Cynics say faith and religion
try to explain away the world's
chaos and mystery.
Sometimes it's the opposite:
They try to explain all the things we KNOW,
though we see no reason in this universe
why we SHOULD know.
A cynic is one who cannot face
how much he knows,
for it is mysterious to him that one can know --
and threatening,because he has done much
that he does not want to know,
nor know that it can be known.
Cynicism, then, is an attempt to explain away
what, despite the world's chaos, we know.
Why SHOULD there be a reason in this universe
for our knowing? Why should we expect
the playground to teach us the game we play?
Some religion is pretended knowledge.
Some religion is refusal to know.
Some religion is an excuse for knowing --
an apology to the physical universe
for patronizing a competitor.
Cynicism is embarrassment about knowing.
If you know and know that you know,
you can dispense with both excuses
and embarrassment.
___________________
The poem above suggests that faith can be many things, and that it is a vast oversimplification to label all faith a crutch, a way to avoid the so-called truths (the "nitty gritty" ones). There is a kind of faith that amounts to integrity, a willingness to recognize one's own knowledge. And most cynicism, I think, amounts to an inverted crutch (must be uncomfortable to rest one's arm pits on the small end).
After all, certain things associated with faith are far from comfortable for most people. For example, if we're immortal beings, what will we do with eternity? Even visions of harps and angels suggest ultimate boredom. And if blame and shame do not end with death, how will we bear those burdens?
Isn't it comfortable to think that we will not have to experience that ordeals we've left to our descendants (possibly nuclear wars, certainly huge indebtedness, perhaps a Brave New Medicated World, etc.)? Isn't it uncomfortable to think that we don't get out of it that easy? That we may be our descendants?
Which is the crutch and which is the obvious? I think the cynical ones know damned well that they've been around longer than one lifetime. Or at least they did as children, before they erected stone walls of arguments and evasions. Why else would they dodge so clumsily? For example, if you say that we are each immortal beings, the cynic will say that that's silly, because we all know that bodies die, an odd non-sequitur. I think the cynic hopes for an end, all debts paid forever, no need ever to take responsibility for past actions. And, as the poem says, I think the cynic proclaims the impossibility of knowing certain things because the cynic hopes never to be known by others.
Of course, some forms of religiosity are refinements of cynicism--of failed cynicism, a cynic covering his ass, just in case, or putting more impenetrable walls between himself and knowing or being known.Skepticism is a different critter. What one knows can and should be tested. But tested against what? What experts say? What "everybody knows"? Actually, I think there are better tests. For example, the day (age 12) when I, drug free, looking up through birch and tall pines at woolly summer clouds, found myself far above my body, filling up the sky, I knew something. Here's a poem I wrote about that:
Growing Pains
At a distance from the bustling cookout fire,
I, twelve, awkward, unpopular,
lay back on my jacket on pine needles
to look up through branches
along tapered birch-laced pines,
rising so swiftly I found myself
suddenly alone in the sky, filled up
with millions of minute rustlings of leaf, needle
and branch, each defining with each movement
new planes of perspective,
bending, supple as wind, to touch
the curvature of clouds. My body
tiny, but I am huge, overflowing
myself, floating there...
when a kid threw sand in my face!
I wept, turned away from him, hid my face.
Wait! Retake! Close-up! Slow motion!
Yes, floating there, I looked down
at the other small bodies scuttling
about the camp-fire and thought: They
could never understand THIS--
and had started to think: THAT thought
doesn't belong to the sky--
when a kid threw sand in a body's face--mine.
Anger and self-pity whooshed out like air
from a punctured balloon, as I was swallowed upb
y my growing body.
Turning from myself, I felt myself,
watching me, weep a few bitter tears
at my silly smallness,
floating there.
_________________
But whether that's "evidence" or can be communicated to others is another subject. What I will say is that at that time I not only knew something, but knew that I knew it. Later I learned of ways others could experience something similar (with considerable predictability--and without drugs or hypnosis). Obviously anyone else's reasoning about how such a thing cannot be or cannot be known will not impinge upon my certainty of my own experience. Unless I'm so suggestible that I can be persuaded that a hot stove is cold because someone has placed a label on it saying "COLD."
But what I mainly look at is workability: Does supposed knowledge, treated as knowledge, open my life up or close it down? Do I become a more able or a less able person, brighter or stupider, better able to align data and resolve confusions or less able, more useful to others or less useful, etc.?
But this, too is another subject, not the point of the poem. My poem is subtler than I am, and doesn't seek to insist on any particular knowledge, but merely to suggest that if there is any to be obtained, it will not be obtained via cynicism. It is true, I think, that some forms of faith (for example, acceptance of dogma with no willingness to relate it to one's own experience) are obstacles to knowing. It is also true, I think, that cynicism is a barrier to knowing. Both are vested interests, based on fear.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Faith--2
O Ye Faithful
Only the faithful, who believe
in what they cannot see,
allow themselves the luxury of doubt.
The faithless cannot afford to doubt,
but must be rigid in their insistence
on not seeing what looms before them:
Behold the adulterer's faith
in spouse's stupidity, in the nonexistence
of a specific agonizing future, in somehow
being able to talk his/her way out of anything
or to wait out all questions in silence
until life moves on, all questions
forgotten. Behold the faith of politicians
in our apathy and forgetfulness, the faith
of conmen, admen and newspapers
in our credibility, the faith of deadbeats
(as they waste friend after friend)
that no matter how many of us they break,
another willing crutch will appear
to prop them up (until it, too,
snaps beneath their bulk
to be replaced by yet another).
_______________________
A friend suggested that this poem should begin with "Behold the adulterer's faith," and probably she's correct, since that's showing what the first stanza, abstractly and somewhat obscurely generalizes about. And it's where the poem moves from purely oracular (and who wants to hang out in an incense-choked cavern with a hag who cuts open birds to search the guts for omens and talks like a zombie?) to something with an element of wit and irony. I think it's interesting to see how much faith the supposedly faithless have. Sometimes blind dumb faith is simply blind and dumb, like all the criminals who know they'll never get caught--even after being caught again and again.
But I've kept the first stanza because I like the point that there's another kind of faith, not at all blind, which gives one the certainty (and space) needed to tolerate doubt. The criminal's faith, if faith it is, is desperate. He puts himself in a position where he can't afford doubt. It's too expensive.
Really, faith is a word we use to describe someone who seems certain of things for which we, who call it faith, see no evidence. But such faith can range from an apathetic agreement with what one has been told or had impressed upon him to desperate grope for something to which one can cling--and to someone who is simply certain of what is obvious to him, an obviousness that escapes others.
If someone had extremely sensitive hearing and could hear melodies where for others there was only silence, those of us who could not hear the melodies he danced to would call his hearing faith until all our instruments agreed with him. The one-eyed man among the blind, if they had no concept of vision, might seem to them a man, not of vision, but of faith, if he went running ahead of them without due regard for obstacles.
But it's fun, when one knows, to doubt what one knows, to challenge it. Science (derived from a word meaning "to know"), when it IS science, relishes doubting itself. I have no doubt that you are here, reading this, but it is easy for me to doubt it. I can decide you're here. I can decide you're not.
For that matter, I can decide that I'M not here. (Or am I a question?) The more certain I am of who I am, the more I can play with who I am. The more able I am to be myself, the more easily I can be anyone or anything, like a child being Daddy. I suppose such things are not really what we usually think of as doubt. They are play, fictions, art (more rudely, lies). But where certainty is simply knowing what one knows (and what one doesn't know), doubt becomes play, fictions, art.
Knowing in the absence of evidence that others can perceive--so similar to what we call insanity (he KNOWS there are giant spiders coming down the wall others see has no giant spiders on it). One difference is that one who DOES know in the absence of such evidence is not obsessive about it, is able to take the viewpoint of others who do not know. He can choose viewpoints. And, if he is artist enough, he can get others to see what he sees. The great composers have all given us music that only they, at first, could hear.
Of course, if he's indiscreet, he may still find himself burdened with a "diagnosis." But only shrinks can fail to see the difference between one clinging to a viewpoint others do not share and unable to assume any other viewpoint, and a person who is able to assume agreed-upon viewpoints, but able to assume viewpoints that are his alone.
It's not the ability to create and experience and dwell in a world no one else can perceive that is madness. It's inability to share in the agreed-upon creation we call reality. And another sort of madness is the inability to create and experience and dwell in a world no one else can perceive. Such an ability is, I think, native to all beings, so those who judge the sanity of others based on departure from agreed-upon reality are, themselves, awfully scared of slipping into knowledge and finding themselves having to take responsibility for what they can create.
