*
When I was a young child about 6, I happened to see a TV program that gave me a virtual orgasm, I don't know why. It was a live children's program, there was a decal or transparency filling the picture frame with the outline of a person, and then a man stepped into the decal. Nothing more than that and yet shots of joy inside me. Like a mule filling in for a horse, my groin did the work of my heart for me.
And this had little to do with sex or with the mirage object that people call "art", art as a thing to be studied. But had more to do with the way the soul places its consciousness over, under and inside things in order to tease out the reality that is there.
It was the outerness that thrilled me and pleased me. I didn't put that there -- the world is stylized, it just "objectively" is.
In John 12, Mary pours burial balm for a death that hasn't happened but is still present in the room (as Lazarus looks on) and then the people of the story step into the hosanna of Psalm 118 as though the words made the physical shape of the world they live in -- which they do, despite the hesitation of that "as though".
A good, penetrating and sorrowful translation of John could be made by substituting the word "the Christians" every time the given text says "the Jews". That means that the story -- its history, its art, its meaning -- isn't finished but continues to boil, recur and churn. Stepping inside it is exciting and dangerous, because nothing is settled. A word like "art" dodges what is happening.
*
That business of stepping in and into. One isn't a person of faith -- no such luck, one is just a person but standing in a place and in that place faith is there, like a color or a garment. At one moment the person is inside wearing the faith and "having" it, the next moment no one and nothing has moved but somehow the person is naked, and yet the realization of nakedness is itself like putting on clothes. So call it art if you want but the realization is the core, no more art than not art.
*
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Friday, January 19, 2007
The Zen warrior went hunting
*
When the Zen warrior went hunting he traveled alone. Broke the basic rule of safety that was: have someone else know. Or accompany. Let them be told. But instead alone. Carried his equipment without help. Traveled far. Took very little food. He hunted his own lack of appetite among the animals. He would bring a prize home if he could manage to eat the small amount that he only wanted to. Not more. He hunted this strange thing.
He set his stand in the woods. Bare and skeletal as was everything. The snow upon the oak. The oak the oak another oak. Snow on each. Snow above them the warrior below. In the air a chill no words for, there weren't words. Below a given temperature all words froze. Only what was in the pocket, only those words could be said at all.
Raccoon tracks, a deer trail. Down that trail they were bound to come. That was tradition. And crows overhead, then no crows, at least no sound of them. An hour then an hour then another hour. Each one colder than the other somehow. So in essence they were like what? The feel of them went deeper then deeper into -- but there the pocket lacked a word. Didn't have it handy.
The hunter looked around. The looking did not make a sound. He raised his weapon. Nonexistent! Air between his hands. Air held steady by his fingers. That was all. He aimed, carefully aimed. A shot in this air, the shot made of air -- that was the entirety of the shot. No animal either fell from this shot or evaded this shot. There was no shot. Here we are -- free at last -- in a world so quiet that there is simply no animal that shoots, or has ever shot, any other animal, not today, not ever. Neither simply nor entirely nor in any other way. Here it doesn't happen. And so the hunter sort of chewed on this fact. And his pockets were empty.
*
When the Zen warrior went hunting he traveled alone. Broke the basic rule of safety that was: have someone else know. Or accompany. Let them be told. But instead alone. Carried his equipment without help. Traveled far. Took very little food. He hunted his own lack of appetite among the animals. He would bring a prize home if he could manage to eat the small amount that he only wanted to. Not more. He hunted this strange thing.
He set his stand in the woods. Bare and skeletal as was everything. The snow upon the oak. The oak the oak another oak. Snow on each. Snow above them the warrior below. In the air a chill no words for, there weren't words. Below a given temperature all words froze. Only what was in the pocket, only those words could be said at all.
Raccoon tracks, a deer trail. Down that trail they were bound to come. That was tradition. And crows overhead, then no crows, at least no sound of them. An hour then an hour then another hour. Each one colder than the other somehow. So in essence they were like what? The feel of them went deeper then deeper into -- but there the pocket lacked a word. Didn't have it handy.
