Philosophy/Religion – Page 21

August 23, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Haunting the bell

Improbable doorways, hello. I’m walking off a drunk — a stagger-stepped and deliberate go at keeping the ground in its place. Down the deserted road two miles, growing steadily more sure-footed, then left through the sleeping village and around the gate into Ikkyu’s old temple, which I’ve explored several times by daylight.

Nothing stirs. The white gravel path is just visible, and I crunch past the meditation hall. I approach the bell in its hillside hanger, an immense shadow in the shape of an inverted sake cup. I stab its three-ton chest with my big finger. Hey! You think you so smart? You come to my temple, at Shao-lin!

No answer. I crouch down, remembering the Noh play where a monk leaps into a bell to escape a serpent. I crab-walk under, then cautiously stand, groping the cold metal.

The ancient bell is noisy with breathing. Startled, I bang my head, and there’s the faintest of reverberations, echoing for several heartbeats. This is not a hat, I whisper. A hat. A hat.

August 18, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Zendo

A Japanese-style zendo on a Pennsylvania hillside. I suddenly remember I too used to dream this dream, years ago. How strange to encounter it in someone else’s woods, though. It’s as if I never woke up.

After half an hour of zazen, I find the continued presence of the wooden floor with its wavy grain somehow comic: everytime I open my eyes, there it is again! Solid yet wandering.

Kettle drum.

Wooden clappers.

Bell.

Rooster.

Cicada.

Airplane.

The growl of a stomach.

A caught breath.

A sigh.

Walking meditation: the world’s most difficult dance. So many possible steps, and none of them wrong. We go single file through the woods. If the trees aren’t laughing at us, they should be.

At the Dharma talk about honoring the body, I watch a black lab running in his sleep.

We are enjoined not to speak throughout the service. The next morning, I feel a cold in my throat.

August 9, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Praying mantis

Long after his head, torso, & prayerful forelegs have fallen prey to her ravenous love-bites, the male mantis stays joined to the female & continues to pump, automatic as a Tibetan prayer wheel: OM the jewel in the heart of the lotus. OMG.

July 31, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Becoming Israel

Genesis 32:24-32

It’s the night before the reunion with my brother the savage whose people & whose flocks infest the land. I isolate myself like a woman in her monthly time. But through the tent wall, through furs, through woolen blanket & robe, another pair of hands find mine & begin to push.

This is contact almost at the level of pure symbolism, but still a kind of arousal occurs. Some slave girl, perhaps, ambitious for a piece of the inheritance? I bump up against a maybe hip & thigh — something warm & solid with just a little give.

Who are you on the other side of sleep? Are these truly hands? Are you even human?

By way of answer, I am crushed in a sudden embrace. A hot harsh breath in my ear: this is no sweet angel. Now I am throwing punches hard enough to stun a ram. Now the curtain falls away & I am face to face with the darkness between the stars.

Ah, but we keep each other close as adversaries must, skin burning skin, grinding into the stony earth. I will not be anyone’s bitch. I will never say Uncle. I will survive until morning, & limp fully blessed into the glare of meeting.

July 29, 2008 by Dave Bonta

WALL-E: Descartes Meets Rabelais

I digest, therefore I am. Mere consumption leads to stasis and death, but the self-aware machine builds phallic temples from the products of its digestion and outfits a shrine with fetish-objects from the civilization of the consumers. Life happens. Love happens. The consumers experience wonder, and start giving a shit.

July 25, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Palimpsest

At last the author relinquishes his hold on the book he has been struggling to finish for almost a century. There’s a sound like the rapid turning of pages, or the beating of wings.

Two vultures were circling low above the treetops, as if in a slow-motion chase. I watched their shadows move through the forest, sliding up and down trunks and gliding over the shiny leaves of the laurel. On a cool morning, they were looking for light and warmth like everyone else. They were looking for a lift.

It’s not the vultures’ fault if their very name provokes fear and revulsion, simply because we are ashamed of where we came from. We too are scavengers with naked faces and an aesthetic preference for clean, straight bones. In the middle of the day, when the predators retreat to the shade, we venture out, alert to the crushed leaf, the snapped twig, the blood-dark berry. Stark contrasts are pleasing to us. The savanna — half grass, half trees — was our founding parchment, and we return to that garden every chance we get.

At this very moment, in some back garden in Damascus, a brand-new tree is struggling to be born.

