Category: Philosophy/Religion

B.S. alert. If you’ve come for enlightenment, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Eight ways of looking at an octopus

1. They are voracious predators, though they have no backbone – no hard parts at all, in fact. They often change color to match their prey, and when threatened, they attempt to hide in a cloud of ink. And sometimes, for no known reason, they go on a frenzy of self-consumption, ending in their own death. Republicans?

2. Octopuses (see here for a discussion of other plural forms) have long been known to commit autophagy – that is, to eat themselves, starting with the tips of their arms and working their way up. The precise reason isn’t known; stress and infection by some unknown virus are the reasons most often postulated. One of the few other creatures known to commit autophagy is the laboratory rat, so possibly a certain threshold of intelligence must be reached before a creature can attain this level of perversity.

3. Sometime in the late Renaissance, imaginative Christians began to associate the octopus with Christ. Whatever this may mean in evolutionary terms, it’s definitely a step up the food chain from the Jesus fish.

An on-line abstract of an article from a French journal discusses the persistence of this image of “The Autophagous Christ”:

Father Chesneau’s sixty-third Eucharistic emblem has the octopus as a symbol of Christ. This being justified by the fact both octopus and Christ are autophagous. So by the middle of the XVIIth century a theological treatise on the Holy Sacrament can put forward an extremely realistic proposition, thus resuming an astonishing point in the debate on the Eucharist: the autophagy of Christ. This article endeavours to seize [sic] how, after the Council of Trent, Catholics went on using the controversial figure of an autophagous Christ in their debates, and to question the way it came to be used in a book of emblems of Augustinian bent.

4. The Christ-as-octopus image is an interesting example of convergent mythological evolution. Samoans and Kiribatians believe in an octopus god named Na Kika, who assisted the trickster god Nareau the Younger in the creation of the world. In this case, the octopus’ ability to survive on land as well as in the water seems to have given rise to the conception of octopus as mediator between island and ocean.

5. Symbols, of course, have their separate evolutionary history; the ancestral symbol to the autophagous Christ is the ouroborus.

6. Philosophically, autophagy is the antithesis of autopoiesis, which any biological definition of life cannot fail to take into account. The capacity of systems to self-organize also constitutes the strongest argument for the viability of social anarchism. Note, however, that anarchists themselves, like Republicans, often resort to autophagy. Their inability to agree upon how to describe anarchism for the Wikipedia is typical, and also ironic, given that the Wikipedia is itself an outstanding example of a successful anarchistic system.

7. In my dreams about trees, whenever a tree walks, its roots move over the earth like octopus tentacles. Even waking, I’ve noticed that old yellow birch trees often seem on the verge of opening bloodshot eyes. Just look at the way their roots engulf the ground.

8. Of all their attributes, what I envy most about octopuses is their power to change color, and sometimes shape, to match the environment. If I could do that, I could sleep almost anywhere – the world would be my oyster bed.

Sleep in a state or national park and it’s called camping. Sleep in a town or city park and it’s called vagrancy. Sleep in a refugee camp and it’s called dispossession. In so many ways, it seems, one person’s vacation is another person’s prison sentence. And yet, when we sleep, don’t we all inhabit the same country?

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that this post was sparked by an e-mail exchange with my brother Mark, whose birthday is October 8. Happy birthday, buddy.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Wendell Berry and the way of ignorance

The Christian Century last month featured a wonderful essay by Wendell Berry, an excerpt from his upcoming book The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays. It’s finally on the web. Entitled “The Burden of the Gospels: An Unconfident Reader,” it’s essentially the text of a speech Berry delivered at a Baptist seminary this past August, as his opening paragraphs acknowledge:

Anybody half awake these days will be aware that there are many Christians who are exceedingly confident in their understanding of the Gospels, and who are exceedingly self-confident in their understanding of themselves in their faith. They appear to know precisely the purposes of God, and they appear to be perfectly assured that they are now doing, and in every circumstance will continue to do, precisely God’s will as it applies specifically to themselves. They are confident, moreover, that God hates people whose faith differs from their own, and they are happy to concur in that hatred.

