Philosophical Analysis

Philosophical Analysis: “Selves and the Egos”

Poem: “Selves and the Egos”

Poet: Dr. Alireza Bemanian

Date of Composition: June 10, 2026

© www.bemanian.com

Collection: Odyssey Volume 9, Chapter 3: Moments and Passages (Poem 1)

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خرقه بر سینه شود چاک که تا خیمهِ طرار ز دستار به دریا فکنم

(© Alireza Bemanian / بمانیان)

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Introduction

Chapter 3 of Odyssey Volume 9 is titled “Moments and Passages,” and its epigraph — خرقه بر سینه شود چاک که تا خیمهِ طرار ز دستار به دریا فکنم (© Alireza Bemanian / بمانیان) — announces the chapter’s governing philosophical condition with the compression of a concentrated image: the dervish’s robe is torn open at the chest so that the thief’s encampment may be cast from the turban into the sea. The خرقه (the Sufi’s patched robe — the garment of genuine spiritual seeking) is torn at the سینه (the breast, the place of the heart) not in defeat but in order to expose and purge: the خیمهِ طرار (the thief’s tent — the encampment of the one who takes what is not genuinely theirs) has been living within the دستار (the turban — the outer sign of piety and authority), and the act of tearing the robe at the heart is what makes it possible to throw the theft into the sea. The epigraph distinguishes between the outer authority of position and the inner reality of genuine seeking — and names the act of genuine spiritual stripping as the condition for purging the false from within.

“Selves and the Egos” opens this chapter as its first poem, and it carries the epigraph’s philosophical argument into eight stanzas of concentrated formal attention. The poem’s title names a distinction that Persian philosophical psychology has inhabited for centuries — the distinction between authentic selfhood and the insisting, position-claiming ego — but “Selves and the Egos” does not oppose these as simple enemies. It traces their joint developmental arc across the poem’s eight stanzas, arriving at a closing image of unexpected spatial grandeur: gorges, canyons, and valleys spreading blankets of joy, and eagles and sparrows both finding their authentic modes of flight.

The poem’s triple movement organizes this arc with formal precision. The Opening Desolation (stanzas 1–2) names a world emptied of genuine connection: harbors lonely, shelters vacant, nests hollow, rainbows murky, routes barren, the shine of light hindered from passing. This is the world from which authentic selfhood has been displaced — not destroyed but departed, leaving the forms without the animating force. The Conditions of Authentic Ascent (stanzas 3–4) identify what genuine upward movement requires: roots woven tight so that the wind enables rather than merely pushes, song that is genuinely inhabited rather than appropriated. The conditional “if roots woven tight” is the poem’s most philosophically concentrated formal hinge, and stanza 4’s “mantles do not carve, the stolen songs” names its epistemological corollary. The Resolution Arc (stanzas 5–8) passes through the temporal pivot — “moments do pass by, the shades follow sun” — to the self/ego dialectic named in the title stanza, through the epistemological either/or of stanza 7, and finally to the closing formation: bone up the inner core, egos get formed, spirits survive, moods subsist, and the deepest spaces spread the widest joy.

The poem’s grammatical signature is formal and varied. The While hinge arrives in stanza 1 — “while, the breeze passes by, and the shadows trace sun” — holding the desolation and the continuing world simultaneously in the poem’s opening lines. The conditional “if” in stanza 3 (“if roots woven tight”) is the poem’s structural pivot. Two either/or questions in stanzas 2 and 7 (“ignites are to be absorbed, or, reflections take its course” and “are these the ordeals… or, just the pardons”) continue the Odyssey sequence’s epistemological questioning. The rhyming of stanza 6 on the “-in” ending (cave in, curve in, douse in, sink in) is formally unique in the recent poems — a sound structure that enacts the containing, plunging, immersive quality the stanza describes. And the double “Then” pivot (stanzas 4 and 8: “then, the gates are unlocked” and “then, the eagles enjoy”) marks the two moments of conditional resolution in the poem’s arc.

The deepest question “Selves and the Egos” poses is: what must the self/ego complex develop into for genuine ascent — the flight of both eagles and sparrows — to become possible? The poem’s answer is specific: the ego must form rather than simply dissolve; the roots must be woven tight rather than released; the song must be genuinely inhabited rather than taken from the outside; and the deepest spaces must be recognized as the source of the widest joy rather than the places to escape from.

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Five Philosophical Perspectives

I. The Dialectical Perspective: Selves and Egos as Developmental Pair

The poem’s title performs a philosophical act before the first stanza begins. It names not “the ego” or “the self” alone but “Selves and the Egos” — the conjunction is the philosophical program. In the Islamic philosophical psychology that Dr. Bemanian inhabits as primary formation, the nafs (self/soul) is not a single thing but a complex of levels: the nafs ammara (the commanding self that insists on its own demands), the nafs lawwama (the self-accusing self that recognizes its failures), and the nafs mutma’inna (the tranquil self that has found its genuine orientation). The plural “Selves” and “the Egos” together — not one at the expense of the other — name this full complexity as the poem’s subject.

Stanza 6, where the title phrase appears, is the poem’s most philosophically exact in its deployment of the self/ego distinction: “Selves and the egos, seldom to cave in, / Brooks and torrents, always to curve in.” The paired contrast is between what “seldom caves in” (the selves and egos, both resistant to surrender) and what “always curves in” (the brooks and torrents, water perpetually finding and following the path of least resistance). This is not the opposition of ego to self, of false to genuine: it is the distinction between the category of the human subject — which characteristically resists, which “seldom caves in” — and the category of the natural process, which “always curves in” because its nature is to follow the available gradient. The philosophical claim implicit in this pairing is that the human self is constituted by a resistance that water does not have, and that this resistance is not merely the obstacle to genuine life but one of its essential structural conditions.

The resolution of stanza 8 confirms this: “egos do get formed, spirits survive, the moods to subsist.” Formation, survival, and subsistence are the three verbs that name the three levels of the self/ego complex’s developmental outcome. Egos “get formed” — not dissolved, not overcome, but shaped into their genuine configuration through the developmental arc the poem traces. Spirits “survive” — they persist through the formation process, maintaining the genuinely animating dimension of the subject while the ego finds its form. Moods “subsist” — the most passing and fluctuating dimension of the subject (neither ego nor spirit but the intermediate emotional coloring of experience) simply continues, the ongoing texture of genuine life. These three verbs constitute the poem’s most precise philosophical account of what happens when the self/ego complex is properly developed: not the elimination of any level but the authentic formation of each.

The self/ego dialectic in “Selves and the Egos” therefore proposes something more philosophically demanding than the conventional spiritual injunction to overcome the ego: it proposes that the ego’s formation — the process by which the insisting, resistant dimension of the subject finds its genuine shape — is itself part of what the genuine spiritual life requires. The chapter epigraph names the purging of the thief from within the turban of authority; but the poem’s developmental arc names not the elimination of the ego but its formation.

II. The Aerial-Rootedness Perspective: The Condition “If Roots Woven Tight”

The poem’s most formally concentrated philosophical statement appears in stanza 3 as a conditional: “the wind, gale and gust, pushing the feathers, if roots woven tight.” The “if” is the hinge on which the entire poem’s argument about ascent turns. Wind, gale, and gust — the external forces that act on the eagle — do not themselves determine whether the movement they cause is genuinely upward. The outcome depends entirely on whether the roots are woven tight. If they are, the wind’s pushing becomes the enabling force of genuine ascent; if they are not, the same forces merely displace without grounding.

This conditional appears in the context of the eagle’s specific prior act: “Eagles stop gliding; heading to the top.” The semicolon is philosophically precise. Gliding — the effortless, sustaining movement through the air that requires the least active engagement of the eagle’s own powers — is stopped. The cessation of gliding is the precondition for heading to the top. This is not a criticism of gliding; gliding is the eagle’s native capacity, the expression of its aerial mastery. But genuine ascent toward the top requires the interruption of that effortless mode: the eagle must stop being carried and begin to climb purposefully. The ego that “seldom caves in” (stanza 6) is what makes this interruption possible — the resistant, insisting dimension of the subject that refuses the comfort of effortless drift.

The eagle-sparrow arc across the poem’s formal span is the philosophical demonstration of what this condition produces. In stanza 1, “sparrows’ lonely nests” — the small birds isolated in desolation, their nests hollow alongside the harbor that is lonely and the shelter that is vacant. In stanza 8, “eagles enjoy, and sparrows soar.” The sparrows, who began in lonely nests, end in soaring. The eagles, who stopped gliding to head to the top, end in enjoyment — not striving but the relaxed fullness of having genuinely arrived. Both transformations are conditional: they follow from the roots being woven tight, from the egos being formed, from the genuine rather than the stolen song.

The philosophical claim this arc generates is that soaring is not the eagle’s default mode but its achieved mode. The eagle’s default is gliding; its achievement is stopping the glide and heading purposefully to the top, which paradoxically produces not the striving that the purposeful heading anticipates but the enjoyment that comes when the purposeful heading has been genuine. And the sparrow — which has no pretension to the eagle’s native aerial mastery, which cannot glide in the same way — can soar when the conditions of genuine root and genuine formation are met. The poem proposes that both the high aspiration (eagle) and the more modest but genuine aspiration (sparrow) become available when the self/ego complex is properly developed.

