The ancient now

 Ancient Greek conclusion of drama could be contemporary Boston.

PROMETHEUS

The time is past for words; earth quakes 

Sensibly: hark! pent thunder rakes 

The depths, with bellowing din 

Of echoes rolling ever nigher: 

Lightnings shake out their locks of fire; 

The dust cones dance and spin; 

The skipping winds, as if possessed 

By faction-north, south, east and west, 

Puff at each other; sea 

And sky are shook together: Lo 

The swing and fury of the blow 

Wherewith Zeus smiteth me 

Sweepeth apace, and, visibly, 

To strike my heart with fear. See, see, 

Earth, awful Mother! Air, 

That shedd'st from the revolving sky 

On all the light they see thee by, 

What bitter wrongs I bear! 

(--from Internet classics archive) 

Another translation:

PROMETHEUS

[1080] Indeed, now it has passed from word to deed—the earth rocks, the echoing thunder-peal from the depths rolls roaring past me; the fiery wreathed lightning-flashes flare forth, and whirlwinds toss the swirling dust; the blasts of all the winds leap forth and set in hostile array their embattled strife; the sky is confounded with the deep. Behold, this stormy turmoil advances against me visibly, sent by Zeus to frighten me. O holy mother mine, O you firmament that revolves the common light of all, you see the wrongs I suffer! 

[Amid thunder and lightning Prometheus vanishes from sight; and with him disappear the daughters of Oceanus.]

(--From PROMETHEUS BOUND , TRANSLATED BY H. W. SMYTH)

 We are translating human experience into the ancient now.

waiting for useful repair to retrieve and rebuild with restrained creativity

Keeping watch last night.

A solitude of sorrow for wholeness to be retrieved.

Quote: (from The Dawn of a New Age? By I. M. Oderberg) 

"An illustration of the emerging world picture appears in a remarkable, indeed exciting, study of the life and work of Erwin Schrodinger, Nobel Prize winner for his pioneering efforts in the field of wave mechanics. The philosophical side of his genius stands out in this book by Walter Moore (Schrodinger, Life and Thought, 1989). According to him, Schrodinger claimed that

consciousness is associated with learning by a living substance. The knowing how of life is consciousness, whether it occurs in an animal nervous system, a plant or an amoeba. Living processes in general are associated with consciousness whenever they represent the emergence of something new. . . Schrodinger suggests further that such consciousness is intimately associated with organic evolution. (-- pp. 463-4)

Schrodinger felt that the claim made by his colleagues that his concept of the "real world" and consciousness arises merely out of his own consciousness, was a "false conclusion," and if this interpretation were widely accepted it would let loose "a pandemonium of logical consequences" (p. 464). One would be the "fruitless quest for the place where mind acts on matter or vice-versa." In this connection, Schrodinger quoted Carl Jung:

"All science is a function of the soul, in which all knowledge is rooted. The soul is the greatest of all cosmic wonders, it is the conditio sine qua non of the world as an object. It is remarkable that Western mankind, with few exceptions, has accorded so little value to this fact. The flood of external objects of cognizance has made the subject of all cognizance withdraw into the background, and often into apparent nonexistence." (-- 1946 Eranos Meeting, Switzerland, quoted in Moore, p. 464)

Professor Moore adds that "Schrodinger agrees with Jung that science must be made over again, but great care will be needed in changing foundations that have endured for at least two thousand years" (ibid.)"

http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/science/sc-imo6.htm

What withdraws from ego and fear is being itself displaced by terror.

There is a watchful gaze that knows the watcher is himself capable of killing and hatred. And with that awareness, carefully scrutinized, comes the realization it need no longer honor the terror of the ego. Which, like pocketknife folded into leather case on belt, there it remains unopened, not plunging into greed, desire, or revenge, but waiting for useful repair to retrieve and rebuild with restrained creativity the wounded broken pieces of human body, spirit, mind.

I know what I am. 

Now, we, all of us, are finally free to attend to the genesis wording forwarding the omnipresent origin of the universe.

Let us be told -- again -- there is no longer a need for ego's destruction. 

Let it live with love and be transformed! 

feeling common ground

In Maine, up by brook,
 water comes down mountain, passes

under plank-bridge, continues
toward yurt, around bend.

I pray with water
for those in Boston,

those killed, those injured,
all frightened.

We listen, seeking deep ground
feeling common sound...

Keep Clear

 Some days, witnessing the nothing there, mind is affected. These days, witnessing the disintegration of this mind, nothing is effected.

It happens slowly. Words of Yeats poem and Achebe novel and Pema Chodron adds 'when' before "things fall apart' -- the effective deterioration and affective destabilization run in silent depth through a very large emptiness through which not anything appears as it is.

The symbols have had what they carried fall weighted away.

