Philosophy/Religion – Page 32

August 4, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Milk teeth

Early morning – still cool – of another day that will test the limits of comfort. A rending of bark from the woods’ edge draws my gaze to three moving portions of darkness, the mother bear & two of her cubs visible for half a minute before they disappear up into the laurel.

My heart leaps. I wonder again how it is that we can love such fierce strangers as these, our fellow inhabitants? But how can we not? My brother’s baby daughter Elanor, focus of so much doting attention, already has three bears of her own: a pink plastic one that squeaks loudly when squeezed, a plush panda doll, & a brown teddy bear with a sewn-on smile & the words “cuddly lovable” stitched right into its chest. When the left paw is brought to the mouth, it makes a kissing noise.

Elanor has learned to signal pleasure through noisy spitting – a bilabial trill, as her linguist daddy calls it: “a sound that every baby knows, but which is not represented phonemically in any of the world’s languages.” One sees already in a six-month-old baby how strong and how literal is the thirst for knowledge. Barely able to crawl, her reach still far exceeds her grasp, and the object of every grasping is to mouth, to slobber on, & if possible, to ingest. Grasping the link between mouth-sounds & the stimulation of mutual pleasure among the rest of us, she bubbles over with effusive joy.

It’s encouraging to think that the urge to give back should be so basic. Only the bottom row of milk teeth have broken the surface, but already I am anticipating the sharp shards of language. I’m waiting to see how real knowledge of love is acquired: does it sprout like teeth from the jaw, ready to bite? Or does it need to be sharpened against increasingly fine permutations of joy & rage? And what age will she be, I wonder, when that caricature of an animal intended solely to ease her passage through the night acquires a personality of its own?

It can’t be long. I almost remember the bear of my own infant imagination, feeling a heat in its haunches, a quick rhythm in its chest. Its breath becoming a black sun, hot on the back of the neck. And then the tug of something like a comb, a wordless harrow through hair standing suddenly at attention.

July 22, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Close

After one day with low humidity (Wednesday), it’s back to being almost unbearably close & sticky. Even thinking seems too great an effort. Frustrated, I lean back in my chair & turn my head upside-down, gazing at the ceiling until floor & ceiling trade places. How clean & uncluttered the house suddenly appears!

Outside in my garden, a monarch glides in & lands on the butterfly weed, orange rhyming with orange. After a few minutes it lifts off & lands on the budleia’s purple torch. Stained glass wings sail rather than flutter. Thanks to its larval nursing on milkweed poisons, the monarch is able to save for transcontinental journeys the energy it would otherwise have to expend on chaos – the typical butterfly strategy for evading capture.

Up at my parents’ house, a red-spotted purple clings to the kitchen screen door handle, dusting the knob for thumbprints. Its wings are tattered & faded, with three large holes torn out of the bottom edges. I picture the phoebe diving for the dark abdomen & coming up with a beak full of dry leaves. Close, but no cigar.

I’m peeling my first ripe peach of the season. The stem gone, I can see into the center where the halves of the pit have pulled apart. I hold it up to the light. It glows like the sun’s own chapel, golden yellow. But as I cut the flesh away, a mound of mold appears in each hemisphere of the pit, in size & color identical to the clumps of dust that gather in the backs of closets & under the bed.

As I walk back down to the other house, I think: closeness is something that alternately attracts and repels. Here the cockleburs, there the tear-thumb; here beggar ticks, there raspberry canes. I duck my head to dodge a wasp, swipe ineffectually at a mosquito.

Back at my writing table, I stare at the ceiling some more. This is like doing the back stroke – the only style of swimming I enjoy. Once or twice each summer it’s fun to go to some little lake in the mountains & bare my fishbelly-pale skin to the too-close sun, ears under the waterline, kicking & sculling just enough to stay afloat. It’s so quiet under the water. And the sky looks more & more like another, fully inhabitable world, so clean & uncluttered.

The peach was delicious.