III. The Epistemological Perspective: Authentic Song Against the Stolen and the Refused

Stanza 4 concentrates the poem’s most philosophically consequential epistemological claim in two adjacent lines: “not if the seekers, refute and rebut, / mantles do not carve, the stolen songs.” These two lines constitute a double epistemological claim about what blocks genuine access to the wonders that “mantras and chants, warbles and carols, churn astounding sounds” make available.

The first claim: the wonders are not available to those who “refute and rebut.” To refute is to prove wrong by argument; to rebut is to reply to and undermine. The seeker who encounters the “wonders, marvels and the awes” that the gates’ unlocking and the tunes’ untying release, but who meets them with argumentative rejection — who challenges their validity, who defends against their force by questioning their grounds — finds that the wonders are simply unavailable. The epistemology of genuine wonder is not defensive but receptive: it requires the gates to be unlocked and the tunes untied on the inside of the seeker as well as on the outside.

The second claim: “mantles do not carve, the stolen songs.” The mantle is the outer garment of achieved spiritual authority — the cloak that marks the wearer as one who has arrived at a position of recognized standing. The claim is that this mantle has no creative power over material that has been taken rather than genuinely inhabited. To “steal” a song is to take the form without the genuine inhabiting — to wear the song as a mantle rather than to be constituted by it. And what the mantle cannot do is carve: it cannot shape the stolen material into genuine expression. The metaphor is precise — carving requires both the tool and the appropriate relationship between the carver and the material. The mantle worn without the genuine interior cannot cut; it can only drape.

This connects directly to the chapter epigraph’s image of the خیمهِ طرار (the thief’s tent) dwelling within the دستار (the turban of authority). The turban is the mantle’s head-level counterpart: the visible sign of piety and learning. The chapter epigraph names the situation in which genuine spiritual authority (the robe torn at the heart) is required to expose and purge the theft that has been residing within the position of authority. The poem’s stanza 4 names the epistemological consequence: the stolen song cannot be carved by the mantle, cannot be made genuine by the authority that has appropriated it. The thief who refutes and rebuts the genuine wonders also cannot carve from what has been taken.

IV. The Temporal Perspective: Moments, Passages, and the Visceral Strike of Life

The chapter’s title — “Moments and Passages” — finds its most concentrated embodiment in stanza 5: “Moments do pass by, the shades follow sun, / merging the instants, sharing the replies, / caring the contents, shaking inner thoughts, / the life flows by, vibe strikes heart.” This stanza is the temporal pivot of the entire poem — the hinge between the establishment of conditions (stanzas 1–4) and the resolution of the self/ego dialectic (stanzas 6–8). It is also the poem’s shortest and most compressed, with a declarative directness that stands in formal contrast to the denser surrounding stanzas.

“Moments do pass by, the shades follow sun” — the poem’s governing temporal claim in its most economical form. The use of “do” — “moments do pass by” — is not merely emphatic but philosophically assertive: the passing of moments is not incidental or regrettable but a simple fact that the poem affirms rather than laments. The shades follow the sun: this is what shadows do, and the poem names it without complaint. Time passes; the world continues its daily arc. Against the background of the opening desolation (the lonely harbors, the vacant shelters), this affirmation of time’s simple continuation is not resignation but a different kind of recognition.

“Merging the instants, sharing the replies, / caring the contents, shaking inner thoughts” — four participial phrases that name the specific activities through which the passing of time is inhabited. To merge the instants is to make the discrete moments of experience continuous — to find the thread that connects rather than the gap that separates. To share the replies is to maintain the responsive dimension of genuine engagement across the flow of time. To care the contents is to tend what each moment carries rather than allowing it to pass through empty. To shake inner thoughts is to allow the passage of time to disturb and stir the interior rather than maintaining a static interior against the flow.

“The life flows by, vibe strikes heart” — the stanza’s compressed closure. “The life flows by” echoes “moments do pass by” but with a qualitative addition: it is life itself, not merely moments, that flows. And then the most compressed and visceral phrase in the poem: “vibe strikes heart.” This is not a philosophical statement about life’s passage but its felt consequence: something strikes the heart, and what strikes it is vibe — the quality or vibration of the moment, unnamed and untranslatable into more specific vocabulary. The strike is not invited or prepared for; it simply occurs as life flows. The poem names this as fact and leaves it: no elaboration, no explanation. The stanza’s final brevity is itself the philosophical claim — the passage of time and the strike of life on the heart require no interpretation, only acknowledgment.

V. The Topographical Perspective: Depth as the Source of Joy

The poem’s final stanza deploys the most spatially unexpected image in the recent Odyssey volumes: “gorges, canyons, valleys, spread blankets of joy, delight and thrill.” In the conventional symbolic mapping of aspiration, depth is the site of sorrow, obstacle, or danger — the place one must ascend from rather than the place one finds what one has been seeking. The eagle heads to the top; the sparrow aspires beyond the lonely nest; the roots are woven tight so that the flight can be upward. Against this entire directional momentum of the poem’s earlier stanzas, the closing image inverts the spatial logic: the gorge, the canyon, the valley — the deepest geological formations, the places of greatest depth — are what “spread blankets of joy, delight and thrill.”

“Spread blankets” is philosophically precise in its domesticity. A blanket spreads — horizontally, covering a surface, providing warmth. The image is not of joy as a pinnacle achieved but of joy as a covering that spreads across the space between the deep walls of the gorge, the canyon, the valley. The joy does not ascend; it spreads. The thrill does not require height; it requires depth. This is the poem’s most original spatial claim: not that depth must be overcome for joy to be available, but that depth is the specific condition from which the most expansive joy spreads.

The connection to roots woven tight in stanza 3 is now complete. The roots that are woven tight are woven into the gorges and canyons — into the deep geological formations that spread blankets of joy. The eagle that stops gliding and heads to the top does so from roots that go down into the valley; the sparrow that soars does so from a nest that, however lonely in stanza 1, is rooted in the same depth. The eagles enjoy and the sparrows soar precisely because the formation of the ego, the survival of the spirit, the subsistence of the moods, and the boning up of the inner core have all been done in relation to the deep spaces — the gorges and canyons — that spread joy, not despite their depth but through it.

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Combinational Interaction Outcomes

1. Dialectical + Aerial-Rootedness: The Ego’s Resistance as the Condition of Root

The interaction between the self/ego dialectic (selves and egos seldom cave in) and the aerial-rootedness perspective (if roots woven tight) generates the poem’s most philosophically surprising claim about the relationship between the ego’s characteristic resistance and the condition of genuine flight. The ego that “seldom caves in” is precisely what weaves the roots tight: if the self/ego complex simply yielded to every pressure — if it always curved in like the brooks and torrents — it would have no rootedness, only flow. The eagle can stop gliding and head purposefully to the top because the ego has not simply dissolved into the effortless glide. The combinational outcome: what looks like the ego’s resistance as an obstacle to genuine openness is revealed as the structural tension that makes the roots hold. The egos do not need to be eliminated; they need to get formed — and their formation is inseparable from the tight weaving of the roots that makes genuine ascent possible.

2. Epistemological + Topographical: The Stolen Song Cannot Reach the Gorge’s Joy

The interaction between the epistemological claim (mantles do not carve the stolen songs) and the topographical resolution (gorges, canyons, valleys spread blankets of joy) generates the poem’s most precise account of what genuine access to joy requires. The blankets of joy that spread from the gorges and canyons are accessible to those who have woven their roots into those depths — who have genuinely inhabited the deep spaces rather than appropriating their surface. The stolen song — the form taken without the genuine interior inhabiting — has access to the appearance of depth but not to the depth itself. The mantle that cannot carve from the stolen material is the mantle that cannot spread its blanket from within the gorge, because the gorge requires genuine rootedness that the appropriated position cannot provide. The combinational outcome: the joy that spreads from the deepest spaces is available only to those whose formation has been genuine — egos properly formed, spirits surviving, moods subsisting — and not to those whose authority is the stolen song worn as a covering over an unrooted interior.

3. Temporal + Dialectical: The Self/Ego Complex in the Flow of Moments

The interaction between the temporal pivot (moments do pass by, vibe strikes heart) and the self/ego dialectic generates the poem’s most human-scaled account of how the philosophical formation actually occurs. The passage of moments is not the abstract flow of time but the specific texture of the self/ego complex’s development in real time: merging the instants (holding the moments together across the ego’s resistance to continuity), sharing the replies (maintaining responsiveness as the ego insists), caring the contents (tending what the moments carry against the ego’s tendency toward defensive blankness), and shaking inner thoughts (allowing time’s passage to disturb and stir rather than to harden into the ego’s fixed positions). The combinational outcome: the formation of the ego described in stanza 8 — “egos do get formed” — is what happens when the moments of stanza 5 are inhabited rather than merely passed through. The temporal pivot is the passage in which the self/ego developmental arc takes place, moment by moment, vibe by vibe striking the heart.

