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Ball and Polo Stick or The Book of Ecstasy
Little is known of the poet ‘Arifi of Herat (d. 1449), but his book The Ball and
Polo Stick has been popular since its composition in A.H. 842 (A.D. 1438-39) at the height
of Timurid power. The underlying theme of this work is self-sacrificing love, a
conceptualization that was derived from the Sufi ideal of love. This love not only by
definition is unrequited but also demands the ultimate death of the lover. In terms of
mystical speculative philosophy, the “death” of the lover is the annihilation of
selfhood and self-awareness i.e., the total absorption of the lover’s own
consciousness of self into that of the beloved. On the purely mystical level, this
represents the annihilation of the individuated soul, the lover, into the godhead, the
beloved. When translated into human terms, the hapless lover would have to die in ecstasy
at the feet of his beloved. This was the conceptualization of love that was taken up and
glorified by Persian poetry. |
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