Pre-Amble
One of the things we often forget to do with historical material is to ask what was understood at the time about the nature of that material. Assuming that we already know what the artist, author, or scientist was setting out to do, we engage with his or her output as if it was produced today, and tacitly ignore or explain away the parts that do not make sense. But these are the parts that make sense of the whole project! These are the parts that tell us what Shabistari and his contemporaries thought art is and what it is for, and what was going on when he launched publicly into this extemporary poem. They tell us what we need to know about him, and hint at the importance of this event that was timed to place it within the cyclical continuum of the metaphysical universe, and they challenge us to let this work of medieval art do the work it was intended to do: to make change.
Let’s take “The Cause” line by line and reveal the incredible density of information given in it.
Title: The Cause of Writing
Here is the first indication of the medieval understanding of art. This understanding goes back ultimately to Aristotle, whose root definition of art is scattered through several works and tends to be set aside because he himself paid more focussed attention to his subordinate definition of one kind of art as mimesis (copying nature). That root definition notes that art is something that is neither inevitable nor a result of a natural process, but it is a potential thing brought into existence by an agent with a capacity to think[1] who also has a purpose for it[2]. That purpose can be served because, he says, art is something that can cause change in other things, possibly including the artist himself[3]. So the title of this section (“The Cause of Writing”) tells us that Shabistari and Lahiji both see art in Aristotle’s terms because the first thing they want to tell us is that the poem had a cause or purpose, and that establishes that this poem is art.
[1] Nichomachean Ethics, VII, 4 (see VI or VII, depending on edition: in the following link see VI) http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.6.vi.html#117
[2] Parts of Animals, I (half way through paragraph 2), http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/parts_animals.1.i.html#58
[3] Metaphysics, IX, 2 (especially paragraph 1) http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.9.ix.html#63