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Flights of Imagination: Avicenna's Phoenix (ʿanqā) and Bedil's

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Flights of Imagination: Avicenna's Phoenix (ʿanqā) and Bedil's JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 2 (2019) 28–72 brill.com/saih Flights of Imagination: Avicenna’s Phoenix (ʿAnqā) and Bedil’s Figuration for the Lyric Self Jane Mikkelson Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA [email protected] Abstract The phoenix (ʿanqā) appears in the philosophy of Avicenna (d.1037) as his example of a “vain intelligible,” a fictional being that exists in the soul, but not in the world. This remarkable bird is notable (along with the Earth, the moon, the sun, and God) for being a species of one. In this essay, I read the poetry Bedil of Delhi (d.1720) in conver- sation with the philosophical system of Avicenna, arguing that the phoenix in Bedil’s own philosophical system functions as a key figuration that allows him simultaneous- ly to articulate rigorous impersonal systematic ideas and to document his individual first-personal experiences of those ideas. The phoenix also plays a metaliterary role, allowing Bedil to reflect on this way of doing philosophy in the first person—a method founded on the lyric enrichment of Avicennan rationalism. Paying attention to the adjacencies between poetry and philosophy in Bedil, this essay traces the phoenix’s transformations from a famous philosophical example into one of Bedil’s most striking figurations in his arguments about imagination, mind, and self. Keywords lyric poetry – phoenix – Bedil – Avicenna – philosophy and literature – imagination – self ∵ © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/25425552-12340012Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 12:48:03PM via free access Flights of Imagination 29 Mī-dān kih zamānah naqsh-i saudā-st bīrūn zi zamānah ṣūrat-i mā-st zīrā qafas-ī-st īn zamānah bīrūn hamah kūh-i qāf u ʿanqā-st Understand: time is an image of melancholy. Outside of time is our true form. For this worldly time is a cage: Outside—all is Mount Qāf and the phoenix. – Rūmī1 Examples used in logical arguments have a distressing way of lingering on with a life of their own. – Paul de Man2 In his Foreword to The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell describes his forma- tive encounter with Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as “living with the sound of it, subjected to the sound.” This almost orphic epistrophe can- not but reverberate across a subsequent passage—more impersonal, less sensuously autobiographical—where Cavell identifies a kind of interpre- tive pause one experiences, an “uncertainty” regarding Wittgenstein, having to do with the reader’s intuition that “the shape Wittgenstein’s work takes is not arbitrary, that it was not willful of him not to have given it a more sys- tematic cast.”3 Long anticipating such attempts by Cavell and others to suture the breach in twentieth-century thought between analytic and continental 1 Ghazal No.365, Lines 1–2. Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, ed. Badīʿ al-Zamān Furūzānfar, Kullīyāt-i Shams-i Tabrīz (Tihrān: Muʾassasah-yi Maṭbūʿātī Amīr Kabīr, 1336SH [1957–1966CE]), 178–179. Transliteration of Arabic and Persian follows the IJMES system, with minor modifications for the Persian. 2 Referring to an example given in J.L. Austin’s “On Excuses” of an attendant at an insane asy- lum who has accidentally boiled an inmate to death in a scalding bath due to an untimely lapse in attention to the water taps. Paul de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks, 11–28 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 18. 3 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), xix–xx. JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 2 (2019)Downloaded 28 –from72 Brill.com09/24/2021 12:48:03PM via free access 30 Mikkelson philosophy, there is a rich history in the Islamic world of establishing, nego- tiating, and blurring the boundaries between the rational and the literary, between poetry and philosophy. This essay attends to the philosophical and literary work performed by a single figure—the phoenix—in the thought of the poet-philosopher Bedil of Delhi (d.1720), paying particular attention to how the phoenix serves as a means of articulating arguments about self and selfhood. It is argued here that the figure of the phoenix allows Bedil to reflect upon his own way of doing philosophy in the first person, a method founded in part upon his lyric enrichment of Avicennan rationalism. To illustrate the vital adjacency of literature and philosophy in Bedil’s corpus, the following pages trace the phoenix’s transformations from a figure of myth into a philosophi- cal example, and from a common metaphor into one of Bedil’s most striking figurations for the lyric self. The phoenix (ʿanqā) appears in the philosophy of Avicenna (d.1037) as his example of a “vain intelligible,” a fictional being that exists in the