July 20, 2005 by Dave Bonta

I ain’t superstitious

When my brothers and I were kids, we always used to holler “Geronimo!” in the midst of some daring leap into the hay or swing on a grapevine. I have no idea why, or what we thought would happen if we didn’t.

From comic books we learned about seeing stars after any sudden blow to the head. Since we horsed around a lot, we had plenty of opportunities. I always assumed that real rather than figurative stars were meant: if one’s natural eyesight were jarred a bit, I figured, a kind of tunnel vision would set in, allowing one to see beyond the atmosphere just as someone at the bottom of a deep canyon – so I’d heard – could see stars at noon. “Seeing stars” was the stage just before “getting your lights knocked out.” Vision must be something like a searchlight, as I envisioned it.

“Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight…” I wished upon stars for years. I attributed its lack of success either to my having wished mistakenly upon a planet, satellite, jet, firefly, etc., or to my insufficient sincerity. I practiced being as sincere as possible.

Kids tend to think of the world in very concrete ways. This is often referred to as literalism, but that seems like a misnomer since the practice dissipates with growing literacy. Writing enables abstraction. Children, like people in oral societies, lack the habit of objectifying words and subjectifying things and beings. Metaphors delight them; dishonesty – breaking the intimate relationship between word and world – outrages them. And the very young conspire with the old to perpetuate ritual and tradition. Since the world is essentially arbitrary and mysterious, things should always be done as close as possible to the way they were done before.

Arbitrary and mysterious were the things we did to avoid bad luck and seek fortune. “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back!” Hear that once as a small child and, unless you despise your mother, you will avoid stepping on sidewalk cracks for years – no questions asked. As a kid, I wallowed in tragedy, convinced that this was the best way to stave off real misfortune. Perhaps someone had once used the phrase “taking your medicine” in conjunction with a well-deserved spanking; wherever the superstition came from, I was convinced that self-inflicted misery possessed a kind of homeopathic power to stave off the very real terrors that seemed to haunt every other family but ours: the house burning down, the sudden death of one or both parents.

To some extent I’m still this way. While a lot of people feel that anticipating negative outcomes is very dangerous, and are very superstitious about discussing possible misfortunes, I’m just the opposite. The Fates hate to be predictable, so anticipating ill fortune is the best way to keep them at bay. Readers of this blog should be well acquainted with my chief superstition: that things seldom happen the way anyone expects, because the world is too complex for human minds to encompass. That adds up to a belief that if we think it, it must not be true.

For the same reason, unguarded predictions of good fortune are dangerous: they tempt fate. We were always knockers on wood in my family. At a certain point, I turned it into a joke and began rapping on my own skull, but the fact remains I do still do it – or at least say it – as automatically as any Muslim says “Inshallah.” Another way to play with fortune is to manipulate one’s own desires, one’s very notion of what constitutes good and bad luck. “If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all,” as the old saw has it. Gallows humor is still the surest way I know of triumphing over death. To think this way is to rise above our own desires, to some extent – to see ourselves as fairly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. And isn’t that very near the core of what it means to be religious?

I’m not sure I observe any real taboos. I walk under ladders, spill salt, and ride the elevator to the 13th floor without a qualm. Black cats are, if anything, good luck as far as I’m concerned. If you want a good mouser, why pick one that’s easy to see in the dark? I have learned the hard way, though, that sharing an idea for a book or other writing project before it is fully fleshed out and at least partially completed is almost guaranteed to kill the inspiration. In talking to writer friends, I’ve found that they take similar precautions. Since inspiration is ultimately mysterious, it stands to reason that writers and artists would become as superstitious about it as baseball fans and players about the outcome of a game. Once I find a certain combination of behaviors that seem to lead to decent writing first thing in the morning, I am reluctant to change a single thing about my morning rituals.

I have never been much of a believer in signs and portents, though part of me feels as if I should be. On the one hand, it’s a way of discovering significance in seemingly ordinary or inconsequential things – not too different from what I strive to do as a poet. On the other hand, though, there’s a kind of egotism about it that repels me. I once briefly dated a woman who saw omens everywhere, in every bird call and strangely bent blade of grass. This was fascinating for a little while, but it gradually dawned on me that she was using her omen reading as a license for bizarre and erratic behavior. The world revolved around her, but she was, in her own mind, something of a marionette. Powerful, invisible forces battled for control of the strings. At least she didn’t listen to voices, as far as I know. But it’s worth wondering to what extent her belief system really differed from that of a more conventionally religious person.