June 18, 2008 by Dave Bonta

The Judeo-Christian Book of the Dead

I happen to have — for once — a copy of the King James Bible at my elbow. I open it at random while I’m waiting for the computer to boot up, and read this:

The burden of the valley of vision.
What aileth thee now, that thou art wholly gone
up to the housetops?
Thou that art full of stirs,
a tumultuous city, joyous city:
thy slain men are not slain with the sword,
nor dead in battle.
All thy rulers are fled together,
they are bound by the archers:
all that are found in thee are bound together,
which have fled from far.
Therefore said I, Look away from me;
I will weep bitterly, labour not to comfort me,
because of the spoiling of the daughter of my people.
For it is a day of trouble, and of treading down,
and of perplexity by the Lord God of hosts
in the valley of vision, breaking down the walls,
and of crying to the mountains.

That was from Isaiah, the beginning of Chapter 22. I really don’t know what the hell it means — nor, I’m afraid, do I particularly care. Though I do kind of admire the way Isaiah and the other prophets challenged the authorities and institutions of their day, they were all basically a bunch of fanatical whack-jobs, as far as I’m concerned. But isn’t it terrific poetry? “Thou that art full of stirs, a tumultuous city, joyous city” — the way this is phrased, all metaphorical possibilities remain open. Compare the New International Version, that favorite of modern evangelicals: “O town full of commotion, O city of tumult and revelry.” Gone is the familiar, affectionate “thou,” replaced by the affected “O.” Any suggestion that this “thou” might be a female, tapping into that city/woman metaphor so popular among the literary prophets, has been eliminated as well.

Then of course there is the inaptly titled New Living Translation, an almost unspeakable abomination among “translations.” If any book should ever be burned, this nuance-destroying exercise in tone-deaf exegetical hubris tops the list. Here’s what it does with the verse: “The whole city is in a terrible uproar. What do I see in this reveling city?”

“Reveling”?!

Maybe this is why, when I try to explain why I love the Old Testament, I get puzzled looks.

But I guess I’m a mystery-monger and an obscurantist at heart, because it occurs to me that one of the things I most love about the King James Version is the near-impenetrability of many of its archaic phrases. Last week, a post at Read Write Poem asked poets to list the four books that most influenced their writing. My list led off with the great anthology Roots and Wings: Poetry from Spain 1900-1975, edited by Hardie St. Martin, but I forgot to mention the book which had prepared me for all that surrealism in the first place, by whetting my appetite for difficult language and nightmarish visions. And I’m quite sure that the kind of rhythmic free verse I specialize in was strongly marked by my youthful reading of the KJV.

I had the Bible out this morning because yesterday I’d been to a funeral, and the choice of readings struck me as a little unusual. Instead of the nauseatingly familar 23rd Psalm, the minister read Psalm 140 — one of the vengeful Psalms. This seemed especially incongruous given that the sermon that followed took the parable of the Good Samaritan as its text, extolling the kind and generous spirit of the departed. And the other reading could not have been more different: Ecclesiastes 3, in its entirety. That’s the one that begins, “To every thing there is a season.” It was, I thought, an inspired choice for a funeral.

I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.

As most regular readers of this blog are probably aware, I’m not a conventionally religious person; I can’t see having a man or woman of the cloth officiating at my funeral, with all the usual assurances about an afterlife in which I do not believe. But if the Bible had to be part of the last rites for my small portion of supernova excrement, which verses could I stand to have read? Psalm 139 is a favorite — at least up until the 19th verse, when it turns hateful and paranoid. It’s got that whole pantheist vibe going on. And Verse 8 might be especially interesting at a funeral:

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there;
if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

Job 14 might be good for mourners to hear, as well:

Man that is born of a woman is of few days,
and full of trouble.
He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down:
he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not…

But my top choice would probably be Ecclesiastes 11, beginning as it does with an exhortation to be generous, followed by a defense of religious agnosticism, and concluding with the Biblical version of “gather ye rosebuds while ye may.”

Cast thy bread upon the waters:
for thou shalt find it after many days.
Give a portion to seven, and also to eight;
for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth.
If the clouds be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth:
and if the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north,
in the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be.

He that observeth the wind shall not sow;
and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.
As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit,
nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child:
even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all.
In the morning sow thy seed,
and in the evening withhold not thine hand:
for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that,
or whether they both shall be alike good.

Truly the light is sweet,
and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun:
But if a man live many years, and rejoice in them all;
yet let him remember the days of darkness;
for they shall be many.
All that cometh is vanity.
Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth;
and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth,
and walk in the ways of thine heart,
and in the sight of thine eyes:
but know thou, that for all these things
God will bring thee into judgment.
Therefore remove sorrow from thy heart,
and put away evil from thy flesh:
for childhood and youth are vanity.

What about you? What Bible verses can you imagine being read at your funeral?

May 28, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Poem for Display in a Hospital Waiting Room

This entry is part 6 of 14 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.

