Two here. I visit for second week J who is quiet and still and seems … comfortable.
We sit for length in silence. We listen to ambient music. I read a bit and trust the noiseless sound of words moving through me also move through her in ways we do not yet know how to identify. We’ve been together, here, in this place.
two silent people of a thursday evening
(a waka for j)
We don’t have much to
say to one another, so
we say nothing, not
a word that can be heard, she
is dying, we share this place
We wonder about the ascension. What does it mean to say that Jesus ascended into heaven?
Where did he go? And why do so many look after him?
Introitus
Viri Galilǽi, quid admirámini aspiciéntes in cælum? allelúia:
Men of Galilee, why gaze in wonder at the heavens? Alleluia.
quemádmodum vidístis eum ascendéntem in cælum, ita véniet,
This whom you saw ascending into heaven will return as you saw him go,
allelúia, allelúia, allelúia.
alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
Omnes gentes pláudite mánibus:
All nations, clap your hands.
jubiláte Deo in voce exsultatiónis.
Shout joyfully to God with a voice of exultation.
Viri Galilǽi, quid admirámini aspiciéntes in cælum? allelúia:
Men of Galilee, why gaze in wonder at the heavens? Alleluia.
quemádmodum vidístis eum ascendéntem in cælum, ita véniet,
This whom you saw ascending into heaven will return as you saw him go,
allelúia, allelúia, allelúia.
Have we, as well, ascended into heaven? Are we looking after where we’ve been with an unconsciousness that does not realize the place, the dimension, that has been our dwelling place unrecognized by eyes or memory?
Philosophy, poetry, and spirituality try to unveil for us our (so-called) true home.
We long for it, but are slow to recognize or resemble this place, this true, home.
What does it take? How do we awaken? When will the echo of a faint melody come clear?
Who recognizes the simplicity, the refreshing familiarity, the embracing intimacy of true home?
allelúia, allelúia, allelúia.
https://app.neumz.com/listen/missa-viri-galilaei-7/18-05-2023
Truth and falsehood walk alongside us. Some prefer one, some the other.
It’s our fate to be so conflicted by choice.
Asha (/ˈʌʃə/; also arta /ˈɑːrtə/; Avestan: 𐬀𐬴𐬀, romanized: aṣ̌a/arta) is a Zoroastrian concept with a complex and highly nuanced range of meaning. It is commonly summarized in accord with its contextual implications of 'truth' and 'right' (or 'righteousness'), 'order' and 'right working'.[1][2] For other connotations, see meaning below. It is of cardinal importance[3]to Zoroastrian theology and doctrine. In the moral sphere, aṣ̌a/arta represents what has been called "the decisive confessional concept of Zoroastrianism".[4] The opposite of Avestanaṣ̌a is 𐬛𐬭𐬎𐬘 druj, "deceit, falsehood".
Its Old Persian equivalent is arta-.[c] In Middle Iranian languages the term appears as ard-.[a]
(—Wikipedia, asha )
It is not a given that truth or falsehood will prevail.
Individuals fail in the choice. Institutions fail in the choice.
We like to think there is a choice.
I think there is.
When carefully made, the choice for truth or falsehood must faithfully serve the situation and circumstances in which the choice arises.
Life, for humankind, is less dogmatic and more existential.
Look around.
Each thing speaks its name
But god, they say, has no name
Find both in silence
Silencio habla sin;
palabras — hearing oneself
The world is made of things. William Carlos Williams wrote the words “No ideas but in things.”
If things go away, perhaps such disappearance will signal the obsolescent evanescence of ourselves as both sentient beings and existential entities.
Undinge proposes that the age of objects is over. The terrane order, the order of the Earth, consists of objects that take on a permanent form and provide a stable environment for human habitation. Today the terrane order has been replaced by the digital order. The digital order makes the world less tangible by informatising it. Nonobjects are currently entering our environment from all sides and displacing objects.
I call nonobjects information. Today we are in the transition from the age of objects to the age of nonobjects. Information, not objects, now defines our environment. We no longer occupy earth and sky but Google Earth and the Cloud. The world is becoming progressively less tangible, cloudier and ghostlier. Nothing is substantial. It makes me think of the novel The Memory Police [1994], by the Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa. The novel tells of a nameless island where objects – hair ties, hats, stamps, even roses and birds – disappear irretrievably. Together with the objects, memories also disappear. People live in an eternal winter of forgetting and loss. Everything is seized by a progressive disintegration. Even body parts disappear. In the end it’s just disembodied voices, floating around in the air.
Byung-Chul Han, https://artreview.com/byung-chul-han-i-practise-philosophy-as-art/ .
Spirituality is not the dissolution of matter. Rather, spirituality is the revelation emerging from and into the center of each thing, each person, each being in communication with any and every other being, person, and thing sharing the phenomenal world.
We’re uncertain about a spiritual realm. Some call it heaven. Some a non-physical dimension. Plato had his world of ideas. Some dwell in abstraction.
What does it mean to speak of faith without object?
Is each thing a subject?
First person singular?
No-thing without faith.
Faith is the thing-in-itself.
Look at you.
A fool sees himself as another, but a wise man sees others as himself. – Dogen Zenji
( from Old French voir ‘true’ + dire ‘say’.)
There’s often an unsettling caesura between poetry and zen.
Still, we love poetry.
Still we love, zen.
Taneda Santoka Biography
Taneda Santoka was a Japanese haiku poet who specialised in free verse haiku during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He also translated works in French and Russian into Japanese.
His birth name was Taneda Shoichi and he was born on the 3rd December 1882 in a small village on the southwestern tip of Honshu which is Japan’s main island. He had a comfortable upbringing as his family were well off landowners. Tragically though he lost his mother to suicide when only eleven years old. It was said that she threw herself into the family well as she could not cope with her philandering husband. Following this the boy was taken in by his grandmother who raised him.