Having been invited to speak to a convocation of Christian seminarians, I at first felt that I should say nothing until I confessed that I do not have any such confidence. And then I understood that this would have to be my subject. I would have to speak of the meaning, as I understand it, of my lack of confidence, which I think is not at all the same as a lack of faith.

The Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader reporter who covered the speech focused in on the one point that most struck me: Berry’s attempt to recover literalism from the fundamentalists. I still have some notes I jotted down back in June to the effect that we dishonor the Bible if we treat its poetry either as “only” metaphor on the one hand, or as completely interpretable, reductionist description on the other. If anything, I find allegorical readings of the Bible even more offensive than the brand of literalism espoused by proponents of “Biblical inerrancy.” But I was very pleased to see these thoughts given shape by a true Christian (as opposed to a part-time, make-believe Christian like me) – someone who actually lives his faith. In fact, I think Berry is one of a small handful of prominent public intellectuals whom one could fairly describe as prophetic in the Biblical mold.

Berry described himself as a literalist – [insisted] that the Gospels “say what they mean and mean what they say” – but he emphasized that his sense of literalism is not the same as fundamentalism, a belief that everything in the Bible is literally true and without error.

Then there was the issue of contradictions in the Gospels, the very idea of which would disturb fundamentalists.

Berry said: “What, for example, are we to make of Luke 14:26: ‘If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sister, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.'”

That passage, he said, contradicts “not only the fifth commandment but Jesus’ instruction to ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.'”

Such a contradiction, he said, should not be viewed as a problem or flaw, “but as a question to live with and a burden to be borne.”

The Gospels “stand at the opening of a mystery in which our lives are deeply, dangerously and inescapably involved,” he said. “It is a mystery that we are condemned but also highly privileged to live our way into, trusting properly that to our little knowledge, greater knowledge may be revealed.”

He concluded: “May heaven guard us from those who think they already have the answers.”

This summary, of course, does not do justice to the suppleness and clarity of Berry’s thinking. Read the full essay here – and please pass it on.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Facing the music

I haven’t posted any fiction here in quite a while. There might be a good reason for that, I’m thinking…

Out for a walk one night, my foot bumps against something in the middle of the road. I feel it move just a little. I tap it cautiously with the toe of my boot; it seems pretty solid. It’s light enough to push without a whole lot of effort and makes only the slightest scraping sound, like cloth or fur rubbing against the asphalt.

I can’t see anything in the pitch darkness; it’s the last night before the new moon, I believe. I bend down and listen, cupping my hands to my ears. It’s hard to tell for sure, but I think I can just make out a quiet breathing. Whatever it is, it must be in trouble – a normal, healthy animal would have run away.

I should explain that I often go out for walks after dark, largely to enjoy the darkness. My wife finds this deeply weird – but then, she finds almost everything about me a little hard to fathom, I’m afraid. “Are you sure you don’t want to at least carry a flashlight in your pocket?” she asks. “What if you run into a skunk, or a rabid raccoon? What about snakes?” I shake my head, unable to explain the attraction of venturing out into an unlit world.

One of my main criteria in selecting the house we live in now was that it be as far as possible from any streetlights. Sure, the house needed a lot of work, but we can afford to pay other people to do it, I said, and she agreed. She was sold on the huge vegetable garden, where she spends every spare moment pulling weeds or mixing up biodynamic preparations to dribble onto the beds. All the while I sit inside, bent over my drafting board. So many kinds of paper, and almost all of them are some shade of white. It makes my eyes ache after a while.

Is this really breathing I’m hearing, or the quiet throbbing of my own pulse? A jet goes over, and for a couple minutes I can’t hear anything else. I am about to give the whatever-it-is another nudge with my toe, but stop short. If it is a living creature – especially one in great pain – the last thing it needs is to have some terrifying giant pushing and prodding it when all it wants, perhaps, is to die out under the stars. I step to the side and resume my slow progress.

