Robert F Kennedy --
shot and killed in 1968 --
reading about the death
and investigation of same
Such a pivotal year
my life encompasses
the over half a century death
bringing episode back clearly
Facts are pesky and slippery
it's why we try to avoid them
bullets have no conscience
nor those who dispense them
we don't know
we do know
we'll never know
of course we know
who benefits --
who knows
and if knowing had feet
only empty shoes remain
In prison Friday morning, German and English, poem by Hölderlin:
Der Spaziergang
Ihr Wälder schön an der Seite,
Am grünen Abhang gemalt,
Wo ich umher mich leite,
Durch süße Ruhe bezahlt
Für jeden Stachel im Herzen,
Wenn dunkel mir ist der Sinn,
Den Kunst und Sinnen hat Schmerzen
Gekostet von Anbeginn.
Ihr lieblichen Bilder im Tale,
Zum Beispiel Gärten und Baum,
Und dann der Steg, der schmale,
Der Bach zu sehen kaum,
Wie schön aus heiterer Ferne
Glänzt einem das herrliche Bild
Der Landschaft, die ich gerne
Besuch in Witterung mild.
Die Gottheit freundlich geleitet
Uns erstlich mit Blau,
Hernach mit Wolken bereitet,
Gebildet wölbig und grau,
Mit sengenden Blitzen und Rollen
Des Donners, mit Reiz des Gefilds,
Mit Schönheit, die gequollen
Vom Quell ursprünglichen Bilds.
(—Poem by Friedrich Hölderlin, 1770-1843)
Out for a Walk
The margins of the forest are beautiful,
As if painted onto the green slopes.
I walk around, and sweet peace
Rewards me for every thorn
In my heart, when my mood has grown
Dark, for right from the very beginning
Art and thinking have cost me pain.
There are lovely pictures in the valley,
For example the gardens and trees,
And the narrow footbridge, and the brook,
Barely visible. How beautifully
The landscape shines, cheerfully distant,
Like a splendid picture, where I come
To visit when the weather is mild.
A kindly divinity leads us on at first
With blue, then it prepares clouds
Shaped like gray domes, with
Searing lightning and rolling thunder,
Then comes the loveliness of the fields,
And beauty wells forth from
The source of the primal image.
(—Poem by Friedrich Hölderlin)
Notes
During the long years of his insanity, Hölderlin was occasionally able to focus his mind long enough to write presentable poetry, some of which resulted from supervised walks he was taken on through the countryside around Tübingen. I've translated the poem's German title, which is simply "The Walk," to reflect this. In several of these late poems, Nature reveals itself in the form of pictures. As the poet walks outdoors, what he sees is not Nature itself, but rather images or reflections of Nature, a kind of virtual reality.
If you visit the “Hölderlin Tower” on the bank of the Neckar River in Tübingen today, you can stand in the small apartment where he was looked after for over 35 years, and where it is not hard to imagine how looking through the windows toward the surrounding countryside might have eventually seemed like looking at pictures hanging on the wall.
Website and Translations Copyright © 2022 by James Mitchell
The attentive interest to Hölderlin's words and one another's observations made the morning a lively investigation.
Sehr gemütlichkeit.
I loved studying pre-Socratic philosophy as an undergraduate. Peter Kingsley reminds me: “…[T]he one thing Parmenides’ teacher and guide introduced him to was stillness: hêsychia.” (p.44, Reality, Kingsley)
HESY’CHIA (Hêsuchia), the personification of tranquillity and peace, is called a daughter of Dice, that is, Justice. (Pind. Ol. I’ve. 18, Pyth. viii. 1, Fragm. 228. P.669, ed.Boeckh.) Source: Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. cf. https://www.theoi.com/Daimon/Hesykhia.html
What will be is not as interesting as what is.
Nor is what has been as interesting as what is.
Inter-esse in Latin means “between — to be.”
Makes me wonder — does truly to be mean “to be between”?
Something interesting is something we might get into, be surrounded by, find ourselves in the middle of.
“What is” is centric.
It is where we truly exist and dwell when at home in our being.
Where justice and stillness cannot be divided.
May all beings come to dwell in their true home!
As students of philosophy and history, when anomalies arise, you have to take note.
In 2004 a senior advisor to President George W. Bush famously told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community.” They believed people could find solutions to problems through careful study of discernible reality. But, the aide continued, Suskind’s worldview was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” the aide said. “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality— judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (--Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004, at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html
We appear to be in a moment when the reality-based community is challenging the ability of the MAGA Republicans to create their own reality. (--Letters from an American, September 25, 2024, Heather Cox Richardson, Sep 26)
Reality is a sometime thing.
If you have, by some fluke, garnered power to yourself, there is the temptation to believe in and act on your ability to change reality. It happens to presidents and it happens to assassins. You believe you can change history.
But changing ontological (metaphysical) reality is a deeper task. After all, it is said, reality is reality, a tautology currently morphed into the contemporary allocution "it is what it is."