That's a complex statement. To simplify: There are the normal (the so-called sane), who are not in very good shape, having lost the child's ability to pretend and perhaps a great deal more and who cling to what everyone knows, the most boring sort of faith. There are those who, having been bruised by the reality that everyone knows and having harmed others in that reality, prefer not to confront that reality, prefer to pretend it's not there or dub-in something else, rooms crawling with giant spiders, for example. (His world will be full of exaggerated manifestations of whatever he is trying to evade in reality. Resistance is pressure against something that has no space to retreat into. It oozes back into the life of the one who pushes it away.)
And there are those who are truly sane, able to choose a viewpoint, certain enough of themselves not to need to cling to agreement, nor to need to fight agreement and cling to an alternative reality. Able to create.
Only the faithful, who believe
in what they cannot see,
allow themselves the luxury of doubt.
The faithless cannot afford to doubt,
but must be rigid in their insistence
on not seeing what looms before them:
Behold the adulterer's faith
in spouse's stupidity, in the nonexistence
of a specific agonizing future, in somehow
being able to talk his/her way out of anything
or to wait out all questions in silence
until life moves on, all questions
forgotten. Behold the faith of politicians
in our apathy and forgetfulness, the faith
of conmen, admen and newspapers
in our credibility, the faith of deadbeats
(as they waste friend after friend)
that no matter how many of us they break,
another willing crutch will appear
to prop them up (until it, too,
snaps beneath their bulk
to be replaced by yet another).
_______________________
A friend suggested that this poem should begin with "Behold the adulterer's faith," and probably she's correct, since that's showing what the first stanza, abstractly and somewhat obscurely generalizes about. And it's where the poem moves from purely oracular (and who wants to hang out in an incense-choked cavern with a hag who cuts open birds to search the guts for omens and talks like a zombie?) to something with an element of wit and irony. I think it's interesting to see how much faith the supposedly faithless have. Sometimes blind dumb faith is simply blind and dumb, like all the criminals who know they'll never get caught--even after being caught again and again.
But I've kept the first stanza because I like the point that there's another kind of faith, not at all blind, which gives one the certainty (and space) needed to tolerate doubt. The criminal's faith, if faith it is, is desperate. He puts himself in a position where he can't afford doubt. It's too expensive.
Really, faith is a word we use to describe someone who seems certain of things for which we, who call it faith, see no evidence. But such faith can range from an apathetic agreement with what one has been told or had impressed upon him to desperate grope for something to which one can cling--and to someone who is simply certain of what is obvious to him, an obviousness that escapes others.
If someone had extremely sensitive hearing and could hear melodies where for others there was only silence, those of us who could not hear the melodies he danced to would call his hearing faith until all our instruments agreed with him. The one-eyed man among the blind, if they had no concept of vision, might seem to them a man, not of vision, but of faith, if he went running ahead of them without due regard for obstacles.
But it's fun, when one knows, to doubt what one knows, to challenge it. Science (derived from a word meaning "to know"), when it IS science, relishes doubting itself. I have no doubt that you are here, reading this, but it is easy for me to doubt it. I can decide you're here. I can decide you're not.
For that matter, I can decide that I'M not here. (Or am I a question?) The more certain I am of who I am, the more I can play with who I am. The more able I am to be myself, the more easily I can be anyone or anything, like a child being Daddy. I suppose such things are not really what we usually think of as doubt. They are play, fictions, art (more rudely, lies). But where certainty is simply knowing what one knows (and what one doesn't know), doubt becomes play, fictions, art.
Knowing in the absence of evidence that others can perceive--so similar to what we call insanity (he KNOWS there are giant spiders coming down the wall others see has no giant spiders on it). One difference is that one who DOES know in the absence of such evidence is not obsessive about it, is able to take the viewpoint of others who do not know. He can choose viewpoints. And, if he is artist enough, he can get others to see what he sees. The great composers have all given us music that only they, at first, could hear.
Of course, if he's indiscreet, he may still find himself burdened with a "diagnosis." But only shrinks can fail to see the difference between one clinging to a viewpoint others do not share and unable to assume any other viewpoint, and a person who is able to assume agreed-upon viewpoints, but able to assume viewpoints that are his alone.
It's not the ability to create and experience and dwell in a world no one else can perceive that is madness. It's inability to share in the agreed-upon creation we call reality. And another sort of madness is the inability to create and experience and dwell in a world no one else can perceive. Such an ability is, I think, native to all beings, so those who judge the sanity of others based on departure from agreed-upon reality are, themselves, awfully scared of slipping into knowledge and finding themselves having to take responsibility for what they can create.
That's a complex statement. To simplify: There are the normal (the so-called sane), who are not in very good shape, having lost the child's ability to pretend and perhaps a great deal more and who cling to what everyone knows, the most boring sort of faith. There are those who, having been bruised by the reality that everyone knows and having harmed others in that reality, prefer not to confront that reality, prefer to pretend it's not there or dub-in something else, rooms crawling with giant spiders, for example. (His world will be full of exaggerated manifestations of whatever he is trying to evade in reality. Resistance is pressure against something that has no space to retreat into. It oozes back into the life of the one who pushes it away.)
And there are those who are truly sane, able to choose a viewpoint, certain enough of themselves not to need to cling to agreement, nor to need to fight agreement and cling to an alternative reality. Able to create.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
What is Faith
[This is the first of a series of poems (and brief essays) on the concept: Faith.]
Someone Somewhere
Faith is the certainty,
even in the absence of perceivable life,
that there is someone there,
and not only someone,
but an infinite abundance of someone.
We dress up someone as Self, thinking,
how can one lose certainty
of self, but one can, as easily
as looking in the mirror.
Then we name it others,
until the day we extend a trembling candle,
whispering, "Is there anyone there?"
Then we call it God,
so that it has nothing to do
with us, and this works, except only God
is allowed to have certainty,
while faith has become our own
cancerous replica of certainty,
the machine's decision that machines
are not designed to operate smoothly
in the absence of the idea
of someone somewhere.
Commentary: This poem describes a reduction or decay of faith, not into cynicism, but into a mockery of itself, the way clumps of cancer cells sometimes take the shapes of the organs they destroy.
Faith, as seen in stanza one above, is a certainty. When one chooses to doubt this certainty (persuaded it is shaky? for a game?), the next step is to "solve" this doubt by putting faith in something more broadly agreed upon, more visible, like one's identity.
When that proves shaky too (and who has not at some point looked in the mirror and seen signs of mortality and weakness?), we put faith in others--for example, fall in love, and place our faith in a lover, one who will never fail us.
That failing, we put faith in something safe because it seems to us to be nothing at all (a God posited to be beyond anyone's experience). Probably we first try wooden and stone gods, looking for lastingness. Wood burns, stones shatter. But nothing can shatter what can't be experienced.
What we start with is hard to identify, but can be experienced, that infinity of presence. Whether it is called God or Self or true self or spirit or glumph, it is not only a presence, but an infinity of presence or an infinite capability in God or in ourselves of granting life. It is not a certainty one must cling to or protect. It is simply created and known (and creating is the surest knowing--the ability to create and uncreate).
Master Eckhart (best Googled as "Meister Eckhart"), a Catholic mystic, said (before the Inquisition gagged him) "The eye with which you see God is the eye with which God sees you." The faith I describe in the first stanza is, in a way, that eye. It isn't important whether that certainty is God's certainty of you or your certainty of God. They are one thing.
Or so postulates this poem.
It moves from God to God, where God begins as what is most intimately present to us (more so than the "self" we define by body, personality, attitudes, etc.), then moves to God as infinitely alien to us. It moves from faith as certainty to faith as desperate fear of having no certainty and of there being nothing it is possible to be certain of.
At the top, faith is not separable from knowledge by immediate experience, and is perhaps even communicable to others, simply by sharing that presence. It is as empirical as the expectation that a hammer blow to the finger will cause pain. At the bottom, faith becomes a footnote to one's life, an insistence on knowing what one has decided can't be known, a creed. It is this level of faith that we call different from or even incompatible with knowledge. It is when we view faith this way that we begin to classify religions as gnostic (based on the idea that one can come to know God or spiritual awareness) as opposed to faith-based.
