Flowers not flowers, fog not fog; It comes at midnight, goes at dawn. Arriving like a spring dream, Leaving like the morning clouds- No way to hold it.
— Pai Chu-I (772-846) dailyzen
There are no parts to reality.
The probability of reality is that reality is possibly the only true phenomenon.
Finnegans Wake might sound like nonsense, but sometimes nonsense has lovely lilt and pleasing echo. Not unlike history, “never get stuck in another man’s fight” (James Joyce, in FW)
July 16 marks the 160th anniversary of the most destructive riot in U.S. history. On July 13, 1863, certain Democrats in New York City rose up against the Lincoln administration. Four days later, at least 119 people were dead, another 2,000 wounded. Rioters destroyed between $1 and $5 million in property including about fifty buildings, two churches, and an asylum for orphaned Black children. In today’s dollars, that would be between $20 million and about $96 million in damage. .—Heather Cox Richardson
Sides swing back and forth. Republicans, Democrats; Left, Right; You, Me.
We desire God; we are repulsed by the idea of a God.
You love life; you loathe it.
jacta cogitátum tuum in Dómino,
cast your care upon the Lord,
et ipse te enútriet.
and He will support you
— Missa — Introitus, 16july2023
Curiously, we forget history.
Incuriously, we slide through invisible time as though immaterial neutrinos suddenly taking a right turn heading into barber shop for a not-there cut.
Tread lightly, downpours in hiatus will reconvene in thirty minutes. Rhubarb will be picked, dog walked in the breach. I’ll wait for the exhalation of nature to inhale what next breath might be offered this Sunday morning.
The events of daily occurrence linger lost in potential until, when suddenness shrugs and matters materialize, voila, men act and bizarre thoughts find arms and legs to set out to streets and wells of deliberative bodies to writhe in the agony of human opinion enacting the deranged madness of senility pretending to be courage and pro patria engagement with the enemy du jour.
Pour me a double orange juice. Kill the fatted English muffin. Roast the day old coffee. I am ready for battle.
I am ready to give my life for a parchment commendation and an inch of eschatology in the nonlocal newspaper.
In prison yesterday one of those fleeting but important intuitions — every belief, prayer, story, thought, or experience we have or relate is only, as one of the men puts it, a placeholder until something else or next comes along that changes, deepens, or eradicates that which is the placeholder.
Heraclitus of Ephesus (535–475BC) wrote: “Everything flows and nothing abides” (Greek “Panta rhei kai ouden menei”)
So, pray what is familiar to you. It, and you, will change. Let both happen.
“Tommy," Willie said. "I love you, you son of a bitch, and don't die." Thomas Hudson looked at him without moving his head. "Try and understand if it isn't too hard." Thomas looked at him. He felt far away now and there were no problems at all. He felt the ship gathering her speed and the lovely throb of her engines against his shoulder blades which rested hard against the boards. He looked up and there was the sky that he had always loved and he looked across the great lagoon that he was quite sure, now, he would never paint and he eased his position a little to lessen the pain. The engines were around three thousand now, he thought, and they came through the deck and into him. "I think I understand, Willie," he said. "Oh shit," Willie said. "You never understand anybody that loves you.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream
The gist is the guest. Comes and goes. Like supper. Dishes placed in sink.
Morning.
Washing up. Grinding coffee. Splitting English muffin. Down toaster. Liturgy from France.
Once I was less a clownish hobo. Then everything started to fall off the table to ground.
Once I thought I had a home. Then all the walls began to crumble and no barn slider opened to dooryard.
Once the yurt and brook stood sentinels to mountainside. Then solitude whispered invitation and soul forages like low snorting deer as insects crisscross outside door screen.
Tumbling water at turn of brook will soon arrive at Hosmer Pond where young day campers delight unperspectivally their ritual play of a hot afternoon.
Things, if you glance around, as they say, are looking up.
My death will not be unexpected. I will not have fought a fraught battle courageously, nor will I want a gathering of loved ones to wave me off to a reunification tour of relatives and good friends in some heavenly coffee house where brioches and millet muffins are free and fresh.
Obituaries seldom say “he’s off to hell to burn forever” and understandably so — it’s hard to see through smoke and sulphuric fog to track the wretched deceased’s downward spill.
My room, my squalid cell, will not be roped off and amber froze as a museum look-in for two bits on Saturday tours, nor will any plaque hang from lamppost indicating right here he leaned and fell while attempting to comfort a broken down Ford 150 whose radiator leaks to the curb.