The hunter looked around. The looking did not make a sound. He raised his weapon. Nonexistent! Air between his hands. Air held steady by his fingers. That was all. He aimed, carefully aimed. A shot in this air, the shot made of air -- that was the entirety of the shot. No animal either fell from this shot or evaded this shot. There was no shot. Here we are -- free at last -- in a world so quiet that there is simply no animal that shoots, or has ever shot, any other animal, not today, not ever. Neither simply nor entirely nor in any other way. Here it doesn't happen. And so the hunter sort of chewed on this fact. And his pockets were empty.
*
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Useless poems - 11
*
A certain path
This twisting pain must be the path,
what other path for one like you,
insensible to all sensible things?
Your path to God is this hooked thread of breath.
Is sun aflame? horizon blue?
Anyone else would know but you when you
notice at all think it's a sign you do.
So pain is needed, mindful pain
to wake you into mindfulness again,
a hooked blood painterly and horrible
whose spatter must not clot till even you
feel the things clearing in you, even you
feel the you hooked and reeled into
this ultimate you're blindly walking through.
*
A certain path
This twisting pain must be the path,
what other path for one like you,
insensible to all sensible things?
Your path to God is this hooked thread of breath.
Is sun aflame? horizon blue?
Anyone else would know but you when you
notice at all think it's a sign you do.
So pain is needed, mindful pain
to wake you into mindfulness again,
a hooked blood painterly and horrible
whose spatter must not clot till even you
feel the things clearing in you, even you
feel the you hooked and reeled into
this ultimate you're blindly walking through.
*
Sunday, January 14, 2007
J -- The Cruise
*
You mustn't profit from acts of violence committed by yourself. J had had a friend named Arthur, a "pillar" of the gay community (a pillar with no building!) and Arthur had fallen in love with a hustler from P Street. Arthur died, the hustler inherited, no one questioned. The ex-wife grieved and wrung her hands -- no one paid attention to her. Then the hustler took on a name and an identity: Johnny People. Johnny disappeared from the community, money lets you do that. Then about a year later J took an exotic cruise to a semi-imaginary country far away from all probability. No pillars here, my Lord. Johnny was also on the cruise with yet a new name and a new persona for him to "people". And Johnny developed a sexual fixation on the elusive J but that didn't matter too much, as it turned out.
They stood in their life jackets. I feel I know you, Johnny said. My name is Kevin.
I don't know you, J said. You are a total stranger.
Maybe, Kevin said, but still... it's the strangeness that feels so familiar. Flowers in windows. The all-clear whistle.
The rocking of the boat made it difficult to think. Strangers were "exchanging the peace" in the so-called library, filled with best-sellers and out-of-date travelogues. How I am missing my daily dose of the Times, Kevin said. Also of course the Internet. One needs these things.
Did you know that I am 14 years old and horny as hell on the Internet? Kevin asked. That's the role I play there, that's my "space". My list of dear friends goes scrolling for ages. It's all just a lovely fantasy perhaps. I have this beautiful sense of freedom.
His clothes were vulgar and at the same time very drab. Without Arthur he seemed loose, directionless.
The boat had a daily wine-tasting yet it always seemed to be the same wine. Something from California with a screw top.
A midnight costume party. Many didn't have much costume to speak of and didn't speak anyway. J would haunt the library hoping someone would return a new "sensation novel". Most of the sensations one knew of had been flogged to death.
The cruise ship had filled the ship's chapel with sound equipment. You couldn't move or see the altar. A blasphemy but no one said anything. People averted their eyes. Down the corridor, Kevin won Bingo hands down and grabbed J in the crush on the way out. I want you to come celebrate with me. Thank God for J that Tina was there. Tina pushed with that amazing pectoral strength, pushed and exerted her will. Get lost, you loser. Pulsing bystanders with their shoulder-hair a-bristle. We run a polite ship here. There will be none of this, there will be none of that. Slap slap. Push the blighter to the deck's edge, push a little farther. They say he murdered Arthur. No no, Tina, it's all right. Vacationers lifted their parasols as they strolled up and down the passage, and it was up and down, such was the naughtiness of the waves. Then the parasols fell like missiles. Kevin's knocked an old man down from his walker. No. No. There will be none of that, my good man.
