Category Archives: The via negativa

All things apophatic — the ostensible subject for this blog (ha!).

Poem for Display in a Hospital Waiting Room

Posted on May 28, 2008 by Dave Bonta
This entry is part 6 of 15 in the series Public Poems

The doors swing
both ways; be careful.
From either side,
the other looks like out.
This mystery your body
is like a Klein bottle,
all surface, no way in.
From the inevitably
flawed models, it appears
to intersect itself:
it dwells within the without.
That’s why the wind —
or is it breath? — can’t
be held, & you need
a fourth dimension
to lose those edges
called sickness,
to become whole.

Posted in Poems & poem-like things, The via negativa | 6 Comments

Root

Posted on March 16, 2008 by Dave Bonta

sky roots
(Click photo to see larger version)

Mid-March at this latitude is a time when even the most ordinary things can seem like revelations, as the Theriomorph observes. There is both less and more of things than we remember. Upturned roots diminished by rot seem to draw sustenance directly from the clouds, while living roots on a stream bank eroded by floods are left clutching little but each other and a few, bare rocks. As we circle, examining them from all angles, these signs turn gradually into ciphers. Soon we risk our own entrapment in a spell of undiscovery. Did she really say, “Even the babies have rocks in their parts”? What does it mean?


(Video from the Undiscovery Channel)

*

A couple of housekeeping notes: I’ve introduced a Feedburner version of the RSS feed for this site, the main advantage of which is that it displays videos to subscribers. Sometimes, as with that skunk video in “Canoe Creek,” I forget to include a note or caption to tell people reading this via Bloglines, Google Reader, or wherever that there’s a video in the post. And why make them click through to view it, after all? Other advantages to the new feed include helpful links to share the post via email, Facebook, and so on, similar to what you have on-site with the ShareThis utility. I’ve made it the new default, meaning that it’s what you’ll get if you click on the little feed icon in the Firefox browser window.

And speaking of the browser window, if you’ve noticed a question mark inside a yellow warning triangle to the left of the URL, don’t be alarmed — that’s simply my new favicon. (Don’t like it? Design me another one!) It used to be an exclamation point, but it was subjected to rigorous questioning in Photoshop. If you can’t see the new favicon, and are still still looking at the old, nearly indecipherable one (which was supposed to be a “falling rocks ahead” sign, but looked more like a sideways “V”), that’s probably because your browser is still caching the old one. Don’t worry — you’re not missing much.

Posted in Photos, The via negativa, Trees, Video | 7 Comments

Eclipse

Posted on February 20, 2008 by Dave Bonta

eclipsed moon

Coming home from a meeting after dark, I found myself walking up the hollow just as the lunar eclipse was getting underway. When I got up to the top, I stood watching among the pines until it reached totality. The trees’ shadows grew fainter and fainter until they disappeared altogether. Meanwhile, the stars had grown much brighter.

eclipsed moon with Saturn 1

I starting snapping pictures about five minutes later. From my front porch, the moon had just cleared the treetops. Astronomers had said it might turn an interesting shade of orange or red because it would be passing through the outer part of the umbra, and it didn’t disappoint, changing color from minute to minute. There were also some very thin strattus clouds that altered the hue from second to second, as in the following shot. (That’s Saturn in the lower left. Regulus appears above the moon in the last shot.)

eclipsed moon with Saturn 2

Unaware of coming, going,
I turn back alone.
Caught in the midnight sky,
The moon silvering all.
–Eun, 1232-1301
(from Zen Poems of China and Japan, tr. Lucien Stryk and Takahashi Ikemoto)

Where is your Buddhist enlightenment now? MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

eclipsed moon with Saturn and Regulus

Via Negativa!
Via Negativa!
Via Negativa!

(O.K., must cut down on watching political speeches on YouTube.)

UPDATE: See also Shai Gluskin’s great series of eclipse photos.