At the age of 20 Taneda began studying literature at Waseda University in Tokyo. This was not a happy time as he frequently drank to excess and he soon dropped out of his studies. This coincided with the beginning of the Russo-Japanese war in 1904. Two years later his father sold some of the family’s land and used the proceeds to open a sake brewery and, wanting to see his son married, he arranged for Taneda to marry a girl from the next village. Memories of his dead mother’s body being recovered from the well had soured his relationships with women though.
His literary career took off when he published translations of the work of Guy de Maupassant and Ivan Turgenev in a literary journal called Seinen. He also had ambitions to write his own poetry and joined a local haiku group. His writing mostly took the form of the traditional syllabic format but occasionally he wrote in hypersyllabic, an example of this being:
In 1913 his efforts earned him a place studying under Ogiwara Seisensui who was the leading haiku reformist at the time, and was widely regarded as the originator of the free-form haiku movement. Within three years his family was facing financial ruin when his father went bankrupt due to the failure of his sake brewery. What had once been an affluent family was now in dire straits and Taneda found himself moving from location to location striving to secure paid employment connected with his writing. Tragic news followed him though with his grandmother dying, his younger brother committing suicide and then the death of his father.
His inability to settle to anything worthwhile led to another nervous breakdown to follow those from previous years. He suffered an earthquake while living in Tokyo and was also arrested under suspicion of being a communist. Perhaps he had stretched his fragile mental health right to the edge when, in 1924, he got blind drunk and jumped in front of a moving train. Perhaps someone was looking down on him with benign thoughts though; he survived this apparent suicide attempt and then found himself accepted into the Zen fraternity by the head priest of the Soto Zen temple Hoon-ji. Finally he found some peace and his life followed a smoother path from then on.
While on a number of walking trips, dressed in the typical priest’s robes, he wrote poetry and he begged at people’s houses for food and money, just to survive. He was not an ordained priest though so found this life very difficult and not really to his liking, and many people gave him nothing but scorn. He eventually gave up the wandering life and tried to concentrate on writing.
In all he produced seven collections of poetry in his lifetime. Here are a couple of examples of his free-style haiku, much of which had references to drinking in them:
Perhaps, having lived such a tempestuous life, it was ironic that Taneda Santoka died peacefully in his sleep on the 10th October 1940. He was 57 years old.
https://mypoeticside.com/poets/tanned-santoka-poems
Still, we appreciate the poet, the zen, the poetry.
Just as we look at our own life, look away, look back.
Finally remembering there’s huge chocolate donuts from Moody’s Diner in Waldoboro gotten after reading pagan philosophy at prison yesterday morning.
At breakfast
The sphinx riddle
Sat all around us
(wfh)
What if each human
being contained all knowledge
all infinite space
within one’s soul, in each mind
turning wisdom inside out
Staring up through sky
Some billions of light years shine
Through black emptiness
The danger is found in trying to take a thought so far down the road that it turns into a belief that there is a natural or artificial conclusion that has to be hammered out, promulgated, philosophized, mechanized, and implemented to erase the conceived problems falling outside the train rail of inference and logical pathway moving along the fastened iron going forward with irrepressible clickety-clack progress.
Reading about 19th century:
The Völkisch movement (German: Völkische Bewegung; alternative English: Folkist Movement) was a German ethno-nationalist movement active from the late 19th century through to the Nazi era, with remnants in the Federal Republic of Germany afterwards. Erected on the idea of "blood and soil", inspired by the one-body-metaphor (Volkskörper, "ethnic body"; literally "body of the people"), and by the idea of naturally grown communities in unity, it was characterized by organicism, racialism, populism, agrarianism, romantic nationalism and – as a consequence of a growing exclusive and ethnic connotation – by antisemitism from the 1900s onward.[1][2] Völkisch nationalists generally considered the Jews to be an "alien people" who belonged to a different Volk ("race" or "folk") from the Germans.[3]. (Wikipedia)
I recall a book I read during college studies by Alexis Carrel. It was intriguing. I do not think I understood sixty years ago the conclusions and ideology that could have been (and were) implied by the material pondered and impulses racing toward resolution that the studies and thought could careen recklessly (even mindlessly) toward.
Man, the Unknown (L'Homme, cet inconnu) is a best-selling[1]1935 book by Alexis Carrel in which he endeavours to outline a comprehensive account what is known and, more importantly, unknown of the human body and human life. The book elucidates problems of the modern world and possible routes to a better life for human beings. It is specifically known for its advocacy of eugenics and euthanasia.
For Carrel, the fundamental problem was that:
I am led to consider the matter of concluding or conclusion.
I can’t remember who said it, and my trying to look it up meets no success, but here is what I recall: “Not to conclude is the sign of a creative mind.” Some French poet, I think, wrote it.
So much, it seems, depends upon an ability to draw conclusions, nail things down, wrap it up, submit report, file it away, move on to something else.
In doing so, I submit, there is a rush to put into action plans the conclusions reached, the outcomes concretized.
But, not to conclude . . . well . . .
That’s a tricky proposition. That’s a a risky non-strategy. That’s where spirituality and poetics meet meditation and contemplation within the auspices of practice and no-mind attentitiveness and presencing awareness.
Surely there’s a name for such a way of being-in-the-world?
But let’s not give it a fixed name.
For now, let’s call it the mourning of morning for what has been and what will be.
Let’s, for now, acronymize this "mourning of morning" as “mom”.
Give whatever name you wish to this arising and falling, coming and going, constructing and deconstructing, materializing and dematerializing, appearing and disappearing, loving and letting go . . .
For now, “mom” is gut genug — mom is good enough.
Good . . .
Enough!
(Happily)