Tina asked: What do you think? Should I push this asshole overboard?
Relax Tina, J said.
Arthur would not have wanted such a thing. Dear gentle Arthur.
There were open sores all over Kevin's back and he was "peopled" with bruises worse than Johnny's were in his street days. When the boat lurched, his cocktail would spill and the syrup would linger in the pocked spaces. The sky was purple but not a bruisy purple, more a livid color like a piece of carbon paper that had gotten wet. There was nothing left in his glass. Kevin, you just threw it overboard. That's a crime of the sea.
The glass was just glass, Kevin said. You are what I'd call litter, man. Leave me alone.
You left him suffocated in an alley, J said. Gay people were the only family he still had. We don't do that to each other.
J said all this but kept his mouth closed. Kevin rocked into the wee hours. Disco had been resuscitated for the 100th time. When the man disappeared overboard not even the purser said anything. It isn't as though these were ties that broke down. All ties were broken. The thing about "you mustn't profit" was really more structural. That is, the person who broke human laws had then to submit to different ones, to animal ones. And then it didn't matter. Nobody notices say a dead seagull when its body disappears. Or a dead squirrel. Gurus say that the right to be human is precious, has to be attained -- not earned exactly but at least not spurned exactly. Money is so beside the point, sex is so irrelevant. Anyway it had taken this orgiastic cruise to turn J into a quasi monk. He ended up hardly leaving his stateroom. The purple light poured into the window and thickened like glue. It was hard to read by. Lots of time for thinking. No hangover, he didn't drink. No pain, no nothing. So what is this nada nada, where is your faith? He tried to pray, managed a little, but couldn't shake the hatred in his heart, not completely. This was just one more piece of damage that Johnny had done to things. The kid had maybe just been scrambling for security but but. But to let a person die. How did you pray around that? The truth is that evil is suffocating. It exists. It exists. Or if it's an illusion then equally so are the people who give into it. Surely they are the ones who don't exist. Can we just forget about them? Why not, why not? When the ship docked at some wretched unknown port, J got off and then refused to get back on. Let the world be my monastery. What I renounce is having any preference. So he turned his back on the cruise. Because he never went back, he also never heard that a man had gone overboard.
*
You mustn't profit from acts of violence committed by yourself. J had had a friend named Arthur, a "pillar" of the gay community (a pillar with no building!) and Arthur had fallen in love with a hustler from P Street. Arthur died, the hustler inherited, no one questioned. The ex-wife grieved and wrung her hands -- no one paid attention to her. Then the hustler took on a name and an identity: Johnny People. Johnny disappeared from the community, money lets you do that. Then about a year later J took an exotic cruise to a semi-imaginary country far away from all probability. No pillars here, my Lord. Johnny was also on the cruise with yet a new name and a new persona for him to "people". And Johnny developed a sexual fixation on the elusive J but that didn't matter too much, as it turned out.
They stood in their life jackets. I feel I know you, Johnny said. My name is Kevin.
I don't know you, J said. You are a total stranger.
Maybe, Kevin said, but still... it's the strangeness that feels so familiar. Flowers in windows. The all-clear whistle.
The rocking of the boat made it difficult to think. Strangers were "exchanging the peace" in the so-called library, filled with best-sellers and out-of-date travelogues. How I am missing my daily dose of the Times, Kevin said. Also of course the Internet. One needs these things.
Did you know that I am 14 years old and horny as hell on the Internet? Kevin asked. That's the role I play there, that's my "space". My list of dear friends goes scrolling for ages. It's all just a lovely fantasy perhaps. I have this beautiful sense of freedom.
His clothes were vulgar and at the same time very drab. Without Arthur he seemed loose, directionless.
The boat had a daily wine-tasting yet it always seemed to be the same wine. Something from California with a screw top.
A midnight costume party. Many didn't have much costume to speak of and didn't speak anyway. J would haunt the library hoping someone would return a new "sensation novel". Most of the sensations one knew of had been flogged to death.