But the damage has been done: now I have Johnny Cash running through my head, his tremorous but still strong, old man’s voice singing “Oh bury me not on the lone prairie…”

It’s funny – I go for months without listening to recorded music, putting in earplugs whenever I’m in the vicinity of a radio, and I still can’t banish other people’s songs from my head. I wonder if my ears will ever be sensitive enough to discern what so many pre-modern writers attested to: the so-called music of the spheres, harmonies that seemed to emanate from the center of a clear night sky. The 14th-century English mystic Walter Hilton wrote matter-of-factly to a friend about hearing “‘the song of angels,’ or divine harmony.”

Just as a soul can sometimes be helped to understand spiritual matters by the spirit working through human imagination, so the spirit can help a soul caught up in the love of God to escape from all material and bodily sensations to a heavenly joy, in which it can hear a divine harmony, the angels’ song of love, provided it has attained a high enough degree of love.

But simply being “perfect in love,” Hilton added, might not be sufficient.

The soul has to be so consumed in the crucible of love that all physical elements have been burned out of it, and anything that can come between this soul and the purity of the angels has been removed and taken away from it. Then indeed can this soul ‘sing a new song to the Lord;’ then it can really hear the blessed harmony of heaven, the angels’ chorus of praise, without pretending or being deceived.

It’s strange, isn’t it, the alchemical imagery, the focus on the heart and mind of the experimenter rather than on the results of the experiment. This Augustinian language of the soul was as technical and precise as the jargon of any modern scientific discipline, though. I fully admit the shallowness of my attraction to it: it’s as exotic, as unreachably distant from my experience as the stars themselves.

We are not used to denying ourselves the pleasures of light, color and music, and the notion that some forms of knowledge might be accessible only to a carefully prepared mind seems heretical in an Information Age. I have a decidedly different take on carnal love from the 14th-century mystics. But the memories of my youthful “experiments” with mind-altering chemicals have stuck with me. When Hilton talks about the soul being “lifted, seized up, out of its senses, and beyond consciousness of physical things” until it can “hear and feel the divine harmony,” I know better than to dismiss him out-of-hand. I remember my friend who died of an overdose describing the effect of heroin the first time he tried it: not only was it far better than sex, he said, it made him realize that the mundane experiences of the body were only a kind of shadow-play. If he ended up choosing what most of us would consider darkness, perhaps it was because our own version of the light seemed so dim, so deficient.

I think about people like him whenever I’m out walking – people who, in essence, stimulate themselves to death. I have yet to find the right words to convince anyone that self-denial – “charity,” in Hilton’s archaic terminology – can also be a source of great pleasure.

As I stand there thinking in the middle of the deserted road, a sudden light rakes the branches above me and disappears. A few seconds later it reappears, illuminating the bushes to the other side before vanishing once more: headlights. I can’t hear any engine yet, but it will be here in less than a minute, I think. Whatever is lying in the road will be illuminated – and possibly crushed. Skunk? Squirrel? Raccoon? I turn and start jogging back, berating myself for not being more inquisitive, more solicitous.

I can hear the car’s engine, now, and the low heartbeat thumping of its stereo. I reach what I guess to be the right spot and start feeling wildly around with my feet and hands, all caution thrown to the wind. Nothing.

The headlights reach the last bend before the straightaway and I step to the shoulder, right hand shielding my eyes against the glare. They’re traveling too fast, whoever they are, for me to want to risk flagging them down.

A hundred feet away in their direction, a small, dark shape appears in the road, silhouetted for a few seconds in the high beams. It looks like nothing so much as an old leather boot. Then the car is hurtling past me, a convertible with its top down and music blaring, trailing an indecipherable string of shouted words.

My wife is right, I decide as I trudge back down the road. It wouldn’t kill me to at least carry a flashlight.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Color

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Imagine if, like most mammals, we saw the world in black and white. We might know autumn as the time when the leaves try to match the cloudless sky in clarity, just before they free themselves from their tenuous attachments.

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Imagine – answers the cynic – if we didn’t see the world in black and white. Sharp contrasts are pleasing to the eye and the mind of a creature whose not-so-distant ancestors relied on depth perception to keep from falling, perhaps to their death.

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Imagine how different, how much more modulated our sense of the world would be if the nostrils were our main doors of perception. While our eyes can perceive only a narrow spectrum of colors, the number of smells our noses can distinguish is said to be virtually infinite. Given the troubles we have with leaders whose outstanding characteristic is a fondness for dichotomy, I wonder what would happen if we restricted positions of power to those with highly sensitive olfactory organs?

