11 The Mind as Spume, the Body as Knower
I find it harder and harder to pay attention to ideas, to the abstract. People sit on a beach and think about--I haven’t the slightest idea! Hopes and fears, probably. People sit on a beach and think about what the shore means other than itself!
I sit on the beach and think about salt and sand. I know through touch. I know that the mind is spume coughed up by the surf, nothing more. What is so revolting about the world-in-itself? What is so detestable about the physical?
Even a simple garden is not safe from attempts to purify it, to disinfect it, to idealize it, to make of it something other than itself.
My friend Jal sent me a letter about his garden:
“What do plants eat? They eat dead animals; that’s the problem. For me that was a horrifying realization. You want to be an organic gardener, of course, so you keep reading ‘Feed the soil, feed the soil, feed the soil…’
“Alright. Well what does the soil want to eat? Well, it wants manure, and it wants urine, and it wants blood meal and bone meal. And I…could not face that. I wanted my garden to be pure and death-free. It didn’t matter what I wanted: plants wanted those things; they needed those things to grow.” (Jal White)
The sun digests its own guts, devouring itself in a feast that keeps going late into the night, swallowing itself even as it erupts from overindulgence, and it pours itself over the Earth, and we clever Moving Things that have found a way to trap its energy in our sinewy flywheels spend our lives building up our fatty tissues and dissolving them again, eating ourselves, eating each other, grazing the patient Standing Things for their sugars only to serve ourselves up to their roots as nitrogen and phosphates when our husks are worn to fibers.
This is not a metaphor!
I see the cycle so clearly, now, and I recognize it for what it is: Paradise!
The Garden is a garden, my friends. And gardens are places of growth and attrition, bloom and rot, taking and rendering.
This is not a metaphor!
A friend asked me if I like sex. He is not the first to observe that I seem to take it or leave it. I would have given him the long answer, but I don’t think his attention span can handle it, with how distracted he is by desires--a quality I do not disparage, by the way!
But, my friends, if you have not felt a profound wonder at the way sand falls through the sieve of your fingers, sex is wasted on you. If you have not stopped to appreciate the electric-silk texture of steel, sex is wasted on you. If the waxy skin of a leaf, and its vibrant odor when you crush it to green pulp between your fingers, does not make you even the least bit dizzy, you may as well be listening to a symphony from the roof of the concert hall, feeling only faint vibrations through the masonry on the soles of your feet and congratulating yourself on your enthusiasm for music.
This is not a metaphor!
The body can feel more. The body can know more.
Quod Verum Corpus potest Scire.
I sit on the beach and think about salt and sand. I know through touch. I know that the mind is spume coughed up by the surf, nothing more. What is so revolting about the world-in-itself? What is so detestable about the physical?
Even a simple garden is not safe from attempts to purify it, to disinfect it, to idealize it, to make of it something other than itself.
My friend Jal sent me a letter about his garden:
“What do plants eat? They eat dead animals; that’s the problem. For me that was a horrifying realization. You want to be an organic gardener, of course, so you keep reading ‘Feed the soil, feed the soil, feed the soil…’
“Alright. Well what does the soil want to eat? Well, it wants manure, and it wants urine, and it wants blood meal and bone meal. And I…could not face that. I wanted my garden to be pure and death-free. It didn’t matter what I wanted: plants wanted those things; they needed those things to grow.” (Jal White)
The sun digests its own guts, devouring itself in a feast that keeps going late into the night, swallowing itself even as it erupts from overindulgence, and it pours itself over the Earth, and we clever Moving Things that have found a way to trap its energy in our sinewy flywheels spend our lives building up our fatty tissues and dissolving them again, eating ourselves, eating each other, grazing the patient Standing Things for their sugars only to serve ourselves up to their roots as nitrogen and phosphates when our husks are worn to fibers.
This is not a metaphor!
I see the cycle so clearly, now, and I recognize it for what it is: Paradise!
The Garden is a garden, my friends. And gardens are places of growth and attrition, bloom and rot, taking and rendering.
This is not a metaphor!
A friend asked me if I like sex. He is not the first to observe that I seem to take it or leave it. I would have given him the long answer, but I don’t think his attention span can handle it, with how distracted he is by desires--a quality I do not disparage, by the way!
But, my friends, if you have not felt a profound wonder at the way sand falls through the sieve of your fingers, sex is wasted on you. If you have not stopped to appreciate the electric-silk texture of steel, sex is wasted on you. If the waxy skin of a leaf, and its vibrant odor when you crush it to green pulp between your fingers, does not make you even the least bit dizzy, you may as well be listening to a symphony from the roof of the concert hall, feeling only faint vibrations through the masonry on the soles of your feet and congratulating yourself on your enthusiasm for music.
This is not a metaphor!
The body can feel more. The body can know more.
Quod Verum Corpus potest Scire.