08 November 2018

A Carving is the Death of a Stone



Hakuin - The Monkey and the Moon




The phenomenon of getting lost inside of piece of music fascinates me. There is a timelessness within the duration of the song. There are works, songs, that I have listened to over and over, each new listening transforming into a sort of vision where the boards or bricks of the house seem to separate and open and another world is glimpsed from between the slats and rafters - Plato's realm of Ideal Forms, the ancient crystalline spheres of the Universe with crystalline gears and inner workings sounding celestial music. This, I reiterate, hidden away inside, in the "the dearest freshness deep down things," as the magical robe inside the wardrobe or through the looking-glass, passages through into a higher world.

And, for me, It doesn't have to be an acclaimed work of serious music. A recent example was Anais Mitchell's Young Man in America. When I was in the Chama Canyon last year, I lost myself in that song, dreaming between her words and the melody, following elusive memories as the hovered there just on the edge of my awareness. I played it over and over as i walked through the canyon, sat beside the Chama River, gazed into the fire, studied the stars. And while I heard her lyrics, I was listening to something else. It seemed as i lived weeks and months in between each word of the song. Every time I started over, I felt like I was in the Land of the Lotus Eaters; give me another "minute" in that timeless realm.

Like the wind I make my moan, howling in the canyon
There's a hollow in my bones, make me cry and carry on
Make the foam fly from my tongue, make me want what I want
Another wayward son waiting on oblivion

Waiting on the kingdom come to meet me in my sin
Waiting to be born again, mother, kiss me cheek and chin
Mmm, a little medicine, mmm, and then I shed my skin
Mmm, and lemme climb back into the bed you made me in

What it was within the song that brought me to such a state of mind would take years to explain. And this is ancillary to the actual meaning content of the song. Perhaps that is what I am now doing in one way or another. For every day I "spend more time" inside that "other world," my Memory Cathedral, this timeless place. This is the true value in solitude for me. The gift.

I am often asked if I am lonely. And my answer has often been that I am lone, but not lonely. I do not long for the company of others. At least, not in a physically present sense. I do desire presence. And I feel that in those friends and family whose active and living memories I maintain as vital flames within. But the occupations of my mind are demanding and with the limited number of years remaining to me, there is no time to indulge in anything resembling loneliness. I am busy building something blasphemous and strange in here. A monument to a dead man's bones and the ghost of a god that continues to haunt me. Otherwise, the memory practice, my "religion," requires the remains of the day.

Within the Memory Cathedral, I am occupied with the necessary rituals to sustain the Fire, the Pulse. I walk the familiar path up the front steps, acknowledging the statuary on the front facade, note the allegories carved into the bronze doors, stop at the Purifying Font to wash my hands and face, step into the nave, walk through the Stations of the Sephirot towards the High Altar. Along the transepts to either side - Intellectual to the right (Poetry, Prose, Biography, History, etc.); Emotional to the left (Lovers, Friends, Family, Society, etc.) - are radiating chapels, each with it's own furnishing, statues, painting, books and icons of memories. Beyond the musical mnemonics of the choir, is the apse with painted dome and stained glass, where the Spirit is memorialized, below the bones and skull of God contained within the Crypt.

My daily walk takes me down the Transept of the Intellect to the right, where I enter into the Poetry Chapel with its altar. There is a small doorway to the right of the altar what leads to an octagonal room for Shakespeare's Sonnets. In the center of this room is a stature of Shakespeare wearing a mask. You can remove the mask to study the skull beneath it. The 8 walls contain 20 small recessed compartments arranged with icons for each sonnet. There is a final wall, next to the door, also with 20 compartments, but with only 14 containing sonnets. The remaining 6 contain other poetry by Shakespeare. So all 154 sonnets have their place. If I go to say the compartment with Sonnet 43, fourth wall, third compartment, there is a small sign above it with a winking eye. Within is a diorama with a cave labeled Plato's Cave and Figure of Beauty visible as a luminous shadow amongst other shadows. You can see time pass from night to day and the Shadow of Beauty becomes increasingly radiant until it burns like a sun. These are all mnemonic elements of Sonnet 43 for me. Additionally, I can turn on a phosphorescent web of glowing gossamer threads that connects 43 to 46 and 47, but also to 113 and 27 and 28. There is a comfortable chair where I can sit and meditate upon the web of interconnections that weave and wind through the sonnets, the room dimmed down and the interconnected sonnets like constellations in the night sky.

