(no subject)
I tried to show you but I couldn’t manage it. So this is me telling you. This is how I tell you, this is what I tell you. And this is how I fail to tell it. This is how the failure is the telling. Your skin is yeast and your eyes pearls. What I am trying to say is that the words don’t change what I am trying to say. The part of you that points the sword only at yourself and the part of you that shines the blade like it’s new are separated only by what holds their place. Please, hold my place.
Thanks to Linds and her friends for taking me out again. I feel enormously grateful and apologize if I seem overly reserved/polite. I am neck deep in things which are hard to name and the sense of pure awe and overwhelm that surrounds me seems best tempered when my neurosis is reigned in a little. But I assure all that there is no lost passion and some of you may be receiving a videotaped musical performance from overseas to prove it.
So there I was, listening to some Alanis Morrisette (sp?) (and no it isn’t ironic, just coincidental) coffee house type in an ….umm…coffee house that was overly quiet and made me anxious. So, though I was in the front and am still wondering if I should feel bad about this, I picked up a book. I mean I’m sure like that everyone else was all dispassionately into it and stuff and/or deep in some like really…deep…thoughts, so I don’t think brought down the vibe. The book was called something like “Where the Great Religions Came From”. I flipped to the chapter about Taoism, which was curiously subtitled “the religion few understand”. After a nice section about the life of good ol’ Lao Tse the chapter proceeded to address the specifics the religion’s foundational text, the Tao Te Ching. While scholars and seekers have poured over this incredibly rich text for millennia, the author of this book seemed fairly confident that he could pretty much boil it, and the foundational teachings of Taoism as a whole, down in a paragraph or two by saying that the religion was valid and noble insofar as it’s more “clear” statements expressed rather universal (and definitely great) ideas like being kind to all and the evil of war. However, the author quite boldly dismissed large sections of the Tao Te Ching as “impossible to understand”, “unclear”, and thus useless. This sent me up the wall. I mean the reason everyone believes the same thing and shares in some glorious unified universal interpretive experience, and the overall reason that peace and tranquility abound is because truth is so undeniably “clear” right? Now I’m not going to venture into the tired relativism/absolutism debate or whine about “shades of gray”, because that’s not what I am concerned with. The problem here, and this is indicative of a much larger pathology in the social consciousness, is the complete inability to deal with nuance, paradox, and anything which sidesteps whatever unnamed structuralist/dualist conception of language and truth that most people seem to hold fast to. More so than any of the other major world religions, Taoism is based in poetry, and thus in art. The strict apollonian view of meaning (which only understands in terms of either/or) is killing the public, political, religious, and educational discourse. This is why we have so few believers who transcend childish and reactionary fundamentalist religious models, or why no one likes poetry. Think of how this plays out in the high school classroom. Teacher walks in and says “hi kids we are going to analyze poetry today”. The children grunt in dismay anticipating the literary death march ahead of them. “Lets try to see if we can figure out what this poem ‘means’” says the teacher. The assumption is thus made that poems are to be read for what they ‘mean’. And of course the teacher already knows what the poems means and is thus smarter than the students, who resent this dichotomy and the author for not just saying what they mean so they don’t have to go through this pain. The teacher pokes and prods the students in a piously assured manner, after all, he know what the poems means, the teachers guide told him. After some flimsy argument based on the “plain” being a symbol for the “emptiness of the heart” the teacher exclaims that the poem is saying that the author feels lonely, I mean isn’t it obvious! “But why didn’t he just say that” Johnny says. All parties are left helplessly in the dark, not understanding that supposed ‘meaning’ is entirely context dependent, that poems are meant to ‘do’ things more than be ‘about things’, the sound/feeling/layout/rhythm “mean” just as much as a summation of definitions, that the purpose of a poem is not to obscure but to explore, and that when frank o hara writes that “having a coke with you is more fun than going to the top of San Sebastian…….” that this is exactly what he means, the exact words, in that order, and not just that he is in love.
