The missing virtue of people[1]
After the World War 2, a form of poetry became popular in German literature that had a graphical aspect, in a sense it uses the word in the service of painting, or we can say it combines these two mediums. For example, when the poem is filled with words, instead of the word “silence” there would be an empty space and in another one of these poems the words shape a bridge, they form a wall. If we want to find an interpretation for the words “bridge” and “wall” in Masnavi Maanavi we encounter verses like
ای بسا هندو و ترک هم زبان(Indians and Turks could speak the same language)
ای بسا دو ترک چون بیگانگان(and two Turks could be strangers to each other)
پس زبان محرمی خود دیگر است(so language is just another barrier)
همدلی از همزبانی بهتر است(so being sympathetic towards each other is better than speaking the same tongue)
Two clowns and a half the thing that strikes the mind of the audience from the first dialogues and makes them feel the anxiety, the anxiety that lives between his laughs, is the useless nature of language, this absolute disability of its form as a medium is the reason that even though people constantly talk to each other and have interactions, even though they search the six dimensions of the world, even though they do everything they can, they are not able to reach each other.
Now if we return to the verses of Masnavi verses we have to ask ourselves, what is this thing that has made this people alien to each other, unable to interact and connect with one another? In a more romanticizing sense, what’s the problem between them that has put this barrier within every single one of them and has taken sympathy away from them? There is a story of an old deaf man who visits his young but sick neighbor and instead of being compassionate to him, just hurts him. The old guy’s deafness and the other guy’s sickness shows that they both lacked something to be able to understand each other. So what is the thing that people in this script don’t have that even though their conversations is a key part of the script, a part so big that almost fills the empty space of decor, it still feels like they’re a bunch of deaf and blind people like the balls played in polo, lost in an empty space with no foundation or anything to hold into. I guess this text begs the question of what is funny about this script and what is tragic, especially at the moment when language becomes more transparent to us as the audience and more relatable to the real world, that’s when it almost becomes metaphorical.
Mahmood Hadadi
[1] Tajrobe Monthly magazine,2014