Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Zen and Some Thoughts on Poetry


            With as busy as I have been, I regret that I have not been able to keep up with reading and writing poetry.  Nonetheless, every now and then I run across something that resonates for one reason or another.  I also tend to write when emotion is at its rawest.  I’m just not in that space right now.  Zen and all of the meditation that I have been engaged in have placed me comfortably in the analytical mode where I need to be to complete this dissertation.  If all goes well, that journey completes itself within the year. I have the distinct feeling that I will be making sense of that journey for some time. Too much has happened, the path has forked, the path disappears, the path resumes.  Robert Frost, presented with two paths that diverged in a yellow wood, chose the one less traveled.  Luxury to choose.  The Taoist in me says that half of the time there is only one path.
            I will stick with this metaphor for now, because I suspect that a lot of the time we are clearing the path.  When I actually started studying Buddhism three or four months ago, I read something about Mahayana Buddhism appealing to psychologists, and Zen appealing to the poets.  This makes more sense to me now, Zen is inextricably tied to the arts and culture of Japan.  It also makes sense to me why Zen appealed to me instinctively.  Poetry is probably closer to the natural state I wish to be, psychology is my profession, and while enjoyable it can be exhausting and unhealthy for me.  I end up analyzing my own mind, and applying mental models that all eventually find their necessary inadequacy and leave me in a recess where I have produced enough existential dread to power my next three years of work.
            Zen also appeals to the Taoist in me.  Zen was birthed out of Taoism, which was a rejection of the formalism of Confucianism.  The art of Japan can be strikingly minimalist, which leads to the perception that Zen is to be associated with the most austere formalism, and while it cannot be disconnected from the activity, Zen occupies the space just beyond. It is knowing the form so thoroughly that one is liberated from it, free to pursue the artless art.  Zen in the Art of Archery illustrates this much better than I can.  Poetry is the language for this space.  It is our best effort to put language to direct experience.  It never captures it, but it can arrive so close that it achieves something that appears universal.  I have no idea if e.e. cummings, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, or Anne Sexton knew anything about Zen, but I see in their art the points where the formalism breaks under the emotional weight of direct experience.
            I was in the library a few weeks ago and happened on a biography of James Dickey, entitled The World as a Lie.  I had been oddly attracted to his work when I ran across some unfamiliar pieces this Spring.  But, this title was now wedded to all that I had been reading about Buddhism.  The world as it is perceived is filled with illusions.  A massive amount of what you are visually perceiving at this given moment, is not accurate, the brain constructs a lot of the periphery based on assumptions—it has no time to see every brick when the point is seeing the wall that you may be about to hit.  Such is life, where our goals, impulses, emotions, and memories all compete for attention.  This is not necessarily a regrettable position, there is beauty and history in all of that.  I sometimes wonder if this a necessary condition for our existence, without mystery, confusion, ambiguity we would have something that probably resembles certainty.  What purpose would we have to living?  Zen rejects this not on the grounds that these things don’t matter, but that they are incomplete and therefore certainty is an illusion, even when we feel certain.  We miss the world for the lie.
            So, back to the journey I have been on for the past 4 years. In March I was convinced that I had a moment of Zen. I had no idea what I was talking about, because I have now studied Zen and I can tell you that I know nothing about it.  It was probably closer to what they call satori, an awakening in perception, an awareness.  If you read anything on Zen you will find countless examples of this experience. It is both fleeting and unmistakable, and it really cannot be captured in words because it is so elusive.  It can be described, but what is the point? I only I have access to it. 
            As best I can describe, I felt time was suspended.  It was not that I could see the future, that is ridiculous, and please slap me if I ever say anything that grandiose.  But, I could feel the future, and the past, perfectly.  There was no distinction to time.  All of the love of my friends and family, every person that came and went through the first 40 years of my life, the joy at the births of my three children, the losses that haunt—all of it was there.  So you do not mistake me, this is not one of those spiritual stories of bliss.  Bliss was there, but there was also dread.  I still have no idea what the significance of this moment is, but it continues to fuel a massive amount of writing, creative and professional.  It was the first time that all of the dissertation ideas fused and my vision for that project presented itself.
            Zen is present in spontaneity and that is why it appeals to poets and artists, but I suspect that it is present in a great many pursuits—Fritjof Capra wrote similarly about this experience in the Tao of Physics.  One of the things that I am most thankful for in this odyssey is that Zen has placed me in such wonderous state of curiosity.  I sit to write creative work and I have no idea where it is going and could care less, because that is the point—its’s fascinating to see where it goes.  I write these blog entries, without much care if they are read or not, just out of curiosity what others see in it.  I am utterly transfixed with my dissertation work out of the pure curiosity of what my investigation may reveal.  To go back to the path metaphor—something tells me that Zen is what lies just beyond the path I’ve been clearing.
As I prepare to read some of my work this week, I will offer some of the poetry that resonated over the last year:

The Waking,
by Theodore Roethke
I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling, what is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the ground, I shall walk softly there
And learn by going where I have to go
Light takes the tree, but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair.
I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
Great nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady, I should know
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

I am not sure I can add much analysis to what is plainly said here, but this has often been on my mind in those moments where I am subjecting myself to the verbal abuse that comes with not working on dissertation.  It says to me screw it, you’re onto something, have faith in yourself and the process, it will unfold on its own.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s farm in Pine Island, Minnesota, by James Wright
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,   
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.   
Down the ravine behind the empty house,   
The cowbells follow one another  
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines,   
The droppings of last year’s horses   
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

There was debate in my writing group about whether Wright earned the last line.  What I can tell you, is that it spoke to me. All of what is present to him in this moment is elemental.  There was a moment in the past few months that I had the distinct feeling in those last lines—that I have wasted the last forty years of life.  There was way to much of me governed by externals—worry about offending others (people who truly know me, know that this can be nearly compulsive), worry about the next steps, worry that I was being misunderstood.  So little of that matters.

(From) The Strength of Fields, by James Dickey
The strength of fields. Lord, let me shake   
         With purpose.    Wild hope can always spring   
         From tended strength.    Everything is in that.
            That and nothing but kindness.    More kindness, dear Lord
Of the renewing green.    That is where it all has to start:
         With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less
             Than save every sleeping one
             And night-walking one

         Of us.
                         My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can.

     It sounds like prayer to me.  I hope I have lived up to me efforts to be kind.  I can tell you that about a month ago I was raving like a lunatic about how my dissertation, and life, and Zen and how this is all interconnected and I could not stop writing about it, Sonia said—“well it sounds like purpose.”
  
      And this, I ran across a few days ago.  It was unfamiliar to me, and I see so much that is universal.  We are born into suffering, there is sorrow, there is regret, and yet it is worth refusing this—to live, and to tell.  The tell can be a thousand different things, a thousand gestures of kindness, finding one’s voice through art in spite of life’s thousands of torments.   
      
   I go back to May 1937, by Sharon Olds   
   I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
   I see my father strolling out
    under the ochre sandstone arch, the 
    red tiles glinting like bent
   plates of blood behind his head, 
   I see my mother with a few light books at her hip
   standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,
   the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, 
   its sword-tips aglow in the May air,
   they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,   
   they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are   
   innocent, they would never hurt anybody.   
   I want to go up to them and say Stop,   
   don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,   
   he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
   you cannot imagine you would ever do,   
   you are going to do bad things to children,
   you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
   you are going to want to die. I want to go
   up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
   her hungry pretty face turning to me,   
   her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
   his arrogant handsome face turning to me,   
   his pitiful beautiful untouched body,   
   but I don’t do it. I want to live. I   
   take them up like the male and female   
   paper dolls and bang them together   
   at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to   
   strike sparks from them, I say 
   Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.


   Laura said to me a few weeks ago, “wherever you are going to, I’m glad you’re writing it all out.”  I suppose that’s what this is—the telling about it.

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