2015.08.09 — 10,000 Views, Mr. Palomar and the Fushigi* Zazen of The Upanishads & The Nature of Personal Reality

[Begun on the 9th, and re-commenced on the 13th.]
The fushigis continue to outpace my ability to blog them. Even now, even though I sat down tonight to write a memoir of inertia, my inertia has kept me from writing it and I found myself writing silly Zenish fushigi things instead.

And now, I will begin with music from last night’s small fushigi,

mostly because it involves the joy of listening to Laurie Brown’s The Signal and how her music interacts fushigish with my life. I had Laurie’s music in my ears as I was writing a letter to my sisters. We had had a reunion the night before. I hadn’t seen the one sister since 1991 the other since 2004. We shared our own paths of survival and recovery from the trauma we’d experienced under the charismatic and sociopathic cult-like charms of our mother. (That’s for another story.) I began the letter struggling to describe how I felt. I wrote “I am smiling at how easy and peaceful, perhaps even tranquil, the time felt to me.” As I was writing that, I heard Laurie Brown introduce the next song with, paraphrased, Alana Yorke

bringing ‘comfort, peace and tranquility’. How often do you hear or read the word tranquility these days? And yet as I’m writing it Laurie’s is speaking it. Anyway, I went and found the song from The Signal’s play logs because it is quite beautiful. Enjoy: Song of the Piano Man.

And tonight there was a funny fushigi. It began with my beginning to share on FB a small miracle, or magic, in its own right: Thursday [yesterday, the day of my reunion] I received an email from the Readwave reader/writer webpage that my total story and poem reads there have reached 10,000. That ‘milestone’ occurred on the same day I met with a sister I hadn’t seen since 1991, which is some kind of milestone. While a little amusing, that is not the fushigi. And, funny enough, as it turns out she is married

to a writer! Too funny, how life goes. And even funnier, he is not a mainstream writer, as he explores the liminal areas of human experience. Jasun Horsley is fascinating, and an excellent writer and podcaster.

When I went to share my 10k milestone on FB, I wanted to be clever, and find some quotation on the limits of words. That words have limited functionality and are prone to creating serious miscommunication is a regular theme in my writing. I began to flip through a few of my books. After a few unsuccessful flips, I came across this one in a book that I bought today:

How to Awaken

Most students of Zen apply themselves to mindless zazen [meditation] — a grave error. [It is to be remembered] that the mind is transmitted and enlightened by itself. The non-sentient cannot attain the Way. Students today can’t seem to grasp that to feel cold or warmth, hunger or fullness, is to be mindless and on the right path (61).

Zen: Poems, Prayers, Sermons, Anecdotes, Interviews. Translated by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto.

Nice! I thought to myself. And marked it with a sticky for later, when I would put together this blog.

Well, for some reason, I decided to take a quick look at the other book I bought at the same time as the Zen one. It is Mr. Palomar by the amazing Italian writer, Italo Calvino. And this is what I read!

Ch. 1: Reading A Wave

The sea is barely wrinkled, and little waves strike the sandy shore. Mr. Palomar is standing on the shore, looking at a wave. Not that he is lost in contemplation of the waves. He is not lost, because he is quite aware of what he is doing: he wants to look at a wave and he is looking at it. He is not contemplating, because for contemplation you need the right temperament, the right mood, and the right combination of exterior circumstances; and though Mr. Palomar has nothing against contemplation in principle, none of these three conditions applies to him. Finally, it is not "the waves" that he means to look at, but just one individual wave: in his desire to avoid vague sensations, he establishes for his every action a limited and precise object.

Mr. Palomar sees a wave rise

in the distance, grow, approach, change form and color, fold over itself, break, vanish, and flow again. At this point he could convince himself that he has concluded the operation he had set out to achieve, and he could go away. But isolating one wave is not easy, separating it from the wave immediately following, which seems to push it and at times overtakes it and sweeps it away; and it is no easier to separate that one wave from the preceding wave, which seems to drag it toward the shore, unless it turns against the following wave, as if to arrest it, Then, if you consider the breadth of the wave, parallel to the shore, it is hard to decide where the advancing front extends regularly and where it is separated and segmented into independent waves, distinguished by their speed, shape, force, direction.

In other words, you cannot observe a wave without bearing in mind the complex features that concur in shaping it and the other, equally complex ones that the wave itself originates(3).

And that was perhaps an almost perfect example of a writer using words to move beyond words and, at the same time, embodying the antithesis of the Zen teacher’s lament that student of life cannot live within the ‘natural’ order of life. So delightful.

This was almost immediately followed up with a delightful

‘analytical’ version of Calvino’s Mr. Palomar. I found it in The Nature of Personal Reality by Seth/Jane Roberts.

