Two for Thursday morning:
1.
Having no destination,
I am never lost.
― Ikkyu
2.
Nikos Kazantzakis’ epitaph reads, "I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free." (Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα. Δε φοβούμαι τίποτα. Είμαι λέφτερος.)
Some translate the first phrase, “I expect nothing.”
If nothing comes, then
Let it go — life is right here
Nowhere else, purring
One room is not the other room.
But the doorway
Moving through that luminary space
Doing the movement itself
What do we call that transfiguration?
Of Cheslaw Milosz, he said: “we knew him in the harbors, we never saw him in the full sea,” Not in the hurricanes at sea.
He concludes: "The world doesn't belong to any single poet." (Adam Zagajewski, UC Berkeley, 2011)
Take a view. Speak the sight. Round the world with words!
Yes
92 yr old elder from
Just west of New England
Morning after
Sunday evening practice
Writes gratitude for
Encounter
We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.
And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.
That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.
O my love, where are they, where are they going?
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.
~ Czeslaw Milosz ~
(The Collected Poems 1931 - 1987,
translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Lillian Vallee)
Come
Arrive here
Now
See what is
Before you —
There
You are
And will become
Infinitely
This
February will end tomorrow night. Today it rains. Inland, snow. It feels winter might be winding down. Less than a month by calendar.
Coffee and donut by Rockland harbor earlier. Met prison librarian on main street. Brief catchup. Been a year since last physically there.
They say I'll be called when vaccine is ready for my age range. They've gone sixteen and a half years under mine. They say.
I'm ready. If I get covid I'll die. No reason in particular. Just the panoply of vulnerable conditions. It doesn't seem to phase me.
In New York Review of Books, this: “People evangelize because they fear that the belief to which they have committed themselves may not be true.” (T.M. Luhrmann, anthropologist)
The urge to convince and convert seems a natural
outgrowth of one adopting a particular belief as one's own. The desire
to have company is strong.
Woman during conversation said that Vipassana meditation was the one that the Buddha practiced in India. To see things as they really are is a good thing.
On revient toujours a son premier métier. (One always returns to one's original calling.) The prayers and Latin from childhood and early adulthood reemerge.
The poetry and zen and philosophy and theology and religious studies of university time sit next to me more and more often these days.
Reminiscing:
Graduate course on Yeats' poetry in late sixties with Marjorie Perloff at Catholic University in DC.
Graduate seminar on Heidegger with John Macquarrie at Union Theological Seminary in NYC.
Graduate course on Bhagavad Gita with Thomas Berry at Fordham University in Bronx NY.
Graduate course on Vedanta and Pantanjali's Yoga Sutras at The New School in Greenwich Village Manhattan by a swami from India.
Graduate course on Phenomenology with John Caputo at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.
I've been reading and studying since first attempt at college in 1961. I've been teaching as adjunct for The University of Maine at Augusta for thirty three years. Philosophy and Humanities. A great many of those courses at Maine State Prison's college program. (Two students from a course in 1988 are still there.)
Today a book arrives, Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion (Philosophy of Religion), Oct.22, 2014, by Christina M. Gschwandtner.
There are days when darkness arrives too early.
There’s a very bright moon tonight.
I notice that
Still, the darkness
What if each word were an angel?
Each book a covey of temporary residence for messages ready to light up minds upon opening?
Would we cease our foolish antagonism toward truth and fall in love with what is revealed to our heart?
Cor mundum crea in me, Deus.
Redde mihi lætítiam salutáris tui.
(A pure heart create for me, O God.Give me again the joy of your help.)
(Ps 50, 12a. 14a)
Stay right here
See, hear, now
Don’t tell stories
You’re finally as you are
Fine as such.
(I’m kidding about the stories.
Tell another one.
I’ve plenty of time.)
And when you stop
I’ll still be listening
Just like this
As a last line of a short story
Always feels
Incomplete
Waiting for
What comes next
Traveling 92,955,807 miles
Brother sun —
1.
It seems right that a chair would have its own feast day.
Sit well!
Feast Of The Chair of Saint Peter the Apostle
“‘And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’ Then he strictly ordered his disciples to tell no one that he was the Messiah,” (Mt. 16:17-19).
Also, seems right that “no one” is to be told he’s the messiah. “No one” (is this a Chinese name No-Wan?) doesn’t seem to know who they are.
Tell them! Tell them!
2.
Such a thoughtful, provocative, and meditative wording, “die and become.” Or, “die and so to grow.”
poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the mass man will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.
In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you,
when you see the silent candle burning.
Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love-making sweeps you upward.
Distance does not make you falter.
Now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.