“Superstition” is a funny word. When used to describe the contents of other people’s deeply held beliefs, it is offensive in the extreme, but when applied to certain, fairly trivial beliefs and behaviors of our own, it easily becomes an appropriate topic for cocktail-party conversation – or online bull sessions.

The idea of superstitions as inconsequential, personal tics is a peculiarity of modern, industrialized societies, I’m sure. To me, one of the main attributes of modernity is the virtual monopoly of the habitual. Whereas pre-modern peoples tend to view the world of the humdrum familiar as a kind of veil or illusion, for us, the awesomely complex machines and organizations that regulate and permeate our lives offer the truest measure of reality. Enchantment is a thing for Walt Disney movies and children’s books. While only one percent of U.S. residents typically describe themselves as atheists, the largest percentage of the remainder enforce strict separation between different realms of belief. Consciously held convictions about the spirit world or life after death are essentially private; everything that can’t be touched, seen or demonstrated enjoys a kind of shadow existence in the head or in some, as-yet-undiscovered alternate universe or parallel dimension.

This leaves a vast array of less consciously held beliefs and behaviors, including not only what we call superstitions, but political myths and prejudices as well. Given the uniquely pluralistic nature of religious belief in the U.S., the latter assume perhaps a greater prominence that they otherwise might. The myths that bind us together as a people include such unfounded prejudices as: We have been a uniquely virtuous nation in our good intentions toward other nations; We are a uniquely generous people, without whom the rest of the world would be even worse off than it is already; In America, anyone who really wants to can get ahead; The fondest dream of every brown-skinned foreigner is to become an American citizen.

In saying that superstitions are less consciously held, I don’t mean to suggest that they are completely unthinking. Quite the opposite, in fact: one of their defining characteristics is that, in contrast to the sort of myths just listed, superstitions are beliefs that the believer him/herself considers somewhat questionable. This is where the disenchantment I spoke of comes in. But the peculiarly modern disavowal of the mysterious is not without benefits: an ironic detachment from irrational or supra-rational beliefs may be a necessary precondition for overcoming racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry. My father always felt that his father was somewhat ashamed of his own bigoted views about black people, and tried hard not to air them in front his children.

In this vein also are curses: believed in just strongly enough to give them a kind of compulsory quality. Few people who shout “Goddamn it to hell!” believe in a literal hell, much less in the possibility of damnation – Americans believe in heaven, by and large, but not, with the exception of fundamentalists, in hell. And just as the ideology of progress has enabled the widespread discrediting of bigotry, among people who no longer inhabit a demon-haunted world, profanity spills out of its once narrow banks to form a vast but shallow sea. Cursing represents the ultimate in reductionism: you are nothing more than the sum of your urges, a cunt, an asshole, an unbeing. But cursing curses itself, because in an utterly profane universe, words are drained of meaning and curses become hoist by their own reductionist petard. Pervasive as cursing currently seems, it’s easy to believe in a dystopian future where everybody is fucked but nobody really fucks.

By contrast, when we say “Bless you!” to someone who has just sneezed, we may actually feel that such effusions of good feeling have the power to confer blessing. This qualifies as superstition because: A) it is virtually automatic; B) the underlying reason for it (belief in soul-loss) has been long forgotten, but C) we nonetheless believe it possesses some kind of efficacy, despite the fact that most people who say it would probably admit it’s “just words.” I think most if not all of what are commonly described as superstitions should meet these three requirements. As the realm of the religious slowly succumbs to privatization, such that no once-dark corner of what used to be called the soul remains off limits to analysis and exploitation, curses and superstitions constitute almost the last vestiges of authentic, vernacular religious behavior.

