Omar Khayam

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,

A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse-and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness-
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.


SLICK CHICKS DIG DICK'S WALLPAPERS was the sign above a wallpaper shop in Partick, Glasgow. The street was in a run-down part of the city but served the population with wallpaper, paint and paste at cheap rates.

To say that Jimmy Dick was an entrepreneur would be to understate his wide interests and skills. He was a conscientious objector during the second world war, was a member of the anti-nuclear ban the bombers in the 60s, smoked long, thin panatellas which suited his dark, Hispanic looks and was obsessed with cowboys, running a bed and breakfast with a wild west theme in a suburb of Glasgow where you weren't allowed in the dining room without a gun, holster and hat. Oh, and he could recite all 75 quatrain verses of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

-->Omar Khayyam, The Astronomer-Poet of Persia, has left the literary pundits with a puzzle. Does his poetry have a meaning that transcends the factual or is it to be taken at face value?

Primarily, he was writing in the latter half of the eleventh century, one-thousand years ago. Recall James Elroy Flecker's To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence, as with Khayyam, written in quatrain mode:

I who am dead a thousand years

And wrote this sweet archaic song

Send you my words as messengers

The way I shall not pass along.

(Flecker was in the consular service, in the Eastern Mediterranean from 1910 when he wrote this. Will someone read these words in 2910?)

Similarly, Khayyam has 'sent his words through time and space' to be translated by Fitzgerald whose rendering is clear and immediately comprehensible. Of course, something of the ineffable meaning of the poetic language and connotations will be lost along the way, but nevertheless, there is very little you can add to the profundity of his philosophy.

More importantly, Khayyam was quasi-religious, hated by the Sufis whose beliefs and rituals he ridiculed and he refused to submerse himself in the mystical and the orders imposed by the orthodox mullahs. He believed their faith amounted to no more than his own when refined to and brought back to the basics.
The veracity of Khayyam's feelings are expressed in his Rubaiyat and there seems no sense in debating his semantics. He himself says:

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.
Jimmy Dick knew what he had found in Khayyam's Rubaiyat, held on to it and lived it. We have the opportunity to do the same.