At this level, having attributed to God all causality, all ability to create, we have defined ourselves as automatons. This is a "belief in" (I've never seen a good definition of "in" when used thus with "belief"--it makes me think we get into something, like a moving bundle of meat, in order to believe), a belief in God in the absence of God's having any presence in what we are. God's presence in what we are is a concept (in every religion, among some of its followers) that the Gospel of John expresses in "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." There are many other similar expressions, some from people who, apparently, do not mention God.
Personally, I do not look for a theology to believe in. Any theology can be a ladder to be climbed and discarded or an anchor to hold one fixed and down. (And also fun to banter about, mustn't omit that.) But I do find--and I've worked hard at this thing that now is almost second nature--that, increasingly, I'm aware of an infinite abundance of someone, and that, increasingly, it doesn't matter what I find this "in." When I admire our cat, I find it in her (and understand why Christopher Smart included perhaps the best cat poem ever written ("For Geoffrey, His Cat") in a long religious poem, "Jubilate Agno" (rejoice in the lamb). And when I admire any person, I find it, or any tree or nothing at all.
I do not call myself a mystic, because none of this seems mysterious to me. And because I see no importance in calling myself something. Not that I have no named religion, but it's the means I use to achieve the state, not a label for a set of beliefs.
My body is alone now, in a room, typing at a computer, with a faith that you are here, infinitely here with me, if not now...then now.
Someone Somewhere
Faith is the certainty,
even in the absence of perceivable life,
that there is someone there,
and not only someone,
but an infinite abundance of someone.
We dress up someone as Self, thinking,
how can one lose certainty
of self, but one can, as easily
as looking in the mirror.
Then we name it others,
until the day we extend a trembling candle,
whispering, "Is there anyone there?"
Then we call it God,
so that it has nothing to do
with us, and this works, except only God
is allowed to have certainty,
while faith has become our own
cancerous replica of certainty,
the machine's decision that machines
are not designed to operate smoothly
in the absence of the idea
of someone somewhere.
Commentary: This poem describes a reduction or decay of faith, not into cynicism, but into a mockery of itself, the way clumps of cancer cells sometimes take the shapes of the organs they destroy.
Faith, as seen in stanza one above, is a certainty. When one chooses to doubt this certainty (persuaded it is shaky? for a game?), the next step is to "solve" this doubt by putting faith in something more broadly agreed upon, more visible, like one's identity.
When that proves shaky too (and who has not at some point looked in the mirror and seen signs of mortality and weakness?), we put faith in others--for example, fall in love, and place our faith in a lover, one who will never fail us.
That failing, we put faith in something safe because it seems to us to be nothing at all (a God posited to be beyond anyone's experience). Probably we first try wooden and stone gods, looking for lastingness. Wood burns, stones shatter. But nothing can shatter what can't be experienced.
What we start with is hard to identify, but can be experienced, that infinity of presence. Whether it is called God or Self or true self or spirit or glumph, it is not only a presence, but an infinity of presence or an infinite capability in God or in ourselves of granting life. It is not a certainty one must cling to or protect. It is simply created and known (and creating is the surest knowing--the ability to create and uncreate).
Master Eckhart (best Googled as "Meister Eckhart"), a Catholic mystic, said (before the Inquisition gagged him) "The eye with which you see God is the eye with which God sees you." The faith I describe in the first stanza is, in a way, that eye. It isn't important whether that certainty is God's certainty of you or your certainty of God. They are one thing.
Or so postulates this poem.
It moves from God to God, where God begins as what is most intimately present to us (more so than the "self" we define by body, personality, attitudes, etc.), then moves to God as infinitely alien to us. It moves from faith as certainty to faith as desperate fear of having no certainty and of there being nothing it is possible to be certain of.
At the top, faith is not separable from knowledge by immediate experience, and is perhaps even communicable to others, simply by sharing that presence. It is as empirical as the expectation that a hammer blow to the finger will cause pain. At the bottom, faith becomes a footnote to one's life, an insistence on knowing what one has decided can't be known, a creed. It is this level of faith that we call different from or even incompatible with knowledge. It is when we view faith this way that we begin to classify religions as gnostic (based on the idea that one can come to know God or spiritual awareness) as opposed to faith-based.
At this level, having attributed to God all causality, all ability to create, we have defined ourselves as automatons. This is a "belief in" (I've never seen a good definition of "in" when used thus with "belief"--it makes me think we get into something, like a moving bundle of meat, in order to believe), a belief in God in the absence of God's having any presence in what we are. God's presence in what we are is a concept (in every religion, among some of its followers) that the Gospel of John expresses in "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." There are many other similar expressions, some from people who, apparently, do not mention God.
Personally, I do not look for a theology to believe in. Any theology can be a ladder to be climbed and discarded or an anchor to hold one fixed and down. (And also fun to banter about, mustn't omit that.) But I do find--and I've worked hard at this thing that now is almost second nature--that, increasingly, I'm aware of an infinite abundance of someone, and that, increasingly, it doesn't matter what I find this "in." When I admire our cat, I find it in her (and understand why Christopher Smart included perhaps the best cat poem ever written ("For Geoffrey, His Cat") in a long religious poem, "Jubilate Agno" (rejoice in the lamb). And when I admire any person, I find it, or any tree or nothing at all.
I do not call myself a mystic, because none of this seems mysterious to me. And because I see no importance in calling myself something. Not that I have no named religion, but it's the means I use to achieve the state, not a label for a set of beliefs.
My body is alone now, in a room, typing at a computer, with a faith that you are here, infinitely here with me, if not now...then now.
Friday, January 16, 2009
HATS OFF!
When I was little, and my Dad went to "the office", his presence in the house was strongest in the front closet, where, on the top shelf, like a row of conservative silent fathers, were hats, part of the uniform, like suits and ties, part, really, of the shape of a man's head in the 1930s and 40s, narrow-brimmed, felt, front-to-back dented. Fedoras, I guess, though I heard them called only "hats"--where did they go?
They vanished before anyone heard of global warming. Why? They were hardly unmanly. Even now they don't look quaint on Bogart or McMurray or Mitchum. I read recently that the first dictator of Paraguay ordered every man to wear a hat (this in the tropics) so that respect could be shown to ladies by doffing them. (What a good word, "doff"--from "do off". Why didn't it become mob slang: "Vinnie, that asshole needs to be doffed." We'd have the Mafia Don and the Mafia Doff.) So maybe rudeness or Women's Lib unhatted us.
But, by the way, how do we account for the passing of women's hats? They were never doffers, but always hatted, not just at banquets, but whenever they left the neighborhood (e.g., to "go downtown" to shop or see a doctor) and sometimes close to home, big-brimmed bonnets and tiny pill-boxes with bits of veil in front, all shapes and shades. These, too, are gone or worn to stand out, unusual.
But hats don't characterize Mom as they do Dad. Women were most often in and around the house, bare-headed. But men -- any day downtown, lunch hour, groups of suited men passing, heads brim-crossed and muffin-creased, silk bands out, leather sweat-bands in, hair or skin (fashion was kinder to bald men then) nestled in soft silky white inner lining, just enough brim to shade the eyes -- trimmed cowboy hats for crowded city life. If they'd lasted a few years longer, I'd have gotten my first one around age 17 (1959). Were they expensive? Did blue-collar men own at least one, for going to church? I'm so ignorant. When I was a kid, a man was someone who went to an office. But I think they all--even the tramps--wore fedoras, though some were hand-me-down, frayed.
When hats vanished, how many hat makers went unemployed? (Were they all twitching-mad from chemicals used to shape hats--mad as hatters?) And how masculine those hats were! What more seductively perverse than Marlene Dietrich in a man's hat? Did poets then wonder what had become of top hats? Derbies? (Imagine Abe Lincoln in a Fedora, Bogart in a Derby.)
OK, so times and styles change. But this was so quick: It happened in my time, my Dad's time, I don't know when or how or why. There went Dad and his cohorts to work in suits, ties, overcoats and fedoras; then the same men went to work in suits, ties, overcoats and no hats. How do such things happen. Was it Eisenhower? I see Truman fedora'd, but not Ike. He was military. Fedoras were civilian. Probably it was the return of all those soldiers, not in a rush to replace one helmet with another, really in no mood for uniforms of any sort. My Dad wasn't accepted into the Army: Flat feet. Being a civilian in a fedora was not something he was proud of. In 1945 arrived a flood of demobbed, hatless heroes from the world's most informal army, known for slang, chewing gum and big-nosed Kilroy, who was here. (Hitler expected little from such easy-going troops, officers who responded to formal invitations to surrender with "Nuts!") It must have become young and heroic to be hatless. (But why didn't they do away with ties as well? What a sadly missed opportunity.)
