Talk of the Town - Rumi and Hedwig October 24 2001

"The universe is a form of divine law,

your reasonable father.

When you feel ungrateful to him,

the shapes of the world seem mean and ugly.

Make peace with the father, the elegant patterning,

and every experience will fill with immediacy."

-- "Father Reason," Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-73)

Jelaluddin Rumi was the best-selling poet in America a few years ago. His poetry plumbs the wisdom of ecstasy. Read a few lines by the founder of the Whirling Dervishes, and you get a taste of what it might be like to have your brain merge with your heart.

I've been thinking about Rumi a lot lately. The most obvious reason is that he was born in Afghanistan, and it's hard to reconcile the recent generalizations about Islam to his legacy, which endures in his poetry and the living practice of Sufism.

More oddly, I began thinking about Rumi last week when I saw the movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It is, of all things, a castration fantasy hiding behind a Platonic tale. Its hero, Hedwig, is the recipient of a botched sex-reversal operation he undertook as a dimwitted "girlie boy" named Hansel in East Berlin. He has the operation at the insistence of a U.S. serviceman who offers to marry him so he can escape Berlin. Then, assuming a female character, Hedwig lands, Wizard of Oz-backward, in Kansas. The serviceman soon abandons Hedwig, who then forms a band and looks for redemption in rock 'n' roll. The title of the movie is the name of the band, the "angry inch" being what's left of her penis.

The motivating myth behind the story is Plato's explanation of love, told in a song, "The Origin of Love." Once we were ecstatically whole, Plato said, and vengeful gods divided us in two. We spend our lives looking for our beloved "missing half."

This split in ourselves, this natural sense that we are missing part of ourselves, is imaged in Hedwig's stalking a young man she loves. He has betrayed her by stealing her songs, and making himself rich and famous in the process. In an almost shamanic conclusion, Hedwig reclaims the penis — metaphorically in the sense of "phallos," the power of maleness — through a cathartic confrontation with her missing half.

It's a storybook ending.

But what most interests me in the tales of both Hedwig and Rumi is the presence of the father, that principle which Rumi, in the lines above, called the "law" — and one that is imaged in the phallus. As Hansel, Hedwig is cast into fusion with a hateful mother after his father, a U.S. serviceman, is kicked out of the house for molesting the young boy. Hedwig's rescuer — nearly a pedophile himself and also a serviceman — is obviously a surrogate negative father figure who effectively castrates the young man with the help of Mother, who arranges the botched surgery.

Compare that to 24-year-old Rumi's assuming his father's role as sheikh to the educational community in Konya, where his family fled after Mongols invaded Afghanistan. Though powerful and respected for his spiritual wisdom, Rumi lives almost entirely by his intellect. Then, one day, a mentoring father figure, Shams of Tabriz, appears out of the desert, and the two fall in love. Rumi, the intellectual, finds his passion in the wandering dervish. Jealousy among Rumi's students and son ultimately results in Shams' apparent murder.

After Shams dies, Rumi is cast into deepest despair. He begins to listen to music, write poetry to his lost beloved and whirl around, holding his center. And there, inside, he finds Shams — the missing half internalized. It's the same way Hedwig finds her "phallos" — the lost power of the male, the father — inside herself after likewise turning to music. Gender is beside the point.

Both stories tell us about the redemption offered in music, poetry and dance. At depth, they also point to the ultimate necessity of coming to terms with our fathers as bearers (or non-bearers) of the mysterious principle of order, structure, necessary limitation. In whirling, Rumi describes an arc that contains his ecstatic ruminations — a perfect expression of his father's logos and his mentor's passion. In rock 'n' roll, Hedwig finds a container that allows her to discover her own autonomy — as androgyn in the classic alchemical sense of king (ego, law) married to queen (heart, passion).

The loss of effective fathering — literally and in the sense of us taking care of ourselves — is a broad phenomenon of our time. Unfortunately, even where it's been recognized, as in the work of "Wildman" poet Robert Bly and groups like the Promise Keepers, women tend to be blamed. Set in the woods with a drum and a box of Kleenex, men are told to get over their sensitive selves and become warriors again. Nice try, but you don't gain wisdom of Hedwig or Rumi with a weekend workshop or a seat at a rally with a Bible in your lap.

Like Shams and Hedwig, the way men — all of us — achieve power is to love one another without fear, remembering that we are guardians of the world's pleasure and that we live within certain restraints. As father God said to Mohammad: "For you, if you had not existed, I would not have created the heavens and the earth."??