Posted in Nature/Ecology, Photos, The via negativa | 27 Comments

Sleeping with places

Posted on January 13, 2008 by Dave Bonta

SpokesTo sleep somewhere, to surrender our unconscious bodies to a strange bed or a spot on the ground while our minds go wandering — how is it that we feel we haven’t really visited a place until we’ve done this? It is not enough merely to have looked, to have listened, to have smelt and touched and tasted, though all these things matter too.

Perhaps we desire intimacy with the land on the same terms we seek it with a lover. I think it’s more than a euphemism to say of a couple that they’re sleeping together. The language recognizes that what’s important is not the endlessly variable act of lovemaking itself, which is a private matter and doesn’t really concern the larger community, but the quality of a relationship, whose power and potential longevity are clearly signalled by this most basic form of communion. At one level, obviously, it’s a demonstration of mutual trust. At another level, it suggests a shared habitation, even if the partners retain separate residences or rarely sleep in the same place twice.

These speculations are necessarily tenuous because the science of sleep is still in its infancy; researchers argue over the most basic questions about why we need to sleep and dream at all. It’s evidently part of our shared heritage with other animals, which, lacking symbolic language, may rely on dreaming to sort and archive their memories. Even in many pre-literate societies, the world of the past and the ancestors is assumed to remain accessible through dreaming, where hints about the world to come can also be gathered. Conceptions of these worlds vary widely from one culture to the next, so generalization is difficult, but in most cases there’s a direct link between time and distance, and the ability of the dreamer to travel very rapidly or instantaneously from one place to another is key to her clairvoyance. Why this link? Because life is envisioned as a journey, a route along a network of paths; to travel back in time is to travel in space as well.

We know from our own experience how memories are tied to the specific matrices in which they were born, and can be triggered by detailed cues such as odors — which even our inferior primate noses can distinguish by the hundreds — or the gestalt of a place. If I want to relive a memory, my first step is to recall in as much detail as possible the place where it occurred. The modern demotion of place to mere setting or environment simply doesn’t jibe with lived experience.

Maybe sleeping in a place adds to our feeling of truly inhabiting it because it symbolizes its inclusion in these worlds of memory and prescience. It solidifies its position in time and space by dissolving the horizon, which we cannot do away with as long as we are awake and our physical bodies and perceptions still impose strict limits. This in turn suggests why sleeping together is so basic to making love: after the relatively fleeting ecstasy of sex itself, sleep offers another, longer-lasting way to dissolve boundaries. And even as the sex (depending on the partners) may create a new person, the shared sleep creates a new place from the intersection of paths.

Posted in Dreams, Greatest Hits, Philosophy/Religion, The via negativa | 15 Comments

Artifact

Posted on December 25, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Is there any news more significant than the weather? It’s sunny here, and in the 40s, and I’m shading my eyes against the low sun and watching the flash of birds’ wings as they go in and out of the feeders on my parents’ back porch. I’m thinking for some reason of an artifact we had in our museum when we were kids: a piece of soapstone with a hole bored through it, just big enough to fit a finger through. The stone bulged around the hole and tapered toward both ends, and thinking about it now, I guess it must’ve been some sort of tool — perhaps an unfinished axe, or some strange kind of mallet. But whoever gave it to us (I can’t remember now) told us only that it was made by the Indians, so I treated it with the reverence owed the inexplicable, and it never once occurred to me that the hole might’ve been bored for something as prosaic as a tool handle. I thought it was marvelous the way someone would think to create a hole like that and surround it with stone, like a portable well. I would turn it over in my hand and wonder about the time it must’ve taken, and the single-minded focus. Only a hunter would have that kind of patience, I thought, and imagined men with spears going up against a wooly mammoth. Viewed on end, the stone was shaped like a human eye, and I wondered if it might not have some vaguely religious significance, like the god’s-eyes I had learned to make in third grade by weaving yarn around crossed popsickle sticks. A couple of those artifacts of my childhood still remain among my parents’ massive collection of Christmas tree ornaments, and get hung up on the tree every year. As for the soapstone artifact, I’m not sure where that ended up, but I think it’s safe to say that I learned far more from it than I ever would’ve if someone had simply told me what it was.