The cruise ship had filled the ship's chapel with sound equipment. You couldn't move or see the altar. A blasphemy but no one said anything. People averted their eyes. Down the corridor, Kevin won Bingo hands down and grabbed J in the crush on the way out. I want you to come celebrate with me. Thank God for J that Tina was there. Tina pushed with that amazing pectoral strength, pushed and exerted her will. Get lost, you loser. Pulsing bystanders with their shoulder-hair a-bristle. We run a polite ship here. There will be none of this, there will be none of that. Slap slap. Push the blighter to the deck's edge, push a little farther. They say he murdered Arthur. No no, Tina, it's all right. Vacationers lifted their parasols as they strolled up and down the passage, and it was up and down, such was the naughtiness of the waves. Then the parasols fell like missiles. Kevin's knocked an old man down from his walker. No. No. There will be none of that, my good man.
Tina asked: What do you think? Should I push this asshole overboard?
Relax Tina, J said.
Arthur would not have wanted such a thing. Dear gentle Arthur.
There were open sores all over Kevin's back and he was "peopled" with bruises worse than Johnny's were in his street days. When the boat lurched, his cocktail would spill and the syrup would linger in the pocked spaces. The sky was purple but not a bruisy purple, more a livid color like a piece of carbon paper that had gotten wet. There was nothing left in his glass. Kevin, you just threw it overboard. That's a crime of the sea.
The glass was just glass, Kevin said. You are what I'd call litter, man. Leave me alone.
You left him suffocated in an alley, J said. Gay people were the only family he still had. We don't do that to each other.
J said all this but kept his mouth closed. Kevin rocked into the wee hours. Disco had been resuscitated for the 100th time. When the man disappeared overboard not even the purser said anything. It isn't as though these were ties that broke down. All ties were broken. The thing about "you mustn't profit" was really more structural. That is, the person who broke human laws had then to submit to different ones, to animal ones. And then it didn't matter. Nobody notices say a dead seagull when its body disappears. Or a dead squirrel. Gurus say that the right to be human is precious, has to be attained -- not earned exactly but at least not spurned exactly. Money is so beside the point, sex is so irrelevant. Anyway it had taken this orgiastic cruise to turn J into a quasi monk. He ended up hardly leaving his stateroom. The purple light poured into the window and thickened like glue. It was hard to read by. Lots of time for thinking. No hangover, he didn't drink. No pain, no nothing. So what is this nada nada, where is your faith? He tried to pray, managed a little, but couldn't shake the hatred in his heart, not completely. This was just one more piece of damage that Johnny had done to things. The kid had maybe just been scrambling for security but but. But to let a person die. How did you pray around that? The truth is that evil is suffocating. It exists. It exists. Or if it's an illusion then equally so are the people who give into it. Surely they are the ones who don't exist. Can we just forget about them? Why not, why not? When the ship docked at some wretched unknown port, J got off and then refused to get back on. Let the world be my monastery. What I renounce is having any preference. So he turned his back on the cruise. Because he never went back, he also never heard that a man had gone overboard.
*
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Thoughts about a Place
*
You looked for your destiny -- or your salvation -- at the bottom of time, you pawed through time like a famished little dachshund, but you never thought to ransack place, or even tried to learn how. So you chose time over place, why? Why time not place? Would a place properly understood be your more vivid form of salvation?
*
One was careful to say place not space. Because space might perhaps be empty, defined that way -- but a place was always occupied.
*
Jane Austen fainted when they told her that her family would move. Wise lady! When one moves not everything moves and then how can you be in two places at once? Which part of you is where, and at the end where are *you*? Or put it this way: place isn't transferable. It is what it is. There is no substitute for a given place and no place substitutes for another. So if you have it you have what is not comparable or expendable, nothing you can just give away without thinking. Because you are wedged in it so far that the wedging is you. And there you stand, completely happy. Enclosed.
*
And a place cannot be ransacked either. Its meaning is not hidden at the bottom of it or hidden behind what is there or in any way extractable. Because what is there? What would that "there" be? That was what you wanted, after all. You thought you were searching for a meaning but the meaning and the search were in a place and the place was what you wanted, not the lesser things it contained. It was "already", it was, it was not hidden unless in plain sight, which only hid itself from people who didn't look at it -- oh, if they only knew! "Plain sight" was paradise!