I'm satisfied. I'm sure that's the answer, so don't tell me about the felt mines drying up in 1946--I don't want to hear it.
They vanished before anyone heard of global warming. Why? They were hardly unmanly. Even now they don't look quaint on Bogart or McMurray or Mitchum. I read recently that the first dictator of Paraguay ordered every man to wear a hat (this in the tropics) so that respect could be shown to ladies by doffing them. (What a good word, "doff"--from "do off". Why didn't it become mob slang: "Vinnie, that asshole needs to be doffed." We'd have the Mafia Don and the Mafia Doff.) So maybe rudeness or Women's Lib unhatted us.
But, by the way, how do we account for the passing of women's hats? They were never doffers, but always hatted, not just at banquets, but whenever they left the neighborhood (e.g., to "go downtown" to shop or see a doctor) and sometimes close to home, big-brimmed bonnets and tiny pill-boxes with bits of veil in front, all shapes and shades. These, too, are gone or worn to stand out, unusual.
But hats don't characterize Mom as they do Dad. Women were most often in and around the house, bare-headed. But men -- any day downtown, lunch hour, groups of suited men passing, heads brim-crossed and muffin-creased, silk bands out, leather sweat-bands in, hair or skin (fashion was kinder to bald men then) nestled in soft silky white inner lining, just enough brim to shade the eyes -- trimmed cowboy hats for crowded city life. If they'd lasted a few years longer, I'd have gotten my first one around age 17 (1959). Were they expensive? Did blue-collar men own at least one, for going to church? I'm so ignorant. When I was a kid, a man was someone who went to an office. But I think they all--even the tramps--wore fedoras, though some were hand-me-down, frayed.
When hats vanished, how many hat makers went unemployed? (Were they all twitching-mad from chemicals used to shape hats--mad as hatters?) And how masculine those hats were! What more seductively perverse than Marlene Dietrich in a man's hat? Did poets then wonder what had become of top hats? Derbies? (Imagine Abe Lincoln in a Fedora, Bogart in a Derby.)
OK, so times and styles change. But this was so quick: It happened in my time, my Dad's time, I don't know when or how or why. There went Dad and his cohorts to work in suits, ties, overcoats and fedoras; then the same men went to work in suits, ties, overcoats and no hats. How do such things happen. Was it Eisenhower? I see Truman fedora'd, but not Ike. He was military. Fedoras were civilian. Probably it was the return of all those soldiers, not in a rush to replace one helmet with another, really in no mood for uniforms of any sort. My Dad wasn't accepted into the Army: Flat feet. Being a civilian in a fedora was not something he was proud of. In 1945 arrived a flood of demobbed, hatless heroes from the world's most informal army, known for slang, chewing gum and big-nosed Kilroy, who was here. (Hitler expected little from such easy-going troops, officers who responded to formal invitations to surrender with "Nuts!") It must have become young and heroic to be hatless. (But why didn't they do away with ties as well? What a sadly missed opportunity.)
I'm satisfied. I'm sure that's the answer, so don't tell me about the felt mines drying up in 1946--I don't want to hear it.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Add Freedom and Stir
Freedom is what my love grants
any motion I choose to become.
Since I can endow it, I must
be it, becoming aware of myself
(which is becoming aware of freedom)
in the bestowing.
I grace the eagle's obsessive circling
with soaring ecstasy;
I invest the cat's wide-eyed insinuations
with her love for us, freely given;
I tease the tree's knotty algorithms
for maximizing absorption of sunlight
(another form of freedom) through
leaf surfaces – I tease them into
a naughty frolic of lacy extravagance;
I add to a dust-blued scrim of atmosphere
my own infinity into which vision
can plunge, losing itself.
All this is true, but it must be added,
what I give to what I love is also true,
and, once given, has always been,
for it is I and I (and each of us) alone
who am always and endow the gleam of now --
like sunset's red-gold sparkle racing our car
along the telephone wires -- with what I am.
any motion I choose to become.
Since I can endow it, I must
be it, becoming aware of myself
(which is becoming aware of freedom)
in the bestowing.
I grace the eagle's obsessive circling
with soaring ecstasy;
I invest the cat's wide-eyed insinuations
with her love for us, freely given;
I tease the tree's knotty algorithms
for maximizing absorption of sunlight
(another form of freedom) through
leaf surfaces – I tease them into
a naughty frolic of lacy extravagance;
I add to a dust-blued scrim of atmosphere
my own infinity into which vision
can plunge, losing itself.
All this is true, but it must be added,
what I give to what I love is also true,
and, once given, has always been,
for it is I and I (and each of us) alone
who am always and endow the gleam of now --
like sunset's red-gold sparkle racing our car
along the telephone wires -- with what I am.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
One S or Two S's?
One, Many, None.
The addict has many needles,
but is only briefly needless.
Rain. No cabs. It raises my hackles,
being hackless.
At poker my money trickles away
when I am trickless.
You pick the ticks off me: It tickles...
But I become tickless.
I blow bugs from my bugles until they are bugless.
Don't drool on your Bibles:
Never read your Bibles bibless.
No cookie crumbles crumblessly.
With toothpicks I could spear the pickles...
were I not pickless.
In pain, we welcome Death, for sickles
make us sickless.
Having many girdles, she is never girdless.
Milk that curdles is not curdless.
In his groin he feels no prickles, being prickless.
The proud teamster lost his truck, begs the bosses
for another: Truckless, he truckles.
Breathless, he dangles, dang!-less.
Lovers sing, but singles are singless.
The jungles of the Collective Unconscious may be Jungless.
In many trips to the plate, he triples,
but now, retired, he is tripless.
No man wants her with all her pimples,
so she is pimpless.
She found all men to be wimps, so became a nun.
Now, wearing wimples, she is wimpless.
Waiter, we asked for our bills. Why are our tables
tabless?
Animals in old stories never use laundry detergent.
All our fables are FABless.
The minister told his hecklers to go to Hell,
for, wearied by heckles, he was Heckless.
Spaghetti without sauce, tangless tangles.
Spilt barrels: bungless bungles.
The widow's soup: Ladless, she ladles.
No spurs on our horses. These are stabless stables.
Tall silent movie idols: gabless Gables.
The passionless man idles, Idless.
How do we get to the maples, mapless?
To make us A.D.D.less, with drugs the shrink addles us.
_______________________________________
The addict has many needles,
but is only briefly needless.
Rain. No cabs. It raises my hackles,
being hackless.
At poker my money trickles away
when I am trickless.
You pick the ticks off me: It tickles...
But I become tickless.
I blow bugs from my bugles until they are bugless.
Don't drool on your Bibles:
Never read your Bibles bibless.
No cookie crumbles crumblessly.
With toothpicks I could spear the pickles...
were I not pickless.
In pain, we welcome Death, for sickles
make us sickless.
Having many girdles, she is never girdless.
Milk that curdles is not curdless.
In his groin he feels no prickles, being prickless.
The proud teamster lost his truck, begs the bosses
for another: Truckless, he truckles.
Breathless, he dangles, dang!-less.
Lovers sing, but singles are singless.
The jungles of the Collective Unconscious may be Jungless.
In many trips to the plate, he triples,
but now, retired, he is tripless.
No man wants her with all her pimples,
so she is pimpless.
She found all men to be wimps, so became a nun.
Now, wearing wimples, she is wimpless.
Waiter, we asked for our bills. Why are our tables
tabless?
Animals in old stories never use laundry detergent.
All our fables are FABless.
The minister told his hecklers to go to Hell,
for, wearied by heckles, he was Heckless.
Spaghetti without sauce, tangless tangles.
Spilt barrels: bungless bungles.
The widow's soup: Ladless, she ladles.
No spurs on our horses. These are stabless stables.
Tall silent movie idols: gabless Gables.
The passionless man idles, Idless.
How do we get to the maples, mapless?
To make us A.D.D.less, with drugs the shrink addles us.
_______________________________________
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Famous Fatty-Ass IDs
Yesterday I suggested to people
(poets marveling over the wondrous
human brain, the only bit of organic matter,
said some admired scientist, that is aware
of itself) that they were not their brains,
but themselves. One of them said,
"Not according to science" - referring,
I suppose, to some brains kept in skulls
(rather than bottles) attached to muscles
in white (probably stained) lab jackets or
dark (subtly striped) suits and discreet ties.