I wanted to say something about how this plays out in theology but I don’t have the energy except to say that one of the best pieces of wisdom I have ever received and experience is that “faith is not the acceptance of a set of articles of belief”. God does not live in lists of tenants on a page or words running from the spit-soaked mouth of some pig preacher on the television but in that moment, when amidst all the things that should make you feel otherwise, the sinews of your chest tighten and all you can feel is the feeling itself, extending across the horizon and shot back to you wrapping around your body so tight you can hardly speak of it, and so you don’t.
Last night Eric rode his bike along side me as I ran and afterward I felt so immanent that I couldn’t sleep. I love him and you and myself and if you are willing I will wrap you in a drone and give you back when its safe, if you will promise to do the same for me.
I am getting my wisdom teeth out on friday and soon after leaving for Europe. This isn’t goodbye but almost. I will be expecting some “I had oral surgery and all I got was this stinking mixtape/video collage/reading material/care package/visit” action this weekend!
This is all that need be said……..
“we look for it but we do not see it;
we name is ‘subtle’.
we listen for it but do not hear it;
we name it ‘rare’.
we grope for it but do not grasp it;
we call it ‘serene’.
these three cannot be fathomed therefore they are bound together to make unity.
of unity,
its top is not distant,
its bottom not blurred.
Infinitely extended and unnamable,
it returns to nonentity.
this is called the form of the formless,
the image of nonentity.
this is called the amorphous.
following behind it you cannot see its back.
approaching its front you cannot see its head.”
-Tao Te Ching 58(14)
“And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of kids playing a made-up game in the neighbor’s yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice, or piggyback races on the weedy lawn, and its your voice you hear, essentially, under the glimmerglass sky, and you look at the things in the room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in the light. the thick lived tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measures of experience in a random glance, the monk’s candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils, and you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow, its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hail and farewell, a word that carries the sunlight ardor of an object deep in the drenching noon, the argument of binding touch, but its only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive-a word that spreads a longing through the raw scrawl of the city and out across the dreaming bourns and orchards to the solitary hills.”
Don Delillo’s Underworld
and finally…
“Yes Father! Yes, and always, yes!”
-from the prayer of St. Francis de Sales
Thanks to Linds and her friends for taking me out again. I feel enormously grateful and apologize if I seem overly reserved/polite. I am neck deep in things which are hard to name and the sense of pure awe and overwhelm that surrounds me seems best tempered when my neurosis is reigned in a little. But I assure all that there is no lost passion and some of you may be receiving a videotaped musical performance from overseas to prove it.
So there I was, listening to some Alanis Morrisette (sp?) (and no it isn’t ironic, just coincidental) coffee house type in an ….umm…coffee house that was overly quiet and made me anxious. So, though I was in the front and am still wondering if I should feel bad about this, I picked up a book. I mean I’m sure like that everyone else was all dispassionately into it and stuff and/or deep in some like really…deep…thoughts, so I don’t think brought down the vibe. The book was called something like “Where the Great Religions Came From”. I flipped to the chapter about Taoism, which was curiously subtitled “the religion few understand”. After a nice section about the life of good ol’ Lao Tse the chapter proceeded to address the specifics the religion’s foundational text, the Tao Te Ching. While scholars and seekers have poured over this incredibly rich text for millennia, the author of this book seemed fairly confident that he could pretty much boil it, and the foundational teachings of Taoism as a whole, down in a paragraph or two by saying that the religion was valid and noble insofar as it’s more “clear” statements expressed rather universal (and definitely great) ideas like being kind to all and the evil of war. However, the author quite boldly dismissed large sections of the Tao Te Ching as “impossible to understand”, “unclear”, and thus useless. This sent me up the wall. I mean the reason everyone believes the same thing and shares in some glorious unified universal interpretive experience, and the overall reason that peace and tranquility abound is because truth is so undeniably “clear” right? Now I’m not going to venture into the tired relativism/absolutism debate or whine about “shades of gray”, because that’s not what I am concerned