Mono no aware (物の哀れ)

When we thought once that we might want to be obvious we used mono, ie monastics of no other.

Today I love that the Japanese phrase Mono no aware (物の哀れ) suggests, in english, that "a mono is not aware."

Astute criticism both soothes and crushes ambition. 

Mono no aware (物の哀れ),^[a] lit. 'the pathos of things', also translated as 'an empathy toward things', or 'a sensitivity to ephemera', is a Japanese idiom for the aesthetic appreciation of impermanence (無常, mujō), or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.^[2]

Japanese woodblock print showcasing transience, precarious beauty, and the passage of time, thus "mirroring" mono no aware^[1]

I like the Japanese translation and explanation.

It captures my attention.

Then frees it.

interplay

 Breeze wavers trees across way

swaying upper branches against blue sky --

Bald Mountain, verdant elephant, doesn't move

be ordinary, say nothing to anyone

  This poem by Lisel Mueller from Doris this morning: 

Pillar of Salt

 

More and more I resemble

the woman turned stela,

whom I imagine standing

like a solitary cactus

at the edge of the desert.

 

By now I too have become

a storage tower of memory

that salty substance not absorbed

or sloughed off by the body.

 

Like her, I was rescued

(who knows why) for survival

and looked back at the destruction

of the place I had come from,

stunned by history’s genius

for punishing the guiltless.

 

Surely not all of her people were wicked.

Perhaps the ones who loved her

and whom she loved

were gentle, like my people,

whom I reprieve from their deaths

each time I remember my life

among them, my grandparents,

three guardian angels.

 

As a child I played

with Japanese paper flowers.

In the package they were

tiny, shriveled bits of confetti,

nearly weightless,

but when they were put in a bowl of water

they sprang open, transformed

into a splurge of lotus flowers,

amazing yellow, orchid, rose.

 

It’s like that when I think of them,

when I give them back brilliant moments

of family happiness

in random sunlit spaces.

The show is not for them.

 

It is for me. l set it up

so I can change the ending,

stop short of hell,

give them a bearable old age,

a decent death. It doesn’t work;

it hasn’t worked all these years;

history has taken nothing back.

 

Memory is the only 

afterlife I can understand,

and when it’s gone, they’re gone.

Soon I will betray them.

Think of it as the solid pillar

dissolving, all that salt

seeping back into the sea.

 

 

(--Poem by Lisel Mueller )

 

…

 

Lisel Mueller was born in Germany in 1924. ln 1935 she fled to the US  with her family to escape persecution after her father spoke out against the Nazi regime. In a recurrent theme, this poem reflects her struggle to reconcile the “brilliant moments of family happiness” of her German childhood with the  horror that came out of that same nation. In that, she speaks for me, also.

 

I enjoyed looking up “stela.”

Stela of Merneith from her tomb at Abydos, 1st dynasty

Photo: Lisa Saladino Haney (cf. https://arce.org/resource/stelae-ancient-egypts-versatile-monumental-form/ )

A stele (/ˈstiːli/ STEE-lee) or stela (/ˈstiːlə/ STEE-lə)^{[note 1]} is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected in the ancient world as a monument. The surface of the stele often has text, ornamentation, or both. These may be inscribed, carved in relief, or painted.

Stelae were created for many reasons.^[1] Grave stelae were used for funerary or commemorative purposes. Stelae as slabs of stone would also be used as ancient Greekand Roman government notices or as boundary markers to mark borders or property lines. Stelae were occasionally erected as memorials to battles. For example, along with other memorials, there are more than half-a-dozen steles erected on the battlefield of Waterloo at the locations of notable actions by participants in battle.^[2]

A traditional Western gravestone (headstone, tombstone, gravestone, or marker) may technically be considered the modern equivalent of ancient stelae, though the term is very rarely applied in this way. Equally, stele-like forms in non-Western cultures may be called by other terms, and the words "stele" and "stelae" are most consistently applied in archaeological contexts to objects from Europe, the ancient Near East and Egypt,^[3] China, and sometimes Pre-Columbian America. (wikipedia)

Lisel Mueller also words this poem which reminds me why poetry is so often so delicious: 

There Are Mornings

 

Even now, when the plot

calls for me to turn to stone,

the sun intervenes. Some mornings

in summer I step outside

and the sky opens

and pours itself into me

as if I were a saint

about to die. But the plot

calls for me to live,

be ordinary, say nothing

to anyone. Inside the house

the mirrors burn when I pass. 