When I dared to mention the frequent bemusement
of such brains, when distracted by generous grants
from pharmaceutical brains (it takes money
to maintain fatty, healthy brains), he began
to lift his pencil before him and drop it
on the table and pick it up again and
drop it again, to show me that each time
the pencil, dropped, moved downward,
something he seemed to think had been discovered
by modern science. I thought this game
with his pencil was an amazing thing
for a brain to do.
Later he read us a poem (for this was
a poetry workshop - brains aware of being
brains marvelously aware of being brains
aware of being marvelous brains) that told
a story about someone referred to as "I."
A brain (with a name the brain calls "mine")
suggested replacing "I" in each occurrence
with "A brain." It didn't read well that way
(to this brain's judgment), but why should
that matter to that matter?
Posted by Dean Blehert
(poets marveling over the wondrous
human brain, the only bit of organic matter,
said some admired scientist, that is aware
of itself) that they were not their brains,
but themselves. One of them said,
"Not according to science" - referring,
I suppose, to some brains kept in skulls
(rather than bottles) attached to muscles
in white (probably stained) lab jackets or
dark (subtly striped) suits and discreet ties.
When I dared to mention the frequent bemusement
of such brains, when distracted by generous grants
from pharmaceutical brains (it takes money
to maintain fatty, healthy brains), he began
to lift his pencil before him and drop it
on the table and pick it up again and
drop it again, to show me that each time
the pencil, dropped, moved downward,
something he seemed to think had been discovered
by modern science. I thought this game
with his pencil was an amazing thing
for a brain to do.
Later he read us a poem (for this was
a poetry workshop - brains aware of being
brains marvelously aware of being brains
aware of being marvelous brains) that told
a story about someone referred to as "I."
A brain (with a name the brain calls "mine")
suggested replacing "I" in each occurrence
with "A brain." It didn't read well that way
(to this brain's judgment), but why should
that matter to that matter?
Posted by Dean Blehert
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
ON NOT DYING
Note: This poem is actually twelve poems (ah, those pretentious Roman Numerals!) on a single theme: Specific times in my life where I became aware of myself as something other than the body by which I was known to others and even to myself, at first. That is, most of the poems are specific moments. A few, like the last section, are conclusions, parables, exercises for that mythical creature, "the reader". I'll add a few notes at the end. Here are the poems:
I
I know that bodies do not last,
but wonder if we do.
I remember once, exhausted
after too many laps, I stood
on the sand track, knees turned
to water, holding myself up
as if from above by wires,
head hanging, a leaden mass,
when before me were hive-like
crystalline golden cells, huge
grains of sand filling my vision
too close for eyes to focus, yet
unblurred, and I had time to wonder
if I'd hurt myself falling
on my face when, finding again
my eyes, I realized I still
stood, had seen or dreamed
those grains of sand at my feet
with other than my body's eyes,
"seen or dreamed" I say now,
but knew then only seeing.
II
If we are immortal,
we are all here.
It gives me pause,
even with those of us
who are in familiar bodies,
to think we are all here.
I sit near the window,
reading, hardly aware of the dog
asleep on his couch across the room.
He stretches, lifts his head,
scratches his chin with a few fast
rhythmic swipes of a paw, then
looks at me, and it astonishes me
to think that he is here with me,
has been with me all day, being
whatever he is just as you and I,
all along, have been with each other,
an idea that stirs me as if I were
a baby bursting with giggles
each time Momma pokes her head in view
and goes "peek-a-BOO!"
III
Once, sitting on the edge of a bed,
I noticed my head wasn't quite
in the right place, just an inch
or so out of kilter, my whole body
not quite right--in fact, it had
begun to slip from me, was hanging on
just barely by the habit of being me,
and I sat there or rather
it sat and I floated just above
and noticed my state and poised,
as if an unquiet breath or thought
would jar me loose to slip or glide
like a dew down a blade of grass
into alignment with the body,
and as I thought it, I did.
IV
I don't remember much of being
anything this body was not,
but I remember one childhood day,
walking past the playground fence
on my way home, thinking, this is it,
I am really a third-grader, one of
them, whatever "them" was, I can't
remember now, but I remember
the certainty, the vividness
of what, then, being a third-grader was.
And now, if you asked me how old
I am, I would not have to look
at old albums or a wristwatch
to say "50" ("going on 51!"
as the third-grader would eagerly
add). And once, assailed by more
certainties than I could stomach,
I knew I was ageless, had seen
and done more than I wanted to know,
knew, not by remembering, but by
being unable to unpicture,
the bottomlessness of my forgetting.
It is not what I knew, but the way
I knew, as, in third grade, I knew
I was in third grade.
V
Right now it's more remembering
than knowing. You trot out
the same experiences for years
to prove things to yourself
and they get shopworn, encrusted
with the dust of words, the tarnish
of opinions. But I remember
knowing.
VI
When I think of an ending
to what I am, a lack
of me knowing I am, standing here
before the window, seeing
what my eyes can see, being,
somehow, a head which must be
moved to move me who am perforce
put wherever my body is put,
I wonder if this, what we call
life, this being a thing of flesh,
is not itself
that not knowing
that I am what I am,
that ending
to what I am.
VII
A man sits in a cell and knows
(the way his forehead knows
when it cracks against the wall):
this is where he's always been
since he's been anything and
where he'll always be until
he becomes nothing at all.
What could be worse? Maybe
whatever he did to get himself
into this, maybe what he was,
could be again, must not
remember.
VIII
Odd that more people don't hate
having to go to bed. Children
understand, plead to stay up,
watch the good TV shows full of
violent action, want the hall light
left on, try to prolong goodnights
from loving giants who cannot hide
the fact that they are ready
to use whatever force is needed
to make the child be as much
as possible without sound or motion.
The child lies there trying out
different horizontal postures,
spreading the legs apart
to be a cowboy or, on his side,
drifts off, running in place,
an angel embedded in amber.
Children sense it is an unnatural thing,
an imprisonment, to be put
on a padded shelf, there to lie
almost still, only a few feet
in which to twist, having to close
their eyes and not do anything--
IX
Perchance to dream. You can dream.
And if you don't wake up,
who will be with you in your dream?
What if, in your dream, you are still
you, but have not even a bed
to move in, are buried in your coffin,
not an inch of leeway to stretch,
utter dark, utter silence, utter
knowledge of never seeing the sky,
of no one knowing you are--
what does it mean then to say you
are still you? And if you had
no body at all but were still,
somehow, you, could you sense
anything, get in touch with
anyone? From these dreams gladly
we waken to our prison of meat.
X
Once, staring intently back at a cat,
suddenly I saw a human face
staring at a cat, saw from where
the cat's eyes were, saw so clearly
I could see a cat's face reflected
in the human eyes. It was a flash--
then I was seeing a cat flinch
and gallop full tilt from the room
as if she'd sensed (as cats do)
a ghost. Once, looking
at someone who looked at me
for a long time, I said to her,
"Your face just disappeared,"
and she replied, "I know.
So did yours." Once, lying
beneath pine trees, looking up
along the tall trunks through
pinwheeling branches to the sky,
I found myself in the sky,
and I could see and know
and I was I. Once, after making love,
I knew what she would say
before she said it and what
I would reply and what she'd say
to that, and I saw her knowing
me know this and I started to say
and she said, we said
as I knew we would,
"I know".
XI
If I sit very still
I can feel it, my head a tension
and waves of tension around my head,
a force field, solid and habitual.
If bodies are traps, does death free us?
Not if, nullified by eons of force,
we've grown addicted to bodies,
think ourselves nothing without bodies,
think we must suck memories from them,
having none of our own, cannot see
without eyes, hear without ears,
we undead embedded in our heads;
releasing us is like releasing habitual
criminals. Death can't hold us,
only knowing can. We'll be back.
XII
From beneath the earth
where we cannot move,
a worm.
From beneath the water
where we cannot breathe,
a fish.
From the fire
we could not withstand,
food.
From our own guts,
where we will never go,
excrement
we send...where,
we choose not to know.
What can you be?
Where can you go?
If the air were a wall,
if your own flesh were a wall,
if you could see only as far
as your own retina
and could not unsee that,
if the future were a wall,
mirroring the solid past,
if...can you hear me?
From where?
*************
Notes:
Part 1: This occurred in 1964 or 1965. I'd been jogging round the track at Stanford (where I was a grad student), working out hard. I stood exhausted, looking down at the sand, and suddenly saw (as vividly as anything I'd seen) a microscopic view of the grains of sand, at first didn't realize what I was seeing, then, knowing what it was, thought I must have fallen, since my eyes seemed up against the sand, but (backing my vision back into my head), found I'd been standing up the while. As the poem says, I saw the grains in perfect focus, not blurry, as one might have expected had my eyes been a quarter of an inch from the sand.
