Ghazal 45, Verse 6x

Gyan Chand:

By diid is meant not the sight of the beloved, but rather the spectacle of the scene of the world. The people who take refuge in the privacy of the wine-gathering have become tired from the spectacle of the world. The wine-bottle [botal] has become a blister on the feet of their gaze. Blistered feet cannot travel. If the feet of the gaze too would be blistered, then one will remain excused from traveling. The people who make the wine-glass their pursuit remain blind to the outer scene....

[Or:] The lovers, waiting for a sight of the beloved, remained standing for a long time by the side of the road. Finally they became tired and came in, with the thought of the gathering, and began to divert their hearts with wine. Finally it became a blister on the gaze of waiting. The former meaning is more appropriate, for those who have fallen into the pursuit of wine no longer have any awareness of the world. (102)

FWP:

SETS == GROTESQUERIE
GATHERINGS: {6,3}
GAZE: {10,12}
WINE: {49,1}

Raza p. 116; Raza p. 117. S. R. Faruqi's choices. Ghalib originally composed a ghazal of nine verses, from which he chose five for publication in his divan. In the original nine-verse ghazal, this verse was the second one.

Those 'exhausted with sight' (and notice also 'lagging' and 'exposed', the elegantly appropriate secondary meanings of vaamaa;Ndah ) are ones who choose to withdraw from the gathering. Perhaps it's their own eye-'sight' that has simply become tired from over-use; or perhaps the gathering offers 'sights' that dazzle and stupefy the sensitive beholder with their radiance. (The sight of the beloved can even vaporize the lover entirely, as in {78,5}.)

Gyan Chand thinks that these sight-exhausted ones withdraw not 'from' but 'to' the gathering, but the wine-glass as a blister seems best suited to convey the idea of fatigue incurred while drinking, not before drinking. (He adduces the possible use of the 'blister' as metaphorical excuse to avoid the outside world, but this reduces the imagery to blandness.)

The glass of wine is like a blister because both offer a round surface and contain liquid. If it's white wine, it could resemble the clear serum that forms inside some blisters; if it's red wine, it could resemble the liquid in a blood-blister. Is this gross? Yes! No doubt we're not actually invited to consider drinking from a blister, but still the verse easily meets my criteria for 'grotesquerie'.

But the imagery of the verse also moves us very rapidly into sheer, unvisualizable abstraction: it equips the 'gaze' with a 'foot'. Surely this is even stranger than equipping the gaze's foot with a blister, because if a foot exists at all, it's easy to imagine that it might be blistered. But how are we to conceive of the 'foot' of a 'gaze'? There's no way to provide it with an 'objective correlative' in the real world.

But then, this verse is the experimental (?) work of a poet aged eighteen or so-- and after all, he decided not to publish it.