Posted in Riffs, The via negativa | 3 Comments

Flock

Posted on October 25, 2007 by Dave Bonta

We’ve been getting some sorely needed rain over the past couple of days, but today it’s merely overcast and damp, so this morning I went out for my first walk with a camera since last Sunday, heading straight up the side of the ridge above my house. My boots made almost no sound on the wet, moss-covered trail. Every breeze precipitated a small shower and a clatter of acorns.

About three-quarters of the way up the ridge, a flock of grackles suddenly came flying low over the treetops from the northeast. As I was focusing on that, a larger flock swept in from the other direction and the two of them met almost directly overhead. They wheeled about in one great spiral, doing exactly what I had tried to provoke the flock on Sunday into doing without success, their wings making a sound like the crashing of surf, or perhaps an angelic applause. Then they flew off toward the south and I didn’t see or hear another grackle the rest of the morning.

See, this is what I mean when I say I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something more. Do I think this encounter was a sign from God, or some kind of omen? Hell no, because I don’t believe the universe revolves around me. Those birds all have their own lives, each as significant as my own. Should I say it was a mere coincidence, then, and let it go at that? Not quite. Because what’s that word “mere” doing in there? Aren’t coincidences, in fact, pretty goddamn wonderful? My reaction instead was to smile. If I believe, the joke is on me. If I don’t believe, the joke is still on me. The universe seems to have a pretty good sense of humor sometimes.

I watch the increasingly acrimonious public debate between religious fundamentalists and scientific fundamentalists with dismay: like the blind men with the elephant, each is partly in the right and all are in the wrong. Reductionism, though a powerful tool essential to the proper conduct of science and mathematics, offers no more definitive a view of reality than mysticism or magic. Each way of seeing can be useful, especially if one uses them in alternation and never allows oneself to become emotionally committed to a single perspective. Sometimes, it’s helpful to realize that X is no more than Y, but at other times, one needs to remind oneself that X is no less than Y. All quantification is provisional — but so is every effort to qualify. It has so much to do with where you look, which instruments you use, which frames or frameworks you impose.

The only sane response, I feel, is to get comfortable living with the questions — and to school ourselves in appreciation. Let the questions spiral in on themselves like a host of grackles. If we wonder why coincidences happen, what does that tell us about our expectations? What is this thing called “random chance”? If we’re so certain chance exists, why do we need to add a reduntant modifier? What does it mean to say that things happen for a reason, if we admit in the next breath that such reasons must remain forever beyond the limits of our understanding? Can we admit that we just don’t know why things happen in one way and not another? Does it rob either religion or science of their power if we admit this?

I mentioned appreciation, but a purely aesthetic response can be as dispassionate as an analytical one. Christians refer to the central mystery of their faith in terms of passion, and I have to admit, strong emotions — both good and bad — can be awfully mysterious in their comings and goings. We shit in our pants with fear, for example. In a large crowd brought together by a common passion, we tingle all over with the pleasure of merging with the flock. In the throes of physical passion, we experience orgasm, something biologists still have a hard time explaining. Or in what I would argue is our closest brush with the sacred, we burst out laughing, that part of our body where we once were physically connected to something larger heaving convulsively, as if trying to link back up with a cosmic mother. One way or another, we exceed ourselves, and are reminded in the most concrete way possible that the little idol called ego is not sovereign; there is always something more.

And that’s all I have to say about religion for a while, I think.

Posted in Philosophy/Religion, The via negativa | 7 Comments

Walking with whatever

Posted on October 22, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Moving into a house where I already live is turning out to be more time-consuming than I anticipated. But the beautiful weather lured me into taking a short walk yesterday morning, in between working on a new batch of bread up at my parents’ house. Sundays are always a good day to go walking, regardless of the weather, due to the relative quiet. There isn’t as much traffic on the highways, and most noise-making businesses are shut down. Despite my left-libertarian views, I’m a strong supporter of blue laws.