Part 2: This sense of immortality and its corollary -- that we've all been here all along -- gives the game of "peek-aboo" a dazzling hall-of-mirrors quality. When Momma says to baby, "Peek-aBOO!", she's also saying, "Hey, don't worry so much about that cute blob of flesh. We're ancient friends, you and I." Maybe she doesn't know she's saying it. Maybe baby is trying to tell HER that. Certainly my dog seemed to be telling me we'd known each other forever. Somewhere he's scratching another chin, I'm sure.
Part 3: Briefly (1964-5) I had a few encounters with drugs. The verdict? I had drug experiences that made it obvious to me that I was not a body. But before those experiments, I'd found it fairly easy to move away from and towards my body. After them, I was kind of stuck to the body (like B'rer Rabbit to the tar baby) for years, looking for a way out. Psychedelics, I'd say, pushed me off on an elastic leash that snapped me back in, and when I snapped back, I found that I'd become sticky. (These days, I occupy a space in which, sometimes, my head is a long ways off, down by my toes -- just 6 feet from them. For example, sitting in a living room, talking with people, I'll notice that our bodies are very small and oddly distant.)
Part 4: That day when I realized, with surprise, that I was in 3rd grade, I was walking past a playground wall that was diminishing as I walked up the slight incline -- a diminishing of the wall's height that may have (inversely) heightened the realization. Numbers meant something. I'd only been in first grade for a month or two before being skipped (because I knew how to read from age 4), but had some difficulty in 2nd grade with my own immaturity and never felt I was one of the "real" 2nd graders, but on this day, well into third grade and doing a bit better (with a far more friendly teacher), it struck me that I was now a REAL 3rd grader.
Our labels, superficial though they are, are also the best way to become free of our labels. We find ourselves when we are amazed to realize that we are REALLY an adult, a lover, a tax payer, a car driver, a person with a job, an old person, a dying person, etc. We find ourselves in our amazement.
Part 5: You can't really wear out a good memory. It only seems that way when you try to use one of them to handle current upset or sadness. Instead of reanimating the past, re-creating it anew, BEING the enthusiastic child one once was, we try to buy new joy with that counterfeit, the memory, and, finding that memory (merely a verbal recitation after much use of it) ineffective, we dismiss it as "gone forever" or "useless" or "wasn't much after all." But it's all there and can be fired up again. In fact, one day, when you look around you and fall in love with the world again, you slip into that "memory" and find it fully alive and functional. (Forgive my rapidly shifting pronouns, we, one, you -- someday I'll make up my/our/one's mind(s).)
Part 6: Some slippery syntax -- that which is that that.... But I hope the point is obvious: Being in a body (to the extent that our involvement in the body clouds our knowledge of our spiritual existence) may be said to be the only death (ending) there is: We forget ourselves.
Part 7: This section suggests a few of the questions that might (if pursued) help us understand why these bodies and this belief in the absoluteness of death are so persuasive. For example, if we have done things in the past that we regret or that give us overwhelming indebtedness, we may prefer to believe that we are mortal and end at death. Where memories are painful, we may choose to believe there are no memories. In other words, though the thought of being imprisoned in a small cell is unpleasant for most of us, and though, if we think of it, the body itself is an imprisonment, there are probably things far more unpleasant that we think we avoid by being bodies. Another troubling aspect of immortality (not dealt with particularly in this set of poems, but in some of my others) is "Now what?" -- what does an immortal being do for a game?
Part 8: How huge those childhood beds seemed to my small body, how easily I could lie in bed with my legs spread wide, thinking I was being a cowboy. But such pleasures quickly palled, and on nights where I didn't easily fall asleep (perhaps because I could hear some "good" radio show downstairs, knowing it was good because of the gunshots), it was hard to avoid feeling a certain limitation, a sense of being only where I was, of being located (like a target), of being unable to be anything other than what I was. It was easier to pretend -- when awake and running about in the yard or lost in radio drama or talking to Mom or a friend -- that my limitations were temporary and flimsy, that there was future, over the horizon, just around the corner, etc. But lying in bed awake at night, I sometimes slipped from three to two dimensions, so that it was a relief to hear the distance being created by the moving a way of a distant steam locomotive's fading chuff-puff.
Part 9: Another nightmarish vision of self limited to self being no self at all, of limitlessness being another kind of limit, for if you extended to fill the universe, you would be just that, the universe. The point is not that existence is a nightmare, since we could, as players on a playing field of that scope, create newer, better games and dreams than we can conceive of from our current vantage points. In other words, we generate nightmare considerations by imagining our limited selves somehow (superficially) limitless. It's like imagining ourselves 10,000 feet above the ground, but neglecting to imagine for ourselves means of flight. But such silly nightmares do scare us back towards our illusions of mortality and are perhaps fed us through the generations to keep us under control.
Part 10: The love-making incident is a composite, but mainly refers to incidents in 1962 and 1964. My moment of filling up the sky occurred at camp when I was 12 or 13. There's a longer story to it, which you can find well into my longer poem, BLANK PAGES, on www.blehert.com. (Briefly, just as I was having some petty thoughts about how the other campers down at the campfire, wouldn't understand this experience, another camper, from behind me, used a small shovel to toss sand in my eyes, and when I cried, a counselor took me aside and tried to console me, thinking I was crying because of the sand, and I had to explain to him that it wasn't the sand, but the loss of that experience, and that I'd brought it about myself by indulging in the petty thoughts. (And I had to figure that out in order to tell him -- far less articulately than I've done so here.) The incident with the cat occurred in 1965, and one of those drug experiments precipitated it, but nonetheless, I saw what I saw, and I saw the cat seeing it too. Poor cat. (I've had other more vivid experiences in the absence of drugs (haven't touched a drug, in over 40 years -- except one flu tablet in 1974, a partial shot of novacain when a dentist forgot that I'd said no anaesthetic (in the 1980s) -- I stopped it, prefer pain to numbness; some second-hand smoke, a bit of caffeine, etc.). But here I'm pulling together a few scraps of experience that seem to me to create a larger picture.
Part 11: There have been times when I've become aware of my body as swathed in tensions, masses pressing against it, wound around it, etc. This came up during my brief period of drug experiments (about 7 of them in all) and several times before and after them when I would meditate (something I did a lot of, 1963 through 1968). I've since unwound these. (I'm no longer so "tightly wound.") I won't say that I got nothing valuable out of meditation, but it led me into some things that I found I couldn't handle with meditation, but could handle by other means and do so better by dispensing with meditation.
The idea of recidivism here is that so long as we have no strong sense of who we are, a self-definition and self-knowledge that is not dependent upon having a body, death is no escape: We'll get ourselves stuck on body after body (or drift around in a daze when bodies aren't available), because we can't conceive of any other way to have an identity and, thereby, a game.(Gotta have a uniform with a number to be on team, right?) Death won't "hold us" (apart from bodies). Only self-knowledge (becoming the player of the game or even the game maker) gives us the choice to be or not to be (a body or anything else).
Part 12: This poem is meant as a kind of exercise for the reader -- an exercise in locating oneself or dislocating oneself. It seems to be a turning inward into ever more solid introversion, with a twist at the end that perhaps points to the freedom of the being playing the game of being solid in a solid world -- and the role of live communication in freeing us.
For more data on bodies and ways of orienting oneself inside them and outside them, I recommend the books to be found at Scientology.org.
I
I know that bodies do not last,
but wonder if we do.
I remember once, exhausted
after too many laps, I stood
on the sand track, knees turned
to water, holding myself up
as if from above by wires,
head hanging, a leaden mass,
when before me were hive-like
crystalline golden cells, huge
grains of sand filling my vision
too close for eyes to focus, yet
unblurred, and I had time to wonder
if I'd hurt myself falling
on my face when, finding again
my eyes, I realized I still
stood, had seen or dreamed
those grains of sand at my feet
with other than my body's eyes,
"seen or dreamed" I say now,
but knew then only seeing.
II
If we are immortal,
we are all here.
It gives me pause,
even with those of us
who are in familiar bodies,
to think we are all here.
I sit near the window,
reading, hardly aware of the dog
asleep on his couch across the room.
He stretches, lifts his head,
scratches his chin with a few fast
rhythmic swipes of a paw, then
looks at me, and it astonishes me
to think that he is here with me,
has been with me all day, being
whatever he is just as you and I,
all along, have been with each other,
an idea that stirs me as if I were
a baby bursting with giggles
each time Momma pokes her head in view
and goes "peek-a-BOO!"
