Essay:  How did Rumi use metaphor? / Silence – the ultimate metaphor 

    By Rumi’s wisdom, since everything in the universe is God’s creation, everything is a receptor for God’s essence. Everything is a living metaphor for God’s love, humor, wildness and in short, the Divine’s presence. . .In fact much of Rumi’s poetry is an ecstatic game of hide and seek in which the seeker is not trying too-too hard to find God because then the game is over. This is one stream of Rumi’s ecstatic dance with language – his gamey-ness. He knows that God is hidden because “His radiance is all too great. . .like the sun, . . .He cannot be seen  because he is too manifest” (Schimmel, Rumi’s World, 2001, 87). 

You seek Him Where-no-place is –

then he gives signs of His place:

But if you seek Him in places

to where-no-place He will flee.  

. . .He’ll flee from you if you try then

to sketch his image and form –

The drawing will flee from the tablet,

the sign from the heart will flee! (86)  

    “For this reason the poet must turn to the use of metaphor to speak to God, of his Kibrya (divine glory)” (87). . .But metaphorical language, no matter how sophisticated and ecstatic, is language nonetheless and Rumi never fails to remind us that silence is the ultimate language. . .

When you are silent, His speech is your speech.

When you don’t weave, the weaver will be He. (84)

    And the ultimate relationship with God is one in which there is no relationship because no distance remains between seeker and hider, God and soul, voice and silence. When God manifests as Beloved, the poet, as lover, merges with the Divine; there is only ecstatic union. 

    In the very last part of the Masnavi, in the final phase of his life. . .(Rumi) is filled with love.  He sings:

If He makes me a goblet, I become a goblet,

If He makes me a fountain, then I shall give water,

If he makes me rain, I’ll bring forth the harvest,

If he makes me a snake, I’ll produce poison, (85). . .

    This echoes Amergin’s ecstatic pronouncent, “I am the wind. . .I am the hawk on the cliff” (Cowan, Fire in the Head, 1993, 28).

    Metaphor, all degrees of metaphor, have been replaced by a formula stating ecstatic equality. Here is symmetry and balance. Here is eternity, fact, crystal clarity, perfection, absolute acceptance. This language strikes me as a noble concession to those Rumi is about to leave behind, seeing as how he was about to consciously become the fly that disappears into the buttermilk, the moth about to flutter into the flame. . .    

    On the very last page of Bark’s Soul of Rumi, after his translation of Book IV of The Masnavi, in the middle of the page, there appears nothing but a single parenthetical phrase:  “(They break for the afternoon rest and silence.)” (Barks, 2001, 388). 

     Silence, in human terms, might well be defined by what precedes it. After the Masnavi, such a silence.