"It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit, when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past, when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain, when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless."
--Abraham Joshua Heschel, in God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism

There's a debate going on in America. Some want to preserve their ability to shoot and kill, animals or 'bad guys.' The other side wishes guns and ammunition to be more circumspectly portioned out. Parents and families of slaughtered children feel powerfully about this. Those who hand out money, profiting from sales and receipts, feel their economic rights strongly endangered. Another group, those who feel they'd like to have enough guns and ammo to countervail an arrogant and threatening government when the time comes -- these are the most serious.

I own only the ability to cry, to bleed, to suffer pain, and to die. I stockpile these vulnerabilities in places anyone could find, anyone could manipulate, anyone could have if they want them.

Perhaps this is what both Buddha and Jesus meant when they presented themselves strangely earlier in our history.

There is suffering, Siddhartha Gautama said. Just that: there is suffering. We might diminish it, understand it, live through it, even make it nothing in our personal universe -- but there is suffering in life.

Isaiah wrote about the Suffering Servant. Jesus, it is said, became the words of Isaiah and the very Word through which God could be heard in human language. The mystery of his suffering and death remains iconic in our consciousness. The lore of resurrection remains impossible for us to sort through and fathom. Suffering in this pageant of pathos cannot be taken away -- only lived through. (For the religious zealots among us: There's no reason for self-imposition of suffering -- that only points out profound mistrust of life to provide it to you.) You are no holier if you harm and mutilate or suicide yourself. It does not please or serve 'God' to harm self or others in order to better things. Thank you for the thought, but our intentions to short-cut or improve our lot is self-serving masochism or sadism best left at a therapist's office.

We might, instead, become mystics.

Ms. Tippett: One scientist talked to me about the spirituality of a scientist, and here's how he described it. He said, "The spirituality of a scientist is like the spirituality of a mystic, which is that in any given moment you are discerning truth as best you can and you're also completely aware that you have everything yet to discover." 

An evolutionary biologist who's not religious recently said to me that he thinks scientists need to recover the word spirituality. He said we talk about it. We talk about the spirit of inquiry. So I just want to ask you, you know, very personally. Like, you know, if you did use that phrase, the spirituality of scientists, what would that mean for you? 

Dr. Krauss: I think you've captured some of it. If I had to use the term, I'd use awe in the wonder of nature and the realization that spirituality isn't having the answers before you ask the questions. And that's the main thing: that real spirituality comes from asking the questions and opening your mind to what the answers might be. 

(--from, Transcript for Our Origins and the Weight of Space with Lawrence Krauss, April 11, 2013, with Krista Tippett: On Being. "The physicist Lawrence Krauss says that one of the values of science is to make us uncomfortable.")

There's a lot we don't know, can't see,  or hear, and have no idea of wherefore or whither or whence.
The universe, you'll be happy to know, is as dark as our consciousness. 'Dark' as in unknown. Not 'dark' as in malevolent or cruel. We don't understand suffering and we don't understand dark emptiness. To approach one or the other you have to score a union card that says: 'Admit One Mystic.'

Krauss was asked about dark matter:

Audience Participant: Thank you. Can you explain to us what dark energy and dark matter are and why — excuse me, how — it's important to us? 

Dr. Krauss: Well, they are almost everything in the universe. Let me make it quite clear that you are indeed far more insignificant than you ever imagined. [Laughter] 

Dr. Krauss: Not just you, but you, not me, but all of you, but, uh, no, all of us, because we have learned that, if you'd look at everything we could see, the beauty of the night sky here and it's nice and dark at night. I was looking last night at the stars. 

The beauty of the night sky and everything we see is just a bit of cosmic pollution in a universe full of dark matter and dark energy. Ninety-nine percent of the universe, 30 percent of the universe roughly is this dark matter, which is made, we're reasonably convinced, of some new type of elementary particle that doesn't exist here on earth. Seventy percent is dark energy, which is the energy of nothing. [Ibid]

 Lately, my attention turns to aesthetics. It was a seeming throwaway sentence by Peter Singer ending his introduction the the section "Animals and the Environment" in The Moral of The Story, An Anthology of Ethics through Literature (Edited by Peter Singer and Renata Singer, c.2005). He wrote: "We may have reached the point at which aesthetic judgment takes over from ethical argument." 

In all, Kant’s theory of pure beauty had four aspects: 

• its freedom from concepts, 

• its objectivity,

• the disinterest of the spectator, and

• its obligatoriness.