4. Aerial-Rootedness + Topographical: The Roots into the Gorge as the Ground of Soaring

The interaction between the aerial-rootedness condition (roots woven tight) and the topographical resolution (gorges, canyons, valleys spreading joy) completes the poem’s spatial argument. The roots that must be woven tight are woven into the gorges and canyons — into the deepest available ground. The sparrows that soared in stanza 8 soared from nests whose roots had been woven into the valley floor. The eagles that enjoyed had stopped gliding precisely because they found the place where the roots could go deep: into the gorge, down the canyon wall, into the valley bed. The combinational outcome: the counterintuitive spatial logic of the poem is fully visible only when the two perspectives interact. Soaring requires depth, not despite it. The deepest roots make the highest flight possible, and the deepest spaces spread the widest joy because the depth is what the roots require.

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Three Philosophical Claims

The Ego’s Formation Is Not the Opposite of Genuine Selfhood But Its Structural Condition

“Selves and the Egos” places before the philosophical and literary world a claim that advances beyond both the traditions of ego-dissolution (the spiritual aspiration to overcome the commanding self) and the traditions of ego-assertion (the secular valorization of the individual will). The poem proposes that the egos “do get formed” — not overcome, not asserted, but formed through the developmental arc that the poem traces. Formation is a specific developmental event: it requires resistance (the ego seldom caves in), exposure to pressure (the wind, gale, and gust), and the condition of rootedness (if roots woven tight). What the egos form into is not named in advance; the poem does not prescribe the shape of genuine ego-formation but names the conditions under which formation occurs. The philosophical world receives from this poem the claim that ego-formation — the process by which the insisting dimension of the subject achieves its genuine shape — is part of what authentic human development requires, not the obstacle to it. Spirits survive and moods subsist alongside the egos that form: the full complexity of the subject persists through its developmental arc without any dimension being eliminated.

Authority of Position Cannot Produce Authentic Expression — Only Genuine Inhabiting Can

The most concentrated epistemological claim of “Selves and the Egos” — “mantles do not carve, the stolen songs” — advances a philosophical principle that reaches beyond its immediate context of spiritual seeking to any domain where position and genuine inhabiting can come apart. The mantle of achieved status, the turban of recognized authority, the garment of social or spiritual standing: none of these gives the wearer the power to carve — to shape and create — from material that has been taken rather than genuinely inhabited. This is not a claim about the illegitimacy of authority or the corruption of status, but about what authority cannot do: it cannot produce genuine expression from appropriated material. The literary and philosophical world receives from this poem a precise diagnostic for the distinction between genuine expression and its authoritative imitation: genuine expression has been inhabited from the inside; imitation has been taken and covered with the garment of position. The chapter epigraph’s thief who dwells within the turban is the emblematic figure: not the one who has no authority, but the one whose authority houses a theft.

The Deepest Spaces Are the Sources of the Widest Joy

The most spatially original philosophical claim of “Selves and the Egos” is the inversion of the conventional hierarchy of depth and height in the account of joy. Where the poem’s aerial register might suggest that joy belongs to the summit — to the eagles at the top, to the sparrows soaring — the closing stanza locates joy in the gorges, canyons, and valleys that “spread blankets of joy, delight and thrill.” This is not a retreat from ascent but its geological foundation: the roots that make ascent possible are rooted into these deep spaces, and the joy that spreads from the deep spaces is the joy of genuine formation rather than the thrill of achieved elevation. The philosophical world receives from this poem the claim that genuine joy spreads horizontally from the deepest available spaces — that it covers and warms like a blanket rather than illuminating like a summit. The eagle that enjoys and the sparrow that soars do so from roots that reach into the valley floor; their flight is the expression of what the deep space has made possible, not the escape from it.

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Comparative Synthesis

“Selves and the Egos” engages most consequentially with the Persian philosophical and poetic tradition’s account of the nafs, with Muhammad Iqbal’s philosophical poetry on selfhood and the eagle, and with the Western lyric tradition’s aerial imagery, at the three points where those accounts approach but do not reach the specific positions this poem claims.

The Islamic philosophical psychology of the nafs — developed from Al-Ghazali’s Ihya Ulum al-Din through the Persian Sufi poetic tradition — has consistently framed the nafs ammara (the insisting self) as the central obstacle to genuine spiritual development: the self that must be disciplined, overcome, or purified through sustained spiritual practice. The chapter epigraph’s image participates in this tradition — the robe torn at the heart to expose and cast out the thief — but the poem’s developmental arc departs from it at the crucial point. Where Al-Ghazali’s account aims at the dissolution or taming of the commanding self, Dr. Bemanian’s poem proposes that the egos “do get formed.” Formation is not dissolution: it is the development of the ego into its genuine shape through the conditions of resistance, pressure, and rootedness. The literary world receives from “Selves and the Egos” an advance on the tradition’s account: not the ego to be overcome but the ego to be formed — not the commanding self as the spiritual life’s enemy but as one of its developmental materials.

Rumi’s reed flute (نی) in the opening of the Masnavi — whose cry is the authentic sound of separation, whose music is inseparable from the pain of being cut from the reed bed — is the tradition’s most concentrated account of authentic song. The reed’s cry is genuine precisely because it has been genuinely inhabited by the pain of separation; it cannot be imitated without that inhabiting. Dr. Bemanian’s “mantles do not carve, the stolen songs” advances this Rumian insight by naming its negative: what the stolen song lacks is exactly the inhabiting that the reed’s cry possesses. The mantle that covers the stolen song can wear the form without the pain that makes the form genuine. The advance beyond Rumi is in the specificity of the claim: not merely that the genuine cry comes from genuine inhabiting, but that the authority of position has no creative power over what has been appropriated. The garment of standing cannot transform the theft.

Muhammad Iqbal’s philosophical poetry — particularly in the Asrar-e-Khudi (Secrets of the Self) and Bal-e-Jibril (Gabriel’s Wing) — deploys the شاهین (shaheen, the eagle) as the emblem of the authentic self that has claimed its genuine nature against the comforts of conventional life. Iqbal’s eagle is constituted by its aspiration: it knows its own dignity and refuses to roost with the lesser birds. Dr. Bemanian’s eagle in “Selves and the Egos” makes a more philosophically precise move: “Eagles stop gliding; heading to the top.” The eagle that stops gliding is not Iqbal’s eagle, which is always already ascending; it is an eagle that has been gliding — enjoying the effortless mode of its natural aerial mastery — and that stops the glide to make the purposeful ascent. The advance beyond Iqbal is in the recognition that even the eagle’s native capacity (gliding) can become the obstacle to genuine ascent: the comfortable expression of natural talent must be interrupted for the more demanding purposeful movement to occur. And crucially, where Iqbal’s eagle soars alone as the model of self-realization, Dr. Bemanian’s poem closes with both eagles enjoying and sparrows soaring — the accessible modes of authentic flight available to both the natively aerial and the more modestly aspiring.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover” (1877) — “I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon” — locates in the falcon’s flight the revelation of divine beauty and the occasion of the speaker’s moral realization: “Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here / Buckle!” Hopkins’s bird is the occasion of a received revelation; the speaker is passive in the encounter. Dr. Bemanian’s eagles are not occasions of revelation but agents of their own formation: they stop gliding, they head to the top, they enjoy. The philosophical advance over Hopkins is from the aerial creature as the occasion of a received insight to the aerial creature as the figure of the subject’s own developmental achievement — specifically conditional on whether the roots have been woven tight.

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Conclusion

“Selves and the Egos” opens Chapter 3 of Odyssey Volume 9 by establishing the developmental program that the chapter’s title — “Moments and Passages” — announces. The poem begins in a world of genuine desolation: the forms of connection without the animating presence, the rainbow murky, the routes barren, the nests hollow. It establishes the conditions of genuine ascent in the conditional hinge of stanza 3 and the epistemological claim of stanza 4. It passes through the temporal pivot of stanza 5, where moments pass by and vibe strikes heart. It names the title dialectic in stanza 6 — selves and egos that seldom cave in, against brooks and torrents that always curve in. It poses the either/or of stanza 7 (ordeals or pardons?), and it arrives at the resolution of stanza 8: bone up the inner core, let the egos get formed, let the spirits survive, let the moods subsist, and discover that the gorges, canyons, and valleys spread blankets of joy.

The poem’s most original philosophical contribution is the triple claim that connects ego-formation, rootedness, and depth: the egos that seldom cave in weave the roots tight; the roots woven tight go deep into the gorges and canyons; and the gorges and canyons spread the widest blankets of joy. This is a complete inversion of the conventional spiritual expectation — that ego-dissolution leads to heights, that the self must be emptied to ascend. “Selves and the Egos” proposes instead that formation, not dissolution, is the developmental event; that roots, not wings, are the precondition; and that depth, not height, is the source. The eagles enjoy and the sparrows soar not because they have escaped the deep spaces but because their roots reach into them.

The chapter epigraph that governs this poem’s philosophical territory — the torn robe that exposes the heart to cast out the thief from the turban — is enacted in the poem’s developmental arc: the genuine interior (bones up, spirits surviving) is what remains after the stolen song has been named as uncarvable and the ego has been genuinely formed rather than falsely authorized. The torn robe is not a wound; it is the opening through which what is genuinely present becomes visible.