I will spare the public their lachrymose response to sordid departure, wreaths of dandelion and crabgrass, after-service table filled with potato salad and four-bean gorp alongside Pillsbury rolls.
No.
When I die just go about your business. Stay away. Write no nonsense about how I loved to fish and attend art openings, gave waifs and scraped-knee lads a nickel or dime for the candy store, tipped my cap to the honorable ladies perusing main street with kidlets in tow.
There’s no need to pause. No need to ponder. No need to pretend.
He’s gone. That’s it. What’ll we have for breakfast?
In prison yesterday morning, conversation about gravitational waves, perception, our illusory perceptions, the unceasing awareness we must bring to every encounter, each person before us, whatever temporary conclusions we draw as to the relative safety or danger of each assessment made. As well as laughing at our own absurdity and posturing.
Then there's this:
His universe-as-one-giant-computer theory, as described by the author and science writer Robert Wright in The Atlantic Monthly in 1988, is based on the idea that “information is more fundamental than matter and energy.” Professor Fredkin, Mr. Wright said, believed that “atoms, electrons and quarks consist ultimately of bits — binary units of information, like those that are the currency of computation in a personal computer or a pocket calculator.”
As Professor Fredkin was quoted as saying in that article, DNA, the fundamental building block of heredity, is “a good example of digitally encoded information.”
“The information that implies what a creature or a plant is going to be is encoded,” he said.
“It has its representation in the DNA, right? OK, now, there is a process that takes that information and transforms it into the creature.”
Even a creature as ordinary as a mouse, he concluded, “is a big, complicated informational process.”
As an 'informational process', a description which, in a different time and head-tilting consideration, Heraclitus (6th C. BC) would probably nod in affirmation, as would A.N.Whitehead (1861-1947), the term 'process' indicating a developing progression moving through the parameters of time and space.
Those in prison would like such consideration. While terms like punishment and rehabilitation are part of the lexicon, and new terms such as restorative justice and prison abolition, parole and community confinement, enter the discourse. In addition, there are other lexical considerations to mull.
Familiar terms such as evolution and mutation, maturation and moral change, existential awareness and personal integrity.
Men in prison, by and large, change. I know many men who've been in prison for 20, 30, 40 years. They are not murderers. Yes, they've committed homicide, the act. But they are not their crime. They do not think, "Man, I can't wait to get out so I can murder again." It was something they did, not something they are. Most would say it was a terrible moment in their lives. A moment that hurt everyone involved. And they understand the reverberations felt affecting the wide circle of consequence and heartbreak.
But they do not need to be kept in that clanging box of static memory. They have, by and large, stepped beyond their terrible moment. So very many are ready to be graced if allowed to demonstrate their newness to the greater society beyond the echo chamber of closed recrimination.
Modern prisons, mostly the good ones (if such can be said), offer courses, trainings, seminars, counseling, conversations, job-skill development, work regimens, and higher education. Maine State Prison and Bolduc Correctional Facility are two places where meetingbrook *conversations are held each week. These are open-ended, drop-in, any-topic, exploratory conversations where poetry, physics, politics, personal exploration, philosophy, the nature of space and the cosmos, psychology, or even the subtleties of language and how words and thinking affect how we perceive the world.
These are joyful gatherings where straight-talk with insight and honesty takes place, and where posturing and bullshit seldom take place.
Kibitzing and laughter are equally at the table. It is my favorite swap for teaching university courses. (I hate grading. And would not want to navigate the quisling offerings of AI chat bots.) I love the open agenda and constant flow in and out of participants with their enthusiastic thoughtful investigatory insights and non-mandated personal writings meant to augment our common inquiries and conversations.
We turn together. They turn within themselves. We turn within ourselves.
Perhaps, soon enough, prison systems and society at large will also take the turn, and allow the vast number of folks in prison who are no future threat to anyone, to have their turn at redemption and creative reconnection with life outside prison.
mid-14c., "place where one lives or dwells," also "general course of actions or habits, manner of conducting oneself in the world," both senses now obsolete; from Old French conversacion "behavior, life, way of life, monastic life," and directly from Latin conversationem (nominative conversatio) "frequent use, frequent abode in a place, intercourse, conversation," noun of action from past-participle stem of conversari "to live, dwell, live with, keep company with," passive voice of conversare "to turn about, turn about with," from assimilated form of com "with, together" (see con-) + versare, frequentative of vertere "to turn" (from PIE root *wer- (2) "to turn, bend").