 

(--Lisel Mueller from Alive Together (LSU Press, 1986)

 

I sometimes step out of my sarcophagus solitude into dooryard green, Adirondack plastic chair facing Bald Mountain, birdsong, leafy branches, cut grass, and Ensō dog burrowed under Yew. I sit there. I look over what is there. Everything is right where it is.

Near-stone.

Stela.

A boundary marker as yet unfixed.

kokoro 心

 If you call

My name and

No one answers

Rest assured

We both have done

The right thing

se situer entre... tout au long de...(to be between throughout)

T’aego is right.

He guesses, or sees, what many of us long for.

A faith.

That what is there is there.

No matter how dull our minds.

No matter how clouded our perception.

No matter how dusking our hope.

There is something bright and clear,

without falsity, without biases,

tranquil and unmoving,

possessed of vast consciousness,

fundamentally without birth, death and discrimination,

without names and forms and words.

It engulfs space and covers

all of heaven and earth,

all of form and sound,

and is equipped to function.

T’aego (1301-1382)

Taego Bou painting from the 19th century

Taego Bou (Korean: 태고보우; Hanja: 太古普愚, 23 October 1301 – 27 January 1383), alternatively romanized as Taego Bowoo or Taego Bowu, was a Korean Seon master who lived in Goryeo, was the cofounder of the Jogye Order with Jinul, and is credited as the founder of the modern Taego Order.

--wikipedia

When Zen Master Seung Sahn (called by his students Dae Soen Sa Nim, or "Great Honored Zen Teacher”) came to America from Korea in 1972, I sat with him in Manhattan and in Providence. I was not a formal student, only interested. (Inter-esse -- to be between)

Jesuit priest, poet, and peace-advocate Daniel Berrigan used the word “interesting” as a revelation to me as I walked beside him in Norristown PA (1981) during one of his court trials. He would say the word there and elsewhere as if it were a holy word.

Seung Sahn and Daniel Berrigan were interesting to me.

Something that is taking place between what you consider “me” and that which just might be the "sacred non-self.”

That holy place holding together an entropic material/spiritual universe which is perennially flying off from itself into diverse and disordered realms of the unknown.

Between order and disorder, between this and that, between heaven and hell, we are “interesting.”

Are we, as “interesting,” that which unknowingly finds ourselves placed between the centrifugal and the centripetal as necessary beings, (compare “Christs”) as that which holds-to-itself in a time of rampant self-annihilation and elimination?

To be “interesting” is to be “between” that which is whole and that which is whole; that is, that which is wholly unknown and that which is wholly known. 

To exist as itself.

Throughout.

Is this what is meant by the practice of nearing God?

Is this what a true practitioner of a holy path is doing?

Placing one’s-self between what-is there and what-is-not here?

Being absurdly willing to stand in the place of unknowing between the completely unknown and the wholly known?

To be there with dignity and forbearance, with vulnerability and trust, with humility and good humor?

Throughout.

Unafraid to see and learn truth; unafraid to experience and notate untruth?

To be between throughout.

Interesting.

at bedtime

Saint-Saëns: Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix ∙ Gautier Capuçon ∙ Thierry Escaich

The delight of it!

hard tellin’ . . . right in my ear . . . I just can't stop listening

 No thinking about this --

just feeling it!

https://bsky.app/profile/catdamama.bsky.social/post/3mqavmlwaok2f

don’t mind me, feel me

I’ve not done psychedelics. My mind is altered by common perception. However wrongly interpreted, that which we consider real is commonly perceived, discussed and argued about, without the hallucinogenics of personalized alteration specific to a particular experience.

We do have difficulty interpreting the so-called known world.

Such as, is the Senator from Kentucky dead or alive? Also, is the twice elected president of the country an insanely demented sociopath?

We seem, as a country, for the moment, to disagree on the answers given to the questions.

It’s not that our consciousness is aberrant. More, that our psychical interpretation of our perception of reality is disconnected from a true reception of data and signals emanating from the source of our inquiry.