And so long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.
Translated from the German by Robert Bly
3.
It’s a long and varied trail from being no one to realizing who you are with everyone. In a paroxysm of infinite discovery we come to markers showing way up mountain and through wooded turns.
4.
“How do you make love to a physicist? With your whole self, quivering, lush, unafraid.” So concludes Deesha Philyaw in her short story in The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, 2020.
5.
When we practice, we are enlightened. When we are enlightened, we practice. That's what Dogen Zenji tells us.
To be enlightened, as far as I can surmise, is to see things as they are.
And that's good.
6.
So, let go. And become what we, at heart, are -- quivering, lush, unafraid.
Only Breath
Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen. Not any religion
or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up
from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,
am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any
origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,
first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.
(—Rumi, 1207-1273)
Talk of hope at Friday evening conversation.
Are you hopeful?
Hopeful? Me? No, I’m not hopeful.
Really? How can you live without hope?
I can. I do.
What do you rely on?
Not much. I’m watchful.
Watchful?
Yeah, watchful.
Yes.
Resonance of chant
From France, sicut erat in
Principio, plow
Passes outside, thin
Covering of snow, winter
In its final month
In this time of COVID-19 we are all sages.
Are we not?
Hence the sage is like an empty hollow. He
cherishes no knowledge. He dwells in the
world of change and utility, yet holds himself
to the realm of non-activity (wu wei). He rests
within the walls of the nameable, yet lives in
the open country of what transcends speech.
He is silent and alone, void and open, where
his state of being cannot be clothed in
language. Nothing more can be said of him.
(--p.56, Zen in Plain English, Experience the
Essence of Zen, by Stephan Schuhmacher, 2009;
from p.268, Fung Yu-lan: A History of Chinese
Philosophy, Vol. II, 'The Period of Classical
Learning' 1953)
What can we say?
What can be said of us?
And 1500 years from now, who, really, will recognize our difficulty of understanding?
Though we say we live in the 'real world' -- do we?
And what are "saturated phenomena".*
Bedazzlement and overwhelmingness are marks of saturated phenomena, especially those that are "unbearable according to quantity" such as the painting as idol. It is in just this context that Marion gives the transfiguration as an example. But in the very same passage, he gives the teaching of Jesus as another example, citing John 16.12: "I still have many things to say to you, but you do not yet have the power to bear them."8 Marion might as easily have turned to the gospel of Mark. There we find people amazed when Jesus cast out an unclean spirit (Mark 1.23-27) and when he healed the paralyzed man let down through the roof (Mark 2.3-12) but also at Jesus’ teaching: "They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes" (Mark1.22). The phenomenologist can and should take note of the fact that such teaching and the faith that receives it can be and have been experienced as a supernatural gift of supernatural grace. But that does not make Jesus’ teaching miraculous in the sense in which casting out demons and healing the sick are miraculous. In short, the phenomena of revelation need not be miracles.
It might be helpful here to recall Mary Magdalene as portrayed in Jesus Christ, Superstar. She sings, "I don’t know how to love him . . . He scares me so." While Jesus was unquestionably a saturated phenomenon in her experience, it would be a strange reading to assume that what scared her about him was the healings and the exorcisms. Quite clearly, what bedazzled, overwhelmed, and even scared her was the way he loved her, and there is nothing of magical realism in the implicit narrative of her relation to Jesus that underlies her portrayal in the musical.
(--Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, Vol. 1 Issue 1, page 27, Merold Westphal, Transfiguration as Saturated Phenomenon)
That which exceeds what our intention can grasp. An intuition beyond verification or full comprehension.
Where fully foolish sages loiter in contemplative repose while less foolish insurgents run to tackle fabricated meaning fully geared with zip-ties tiptoeing alongside at their ready.
* Jean-Luc Marion's claims about givenness and the self of the phenomenon culminate in his new category of “saturated” phenomena. According to Marion, some phenomena give more intuition than is needed to fill a subject's intention. Such phenomena are “saturated” with intention, and exceed any concepts or limiting horizons that a constituting subject could impose upon them. Marion describes five possible types of saturated phenomenon, and then presents a “figure” as an example of each type. Marion develops his concept of saturated phenomenon across three main texts. In Marion's early texts, saturated phenomena are introduced as a way of making space in philosophy for specifically religious phenomena. Even in his later texts where Marion omits this religious context, the examples of saturated phenomena that he chooses are somewhat obscure, and might be regarded as no more than interesting curiosities.
(--The Theory of Saturated Phenomena, Shane Mackinlay, Fordham Scholarship Online)
It makes me wonder whether what we refer to as 'higher dimensions' and 'miracles' are the fields of intuition and mystical glimpse that resemble and reside in uncategorizable experiences.