July 13, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Home and altar

1. Home and altar seem to occupy mutually exclusive positions in the religious imagination. What happens to the home when it incorporates an altar? What happens to the altar when a religious sanctuary is converted into a private home?

2. The home as a container for personal possessions, including the weapons necessary for their defense, is very far from the idea of a sanctuary, open to all who come in peace. But in many parts of the world, the distinction is not nearly so sharp, and offering an unreserved welcome to the stranger is recognized as the foundation of ethical behavior. An important test of ethical behavior is a willingness to part with anything, should the guest’s fancy alight on it.

3. Abrahamic religion encourages a view of every stranger as a potential hypostasis of the one divinity, but whether the godhead is viewed as singular or plural is not of such great moment as the attitude toward divine representatives and representations: may they be permanently housed in stone, in wood, in icons? Or is this an impermissible encroachment on divine prerogatives? In the so-called Ten Commandments, an injunction against service to other gods is coupled with an injunction against the manufacture of religious images. Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, divinity may choose to rest in a particular place – e.g. the Ark of the Covenant, or a human heart/mind – but it remains essentially homeless and apart. It may not be compelled by rite or prayer nor encompassed by preconception or mental category.

4. As the practice of Jubilee suggests, there are no permanent possessions before God. Clinging to objects of desire is not merely a transgression against the laws of hospitality but an act of supreme impiety, a violation of the commandment against idolatry. Might the presence of an altar within the home simply be a concession to human weakness? We take whatever it is we most value and place it, literally or symbolically, among the offerings.

5. One problem with religious objects and images – fetishes, icons, priestly vestments, etc. – is that they cannot be freely given to any guest who shows an interest in them. But this may be problematic only if one sees God as uniquely transcendent and unbounded and everything else as (ideally) bounded. An animistic or pantheistic/immanentist view tends to hold that all things, including natural and man-made objects, are imbued with manas and possess a sovereignty (whether their own, or refracted) that commands respect. Earth as home becomes a sanctuary for an infinite number of guests, any of which may enter into a covenantal relationship with any other but remains otherwise free and sovereign. Abrahamic religion tries to simplify things by positing one, fundamental relationship which all others should aspire to emulate. Anything that comes into contact with the divine presence becomes a locus of uncreatedness within the midst of Creation. A shrine or altar is the physical manifestation of this paradox.

6. Within the sanctuary, the altar is the place of maximal openness – a portal, perhaps even a vortex. It need not be reserved for non-quotidian purposes: in its simplest, shamanic form it is nothing more than a chimney or smoke hole through which the shaman’s spirit too might pass into a suddenly transfigured Outside. Might the home computer, connected permanently to the Internet, provide a rough analogy? Isn’t the open source movement simply the latest manifestation of an age-old, idealistic tradition of radical hospitality?

7. The occasional necessity of breaking into one’s own home or vehicle is a peculiarly modern source of vertigo. How might such vertigo differ from the experience of Christians reenacting the Last Supper before the symbolic empty tomb, or Jews welcoming Elijah (in lieu of the Destroyer) across the threshold on Passover, inviting him to take the empty place at the table?

8. One good definition of altar is a stage upon which divine dramas are reenacted or pantomimed. These dramas need not be violent, but I believe they must, at some point, involve a sacrifice, which I interpret in the broadest possible sense as an act of renunciation, a shedding of self-centered attachments. Even non-hierarchical worldviews tend to acknowledge the sacred responsibility of periodically overcoming social or provisional boundaries between self and other, participating in a more fundamental openness or unboundedness. In the ancient Middle East and elsewhere, the marriage bed was seen as the primordial form of the altar.

9. What about the table, then? Quoting myself (a deplorable practice, I know), “Against sacrifice: Every nation-state is built around an altar; ours is no different. But I am not sure what to think about altared states of being: the bull that turned into a god in the ancient Near East, the Mesoamerican serpent demanding that the whole world shed its skin. Like so many moderns, I prefer the living with their claws and hooves, their manes and humps and barbs, their scales, their feathers. When I eat them, it is not for power. At most I might sketch their shadows, I might dream of trading colors for a world of scent. I have no ambition to don a theurgist’s cloak or wield a jewel-encrusted letter-opener to read a supposed message from another supposed world: this one’s enough. To suck the marrow yet would be too much. I don’t taste half of what I eat.”