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About the Poem

“Selves and the Egos” is the first poem of Chapter 3, “Moments and Passages,” in Odyssey Volume 9. It was composed on June 10, 2026, the day following “Rainbows Hover” (June 9, 2026), which closed Chapter 2 with the hovering covenant’s refinement of empathies and the dyadic brace of “one soul, one heart, and one self.” “Selves and the Egos” opens the new chapter with a different formal character: eight stanzas of compressed, often declarative lines, a governing conditional rather than a governing either/or, and a developmental arc that moves from desolation to formation through the explicitly named self/ego dialectic.

The poem’s eight-stanza structure gives it a different temporal breath from the seven-stanza poems that preceded it. The additional stanza is not mere expansion but formal necessity: the developmental arc of ego-formation, across the full range from the opening desolation to the closing topographical joy, requires the full eight-stanza span to arrive at its resolution without truncation. Stanza 5’s temporal pivot — the shortest and most compressed stanza in the poem — functions as the poem’s fulcrum: four lines where everything up to that point is held in momentary suspension before the self/ego dialectic is explicitly named and the resolution arc begins.

Dr. Alireza Bemanian is a poet, system architect, and physicist whose work commands both Persian and English literary traditions with equal authority and whose formation across physics, systems thinking, and Persian and English poetry converges in the specific deployments of each poem. In “Selves and the Egos,” the physicist’s understanding is present in the conditional structure of the rootedness claim: “if roots woven tight” names a structural condition whose consequence (the wind enabling rather than merely pushing) is physically precise — the difference between a rooted structure that converts wind into lift and an unrooted one that converts wind into displacement. The system architect’s sensibility is present in the poem’s account of formation: egos do not dissolve but form, spirits survive in context, moods subsist as the ongoing affective texture — these are the three subsystems of the subject that the developmental process shapes rather than eliminates. And the poet who inhabits the Persian philosophical tradition as primary formation brings to the nafs dialectic the specific precision of one for whom خرقه and دستار and طرار are not exotic vocabulary but the native conceptual instruments of a centuries-long philosophical conversation about genuine selfhood.

Dr. Alireza Bemanian’s poetry is published at www.bemanian.com, where the full range of his work in both Persian and English can be encountered.

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© Dr. Alireza Bemanian, www.bemanian.com

Note: This analysis honors the intellectual property and creative vision of Dr. Alireza Bemanian.

The poem “Selves and the Egos” is © 2026 www.bemanian.com, all rights reserved.

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Formal Analysis (Expanded)

Analysis: “Selves and the Egos”

Poet: Dr. Alireza Bemanian | Odyssey Volume 9, Chapter 3: Moments and Passages (Poem 1)

June 10, 2026 | © www.bemanian.com

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خرقه بر سینه شود چاک که تا خیمهِ طرار ز دستار به دریا فکنم

(© Alireza Bemanian / بمانیان)

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I. Introduction

“Selves and the Egos” opens Chapter 3 of Odyssey Volume 9 with a formal character distinct from the seven-stanza poems that preceded it in this volume. Its eight stanzas, shorter lines, and governing conditional — “if roots woven tight” — produce a different temporal breath: the poem moves through desolation, through the establishment of conditions, through a temporal pivot, through the explicit naming of the self/ego dialectic, and finally through a spatial inversion that places joy not at the summit but in the deepest available ground. It is a poem of developmental philosophy in compressed declarative form, and its eight stanzas are precisely the span the developmental arc requires.

The chapter epigraph — خرقه بر سینه شود چاک که تا خیمهِ طرار ز دستار به دریا فکنم (© Alireza Bemanian / بمانیان) — names the chapter’s governing philosophical condition with the compression of a violent and precise image. The خرقه (the Sufi’s patched robe — the garment of genuine spiritual seeking) is torn open at the سینه (the breast, the site of the heart) not in defeat but in order to expose and purge: the خیمهِ طرار (the pickpocket’s tent — the encampment of the one who appropriates what is not genuinely theirs) has been residing within the دستار (the turban — the outer sign of piety, learning, and authority), and tearing the robe at the heart is the act that makes it possible to cast the theft into the sea. The chapter’s philosophical program is therefore the stripping of the false from within the position of authority — not the external critique of the authoritative but the internal exposure of what authority has housed without genuine inhabiting.

“Selves and the Egos” carries this program through the eight-stanza developmental arc. Its triple movement:

The Opening Desolation (stanzas 1–2) establishes the world from which genuine selfhood has departed: harbors lonely, shelters vacant, nests hollow, rainbows murky, routes barren, light hindered. These are not destroyed structures but emptied ones — the forms of connection and purpose without the animating presence. This is the world of the stolen song already in effect: the structures stand, but the genuine content has left.

The Conditions of Authentic Ascent (stanzas 3–4) identify what genuine upward movement requires. The conditional “if roots woven tight” in stanza 3 is the poem’s philosophical hinge: not a prescription for what to do but the identification of the one condition on which everything else depends. Stanza 4 names the epistemological correlate — “mantles do not carve, the stolen songs” — and confirms that the unlocking of the gates and the untying of the tunes that follow the “Then” of its opening are conditional on the roots being woven into genuine depth.

The Resolution Arc (stanzas 5–8) passes through the temporal pivot (stanza 5’s “moments do pass by, vibe strikes heart”), through the self/ego dialectic explicitly named in the title stanza (stanza 6), through the epistemological either/or of ordeals and pardons (stanza 7), and arrives at the developmental resolution: bone up the inner core, form the egos, let the spirits survive, let the moods subsist, and discover that the gorges, canyons, and valleys spread blankets of joy — the deepest spaces the widest source of what the formal arc has been preparing for.

The poem’s grammatical signature operates through five formal devices that together constitute its philosophical architecture. The While hinge in stanza 1 — held in the poem’s first four lines — contrasts the emptied human world with the continuing natural processes (breeze and shadow). The conditional “if” in stanza 3 is the poem’s pivot: the only true conditional in the poem, everything after it is consequence. Three either/or structures appear in stanzas 2, 4, and 7, each at a different depth of the poem’s epistemological inquiry. The rhyme on “-in” in stanza 6 — cave in, curve in, douse in, sink in — is formally unique in the recent Odyssey volumes and enacts through sound the containing, immersive, plunging quality of the stanza’s content. And the double “Then” — stanzas 4 and 8 — marks two moments of conditional resolution, establishing the formal guarantee that the poem’s conditions, when genuinely met, produce the promised consequence.

The poem’s deepest question: what must the self/ego complex develop into for genuine ascent — the soaring of both eagles and sparrows — to become possible, and what must be recognized about the deep spaces of experience for the joy that ascent makes available to be properly understood?

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II. Stanza-by-Stanza Analysis

Stanza 1: The World Emptied of Animating Presence

> Harbors get lonely, shelters go vacant, the nests turn hollow,

> rainbows get murky, the routes set barren,

> squirrels sit silent, sparrows’ lonely nests,

> while, the breeze passes by, and the shadows trace sun,

The three verbs of the first line — “get,” “go,” “turn” — are each a slightly different mode of becoming-empty. Harbors “get” lonely: loneliness is something that happens to them, an acquired condition. Shelters “go” vacant: vacancy is where they go, the direction of their emptying. Nests “turn” hollow: they rotate into hollowness, as if the emptying were a transformation of their fundamental character. Together, these three verbs name different phenomenologies of genuine purposelessness: the harbor that is designed for vessels has none; the shelter designed for those needing refuge has none; the nest designed for eggs and young has none. The structures persist, but without the beings that give them their function, they are constitutively empty in a way that differs from merely being unused.

“Rainbows get murky” — this is the poem’s most significant opening departure from the prior chapter’s governing image. Chapter 2’s “Rainbows Hover” established the rainbow as the covenantal sign that hovers, grinds and polishes empathies, and shapes mere devotions. In the opening stanza of Chapter 3, the rainbow is murky — its clarity obstructed, its refraction compromised. The same atmospheric conditions that Chapter 2’s poem declared as the place where the covenant becomes visible are now declared as the place where the covenant becomes obscured. This is not a retraction of “Rainbows Hover” but the establishment of the conditions this poem must begin from and resolve: the chapter’s philosophical program is to restore the conditions under which the rainbow can hover clearly, not to take those conditions as given.

“Routes set barren” — routes become unpathable, unable to sustain passage. Not merely unused but actively barren: the word imports the agricultural vocabulary of infertility, suggesting that the route cannot support the growth that genuine passage would require. “Squirrels sit silent” — squirrels are characteristically and notoriously busy, gathering, moving, alert to what the season requires. Sitting silent is the negation of their essential character. “Sparrows’ lonely nests” — the sparrows of stanza 8’s resolution are introduced here in their desolated condition: the nests that belong to them are lonely, which means the sparrows themselves have departed even from the place that is theirs.

The While hinge arrives at the stanza’s close: “while, the breeze passes by, and the shadows trace sun.” Against the desolation, the natural world continues its processes without pause or interruption. The breeze does not stop because the harbors are lonely; the shadows do not cease their solar tracing because the nests are hollow. The While, here in the poem’s first stanza (as in “Rainbows Hover”), does not introduce contrast but simultaneity: the desolation and the continuing world coexist, each fully real in the same moment.

