[Poetry Chaikhana] Ramon Llull - January (from The Book of the Lover and Beloved)

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January (from The Book of the Lover and Beloved) By Ramon Llull (1232 - 1315) English version by Jordi Miralda Escude   1. The lover asked his beloved if there was anything left in him to be loved; and his beloved replied that whatever could make his love stronger remained to be loved. 2. The path the lover must walk to search for his beloved is long and dangerous, replete with thoughts and deliberation, with anguished moans and cries, and enlightened with love. 3. A multitude of lovers gathered to worship one beloved, who filled all of them with love; and everyone cared for his beloved and his enjoyable thoughts, for which they felt pleasant wonders. 4. The lover wept and said: - How long till darkness ceases in the world, so that evil deeds will cease? And how longer for the water, which customarily moves downward, to have the nature to move upward? And how longer for the innocent to be more than the guilty? 5. - Ah! When will the lover rejoice, when he dies for his beloved? And the beloved, when will he see his lover languish for his love? 6. The lover said to his beloved: - You, who fillst the Sun with glare, fill my heart with love. To which the beloved answered: - Without fulfillment of love your eyes would not be in tears, neither would you have come to this place to see your loved one. 7. The beloved tempted his lover, and inquired if he loved perfectly; and he asked what the difference was between presence and absence of the beloved. Replied the lover: - From ignorance and forgetfulness, to knowledge and remembrance. 8. The beloved asked his lover: - Can you remember anything that I gave you, for which you love me? And he replied: - Yes, since among the sorrows and pleasures you give me, I make no difference. 9. - Tell me, my lover - said the beloved - : will you have patience if I double your misery? - Yes, if you just double my love. 10. The beloved said to the lover: - Do you know, yet, what love is? Replied the lover, - If I did not know what love is, would I know what hardship, sadness and pain are? 11. The lover was asked: - Why are you not answering your beloved, who is calling you? He answered: - I am already facing grave danger to attain him, and I surely speak to him wishing for his honors. 12. - Crazy lover: why do you destroy yourself and give your money away, and ignore the pleasures of this world and go disdained among the people? He answered: - To honor the principles of my beloved, who by more people is despised and dishonored, than honored and loved. 13. - Tell me, crazy for love: Who is the most visible, the beloved in the lover, or the lover in the beloved? And he said the beloved is seen in love, and the lover is seen in sorrow, in weeping, in hardship and pain. 14. The lover was seeking someone who would tell his beloved how he bore grave hardship and died for his love; and he met his beloved who was reading in a book where all the grief and all the delights which his love would give him for his beloved were written. 15. Our Lady brought her Son to the lover, so he could kiss his foot, and so that he would write in his book the virtues of our Lady. 16. - Tell me, bird who sings: have you come to my beloved so that he defends you from hatred, and he multiplies love in you? Replied the bird: - And who makes me sing, but the Lord of love, to whom hatred is dishonor? 17. Love has settled between fear and hopefulness, living with thoughts and dying by oblivion as the foundations are over the delights of this world. 18. A dispute occurred between the eyes and the memory of the lover, for the eyes said it was better to see the beloved than to remember him, and the memory said that through remembrance the water rises to the eyes and the heart swells with love. 19. The lover asked intelligence and will which one was closest to his beloved; and they both ran, and intelligence was to his beloved before will. 20. Into discord came the lover and the beloved; and it was seen by another lover, and he wept for so long until he had brought into peace and agreement the beloved and the lover. 21. Sighs and tears came to the judgment of the beloved and asked him which one he felt most strongly loved by. The beloved judged that sighs are closer to love, and tears closer to the eyes. 22. The lover came to drink from the fountain that arouses love in those who do not love, and his sorrows were doubled. And then the beloved came to drink from the fountain to double again the love of his lover, in which he would double his sorrows. 23. The lover fell sick, and the beloved looked after him: with worthiness he fed him, and with love he gave him drink, with patience he abounded him, of humbleness he dressed him, with truth he cured him. 24. The lover was asked where his beloved was. He replied: - See him in a house that is more noble than any other created nobilities; and see him in my acts of love, and in my suffering and in my weepings. 25. They said to the lover: - Where do you go? - I come from my beloved. - Where do you come to? - I go to my beloved. - When will you be back? - I will be with my beloved. - How long will you be with your beloved for? - As long as my thoughts will be with him. 26. The birds were singing the dawn, and the lover, who is the dawn, awakened; and the birds ended their song, and the lover died for his beloved in the dawn. 27. The bird was singing in the garden of the beloved, when the lover came and said to the bird: - If we don't understand each other by language, let us communicate with love; for to my eyes, my beloved is represented in your song. 28. The lover, who had worked hard to search for his beloved, felt sleep coming to him; and he feared he might forget his beloved. And he cried, so as not to fall asleep, and so that his beloved would not be absent to his consciousness. 29. The lover met his beloved, and he said: - You need not speak to me; but make a signal with your eyes, which are words to my heart, when I give you what you ask me. 30. The lover disobeyed his beloved, and he wept. And the beloved came to die in the gown of his lover, to let him recover what he had lost; and he gave him yet a greater gift than the one he had lost. 31. The beloved brings love to the lover, and does not pity him for his sorrows, whence he may more strongly be loved and, in the greatest sorrow, find pleasure and renewal.   / Photo by trix0r /

