Shuffle Synchronicities: Volume 1 - #87

"May This Be Love" by Jimi Hendrix - 03/30/21

"May This Be Love" by Jimi Hendrix

This Jimi Hendrix song feels to me like a Sufi poem.

The Sufi poets (mystical Muslims from the 13th/14th century) often used metaphors of nature or objects to describe God or the Beloved or the unnameable.

Here’s Jimi’s first verse:

Waterfall
Nothing can harm me at all
My worries seem so very small
With my waterfall

Hendrix’s “Waterfall,” to me at least, seems to be the metaphor of knowing (and feeling and embodying) that you are held by the Beloved in every moment of time and in every place of space.

With it, “nothing can harm you at all.”

With it, “worries seem so very small.”

While Hendrix employs the metaphor of a waterfall, here’s an example from Hafiz employing the metaphor of a feather from the 14th Century (translated into today’s English language).

A Strange Feather

All
The craziness,
All the empty plots,
All the ghosts and fears,
All the grudges and sorrows have
Now
Passed.
I must have inhaled
A strange
Feather
That finally
Fell
Out.

Hafiz’s “strange feather,” to me at least, seems to be the existential irritant of neurosis, of unhappiness, of not knowing/feeling/embodying that the Beloved is in all.

Here’s Hendrix’s next verse:

I can see
My rainbow calling me
Through the misty breeze
Of my waterfall

Hendrix’s “rainbow,” to me at least, feels like a manifestation of the Beloved that calls to Hendrix, that is, music.

Hendrix’s calling to music, which is his manifestation (rainbow) of the Beloved (waterfall), is just like Hafiz’s calling to poetry.

Though like in the Pixar movie “Soul” we should also have a calling to just live life.

Here’s another Hafiz poem mixing music, poetry, and life:

I Am Really Just A Tambourine

Good
Poetry
Makes the universe admit a
Secret:
"I am
Really just a tambourine,
Grab hold,
Play me
Against your warm
Thigh."

The title of the Hendrix song “May This Be Love” also suggests another layer to the song, which is perhaps romantic love.

Is the “waterfall” also the romantic partner, as some critics have implied?

Author and musicologist Keith Shadwick wrote: "This is a melodic, romantic composition.”

AllMusic’s Thomas Ward says it “is essentially a beautiful love song, one of the finest love songs in Hendrix’s canon.”

Musically it is quite romantic, but it is romantic in the way of the Sufis for love of God, to me at least.

Hendrix seems to be saying in effect “This may be love.”

He might agree with Hafiz who seems to be saying that a goal of romantic love is to also give that person access to spiritual love.

Or as Hafiz says in this poem:

This One Is Mine

Someone put
You on a slave block
And the unreal bought
You.
Now I keep coming to your owner
Saying,
"This one is mine."
You often overhear us talking
And this can make your heart leap
With excitement
Don't worry
I will not let sadness
Possess you.
I will gladly borrow all the gold
I need
To get you
Back

Hafiz seems to be saying that unhappiness (slavery to the unreal of egoic separation) is sort of a choice that people don’t even realize they are making, or that the world doesn’t give them the opportunity to figure out.

But the goal of Hafiz and me with this blog is to help free anyone from unhappiness we come into contact with!

And I say this with supreme humbleness.

As I also believe it is everyone’s goal, even if they don’t mean it to be.

It’s sort of like J.D. Salinger’s novela Franny & Zooey.

Franny struggles with how to be an ego in the world.

She almost gives up her creativity, her acting, which would be Hendrix’s music, Hafiz’s poetry, or my whatever form of writing this Substack is, until her brother Zooey says:

“I don’t care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, it can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I’ll tell you a terrible secret — Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know —listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is?…Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.

For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands.

For a fullish half minute or so, there were no other words, no further speech. Then: ‘I can’t talk any more, buddy.’ The sound of a phone being replaced in its catch followed.

Franny took in her breath slightly but continued to hold the phone to her ear. A dial tone, of course, followed the formal break in the connection. She appeared to find it extraordinarily beautiful to listen to, rather as if it were the best possible substitute for the primordial silence itself. But she seemed to know, too, when to stop listening to it, as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers. When she had replaced the phone, she seemed to know just what to do next, too. She cleared away the smoking things, then drew back the cotton bedspread from the bed she had been sitting on, took off her slippers, and got into the bed. For some minutes, before she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, she just lay quiet, smiling at the ceiling.”