Some call it affinity. Some, attraction. Others recognize the essential and existential reality of interrelated reciprocity between beings and Being.
Physicists and biologists might call this the integrity of materiality. Zen practitioners: the don't-know mind, circumincessional interpenetration, co-original interdependence, buddhanature. Christian mystics: the trinity, perichoresis relationality, christ-mind. Jazz aficionados: what-is, baby!
One reflects the Other because the Other is One.
One now might ask, however, how is it that Being came to be (mis)understood as a thing or even the ultimate thing among things? According to Heidegger, the pre-Socratics – Parmenides and Heraclitus specifically – agreed that the belonging-together of Being and beings is intimately intertwined with the relationship that thinking has to Being. It is this consideration that suggests an imaginable affinity between Lao Tzu’s Taoism and Heidegger’s existential phenomenology.
Lao Tzu articulates the relationship of thinking and Being, closely intertwined with the relationship of Being and things. Verse 23 of Lao Tzu’s “Tao Te Ching” reads, in part, as follows: “The learner of Tao identifies with Tao. When one achieves it, one identifies with one’s achievement. When one loses it, one identifies with one’s losing. When man identifies with achievement, achievement also willingly identifies with man. When man identifies with losing, losing willingly identifies with man.” (Chang, 2014)
Parmenides (it would seem) – at least Heidegger’s Parmenides – echoes LaoTzu’s thoughts here in that Parmenides maintains that thinking is not to be regarded as localized in the subjectivity of the subject, nor is Being to be regarded as located in the objectivity of the object. That is, Heidegger’s Parmenides perceives that “Being” becomes an object of objectivity as a result of the philosopher’s infatuation with beings and things to the extent that these metaphysicians forget the Being of this or that being or thing. A more accurate description of Being, according to Heidegger’s (hermeneutic phenomenology of) Parmenides, is that thinking and Being are unified in a more fundamental relationship. Thinking, for Parmenides (and seemingly also Lao Tzu), means: to grasp, take in, to let something come to the thinker.
The cosmos is mysterious. Neutrinos zip through our bodies and settle deep in earth. Gravitational waves do the same altering our shape during their passage. Advertisers tolerate tv offerings until their primary selling marathons reclaim time and attention of unsuspecting viewers. MLB all stars swing their bats. The price of USPS letters and parcels goes up again. People who die are still dead. Grass grows wild in yard.
Taigu Ryokan (1758-1831) wrote:
White Hair
Though frost come down,
Night after night
What does it matter?
They melt in the morning sun.
Though the snow falls
Each passing year,
What does it matter?
With spring days it thaws.
Yet once let them settle
On a man’s head,
Fall and pile up-
Then the New Year
May come and go,
But never you’ll see them fade away.
At Friday evening conversation AI was topic. Some were reading "Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World"by Mo Gawdat and Bluebird, 2021. There was a muted plea that, yes, we should be worried, but, no, do not be negative, because that would predispose us and our children to manifest a negative reality wherein which to dwell.
It strikes me that it’s not easy to see flaws and deficiencies and still maintain skillful speech describing and counter-semanticizing toward a renewing recapitalization of articulating future reality.
Richard Hugo began his poem “Villager” with What’s wrong will always be wrong. For the brief deranged time I thought that line was one I’d written and squirreled away in brown corduroy sports jacket. One day I wrote a second line, But what’s right is each time created new.
My illusory authorship remains a psychic cyber-signature these forty three years later.
It still bothers when suggested that only positive explication of reality and social phenomenology be our focus. Although I see the point being made. Proponents of positive thinking have positive worth in discourse. And I’ll concede that good and positive news does uplift and dust off the road dirt. So I’ll leave it to the practitioners of positivity to carry the unbearable lightness of being through our common discourse.
[Real love] is a state where we allow ourselves to be seen clearly by ourselves and by others, and in turn, we offer clear seeing to the world around us. It is a love that heals. —Sharon Salzberg, “Real Love” tricycle
Time is an artifact of a particular perspective. That’s what is said in conversation between Spira, Hoffman, et al, episode 58. Going beyond space/time. Folding consciousness. One becoming itself right where it is.
Hence, what now seems to be a miracle of extended presence.
Consciousness, as in perennial philosophy, remains as is throughout. But the contents of consciousness have changed through 25 hundred years of explanation and expression.