============ Thought for the Day: Let each experience feed the fire of love. ============

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Hi Omss -

It's January... a new year. A new pathway, new possibilities, perhaps a new vision of yourself.

I thought we might take a page from Ramon Llull's meditations on sacred love and the Divine Beloved. We have thirty-one verses, one for each day of the month, inspiring us day-by-day to discover how to be true lovers of the Divine. So many wonderful lines here, each line a reminder that we can bring the same giddy intensity to the lover's passionate quest for sacred union...

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Ramon Llull was in many ways a Renaissance man several centuries before the European Renaissance. In his youth he was a wealthy adventurer, politician, administrator, romantic poet, troubadour, and womanizer. He then went through a powerful religious conversion, became a Franciscan, a philosopher, a theologian, one of Europe's first novelists, a mathematician, an astrologer and alchemist, and a rationalist mystic.

Ramon Llull was born in Palma, the capital of the island kingdom of Majorca (now part of Spain). He was raised in a wealthy family and received an excellent education, learning to speak Catalan, Latin, Occitan, and Arabic.

While still a young man, Llull became an important administrator to King James II of Majorca. He married and had two children, though he was often traveling and he developed a reputation as a womanizer.

At some point he had a profound experience of spiritual conversion. In his dictated autobiography, he says he was composing a poem to seduce a young woman, when he turned to his right and had a vision of Christ on the cross, a vision that was repeated five times.

In the aftermath of his conversion experience, Llull became a Franciscan tertiary -- that is, dedicating himself to the Franciscan way of life but without taking monastic vows.

Ramon Llull began to dedicate himself to intellectual and spiritual pursuits. He wrote on alchemy and natural history. He practiced astrology. He wrote what is considered by some to be the first true novel in a European language, Blanquema. And he wrote his mystical meditations on the nature of divine love called The Book of the Lover and the Beloved -- inspired, surely, by Sufi mysticism, with which he would have been familiar, and laying the groundwork for later mystical meditations on European "courtly love." The breadth of his esoteric writings earned him the epithet "Doctor Illuminatus."

Llull, however, shared the European prejudices of the time, and he focused a great deal of his philosophical writings on strengthening Christian debate in order to convert Muslims and Jews to Christianity. He developed an elaborate rationalist form of mysticism in order to bring European Christian thought to a more equal footing with the highly developed Muslim and Jewish philosophies of the era. To this end, he even invented logical "machines," logical pneumonic devices of concentric wheels that could link philosophical and scientific ideas together in surprising and compelling ways. Filled with his missionary zeal, Llull spent his later years traveling through Europe and North Africa.

Although our modern world teaches us that we need to recognize and respect the rich diversity of religious and spiritual traditions, rather than such attempts at conversion and conformity, we should not overlook the depth of insight and stunning range of life experience exhibited by a figure like Ramon Llull.

Many blessings,
Ivan

 

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