Salinger seems to be saying something like, know that God is in everyone, instead of thinking that everyone are “phonies” as Salinger wrote about in his previous book “Catcher in the Rye” because that is the key to joy, to “what little or much wisdom there is in the world” to know.

For what it’s worth, I tried to re-read Salinger’s entire oeuvre for a conversation with a friend, the artist, Dave Dorsey.

I tried to re-read Catcher in the Rye last year, and couldn’t make it through the overwhelming unhappiness.

But I was able to make it through the rest, and it seemed like once Salinger landed on the opposite side of unhappy separateness, (Catcher) he told one grand story that ended in joyful connection, (Franny and Zooey) then grew almost bored with fictional conflict, and just seemed to write philosophically to mainline the ideas to people.

Similarly, I also feel quite bored by most movies and TV shows and even novels now which are full of conflict just to get to a drop of wisdom.

Yet I digress.

Salinger’s Christ in the audience, everyone is your brother/sister/God metaphor, reminds me of this Hafiz poem:

If God Invited You To A Party

If God
Invited you to a party
And said,
"Everyone
In the ballroom tonight
Will be my special
Guest,"
How would you then treat them
When you
Arrived?
Indeed, indeed!
And Hafiz knows
There is no one in this world
Who
Is not upon
His Jeweled Dance
Floor

In the next verse, Hendrix seems to be saying that the people who don’t believe in the spiritual world and its manifestation of callings of creativity, or anything really, those who “laugh at” others and call them a “lazy minded fool” are “wrong” but paradoxically also don’t bother him.

Because he believes “just as long as I have you” (the waterfall or the Beloved as well as the rainbow or the manifestation of his calling) “to see him through he has nothing to lose”.

Some people say
Daydreaming's for all the, huh
Lazy minded fools
With nothing else to do
So let them laugh, laugh at me
So just as long as I have you
To see me through
I have nothing to lose
Long as I have you

Here’s another Hafiz poem sort of about that:

That Regal Coat

Joy
Is the royal garment
And now everyday I could wear
That regal
Coat,
But I so love the common man
And feel for all
Their labor
I often paint a vast drop
Of compassion
In
My
Eye.

Hafiz seems to be saying to the normal people laughing at Hendrix’s laziness, he feels for their labor in the worldly world, which keeps them perhaps from experiencing the joy available to them, and he paints a vast drop of compassion for them in his eye.

Yet, this is perhaps a controversial thing for me and for others.

Is the joy that Hafiz and Hendrix and Salinger and I are talking about only available to me because I am furloughed and can do whatever I want with all of my time?

I will say after the awakening / manic episode I mostly felt this way even at my day job.

What was once oppressive and stressful and grim became like the rest of the world a place for love, joy, and connection.

I can’t express enough that you can be anyone and experience what Hafiz and Hendrix and Salinger seem to be talking about, you don’t need to be an artist, you could be a janitor, it might even be easier if you are a janitor.

In fact, at my day job, the happiest man there seemed to be a janitor who I befriended.

But the key to me is that the joy comes and goes, at least for me.

In the last verse, Hendrix calls out to the waterfall, which has given him his joy and peace and says, “don’t ever change your ways, fall with me for a million days.”

Waterfall
Don't ever change your ways
Fall with me for a million days
Oh, my waterfall

Suggesting that’s he’s also experienced its temporary loss.

It reminds me of this Hafiz poem:

The Sky Hunter

Keep
Ringing the bell,
Playing the tamboura, calling for Him
For you
Have touched something holy inside
With your spirit-body
And now your eyes look broken
Without His sacred presence near
The heart is like that: blessed and ruined
Once it has known
Divine beauty,
Then,
It becomes a restless sky hunter.
The lover keeps circling in their being
Their sweetest moments
With God
Needing to kiss
His face
Again.

We are all likely sky hunters, perhaps there are a few truly enlightened ones, whose every moment is a sweet one with God, but I think the rest of us all experience joy and peace, just some of the time.

I hope that your some of the time keeps growing to most of the time and perhaps to all of the time, because I also believe anything is possible.

Thanks for reading this long one!

Here’s a link to the Hafiz book of poems I quoted from.

Okay, that’s the eighty-seventh Shuffle Synchronicities.