soul, but not in the world. This remarkable bird is also notable (along with the Earth, the moon, the sun, and God) for being a species of one. The phoenix is at once a creature that is imagined (indeed, it is only imagined) and is also an imagin- ing agent; as such, in Bedil’s thought, the phoenix becomes a key figuration, or master metaphor, that perfectly suits both Bedil’s articulation of rigorous, impersonal systematic ideas as well as his presentation of his individual first- personal experiences of those ideas. I argue that Bedil exploits the singularity, ontological murkiness, and conceptual evocativeness of Avicenna’s phoenix example, and fashions it into one of the governing metaphors for his own argu- ments about mind, self, and the status of the imagination. After introducing Bedil’s phoenix through the example of an early lyric poem, I place Avicenna’s thought into conversation with Bedil through the close read- ing of phoenix examples across Bedil’s corpus: in the long narrative poem Mount Sinai of Enlightenment (Ṭūr-i maʿrifat), in several lyric poems, and in his auto- biography, The Four Elements (Chahār ʿunṣur), where the phoenix functions as an important framing device. I conclude by offering some thoughts about what reading Bedil in the light of Avicenna can reveal about the adjacencies, shared territories, and dividing boundaries between lyric poetry and philosophy. The Neighboring Phoenix: Bedil’s ʿAnqā ʿAbd al-Qādir Bedil of Delhi composed nearly three thousand lyric poems, of which only a handful may be dated with reasonable confidence. His vast dīvān (collection of verse) is arranged alphabetically by the last letter of the JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUALDownloaded HISTORY from 2 Brill.com09/24/2021 (2019) 28–72 12:48:03PM via free access Flights of Imagination 31 refrain (i.e., not chronologically), and, taken as a whole, these thousands of poems display a great deal of consistency in their syntax, metaphor, imagery, and diction. Certain metaphors stand out due to their multiple occurrences, as do recurring patterns of intertwined concepts—repetitions which Prashant Keshavmurthy has called “rhizomic interconnections.”4 These are somewhat reminiscent of Shakespeare’s famous imagery clusters: some are obviously significant (Shakespeare’s Kates, coxcombs, and upright tree branches; spring- time and red-nosed sickness; Bedil’s circles and breaths; minds and lanterns), while others feel more like an idiosyncratic tic of diction (Shakespeare’s ap- ples, eels, and crabs; Bedil’s color and fracture).5 As a combined result of such consistency and lack of chronology, Bedil’s lyric corpus can frequently feel as though it is fused into an impressively resistant monolith, across whose surface it is all but impossible to trace developmental arcs. One way to etch out some semblance of evolution in Bedil’s lyric poems is with the aid of third-party testimony, the kind that his found, for instance, in early modern Persian biographical compendia (tazkirahs), collections of biographical notices about authors that frequently include examples of each author’s work. Since tazkirahs are, for the most part, reliably dated, exam- ples of Bedil’s poems found therein furnish an occasional treasured time- stamp. An example of such a date-anchored poem by Bedil is found in the Muḥammad Afżal Sarkhush’s biographical compendium and work of literary criticism, The Words of the Poets (Kalimāt al-shuʿarāʾ, 1682), where the entry on Bedil6 contains a brief reference to his ghazal No. 14.7 While this poem is not, strictly speaking, a sample from Bedil’s juvenilia (born in 1644, Bedil may have been as old as 37–38 when he composed a poem included in Sarkhush’s Kalimāt), nevertheless, this poem can at least beattributed to the earlier part of his career. 4 Prashant Keshavmurthy, Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi: Building an Ark, (New York: Routledge, 2016), 117. 5 For classic examples of Shakespeare’s “clusters,” see Caroline F.E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 1935). 6 Muḥammad Afżal Sarkhush, Kalimāt al-shuʿarāʾ (The Words of the Poets), ed. ʿAlī-Riżā Qazvah (Tihrān: Markaz-i Pazhūhish-i Kitābkhānah, Mūzah va Markaz-i Asnād-i Majlis-i Shūrā-yi Islāmī, 2011), 48–53. All subsequent references to and paraphrases from this tazkirah are from this passage. 7 Ghazal No. 14 (“Āyīnah bar khāk zad ṣunʿ-i yiktā”). ʿAbd al-Qādir Bedil Dihlavī, Kullīyāt-i Abū l-Maʿānī Mīrzā ʿAbd al-Qādir Bedil Dihlavī, ed. Khalīlullāh Khalīlī (Tihran: Intishārāt-i Ṭalāyah, 1389SH [2010/2011CE], I:6–7. JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 2 (2019)Downloaded 28 –from72 Brill.com09/24/2021 12:48:03PM via free access 32 Mikkelson Sarkhush notes that this poem was composed on a “model” (“zamīn,” lit- erally “ground”—meaning shared meter and other formal features)8 by Ḥāfiẓ (d.ca.1390), whose poetry set the tone, form, and standard for the Persian lyric for centuries, including Bedil’s era.
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