George Bush, Dick Cheney, and their cohorts created the Iraq-United States war. They believed, and successfully, that the American people would affirm their propaganda that Saddam Hussein (not a likable man) was somehow responsible in a roundabout way for the 9/11 attacks on America.
These days, the MAGA creature roams through the land expurgating and secreting lies and exaggerations, blatant lies and false exaggerations, into wide-eyed and remorseless followers.
Creating one's own reality, while sounding like a sound influencer promulgation, is not as useful as advertised.
Ontology seeks reality.
on·tol·o·gy
/änˈtäləjē/
noun
noun: ontology; plural noun: ontologies
As a first approximation, ontology is the study of what there is. Some contest this formulation of what ontology is, so it’s only a first approximation. Many classical philosophical problems are problems in ontology: the question whether or not there is a god, or the problem of the existence of universals, etc.. These are all problems in ontology in the sense that they deal with whether or not a certain thing, or more broadly entity, exists. But ontology is usually also taken to encompass problems about the most general features and relations of the entities which do exist. There are also a number of classic philosophical problems that are problems in ontology understood in this way. For example, the problem of how a universal relates to a particular that has it (assuming there are universals and particulars), or the problem of how an event like John eating a cookie relates to the particulars John and the cookie, and the relation of eating, assuming there are events, particulars and relations. These kinds of problems quickly turn into metaphysics more generally, which is the philosophical discipline that encompasses ontology as one of its parts. The borders here are a little fuzzy. But we have at least two parts to the overall philosophical project of ontology, on our preliminary understanding of it: first, say what there is, what exists, what the stuff of reality is made out of, secondly, say what the most general features and relations of these things are.
(--Stanford Enclyopedia of Philosophy, under Logic and Ontology, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-ontology/#Onto)
We suffer "what there is."
And while we share the same Reality in some absolute sense, we diverge into separate realities in multifarious relative senses.
Bush and Cheney's reality. Donald Trump's reality. Vladimir Putin's reality. The Mayor of New York City's reality. Caitlin Clark's reality. The Boston Red Sox reality.
And into what part of ontological reality does the phrase "Jesus suffered for/with us" fall?
Anyone's opinion of me or you, positive or negative, is not me or you. Perhaps applicable in a relative sense, but more likely not absolutely.
The matter of discovering our own isomorphic interconnection with absolute reality is a worthy inquiry and worthwhile engagement.
Don't let anyone define you. Don't let those puffed up by their personal opinion create the world within which they want you to serve them.
A Koan from the Mumonkan, “Ruiyan Calls His Master,” Case 12.
The Case:
Every day Ruiyan would call to himself, “Master, Master!”
And every day he would respond, “Yes, yes.”
Then he would say, “Be awake! Be alert!”
“Yes!”
“From now on, don’t be fooled by anything.”
“No, I won’t be!”
https://ancientforestzen.wordpress.com/2013/03/31/master-master/
Ha!
Take that!
(Did you just slap me upside my head?)
“Being with you, and not being with you, is the only way I have to measure time.” —Borges—
Borges went blind, wrote
Each word seeing for him, page
After own landscape
Someone pointed out that no one was punished for the craven disinformation invasion of Iraq in 2003. The executive office of Bush/Cheney faced no consequences.
No one knows with certainty how many people have been killed and wounded in Iraq since the 2003 United States invasion. However, we know that between 186,694 -- 210,038 Iraqi civilians have died and a total of 280,771 -- 315,190 have died from direct war related violence caused by the U.S., its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces from the time of the invasion through March 2023. The violent deaths of Iraqi civilians have occurred through aerial bombing, shelling, gunshots, suicide attacks, and fires started by bombing. Many civilians have also been injured.
Because not all war-related deaths have been recorded accurately by the Iraqi government and the U.S.-led coalition, the numbers are likely much higher. Several estimates based on randomly selected household surveys place the total death count among Iraqis in the hundreds of thousands.
We are able to hold accountable, rightfully or not, a single man for a single death which happened in 1998.
The state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams on Tuesday evening by lethal injection, over the objections of the local prosecutor whose office obtained Mr. Williams’s murder conviction in 2003.
Mr. Williams, who for decades maintained his innocence, had in recent days sought clemency from the governor and a stay of execution from the State Supreme Court. But on Monday, both the governor, Mike Parson, and the State Supreme Court turned him down, and on Tuesday the U.S. Supreme Court, his last hope, declined to intervene.
He was pronounced dead at 6:10 p.m. at a state prison in Bonne Terre, the Missouri Department of Corrections said in a statement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/24/us/marcellus-williams-execution-missouri.html
Time doesn't make us forget. Sometimes it just makes us addled and incurious, and content to let bygones be forgone manipulation and beyond the law.
Mr Williams may have been guilty. Messrs Bush and Cheney may have been guilty. I might be guilty.