How much time has passed out there? At the end of my time within my Memory Cathedral, I often feel like Rip Van Winkle. Days and weeks have less and less relevance when I am inside working. This tale of Jones I am telling... a times it feels as if I am Scheherazade and the tale unfolds and forks new paths the deeper I go within, my life somehow wagered on the continued telling. This Tale of Jones is the bodying forth of the most essential aspects of my Memory Cathedral. I think of Rethel's Death as a Friend. The Tale of Jones will be complete when the bell tolls.

One of the mnemonic icons upon the altar of my Cathedral is the original handwritten text of the Tao te Ching by Lao Tzu. I reach out to pick it up...

Here we are, you and I, gathered around the fire at the Gate of Bones that leads out of this world. A place called Han Chou Pass.

Many years ago, Lao-Tzu lost faith in the world of human beings. He climbed up on the ox and made his way out of the world. At the Western frontier, Han Chou Pass, there was a Gatekeeper who stopped him. The Gatekeeper recognized Lao-Tzu as a wise and holy man. He said he would only allow Lao-Tzu to pass through the Gate of Bones if he wrote his wisdom down in a book. Lao-Tzu agreed. He wrote all night. The next morning, he presented the Gatekeeper with the Tao Te Ching. The Gate of Bones were opened and Lao-Tzu climbed atop his ox and rode out of this world. The Gatekeeper recounted to all who came to the Gate of Bones the story of Lao-Tzu and encouraged them to read the Tao Te Ching. All were impressed and soon the story of Lao-Tzu and the Tao Te Ching became known all over the world.

I tell you this story here because it is a central part of the Jones tale. I may have told you all of this before. But it bears daily repetition. For the truth of the story of Lao-Tzu and the Gatekeeper - a truth that Jones understood - is that the tale is a lie. Lao-Tzu, riding his ox out of the world, reached this place, Han Chou Pass. There was no one here to prevent he and his ox from passing through. He remained here for a long time, meditating upon his duty to his self and his duty to others.

One day, he figured out a solution: he wrote down all of his wisdom in a small book and he left it here on a stone in the middle of the path. He climbed on his ox and was on the verge of crossing over when he considered that it might be many years before anyone would find his book. Part of him enjoyed the picturing the book of his wisdom soaked with rain, baked by the sun, pages blown out by the wind, lost in the leaves and covered with dust. But another part of him resisted the loss.

He turned the ox around and built a small hut and next to this he constructed the Gate of Bones. He assemble an altar in the corner of his hut to the memory of Lao-Tzu, set the Tao Te Ching within it. Then, he became the Gatekeeper, the teller of the tale of how he was the one who recognized Lao-Tzu as he was leaving the world and stopped him and would not allow him passage through the Gate of Bones until he had written down his wisdom. Lao-Tzu was now long gone and all the remained was the Tao Te Ching and the Gatekeeper's Tale.

There is a sorrow latent within all creation. During the process of creation, there is a unity and a one-ness with the artifact being made and carved out of the world. The language is evocative here. But after having finished, there is the inevitable withdrawal out of. The thing is done. There is the sorrow of having formed an artifact. Perhaps, abdicating the role of the creator and assuming the role of the one who has received the gift of creation is a manner of ameliorating this latent sorrow.

Steiner writes:

"At the heart of form lies a sadness, a trace of loss. A carving is the death of a stone."

There is a nostalgia for what Lao-Tzu called the "Uncarved Block." Steiner continues:

"More complexly: form has left a “rent” in the potential of non-being, it has diminished the reservoir of what might have been (truer, more exhaustive of its means). Concomitantly, in ways most difficult to articulate, major art and literature, music most readily, convey to us vestiges of the unformed, of the innocence of their source and raw material. The persistence of the abyss — French allows the epithet abyssal and it nominal use—is vitally ambiguous. There is the threat of deconstruction, but also the intimation of a great calm, of a tide whose return will cleanse matter of the separation, of the violence (I will come back to both these aspects) inherent in making. Michelangelo is almost obsessed by this nostalgia for the sleep in the marble prior to the chisel."

And,

"Rousseau’s summation in La Nouvelle Héloīse is lapidary: 'such is the nothingness of things human that, except for the Being which exists self-created, there is nothing beautiful except that which does not exist' ('hors l’Etre existant par lui-même, il n’y a rien de beau que ce qui n’est pas')."

The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.
I don't know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.