April 14, 2008May 30, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Cutting a hatchet

I started to write a footnote to the previous post, but pretty soon it was longer than my poem, so I thought it deserved its own post.

Gary Snyder’s poem “Axe Handles” introduced a lot of American readers to a critical passage in the Confucian classic The Doctrine of the Mean, attributed to Confucius, who was himself quoting a folk-poem from the ancient Shi Jing. With the assistance of James Legge’s bilingual edition and my trusty Chinese-English dictionary, I’ve attempted my own translation — I hope it isn’t too much of a hatchet-job. (Fu can mean either axe or hatchet, of course. I prefer the latter here because I think a shorter-handled tool is at issue, though “axe” is certainly general enough to include hatchets as well.)

To cut a handle for a hatchet, what do you do?
Without a hatchet in hand it can’t be done!
In taking a woman to wife, what do you do?
Without a go-between it can’t be done!

Cutting a hatchet, cutting a hatchet,
The pattern is close at hand.
As soon as I laid eyes on the lady,
The serving vessel was ready to perform.

Folk poems tend to be earthy, and I see no reason to assume that this one is any different. If this were a country blues song, we’d take it for granted that “go-between” and “serving vessel” were both examples of double entendre. I guess it’s also possible that both were meant literally, and the only subsidiary analogy here is between woman and serving vessel (bian dou, “an ancient food container,” according to my dictionary. It would be a great help if I knew what one looked like). But in that case one would be left wondering about the violence of the hatchet-cutting image.

For the passage in the Doctrine of the Mean (13:1-3), I’m going to chicken out and just quote Legge this time. I’m sure there are better translations, but this is the best of the three I happen to have on my shelf (including the execrable one by Ezra Pound which Snyder references).

The Master said “The path is not far from man. When men try to pursue a course, which is far from the common indications of consciousness, this course cannot be considered The Path.

“In the Book of Poetry, it is said, ‘In hewing an ax handle, in hewing an ax handle, the pattern is not far off.’ We grasp one ax handle to hew the other; and yet, if we look askance from the one to the other, we may consider them as apart. Therefore, the superior man governs men, according to their nature, with what is proper to them, and as soon as they change what is wrong, he stops.

“When one cultivates to the utmost the principles of his nature, and exercises them on the principle of reciprocity, he is not far from the path. What you do not like when done to yourself, do not do to others.”

Chapter 13 concludes with an elaboration of the principles of reciprocity and absolute sincerity — or so Legge translates these key Confucian concepts. Since discovering and becoming a lurker at Manyul Im’s Chinese Philosophy Blog several months ago, I’ve gotten a pretty good idea of just how hotly contested these sorts of translations tend to be. I think it’s safe to say that the image of the hatchet handle appealed to Confucius because it spoke to his emphasis on ethical self-governing in the here-and-now. I love the way he derives the Golden Rule from this — especially since that seems (to me at least) to have been far from the mind of the original poet. My only, neo-Daoist criticism here concerns the fittingness of the image of carving itself. I don’t question the necessity of hatchets and hatchet-handles, but it seems to me that we can learn even more about how to conduct ourselves in the world from a contemplation of the uncarved tree. I admire the Talmudic way the Doctrine of the Mean borrows and reads into passages from the Shi Jing. But uncarved poems have a unique resonance and radiance that no single interpretation can ever quite do justice to.

March 22, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Medicine tree

My grandmother had a reverence for the sun, a holy regard that is now all but gone out of mankind. There was a wariness in her, and an ancient awe. She was Christian in her later years, but she had come a long way about, and she never forgot her birthright. As a child she had been to the Sun Dances; she had taken part in those annual rites, and by them she had learned the restoration of her people in the presence of Tai-me. She was about seven when the last Kiowa Sun Dance was held in 1887 on the Washita River about Rainy Mountain Creek. The buffalo were gone. In order to consummate the ancient sacrifice — to impale the head of a buffalo bull upon the medicine tree — a delegation of old men journeyed into Texas, there to beg and barter for an animal from the Goodnight herd. She was ten when the Kiowas came together for the last time as a living Sun Dance culture. They could find no buffalo; they had to hang an old hide from the sacred tree. Before the dance could begin, a company of soldiers rode out from Fort Sill under orders to disperse the tribe. Forbidden without cause an essential act of their faith, having seen the wild herds slaughtered and left to rot upon the ground, the Kiowas backed away forever from the medicine tree. That was July 20, 1890, at the great bend of the Washita. My grandmother was there. Without bitterness, and for as long as she lived, she bore a vision of deicide.

N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain (University of New Mexico Press, 1969)