Joyce wrote:
“He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.” (― James Joyce, Dubliners)
(οὐδὲν ἐξ οὐδενός — Parmenides)
Morning by woodstove
Thump of cat jumping down, crunch
Of kibbles reach me
Yes.
From his poem AshWednesday, by T.S.Eliot, an excerpt:
VI
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn
Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings
And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.
Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit
of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separatedAnd let my cry come unto Thee.
(—from, Ash Wednesday, by T.S. Eliot)
I’ve been thinking about our practice.
We sit zazen.
We read someone’s writing.
We converse from what has gotten our attention.
We take a brief silence
We have a final circle.
We recite the bodhisattva vows.
We pronounce a metta blessing.
We say goodnight.
Tweets by
15feb2021Post-impeachment, we can say this: Trump's presidency has amended the Constitution. Not formally, of course, but informally...which matters just as much. Here are the five Trump amendments. 1/9
1. "No president shall be removed from office for treason, bribery, or any other crime or misdemeanor provided a partisan minority of the Senate will protect him (which is always). Impeachment is thus a nullity and presidents can expect impunity." 2/9
2. "Congressional oversight shall be optional. No congressional subpoena or investigative demand shall be binding on a president who chooses to ignore it." 3/9
3. "Congressional appropriations shall be suggestions. The president may choose whether or not to conform with congressional spending laws, and Congress shall have no recourse should a president declare that his own priorities supersede Congress's express will." 4/9
4. "The president shall have authority to make appointments as he sees fit, without the advice and consent of the Senate, provided he deems his appointees to be acting, temporary, or otherwise exempt from the ordinary confirmation process." 5/9
5. "The president shall have unconstrained authority to dangle and issue pardons for the purpose of obstructing justice, tampering with witnesses, and forestalling investigations. There is nothing anyone can do about this (see Amendment 1 above)." 6/9
Let's count our blessings. Had Trump won a second term, he'd have put through a 6th amendment: "The president may ignore or violate court orders." 7/9
Still, the existing Trump amendments give the president WAY more discretion and impunity than the Founders intended. After Trump, we're more dependent than ever on the president's character to prevent a quasi-monarchy. 8/9
And more than ever, there's a howling void at the center of the Constitution...one called Congress. 9/9
“It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah!” (Leonard Cohen)
As cynicism and darkness
sit shivering and dissipated
in near obsolescent
obscurity. . .
A page is turned.
(Still,
in the
Hanging icicle
Glints of
glancing sunrise
Telling,
God is
There,
heard
Singing . . .)
Yes
Forty years I endured that generation.
I said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray
and they do not know my ways.”
So I swore in my anger,
“They shall not enter into my rest.”
(Psalm 95)
Justice will walk out from the alley where it has slept the night
Walk to front door of mansion where willful depravity has lounged in silk and gold all night
And knock
When door opens, face to face for that brief archeology of trawling recognition
Will nod to the other
Shut door, turn, walk together down to river as light begins to stretch
Sit, look out side by side, begin to talk
Our attention pulls slowly away
Back up the hill
Up over tree tops and building roofs
Far out into distant spacious emptiness
Off beyond what we can possibly understand
Into silence
Blinking dim distance
Out of sight
Gone mind
Nowhere now
Beholding itself what is within without
Ita sit. (So be it.)
Eamus deinceps. (Let's go forward)
Prosit democratiam . (Good luck to democracy)
Nothing isn’t something. It can’t be placed on your mantel. It is not something hiding just behind something. Rather nothing is what is both within and beyond everything we call something, which, in itself, is nothing.
But this realization isn’t nihilism. It is nihility.
We might get away with saying that, rather than being something or nothing, we are appearing. We are temporary emergence out of and into “Way.” This transient and impermanent manifestation is the constant surprise of what we call “existence” “world” or “my life.”
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 25
Something mysteriously formed,
Born before heaven and earth.
In the silence and the void,
Standing alone and unchanging,
Ever present and in motion.
Perhaps it is the mother of ten thousand things..
I do not know its name.
Call it Tao.
For lack of a better word, I call it great.
Being great, it flows.
It flows far away.
Having gone far, it returns.
Therefore, "Tao is great;
Heaven is great;
Earth is great;
The king is also great."
These are the four great powers of the universe,
And the king is one of them.
Man follows the earth.
Earth follows heaven.
Heaven follows the Tao.
Tao follows what is natural.
(translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English)
What is this “what is natural”?