*
What would it mean for one actually to be where one was? Would salvation have a piece of this, in its not grasping so much at an elsewhere? I mean to say, I think the transcendence is real and the imminence is real but they are just about the same. In the sense that both are intense or both are weak. When you feel them you then don't have to do so much walking, or else the walking is itself right *there*, itself placed and not really moving. Because what if time could be seen as no longer breaking down one place to reach another, but instead simply the deepening of your being in a place? Time would be the act of understanding a place. It wouldn't exactly go anywhere. Or the going somewhere would be very calm.
*
Understanding would be mindfulness with nothing reductive about it.
*
You could walk away from those aesthetic cliches -- death in a vacuum, meaningless death, meaningless life -- all those wearisome monologues that try to presuppose existence without a place. As though even absolute freedom didn't have its placement, its being placed, a place that itself is perhaps not free, or a place that is neither free nor unfree but something else. This whole bliss is "already" set down and the only part of it that is "not yet" is your relation to it. Maybe you are not "virtual" but just confused. Maybe unhappiness is not really where you are.
*
Otherwise you would be just like today's affluent ones (inwardly so very poor) who endlessly move from place to place and from address to address, starting over each time and somehow remaining quite the same -- with that "same" never quite defined or confronted or even effectively evaded.
*
If you harp on God's absence so much, is that because God's presence would be too much to bear? And because it might provide a sort of jewel shaped hollow for your own presence or absence?
*
You looked for your destiny -- or your salvation -- at the bottom of time, you pawed through time like a famished little dachshund, but you never thought to ransack place, or even tried to learn how. So you chose time over place, why? Why time not place? Would a place properly understood be your more vivid form of salvation?
*
One was careful to say place not space. Because space might perhaps be empty, defined that way -- but a place was always occupied.
*
Jane Austen fainted when they told her that her family would move. Wise lady! When one moves not everything moves and then how can you be in two places at once? Which part of you is where, and at the end where are *you*? Or put it this way: place isn't transferable. It is what it is. There is no substitute for a given place and no place substitutes for another. So if you have it you have what is not comparable or expendable, nothing you can just give away without thinking. Because you are wedged in it so far that the wedging is you. And there you stand, completely happy. Enclosed.
*
And a place cannot be ransacked either. Its meaning is not hidden at the bottom of it or hidden behind what is there or in any way extractable. Because what is there? What would that "there" be? That was what you wanted, after all. You thought you were searching for a meaning but the meaning and the search were in a place and the place was what you wanted, not the lesser things it contained. It was "already", it was, it was not hidden unless in plain sight, which only hid itself from people who didn't look at it -- oh, if they only knew! "Plain sight" was paradise!
*
What would it mean for one actually to be where one was? Would salvation have a piece of this, in its not grasping so much at an elsewhere? I mean to say, I think the transcendence is real and the imminence is real but they are just about the same. In the sense that both are intense or both are weak. When you feel them you then don't have to do so much walking, or else the walking is itself right *there*, itself placed and not really moving. Because what if time could be seen as no longer breaking down one place to reach another, but instead simply the deepening of your being in a place? Time would be the act of understanding a place. It wouldn't exactly go anywhere. Or the going somewhere would be very calm.
*
Understanding would be mindfulness with nothing reductive about it.
*
You could walk away from those aesthetic cliches -- death in a vacuum, meaningless death, meaningless life -- all those wearisome monologues that try to presuppose existence without a place. As though even absolute freedom didn't have its placement, its being placed, a place that itself is perhaps not free, or a place that is neither free nor unfree but something else. This whole bliss is "already" set down and the only part of it that is "not yet" is your relation to it. Maybe you are not "virtual" but just confused. Maybe unhappiness is not really where you are.
*
Otherwise you would be just like today's affluent ones (inwardly so very poor) who endlessly move from place to place and from address to address, starting over each time and somehow remaining quite the same -- with that "same" never quite defined or confronted or even effectively evaded.
*
If you harp on God's absence so much, is that because God's presence would be too much to bear? And because it might provide a sort of jewel shaped hollow for your own presence or absence?
*
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