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Probably things wouldn’t turn out too differently. I can think of plenty of highly sensitive people – many poets, for example – who don’t know the first thing about compassion. It’s the heart that needs to learn more hues than red.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Above the ears, below the waist

This entry is part 17 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the sixth poem in the second section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

Robinson Crusoe’s Notebooks
by Paul Zweig

When I am alone,
the world becomes an erotic dream.
Sex boils in my shoes…

[Remainder of poem removed 9-24-05]

* * * *

John the Baptist’s Final Sermon

Whose tongues tick, whose lips move in whispers
as if to raise lost consonants from the dead?
I am that man just off-stage, in the prompter’s box.
If I find willing ears, they will hear me
the way I see the world: askance.

Madam, I am no Adam, giving creatures their names
while his still-ignorant member wandered in his lap.
Male & female, says the scripture, hermaphroditic
were they made to gambol along the edge
of unpronounceable vision – through dreams, perhaps,
or in the margins of a hand-drawn map.
But then the names leapt like sparks from a campfire,
setting their fur alight, & scorched them into awareness.

We who are among all creatures the most naked:
unto us is given the most excruciating consciousness.
I remember how it burned for weeks, that circumcision.
I remember the crown of an infant’s head, right
at the moment of birth: apple of its mother’s eye, full
to bursting. And an even more pregnant fullness I recall,
among glossalalia & the moving shapes of shadows,
in which this Life was shouted into being.

Whatever is holy is almost unbearable.
One cannot proclaim the Word with unclean lips
or catch more than a glimpse of holy Presence
& expect to live. How could such immensity
restrict itself to a name on the tongue or
an image within the heart, within the head?

But dipped in the waters of rebirth,
the Anointed One prepares his terrible crown.
Everything above the ears becomes a place apart –
& then the whole rest of him, of us, because
for the longed-for future ever to descend,
we are commanded to cleave to just such single-
mindedness, O Salome.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Eating a tomato

I wake at 2:00 a.m. with a bad taste in my mouth, and I think I know what it is: it’s me. That slightly metallic taste of ego. It mingles with last night’s eggplant curry, which was a culinary disaster. I have been cooking too quickly, eating too quickly, I have been much too quick to speak my mind. Why such haste? It’s as if we’re shrews or blind moles, daydreaming about slowness and enlightenment in between our frantic gropes and gulps. Fortunately, I have a very forgiving digestive system – but perhaps it would be better if I didn’t. It might force me to slow the hell down.

I remember as a child how I pictured my insides: a great, dark cavern below the heart and the gracefully flapping lungs. The throat ends in a sort of chute, out of which food and drink drizzle or plop into the swamp below. I don’t know when or how this image originally took shape in my imagination, but I remember clinging to it in a half-unconscious sort of way well into my teenage years. The fact that it was incompatible with what I had learned about human anatomy in school was not in itself enough to banish it; I had to bring it to the surface of my consciousness and reason it away, just as I had driven out ghosts and under-the-bed monsters years before.

Now I wonder if we don’t dishonor and diminish the imagination to enslave it to our daytime egos in such a manner. In a conversation last night before bed, my linguist brother reminded me that the root meaning of “tantra” is “trick.” The idea that there might be educational value in training our minds in conscious self-deception, though fundamental to vernacular religious traditions the world over, seems almost incomprehensible to those of us accustomed to thinking of the mind as an innocent mirror. The religions of the powerful – the traditions whose central focus has become the perpetuation of power – school us in reduction, in the wonder-sucking necromancy of algebra. Something either is or it isn’t, Parmenides intones. Do good and eschew evil, the sacred texts say, making stern necessity out of virtue.