We’re rapidly approaching the peak of fall color now. Almost all the trees and shrubs in the understory had turned, and shone like stained glass in the morning sun. As I started up the trail, I found myself thinking of a poem by my friend Teju Cole that I had just re-read a couple hours earlier: “The God Walker.” It originally appeared last year in his blog miracle speech, which is no longer online, but was also included in a soon-to-be-published anthology of blogger poets called Brilliant Coroners, of which I have an advance copy. “In the forest near my house / I have taken my god for a walk,” it begins. This is “a household god, / bred for an apartment’s confines,” but by the end of the poem, seduced by the forest smells, he “goes a little wild.”

“Walking with God/Jesus” is one of those clichés that makes intellectual snobs like me keep Protestant Christianity at arm’s length. I like how Teju subverts it in his poem, going out for a walk not with some abstract, omnipotent father-figure but instead with something like a familiar spirit — if not, indeed, Man’s Best Friend (“his wolf ancestors calling to him, / the god flares his wet nose”). “Household god” makes me think of the fetishes — described as “gods” in the King James Bible — which Rachel stole from her father Laban when she fled with Jacob (Genesis 31:19-34). I like the recognition that our images of the divine are limited not only by our own imaginations, but also by the physical environment we associate them with, and our tendency to keep them on leashes. One of my biggest problems with most formalized religions is the way they domesticate and sanitize divinity in the process of making it safe for mass consumption. Usually the trickster persona is the first to go. And once god(s) can no longer legitimately just fuck with people or unleash chaos without having their divinity called into question, you enter the maze known as theodicy, or “justify[ing] the ways of God to Man,” in Milton’s memorable phrase. Aspiring to worship an omnipotent God, we end up instead with one alarmingly subject to human approval, and risk psychological damage in the process by creating a situation where if bad things happen, it can only be our own fault — or at best, the fault of a fallen trickster turned into a cosmic bad cop.

A slightly more conventional but equally creative and whimsical take on divinity comes from another blogger friend, graphic artist Natalie d’Arbeloff in her new book of comic strips, The God Interviews. I bought a copy from her when I was in New York last month, and actually got it inscribed by God, as channeled by Natalie. He gave me two Xs, which I hope represent kisses — if not, I could be in big trouble.

But probably not from this God, who is very much the all-loving sort. He gets out of the theodicy trap in the usual way, by talking about freedom, though with a fun analogy: “You know that thing when a novelist creates characters and they start to have a mind of their own?” God asks. “Yes, but that’s fiction. I’m talking about reality,” says Natalie’s cartoon alter-ego Augustine (no, not that Augustine). “In this reality I’ve given my characters freedom,” says God.

“Freedom to destroy ourselves and the whole shebang?”

“Freedom to reach my destination in your own time in your own ways.”

“And the destination is?”

“Love, naturally.”

Can you really call it freedom, though, if a higher power had to grant it? To my way of thinking, freedom of action is intrinsic to all living things. If it makes sense to talk about divinity at all — and an intuition of “something more” often persuades me that it does — then I think we must be careful not to separate it too much from the way things naturally work. My worldview doesn’t have any room for a supernatural, I guess. The new idea of divinity as an emergent property of complex living systems has definite appeal, though, especially to someone with a strong animist bent.

It’s only fair to point out that Natalie is very much a visual thinker, and the power of her argument is diminished by reducing it to text alone. God is of necessity anthropomorphic — male and brown-skinned, usually barefoot and wearing a t-shirt that says “God,” though his size and sometimes his apparel varies to suit the occasion. So again, as with Teju Cole’s poem, this is divinity as real people experience it, not as priests or theologians or smart-ass poet-bloggers think it should be.

Nor does d’Arbeloff neglect the via negativa. My favorite section, Chapter 12, begins with a visit to a bookstore, which is having a “SUPER SPIRITUAL SALE — All the Answers For the Price of One!” It includes a paean to the power of the imagination reminiscent of William Blake — and given Blake’s understanding of how the prophets could claim to speak for God, that’s probably no accident.

