Longing

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I've been watching a slew of movies lately and I'm going to comment on them in later posts.

Many of these movies made me think of a conversation I had last winter with one of my students about the poetry of Rumi. I've recorded myself on the player above reading two poems by Rumi. The two poems give a slight idea of what happens in his poetry and provide a context for the following conversation.

I opened my office door and heard one of my students say, "This Rumi shit. It's totally fucking with me. I mean I totally love it. My freakin' head is ready to explode. I have to talk with someone and you're the only person I could think of. I mean, it's your freakin' fault for assigning us this dude and his ridiculous poetry."

"Come on in. We can talk."

She then addressed something that I've gotten more used to hearing as a concern the more I teach the youth of the early years of the 21st century. I began to hear my younger step-daughter say all the time: "Today this guy came into Starbucks. Oh my God! He was so totally coming on to me! I just thought, whatEVer, and made him his frickin' double latte with skim and and like looked at him like he was a total asshole and he left and Ellen said, "How hilarious was that" and we laughed our asses off."

So my student walks in and makes it clear that she is so totally not coming on to me, that she just needs to talk.

I nodded. It's what I did for the rest of the time she was in my office. From this point on, I didn't say a word. I just listened. She said the following:

"I sooo know what Rumi means when his poems deal with longing. Things are so sketch with my husband right now. I never thought this happened with guys, but he's totally lost interest in sex. It's okay, right, that I'm talking about this, right? I mean I thought guys were always into sex, but it's like he's on another planet. He won't even touch me and he like jumps when I touch him, you know, like if he's sitting at his desk reading and I come up and put my hands on his shoulders, he acts scared or like I've tased him. It's weird.

"We don't have kids, so we don't have to like quote stay together for the kids unquote, but we take in dogs, like give dogs foster care, and we are tight with that. I mean, when we are working with the dogs things are tight. We're good. Same with money. No problems. We don't fight, or anything like that, but I can't figure out this sex thing. I mean it's not like I'm unattractive, but I got pissed at him one day a couple of months ago and yelled at him, I hadn't been taking my Zoloft, and he said he can't be close to me ever since then.

"Anyways, the feeling I have for wanting to be close to him is just what we've been talking about in class, it's longing. I never thought about it before. I just felt bad and kept beating myself up but Rumi, you know, Rumi makes me think about this as a spiritual thing, you know what I mean? You know, how Rumi says that this longing we have for another person is like the longing we have for God or the Divine or whatever, like the way we've been talking, and I sooo feel that, and I don't know what to do with this longing. I mean my husband won't do anything to be close and I cry at night when he sleeps on the couch and it makes me long for knowing God, too, but somehow knowing that Rumi knows about this stuff and I'm not alone helps me, you know, maybe be patient. I mean maybe it won't always be this way, oh I don't know, I mean I love my husband and I love what we do with the dogs and when the subject isn't sex I love how we talk and laugh together, I mean we're both smart and funny. God.

"So, I guess I just want you to know that I love Rumi and I love this class and it's helping me soo much think about things and know that these things with love and everything have been going on forever and it makes me feel so much less like I'm just being, you know, so 90210, and that maybe my husband feels some longing, too, who knows?"

My student's monologue has stayed with me and I came to understand Rumi even better because of it.

Moreover, as I've been watching movies over the last few weeks, I've experienced most of these movies portraying characters who long for something outside of themselves. These characters are unfulfilled and take their longing into their worlds and act on their longings in a variety of ways.

That's what I'll be writing about in future posts as I explore this longing in the movies I've watched.