III
Once, sitting on the edge of a bed,
I noticed my head wasn't quite
in the right place, just an inch
or so out of kilter, my whole body
not quite right--in fact, it had
begun to slip from me, was hanging on
just barely by the habit of being me,
and I sat there or rather
it sat and I floated just above
and noticed my state and poised,
as if an unquiet breath or thought
would jar me loose to slip or glide
like a dew down a blade of grass
into alignment with the body,
and as I thought it, I did.
IV
I don't remember much of being
anything this body was not,
but I remember one childhood day,
walking past the playground fence
on my way home, thinking, this is it,
I am really a third-grader, one of
them, whatever "them" was, I can't
remember now, but I remember
the certainty, the vividness
of what, then, being a third-grader was.
And now, if you asked me how old
I am, I would not have to look
at old albums or a wristwatch
to say "50" ("going on 51!"
as the third-grader would eagerly
add). And once, assailed by more
certainties than I could stomach,
I knew I was ageless, had seen
and done more than I wanted to know,
knew, not by remembering, but by
being unable to unpicture,
the bottomlessness of my forgetting.
It is not what I knew, but the way
I knew, as, in third grade, I knew
I was in third grade.
V
Right now it's more remembering
than knowing. You trot out
the same experiences for years
to prove things to yourself
and they get shopworn, encrusted
with the dust of words, the tarnish
of opinions. But I remember
knowing.
VI
When I think of an ending
to what I am, a lack
of me knowing I am, standing here
before the window, seeing
what my eyes can see, being,
somehow, a head which must be
moved to move me who am perforce
put wherever my body is put,
I wonder if this, what we call
life, this being a thing of flesh,
is not itself
that not knowing
that I am what I am,
that ending
to what I am.
VII
A man sits in a cell and knows
(the way his forehead knows
when it cracks against the wall):
this is where he's always been
since he's been anything and
where he'll always be until
he becomes nothing at all.
What could be worse? Maybe
whatever he did to get himself
into this, maybe what he was,
could be again, must not
remember.
VIII
Odd that more people don't hate
having to go to bed. Children
understand, plead to stay up,
watch the good TV shows full of
violent action, want the hall light
left on, try to prolong goodnights
from loving giants who cannot hide
the fact that they are ready
to use whatever force is needed
to make the child be as much
as possible without sound or motion.
The child lies there trying out
different horizontal postures,
spreading the legs apart
to be a cowboy or, on his side,
drifts off, running in place,
an angel embedded in amber.
Children sense it is an unnatural thing,
an imprisonment, to be put
on a padded shelf, there to lie
almost still, only a few feet
in which to twist, having to close
their eyes and not do anything--
IX
Perchance to dream. You can dream.
And if you don't wake up,
who will be with you in your dream?
What if, in your dream, you are still
you, but have not even a bed
to move in, are buried in your coffin,
not an inch of leeway to stretch,
utter dark, utter silence, utter
knowledge of never seeing the sky,
of no one knowing you are--
what does it mean then to say you
are still you? And if you had
no body at all but were still,
somehow, you, could you sense
anything, get in touch with
anyone? From these dreams gladly
we waken to our prison of meat.
X
Once, staring intently back at a cat,
suddenly I saw a human face
staring at a cat, saw from where
the cat's eyes were, saw so clearly
I could see a cat's face reflected
in the human eyes. It was a flash--
then I was seeing a cat flinch
and gallop full tilt from the room
as if she'd sensed (as cats do)
a ghost. Once, looking
at someone who looked at me
for a long time, I said to her,
"Your face just disappeared,"
and she replied, "I know.
So did yours." Once, lying
beneath pine trees, looking up
along the tall trunks through
pinwheeling branches to the sky,
I found myself in the sky,
and I could see and know
and I was I. Once, after making love,
I knew what she would say
before she said it and what
I would reply and what she'd say
to that, and I saw her knowing
me know this and I started to say
and she said, we said
as I knew we would,
"I know".
XI
If I sit very still
I can feel it, my head a tension
and waves of tension around my head,
a force field, solid and habitual.
If bodies are traps, does death free us?
Not if, nullified by eons of force,
we've grown addicted to bodies,
think ourselves nothing without bodies,
think we must suck memories from them,
having none of our own, cannot see
without eyes, hear without ears,
we undead embedded in our heads;
releasing us is like releasing habitual
criminals. Death can't hold us,
only knowing can. We'll be back.
XII
From beneath the earth
where we cannot move,
a worm.
From beneath the water
where we cannot breathe,
a fish.
From the fire
we could not withstand,
food.
From our own guts,
where we will never go,
excrement
we send...where,
we choose not to know.
What can you be?
Where can you go?
If the air were a wall,
if your own flesh were a wall,
if you could see only as far
as your own retina
and could not unsee that,
if the future were a wall,
mirroring the solid past,
if...can you hear me?
From where?
*************
Notes:
Part 1: This occurred in 1964 or 1965. I'd been jogging round the track at Stanford (where I was a grad student), working out hard. I stood exhausted, looking down at the sand, and suddenly saw (as vividly as anything I'd seen) a microscopic view of the grains of sand, at first didn't realize what I was seeing, then, knowing what it was, thought I must have fallen, since my eyes seemed up against the sand, but (backing my vision back into my head), found I'd been standing up the while. As the poem says, I saw the grains in perfect focus, not blurry, as one might have expected had my eyes been a quarter of an inch from the sand.
Part 2: This sense of immortality and its corollary -- that we've all been here all along -- gives the game of "peek-aboo" a dazzling hall-of-mirrors quality. When Momma says to baby, "Peek-aBOO!", she's also saying, "Hey, don't worry so much about that cute blob of flesh. We're ancient friends, you and I." Maybe she doesn't know she's saying it. Maybe baby is trying to tell HER that. Certainly my dog seemed to be telling me we'd known each other forever. Somewhere he's scratching another chin, I'm sure.
Part 3: Briefly (1964-5) I had a few encounters with drugs. The verdict? I had drug experiences that made it obvious to me that I was not a body. But before those experiments, I'd found it fairly easy to move away from and towards my body. After them, I was kind of stuck to the body (like B'rer Rabbit to the tar baby) for years, looking for a way out. Psychedelics, I'd say, pushed me off on an elastic leash that snapped me back in, and when I snapped back, I found that I'd become sticky. (These days, I occupy a space in which, sometimes, my head is a long ways off, down by my toes -- just 6 feet from them. For example, sitting in a living room, talking with people, I'll notice that our bodies are very small and oddly distant.)
Part 4: That day when I realized, with surprise, that I was in 3rd grade, I was walking past a playground wall that was diminishing as I walked up the slight incline -- a diminishing of the wall's height that may have (inversely) heightened the realization. Numbers meant something. I'd only been in first grade for a month or two before being skipped (because I knew how to read from age 4), but had some difficulty in 2nd grade with my own immaturity and never felt I was one of the "real" 2nd graders, but on this day, well into third grade and doing a bit better (with a far more friendly teacher), it struck me that I was now a REAL 3rd grader.
Our labels, superficial though they are, are also the best way to become free of our labels. We find ourselves when we are amazed to realize that we are REALLY an adult, a lover, a tax payer, a car driver, a person with a job, an old person, a dying person, etc. We find ourselves in our amazement.
Part 5: You can't really wear out a good memory. It only seems that way when you try to use one of them to handle current upset or sadness. Instead of reanimating the past, re-creating it anew, BEING the enthusiastic child one once was, we try to buy new joy with that counterfeit, the memory, and, finding that memory (merely a verbal recitation after much use of it) ineffective, we dismiss it as "gone forever" or "useless" or "wasn't much after all." But it's all there and can be fired up again. In fact, one day, when you look around you and fall in love with the world again, you slip into that "memory" and find it fully alive and functional. (Forgive my rapidly shifting pronouns, we, one, you -- someday I'll make up my/our/one's mind(s).)
Part 6: Some slippery syntax -- that which is that that.... But I hope the point is obvious: Being in a body (to the extent that our involvement in the body clouds our knowledge of our spiritual existence) may be said to be the only death (ending) there is: We forget ourselves.