"Love is the natural condition of all experience before thought has divided it into a multiplicity and diversity of objects, selves and others." ~ Rupert Spira
"The mind, the body and the world are made out of Consciousness but Consciousness is not made out of them. It is made out of itself. Therefore everything is made only out of Consciousness." ~ Rupert Spira
"The discovery that peace, happiness and love are ever-present within our own Being, and completely available at every moment of experience, under all conditions, is the most important discovery that anyone can make." ~ Rupert Spira
Needing nothing and wanting nothing, Spira is saying, is peace.
George Reeves did or didn’t shoot himself post-kryptonite and commit suicide. Marilyn Monroe did or didn’t intentionally commit suicide after rat-pack shake-off by taking far too many pills. Jeshua bar-Joseph did or didn’t become a suicidal sacrifice for fellow so-called human sinfulness.
Truth and accuracy is a sometimes thing.
Better to rely on cinnamon-raisin toast the day after the nation’s birthday.
My great teacher, Galway Kinnell, taught me: “Speak the unspeakable.”
One who receives an intuition of this truth has become a Buddha and attained to the Dharma. Let me repeat that Enlightenment cannot be bodily grasped, for the body is formless; nor mentally grasped, for the mind is formless; nor grasped through its essential nature since that nature is the Original Source of all things, the real Nature of all things, permanent Reality, of Buddha!
How can you use the Buddha to grasp the Buddha, formlessness to grasp formlessness, mind to grasp mind, void to grasp void, the Way to grasp the Way? In reality there is nothing to be grasped—even not-grasping cannot be grasped. So it is said: “There is Nothing to be grasped.” We simply teach you how to understand your original Mind. (Mind is Formless, Huang-Po (d. 850) DailyZen)
Cornelius and Bosgrave have a particular perspective.
You might call it a respective view fraught and brimming with intrigue for universal/catholic identification.
Plymouth
John Cornelius was born of Irish parents in Bodmin, and his talent was soon noticed by Sir John Arundell of Lanherne, who sent him to Oxford. From there he went to the English College in Rheims, and to Rome, where he was ordained priest. He came back to England, and worked here for ten years, before being arrested at Chideock Castle, where he was acting as chaplain to Lady Arundell. Whilst being escorted to the sheriff’s house he was met on the way by Thomas Bosgrave, a relative of the Arundell family, who offered him his own hat, as he had been dragged out bare-headed. Thereupon Bosgrave was promptly arrested. Two servants of the castle, John (or Terence) Carey and Patrick Salmon, both natives of Dublin, shared the same fate. They were executed at Dorchester on July 4th 1594.
Plymouth Ordo
It was a long time ago. A time of prejudices, myopathies, and bigoted power. Such nefarious antipathy, some feel, lurks today in halls of political legislative and judicial unsightly distorted vision.
Their trial took place in the main hall of what is now Chideock House Hotel and they were condemned to death on 2 July 1594 and executed in Dorchester two days later. The first to ascend the scaffold was John Carey; he kissed the rope, exclaiming "O precious collar", made a solemn profession of faith and died a valiant death. Before his execution Patrick Salmon exhorted the spectators to embrace the Catholic faith, for which he and his companions were giving their lives. Then followed Thomas Bosgrave, who delivered a stirring address on the truth of his belief. The last to suffer was John Cornelius, who kissed the gallows and then quoted St. Andrew, "O good Cross, long desired", etc. On the ladder, he tried to speak to the multitude, but was prevented. After praying for his executioners and for the welfare of the queen, John Cornelius also was executed. His body was taken down and quartered, his head was nailed to the gibbet, but soon removed. All the bodies were retrieved and given a proper burial by Lady Arundell.[6]Dorothy Arundell did become a nun and she wrote "Life of Father Cornelius the Martyr" which was kept in the Vatican, but is now lost.[5] wikipedia
In the United States of America we frown on religious and political bigotry and rabid exclusion. It’s a thing with us, frowning.
We accept that differing beliefs arise and set a table for discussion and conversation. So too with differing ideological and political stances held and profferred.
We wear different hats.
We have many hats.
We don’t execute another for matters of hats.
Or beliefs.
Nor any inclination of prejudicial intolerance issued from vaunted position of exclusive legal, ecclesial, or populist posturing.
Here’s your hat, sir or madam — be on your way. I will not waylay, detain, or murder you.
Why not?
If you think about it, because we are not that kind of people.