In my freshman year of college, I plowed through a lengthy tome on Daoist cosmology that simultaneously attracted and repelled me. It devoted many chapters to detailing the Daoist microcosm of the body circa the first millenium A.D., and I remember being fascinated by the notion of such an elaborate system of visualizations based on nothing but idealistic desire. I mean, it’s not as if the ancient Chinese didn’t have good models for the way the body worked. The relative effectiveness of technologies such as Chinese herbal medicine, acupuncture, taiqi and martial arts – all ultimately derived from the same stream of popular religion that spawned Daoist microcosmology – surely testify to the power of the trained imagination, I thought. But I found the focus on physical immortality very off-putting, perhaps because it clashed with my own, Western tendency to devalue the concrete in favor of the abstract.

In any case, it was hard not to be charmed by the culinary route to immortality advocated by popular Daoism: one first eliminates meat, then grains, then vegetables, then finally even liquids until one learns to subsist on nothing but air. Though this might sound like a recipe for anorexia, it’s hard to see how it could lead to that in practice, given the Daoist emphasis on corporeality. Isn’t anorexia nervosa pretty much a Western disease, deriving from our endemic devaluation of the body and the earth? Daoism simply promotes the endearingly goofy idea that the air itself has nutritive value, if only we were sensitive enough to appreciate it. I suspect that the real effect of a Daoist diet would be to train one in greater attention to the sensual qualities of everything one ingests, and in learning to distinguish what the body really wants from what the grasping ego thinks it wants. And lately I’ve been hearing about new research by Western nutritionists suggesting that regular fasts might indeed form a vital part of a healthy diet.

It seemed to me then and still seems to me now a kind of blasphemy against life to try and prolong it indefinitely, but isn’t that what all the world religions are about – abolishing death? Or am I being unfairly reductionist to issue such a sweeping indictment? I do like the teachings about purifying or spiritualizing consumption that are near the center of so many traditions: the Christian communion, the Jewish Pesach, the North American rituals of inhalation – smoke of tobacco, cedar, sage.

I sleep late, break my nightly fast with coffee as usual. Sitting in the sun on my front porch, I think of Vicente Aleixandre’s poem about the old man slowly nibbled away by sunlight. My maternal grandfather attained that level of sweetness in his old age, I believe, though through some cruel trick of fate his death was preceded by several days of agony. I remember last night’s news about the death of my friend Tom’s indomitable mother-in-law: she died peacefully at home, he said, ending her life with a sigh.

I shut my notebook and walk around the house, figuring on putting off eating for a couple more hours at least, but then I spot a ripe cherry tomato on one of the volunteer vines twining through the butterfly bush. To me, a cherry or grape tomato has the perfect proportion of firm flesh to juice. This one’s skin is encased in a thin film of dew, and for the fraction of a second before my teeth close around it, my mouth fills with the pungent, feral redolence common to all the Solanaceae, from jimsonweed to belladonna. Then its blood-colored mucilage mingles with my saliva: such acid sweetness! Grace isn’t something you say, I think, it’s just what happens. And here’s another one. Oh taste and see.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The elephant

In partial response to Dale’s objection to my anti-creed. Generally speaking, though, I think the two of us resemble the blind men in the old Sufi fable, arguing about the nature of the elephant. I’m really not thinking about an elephant, you see.

True teachers always say, Beware of desire. Not because desires are bad, but because they are insufficient. You can’t will your way into heaven; you almost have to surrender willfulness along with every last personal ambition. Surrender to what, to whom? To the Beloved.

For the sake of love – this is tricky – you have to relinquish love. But this may not be such an unreasonable thing, because from the beginning, true love isn’t something one can cling to. It is – as Blaugustine learned in her thirteenth interview of God – not so much a feeling we have as an energy we can tap into, or generate. (At least, it feels as if we’re helping to generate it. But maybe it’s already there, like background radiation left over from the Big Bang.)

Who, then, is this Beloved? S/he can be anyone, any being, I think. The widow and the orphan, of course, and that rank-smelling homeless guy down on the corner, but also the CEO and the sea cucumber, the demagogic president and that squirrel in your bird feeder.

Can it really be this simple? Hell, no! It’s just that, underneath the thin intellectual veneer, I am really a simple person, albeit one enchanted with the complexity of human culture and natural systems. And I have neglected to mention the problem of idolatry, which is enormous – possibly insurmountable.