***

And so, time passes within me as I pass time. Out here in the woods, I can hear the silence and I strive to listen to the silence. Within my Memory Cathedral, I sit before the "rent," the tear, the wound of Being from which emanates a fiery vision. The Shiva Nataraja holding open this wound, dances before me. What can I say when the sounds in my mouth become stones and ash in the saying? What can I write when each word is a miserable thimble of the ocean of this experience? Nothing. The language, these sounds and these words, are only mnemonics - they only "stand for" and do not "stand in stead."

One night, I saw the moon, prurient, full and luminous in the water of a bucket. And I stole it. And though I carry the bucket with me everywhere and drink from it everyday, somewhere along the way, I lost the moon. I want to believe it spilled over the side or fell out when I wasn't looking. However, I know the truth is that it was never in the bucket to begin with. So it is with my language.

That "silence between the notes' that Debussy speaks of, is also there - to a much lesser degree - in the language. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein attempts to say everything that can be said but ends up saying only that that which is most meaningful can not be said and must be passed over in silence. But this is not surrender. (cf. Philosophical Investigations) The language does not fail. Only the imagination. The words adumbrate silence, hover around the unsaid and unsayable like Rilke's creatures emerging from the "unbound forest" to listen to the silence at the Temple.

A tree ascended there. Oh pure transendence!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.

Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright
unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests;
and it was not from any dullness, not
from fear, that they were so quiet in themselves,

but from just listening. Bellow, roar, shriek
seemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been
at most a makeshift hut to receive the music,

a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing,
with an entryway that shuddered in the wind-
you built a temple deep inside their hearing.

(Stephen Mitchell listening to Lao Tzu)

18 April 2018

To trust the mockery of unquiet slumbers.


source


I had an unusual dream last night in which I was "selling my dreams" to a company for money. As a consequence of this transaction, I was no longer able to sleep restfully - in my dream. After I awoke, I lay on my pallet, reflecting on the dream about dreaming and of the feeling of not being able to sleep while I was actually dreaming, deeply asleep. I remembered the line from Novalis: 

We are near waking when we dream that we dream.

I wrote down the dream and published it on The Empty Forms Between The Ivory Gates, then opened my email. There was an pdf update from the authors to a book I had purchased, Shakespeare's Beehive.

Shakespeare's Beehive is an annotated Elizabethan Dictionary which the authors, rare book dealers, are suggesting was annotated by Shakespeare himself. The fact that it is an annotated Elizabethan Dictionary is interesting in itself. Of course, if it was indeed Shakespeare's personal dictionary, that would be remarkable. They have worked hard to make their case. This sort of obsession, especially in regards to Shakespeare, always attracts my attention.

When the book was first published a few years back, I bought an online copy - primarily to read what they had to say concerning the Sonnets. I signed up on their email list. I haven't received an email from them in a long time.

Upon opening the pdf update, I read this passage:

"The headword slumber is recorded in Shakespeare, in all variations, twenty-eight times. Among eleven of these occurrences, the word sleep, one element from the Baret definition, also appears in the speech. In a single occurrence, slumber combines with the other element of the definition, unquiet. This happens in Act III, scene 2, of Richard III. Lord Hastings is the speaker.
Tell him his fears are shallow, without instance; 
And for his dreams, I wonder he’s so simple,
To trust the mockery of unquiet slumbers.
Shortly after Hastings delivers these lines, Richard III emerges, announcing that he has had a long sleep (“I have been long a sleeper”), and, within moments, orders that Hastings’s head be chopped off. Some 250 years later, Emily Brontë wrote of “unquiet slumbers,” with these lines from Wuthering Heights:
I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."
- From the update to Shakespeare's Beehive.


Of course, I was reminded of my dream about "selling my dreams" and the "unquiet slumbers" within. These sorts of synchronicities, co-incidences, echoes between dream and reality, have become much more common of late as I have been increasingly attuned to my creative energies. I believe it is important to make note of them. 

