

“You cannot weigh the moon like so much fish!” 

This quote references the method of finding the Simorgh. The moon is celestial and otherworldly, while fish are an earthly commodity, and so cannot be approached by the same logic of weight. 

“The Truth we seek is like a shoreless sea,/Of which your paradise is but a drop.” 

This is the hoopoe’s reply to the peacock’s excuse for not being able to make the journey. The truth the peacock knows of paradise is only a fraction of the vast and undefinable one that the hoopoe guides the birds to find.

“Yet those hard gems from which you cannot part/Have only helped you to a hardened heart; Without their colors they are nothing more/ Than stones—and to the wise not worth a straw”

This is the hoopoe’s reply to the partridge’s excuse. The partridge’s greed, and by extension the conventions of material wealth in general, are contradicted by the perception of gems as stones. The hoopoe is asking the partridge to reconsider his definition of worth.

“Although the power it brought the king was real,/ Possession of this gem meant that delay/Dogged his advance along the spirit’s Way” 

This excerpt does not deny the power of wealth but situates it as a sacrifice. The power and wealth of King Solomon on a lower plane of reality sacrifices the advancement of his spirit on the higher plane of Reality.

“A king is not one of those common fools/Who snatches at a crown and thinks he rules”

The hoopoe disputes the definition of “king” as someone who holds, or even attempts to hold, as the term “stanches at” implies, earthly definitions of sovereignty. This acts not only as a critique of wealth, but an evaluation of political power.

Weekly Digest: 4/25/2020 – 5/02/2020 (Updates)

The hoopoe says this as a retort to the excuses of several birds. It is the example of wine as a metaphor for the intoxication of mysticism. To “empty the first glass” is to rid oneself of societal convention and religious dogma. 

“You are not God, though in God you are drowned” 

The hoopoe explains the perspective of the birds before they obtain enlightenment. They have not reached the place of unity with the divine, but God remains everything that exists around them. The birds are currently drowning in God, rather than communing with God.

“The Self and Faith must both be tossed away;/Blasphemers call such action blasphemy— / Tell them that that love exceeds mere piety,/ Love has no time for blasphemy or faith”

The hoopoe calls blasphemers the people that use the conventional definition for blasphemy. He equates the antonyms of blasphemy and faith to convey that love exists beyond the human conceptions of both.

“Islam and blasphemy have both been passed/ By those who set out on love’s path at last” 

The hoopoe relates the orthodoxy of Islam and religious scandal to signal that they are one in the same. Neither concept is upheld by those who follow the Sufi Way, here called “love’s path.”

“The reverend sheikh kept swine— who does not/ Keep something swinish in his nature’s plot?” 

In the story of Sheikh Sam’an, the sheikh is told by his Christian lover to keep swine, which is a violation of Islamic religious law. This detail pivots to a rhetorical question towards the audience, communicating that there is no difference between actual swine and the “swinish,” parts of human nature that might be permissible in Islam.

“He saw the Prophet, lovely as the moon,/ Whose face, Truth’s shadow, was the sun at noon” 

This quote is an example of Persian metaphor in the story of Sheikh Sam’an. The Prophet Muhammad is described as both the moon and the sun. These do not contradict each other, but infer that both are necessary to create an image of unity and wholeness in the divine. 

Great Solomon/Once looked at me—it is that glance alone/Which gave me what I know; no wealth could bring/ The substance I received from wisdom’s king./ No one can gain this by the forms of prayer, For even Satan bowed with pious care;/ Though don’t imagine that you need not pray;/ We curse the fool who tricks you in this way./Pray always, never for one moment cease,/ Pray in despair and when your goods increase,/ Consume your life with prayer, till Solomon/Bestows his glance and ignorance is gone.” 

The hoopoe explains to the birds why he has reached enlightenment as receiving the glance of the biblical King Solomon, who he describes as the ruler of wisdom itself. He tells the birds the only way to receive wisdom is to pray unceasingly until they receive this glance, and only then will they obtain wisdom.

“The Self is hell— a furnace belching fire,/ An icy pit as Pride succeeds Desire,/And though a hundred thousand die of grief, That this same dog should die is past belief.” 