10. But in the very next post, I advocated “For sacrifice: In Rabbinical Judaism, hermeneutics – deep reading and critical analysis – became the explicit substitute for the act of sacrifice. The connection, I take it, is that both are discriminatory. In Christianity, sacrifice continues, but in a more sublimated form: the rite of Eucharist. In both cases, the tendency is away from violence. Pueblo religion transformed the bloody sacrificial traditions of greater Mesoamerica in a similarly ingenious fashion. Prayers are animated, given shape, by carved and feathered prayer sticks fashioned by the petitioner himself, or in the case of a woman by her husband. They are, in fact, effigies of the petitioner. Their use is phenomenologically similar to the act of crossing oneself.

11. “It is at this crossroads in the self that the most important sacrifice is enacted.” This image of altar as crossroads may be the most useful of all. In a post describing the anti-shrine pictured above, I quoted Ifa priest and scholar Wande Abimbola: “Sacrifice is an act of exchange. When one makes sacrifice, one exchanges something dear, or something purchased with one’s own money, in order to sustain personal happiness. Sacrifice involves human beings in a process of exchange or denial of oneself, or giving of one’s time, forsaking one’s pleasure, food, etc., in order to be at peace with both the benevolent and malevolent supernatural powers as well as to be at peace with one’s neighbors, family, the entire environment and ultimately to be at peace with oneself.”

12. My blog is your blog. Please feel welcome, as always, to respond to any or none of these points using the comment boxes below.

July 6, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Valentine’s bible

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This is the family bible of my maternal great-great-grandfather Valentine Myers and his wife Viola. It was published in 1882. The title page reads, in part, “The Holy Bible: Containing the Authorized Edition of the New Testament and the Revised Version of A.D. 1881 Arranged in Parallel Columns; with Cruden’s Complete Concordance, Embracing Every Passage of Scripture in the Largest Editions. Comprehensive Bible Dictionary, In Which Every Important Scriptural Word is Fully Explained. A Complete History of Each Book of the Bible, Beautifully Illustrated. Cities of the Bible, With Descriptive Scenes and Events in Palestine. Jewish and Egyptian Antiquities; Biblical Scenery; Manners and Customs of the Ancients; Natural History; Bible Aids for Social Prayer; A History of the Jewish Worship; Biblical Antiquities; Recent Explorations in Bible Lands; History of Herod, King of the Jews, &c. Apocrypha and Psalms. A Concise History of All Religious Denominations, And Many Other Important and Useful Aids to the Study of the Holy Scriptures. All Written to Increase the Interest In and Simplify The Study of the Word of God.”

Two publishers are listed – Bradley, Garretson & Co. in Philadelphia and Wm. Garretson & Co. in Columbus, Ohio and other cities. Given its provenance – the hard coal country of eastern Pennsylvania – it’s safe to assume that this volume was printed in Philadelphia.

In the very center of the gold-embossed leather cover, the names of its original owners are printed: “MR. and MRS. V. MYERS.”

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This is the portrait of Viola Myers that hangs in my parents’ living room, a formal photograph embellished with paint. Our only photograph of her husband is an informal, slightly blurry snapshot taken sometime in the 1930s. He appears as a white-haired and mustached man with the aquiline nose and large chin typical of Myers males, posing with his son Walter, daughter-in-law Georgina, and grandsons Harold – my grandfather, whom we called Pop-pop – and Walter.

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The distinguishing feature of family bibles is of course the record of births and deaths, typically sandwiched, as here, between the Apocrypha and the New Testament. The “Births” column includes only the five children of Valentine and Viola: Claude, Walter, Calvin, Ethel and Harold. The “Deaths” page was filled out by three people: first Valentine, then an unknown hand, and then Pop-pop, who gained custody of the bible from a first cousin a few years before his own death in July 2003.

