Philosophers were concerned with the mind, not the body, which they left to the men of ethics and religion who then imposed thousands of restrictions on it. The contrast here: philosophers liberated the mind and freed it, while religious and ethical men arrested the body and constrained it! This does not mean that philosophers denied ethics; they alone established the moral schools! Philosophical ethics are the
foundations of the values of truth, goodness, and beauty. Truth involves the ethics of equality, love, and justice. Goodness involves
behavior, loyalty, solidarity, and love. Beauty is harmony, splendor, art, and love. Love is
common among these three supreme values. Love is certainly destined to be linked with the spirit, and only minimally with the body. Love is the subject of poetry, philosophy, and ethics!!
(1)
Poets and Love
They said: If we removed love from poetry, music, and art, nothing would remain of what was mentioned. Love is the fundamental driver of human activity. The great philosopher Heidegger stated:
Man is a beloved being before becoming a thinking being.
Poets talked about love on different levels:
Firstly, describing body parts, they said about the eyes:
The eyes, at their glance make you a captive
They kill us, yet they don't grant us life again.
Or more recently:
Your eyes are my sustenance and my homeland
Ships lose their way on their shores
And poets protected the eyes from committing a crime:
No, there is no guilt for those she killed
Her eyes did, not her hands
I bring you back from my dead
And I think you don’t do it on purpose!
And they described the waist:
A delicate waist that adorns her
When she stands, it nearly collapses
Her waist so thin it almost splits her in two.
And they described the stomach as if it was a folded bedsheet
The stomach folded as though tucked
Eggs of bondage are guarded by a cover
And described the face:
The face is like the dawn, brightened
And hair like the night, darkened!
And they said about hair: It writes poetry
But Rashid Issa said about the delicacy of fingers:
Oh you, whose body is imprisoned by the philosophy of the dress,
With her fingertips, she brought the coffee cup
I drank from her fingertips
And forgot the coffee and the cup!
Or that her fingers were so delicate that it was possible to tie them:
And she had fingers that if you desired
To tie them with your own, it would be possible!
The poets did not leave a body part without excelling in its description!!
(2)
The Impact of Love
There is a consensus among philosophers, poets, and others that love
"falls", and it is said in all languages about the lover: They fell in love!! Perhaps because the lover loses much of their firmness and psychological balance.
It's difficult to talk about how poets described the impact of love, they said: madness, thinness, illness, and vanishing:
If it weren’t for her brightness they wouldn’t have seen me from the toll
Nor would they have suffered for her sake
But she appeared like a luminous sun
So I floated amidst the light like a speck of dust
The beloved is like the sun, and the lover a speck
Dust that only appears under her radiance!!
Love can sometimes reach an extreme:
It’s not love until it glues the heart to the gut
And you dissolve until you cannot respond to the caller
And you shrink until love leaves you nothing
But an eye to cry and a heart to call
Love is fatal.
Poets discussed jealousy:
By God, did you embrace Layla
before dawn or kissed her mouth
Or:
I’m jealous about him even from wearing a shirt!
(3)
In the Loss of Reason!
Everyone has heard of Majnun Layla, and how a lover loses their mind:
If I said, ‘return some of my sanity to live with’
She turned away and said, ‘that’s far from you!'"
And if I said, 'my return, O Buthayna, is fatal
from love,' she said, ‘steady and it increases!'
And foolishness for some poets is sitting with women:
They say, 'strive, O Jameel, in a battle
What other jihad than this do I desire?
For every conversation with them is pleasant
And every slain with them is a martyr
And poets even saw their beloveds during battles, to the extent that the poet nearly kissed the spear; because it shone like her smiling teeth:
I wished to kiss the spears because they
Shone like the flash of your smiling mouth!
(4)
The Psychological Impact
The night is very long for those who await the morning to meet their beloved:
Oh night of longing, when is your tomorrow
Is it the day of resurrection appointed?
And distance does not lessen the longing:
Do not think that her distance from us changes us
As long has changed the distant lovers
Yet, closeness might lessen the longing:
With everyone we tried to heal but could not
Yet closeness is better than distance
And the one who bade farewell to his beloved, and one of his eyes cried while the other did not, he said:
One eye wept tears at the moment of parting
The other was stingy with tears for us
I punished the stingy one by closing it
Since we parted, and so for fifty years I lived!
And thus, he closed it for fifty years he lived after the separation!!
*
These are the sayings of the poets! But where are they
compared to the sayings of the philosophers?
This will be the subject of the following discussion!!