1.  By “concept,” Kant meant “end,” or “purpose,” that is, what the cognitive powers of human understanding and imagination judge applies to an object, such as with “it is a pebble,” to take an instance. But when no definite concept is involved, as with the scattered pebbles on a beach, the cognitive powers are held to be in free play; and it is when this play is harmonious that there is the experience of pure beauty. 
2. There is also objectivity and universality in the judgment then, according to Kant, since the cognitive powers are common to all who can judge that the individual objects are pebbles. These powers function alike whether they come to such a definite judgment or are left suspended in free play, as when appreciating the pattern along the shoreline. This was not the basis on which the apprehension of pure beauty was obligatory, however. According to Kant, that derived from the selflessness of such an apprehension, what was called in the eighteenth century its 
3.  “disinterest.” This arises because pure beauty does not gratify us sensuously; nor does it induce any desire to possess the object. It “pleases,” certainly, but in a distinctive intellectual way. Pure beauty, in other words, simply holds our mind’s attention: we have no further concern than contemplating the object itself. Perceiving the object in such cases is an end in itself; it is not a means to a further end, and is enjoyed for its own sake alone. 
4. It is because Morality requires we rise above ourselves that such an exercise in selfless attention becomes obligatory. Judgments of pure beauty, being selfless, initiate one into the moral point of view. “Beauty is a symbol of Morality,” and “The enjoyment of nature is the mark of a good soul” are key sayings of Kant. The shared enjoyment of a sunset or a beach shows there is harmony between us all, and the world.

             [bullets and numbers added]
  (--Barry Hartley Slater, on Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, A Peer-Reviewed Academic Resource, "Aesthetics")  http://www.iep.utm.edu/aestheti/  

There's a lot to sit with.

Let's do just that . . .

and see.

Here and how

I thought about a craigslist purchase. But how do you establish trust with pictures and words?
The aesthetic must be sensed, felt, and seen.
There is no abstract spirituality. No theoretical intimate.
It is the near that we need.
The near and now. 

Slow walking, slow talking

Fifty years later!
What a great idea Vatican II was in 1963.
There's a wonderful Zen saying: "Better to see the face than hear the name."
I'd prefer seeing the face of Christ in the body of creation. More than exegetical ecclesial documentation, perhaps a half-century (this time) of deliberations might give way to the Christian of "now" Rahner spoke about when he called it the "future" -- “a genuine experience of God emerging from the very heart of our existence.” Rahner was saying, “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all” (Theol. Invent. XX, 149).
The embarrassment, a word well chosen, is the church's attempt to own Christ rather than embodying Christ in the emergence.
Fifty years contemplation!
Let's face it!

Addendum: Lyrics from "My Fair Lady" apply here:

Show me! Show me! Don't talk of love lasting through time.Make me no undying vow. Show me now!Sing me no song! Read me no rhyme!
Don't waste my time, Show me!

(Lyrics and music by Lerner and Loewe)

Waiting to be seen through

Hermit says: I am good alone.

God says: I am "hier mit allein."

Become what God is: here, with, alone.

Solitude includes
              seeing through
                                     all...

Ecological mind

Singer wrote something to the effect that we might be moving from ethical argument to aesthetic judgment.

To feel, rather than intellectualize.

To sense, rather than compare concepts.

To be alive, not merely listed as a number.

Try love

Violence is not love.

War is violence.

Try something different.

Don't say more than asked

Maybe the world is a vale (or, veil) of tears. I don't know. At times I think that might be so.
There's some talk.

     An hour is not a house

An hour is not a house,

a life is not a house,

you do not go through them as if

they were doors to another.

Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,

four walls, a ceiling.

An hour can be dropped like a glass.

Some want quiet as others want bread.

Some want sleep.

My eyes went

to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.

         (Poem by Jane Hirshfield, Source: Poetry April 2013).

Have we? been, left, alone?

It's ok if we have.

It does account for the busyness.

The attempts to explain.

Resolving nothing; ending the illusion

How distressing -- there's no trust!
Nonviolent anarchism, peaceful auto-didacticism, caring hospitality -- these are antidotes.
Try these!

Not-yet; spoken

I'd rather be alive while alive. But, when dead, who knows? It hasn't been worded yet.

I've walked through playwright's literary Grover's Corners and heard the words of the cemetery residents about the living. (TW)
I've read the words of Harvard biblical scholar saying that "The language of a people is its fate." (AW)
I've read both of them over a forty five year period. Thornton Wilder and Amos Wilder were brothers. I didn't know that until recently.

And even when Wilder bases a play (or its title anyway) on an overtly religious text, “And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead”—from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer for burial at sea—he challenges conventional piety. The dead, in a clear precursor of Our Town, lose their personalities at the Last Judgment. The Empress reflects:

We still cling obstinately to our identity, as though there were something valuable in it. This very moment I feel relics of pleasure in the fact that I am myself and no one else. Yet in a moment, if there is a moment, we shall all be reduced to our quintessential matter, and you, Mr. Nissem, will be exactly indistinguishable from me. God himself will not be able to tell the Empress of Newfoundland from the Reverend Dr. Cosroe. (CP, 39) 

The souls are "panic-stricken." This does not mean that the collection as a whole denies an afterlife: the plays of Malchus and Childe Roland imply the immortality of the individual soul. Nor is the idea that the soul dissolves into the cosmos a particularly new one. Edgar Allan Poe in Eureka (1848) rhapsodizes about just such an event: “Think that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness—that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah.”65 That is, the universe, both man and matter, is the diffused God, and God will cyclically reunite in one supreme consciousness.  