As mentioned (in Chapter Four), the conscious mind is a portion of the inner self; that part that surfaces, so to speak, and meets physical reality more or less directly.

You are mainly concerned now with physical orientation and the corporeal materialization of inner reality. Therefore the conscious mind holds in ready access the information that you require for effective day-to-day living. It is not necessary that you hold in steady consciousness data that does not directly apply to what you consider your physical reality at any given "time." (Pause, one of many.) As soon as the need for such data — aid, information, or knowledge — arises, then it is immediately forthcoming unless your own conscious beliefs cause a barrier.

The exquisite, precise and concentrated focus of your conscious mind is quite necessary in physical life. It is because of this highly selective quality that you can "tune into" the particular range of activity that is physical (95).

I decided to search a bit more, and a flip or two later I came across something from the Chandogya Upanishad. I read it in The Upanishads, translated by Eknath Easwaran:

Narada, approached the Venerable One, Sanatkumara,

and asked him to teach him. The Venerable One replied, “tell me what you know, and then I will teach you what is beyond that.”

“I know the four Vedas, Rig, Yahur, Sama, Atharva — and the epics, called the fifth. I have studied grammar, rituals, mathematics, astronomy, logic, economics, physics, psychology, the fine arts, and even snake-charming. But all this knowledge has not helped me to know the Self. I have heard from spiritual teachers like you that one who realizes the Self goes beyond sorrow. I am lost in sorrow. Please teach me how to go beyond.”

“Whatever you know is just words,” said Sanatkumara, “names of finite phenomena. It is the Infinite that is the source of abiding joy because it is not subject to change. Therefore, seek to know the Infinite (188-9).”

How does all this tie into a family reunion? Each of us related our struggles out of the deluded illusionary world our mother had made up for us. We had all come to the awareness, had woken up in Zen language, that our mother’s world was ultimately an empty and psychologically poisoned one that only words and the blind who will follow them have the ability to make manifest. Only words have the power to create ideas and ideologies that are completely disconnected from the real world, a world that is comprised of the complexity of our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual beings. We each of us had, in our own unique paths, left the cult of ‘just’ words that our mother adeptly made. And ‘cult’ is not my description. Some time after breaking off communication with our mother, our eldest sister described her shocked realization that the documentary on cults she was watching was describing our childhood.

2009.10.12 - Tolstoy, Orwell, and the Tao of Shakespeare

I've been flipping through Orwell's The Collected Essays Vol 2, and came across the laconic and amusingly ambivalent defense he made against Tolstoy's splenetic dismissal of Shakespeare. Orwell paraphrases Tolstoy's attact as:

... purporting to show not only that Shakespeare was not the great man he was claimed to be, but that he was a writer entirely without merit, one of the worst and most contemptible writers the world has ever seen.

(A quick Yahoo found Tolstoy's article transcribed and in English, on Scribd.)

Now I can't say that I am a big fan of Tolstoy because I am not. Not at all. But still I find this interesting, and also interesting that neither this item nor Orwell's bemusing response was ever alluded to, let alone discussed in my Shakespeare classes.

On the other hand, I've always been a fan of Orwell's writing and his paraphrase of Tolstoy's argument is far more entertaining than is Tolstoy's heavy handed writing. For example, Orwell summarizes Tolstoy's position as follows:

Tolstoy's main contention is that Shakespeare is a trivial, shallow writer, with no coherent philosophy, no thoughts or ideas worth bothering about, no interest in social or religious problems, no grasp of character or probability, and, in so far as he could be said to have a definable attitude at all, with a cynical, immoral, worldly outlook on life. He accuses him of patching his plays together without caring twopence for credibility, of dealing in fantastic fables and impossible situations, of making his characters talk in an artificial flowery language completely unlike that of real life. He also accuses him of thrusting anything and everything into his plays — soliloquies, scraps of ballads, discussions, vulgar jokes and so forth — without stopping to think whether they had anything to do with the plot, and also of taking for granted the immoral power politics and unjust social distinctions of the times he lived in. Briefly, he accuses him [of] being a hasty, slovenly writer, a man of doubtful morals, and above all, of not being a thinker (154).

Ouch!

Okay, okay, this didn't hurt me at all. But it strongly suggests why I do not care for Tolstoy's writing. What I mean is that Tolstoy's polemic is a list of those things in Shakespeare's writing that makes it live and breath — as its longevity argues. In every way, even with the poetical nature of his language, Shakespeare brings to the stage a compressed but startlingly precise and vibrant snapshot of the simplicity and complexity of what comprises being human in the physical world. Despite our intellectual fascination with morality and moralistic fascination with purity, life is a complicated expression of the profane and the sacred, the prosaic and the existential, the beautiful and the foul — that is what comprises capital 'L' life and that 'is-ness' cannot be intellectualized away. Shakespeare's language, characters, and situations, whether historical or magical, express all capital 'L' life because, despite our childish pining for singular truth and pure beauty, our lives are filled with scraps from hither and yon, the fantastical and mundane. Tolstoy's writing, what little I have struggled through, anyway, is heavily laced with what he thinks a meaningful, i.e. moral, life 'should' be comprised of, not that with which capital 'L' Life actually is.