Stanza 2: Hindered Light and the Directive to Align

> The light rays splash, though, the shine has been hindered to pass,

> still, mornings shall surmise, the dawns do surprise,

> ignites are to be absorbed, or, reflections take its course,

> a good reminder, stay aligned to, the thunder and bolt.

“The light rays splash” — light is active and energetic, making contact with surfaces. But “the shine has been hindered to pass” — the shine (the quality of light that illuminates rather than merely touches) is blocked. The distinction between the splash of light rays and the passing of the shine is philosophically precise: there is light present, but not the illuminating quality that makes things genuinely visible. The shine is what the rainbow restored in “Rainbows Hover”; its hindrance here is the continuation of stanza 1’s desolation into the visual-epistemic register.

“Still, mornings shall surmise, the dawns do surprise” — despite the hindered shine, the temporal processes maintain their capacity. Mornings “shall surmise” — they have the deliberative capacity to conjecture, to infer, to arrive at provisional conclusions about what the day will require. Dawns “do surprise” — they retain the capacity to produce genuine surprise, the encounter with what was not anticipated. These are the epistemic capacities of the natural temporal order, which persist even when the shine has been hindered. The surmise of morning and the surprise of dawn are the natural world’s equivalents of the human epistemological capacity that the poem will trace through its seven remaining stanzas.

“Ignites are to be absorbed, or, reflections take its course” — the poem’s first formal either/or. An ignite is the spark of genuine encounter, the moment of contact that generates illumination. The alternative is between absorption (taking the ignite in, integrating it, letting it generate warmth from within) and reflection (allowing the light to course back outward, the more detached processing that keeps the ignite external). The either/or names two different relationships to the moments of genuine illumination that occur even in a world of desolation: one integrates; the other observes from the outside.

“A good reminder, stay aligned to, the thunder and bolt” — the stanza closes with a directive whose grammatical informality is philosophically exact. Not “be aligned” (a state) or “align yourself” (a deliberate act) but “stay aligned to” — the maintenance of an ongoing orientation toward the thunder and bolt. The thunder and bolt are the most forceful and undeniable natural phenomena: they cannot be argued with, cannot be refuted, cannot be reflected past. To stay aligned to them is to maintain orientation toward what genuinely acts on the subject with undeniable force.

Stanza 3: The Eagle’s Interrupted Glide and the Conditional Root

> Eagles stop gliding; heading to the top,

> knowing the targets, rapt goals emerge by,

> the wind, gale and gust,

> pushing the feathers, if roots woven tight.

“Eagles stop gliding; heading to the top” — the semicolon performs the philosophical work that a longer exposition would require. Gliding is the eagle’s native mode of aerial mastery: effortless, sustaining, requiring the least active engagement of the eagle’s own powers, dependent on the thermal conditions that support the bird’s natural genius. Stopping the glide is not a failure of flight but its interruption in order to make a different kind of movement possible — the purposeful, directed, energetic ascent that the second clause names. “Heading to the top” is not what the eagle does when it glides; it is what the eagle does when it stops.

The philosophical claim embedded in the semicolon: the most natural and effortless expression of the eagle’s capacity is not the same as the most genuine. The glide is real flight; it is not the highest flight. For the highest flight, the effortless mode must be interrupted. The ego that “seldom caves in” is what makes this interruption possible — it is the resistant, insisting dimension of the subject that does not simply allow the comfortable expression of native talent to continue when a more demanding movement is available.

“Knowing the targets, rapt goals emerge by” — the eagle’s ascent is purposeful: it knows its targets. “Rapt goals emerge by” — “rapt” carries two active meanings: enraptured (the goals are compelling, holding the attention wholly) and seized (the goals have been grasped, taken hold of). The emergence is “by” — not toward but by means of, through the mechanism of the rapt goals. The goals are both the destination and the means of the ascent.

“The wind, gale and gust, pushing the feathers, if roots woven tight” — the triad of wind forces covers the full range of aerial pressure: the gentle wind, the stronger gale, the sudden gust. Their effect on the eagle — “pushing the feathers” — is neither inherently enabling nor inherently obstructive; the same forces that can assist genuine ascent can displace without grounding. The conditional “if” is the poem’s philosophical pivot: IF roots woven tight, THEN the pushing of the wind enables genuine ascent. The tightness of the weaving is the condition that determines whether wind becomes lift.

“Roots woven tight” as a phrase deserves its own attention. Roots are woven — not merely grown or extended but interlaced, interwoven, constituted by the braiding of multiple elements into a unified structure. And they are woven tight — not loosely accumulated but pressed into genuine cohesion. This is the developmental work that the poem’s arc will name across its remaining stanzas: not the elimination of the ego but its formation into the tight weaving that gives the subject the rootedness the wind requires.

Stanza 4: The Gates Unlocked and the Stolen Song Named

> Then, the gates are unlocked, the tunes are untied,

> mantras and chants, warbles and carols, churn astounding sounds,

> are they the wonders, marvels and the awes,

> not if the seekers, refute and rebut,

> mantles do not carve, the stolen songs.

“Then, the gates are unlocked, the tunes are untied” — the first “Then” of the poem’s double pivot. The word “then” carries two philosophical weights simultaneously: temporal sequence (after the roots have been woven tight, this follows) and logical consequence (given roots woven tight, this is the result). The gate is not merely opened but unlocked — the barrier actively removed. The tune is not merely played but untied — the constraint actively released. Both images are of freedom-from-binding rather than achievement of a new state.

“Mantras and chants, warbles and carols, churn astounding sounds” — the full range of sound-making, from the most sacred (mantras, the repeated sacred formulas; chants, the sustained liturgical tones) to the most natural and musical (warbles, the improvisational songbird call; carols, the celebratory human song). “Churn” is the active verb: not merely producing but working the sounds together, the way a churn works cream into something qualitatively different. The churning produces “astounding sounds” — sounds that genuinely astound, that arrest and hold the attention.

“Are they the wonders, marvels and the awes” — the poem’s second epistemological question, posed after the sounds have been named. The question is not whether the sounds are beautiful but whether they constitute the category of genuine wonder — the wonders, marvels, and awes that mark the encounter with what genuinely exceeds ordinary experience. The triadic naming (wonders, marvels, awes) is itself the poem’s formal acknowledgment that genuine wonder cannot be named by a single term: it requires the three together.

“Not if the seekers, refute and rebut” — the negation arrives before the principal claim, and its placement is philosophically precise. The wonders are not available — the question is answered in the negative — “not if the seekers refute and rebut.” The seeker who encounters the churned astounding sounds and meets them with argumentative challenge — who questions their grounds, who defends against their force by finding objections — finds that the wonders simply close. The epistemology of genuine wonder is not defensive; the gates that have been unlocked close again in the face of refutation.

“Mantles do not carve, the stolen songs” — the poem’s most compressed and consequential philosophical line. The mantle is the outer garment of achieved spiritual or social standing — the cloak that marks the wearer as one who has arrived at recognized position. To carve is to cut into material and shape it — the active, creative relationship between maker and substance that produces genuine form. The claim: the mantle has no carving power over material that has been stolen rather than genuinely inhabited. The thief’s tent from the chapter epigraph is the exact figure: it dwells under the turban of authority, and the turban’s authority cannot transform it into genuine content.

Stanza 5: The Temporal Pivot

> Moments do pass by, the shades follow sun,

> merging the instants, sharing the replies,

> caring the contents, shaking inner thoughts,

> the life flows by, vibe strikes heart.

This stanza is the poem’s formal fulcrum: its shortest, its most compressed, its most declarative. Its four lines hold the full temporal range from the passing of moments to the strike of vibe on the heart, and they do so without ornamentation, without either/or, without conditional. Everything here simply is.

“Moments do pass by, the shades follow sun” — the “do” is philosophically assertive: not “moments pass by” (neutral statement) but “moments do pass by” (affirmation against whatever might resist the acknowledgment). The passing of moments is not lamented or celebrated; it is affirmed. Shades follow sun: this is what shadows do, the natural consequence of the sun’s movement that requires neither complaint nor celebration. Time passes; the world pursues its daily arc.

“Merging the instants, sharing the replies” — the activities through which the passage of time is inhabited rather than merely endured. To merge the instants is to find the thread of continuity across the ego’s natural resistance to dissolution into flow; to share the replies is to maintain the responsive dimension of genuine engagement across the temporal distance between question and answer, between provocation and response.

“Caring the contents, shaking inner thoughts” — “caring the contents” is a non-standard use of “caring” as transitive verb: not caring about the contents but caring them, tending them, maintaining them in the way that a caretaker maintains what has been entrusted. “Shaking inner thoughts” — the passage of moments does not merely register; it disturbs, stirs, unsettles what has become static. The shake is productive, not merely disruptive.

