Oh, plagued no more with Human or Divine, To-morrow's tangle to itself resign, And lose your fingers in the tresses of The Cypress-slender Minister of Wine. The work of Omar al-Khayyam makes it pretty clear that Middle Eastern scholars were light-years...
[more]Oh, plagued no more with Human or Divine,
To-morrow's tangle to itself resign,
And lose your fingers in the tresses of
The Cypress-slender Minister of Wine.
The work of Omar al-Khayyam makes it pretty clear that Middle Eastern scholars were light-years ahead of their European counterparts during Medieval times. While Europe fiddled with an elaborate system of "humours," the Middle East used solid, complex mathematical and scientific systems that would ultimately inform modernity. Physics, metaphysics, geometry, astronomy, algebra, and poetry shared a place in the profundity of al-Khayyam's understanding. It was not until Descartes that the West would produce anyone close to his equal.
Chief among al-Khayyam's mathematical projects were his revisions of the solar calendar (his calculation of the year is more precise than our present one) and his classifications of algebraic formulae. But despite his enormous body of scientific work, al-Khayyam is best known in the West for his grand collection of poems titled the "Rubaiyat."
The "Rubaiyat" contains ruminations on life's fleetingness and beauty, wistful odes to momentary joy, meditations on time, and most importantly, praises for the liberating effects of alcohol. Al-Khayyam's poems present wine as the perfect marriage between the "total immersion" of psychedelics and the comforting warmth of alcohol. In his quatrains, he uses wine as a vehicle to both escape from and move toward the core of existence.
Through his poetic "trips," al-Khayyam ponders life and death and decides, in the end, that the world's mysteries are best left alone. The poetry, written from the perspective of a wise old man, riffs more than it ponders. While philosophy can help place humanity in the world, it doesn't change the fact that everythinf'”philosophy, knowledge, life'”Is transient. Or as al-Khayyam wrote: "I came like Water and like Wind I go."
Al-Khayyam's words are both a thoughtful treatment of humanity and an irreverent dismissal of the importance of philosophy. He approached poetry'”the emotional expression of his scientific findings'”with a scientist's resignation to law. However, his resignation seems more a joyous apathy for tough life-questions. Despite his concrete findings, he still viewed life as a crapshoot, a mystery not worth fretting over. A happily conflicted soul, Omar al-Khayyam was both a scientific inquirer and a devil-may-care celebrator.
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