There’s a reason why the ancient Hebrews put the commandment against idolatry first: it encapsulates all other sins, if by “sin” we mean “separation from the Beloved.” Idolatry is what happens when we allow ourselves to feel that our desires are sufficient, that life is no more than eating, shitting, fucking, drugging, birth and death.

But of course it doesn’t work to just say, “Well, then, I will believe that there is more to life than that; I will call that more-ness heaven, nirvana, moksha; I will relinquish this and pursue that.” Relinquishing desires can be more dangerous than their pursuit; anorexia kills you a lot quicker than over-eating. Here comes the State, for example, saying, “Ennoble yourselves! Sacrifice your beloved son!” So it turns into an idol: our own desire writ large.

The same thing happens with personal wealth or power, however much we may tell ourselves it’s all for the Beloved. An idol begins as a mirror and ends as a mouth, a bottomless pit. We dream of falling – a nightmare at first, but soon a thrilling plunge, an amusement park. In the whirl of excitement, our encounter with the Beloved gets reduced to a brief, wild firing of ganglia. Energy of a sort, but hardly that still, small, inexhaustible Presence whose existence we intuit in between the myriad throbbing things, in the presents they make of themselves to each beloved other.

YES! we are supposed to exult at every egotistical triumph, pulling the lever on an invisible slot machine with our fists. The challenge, some say, is still to find God in the slots.

That may work for you; but knowing myself and my addictive tendencies, I say NO. I will neither aspire nor relinquish. Like everything in nature, love comes on its own schedule, if at all. I will be neither saved nor spent, but simply give thanks for the present of this hunger as well as the food – thanks for the poverty as well as the comfort – thanks for this unquenchable desire that reminds me I am alive.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

This I don’t believe

Recently, a couple of the blogs I read featured statements of personal belief. Rachel Barenblatt of Velveteen Rabbi wrote what she described as a personal credo, although with a few caveats:

I don’t want to risk misunderstanding, or to lose nuance in the attempt to speak too plainly about matters which don’t lend themselves to language. At the same time, I don’t want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good; just because I can’t be sure of expressing myself perfectly is no reason not to try. My final caveat is that I’m not sure it’s possible for a credo to be comprehensive — otherwise it would take lifetimes to write, let alone recite!

Then Tom Montag at The Middlewesterner, in a break with his unwritten rule against personal essays that aren’t related to the blog’s Middlewestern focus, published a somewhat darker statement, the greater part of which seems to consist of caveat.

I believe this as firmly as a righteous Christian believes in Christ, that some twenty-five billion years from now the universe will collapse back upon itself, will congeal and compact and become again the speck from which the Big Bang erupted, and everything that we know, everything that we have cherished, will be lost. That I have lived will mean nothing then. Nothing I have written will survive. Both the good I have done and the pain I have caused will have evaporated as surely as the wind blows away my spoken words, blows away the scent of the decaying world.

I was reminded of National Public Radio’s “This I Believe” feature – not that we are likely to hear views as challenging as Rachel’s or Tom’s on the airwaves any time soon.

Much as I enjoyed reading these statements of belief, however, I felt little inclination to follow their lead, and at first, I wasn’t quite sure why. Rachel’s “Credo” had been sparked by a post at not native fruit, where Karen Mattern penned what could only be termed an anti-creed screed. Karen talks about her strong impulse to escape what she considers the excessively credal focus of her native Catholicism. In my case, though, I can hardly claim to be reacting against my upbringing. My parents always encouraged us kids to think for ourselves, in an environment that was neither hostile toward religion nor favored one religion over another. We took turns reading and discussing the Bible and (eventually) other sacred texts at regular family religion meetings, and all views were welcome as long as we could argue persuasively for them. (I remember how much this used to bother my conservative Methodist grandmother. “Why don’t you take those kids to church and teach them what to think?” she once snapped at my mother.)

The upshot? One of my brothers had a conversion experience and joined a Christian church, while the other remains indifferent to the claims of organized religion. For my part, as readers of this blog may have sensed, despite a strong interest in religion, I have never been able to commit to a single one. To me, this is like going into a Baskin-Robbins and being told that, whichever of the 32 flavors you pick, forever after you can only order that flavor.* I’ve become something of an intellectual chameleon: I change colors to match whatever I am reading at the moment. “Via Negativa”? Perhaps it’s to preserve my own psychic health that I prefer to let my most strongly held convictions take a negative form.