Would the whole country be moribund if the United States Senator were in a vegetative state being kept alive for political advantage?

Would the whole country be insane if there were a willing unwillingness to accept the reality that the chief executive was hopelessly psychically and spiritually incapable of squaring the needs of the country with his personal aggrandized obsession with wealth and chicanery grifting for his family?

I’ve long liked the idea of truth and justice. Somehow the third phrase “and the American way” has become detached from from our superman comical idealization. The American way seems to have become graft, grift, and garrulous pomposity. The so-called “little man” is smaller and less significant than ever.

No psychedelic is going to rectify the corruptible. No gummy or cannabis will right the wrong we experience. No Budweiser or Pinot Noir will make wrong right.

Some spiritual traditions signal that the world is made from and consists of mere consciousness. “Mind” is the matter with the universe and all of creation.  

The task that we seem to find so difficult is how to move through mind into clear awareness of what-is true in-itself, unreliant on our perceptions and interpretations. 

It’s why we’re so ambivalent about God.

Is God that-which-is-in-itself? 

I remember reading Susan Sontag in 1966:

Against Interpretation (often published as Against Interpretation and Other Essays) is a 1966 collection of essays by Susan Sontag. It includes some of Sontag's best-known works, including "Notes on 'Camp'", "On Style" and the eponymous essay "Against Interpretation." In the latter, Sontag argues that the new approach to criticism and aesthetics neglects the sensuous impact and novelty of art, instead fitting works into predetermined intellectual interpretations and emphasis on the "content" or "meaning" of a work. The book was a finalist for the Arts and Letters category of the National Book Award.^[1]      wikipedia

The sensuous, the descriptive, the sensitive -- these help reveal what we are, experiencing.

Placing us in the presence of what-is revealing itself.

flower duet

This rare disappearance.

I find myself nowhere to be found.

Go on! I am making no sound 

Living deep in the mountains

I’ve grown fond of the

Solitary sound of the pines;

On days the wind does not blow

How lonely it is!

--Rengetsu (1791-1875)

 Ōtagaki Rengetsu (大田垣 蓮月; 10 February 1791 – 10 December 1875) was a Buddhist nun who is widely regarded to have been one of the greatest Japanese poets of the 19th century. She was also a skilled potter and painter and expert calligrapher. (wikipedia)

 After marriages and children, after becoming a nun, she lived in tiny huts and moved around quite a lot.

“Flower Duet” by Esther Abrami plays its sweetness.

face drawn in sand

It’s not a matter of being right, it’s a matter of the right’s might being all that matters.

 No wonder Foucault’s name pops up wherever you look. Whenever one group feels threatened or oppressed by another, he can be recruited as vindication, justifying suspicion and resistance. Even his interest toward the end of his life in neoliberalism — an economic philosophy predicated on minimal interference from government regulators — can be understood in these terms: Keep the state out of the market.

Would he have been dismayed that the skepticism of power he promoted is today associated with so much political rancor and division? At the very least, we can bet he would have appreciated this irony: The philosopher who warned against power’s dominating force has himself become dominant.

He might also have insisted that his would not be the last word. With his past-is-future approach to history, Foucault understood that no power is forever. In what feels like another eerie nod to our present and its growing army of ever-smarter A.I. machines, he predicted that the reign of human beings at the center of power and knowledge was destined to end — erased, as he put it in a haunting image, “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”

 (—in “From A.I. to the Deep State, Michel Foucault Foresaw It All,” by Emily Eakin, NYTIMES, 10july26)

I say it again: It’s not a matter of being right, it’s a matter of the right’s might being all that matters.

Is human knowledge being reduced to rightwing billionaire kleptocratic oligarchy for the benefit of “the betters” among us?

I’m thinking of learning how to pray.

Not that prayer will do any good — rather, that I might learn what and where good is.

is the situation what-is always taking place

LOVE

(down 

to my soul:

                         assume your nature as yourself 

                         for the love of God

                                                             not even good enough

    

 Stories 

                 only

                            the possibility

                                                             of discrete  

                                                                                   men 

There is no intelligence 

the equal of
the situation

There are only

                                  two ways:

                                  create the situation

                                                                     (and this is love)

                                  or avoid it.

                                                         This also can be

Love.

(—Poem by Charles Olson)