Isaiah answer’d: “I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in everything, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirm’d, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.”
(The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

Natalie’s version of this is a little more self-reflexive, and of course a lot funnier. “What do you think of all these people who claim they talk to you?” Augustine asks as they leave the bookstore. “You’re talking to me, aren’t you?” says God. “But I don’t claim to be really real!” Augustine says in a tone of honest indignation.

In the panels that follow, the analogy between artist and divinity is, um, drawn out especially well. The last panel employs a visual quote of the two-faces-or-goblet figure from Gestalt psychology to great effect, with the words “What is really real about you?” inscribed on one of the two, nearly identical profiles, and in the black goblet-space between them: “That which cannot be imagined.”

This was the kind of stuff bouncing around in my head yesterday morning, preventing a full awareness of my surroundings, as usual. When I got to the powerline, I started to hear odd creaking noises from the woods ahead. A flock of blackbirds, I thought, and got my camera ready, figuring the flock would pass overhead at any moment. I stood there waiting for several minutes, but the sound didn’t get any closer, so I continued across the powerline and on up the trail. It got louder and louder as I made my way through the dead and dying mountain laurel, which is so painful to look at now. As I approached the ridgetop, I saw the tops of the oak trees shaking violently, though there was no wind. The sound was all around me, and small flocks of birds began rising from the ground at my approach. They weren’t red-winged blackbirds, as I’d figured, but common grackles — thousands of them, feasting on acorns. This is what a very, very small, outlier flock of passenger pigeons must’ve been like, I thought, and felt the hair rising on the back of my neck.

The awe was short-lived. A moment later I was back to thinking how cool it would be if I could get them all to take flight at once, as icterid flocks will do, with a rush of synchronized wings. I moved purposefully toward what I took to be the center of the flock, but the birds only flew short distances ahead of me, and when I stopped, they flew closer and peered down with their disconcertingly yellow eyes, as if trying to make up their minds to rush me all at once.

I had to get back; the bread needed to go in the oven if we were to have any for lunch. The flock regrouped quickly in my wake, and it occurred to me as I hurried back to the house that the main reason why people don’t have true epiphanies any more is that we’re too damned distracted to recognize them. If the image of walking has such strong sentimental appeal, it’s probably because few people actually make the time to walk any more, or even if they do, like me, they’re too preoccupied with their own thoughts to fully appreciate what’s around them. I probably shouldn’t give away the ending of The God Interviews, but let’s just say that it may well have supplied the inspiration for Teju Cole’s poem. We are all vagrants at heart: “strangers and sojourners,” as God put it in Leviticus 25:23, “going to and fro in the earth, and … walking up and down in it,” as Satan says about himself in his two interviews with God at the beginning of Job.

The bread had risen well. I popped it in the oven, and then spent the next hour moving all my fiction into the dining room, to keep company with my six shelves full of religion books. They were all very dusty. It might be time to give them a good airing out.
__________

Be sure to read Dick Jones’ stunning new poem, God.

Posted in Books and Music, Philosophy/Religion, The via negativa | 22 Comments

Groove

Posted on October 20, 2007 by Dave Bonta

I’m spreading the second coat of varnish, moving the paintbrush to the beat of my old boombox and wondering if that might be just the magic needed to ensure a danceable floor. It already possesses a kind of visual music: a metronome in one direction, since all the floorboards are the same width, but at right angles to the grain, the very shallow grooves left by the floor sander every time I paused it, made visible by the varnish, form a more varied but still somewhat regular pattern: step step rest. Step step rest.

Strange stuff, polyurethane — paint without pigment, its presence detectable only by the gloss and extra depth it imparts to surfaces. Like some people’s idea of God, I suppose. And maybe because I just “got down on my bended knees” myself, my old cassette copy of the song Burning Hell, by John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat, seems like a perfect fit right now.

The appealing thing about the song is that the narrator’s skepticism is wholly focused on the afterlife; there’s no mention of God or devil, though one could certainly argue that their non-existence is implied:

Ain’t no heaven,
ain’t no burning hell.
When I die, where I go,
nobody can tell.