     Nevertheless, it is a painful idea for many.Tennyson is horrified in In Memoriam to think that his dear friend A. H. H. might be swallowed up in some oversoul: “Remerging in the general Soul / Is faith as vague as all unsweet” (Section 47). And the great Catholic existentialist Miguel de Unamuno, whose work Wilder knew, dismissed the entire idea: “All this talk of a man surviving in his children, or in his works, or in the universal consciousness, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only those who suffer from affective stupidity, and who, for the rest, may be persons of cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess great talent, or what we call great talent, and yet be stupid as regards the feelings and even morally imbecile.”66 “And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead” may well provoke religious meditation, but it is not of a comforting sort. Of course, if the world is only material, then the ego is extinguished in death. But this playlet suggests that even if the world is not reducible to the material, the ego may still be extinguished  

(--pp.25-26 Thornton Wilder & Amos Wilder, Writing Religion in Twentieth-Century America, by Christopher J. Wheatley, University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, IN.)   http://www3.undpress.nd.edu/excerpts/P01489-ex.pdf

Heidegger said that language is the house of being. Words, then, might form rooms, phrases sketch horizons of dwelling possibilities for our future

Let's put this in context. I am listening to the 9/11 WTC Debate: collapse by fire or explosive controlled demolition?

"On Sunday afternoon, March 6th, [2011] at the Boulder campus of the University of Colorado, Colorado 9/11 Visibility hosted a debate between Richard Gage, AIA (American Institute of Architects), and Chris Mohr, Denver investigative journalist and nondenominational minister.  This is the audo of that historic debate."http://visibility911.libsyn.com/9-11-wtc-debate-collapse-by-fire-or-explosive-controlled-demolition

 It is intelligent and cogent.

The most significant change in world political landscape is also a religious iconography of shifting belief and doubt. It  remains troubling and definitive for the advance of terrorism into the household of being. Some say the United States is becoming the most surveilled, imprisoned, as well as the largest exporter of mercenaries to the world. Warfare, black-ops, assassinations, and coups are ready weapons of this fearful mindset. It is a difficult evolution to understand.

While the questions from 2001 will still be there to be looked at for generations to come, the fright is concealed caprice. The mood of terror permeates corridors of institutions from school to bank, government to train station. Every communication is under surveillance. (Will we find a way to make the dead suspects too?) Is Grover's Corners a dangerous group to be infiltrated? Anyone can be assassinated by a vigilant patriot. No one is beyond suspicion. That's the fear. It is being legislated.

It is about our town. One day in one life -- choose that -- and Emily chooses her birthday. She wonders if anybody ever appreciates their life while they are alive. It passes so swiftly. Each moment, experienced fully, would collapse us, so it seems.

A man we know phoned from prison this morning. He wondered about and wished to prove wrong the statement: "This present moment is all there is." The mistake, (if you could call it that), I told him he was making was Cartesian. By thinking that the sentence suggests that the present moment is separated from "all that is" would be something to diminish its import. But if you see the sentence as suggesting that "all that is" impregnates this present moment with itself, then there is no separation, never could be. It is all here. Everyone is. Each event as well. Hence, to experience fully the present moment fully without trying to grasp, enclose, isolate, push away, or comprehend all that is there, is to see one's way through without collapse or devastation.

"We are poor passing facts" wrote Robert Lowell.

Longing for our living name.

Not yet spoken.

Is this why the One-we-call-God has no name?

Yet? And yet, and yet, and yet.

No way out

There are days that close in.

This one did.

Close in.

When are you tomorrow?

Yesterday, 45 years gone
Went Dr King.
Today, I am yesterday
Lamenting loss

Words from beyond

Who writes poems

Rarely does

Not

All sorts of useful things may be written in perfectly adequate prose: editorials, history, philosophy, theology, even lasting novels. But there is no such thing as a perfectly adequate poem, because a poem into which some strange and surprising excellence has not entered, a poem that is not in some inexplicable way beyond the will of the poet, is not a poem. 
(--PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE, In Praise of Rareness, “The more respect you have for poetry, the less of it you will find adequate to your taste and needs.” -- Christian Wiman) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/178842

A prayer for Thursday

Dear One
Allow us
to be
you
With gratitude

It might have to be

Oh how much trivial stuff there is in the world! Such as my thoughts, opinions, and resentments.

I am not fond of the Monsanto Protection Act signed into law by President Obama.

