Whereof one cannot speak
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Month: January 2014
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Blessed Silence
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Saudade
It is my good fortune to be able to wander in the process of earning my living. I often drive aimlessly through strange cities, and wonder about the lives behind the doors.
Today I did a day trip to a city well known to me, and was struck by the absence of feelings I used to have. I used to feel this sense of absence combined with hope, like salvation was just a woman or experience away. This longing is what drives people to wander. It was what drove the hippies, who used drugs both to stoke and calm it. It is an itch, the scratching of which only drives it further inside.
The Portuguese have an interesting word, which I have posted on before: Saudade.
Saudade is a Portuguese and Galician word that has no direct translation in English. It describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic or deeply melancholic
longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it
often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing will
never return.[2] A stronger form of saudade
may be felt towards people and things whose whereabouts are unknown,
such as a lost lover, or a family member who has gone missing. . . .In Portuguese, “Tenho saudades tuas” (European Portuguese) or “Tenho saudades de você” (Brazilian Portuguese), translates as “I have saudade of you” meaning “I miss you”, but carries a much stronger tone. In fact, one can have saudade of someone whom one is with, but have some feeling of loss towards the past or the future.
Saudade with someone you are with. Ponder that. Do you not coexist with those with whom you have a history in multiple eras? Then, now, and what is to come?
Then I got to thinking of a phrase I first ran into when I was about 17, from Novalis: “Sehnsucht nach dem Tod”, which is also hard to translate, but roughly lust or longing for death, but in at least my understanding meaning with death not extinction, but something else, a point to travel to.
And of course you have to add sadness to all this. And what I saw was that, say, 10 years ago, some part of me was hoping it could live on the surface of life, float happily, that somehow someone or something would rescue me, that just over THAT hill, and then THAT hill there was salvation.
And what I see now is that my path forward is through. It has always been through. I have to look at the mountains of bodies in history, see all the evil, see human life as it IS, and move through it. I am not afraid. There is another side, there is a destination.
There is an end to suffering. It is easy, reading the basics of Buddhism in college or somewhere, to see the Four Noble Truths as facile, simple, easy. But to end suffering is it not perceptually, conceptually necessary to believe it POSSIBLE? Is not the very postulation of a solution a bold step when it is first advanced?
So I looked at this city without romantic illusions, and it felt good.
When there is anything you cannot face in this world, are you not chased by it? Are you not pursued? And can it not always find you?
And I look at the Flower Children of the 1960’s. Did they not pursue an illusion which had no room for Vietnamese Communists hacking children into pieces, or planting bombs on them and remote detonating them like mines? They did not have room for shallow graves with thousands of bodies with bullets in the back of their heads. They did not want to hear about how we might have prevented the horrors in Cambodia, or just what those horrors might have been.
They still don’t.
All of this stems from wanting to live on the surface of life. This is ignoble. It is cowardly. All of us have both good and evil in us, but not all of us admit this.
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Lone Survivor, Part 4
Somebody had to go pick up the pieces of the bodies, not just of Murphy’s group, but of the SEAL’s and Army guys who crashed in the helicopter. The need to find and inter fallen soldiers–or what is left of them– is one of the realities of war few want to speak about. In this case, it was done in what might euphemistically be termed “austere” terrain, and under constant threat of attack.
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Serenity
Who are your heroes? You likely have a list of 5-10 people who come readily enough to mind. For me, the immediate ones are traditional military heroes. [Sammy Davis is one of my favorites. Something about getting knocked on your ass 5 times, and getting back up 5 times makes me laugh with admiration. Then he floats himself, wounded, across a river, even though he can’t swim. God blesses those who don’t know what they “can’t” do.]
Back on topic, for how many of them is their principal positive attribute tranquility? Peace of mind? Calm?
I had said some time ago that I didn’t “get” the seated Buddha, since my life is not spent sitting. But I think I do now: this figure symbolizes FINALLY getting some rest from the worries and troubles, doubts, hopes, fears, sadnesses, and everything else that come with human life.
Yes, of course this is obvious, and yes of course I am stupid for not getting this. But I was sitting today, doing my Kum Nye, and just watching all the endless parade of emotions and images, and realizing that behind it all there is rest.
And I would argue that tranquility is perhaps the most important virtue, because without it all other virtues are expressed compulsively, which is to say inauthentically, mechanically.
True love proceeds from tranquility. It takes an untroubled spirit to offer true empathy without grasping, to give without expectation or need of reciprocation.
We all want to have a happy, untroubled heart, and you must have one to offer it. There is no other way.
We would do well to value more this virtue, which is our workaday world has I think come to seem useless, even though with it you can both work harder and longer.
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Time–something completely different
It is odd to contemplate the daily juxtaposition of Base Ten and Base Sixty numbering. We count time in decades, but we have a dozen months. We buy a dozen eggs. We have sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day. Yet there is no widespread discussing about “metric-alizing” our time.
I looked up the Babylonian numbering system. If you look at the actual symbols, it looks to me like Base Ten. Of course, math has never been my strong suit.
It is odd to contemplate what a strange thing it is that it took so long to invent zero. As I have said often though, it hard enough to see what is THERE, but even harder to see what is not there. Zero symbolizes what is missing. This is something. That is why we have a symbol for it.
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An almost made up poem
Feels appropriate for some reason to post a poem by Bukowski. Chosen more or less at random:
An Almost Made Up Poem
I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous
because we’ never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched. so you went with the famous and wrote
about the famous, and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried about
their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed
with them, who gives them that, and then awakens
in the morning to write upper case poems about
ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they’ told
us, but listening to you I wasn’ sure. maybe
it was the upper case. you were one of the
best female poets and I told the publishers,
editors, “ her, print her, she’ mad but she’
magic. there’ no lie in her fire.” I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didn’ happen. your letters got sadder.
your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all
lovers betray. it didn’ help. you said
you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and
the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying
bench every night and wept for the lovers who had
hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never
heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide
3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you
I would probably have been unfair to you or you
to me. it was best like this.
Charles Bukowski
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Time
It just occurred to me today that time has texture. When you are in a hurry, it closes in on you. When you “have” time, it opens up. The same outward amount of work can be done within both textural contexts, but the best work is done well with the same feeling of space and openness.
As Tarthang Tulku has explained–at least, as I have understood him–across a number of books, work well done is something you enter in to, it is something which expands. It is something you participate in, not something you “do to”.
Where else can you be physically, but here and now? Why not be here and now perceptually as well? Here and now is the only place you have to become larger and duller, in the sense of being diffused, not sharp.
There is a place for the open blade, but its uses are rare.
Again, not entirely sure what I am saying, but you can print this out, and use the back of the paper for a To Do or grocery list.
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Words
Words are of course needed, but they are limiting by their very nature.
Has it ever occurred to you that the referent for “that” can be infinite?
And does not every that short of that that exist within a context with a background, and if we look at that background, and the background to that background, do we not in time wind up with infinity again?
I have no idea what I am saying, but that has never stopped me before.
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Truth
It amuses me to play with ideas. I take it seriously, but nothing worth taking seriously can always be taken seriously. Having said that, I will remind any readers I may have that I not only reserve the right to call myself a dumbass, I reserve the right to not know what I think until I type it, and to then swing around 185 degrees, or maybe 222, to something else.