This quote illustrates one of the hoopoe’s many characterizations of the Self. The Self is an all-encompassing evil, both the furnace of hell and the icy pit. The difficulty of destroying the Self is underlined by the second part of this excerpt: mass human death is more believable than believing in one’s ability to destroy their Self.

“If you are profligate, if you are pure,/ You are but water mixed with dust, no more— / A drip of trembling instability,/ And can a drop resist the surging sea?/ Though in the world you are a king, you must/In sorrow and despair return to dust.” 

Truth has been characterized elsewhere as a shoreless sea, and this excerpt alludes to this characterization. In destroying the Self, one destroys the concept of fixed knowledge and becomes “a drip of trembling instability.” This is also a commentary on power, for water mixed with dust is spiritually superior to a king. 

“The bird of aspiration spreads its wings/And quickly soars beyond terrestrial things— /Beyond the lower world’s complacent guess/Of what is temperance, what drunkenness.” 

Attar makes abundantly clear that the birds are a thin veil for his human audience by using the bird as a metaphor. The lower world, meaning the human world, is only able to guess at the definitions of temperance and drunkenness, highlighting again the frailty of human knowledge and religious orthodoxy. 

“How far this is the world has never learned,/For no one who has gone there has returned— /Impatient bird, who would retrace this trail?/There is no messenger to tell the tale,/And they are lost to our concern below— /How can men tell you what they do not know?”

Describing the Seven Valleys to the birds, the hoopoe makes this remark about the question of the distance to the Simorgh’s palace. The men who have gone on this journey cannot say what it was like, because they are now one with God and have discarded this transient knowledge. They are on a higher spiritual plane and cannot answer the questions of the lower, human world. 

“Love here is fire; its thick smoke clouds the head— /When Love has come the intellect has fled;/It cannot tutor love, and all its care/ Supplies no remedy for love’s despair.” 

In the Valley of Love, human knowledge is no longer useful. Love is religious fervor, which does not need intellect. Love, even the despair of love, is beyond logic, and therefore cannot be tutored by it.

“Our insights come by different signs;/One prays in mosques and one in idols’ shrines— / But when Truth’s sunlight clears the upper air/Each pilgrim sees that he is welcomed there.” 

In describing the Valley of Mystery and Insight, the hoopoe says it doesn’t matter if you are a Muslim or an idol worshipper, as both are welcomed into enlightenment. Truth is a searing sunlight in the higher plane of the spirit, and the distinctions between religions is on the lower human plane. 

“If someone asks: ‘What is your present state;/Is drunkenness or sober sense your fate,/And do you flourish now or fade away?’/ The pilgrim will confess: ‘I cannot say;/I have no certain knowledge any more;/I doubt my doubt, doubt itself is unsure; I love, but who is it for whom I sigh?’” 

Describing the Valley of Bewilderment, the hoopoe presents a hypothetical conversation in which one person speaks in binary oppositions (drunkenness and sobriety, flourishing or fading) and the other, the spiritual pilgrim, cannot see these distinctions any longer. Not only is truth distinct from doubt, but doubt itself has no clear definition. 

“Destroy the body and adorn your sight/With kohl of insubstantial, darkest night./First lose yourself, then lose this loss and then/Withdraw from all that you have lost again—Go peacefully, and stage by stage progress/Until you gain the realms of Nothingness” 

Describing the final valley before enlightenment, the hoopoe describes the physical body as separate from vision. The kohl, or eyeliner, that adorns this vision is without any substance but the celestial sphere. To gain nothingness, you lose your Self, and then the knowledge that the Self ever existed. 

“The substance of their being was done/And they were lost like shade before the sun; Neither the pilgrims nor their guide remained. The Simorgh ceased to speak,/ and silence reigned.”

After the revelation that the Simorgh is a reflection of the thirty birds, the birds cease to exist in the human world. The world of shadow that encompasses the world outside of God is lost in the brightness of divine light. The Simorgh ceases to speak because enlightenment is beyond language and so only silence can remain.