According to chapter 25 of Tao Te Ching, before any form or substance comes to exist, there is chaos. It has no voice or shape and because of that it is beyond any explanation or description with words.
It is nothingness itself. Its enormous size exceeds any human categories, does not depend on anything and conducts all the processes taking place in the universe. For this reason it is called 'Big' or 'Dai' after the Chinese character. The 'Dai' keeps on spreading and advancing the universe. There are no limits to the expansion of nothingness, 'Dai' or the Way. In other words the Way and nothingness are the transcendental beings. For the reason of being transcendental, they embrace all things. Things distant from them as well as close to them such as self; all is included. Because all things are filled with those transcendental beings, it can be said that they include those things and for that reason they can be called 'encompassing' or 'Umgreifende' of Karl Jaspers and as such, they undoubtedly reveal the principles governing nature: four seasons, sunrise and sunset, birth and death. Our limited perception doesn't allow us to see the Way itself, but through comprehending the nature and its rules, we have the ability to experience the Way as the transcendental being. When we reach that state, in front of our eyes there stands the true essence of nature, undistorted and real. This experience brings about a change in us and shows us how to live. But please make no mistake about this; Lao-tzu does not mean doing nothing, but living in accordance with the principles of nothingness. Lao-tzu's nothingness is also called absolute nothingness
According to chapter 21 of Tao Te Ching, the Way is ecstatic and undefined. Only after you calm down and free your heart from ambitions and care, you can feel its subtle, pure and unadulterated nature. It's total and complete and only through impartial attitude we are able to know it, that is by getting rid of the knowledge and concepts we have learned so far in our lives. Nothing can be understood about the Way by linguistic analysis and breaking down concepts. The only way is the direct, intuitive experience and unity with the Way. However, there is the problem of expressing that intuitive experience with words. Naturally, the Way is a being that exceeds human languages; so describing it in a comprehensible manner poses quite a challenge. Still more, its appropriate description is not any form of compendium or a theory, but rather it should take a form close to poetry. Here, it is the source of Lao- tzu's mysticism, which was later on taken over by Chuang-tzu and developed further
(—p.67, PHILOSOPHY OF NOTHINGNESS AND LOVE Kiyokazu NAKATOMI1, in BIOCOSMOLOGY – NEO-ARISTOTELISM Vol. 6, Nos. 3&4, Summer/Autumn 2016)
For those who look to the Bible, perhaps it might be said that God is what is moving.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. (Genesis 1:2-3, the Bible) ibid
What does this nothing, this absolute nothingness, have to do with love?
Last night's Friday Evening Conversation heard a woman tell of a chance meeting with a former schoolmate. He’d had a difficult life. She listened to him. She was sad. She brought that meeting and conversation to us. She cried. We were quiet throughout.
The appearance.
The moving recounting.
The feel of it.
I lied. Am not watch-
ing defense team at trial. In-
stead The Silence by
Don DeLillo, (twice) --
super bowl sunday, twenty
twenty two, (oh dear...)
choosing artful words
instead of chicanery --
counting steps to door
I am and have been a stalwart watcher of the House Managers' presentations.
Not only thoroughly thoughtful and pertinent, but a record for historical reference.
Can't see anything but cold recalcitrance should Republicans fail to to concede the clarity and urgency of the case presented against the former president.
We are all strangers.
All monks, as is well known, are unmarried, and hermits more unmarried than the rest of them. Not that I have anything against women. I see no reason why a man can’t love God and a woman at the same time. If God was going to regard women with a jealous eye, why did he go and make them in the first place? There is a lot of talk about a married clergy. Interesting. So far there has not been a great deal said about married hermits. Well, anyway, I have the place full of ikons of the Holy Virgin.
One might say I had decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world. So perhaps I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves. I attempt to cultivate this plant without comment in the middle of the night and water it with psalms and prophecies in silence. It becomes the most rare of all the trees in the garden, at once the primordial paradise tree, the axis mundi, the cosmic axle, and the Cross. Nulla silva talem profert. There is only one such tree. It cannot be multiplied. It is not interesting.
(— from, Day of a Stranger by Thomas Merton)
Why not call one another by each one’s living name?
Silentio!
Response?
MU
Senate republicans move toward jury nullification.
That’s when you know the defendant is guilty, but you don’t care.
Something very disturbing about their strategy.
For those who value truth and action predicated on truth...
Deep desolation, followed by antagonistic anarchy.
indefensible
trying to end constitutional democracy
the insurrecting mob
the insurrecting mobster
our fatal future
Stand still!
Good
Turns
Around you from you within you as you are
Comes up east goes down west
We are surrounded
Stand (still) for everyone everything
Bows with gratitude