“The life flows by, vibe strikes heart” — the stanza’s most compressed and visceral close. “The life flows by” generalizes from moments to the whole: not the individual instances but life itself as continuous flow. “Vibe strikes heart” — the philosophical compression is complete and exact. “Vibe” names the quality or resonance of the moment, what it carries atmospherically without being reducible to any specific content. “Strikes” is not gentle contact but impact — the vibe does not enter the heart gradually but strikes it, the way thunder strikes without warning. And the stanza ends there: no elaboration, no interpretation. The strike is what it is; the heart receives it; the poem moves forward.

Stanza 6: The Title Stanza — The Self/Ego Dialectic Named

> Selves and the egos, seldom to cave in,

> Brooks and torrents, always to curve in,

> one makes the ocean, one gets to douse in,

> shooting illusions, yearning to sink in.

The stanza’s formal signature is the rhyme on “-in”: cave in, curve in, douse in, sink in. The rhyme is not decorative but enacts the stanza’s content — the recurring sound of entering, immersing, containing, plunging. Each “-in” names a different relationship between the subject and the downward or inward movement: the ego that seldom enters in (caves in), the water that always enters in by curving, the creative one that enters into the ocean it makes, the yearning self that desires to enter in by sinking.

“Selves and the egos, seldom to cave in” — the conjunction is the philosophical program, as the title establishes: both selves and egos together, not in opposition. “Seldom to cave in” names the characteristic of both: they resist the yielding that caving-in represents. To cave in is to collapse under pressure, to yield the structure, to admit that the resistance was not sufficient. The selves and egos of this poem seldom do this — and this seldomness is not presented as failure but as the structural characteristic that distinguishes the human subject from the natural processes that follow.

“Brooks and torrents, always to curve in” — the contrast: water, from the smallest scale (brook) to the largest (torrent), “always curves in.” The curve in is not the cave in: curving in is following the available gradient, bending to the contour of the terrain, finding and following the path that the ground provides. The brook and the torrent do not resist the ground; they incorporate it. The human self/ego complex differs from water precisely in this: it seldom curves in as automatically as water does. It deliberates, resists, insists — and this is not water’s inferiority to the human but the human’s specific structural difference from the natural gradient-follower.

“One makes the ocean, one gets to douse in” — the asymmetry is philosophically significant. Within the self/ego complex, one dimension (unspecified — perhaps the genuine self) makes the ocean: creates the expanse, the depth, the whole. Another dimension (also unspecified — perhaps the ego) gets to douse in: is immersed in what the other has created, gets to experience the plunge into the depth that the other’s creative act has made available. The “gets to” is not passive but earned: to get to douse in is to arrive at the immersion as the consequence of the creative making. The two dimensions are not separate selves but the two operations of the same complex subject: creation and immersion, making and entering-into, the outward creative act and the inward experiential plunge.

“Shooting illusions, yearning to sink in” — the stanza’s most philosophically layered line, and the one that the philosophical analysis did not develop with full depth. “Shooting illusions” and “yearning to sink in” are simultaneous conditions of the self/ego complex: the egos shoot illusions (project upward and outward, aim at and fire things that are not genuinely there) while the genuine yearning is downward (to sink in — to go deep, to descend into what is actually present). The directional opposition is precise: shooting goes upward or outward; sinking goes downward and inward. The ego projects in the wrong direction while the authentic desire is oriented correctly. And “shooting illusions” carries the resonance of the shooting star from “Shooting Stars” — the prior chapter’s poem declared the self as the shooting star, the accumulated trajectory blazing in genuine encounter. The shooting that is “shooting illusions” is the degraded counterpart of that genuine blazing: the same directional energy, the same upward and outward projection, but aimed at what is not genuinely there. The ego that shoots illusions is enacting a distorted version of the shooting star’s authentic blazing — it has the energy and the direction but not the genuine atmospheric entry that “Shooting Stars” named as the condition of the authentic flash.

Stanza 7: Famines, Fortunes, and the Sinking Open Door

> One sees the famines, one counts occasions,

> sorrows to dig in, one sees the fortunes,

> are these the ordeals, sinking open doors,

> or, just the pardons, soothing inner souls.

“One sees the famines, one counts occasions” — the stanza introduces a new form of the division: not selves and egos but two orientational stances toward the same field of experience. One stance sees famines (the deficiencies, the absences, the failures of supply); the other counts occasions (the opportunities, the available moments, what the situation offers). “Counts” is precise — not merely notices but enumerates, assesses the number and nature of what is available. The distinction is not between optimism and pessimism but between two genuine modes of attending: to what is lacking and to what is present.

“Sorrows to dig in, one sees the fortunes” — “sorrows to dig in” is a verbal construction of unusual formal density. To “dig in” is both to excavate (to dig into the sorrows, to go deeper into them rather than across their surface) and to entrench (to establish a fixed position within the sorrows, as one digs in for sustained engagement). “One sees the fortunes” — fortune in its full etymological range: not merely financial fortune but the fated quality of what befalls, the assigned lot, what fortune (fortuna, the turning wheel) has brought. One digs into sorrows; another sees what fortune has brought.

“Are these the ordeals, sinking open doors” — the third and most formally original either/or. The phrase “sinking open doors” is the most philosophically striking image in the stanza and one of the most unusual in the recent Odyssey volumes. A door that sinks is not a door that opens in the conventional direction — outward, forward, upward into new space. A sinking door descends: it leads downward, into the gorges and canyons and valleys that the following stanza will name as the source of the widest joy. The ordeals, then, are “sinking open doors” — not obstacles that close but thresholds that lead downward, opportunities that descend into genuine depth rather than rising into conventional achievement. The ordeal-as-sinking-open-door is the ordeal understood as a descending invitation: it opens, but it opens downward.

“Or, just the pardons, soothing inner souls” — the either/or’s alternative. “Just the pardons” — the diminutive “just” is not dismissive but precise: pardons are the minimum form of what these experiences are, the baseline. A pardon is an act of release from guilt, an acknowledgment that the burden of the ordeal is not to be carried as permanent debt. “Soothing inner souls” — the pardon operates not outwardly (changing the external situation) but inwardly (easing the interior, the soul that has been burdened). The either/or of this stanza does not resolve in the stanza itself — the poem allows both possibilities to stand, the sinking open door and the soothing pardon, as complementary accounts of the same difficult experiences.

Stanza 8: Formation, Depth, and the Double Flight

> Bone up inner core, to shape and ponder,

> the roles do gather, intents do sustain,

> egos do get formed, spirits survive, the moods to subsist,

> gorges, canyons, valleys, spread blankets of joy, delight and thrill,

> Then, the eagles enjoy, and sparrows soar.

“Bone up inner core” — the poem’s most formally compressed directive, carrying two simultaneous and philosophically productive meanings. The idiomatic “bone up” means to study and prepare intensively, to strengthen one’s knowledge and capacity in preparation for what the situation demands. The literal resonance “bone the inner core” means to give the inner core its skeletal structure — the hard, load-bearing element that allows soft tissue to hold its shape and function. Both meanings are operative and philosophically exact: the inner core that is boned up has both been intensively prepared and given its structural skeleton.

“To shape and ponder” — the dual act that follows from boning up: to shape (to give form, to constitute the configuration that the preparation has made possible) and to ponder (to weigh carefully, to sustain the deliberative attention that genuine shaping requires). Shape and ponder are not sequential but simultaneous: shaping that does not ponder produces form without understanding; pondering that does not shape produces reflection without constitution.

“The roles do gather, intents do sustain” — in the developmental movement that follows from boning up, the roles (the social and relational functions that the self inhabits) gather together into coherence rather than scattering. The intents — the directional energies of genuine purpose — sustain: they do not exhaust themselves but persist through the gathering of roles.

“Egos do get formed, spirits survive, the moods to subsist” — three verbs at three levels of the subject’s complex. Egos “do get formed” — the “do” is again assertive, as in stanza 5’s “moments do pass by”: the formation of the egos is affirmed as what actually happens when the conditions of the stanza are met. Spirits “survive” — not achieve, not thrive, but survive: the persistence of the genuinely animating dimension of the subject through the developmental process, maintenance of the spirit’s integrity even as the ego finds its form. Moods “subsist” — the most modest and ongoing register, the moment-to-moment emotional coloring of experience that neither achieves nor survives dramatically but simply continues as the texture of genuine life.

“Gorges, canyons, valleys, spread blankets of joy, delight and thrill” — the poem’s most spatially original claim. The three geological forms named are each the deepest available configuration of the earth’s surface: the gorge (the narrow, steep-walled passage cut by water), the canyon (the large-scale version, the grand geological depth), the valley (the broader, more settled depression between heights). All three spread blankets — not beams of light, not peaks of achievement, but blankets: the warm, horizontal, covering spread of what reaches across the depth between the walls, the topmost layer of what the gorge contains when it is filled with the genuine abundance.

“Then, the eagles enjoy, and sparrows soar” — the second “Then” of the poem’s double pivot. The arc from stanza 1 is complete. The sparrows that had lonely nests in stanza 1 are soaring in stanza 8. The eagles that stopped gliding in stanza 3 are enjoying in stanza 8. Enjoying is not striving: it is the relaxed fullness of having genuinely arrived, the condition that follows from the entire developmental arc — the bones up, the egos formed, the spirits surviving, the moods subsisting, the gorges spreading joy. And the “and” that connects eagles and sparrows is philosophically significant: not the eagles or the sparrows, not the eagles then the sparrows, but both simultaneously. The high aspiration and the more modest aspiration find their authentic modes of flight at the same moment, under the same conditions, from the same depth.

