Interview with Coleman Barks and Ed Henderson by Joseph Roberts

Common Ground: There are so many connections between poetry, music, art and living authentically in the world.
Coleman Barks: Rumi says that knowing that conscious decisions and personal memory are much too small a place to live, every human being streams at night into the loving nowhere, or during the day in some absorbing work.
One way of breaking out of the container of the personality of conscious decisions and personal memory is to find some work that you kind of disappear in while you're doing it. That's what stonework is for me. There are stones in that wall by my creek that I have no idea how I lifted. They're just way too heavy, and I never had any help. I was always by myself. So, I was out of my personal limitations.
CG: Musicians and artists sometimes call that the zone.
CB: Athletes know about it too. We all just adore it because something is flowing through us. Another Rumi metaphor for how that feels is when he says a human being is like the reed flute. It has nine holes and has been plucked from the reed bed mud of God. Now we're able, through our hollowness, to be able to make a noise, which is language. All that language can say, underneath all the intricacies of the tunes and melodies we play, under every language and everything all human beings say, is nostalgia. We want to go back to the reed bed where we were making mud and making sugar from the cane.
The reed flute theory of language implies that if the human is the flute there must be a flute player, so you have to be played. In other words, breath has to flow through you from some other source. The human being can't make the tune itself. The only real tune that can be played is the whining, which is the core of longing in every human being. That longing is the essence of humanity.
CG: Ed, you work with music a lot. How do you see it all connecting?
Ed Henderson: Well, it's really interesting. The state you get to, where artists want to get, where you actually feel like something is playing your instrument -- I'm not thinking about my hands or anything, I'm just there in the moment and playing -- is a state that most musicians I know really long for. That's what we want. We're always trying to find that.
With some people you play with, you just always go there. There's something about that. I don't know if it's the muse or the Great Spirit, but something possesses you and everybody you're working with, and you just go. In a sense, you're the vessel for that moment.
CG: How have birds been an inspiration for you?
EH: Coleman, you said a wonderful thing at the beginning of Birdsong, a delicious thing: "Walking an Irish hillside once, I was stunned, as everyone is, by the performance of a skylark. Falling -- warbling, a chunked gob of pure kamikaze water music, unbelievably fluid and beyond any melody."
Some of the music I wrote, one of the pieces actually had this freefalling thing, this choir all around it. That's part of what inspired me. But it's interesting, the references to bird and birdsong in here and in Rumi's poetry.
CB: Well, in his book Birdsong, Rumi talks about these branching moments, the baby bird that's at that crucial moment where it's about to step off and fly or fall. So it's important to him, being fledged and feathered enough to fly. That's an important metaphor.
He's got a lot of birds [in his writing,] the wonderful story of the hawk that somehow gets in an old woman's kitchen. The noble falcon in the old woman's kitchen, and she says, "Who's been taking care of you? Somebody's let your toenails grow long." He says this is a horrible situation for the raptor to be in. The soul wants to be on the king's wrist and hunting. His image of what that looks like is this noble raptor sitting on the shelf in an old woman's kitchen with the smoke coming up from the cooking and he's crying.
CG: When we get ill we need to listen, but a lot of times we're so distracted we'll take a pill rather than listen. Does Rumi talk about listening to what's being said?
CB: Oh, yes. The whole practice the Sufis have evolved with Rumi, maybe the most experimental, is called Samal. And it's a deep listening of poetry and music, with movement involved sometimes, so that you're seeing something as you're listening. That practice was meant to take us to a shared inwardness. My teacher recognized it in the jewel lights of everybody's eyes. He called his students the jewel lights of his eyes, so the exchange of that shared inwardness was apparent in the shining of the eyes.
Rumi talks about the birds in the flocks, how they do it in one mind. There's not a leader that says when to turn, as there may be in the V's of the geese. Of these birds that flock, he says: "Everything is flying and each particle is circulating on its own." And then he says, "Is the one I love everywhere?" I love what he does at the end of poems sometimes. He just brings a question in that just sort of encapsulates what has come before.
CG: I have to ask your sense around the invasion of Iraq.
CB: I think it's a huge mistake and we have to get out of there as soon as we can. The people in Afghanistan, though, really appreciated our taking down the Taliban. They give the thumbs up sign to the soldiers when they see them, because it was so ugly what they were doing. I mean, that country adores music and they wouldn't let them listen to music or cheer at soccer games.
The place I stayed, the American Institute for Afghan Studies, was an old Taliban Ministry of Virtue and Vice. They had a swimming pool there and keep it about four or five feet deep in the winter. For little infractions, they would make people stand in the pool for 72 hours, and then they'd start to question them, "So you've been listening to the radio again, have you?" Of course, they weren't sane, and the Afghan people are a tremendously sane people and gorgeously cultured.
CG: The Taliban was created by western imperialism after their homes were destroyed. Of course, the empire always thinks it's trying to help people out.
CB: The Americans are giving democracy to this ancient culture, which has been governed by tribal charisma. They've known how to govern for a long time.
EH: How can artists do anything about this? I'd love to know how to get through to the warriors. It's incredibly idealist to think of getting through to the Taliban, except something has to happen.
CB: The Sufis say the great world is the inner world, and the outer world of stores and restaurants and nations and three hundred billion galaxies is the small world. The inner world is your awareness. The outer is a kind of language for our inner. That reversal: you can't shoot a weapon into a place where four hundred people are if you think the great world is the inner world and each of those people is housing a treasure of consciousness. That's a way out of it, I think. I have children and they wouldn't ever pull a gun on somebody for some foreign policy reason that changes every two weeks. Come on. The people I meet would not go to war for any reason.
CG: Coleman, if you were complete with Rumi, what would you be doing now?
CB: I write my own poems, so I divide my time about half and half between these ancient texts and my own poems. I'd probably be doing some of that. But I've also found this 16th century Sufi named Sarmad that I'm interested in. He lived in India and was killed because he'd only say the first half of the Zikhr, "la-h'ila...," there is no God. The rest of it is there is no reality but God. But he just kept saying what he knew: "There is no God, there is no God." He was just doing the negative, that you've got to become rubble first. So he was just emphasizing the absence.
EH: There's a beautiful poem: "The way of love is not a subtle argument. The door there is devastation." I just love, "Birds make great sky circles of their freedom. How do they learn it? They fall, and falling they're given wings."
CB: That's the surrender, isn't it?
EH: Yes, that state of giving up where you suddenly start to fly. I'm really excited to be singing some of your poems, and to be singing some of them in Farsi. We've been working on getting the original Farsi. It's a tremendously gifted choir of singers, amazing musicians. It's beautiful.