In his way, Orwell supplies a similar kind of rebuttal to Tolstoy's rant as this, but in a more convoluted manner. Or maybe it is a simpler one!? Anyway, Orwell wrote that

One must conclude that there is something good — something durable — in Shakespeare which millions of ordinary people can appreciate, though Tolstoy happened to be unable to do so. [Shakespeare] can survive exposure of the fact that he is a confused thinker whose plays are full of improbabilities. He can no more be debunked by such methods than you can destroy a flower by preaching a sermon at it (156-7).

Orwell is most amusing here, because even as he puts down Shakespeare as a 'confused thinker,' he himself uses a similar poetical metaphor as Shakespeare to argue its long-lived appeal — nature, natural Life, trumps intellectual morality.

While thinking and writing the above, I had the great joy of experiencing a delightful fushigi, (Japanese for wondrous event). I stumbled across a delightful, almost identical argument to Orwell's and mine, albeit couched in the Zen language of D.T. Suzuki in his book Zen and Japanese Culture:

There is a famous saying by one of the earlier masters of the T'ang dynasty, which declares that the Tao is no more than one's everyday life experience. When the master was asked what he meant by this, he replied, "When you are hungry you eat, when are are thirsty you drink, when you meet a friend you greet him."

This, some may think, is no more than animal instinct or social usage, and there is nothing that may be called moral, much less spiritual, in it. If we call it the Tao, some may think, what a cheap thing the Tao is after all!

Those who have not penetrated into the depths of our consciousness, including both the conscious and unconscious, are liable to hold such a mistaken notion as the one just cited. But we must remember that, if the Tao is something highly abstract transcending daily experiences, it will have nothing to do with the actualities of life. Life as we live it is not concerned with [intellectual or moral] generalization. If it were, the intellect would be everything, and the philosopher would be the wisest man. But, as Kierkegaard points out, the philosopher builds a fine palace, but he is doomed not to live in it — he has a shed for himself next door to what he constructed for others, including himself, to look at.

...

The Tao is really very much more than mere animal instinct and social usage, though those elements are also included in it. It is something deeply imbedded in every one of us, indeed in all beings sentient and non-sentient, and it requires something altogether different from so-called scientific analysis. It defies our intellectual pursuit because of being too concrete, too familiar, hence beyond definability. It is there confronting us, no doubt, but not obtrusively and threateningly, like Mount Everest to the mountain-climbers (11-2 — my emphasis).

Is not Suzuki's Mt. Evererst analogy exactly identical to Orwell's with the flower? Nature trumps intellect! That is the key to the long-lived vitality of Shakespeare's writing — it embodies the natural world of man more fully than perhaps any other writer in English. This is what Tolstoy's long rant is about, the head feeling left out of living text. And with that thought, how similar is Tolstoy's list of failures to that of the contention that the Tao, to those who who lack depth of understanding of life, is nothing more than cheap animal instinct or unreflective acquiescence to societal mores.

Shakespeare looked into the world of social man without any sort of intellectualized or moralistic or religio-philosophic self-deception or delusion, by which manner he compassed the heart of man even as he talked directly to it. His clarity of sight united with the brilliance of his writing to effectively, meaning-fully, by-pass the intellect. This is likely why Tolstoy wrote Bill off as 'contemptible'. Tolstoy, Orwell, and other great thinkers who put thinking as the sine qua non of being man, are unable to see the sophistication of thought required to not be bamboozled by the bright lights of intellectual achievement, or moralistic sentimentality.

There are many examples of writing of the kind I am describing here. For example, in Henry V when Hal disguises himself as a foot soldier and engages in a quiet, powerful discussion on the meaning of death as a soldier (4.1). And these gems show up in the silliest of comedies, for example when Luciana pleads on behalf of her sister in Comedy of Errors (3.2). The examples are endless, but most broadly is how he wrote, throughout his works, fully realized and embodied women. His women are neither idealized nor vilified even when the characters are good, bad, sexual, prudish, silly, strong, emancipated or kept — and in his plays they are all these things and more. Oh! And Shakespeare was an equal opportunity guy, for the men are equally treated.

If I was going to spend the rest of my days on an island, and was stuck reading one author, I can assure you it would not be Tolstoy. Nor would it be Orwell. It would be Shakespeare, because his writing is the way of life — Tao.