The death of any individual, or hundreds of thousands of individuals, is a serious occurrence. But it is strange that one atrocity and another atrocity receives differing judicial condemnation or annulment based on hierarchal consideration.
There is another former president whose crimes are documented, tried and convicted, but who remains free and veritably immune from any verifiable consequences.
I am sorry for Ms. Gayle's death. I am sorry for Mr. Williams' death. I am sorry for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths based on highly doubtful rationale of the war-makers in Washington DC.
I remain unconvinced.
But willing to pray.
For some sanity and rethinking.
For all of us.
Iain McGilchrist reminds us that the word intelligence comes from Latin words meaning "to read between."
The Online Etymology Dictionary lists this:
late 14c., "the highest faculty of the mind, capacity for comprehending general truths;" c. 1400, "faculty of understanding, comprehension," from Old French intelligence (12c.) and directly from Latin intelligentia, intellegentia "understanding, knowledge, power of discerning; art, skill, taste," from intelligentem (nominative intelligens) "discerning, appreciative," present participle of intelligere" to understand, comprehend, come to know." This is from assimilated form of inter "between" (see inter-) + legere "choose, pick out, read," from PIE root *leg- (1) "to collect, gather," with derivatives meaning "to speak (to 'pick out words')."
To read between has rich implication. To see connection, to apprehend that which lay between differing references or resources, to see what is not apparently visible lingering in the interstices of seemingly disparate definitions or points of view.
The intelligent person is willing to go there.
Benefitting us all.
Peter Kingsley, in dialogue with Adyashanti, quotes Carl Gustav Jung as saying:
The process of individuation is hell, there's nothing more lonely, more solitary, more painful -- because it is the process of dying. Individuation is surrendering oneself to the impersonal.
A teaching of Tuesday morning.
With the silence and invisibility of saints, bodhisattvas, beings of light, buddhas, christs, and gifting teachers wandering deep within us.
One car goes by — time
Four thirty Tuesday morning —
On this bed, duvet
Seasoning warmth as monks chant
Prime in France — another car
There’s something to this.
Dōgen, in his Genjokoan, wrote:
To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand dharmas [i.e. an aspect of truth or reality]. To be enlightened by the ten thousand dharmas is to free one's body and mind and those of others. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this traceless enlightenment is continued forever.”
I’ll sit with it.
In prison today, remembering something written in the Bronx in 1969:
Blend and comprehend,
what, scattered, aches for wholeness.
Then again:
Find your soul, musician,
and you shall be
what your hand's eyes
playfully see
We were speaking about the integration beyond perception and conceptualization. The ways the brain forages the unknown seeking connections.
The originary that gave birth to myth and folklore, legend and philosophical metaphysics prior to both experience and thought.
Vietnam was our national obsession as the 60’s ebbed. The prior year's assassinations of MLK and RFK still smarted, not to mention the unfathomable narrative of Thomas Merton’s sudden and strange death in Thailand following his talk on Marxism and Monasticism. The incredulity of the Warren Commission's Report on the 1963 assassination of JFK left many with great mistrust of government and the shaded untruths it told.
The need to reach beyond the stated, to investigate below the untrustworthy surface, to try to determine whether hope and goodness were fools' gold for the naive believer and patriotic saluting hand.
Prison conversations are sometimes like a miner's helmet light in a dark stretch of tunnel. And still we laugh, zig and zag through insights and perplexities, honestly ponder what cannot be grasped.
One of the men had the enormous dictionary and looked up the word "paradox."
We conjectured the term "uni-vox" was an interesting antinomic/intersection to "para-dox".
Go figure!
Old age is merely an elderly state of mind.
The state of Maine is a reflective corner of the United States. Bordering New Hampshire, Quebec, and New Brunswick Canada.
It is morning once a day. Night comes and things get quiet.
The mountain outside remains where it has been for lone long years. There’s coffee left over from yesterday.
It is the anniversary of Dōgen’s death in 1253. (ありがとう, Arigatō, Thank you!)
God, as often reflexively said, is good.
Today I contemplated
the principle of being at peace,
whatever circumstances are encountered.
The sense of rest is still with me.
This purpose does not admit any slackening.
How could I get sick and tired of things due to old age?
—Wu Yubi (1391-1469)
Two cats at foot of bed, at screened window allowing cool first day of autumn breeze, contemplate damage if I don’t soon feed them.
Hunters ready to pounce.
My life becomes impertinent. I’m good with that. Ambitious dreams all committed hara kiri a long time ago. No one attended the funereal ceremony.
If I were to throw a party inviting all my friends, there would be no one to respond, no dishes would be required, no cleanup afterwards.
All … I am … is happy.
Morning candle atop upright rowboat burns for all needing to be remembered. (I salute and pray for your well-being!)
There’s a chocolate donut from Moody’s Diner by breadbox. Eucharist.
Being at peace is nothing to sneeze at.
Ah…ah…ah…achoo!!!
Gesundheit!
Dänke Schoen!
Bitte sehr!