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III. Conceptual Innovations

1. Shooting Illusions While Yearning to Sink In: The Ego’s Paradoxical Spatial Architecture

The fourth line of stanza 6 — “shooting illusions, yearning to sink in” — names the most philosophically consequential internal contradiction of the self/ego complex, and it does so in terms of opposing spatial directions that give the contradiction its precise structure. “Shooting illusions” is an upward and outward act: to shoot is to project with force in a directional arc, and illusions are projections of what is not genuinely present — the ego fires upward and outward into the space of what it imagines rather than what is. “Yearning to sink in” is downward and inward: to sink is to descend by gravity into what contains one, and the sinking-in is the movement toward the gorges and canyons of stanza 8’s genuine depth. The ego shoots in the wrong direction while its genuine desire is oriented correctly — and the poem identifies this paradox not as a failure to be eliminated but as the specific internal tension that the developmental arc of stanza 8 resolves by formation rather than by suppression.

The resonance with “Shooting Stars” (the first poem of Chapter 2) is philosophically exact and philosophically deliberate. “Shooting Stars” declared the self as the shooting star — the accumulated trajectory blazing in genuine encounter with the beloved’s prior wholeness, the extemporaneous flash of authentic atmospheric entry. The “shooting illusions” of stanza 6 is the degraded counterpart of the shooting star’s authentic blazing: the same directional energy (upward, outward, projective), the same velocity (shooting, not drifting), but aimed at what is not genuinely there. The ego that shoots illusions is performing a distorted version of the shooting star’s genuine act — it has retained the energy and the direction but lost the genuine atmospheric encounter that makes the blazing authentic. The resolution of this internal contradiction is not the cessation of the ego’s shooting energy but its formation — the “egos do get formed” of stanza 8 — into a configuration in which the energy that shoots illusions becomes the energy that enables genuine ascent when roots are woven tight.

The spatial architecture of the self/ego complex in this poem is therefore three-directional: the ego shoots upward and outward (illusions), the genuine yearning moves downward and inward (to sink in), and the authentic flight of the eagles and sparrows moves upward from downward roots. The resolution is not the elimination of any directional energy but the proper formation of the ego’s shooting energy so that it contributes to the upward movement that is grounded in the downward roots rather than to the projective firing that has no ground.

2. The Sinking Open Door: Ordeal as Descending Threshold

The phrase “sinking open doors” in stanza 7 is the poem’s most formally original image and its most philosophically consequential spatial claim. A door that sinks is not a door that opens in any conventional direction — outward, upward, into new space of the same level. A sinking door descends: it opens into what is below, it leads downward into the depth that the poem’s closing stanza identifies as the source of the widest blankets of joy. The either/or of stanza 7 — “are these the ordeals, sinking open doors, or, just the pardons” — is therefore not merely a question about whether difficulties are punishments or forgivenesses but a question about what kind of threshold the ordeals constitute.

If the ordeals are “sinking open doors,” they are descending invitations: not obstacles that close the subject off from the spaces beyond them but thresholds that lead downward into the gorges and canyons from which joy spreads in stanza 8. The stanza’s either/or does not resolve between ordeals and pardons as opposites but between two different accounts of the same experiences — each of which, significantly, leads to the same place. The “sinking open door” leads downward into the gorge; the “pardon soothing inner souls” releases what has been held and allows the soul to descend into what the release makes available. Both are entries into depth.

This is the multi-aspected conclusion that the philosophical analysis named but did not fully develop. The sinking open door resolves the apparent opposition between ordeal and pardon by identifying both as forms of the same descending movement: the ordeal descends through the sinking door; the pardon descends through the release. The famines that one sees and the sorrows that are dug into are, in this account, not the failures of the journey but its descending passages — the ways in which the roots are woven deeper, into the gorges and canyons, until the eagles can enjoy and the sparrows can soar from genuine depth.

The philosophical advance this image makes: where conventional accounts of difficulty divide sharply between ordeal (punishment, obstacle, suffering that serves no purpose) and pardon (forgiveness, release, the end of suffering), “sinking open doors” proposes a third category — the descending threshold — that is neither punitive nor merely releasing but genuinely generative of depth. The ordeals that are sinking open doors are the ordeals that deepen the roots, that weave the roots tighter into the gorge floor, that make the blankets of joy available to spread.

3. The Double “Then” as Formal Guarantee of Conditional Resolution

The poem contains two formal pivots marked by “Then”: “Then, the gates are unlocked, the tunes are untied” (stanza 4) and “Then, the eagles enjoy, and sparrows soar” (stanza 8). The recurrence is not decorative but structural: it constitutes a formal guarantee that the poem’s developmental conditions, when genuinely met, reliably produce the promised consequences.

Each “Then” is the consequence of conditions established in the immediately preceding stanza. Stanza 4’s “Then” follows from the roots woven tight of stanza 3: given tight roots, then the gates unlock and the tunes untie. Stanza 8’s “Then” follows from boning up the inner core, gathering roles, sustaining intents, forming egos, surviving spirits, and subsisting moods — given all of that, then the eagles enjoy and sparrows soar. The logical structure is genuine conditional: if A, then B. Not “when A is wished for, B might appear” but “when A is achieved, B follows.”

This double structure constitutes the poem’s most formally ambitious philosophical claim. The Odyssey sequence has developed, across multiple volumes, a consistent philosophical concern with what is genuine versus what is appropriated, what is authentic versus what is performed. The question of whether genuine development actually produces what it promises — whether the conditions, when met, actually yield the consequence — is the deepest pragmatic question the sequence faces. “Selves and the Egos” answers it twice over, with two “Then” pivots at two different points in the developmental arc: first at the conditions’ midpoint (gates unlock, tunes untie), then at the arc’s resolution (eagles enjoy, sparrows soar). The doubling does not make the claim twice as certain; it makes it formally verified rather than merely asserted. The first “Then” shows that the conditions produce intermediate consequences (musical opening) when met; the second “Then” shows that the conditions produce the arc’s full resolution (genuine flight) when fully developed. The poem does not merely promise the resolution; it demonstrates the reliability of the conditional by instantiating it twice at different scales.

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IV. Comparative Literary Context

“Selves and the Egos” engages most consequentially with Muhammad Iqbal’s philosophical poetry on selfhood and the eagle, with the Islamic philosophical psychology of the nafs and its literary expression in Rumi’s account of authentic song, and with Gerard Manley Hopkins’s aerial imagery, at the precise points where those accounts approach but cannot reach the positions this poem claims. The advance is visible not by comparison but through comparison: Dr. Bemanian’s poem becomes most fully legible when placed against what the prior tradition prepared but did not complete.

Muhammad Iqbal’s philosophical poetry — particularly the Asrar-e-Khudi (Secrets of the Self) and the companion volumes of Persian poetry — deploys the شاهین (shaheen, the eagle or peregrine falcon) as the emblem of the authentic self in its fullest philosophical development. Iqbal’s shaheen is constituted by its aspiration: it knows its own dignity, refuses to roost with lesser birds, and expresses its selfhood precisely through its upward movement. The self, for Iqbal, achieves itself by claiming and inhabiting its own nature against all that would diminish it. Dr. Bemanian’s eagle makes a more philosophically precise formal move: “Eagles stop gliding; heading to the top.” This is not Iqbal’s shaheen, which is always already ascending and whose nature is simply to rise. It is an eagle that has been gliding — inhabiting the effortless, comfortable mode of its natural aerial mastery — and that interrupts the glide to make the more demanding, purposeful ascent. The advance beyond Iqbal is in the recognition that the most natural expression of the eagle’s capacity (gliding) can become the obstacle to its most genuine expression (heading to the top). Even genuine native talent must be interrupted for the highest form of that talent to be exercised. And where Iqbal’s shaheen soars alone as the model of genuine self-realization, “Selves and the Egos” closes with both eagles enjoying and sparrows soaring — the accessible modes of authentic flight available simultaneously to both the natively aerial and the more modestly aspiring, under the same conditions, from the same depth.

Rumi’s most concentrated account of authentic song — the نی (reed flute) of the Masnavi’s opening — establishes that genuine musical expression cannot be imitated: the reed’s cry of separation is authentic because the reed has genuinely been cut from the reed bed and genuinely experiences the pain of that separation. The song is the sound of genuine inhabiting. Dr. Bemanian’s “mantles do not carve, the stolen songs” advances this Rumian insight at the specific point where Rumi stops: the stolen song. Rumi’s account tells us what makes the authentic cry authentic; it does not name what the inauthentic cry looks like from the outside, or identify the structural reason why position and authority cannot transform appropriation into genuine song. “Mantles do not carve” provides the structural reason: the outer garment of achieved standing has no carving power. Carving requires the genuine relationship between maker and material — the maker who has inhabited the material from the inside, who has been constituted by it as well as constituting it. The mantle wearer who has taken rather than inhabited the song material has the form but not the genuine relationship; the mantle covers but cannot cut into what it covers.