with. The problem here, and this is indicative of a much larger pathology in the social consciousness, is the complete inability to deal with nuance, paradox, and anything which sidesteps whatever unnamed structuralist/dualist conception of language and truth that most people seem to hold fast to. More so than any of the other major world religions, Taoism is based in poetry, and thus in art. The strict apollonian view of meaning (which only understands in terms of either/or) is killing the public, political, religious, and educational discourse. This is why we have so few believers who transcend childish and reactionary fundamentalist religious models, or why no one likes poetry. Think of how this plays out in the high school classroom. Teacher walks in and says “hi kids we are going to analyze poetry today”. The children grunt in dismay anticipating the literary death march ahead of them. “Lets try to see if we can figure out what this poem ‘means’” says the teacher. The assumption is thus made that poems are to be read for what they ‘mean’. And of course the teacher already knows what the poems means and is thus smarter than the students, who resent this dichotomy and the author for not just saying what they mean so they don’t have to go through this pain. The teacher pokes and prods the students in a piously assured manner, after all, he know what the poems means, the teachers guide told him. After some flimsy argument based on the “plain” being a symbol for the “emptiness of the heart” the teacher exclaims that the poem is saying that the author feels lonely, I mean isn’t it obvious! “But why didn’t he just say that” Johnny says. All parties are left helplessly in the dark, not understanding that supposed ‘meaning’ is entirely context dependent, that poems are meant to ‘do’ things more than be ‘about things’, the sound/feeling/layout/rhythm “mean” just as much as a summation of definitions, that the purpose of a poem is not to obscure but to explore, and that when frank o hara writes that “having a coke with you is more fun than going to the top of San Sebastian…….” that this is exactly what he means, the exact words, in that order, and not just that he is in love.
I wanted to say something about how this plays out in theology but I don’t have the energy except to say that one of the best pieces of wisdom I have ever received and experience is that “faith is not the acceptance of a set of articles of belief”. God does not live in lists of tenants on a page or words running from the spit-soaked mouth of some pig preacher on the television but in that moment, when amidst all the things that should make you feel otherwise, the sinews of your chest tighten and all you can feel is the feeling itself, extending across the horizon and shot back to you wrapping around your body so tight you can hardly speak of it, and so you don’t.
Last night Eric rode his bike along side me as I ran and afterward I felt so immanent that I couldn’t sleep. I love him and you and myself and if you are willing I will wrap you in a drone and give you back when its safe, if you will promise to do the same for me.
I am getting my wisdom teeth out on friday and soon after leaving for Europe. This isn’t goodbye but almost. I will be expecting some “I had oral surgery and all I got was this stinking mixtape/video collage/reading material/care package/visit” action this weekend!
This is all that need be said……..
“we look for it but we do not see it;
we name is ‘subtle’.
we listen for it but do not hear it;
we name it ‘rare’.
we grope for it but do not grasp it;
we call it ‘serene’.
these three cannot be fathomed therefore they are bound together to make unity.
of unity,
its top is not distant,
its bottom not blurred.
Infinitely extended and unnamable,
it returns to nonentity.
this is called the form of the formless,
the image of nonentity.
this is called the amorphous.
following behind it you cannot see its back.
approaching its front you cannot see its head.”
-Tao Te Ching 58(14)
“And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of kids playing a made-up game in the neighbor’s yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice, or piggyback races on the weedy lawn, and its your voice you hear, essentially, under the glimmerglass sky, and you look at the things in the room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in the light. the thick lived tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measures of experience in a random glance, the monk’s candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils, and you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow, its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hail and farewell, a word that carries the sunlight ardor of an object deep in the drenching noon, the argument of binding touch, but its only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive-a word that spreads a longing through the raw scrawl of the city and out across the dreaming bourns and orchards to the solitary hills.”
Don Delillo’s Underworld
and finally…
“Yes Father! Yes, and always, yes!”
-from the prayer of St. Francis de Sales