Part 7: This section suggests a few of the questions that might (if pursued) help us understand why these bodies and this belief in the absoluteness of death are so persuasive. For example, if we have done things in the past that we regret or that give us overwhelming indebtedness, we may prefer to believe that we are mortal and end at death. Where memories are painful, we may choose to believe there are no memories. In other words, though the thought of being imprisoned in a small cell is unpleasant for most of us, and though, if we think of it, the body itself is an imprisonment, there are probably things far more unpleasant that we think we avoid by being bodies. Another troubling aspect of immortality (not dealt with particularly in this set of poems, but in some of my others) is "Now what?" -- what does an immortal being do for a game?
Part 8: How huge those childhood beds seemed to my small body, how easily I could lie in bed with my legs spread wide, thinking I was being a cowboy. But such pleasures quickly palled, and on nights where I didn't easily fall asleep (perhaps because I could hear some "good" radio show downstairs, knowing it was good because of the gunshots), it was hard to avoid feeling a certain limitation, a sense of being only where I was, of being located (like a target), of being unable to be anything other than what I was. It was easier to pretend -- when awake and running about in the yard or lost in radio drama or talking to Mom or a friend -- that my limitations were temporary and flimsy, that there was future, over the horizon, just around the corner, etc. But lying in bed awake at night, I sometimes slipped from three to two dimensions, so that it was a relief to hear the distance being created by the moving a way of a distant steam locomotive's fading chuff-puff.
Part 9: Another nightmarish vision of self limited to self being no self at all, of limitlessness being another kind of limit, for if you extended to fill the universe, you would be just that, the universe. The point is not that existence is a nightmare, since we could, as players on a playing field of that scope, create newer, better games and dreams than we can conceive of from our current vantage points. In other words, we generate nightmare considerations by imagining our limited selves somehow (superficially) limitless. It's like imagining ourselves 10,000 feet above the ground, but neglecting to imagine for ourselves means of flight. But such silly nightmares do scare us back towards our illusions of mortality and are perhaps fed us through the generations to keep us under control.
Part 10: The love-making incident is a composite, but mainly refers to incidents in 1962 and 1964. My moment of filling up the sky occurred at camp when I was 12 or 13. There's a longer story to it, which you can find well into my longer poem, BLANK PAGES, on www.blehert.com. (Briefly, just as I was having some petty thoughts about how the other campers down at the campfire, wouldn't understand this experience, another camper, from behind me, used a small shovel to toss sand in my eyes, and when I cried, a counselor took me aside and tried to console me, thinking I was crying because of the sand, and I had to explain to him that it wasn't the sand, but the loss of that experience, and that I'd brought it about myself by indulging in the petty thoughts. (And I had to figure that out in order to tell him -- far less articulately than I've done so here.) The incident with the cat occurred in 1965, and one of those drug experiments precipitated it, but nonetheless, I saw what I saw, and I saw the cat seeing it too. Poor cat. (I've had other more vivid experiences in the absence of drugs (haven't touched a drug, in over 40 years -- except one flu tablet in 1974, a partial shot of novacain when a dentist forgot that I'd said no anaesthetic (in the 1980s) -- I stopped it, prefer pain to numbness; some second-hand smoke, a bit of caffeine, etc.). But here I'm pulling together a few scraps of experience that seem to me to create a larger picture.
Part 11: There have been times when I've become aware of my body as swathed in tensions, masses pressing against it, wound around it, etc. This came up during my brief period of drug experiments (about 7 of them in all) and several times before and after them when I would meditate (something I did a lot of, 1963 through 1968). I've since unwound these. (I'm no longer so "tightly wound.") I won't say that I got nothing valuable out of meditation, but it led me into some things that I found I couldn't handle with meditation, but could handle by other means and do so better by dispensing with meditation.
The idea of recidivism here is that so long as we have no strong sense of who we are, a self-definition and self-knowledge that is not dependent upon having a body, death is no escape: We'll get ourselves stuck on body after body (or drift around in a daze when bodies aren't available), because we can't conceive of any other way to have an identity and, thereby, a game.(Gotta have a uniform with a number to be on team, right?) Death won't "hold us" (apart from bodies). Only self-knowledge (becoming the player of the game or even the game maker) gives us the choice to be or not to be (a body or anything else).
Part 12: This poem is meant as a kind of exercise for the reader -- an exercise in locating oneself or dislocating oneself. It seems to be a turning inward into ever more solid introversion, with a twist at the end that perhaps points to the freedom of the being playing the game of being solid in a solid world -- and the role of live communication in freeing us.
For more data on bodies and ways of orienting oneself inside them and outside them, I recommend the books to be found at Scientology.org.
Friday, July 13, 2007
OUT OF TOUCH
All sense is touch,
in a sense, with intervening
distance. With hearing we touch
waves of air or water and know
the motion of what sent them
(and touching the motion, know
across distance of selfhood, meaning).
With sight we touch light and know
with what force and degree of integrity
it bounced off or tore itself away from
what last it touched. Even smell
is the touch of chemical to chemical,
one sating with its excess the other's
craving. All these senses receive
couriers of distant news. Remove
all distance and we touch as now,
my love, I touch you...
Whence, then,
impervious to all my messengers,
this distance?
Note: When in closest conceivable touch, closer than flesh permits (if we were only flesh), in an instant (quicker than a bright day goes gray as a cloud slides over the sun), impossible distances intervene, sudden doubts open wider and deeper than the Grand Canyon and, as quickly, vanish. It seems, in our own universes we have distances and spaces whereof neurochemistry knows nothing.
in a sense, with intervening
distance. With hearing we touch
waves of air or water and know
the motion of what sent them
(and touching the motion, know
across distance of selfhood, meaning).
With sight we touch light and know
with what force and degree of integrity
it bounced off or tore itself away from
what last it touched. Even smell
is the touch of chemical to chemical,
one sating with its excess the other's
craving. All these senses receive
couriers of distant news. Remove
all distance and we touch as now,
my love, I touch you...
Whence, then,
impervious to all my messengers,
this distance?
Note: When in closest conceivable touch, closer than flesh permits (if we were only flesh), in an instant (quicker than a bright day goes gray as a cloud slides over the sun), impossible distances intervene, sudden doubts open wider and deeper than the Grand Canyon and, as quickly, vanish. It seems, in our own universes we have distances and spaces whereof neurochemistry knows nothing.
Poetry Reading
Such a racket of feelings:
Clearly this poet lost her mommie.
That one lost his daddy.
This one needs a good cry,
that one a good lay.
This one is hungry and that one
feels guilty that others are hungry.
This one likes having loved ones,
but isn't sure about always having them,
and if not, how that changes the feeling
of having them. This one is gaga
about something I never heard of
before, but it's purple, and I think
it's some sort of flower. That one
would like to break windows until
everyone (or whoever THE SYSTEM is)
knows that he is not one of THEM
and have THEM admire him for it,
but not too much. These poets
could be anyone, but significantly,
ah! SIGNIFICANTLY so.
Note: This is a mean poem. Most poetry readings are better than that, and most? -- well, many poets are saner than those described. So why did it give me such pleasure to write about these varieties of childishness? Maybe I'm just mean. (Someone said that a poem must not mean, but be. Perhaps I try to have it both ways, by being mean.)
But no, that can't be. I'm the good guy here. See my white hat? (^) So maybe even the saner, more professional poets sometimes leave me wondering: "What are you saying to me? Are you saying it to Me? Why are you saying these things? Why am I supposed to enjoy/admire/care?"
If you're a poet, please ignore my fussiness. You may have to say a few silly things to get to the good stuff.
Clearly this poet lost her mommie.
That one lost his daddy.
This one needs a good cry,
that one a good lay.
This one is hungry and that one
feels guilty that others are hungry.
This one likes having loved ones,
but isn't sure about always having them,
and if not, how that changes the feeling
of having them. This one is gaga
about something I never heard of
before, but it's purple, and I think
it's some sort of flower. That one
would like to break windows until
everyone (or whoever THE SYSTEM is)
knows that he is not one of THEM
and have THEM admire him for it,
but not too much. These poets
could be anyone, but significantly,
ah! SIGNIFICANTLY so.
Note: This is a mean poem. Most poetry readings are better than that, and most? -- well, many poets are saner than those described. So why did it give me such pleasure to write about these varieties of childishness? Maybe I'm just mean. (Someone said that a poem must not mean, but be. Perhaps I try to have it both ways, by being mean.)
But no, that can't be. I'm the good guy here. See my white hat? (^) So maybe even the saner, more professional poets sometimes leave me wondering: "What are you saying to me? Are you saying it to Me? Why are you saying these things? Why am I supposed to enjoy/admire/care?"
If you're a poet, please ignore my fussiness. You may have to say a few silly things to get to the good stuff.
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