The chapter epigraph deepens the Rumian resonance by naming the figure of the thief who dwells within the turban — the خیمهِ طرار inhabiting the دستار. The turban’s authority cannot transform the theft; only the tearing of the robe at the heart (exposing the genuine interior) and the casting of the theft into the sea can purge what the position has housed. Together, the epigraph and “mantles do not carve” constitute a complete account of the stolen song’s impossibility: it is both structurally uncarvable (the mantle cannot do the work) and internally exposable (the torn robe at the heart reveals what genuine seeking looks like from the inside).

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover” (1877) — whose kestrel’s flight produces the speaker’s sudden recognition of the divine beauty within created things (“Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here / Buckle!”) — is the Western lyric tradition’s most concentrated account of the aerial creature as the occasion of philosophical insight. Hopkins’s bird is a received revelation: the speaker is passive, the bird’s grace acts on the speaker and generates the recognition. Dr. Bemanian’s eagles are not occasions of revelation but agents of their own developmental formation: they make the decision to stop gliding, they head to the top, they enjoy at the arc’s resolution. The philosophical advance is from the aerial creature as the medium through which insight arrives to the aerial creature as the figure of the subject’s own developmental achievement — specifically conditional on the roots being woven tight, on the egos being formed, on the gorges and canyons being recognized as the source of the depth from which genuine flight proceeds.

Within the Odyssey sequence, the poem’s most consequential comparative position is its relationship to “Shooting Stars” (Volume 9, Chapter 2, Poem 1), which it engages at the specific point where the prior poem’s account of the shooting self is both extended and corrected. “Shooting Stars” declared the self as the shooting star — the accumulated trajectory blazing in genuine encounter, the extemporaneous flash constituted by atmospheric entry. “Selves and the Egos” identifies “shooting illusions” as the ego’s distorted version of the same act: the energy and direction of the shooting star without the genuine atmospheric encounter that makes the flash authentic. This is not a retraction of “Shooting Stars” but its developmental continuation: the ego that shoots illusions is the undeveloped version of the self that blazes genuinely. Ego formation — “egos do get formed” — is what converts the shooting of illusions into the genuine blazing of the shooting star’s authentic extemporaneous encounter. The sequence’s account of the self is deepened by the juxtaposition: the shooting star is what the ego becomes when it has been formed and the roots are woven tight; the shooting of illusions is what the unformed ego does with the same directional energy.

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V. Philosophical Claims

The Eagle’s Interrupted Glide Reveals That Native Talent Must Be Overridden for Genuine Achievement

“Selves and the Egos” establishes as a philosophical principle what the eagle’s formal act in stanza 3 enacts: the most natural and effortless expression of a genuine capacity is not the highest expression of that capacity. The eagle that glides is genuinely flying; it is not highest flying. For the highest flight — heading to the top, where the wind’s pushing is enabled rather than merely displacing — the effortless mode must be interrupted. This is the poem’s most demanding philosophical claim about the relationship between talent and achievement: genuine capability produces an effortless mode (gliding) that, while genuine, can become the obstacle to the most genuine expression of that capability. The ego’s function in this account is to provide the resistance that makes the interruption possible — the “seldom to cave in” that stops the comfortable glide and redirects the energy toward the purposeful top. The philosophical world receives from this poem the specific identification of native ease as a developmental risk: not talent’s enemy but the comfort that talent generates, which must be overcome for talent’s highest exercise to occur.

The Ordeal Is a Sinking Open Door — Depth, Not Obstruction, Is Its Structure

The poem places before the literary and philosophical world a reconceptualization of the ordeal that the conventional either/or of punishment and pardon cannot accommodate. The “sinking open doors” of stanza 7 names what the ordeals are when seen from the perspective that stanza 8’s gorges, canyons, and valleys make available: they are descending thresholds, openings that lead downward into the genuine depth from which joy spreads. This is neither the account of ordeal as punishment (suffering imposed for transgression) nor of ordeal as test (suffering that strengthens by resistance) but of ordeal as descent: the sinking open door through which the roots are driven deeper, through which the subject arrives at the gorge floor where the blankets of joy spread. The either/or of stanza 7 does not resolve in favor of either option but allows both to stand as complementary accounts of the same descending movement — the pardon soothing the soul is the experiential dimension of what the sinking open door provides structurally. The philosophical world receives from this poem the spatial reconceptualization of ordeal: not as the obstacle on the path but as the opening in the path that leads to the depth where genuine joy originates.

The Deepest Geological Spaces Are the Sources — Not the Sites of Descent From — the Widest Joy

The closing spatial claim of “Selves and the Egos” completes and resolves the poem’s full spatial argument across eight stanzas: the gorges, canyons, and valleys “spread blankets of joy, delight and thrill.” Joy does not emanate from the summit. It spreads — horizontally, coveringly, warmly — from the deepest available ground. This is not a statement about the value of sadness or the spirituality of difficulty; it is a claim about where the foundations of genuine joy are located and what kind of spatial movement gives access to them. The eagles that enjoy and the sparrows that soar do so not by escaping from the gorges and canyons but by having roots woven into their floors — roots that the formation of the egos and the boning up of the inner core have made tight enough to hold. The blanket of joy spreads from the depth that the roots reach, not from the height that the flight achieves. This is the poem’s most complete philosophical reversal of the conventional topography of aspiration: the summit is where the eagles and sparrows arrive; the gorge is where the joy that makes the arrival worth arriving at is spread and from which it reaches even to the highest point of the trajectory.

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VI. Conclusion

“Selves and the Egos” enacts in its eight-stanza arc the developmental program that the chapter’s title announces and its epigraph governs. It begins in a world of genuine desolation — structures without their animating content, light hindered from passing, creatures stilled — and establishes the single condition on which everything else depends: if roots woven tight. From that condition, the gates unlock and the tunes untie; from the development of the inner core and the formation of the egos, the gorges and canyons spread blankets of joy; and then — the second and final “Then” — the eagles enjoy and the sparrows soar.

What distinguishes this poem from the prior poems of Volume 9 is its explicit treatment of the self/ego complex as a developmental subject rather than as a resolved dyadic relationship. The sequence’s Chapters 1 and 2 traced genuine connection from threshold to covenant to brace. Chapter 3’s opening poem steps back from the dyadic resolution to ask what the individual self/ego complex must become for the connection to be genuinely available. The answer is developmental and paradoxical: the egos must form, not dissolve; the roots must go deep, into the gorges; the ordeals must be recognized as sinking open doors; and the shooting of illusions must be understood as the misdirected version of the shooting star’s genuine blazing, to be redirected by formation rather than eliminated by suppression.

The double “Then” is the poem’s formal proof that the conditions are reliable: when met, they produce what they promise. The eagles enjoy because the developmental arc has been genuinely traversed; the sparrows soar because the roots have been genuinely woven into the gorge floor. The poem does not merely describe this outcome but formally guarantees it through the double instantiation of the conditional’s resolution.

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VII. About the Poet

Dr. Alireza Bemanian is a poet, system architect, and physicist whose literary practice is formed at the convergence of two classical traditions — the Persian and the English — each inhabited with equal authority, equal depth, and equal creative ownership. “Selves and the Egos” makes this convergence productive in the three specific formal deployments most visible in the poem.

The physicist’s formation is present in the conditional structure of stanza 3: “the wind, gale and gust, pushing the feathers, if roots woven tight.” This is the language of structural mechanics — the distinction between a load applied to a rooted structure (which can be converted into useful work) and a load applied to an unrooted structure (which merely displaces). The physicist who understands the difference between force as enabling and force as displacing, between conditions under which external pressure generates lift and conditions under which it generates only motion without control, inhabits this conditional not as metaphor but as the precise physical structure that the philosophical claim requires.

The system architect’s formation is present in the developmental account of the self/ego complex’s three-level resolution: egos formed, spirits surviving, moods subsisting. A systems architect thinks in terms of subsystems that persist and function in their specific domains — each with its own mode of operation, its own criteria for success, its own relationship to the others. The three-level account of the subject’s developmental outcome is the systems thinker’s precision applied to the philosophical account of what genuine formation produces: not a single resolved state but three distinct layers operating simultaneously in their appropriate modes.

The poet’s formation in the Persian classical tradition is present in the chapter epigraph — the torn robe casting out the thief’s tent from the turban — which Dr. Bemanian deploys with the native precision of one for whom خرقه and دستار and طرار are not exotic vocabulary but the conceptual instruments of a centuries-long philosophical conversation about the difference between genuine spiritual seeking and the authority that houses theft. The poem’s “mantles do not carve, the stolen songs” is the epigraph’s philosophical program enacted in English, with the full weight of the Persian tradition behind it and the full reach of the English lyric in front of it.

Dr. Alireza Bemanian’s poetry is published at www.bemanian.com, where the full range of his work in both Persian and English can be encountered.

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© Dr. Alireza Bemanian, www.bemanian.com

Note: This analysis honors the intellectual property and creative vision of Dr. Alireza Bemanian.

The poem “Selves and the Egos” is © 2026 www.bemanian.com, all rights reserved.