In his forward to the I-Ching by Richard Wilhelm, Jung writes (my emphasis):

Thus it happens that when one throws the three coins, or counts through the forty-nine yarrow stalks, these chance details enter into the picture of the moment of observation and form a part of it -- a part that is insignificant to us, yet most meaningful to the Chinese mind. With us it would be a banal and almost meaningless statement (at least on the face of it) to say that whatever happens in a given moment possesses inevitably the quality peculiar to that moment. This is not an abstract argument but a very practical one. There are certain connoisseurs who can tell you merely from the appearance, taste, and behavior of a wine the site of its vineyard and the year of its origin. There are antiquarians who with almost uncanny accuracy will name the time and place of origin and the maker of an objet d'art or piece of furniture on merely looking at it. And there are even astrologers who can tell you, without any previous knowledge of your nativity, what the position of sun and moon was and what zodiacal sign rose above the horizon in the moment of your birth. In the face of such facts, it must be admitted that moments can leave long-lasting traces. 
In other words, whoever invented the I Ching was convinced that the hexagram worked out in a certain moment coincided with the latter in quality no less than in time. To him the hexagram was the exponent of the moment in which it was cast -- even more so than the hours of the clock or the divisions of the calendar could be -- inasmuch as the hexagram was understood to be an indicator of the essential situation prevailing in the moment of its origin. 
This assumption involves a certain curious principle that I have termed synchronicity, a concept that formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality. Since the latter is a merely statistical truth and not absolute, it is a sort of working hypothesis of how events evolve one out of another, whereas synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers. 
The ancient Chinese mind contemplates the cosmos in a way comparable to that of the modern physicist, who cannot deny that his model of the world is a decidedly psychophysical structure. The microphysical event includes the observer just as much as the reality underlying the I Ching comprises subjective, i.e., psychic conditions in the totality of the momentary situation. Just as causality describes the sequence of events, so synchronicity to the Chinese mind deals with the coincidence of events. 

What does it mean to the individual, to me, when his attention is arrested suddenly by the appearance of previously unknown co-incidences of meaning?

On an immediate but non-trivial level, it can be accounted for as the byproduct of a widening of attention. For example, when you have a broken arm or are pregnant, you notice a greater number of others in a similar situation. Or when you are memorizing Shakespeare, you recognize his influence on the language every day. There is nothing statistically anomalous about this world. The conditions that brought about your current state of recognition have not suddenly become more mysterious, just the opposite: you are seeing more clearly. The difference in due to your heightened awareness.

But there is another level of synchronistic events: two entirely unrelated spheres of awareness suddenly, and for no apparent reason, have connection. The other morning a little sparrow flew in the house where I am staying. An hour later, with no mention of the event from me, a friend told me about a bird flying into her house. Once when traveling in Morocco, I had a dream about a scarab beetle. The next morning, I found a dead scarab beetle clinging to the curtain of our room. (Only later did I connect this to Jung's example of synchronicity with the golden scarab.) Or the dream of being unable to rest and the email about "unquiet slumbers." Sometimes they hit you over the head, other times they are muted and subtle.

Consider: we each see ourselves in a mirror several times a day. We examine our physical reflection, checking occasionally to make certain we still look all right: hair not messed up, teeth clean, eyes clear, etc. We notice any minute difference in our appearance, attending to the superficial. But there is a psychological component to our reflection. The reflection in the everyday mirror is resistant to this inner face - this more substantial aspect of our selves.

But there are other types of mirrors. These mirrors do offer reflection of our inner faces. When we listen to a piece of music that "speaks" to our inmost emotion and spirit. Or when a poem seems to have been written directly us. Art offers a mirror of this inner dimension. We can often see our selves more clearly as we are reflected or re-presented in works of art.

There are manifold difficulties in expressing precisely why this is so. What is there about a particular passage of music that pulls at our heartstrings? Language is unable to contain it, as a bowl of water cannot contain the river. There are no screws for the tools of logic to unscrew. Imagine logic as the Magician's Hat into which he can reach into it's false bottom and remove a rabbit. But what if the "rabbit" in this case is the Magician himself, the entire stage upon which he stands, the auditorium filled with audience? Here is the white rabbit that leads Alice through the looking glass.

These inner mirrors are not so much illogical as they are hyper-logical, surreal, fourth-dimensional shadows cast into a three-dimensional world. Cause and effect are often turned inside out. The greatest is found in the smallest. Heaven on earth. The fractal rich galaxial spirals of a drop of cream in a cup of coffee. Blake's infinity in a grain of sand. Time is just another trick of the mind. These are dream mirrors, reflecting archetypal figures risen up from the depths of not only our private unconsciousness but of that collective unconscious of human being. And like those monstrous beasts that inhabit the undersea trenches of the oceans, as we look into them, the tiny spark of our luminous inquiry attracts them towards us like a beacon. Nietzsche's Abyss looking back into us.