Negative propositions have played a pivotal role in my thinking since at least the age of fifteen, when I read Masanobu Fukuoka’s lyrical book about natural farming, The One-Straw Revolution, with its central insight that humanity knows nothing. Armed with this conviction, the author says, he was led to pioneer a productive and ecologically sound method of farming which, in contrast to modern industrial agriculture, approaches each problem by asking, “How about not trying this? How about not trying that?” Following nature meant, above all, cultivating one’s mind to appreciate the way things tend to happen on their own, and making as few modifications to these natural processes as possible. As an enthusiastic vegetable gardener who had recently published an article in Organic Gardening magazine entitled “An Experimental Garden,” I was enormously surprised and impressed.

The translator’s footnotes led me to Daoism, in the form of D. C. Lau’s translation of the Tao Te Ching, and the opening verse changed the way I thought about metaphysical questions for good.

The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.

Though I might now prefer a slightly different translation – one that treats Dao more as a verb than a noun – Lau’s translation still seems designed for maximum impact on the worldview of an essence-obsessed Westerner.

Shortly thereafter I discovered some of D.T. Suzuki’s writings on Zen, and began my acquaintance with the Buddhist theory of the self (or rather, no-self) – still the only psychological tradition I can claim any familiarity with. Seven or eight years later, a chance reference in another book about growing food (I think maybe one of Wendell Berry’s, but I can’t recall for sure) led me to Peter Kropotkin, and the great, sadly misunderstood and under-appreciated tradition of Western anarchism. Kropotkin’s views dovetailed with, and greatly expanded upon, political insights I’d gleaned from philosophical Daoism. Along the way I also grappled with such books as Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method. Once I got beyond the shock of realizing that “the emperor has no clothes,” I started turning the questions back on myself, trying to get to the root of our shared assumptions about how the world works, or ought to work. Eventually, I even rejected anarchism, reasoning that as an anarchist my first duty was to free my mind from a subservient relationship to a set of received opinions.

I resisted making a systematic study of any of these influences, believing that insights imported from others are never truly earned. The point is not to be able to claim ownership of an idea, whatever that might mean, but to be able to appreciate its full impact. Plus, I enjoy playing around with ideas; I am far from sharing Buddhism’s disdain for the “monkey of the mind.” Given any new idea, I tend to immediately consider its antithesis, and then try to judge how large the apparent gulf between thesis and antithesis really is, and whether it might be bridged. That virtually reflexive impulse to counter with “How about not?” has proven to be enormously useful to me. I thought it might be fun to list a few of my favorite contrarian stating-points, to give my readers a better idea of where the heck I’m coming from.

Here’s the caveat. Just as the articles of faith in a regular, positivist credo are things one aspires to realize more fully in one’s day-to-day thoughts and actions, so are the non-articles in my anti-creed. The fact that I list them here doesn’t mean that I have fully absorbed their impact or worked out all their implications. They are non-articles in the sense that the form they happen to take here is completely arbitrary. In fact, merely allowing them to coalesce in this fashion may damage their utility for me, because, above all, I view these as starting points for reflection rather than objects of intellectual assent. In no particular order, then:

I don’t believe that “life” has “meaning” in the sense of some knowable purpose. To think otherwise is to reduce a multiplicity, which at best can be experienced as a gestalt, to a limited and tool-like shadow-life.

I don’t believe in the idea of progress, whether in personal, social or evolutionary history. In the long run, as my friend Tom points out, we are all a null set. Salvation occurs in the present or not at all (see next-to-last non-article, below).

I don’t believe that coercion, punishment or retribution can ever be anything but regrettable. Killing wild animals for meat or killing another human being in self-defense may be necessary, but imposing one’s will on another is never of any benefit to the other. It is a criminal’s empathy for his/her former victim, not punishment, that brings about remorse and (with luck) efforts at restitution. True justice works to restore harmony, not to perpetuate disharmony.