The two entries in Valentine’s hand are crucial to appreciating the rest of this post. The first was for his wife:

Viola Miller Myers. Was born at Lehigh Tannery. Pa. June 15th 1864. Died at Vulcan Pa. April 23rd 1894. Aged. 29. Years 10 Months and Eight Days.

Viola died giving birth to her fifth child. Valentine never remarried, raising the children himself and then joining the household of his son Walter, first in the little coal-company town of Vulcan, above Mahanoy City, then in Pottstown. He was probably the single biggest influence on my Pop-pop, who imbibed much of his strict Methodist religiosity, love of learning and conservative, success-oriented outlook from his grandfather.

The second death record, also in Valentine’s hand, is for that fifth child:

Harold Chester Myers. Died at Perkasie Pa. May 25th. 1908, Aged 15 yrs 5 months and nine days.

Thus we learn why it is that Walter’s first son – my Pop-pop, born in 1914 – bore the name Harold Chester Myers, and the name Walter was reserved for his second son.

The other four entries on the “Deaths” page are for Valentine, his son Calvin, and for Pop-pop’s parents Georgina Dresch and Walter D. Myers. Valentine Myers, we learn, “was born at Ashley, Pa., Nov. 27, 1857. Died at Pottstown, Pa. Sept. 27, 1940.”

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In a taped interview conducted by my brother Steve – the oldest and most Myers-like in our generation – Pop-pop recalled how his grandfather Valentine read the Bible continuously, cover to cover, in the last couple decades of his life. “Eighteen times!” Pop-pop said, but my mother told me that that was probably an approximation: “Whenever he said ’18,’ he just meant ‘a lot.'”

I doubt that this was the copy of the scriptures Valentine used for his daily reading, though. For one thing, it’s massive, heavy and awkward, and the corners of the pages do not appear to have been thumbed. Instead, this bible seems to have served as a repository for memories, and probably a great deal more. I don’t know if any of us today, even the most devout Christians, can quite conceive of what it means to employ a sacred text in this manner. One of the first things I discovered in flipping through it was a yellowed newspaper clipping tucked between the pages of the book of Job. You can probably already guess its contents:

Harold Myers Buried.
The funeral of Harold, the 15-year old son of Valentine Myers, was held at the home of the bereaved father, at Vulcan, at 12 o’clock noon today, and was largely attended. The services were conducted by Rev. E. W. Burke, pastor of the Methodist Episcopal church of town, after which cortege proceeded by the 12.50 P. R. R. train to the German Protestant cemetery, where interment was made in the family burial plot.

Below this clipping are the faint outlines of where another clipping had been tucked. It’s not hard to guess whose obituary that might have been. Between the pages immediately following are the pressed remnants of what appear to have been rosebuds, faded to a light brown.

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A ringlet of hair resides between the pages of Jeremiah VI and VII. Jeremiah VII: 29, marked off with a paragraph sign in this edition, reads: “Cut off thine hair, O Jerusalem, and cast it away, and take up a lamentation on high places; for the Lord hath rejected and forsaken the generation of his wrath.”

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I knew that 19th-century Protestants sometimes used the Book of Ruth for divination regarding marriage, but found nothing pressed between its few pages. However, a full-page lithograph illustrating the meeting of Ruth and Boaz – a plate that happens to be located in I Kings – yielded another intriguing find: a ladyslipper orchid, probably a yellow ladyslipper, judging from the shape. I started to think that Pop-pop’s life-long love of wildflowers might have come from his grandfather, as well.

Of course, it’s possible that later owners of this bible might have been responsible for some of the inserts, though it’s hard to imagine someone else appropriating for their own prayerful use a book that has its original owners’ names engraved on the cover.

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Most suggestive of all the inserts is this one: an ancient, very faded carnation tucked inside a scrap of paper and inserted next to the last chapter of The Song of Solomon.

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.

(Song VIII:6-7. See here for my own reactions to this most enigmatic of biblical texts.)