Plato and Socrates believed in Anamnesis, that we are all born with the memories of all who came before us. There are alignments between this and Jung's Collective Unconscious. Recent studies indicate that our brains remember far more than we are able to actively recall, an implicit memory. Forgetting is a vital survival strategy, a filtering or turning down of the volume on the sensory onslaught of the blooming, buzzing world. The problem is we become used to seeing the world in a particular way, we habituate even to these inner reflections of our deeper self. We cease being able to recognize our faces in the mirror. And, consequently, we stop looking inwards.

Taking notice of meaningful coincidences, remembering dreams, becoming aware of previously occult patterns in the world around us, opening up to the reflective fragments found in the unusual, weird, uncanny and strange are methods whereby we can reawaken our abilities to look inwards. Working with the tarot, I-Ching, astrology, crystal balls, chained spheres, charms and other forms of Questioning the Unconscious are methods to clean and polish those mirrors within us that have grown dark with time and dull with habit. As are the Technologies of Ecstasy used by Shaman and Medicine Men and Women. The intention is to see the world new again, with innocence, the child's mind, the beginner's mind.

“Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The great mis-direction of these arts is in assuming they will show you a specific future. What they show is who you are in that moment, your true face underneath the mask of your personality. And by knowing this, you will better know yourself - in the most profound way. And this knowledge will reveal previously hidden pathways into the future before you. It is precisely this knowledge that will open your eyes to make those changes that will shift you from the direction you are going.

These inner mirrors function in an analogous manner to the compass, aligning themselves to unseen magnetic forces that inhabit the planet. When consulted on a regular basis, they help us to re-orient our way through the world and insure that we will arrive at the destination we seek. There is nothing occult about it - any more mysterious than gazing into a mirror to compose our countenance before we venture out into the world. By checking these internal, deep reflections of self, by remarking the meaningful co-incidences of events in time, re-orienting ourselves to True North, we ensure that we stay on the right path.

Regarding these slightest events, what might be called the "death of a butterfly" moments in one's life that snowball down the mountain of time, gaining a momentum beyond what was ever imagined in the instant of their occurrence, Borges once wrote of the painter, James Whistler:
It is known that Whistler when asked how long it took him to paint one of his "nocturnes" answered: "All of my life." With the same rigor he could have said that all of the centuries that preceded the moment when he painted were necessary. From that correct application of the law of causality it follows that the slightest event presupposes the inconceivable universe and, conversely, that the universe needs even the slightest of events.
You, who now read this, most likely someone who knows me, must now wonder how this act of reading will have changed you, slightly shifted your direction or inclined you to pause. The dynamics of our relationship, of me imagining your reaction while reading, has also shaped the creation of the piece. (I also wonder how a future me will be changed by looking back on these words and be yet further changed.) There is a web of mutually interdependent "slightest events" that have brought us here together. A vast network, beyond human reckoning, of provable cause and effect, of hidden magnetic alignments, of intuitive leaps of faith, of seemingly irrational decisions, of unconscious impulses, of irrational responses to the most discrete gestures, a buzzing, blooming field of obstacle and bumper, within which we careen like a silver pinball, passively under what we believe are the implacable forces of fate and actively under the assumptions of free will.

I was driving with someone the other day and she neglected to tell me where to turn. As I took another turn further up the road, she said, "I just changed our entire life." I immediately pulled over to the side of the road. She asked what I was doing. I replied: "Fixing what you just messed up."


Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice 1879–80
James Abbott McNeill Whistler
source





09 February 2018

Living under the constant pressure of death.


source



Living under the constant pressure of death.

The tragedy of youth is to believe you are going to live forever
while that of old age is knowing you have run out of time.
And what time remains is saturated with a core-tiredness.
The energies contained within hope have been long depleted.

Words like empty shells,
no longer full of life,
quiet echoes of what they once were.

God,
I am sick to death
of all these dead metaphors.
The sea shell is traded
for the dried carapace of the cicada,
clinging with a dead mother's grip
to the bark of the pecan tree,
this sepia skinned remnant
smelling like insect death
Van Gogh's boots
her jacket on the hook
that still holds the shape
and perfume of her days.

What is there left to do that hasn't been done already?

The bored artist idly carves
into the face of his muse,
desecrating her beauty,
heedless of her pain,
watching the blood fill
and fall from the wounds.

Is this it?

He reloads his brush with her blood,
spreading the skin apart to dig deep,
has no idea what he might paint,
somehow the dripping brush
seems too much

The only thing interesting about her
was her skull.