{"id":30,"date":"2014-04-13T19:02:25","date_gmt":"2014-04-13T19:02:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/kirin\/?p=30"},"modified":"2014-04-23T04:04:10","modified_gmt":"2014-04-23T04:04:10","slug":"30","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kirin\/2014\/04\/13\/30\/","title":{"rendered":"Cupbearer, fill the bowl with blood, not wine: Connecting human & divine love"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Image 1: The Front Face of the Love Letter\/Card<\/p>\n

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Image 2: The Card Opening<\/p>\n

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Image 3: The Inside Face of the Card<\/p>\n

(medium: cardstock\/black ink – love letter\/card, response: week 10)<\/p>\n

In response to Farid Attar’s\u00a0The Conference of the Birds<\/em>, I crafted a love letter (with the potential to be sent, should the need arise) that reads with the following text from the epic poem itself:<\/p>\n

\n

“Heart\u2019s blood and bitter pain belong to love,
\nAnd tales of problems no one can remove;
\nCupbearer, fill the bowl with blood, not wine –
\nAnd if you lack the heart\u2019s rich blood take mine.
\nLove thrives on inextinguishable pain,
\nWhich tears the soul, then knits the threads again.
\nA mote of love exceeds all bounds; it gives
\nThe vital essence to whatever lives.
\nBut where love thrives, there pain is always found;
\nAngels alone escape this weary round –
\nThey love without that savage agony
\nWhich is reserved for vexed humanity.”<\/h1>\n

\u2015\u00a0\u0641\u0631\u06cc\u062f \u0627\u0644\u062f\u06cc\u0646 \u0639\u0637\u0627\u0631,\u00a0The Conference of the Birds<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This form of creative interaction with the text seemed appropriate to me, because what was most striking in reading the book was the way in which it imagined acts of human love to be part of a guide\/an instructive tool <\/em>for enacting divine love. These forms of love – which are linked to pain, the idea of loss, and the symbolic spilling of blood, impress upon the reader the\u00a0difficulty<\/em> of finding and loving God. There is a sense of\u00a0yearning\u00a0<\/em>in each of these poems that have to do with love that implies that the end goal can be characterized by its unattainability<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The card is an aspirational symbol of expressing one’s love, because it projects hope for positive reception, but cannot ensure it. The form interacts with the content itself. “Hoping for love in return” is an emotion embodied in the sending of a love-letter or a card of this nature. The personal effort and hard work that gets poured into handmade drawings and the writing out of a selected set of words is part of the image of “spilling blood.” It has to do with the “spilling of sweat” that is involved in\u00a0making<\/em> something to give to one’s beloved.<\/p>\n

There is no guarantee in the one-sided sending of a letter or a card, just as there is no guarantee when one pledges their love and devotion to God, who presides over all. In the attempt to perform an act of sacrificial, risk-taking human love, one begins to understand what it means to give up parts of the self in order to love another fully and without reserve. Herein lies the allegory I most wanted to interact with – human love as a pattern and example for divine love.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Image 1: The Front Face of the Love Letter\/Card Image 2: The Card Opening Image 3: The Inside Face of the Card (medium: cardstock\/black ink – love letter\/card, response: week 10) In response to Farid Attar’s\u00a0The Conference of the Birds, I crafted a love letter (with the potential to be sent, should the need arise) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6294,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120131],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-for-the-love-of-god-and-his-prophet-understanding-islam"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kirin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kirin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kirin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kirin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6294"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kirin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kirin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kirin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions\/38"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kirin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kirin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kirin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}