The song is culturally if not theologically Christian, borrowing imagery and a vocal delivery from the charismatic churches. The protagonist asks a deacon to pray for him, and also prays himself, all night long, in the spirit of “help Thou my unbelief.” But apparently it doesn’t do any good: there’s no epiphany, the prayer goes unanswered, and the song concludes as skeptically as it began.

The funny thing is that it doesn’t come off as despairing at all, but defiant and ultimately joyful. John Lee Hooker certainly didn’t invent the style of blues known as boogie, but his concept of it was fairly unique: verses of varying length, as much spontaneity as possible in verbal and musical lines, and an overall impression of songs as mere fragments of something essentially endless. Many of Hooker’s songs are more laid-back than “Burning Hell,” but all of them tap into the same, hypnotic groove, for lack of a better term.

I’ve loved that groove ever since I first heard it, which may be as much as thirty years ago, when my older brother first started playing clawhammer banjo. Though now associated with Appalachian string band music, it’s the old, African style of playing, featuring a bum-ditty beat with the thumb hammering out a drone note. Some sort of drone occurs in many, perhaps most, styles of traditional music the world over, especially those influenced by contact with Islam and the muezzin’s call to prayer — certainly the case with most musical traditions brought to the New World by West Africans. Even the explicit focus on drones in Indian classical music dates back only to the Mogul period, though its subsequent popularity on the subcontinent probably also reflects indigenous metaphysical concepts. According to an online paper on the subject, “the function of the drone or tonicizing ground in Indian classical music is rooted in the ancient Hindu philosophies: it is the physical manifestation of OM.”

So while “Burning Hell” celebrates spiritual homelessness, Hooker’s droning boogie guitar groove is anything but OMless.

Given the title of this blog, I’m sure you’d all be disappointed if I didn’t go on to point out that doubt is a very fruitful position. In fact, I do think about this sort of thing a lot, but have moved away from blogging about it because I don’t feel I have too many original insights on the subject. All I know is that for me, affiliation with some spiritual tradition or another is an on-going temptation I feel I must resist if I am ever to learn anything about reality, whatever that may consist of. As I’ve said before, one of my base assumptions is that if some doctrine or dogma makes me feel good, it can’t possibly be true. “Ain’t no heaven, ain’t no burning hell” has the appeal of a good mantra for me, teaching non-attachment to the self — something that most of the major religions also agree is a good thing, though perhaps only in the same way that Marxist-Leninism preaches the ultimate disappearance of the state.

At any rate, despite spending half an hour sweeping and vacuuming in advance of the varnishing, I’m still finding a few stray bits of dirt as I go along — a fragment of leaf, a hair, a small piece of broomstraw. I could get up and carry them over to the waste basket in the other room, but that would break the rhythm, so instead I shove them into my pocket. The really tiny grains of dirt can be pushed into the cracks between the floorboards, where 150 years of accumulated crud has acquired the status and patina of a deliberately applied grout. I’m reminded of the ancient riddle, quoted by Heraclitus:

What we found, we caught and killed.
What we couldn’t find, we brought with us.

The accepted answer is lice, but it could be almost anything. Atheists and believers both could probably take a lesson from it.

Posted in Books and Music, Greatest Hits, Philosophy/Religion, The via negativa | Tagged | 12 Comments

What does love want?

Posted on August 21, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Friend me

  • To be whole.
  • To be a part.
  • To be apart.
  • To be wholly present.
  • To be a present.
  • To be free.
  • To be treasured.
  • To be changeless.
  • To be infinitely malleable.
  • To be indescribable.
  • To be given multiple terms of endearment.
  • To be at rest.
  • To be in motion.
  • To be emptied.
  • To be filled.
  • To be sovereign.
  • To be of service.
  • To be amusing.
  • To be amazing.
  • To be amazed.
  • To be wildered.
  • To be lost.
  • To be last.
  • To be all things.
  • To be no thing.
  • To be not.
  • To be.

tree on University Park campus
__________

Thanks to SB for posing the question on her Facebook profile.

