Simurgh
Simurgh
My creative project for his week draws on and seeks to combine two different inspirations: First of all I was inspired by the reading of Attar’s “The Conference of the Birds”, especially by the clever way “thirty birds” translates as “Si murgh”, which is also the name of the bird in search of which the other birds begin their journey. Through this, the notion of loosing oneself in and becoming one with God is underlined in a very precise and powerful way. Secondly, I wanted to somehow integrate my favorite piece from the Islamic Art exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. This favorite piece is a dagger from India, made in the second half of the 16th century (http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/140016092?rpp=20&pg=2&gallerynos=464&ft=*&pos=27). Since the handle of the dagger includes zoomorphic elements, it lends itself well to a little makeover in connection with visualizing the Attar’s “The Conference of the Birds”.
For my drawing, I kept to the general shape of the original dagger from the exhibition but redesigned the handle. The entirety of the handle depicts the Simurgh, with the thirty birds incorporated into it (in a perfect world, all these birds would have been integrated in a more subtle fashion similar to the phoenix that makes for the Simurgh’s eye in order to emphasize the oneness of the Si/murgh). Since my scanner sadly refused to show the coloring of my drawing, description will have to suffice: I decided to keep it simple and, in contrast to the original dagger, to refrain from incorporating rubies or other precious stones into the design, which I felt would have contradicted the rather ascetic sentiment of Sufism. The handle is to be imagined as made from the same material entirely and the different birds as only distinguished from the predominant Simurgh by the shaping of the handle and not by e.g. a different color.