Curiously, I'm interested in the conversation some jurisdictions are having about mandating gun ownership by every household. Guns are not in my sights -- the poetry of Christian Wiman is.

from One Time  

by Christian Wiman 

2. 2047 Grace Street
But the world is more often refuge
than evidence, comfort and covert
for the flinching will, rather than the sharp
particulate instants through which God's being burns
into ours. I say God and mean more 
than the bright abyss that opens in that word.
I say world and mean less
than the abstract oblivion of atoms
out of which every intact thing emerges,
into which every intact thing finally goes.
I do not know how to come closer to God
except by standing where a world is ending
for one man. It is still dark,
and for an hour I have listened
to the breathing of the woman I love beyond
my ability to love. Praise to the pain
scalding us toward each other, the grief
beyond which, please God, she will live
and thrive. And praise to the light that is not
yet, the dawn in which one bird believes,
crying not as if there had been no night
but as if there were no night in which it had not been.  (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21964#sthash.G4vjG75A.dpuf )

 The need for guns relies on the need to forget our true relationship to one another. It is easier to kill another out of hatred or fear than it is to say "I hate you!" and let it go at that. Or: "I am afraid of you." and let that sink in to everyone in hearing proximity. It would mean we are available to what we really feel.

[Gabriel] Marcel on Disponibilité and Indisponibilité: Handy, Unhandy, Available, Unavailable 

We come up against a notion here which seems to me of capital importance but for which it is difficult to find an idiomatic English equivalent—at least neither I, nor the English translator of my previous work, Being and Having, managed to do so. The French terms I use are disponibilité and indisponibilité.  Literally, in English, one would render these as availability and unavailability, but it might sound more natural if one spoke of handiness and unhandiness, the basic idea being that of having or not having, in a given contingency, one’s resources to hand or at hand. The self-centred person, in this sense, is unhandy; I mean that he remains incapable of responding to calls made upon him by life, and I am not thinking merely of the appeals for help that may be made to him by the unfortunate. I mean rather that, over a much wider field, he will be incapable of sympathizing with other people, or even of imagining their situation. He remains shut up in himself, in the petty circle of his private experience, which forms a kind of hard shell round him that he is incapable of breaking through. He is unhandy from his own point of view and unavailable from the point of view of others.(--in Quantum Est In Rebus Inane, Philosophy, Literature, Logic, Language, and Orthodoxyhttp://kellydeanjolley.com/2011/07/18/212/)

I eat segments from grapefruit given Saskia by folks she liked so much staying at Mary House in Spencer near Trappist Monastery.

I wear Sterkowski Basque Beret from Warszawa arriving yesterday. It is oversized. I bought it a size or two larger than needed. You never know when size gives way to exigency.

If you do wrong and get beaten for it, what credit can you claim? But if you put up with suffering for doing what is right, this is acceptable in God’s eyes.It was for this you were called, since Christ suffered for you in just this way and left you an example, to have you follow in his footsteps. He did no wrong; no deceit was found in his mouth. When he was insulted, he returned no insult. When he was made to suffer, he did not counter with threats. Instead, he delivered himself up to the One who judges justly. In his own body he brought your sins to the cross, so that all of us, dead to sin, could live in accord with God’s will. By his wounds you were healed. At one time you were straying like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd, the guardian of your souls. 

(--From the first letter of the apostle Peter 2:11-25, Christians are strangers in this world; ttp://divineoffice.org)

 It is often mysterious what to think Peter or anyone else means by their words about "Christ" or "God." Time over Holy Week in stronghold of theological and liturgical catholic atmosphere deepens this mysterious metaphoric milieu of thought.

I become absent to my meanders.

While there I travel to evening wake then, next morning, to funeral and interment of mother of friend of Saskia. The memorials of mortality pass attention -- I will follow that way. And, truth be told, I'm not sure I care that such is the case even if it mattered that I cared. When I pray for the deceased, I pray, "God be with you!" I can think of no other words to say.

What does it mean to say: "God be with you"? Somewhere, someone translates: "Love be with you" or "Mercy be with you" or, "May you be at peace with what is with you." Maybe, if there is no "you" in the equation, one is saying. " May what is be what is!" This could be equally: "God is what is God."

These Poems, She Said  

These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man 
who would leave his wife and child because 
they made noise in his study. These are the poems 
of a man who would murder his mother to claim 
the inheritance. These are the poems of a man 
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not 
comprehend but which nevertheless
offended me. These are the poems of a man
who would rather sleep with himself than with women, 
she said. These are the poems of a man
with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s 
hands, woven of water and logic
and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These 
poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant 
as elm leaves, which if they love love only 
the wide blue sky and the air and the idea
of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said, 
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing. 
These poems, she said….
                                         You are, he said,
beautiful.
               That is not love, she said rightly. 

(--Poem by Robert Bringhurst, “These Poems, She Said”)

There is a need for words and a need to go beyond words. The unknown after death or the complete transcending reality evading perception or cognition -- is part of this absent meander.

