No. 38
My being born brought heaven no gain;
my death has added to its state no grain;
nor could these two ears, from any soul, attain —
why I was brought, then borne away again.*
Philosophical Reflection
The speaker is never the subject of a verb in this poem. Its two key words are verbal nouns, a bringing and a carrying-off, and in both of them he is the thing brought and carried: the object of an action whose agent is never named. A translation can say being born, which is what the bringing amounts to, but the Persian keeps the transitive shape. Something brought me here and something will take me away. Elsewhere in the corpus Khayyam at least lets us arrive on our own feet; here even the arrival is done to us. Having set the speaker down as freight, the poem then asks the one question freight cannot answer for itself: what was the errand for?
It does not ask straight away. It first works through the obvious answers, and the order is careful. The method is the ordinary one: we infer why something was done from what doing it achieved. When a power brings something into being, the likeliest motive is gain, so the first line tests gain and finds none: the turning heaven was no richer for my coming. When a power removes something, the likeliest motive is glory, the lord who takes a life to show that he can. So the second line tests that, and finds the heaven’s rank and majesty no greater for my going. Each event is paired with the motive that would best explain it, and each pairing fails. The tense matters too. The removal is reported in the past, like the arrival, as though the speaker already stood on the far side of it. Persian allows the past for what is certain to come, but on either reading the poem speaks in the grammar of an epitaph, and the question in its last line is put to a life already treated as closed.
The heaven of the first line is the turning one. The word is built on the verb for revolving, and in the cosmology Khayyam set out for his patron in On the Universals of Being, that turning has an explanation. Each sphere, the treatise explains, is moved by its soul through a willed aim directed upward, towards the Intellect it longs to resemble. The sphere also stands among the intermediary causes that give the human being his composition. On that account the heaven really is the bringer, and its purpose really does point elsewhere. It moves for the sake of what is above it, and what it produces below is a by-product of the motion, not its object. The treatise was a commissioned exposition of the school’s doctrine, and nothing obliges us to think Khayyam held it. The quatrain shows what the doctrine yields if one does: an efficient cause in full working order and no final cause that faces us. There is a small irony in the word for the heaven’s majesty, too. It is the word the treatise uses in its doxology for the Necessary Being itself. The poem gives it to one of the intermediaries the treatise insists are not of God’s kind, and then notes that even this majesty did not grow.
The third line turns from reasoning to inquiry, and names the organ: my two ears. Having found no purpose in the effects, the speaker tries the other route, which is to ask, and he reports the result. From no one at all, a phrase as wide as the language allows, has he heard what the bringing was for. Hearing here is not passive. It is what is left after one has gone round the learned and the unlearned alike and asked each of them for a reason, and both ears are named because the search was thorough. The line is therefore not a sceptic refusing to listen. It reports that he listened to everyone who claimed to know, and none of them could produce a proof. The claim is exactly as large as its evidence. It does not say the bringing had no purpose. It says the purpose is unknown to everyone he has been able to ask, which is the stance of those quatrains in which he admits that what lies behind the curtain is closed to him and to everyone else.
A theologian would object that the first two lines are not a complaint but a creed. Of course the heaven gained nothing, and of course nothing behind it gained either: that is what it means for the source of being to be without need. To act for gain is to lack something, and the philosophers’ First Cause, rich in itself and giving without seeking return, is defined by lacking nothing. On this view the poem has stumbled on the doctrine of disinterested generosity and mistaken it for indifference. The objection is right about the doctrine and leaves the poem untouched. Grant that the giver wanted nothing. Then the purpose, if there is one, must lie with the one who was given, so that the bringing was for my sake. The theologian has a second answer ready: that purpose has been communicated, by God, through His prophets. But the third line has already gone where that answer leads. It did not ask whether anything had been said. It asked everyone, the theologians among them, and none could say what this particular coming and going was for. A doctrine that creation has a purpose is not knowledge of the purpose, and the one who recites the doctrine, asked for the purpose itself, has nothing to add. The doctrine of disinterested giving does not answer the question. It shifts the whole of its weight onto the recipient, and leaves him holding a gift no one can explain.
Read whole, the poem is built from two failed searches. The first runs from effects to motive. This coming and going achieved nothing, since the heaven was no richer for the arrival and no grander for the departure, so no purpose can be read off it. The second is plain inquiry: the speaker asked, and found no one who had discovered the purpose or could show it. Reason finds no trace in the world, and report finds no one who knows. The last line then joins the two verbal nouns with a single and and puts one question to both, treating the bringing and the carrying-off as a single errand. All four lines close on the same rhyme, though the form would have allowed the third to stand apart, so the poem ends on the sound it began with, having moved nowhere new. That is its kind of honesty. Nothing in it rules out an answer. It records, in the same past tense it began in, that both roads to one have been walked, and that neither arrived.
Footnote
* Source: Tarabkhaneh, Homaei, no. 38, translated by Kam Austine for Philosophy in Verse.
ز آوردن من نبود گردون را سود
وز بردن من جاه و جلالش نفزود
از هیچ کسی نیز دو گوشم نشنود
کآوردن و بردن من از بهر چه بود
Related Treatises: Risāla dar ʿIlm Kulliyāt-e Wujūd (On the Universals of Being), Risāla fī al-Kawn wa al-Taklīf (On the World and the Duty)
Internal Themes: #Existentialism #Nihilism #Purpose #FinalCause #Metaphysics #Epistemology #Mortality #PersianPhilosophy
Published as part of Philosophy in Verse — The Omar Khayyam Project
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