So I finally watched this movie, which is on many critics top ten lists, and for many at number 1. I read a few years ago it knocked off Citizen Kane in some poll or other.
After reading how confusing it was, I really don’t see it as that confusing at all. It is an attempt to map out and paint the contours of madness, how it feels, what it is like to lose connection with reality.
It is a map of pain, of existential pain so deep it leads to suicide, to the “quietus of a bare bodkin”, and an empty stage–where nothing was real anyway–and to silence.
I feel this. And you know, this story, in all its permutations, is being acted out in many places and many hearts the world over AT THIS MOMENT. A moment ago someone ended their life. I read that, on average, someone ends their live every 40 seconds somewhere on Earth.
You don’t think about this much, but this is an extraordinarily confusing planet. We are born, often born to parents who love us incompletely, confusingly, and sometimes hurtfully because they don’t know any better, or don’t have the will or ability to do better.
Far too many of us are born to dismally poor, filthy places which cannot be escaped. Sex is one of the only comforts which is free, and that leads to children, who repeat the process.
We breathe in our culture, whatever it is. If it is one heavily influenced by modern American triviality, continual rush, mindless banter, and greed, you may find yourself on a conveyor belt to a life which will never nourish anything truly good in you. You will find yourself lonely, surrounded by people, who also feel alone.
What a sight this is!!! I am less alone by myself than I am with most people. But it is because I am not afraid to hear stories of hell that over and over people tell their life stories to me, things they tell they have never told anyone else. I don’t look away.
And to be clear, pain and suffering frighten me as much as anyone else. I feel it more keenly, I think–both my own and particularly that of the world–than most, so if anything I simply have more familiarity with it, more time spent learning to live with it, and perhaps less fear of it than people who have suppressing it and lying about it.
Here is what I want to propose: the hero’s life consists in seeing the evil of the world–the pain, the cruelty, the confusion, the nausea, the self loathing, the unfairness–and learning to live with it, in the present. To reject nothing. To see everything. To KNOW that you can’t fix most of it, or add anything lasting or meaningful. To KNOW this world is broken. But to remain present anyway, and still seek out light in all this, and try to bring it into this darkness.
This is heart wrenching, horrific, terrible, terrifying task.
I will often find myself watching movies and having to pause in some particularly painful or awkward scene. I say to myself “I can’t take it”. But of course I always do. But I am keenly sensitive, to a fault.
How can you feel compassion and not be swept away? This is the key question. I think a lot of people who use this word don’t really understand it. They use it, in my estimation, most of the time as a way of separating the world into the compassionate and those lacking compassion. It is a tool of judgement and one of self importance. And it is nearly always a lie.
Compassion for all is compassion for all, even the deluded and confused. This is an awful thing to attempt to practice in reality. If you do not feel the difficulty in this, then you are a better person than me, or you have not understood this at all.
Ponder the holocaust of the animals, which is the barbeque and cooking of the animals. The countless pigs and chickens and goats and cows herded up, slaughtered, butchered, then cooked and eaten.
But is the ocean not full of the eating of fish by other fish? Is the world outside your door not filled with birds eating insects, and larger birds eating smaller birds and their eggs? If you look, you will often see hawks being attacked by smaller birds protecting their eggs or perhaps themselves.
We did not invent this world. Its rules are not our rules, as far as I know, or as far as anyone, I think, knows.
One cannot live purely in this world. One must compromise. And I think trying too hard to be a saint actually lowers your spiritual level. Saintliness is, if I may coin a word, RULE-liness. It is calcifying your perception and behavior to create ruts within which you live your life. If enough people live in these ruts, peace and harmony result, but this is not, in my view, the best result possible.
I will often lay in my bed after I awake and just feel my body, which is a sort of Kum Nye practice. And I allow what thoughts will come to come, patiently, and without effort.
I read the other day that famous passage from Marcus Aurelius where he talks about how the birds and the bees are up early and about their work, so why shouldn’t he be? The world has an order, and he too has his part to play, so why not up and at it every morning?
Perhaps ironically, perhaps even comically, I was laying in my bed pondering this this morning. Should I be up and at ’em? I feel most days I paint half of a beautiful canvas then give up. I don’t really know why, but I think a big part of it is getting through this digestive hurdle, of accepting the world fully without any avoidable blindness.
And it hit me that people are not animals. We have some unknown and unknowable degree of freedom, what I have for some time called “non-statistical coherence”. We can go sideways. We can cross all the ruts. This is not forward movement, but it broadens the path of our possible progress.
I think our version of the bees and the birds is doing natural good, obvious good, doing the right thing by those immediately around you. Enough good, but not too much. Simple gestures, but not elaborate flourishes. Private giving, without counting, because it is needed.
I think most deep evil can be traced ultimately back, somewhere along the line, to compulsive goodness, or rather, to compulsivity in the name of some principle whose life has been extinguished and stuffed into an outer form filled with sawdust and petty cruelty and ignorance.
A deep rut enables long movement, but only in one direction, and you are closed off from all around you. Going sideways, and perhaps even in circles opens up perceptual pathways which would otherwise remain closed.
And these are ultimately energetic pathways. It is a principle of Kum Nye that energy, when flowing properly, takes care of itself. Your will has nothing to do with it, and after some while not even your conscious attention.
So right now I am looking at this pit of ghastliness, at the man behind the dumpster in Lynch’s vision, and trying to calm all fear, and all aversion, as well as all attachment. It is not hard, you know, to become attached to pain and misery. I see it every day, not least in myself.
To live safely is to live in peace with the knowledge that pain, loss and death are the lots of all of us; it is to look into hell without terror or greed.
Now, logically, there is a light, a Buddha-nature, which helps with all this. When I find it, I will most likely record it here. Perhaps that should not be true, but it most likely is true. I have long found it hard to predict my own future behavior, not least because it is in an interactive loop with both my inner and outer environments.