"There is another world, but it is inside this one." - Paul Éluard

John Keats defined negative capability as a capacity for "being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

Just to look.

Even if not seeing.

Is sufficient.

It has to be.

What is; not me

Prayer does not reveal itself. Rather, prayer unveils the one praying, removing measurement and distance from awareness, leaving an unromantic gaze (as and into) the un-alone.

Nothing to pray to, nor to pray for. Only praying as.

In the eyes of many, hope may of course boil down to wishful thinking. [Gabriel] Marcel readily concedes that this happens many times, perhaps most of the time. Can hope escape this criticism? The answer is provided by the distinction between “hoping” and “hoping that. . . .” Genuine hope is unconditional hope. Genuine hope belongs to the field of “being” rather than “having” (another of Marcel’s favorite distinctions): the person who, “without any condition, without limitation, lives in absolute trust, shall experience the safety of ‘being’ or safety in ‘being,’ rather than the radical insecurity of ‘having.’” Absolute hope, beyond any condition and any image or representation, is interpreted by Marcel as the creature’s response to the infinite Being or even the absolute Thou—and here, of course, most if not all Buddhists will beg to differ.But we may be prepared to hear him when he observes: “Nobody can experience the lightness of living in hope unless he/she be fully liberated from the bonds of possession(s).” He adds, “We remain open to hope, even in a small way, provided there still are some cracks or chinks in the armor of possession, the armor of ‘having,’ built around us.” There is thus a fundamental distinction between hope and expectation, between hope and desire, between hope and self-centeredness. Hope—this is Marcel’s conclusion and last word—hope essentially is disponibilité (being or keeping oneself available, open, receptive).

(--from, "In Hope against Hope" A Christian Meditation in the Light of Buddhism, by Jacques Scheuer, In Monastic Interreligious Dialogue)  http://www.dimmid.org/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC=%7B5A5193BF-26B2-4FC1-A743-BC9574428D76%7D

Regarding the hopeless with fond emptiness is odd comfort. Sitting in Merton Retreat this Easter  Tuesday after walking vacated Snow Bowl where remnant melting mountainside holds sliding dusk silence in its fading tracks.

Expectations involve calculation, management, and—most of the time without our being aware of it (avidyâ)—the double-bind of desire: a relation of both controlling power and passive dependence between subject and object. Desire also includes a “spatialization” of time. All this is rather obvious in the question of the disciples after the resurrection of Jesus: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority” (Acts 1,6-7). No answer thus, except perhaps the following: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” (1,8). In order to realize that their question is meaningless, that it has no genuine object, the disciples will need a good forty or fifty days—or is it forty years, or forty kalpas?Hope seems quite close to the attitude of mu-shotoku: without expectation, without aim or intended object. Is it then a shift from object to subject? Or is it rather the attitude or quality of being unconcerned about subject or object? One should perhaps say: there is hope but no hoping individual—in the same way one says: there is suffering, but no suffering subject. To hope is to remain in this pure openness. Such an understanding and practice of hope would, in a paradoxical way, come quite close to the Chan and Zen tradition of “great doubt” (dai-gi). From a Christian perspective, one would dare say that the true subject of hope is “He who comes,” He who, through his coming, makes hope possible, is the source of hope, opens a space for hope. This coming One is the “Deus semper maior” (E. Przywara), the ever greater Godhead. (Ibid) 

Prayer is misunderstood. It's not meant to get you anything or get you anywhere.

What then is prayer for?

Ask away.

"My God my bright abyss / into which all my longing  will not go / I come to the edge of all I know / and believing nothing believe in this:"
(--final stanza of unfinished poem by Christian Wiman, recent editor of Poetry magazine)

This.

And this alone.

Edging toward what falls freely forever through nothing there being fallen through.

Some call...

 God.

Not me!

Old monk confused

Tommy had a close call.  But he'll live some more. He said so in the call to him at VA hospital in Boston.

Hell, these days everything seems countdown. The old monk in kitchen door leaning on cane looked confused. He might have been looking for his friends who might have stopped by towards dawn for coffee and chocolate after long vigil. But they might have stopped coming years ago, having died, as his long gaze seemed to inquire whether they had returned as someone said they might.

But, seemingly, not.

Tommy, though...

I'm glad he'll continue on.

We've got lies to tell.

Three word phrases to frame.

Until no more.

rephrasing recomposition

You, friends, are rising through truth and love. Truly, you are rising! Blessings of Easter -- be empty tombs -- out from encrypting rock!

Easter

Bach Fugue!

There.

I enter there.

Before dawning

Meditation is realization in this moment of who-I-am.

Jeremiah laments, letter by letter, pleading: "Return again to the Lord your God."

This weekend

Note: all formal events at meetingbrook will not be held Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
A good holiday to each!

word me with silence: kindly, gently, long lovingly look

It is Holy Week.