Posted in Personal/Political, The via negativa, Words on the Street | 18 Comments

Sleeping Buddha

Posted on August 15, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Our submarine sank through layers of strange darkness to the very bottom of the ocean, where we found a lost pocket of terra firma complete with trees, lawns and sidewalks. We came to rest right in the middle of a revolutionary mob, who confused our ship with one of their invisible overlords and began to squabble over who would have the privilege of breaking it the way one breaks a wild horse. When we stepped out to sample the air, the crowd fell silent, and parted on both sides of us like the Red Sea for Moses. We crossed the square to a public fountain, my fellow prospectors and I, and raised cupped hands brimful with a miraculous, salt-free water that had never been sullied by so much as a glimpse of clouds.

As far as I can tell, this dream was prompted by my watching, shortly before bed, a video of the Talking Heads performing “Once in a Lifetime.” I was particularly impressed by the line, “there is water at the bottom of the ocean,” which I had never focused on before.

Buried things have always drawn my attention. Like much of the rest of the nation, I’ve been following the search for the lost coal miners in the mountain in Utah. And this morning over breakfast, I was reading an article about the Afghan archaeologist Zemaryalai Tarzi’s effort to locate the 900-foot-long “Sleeping Buddha” described by the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang in the 7th century. If its remains still exist, buried by who knows how much sand or rubble, they wouldn’t be more than a mile or two from the famous standing Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.

Much like the reclining Buddhas in Thailand, this immense sculpture presumably depicted the Buddha at the point of death/nirvana, though of course it’s more appealing to think of him as enjoying a millennium-long sleep under the ground like some kind of immense cicada. More about that in a moment. First, an essay in the Tricycle blog goes to the heart of the issue: does the recovery of buried or destroyed icons even make sense from a Buddhist perspective? The author quotes from Xuanzang’s journal about the standing and sleeping Buddhas of Bamiyan, and goes on to suggest how the loss of such icons might’ve struck the great theologian and translator:

Xuanzang’s own religious feelings were deeply rooted in an awareness of how loss and nostalgia operate to drive us on the path to liberation. When he reached the Bodhi Tree and stood before the empty seat once occupied by the Buddha, he threw himself into the dust and wept bitter tears. This existential encounter with the Buddha’s absence hammered home that he lived in an age without an enlightened teacher, that he had failed to plant the karmic seeds that would’ve allowed him to meet the Tathagatha when he walked softly upon the earth. Profoundly aware of his own past inadequacies, Xuanzang’s commitment to the Dharma redoubled as he stared the truth of emptiness in the face. A follower of the cult of Maitretya, Xuanzang hoped that being reborn in the Tushita heaven would let him meet and learn from a Buddha after his death. Xuanzang probably wouldn’t agree with those who saw the loss of the Bamiyan Buddhas [at the hands of the Taliban] as conveying a lesson in detachment. Rather, for him it was precisely the pain of losing something cherished that leads to aspiration for following the path of Dharma.

I’ll admit, I’ve always been attracted to the melancholy strain in Buddhist art and Buddhist-inspired literature. Ironically, the modern emphasis on non-attachment coincides with a proliferation of icons, whereas for the first five hundred years or so, Buddhism was strictly aniconic, in the same way that early Christian symbolism privileged the empty tomb. Only the Buddha’s footprints or parasol could be depicted, reinforcing his followers’ consciousness of his absence.

Maybe it’s the subterranean influence of my pagan Germanic heritage, but I can’t help thinking of nirvana as a kind of living death. It is, after all, depicted not as a triumph over death but as a triumph over rebirth — a pure extinction. And since I don’t believe in reincarnation, the only way I can understand this is to imagine a supernatural ability to elude decay and the recycling of all of one’s elements into new lifeforms. I picture the Buddha lying in suspended animation when at last some modern Grettir discovers his burial mound and descends into the darkness with the gift of breath like a sword between his teeth.

Posted in Personal/Political, Philosophy/Religion, The via negativa | 9 Comments
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