I don’t believe in hierarchies. While they may sometimes serve a limited, heuristic purpose, hierarchical structures, methodologies and ideologies are little more than extensions of ego, and work to hamper the freedom (political, intellectual, and spiritual) of those who use them as well as those whom they seek to define.

I don’t believe in ownership. The ultimately fruitless attempt to possess is nothing but an enlargement of ego, harming the would-be owner as well as the being, object, idea or portion of space over which ownership is asserted. (The concept of God is most useful as a way of conceptualizing that portion of experience which is fully sovereign and beyond ownership: to a faithful monotheist, virtually everything.)

I don’t believe in essence. “Being” is a falsely reified byproduct of an Indo-European grammatical construct, the copulative verb. This is not an argument for nihilism, because “is not” is simply a derivation of “is.” (The Buddhist concept of Emptiness is most useful as a way to remember the contingent and provisional nature of all things.)

I don’t believe in a unique and singular self. The quest for liberation becomes immeasurably simpler when one realizes that there is nothing to liberate (see also next-to-last non-article below). Whether or not we experience ourselves as unitary individuals is conditioned by culture: many traditional societies have the belief that a person is made up of multiple souls and spirits, for instance. For psychological health, probably only the experience of wholeness is necessary.

I don’t believe in the alienation of subject from object. While discriminatory reasoning is a powerful tool with many obvious applications, those who employ it should beware against its unlimited extension; they risk becoming the sorcerer’s apprentice. (By contrast, the “logic of participation” at the root of magical/animist views is vital to the creation and appreciation of art, music, love – everything that makes life worth living.)

I don’t believe in a mundane level of reality. Life may appear mundane much of the time, but that is because we are not fully awake to it – and/or because we are unwittingly conspiring to perpetuate collective delusions and multiply suffering, our own as well as others’, in the pursuit of ego-gratification. (The non-mundane may take the form of sacrality, comic absurdity, or anything in between.)

I don’t believe in proselytization. For persuasion to remain non-coercive, it must stop short of explicit or implicit threats aimed at the other’s spiritual well-being. Invitations to join a faith community should only ever be offered in a spirit of genuine friendship; otherwise, efforts to increase the numbers of the faithful amount to little more than empty power plays (and will lead to endless schisms).

I don’t believe in the pursuit of personal salvation, liberation or enlightenment. If you make your own advancement a priority, your ability to empathize is fatally compromised – and without empathy, there can be no true understanding. Besides, advancement – a version of “progress” – is an illusion: there is nowhere to advance to beyond the present moment. Liberation seems to be a natural human instinct, just like the instinct for food or sex, but as with these other desires, until we are willing to abandon it at any moment to serve others without a second thought, we remain imprisoned, mired in egotism.

I don’t believe in static creeds, ideologies, or other self-consistent systems of thought. A god that requires assent to propositions as a pre-condition for salvation is no God, but a tyrant. And even for the godless, I think, when the pursuit of intellectual consistency starts to feel compulsive, it’s time to stop. Abstractions are masters incapable of mercy. Repeat after Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I embrace multitudes.”

O.K. that’s enough! I could probably split some of these up or think of one or two others, but these are the monkey bars on which my thoughts most often play.
__________

*Although, in point of fact, I always do get the same flavor of ice cream wherever I go: mint chocolate chip.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Owed

This entry is part 3 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the third poem from his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See the introduction to yesterday’s post for details.

God’s Ledger
by Paul Zweig

You gave me what I didn’t want
And taught me to love it. You fed me
Sweet food, and killed each painful cell…

[Remainder of poem removed 8-23-05]

* * * *

Anti-Psalm

The Lord is my venture capitalist; I shall not wonder.
My mouth scarcely shapes itself into an Owe
& His pen is already busy adding zeroes.
He underwrites my need for better reception.
Who knew I harbored such complex involucres?

He asks for nothing difficult in return:
there’s no soul in receivership, no pain that doesn’t pass —
hard currency of that heaven they harp about.
I am full, full. Beggars get fat on my crumbs.

He gives me something to quench the flames
well in advance of setting me on fire.
He asks for nothing, believe me.
He takes a loss.