Body meditates and mediates.

Is it a matter of metaphor? If it is: "The world is marketplace" -- then we are coin-spenders of the realm. If it is: "The world is a battle of good versus evil", then we are perpetual warriors and at war. Thomas Hobbes thinks, in war, with our "enemy" mentality, our lives are "nasty, brutish, and short."  

"Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." (Hobbes, from Leviathan)

But if, "The world is Being-Itself" -- then we are beings attempting to realize our true being-in-the-world. The metaphor leads the reality we follow. Amos Wilder (1895-1993), Harvard Biblical Scholar, wrote: "The language of a people is its fate." 

To me this suggests that what we call ourselves is what we become. The metaphors we use, the descriptors we employ, are roadmaps to a destination we are far too often surprised and shocked to be arriving at. We need to both watch our words, and word what we see ourselves becoming.

Sally McFague in Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology (1975), wrote:

Amos Wilder has written that "the language of a people is its fate."

Any human language represents a special kind of order superimposed upon existence. Generations live in it as a habitat in which they are born and die. Outside of it is nescience. . . . Perhaps one can say that nothing affects the significance of human existence more than the range and resource of our articulation, vocabulary, syntax and discourse.¹

It is almost a common assumption now that human beings are linguistic -- this, and not our reason (understood abstractly, non-linguistically) is what is most distinctive about us We are the ones who speak (reason or conceptualization is dependent on linguistic symbolization), who name all things and thus give order to our world and give ourselves a past and a future. George Steiner has written:

That articulate speech should be the line dividing man from the myriad forms of animate being, that speech should define man’s singular eminence above the silence of the plant and the grunt of the beast is classic doctrine well before Aristotle. . . . Possessed of speech, possessed by it, the word having chosen the grossness and infirmity of man’s condition for its own compelling life, the human person has broken free from the great silence of matter. Or, to use Ibsen’s image: struck with the hammer, the insensate ore has begun to sing.²

It is not only a philosopher such as Martin Heidegger who speaks of language as "the house of being," but almost universal notion that human beings are linguistic through and through.^2b If one notices the way an animal looks at something as against the way we do, the difference is language -- we can do something other than smell things and decide whether they are good to eat or dangerous. We can remember, generalize, hope, particularize, compare, contrast, wish, and so on, all because the object before us is also a "word," a symbol, that can enter into all sorts of relations with other symbols.  

  http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=452&C=364

 If word becomes flesh and goes ahead of us toward an outcome both uncertain and undetermined, our language might wish to be carefully integrated with our imagination as we proceed toward our chosen and articulated destination.

Daniel Berrigan wrote: "bodies belong / where words / lead."

It is Holy Week.

Body meditates and mediates.

one more death

Doris writes: Behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed... (1Cor 15:51)

It is a week of death, of passing over, of biblical turning points and saying no to intubation.

Chinua Achebe earlier this week, and Marion Costin yesterday. These are family. 

Mr. Appiah, a professor of philosophy, found an “intense moral energy” in Mr. Achebe’s work, adding that it “captures the sense of threat and loss that must have faced many Africans as empire invaded and disrupted their lives.” (--from NYT Obituary)

Passover moon grows full. 

We become One by ceasing to be enslaved. To be enslaved is to be two. To enslave others is to be two.  To let be free is to approach One.

One,

more,

death.

To be set free. To free. To see One-Another.

Jesus was curious. He asked: "Who do you say I am?"

A Mother In A Refugee Camp

No Madonna and Child could touch
Her tenderness for a son
She soon would have to forget. . . .
The air was heavy with odors of diarrhea,
Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs
And dried-up bottoms waddling in labored steps
Behind blown-empty bellies. Other mothers there
Had long ceased to care, but not this one:
She held a ghost-smile between her teeth,
And in her eyes the memory
Of a mother’s pride. . . . She had bathed him
And rubbed him down with bare palms.
She took from their bundle of possessions
A broken comb and combed
The rust-colored hair left on his skull
And then—humming in her eyes—began carefully to part it.
In their former life this was perhaps
A little daily act of no consequence
Before his breakfast and school; now she did it
Like putting flowers on a tiny grave.

(—Poem by Chinua Achebe) 

Not something; nothing

"Man can embody truth but he cannot know it."  (William Butler Yeats)

Nothing can be

Closer

To the truth.

absent no one and nothing

This is the day I have entered so many places thinking I had it made, under control, aware of destiny and fate, ready to engage.

Only to find out I knew nothing, things fall apart, ignorant of what was before and behind, preparing to run away.

I don't dwell in that humbling land for too long. Each next step brings it back fresh and new in what presents itself. It is unnecessary to carry the failures of the past. Sufficient to say, and for the day, is what crumbles into the present on its way elsewhere.

Another motto for meetingbrook:

praeeste huc et nunc; deeste nemo et nil  

(present here and now; absent no one and nothing)  (wfh)

It does not belong to us to determine who is in who is out. If, and I repeat, if, there is a guiding spirit of well-being and wisdom pervading all existence emanating emergence from beyond being, i bow and affirm the mystery.

Each thing, each ray, each object, each being is prophetic voice sounding in stillness phonemes of phenomenal noumena.

We listen. Aliquid stat pro aliquo.  (Something stands for something else). (Latin saying) 

The semiotics of silence!

Darryl Whetter:  In your essay “How To Be Here,” you use the idea of haecceity. Does haecceitas announce a specific form or image? In the "creation" of a metaphor, are you recovering or achieving or finding something of that haecceitas? 

Tim Lilburn:  John Duns Scotus, from whom this phrase and notion comes, says that the thisness of a thing is unknowable (given the mind as it is now), but there. It’s the highest expression of the thing, but it can’t be known with precision or named. 

(-- Excerpts from “Listening with Courtesy: A Conversation with Tim Lilburn.”  Interview by Darryl Whetter.  [Studies in Canadian Literature, Fall 1997] http://finearts.uvic.ca/timlilburn/interviews.html

The "thisness" of the monastic monistic is only reached by attentive contemplation, a gazing that is open and welcoming.

Darryl Whetter:  In “Contemplation is Mourning,” there is a suggestion that “You will be shaved and narrowed by the barren strangeness of the / deer, the wastes of her oddness.” Is it important for us to be so shaved? 

Tim Lilburn:  No. That’s coming at it the wrong way; you just are shaved if you look long and deeply without presumption. That’s a large part of what looking is, the refusal of presumption or caricature. Otherwise what you’re seeing is simply yourself; you’re looking in the mirror everywhere. Being shaved is just the realization that all of your notions of power and centrality are stolen or made-up, it’s stolen fire. Hard looking can relieve you of this.
(Ibid)

When the quiet allows me into its presence, I drop everything thereupon and there-within. I remain where I am -- in transition from this place to no place -- two sips of coffee with no between.

Saskia brought rosewater and bread for communion before Quakers arrived in Merton Retreat. We prayed for all asking or promised, took bread, took water -- were grateful. Dogs had small biscuits. Quakers arrived -- an hour of silence with them.

And I think, on seiza bench for that hour, again epigrammatically:

veta nil, patere omne; ignosce judicium mentem

 (forbid nothing, allow everything; forgive discriminating mind)  (wfh)

These bastardized fragments of Latin sayings -- an idle of a Sunday in March. Maybe mendicant prelude to poetry, not poetry itself. For poetry, as Milosz said, is different:

What I am saying here is not, I agree, poetry, 

as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, 

under unbearable duress and only with the hope 

that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument. 

(--from poem, Ars Poetica? -- by Cheslaw Milosz)  http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ars-poetica/

Tim Lilburn goes on:

Interviewer:  Why poetry? 

Tim Lilburn:  I am interested in poetry because I believe that only in it can a person think and feel as deeply and as flexibly and as surprisingly as is humanly possible. This extreme, unexpected thinking and feeling is not only great fun, but is important now, in ways a little hard to fully explain, for us as a species. The strange metaphorical and contemplative thinking that goes on in poetry might just serve as a basis of a new politics that knits the human world with the natural world. It would likely take a whole book to work out this new politics. (--An Excerpt from the Great Victoria Public Library Website. Ibid)

It is Palm Sunday.

Welcome!

Enter!

Maybe this time . . . will be . . . different.

O Mystery; Attend!

No knowing; exact experiencing

Who knows?

In my dream I saw
The spring wind gently shaking
Blossoms from a tree;
And even now, though I'm awake,
There's motion, trembling in my chest.
-- Saigyo (1118-1190)

Who knows anything?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

However you look at it, we're all trying to find home. That's all. Just wandering around through this dream and that. Looking through this persona and that image trying to recognize what looks back at us from the mirror.

The eve of Holy Week. A reluctant hermit in the monastic silence of Ragged/Bald, the solitude of mountain stillness, Merton Retreat asks if I'd rather stay where I am than travel to someone else's monastery.

 I'm trying to remember what I felt the last time I watched the solitary fire burning in the library fireplace in Spencer. For so many years I remained behind in the darkened cloister as candle and community turned the vaulted corners to final Lumen Christi between choir stalls. 

Always guest, outlier sannyasin.

Never at home.

Saying is what is Saying. Listening is what is Listening.

God is what is God.

Is what Is.

What?

Is what Is?

God is what is God?

Adios

Drop off body and mind.

Dogen, it is said, was enlightened when hearing those words.

For me, it feels like acquaintance with death.

Body collapses. Mind disintegrates. Light, only light, remains through darkness.

It is spring.

It enlightens.

Everything falls away, is impermanent, incomplete, imperfect.

Goes...

Silent