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The Book of Numbers – specifically, Chapters VIII, IX and X – holds the mother lode: two more obituaries for Harold Myers (one with his last name misspelled), a newspaper subscription receipt for “Mrs. Myers,” and a local tax receipt for someone named Martin Robters (sp.?). The reasons for including these last two items are not immediately clear to me; I want to suggest some relationship to the practice of numbering or record-keeping, but I’m not sure. Chapter IX of Numbers contains the instructions for removing impurities conferred by contact with a corpse, and the way in which resident aliens – “strangers sojourning among you” – should keep Passover. Perhaps the tax receipt was for someone whom Valentine helped out, during the Depression or before? As a retired mine supervisor, he was always fairly well-off, and spent generously on acts of charity. His daughter-in-law Georgina had a similarly generous spirit: Pop-pop recalled in the interview that they fed every stranger who came to their door during the Great Depression.

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A two-page spread on “Scripture Natural History – Zoology” contains some pressed tree leaves and another orchid blossom. Again, I’m not sure how to read this insertion. Perhaps some metaphorical meaning was intended – a reminder of the fragility and preciousness of life itself, say, or of this very bible, whose gilt-edged pages have grown almost as brown and brittle as the leaves and clippings it so lovingly enshrines.

July 2, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Washing the lettuce

It is said that Plato once came upon Diogenes the Kynic washing wild lettuce for his supper. “If you had paid court to Dionysius, you wouldn’t be reduced to washing lettuce,” said the philosopher. “If you had learned to wash lettuce, you wouldn’t have had to pay court to Dionysius,” replied the Kynic.

Diogenes believed in direct, unconventional responses rather in the manner of a Tang Dynasty Zen master. Once, when someone tried to convince him of the merits of Plato’s philosophy of Ideas, he squatted down and took a shit.

Once, on a sea voyage, Diogenes was captured by pirates who took him to Crete and put him on sale at the slave market. The auctioneer asked him whether he had any marketable talents. “Yes,” he said, “I excel at giving orders. Sell me to someone who needs a master.” It is said that a man called Xeniades was so impressed by this, he purchased him to tutor his children. Diogenes was soon in control of the man’s entire household. Years later, living in his tub, he used to deride rulers as slaves to their people.

Someone once asked Diogenes why it is that people give alms to beggars, who do little to deserve it, and not to philosophers, who perform such valuable services for all humanity. “Everyone expects that they themselves might someday be reduced to beggary,” Diogenes observed, “but no one ever expects to be reduced to philosophizing.”

June 6, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Legends of the Cherokees

These are legendary in the sense that they are my own, brash interpretations of sacred traditions, drawn mainly from material collected and interpreted in the late 19th century by the anthropologist James Mooney.

LONG MAN

Long Man dips his toes in the ocean and cracks his knuckles in the coves. He is the original “long drink of water;” when he climbs over the rocks, fish fall out of his hair. His skin is so translucent you can see the veins ticking beside each ear. Ball players always go to him for help, because weak as he sometimes appears, nothing in the world can hold out against him. He is never silent, though it takes a trained listener to distinguish his words from the ordinary drip & flow of events. Those are his wet footfalls just beyond the campfire’s circle of light.

WILDERNESS

To change into a bear or panther, go live among them & eat what they eat. Quite soon they start to look like people, how people would look if they weren’t so hairless & full of spite. Bear & panther can get everything they need with so little effort, who wouldn’t want to be like them? The name of their country is Always Enough. The only immigration requirement is a seven-day fast; it’s going back home that kills you, almost every time. The borders of our country & theirs make a perfect match, but here everything’s turned outside-in, like the fur in a hunter’s boots.

SHINING WOMAN

Shining Woman lives in the south & walks on a shining road. Her shining cloak opens wide, a house that expands to accommodate all visitors. She has the power to banish sorrows; she can exorcise despair. No one can travel her road & not lay down their burdens one by one, growing lighter with every step. Such happiness, they say, is contagious – the same as misery. But beware of her imitators here in the north, those with a small share of her magic who awaken only a restless itch to be elsewhere. Bar your door against these beautiful ones, unless you would turn as blue as a tree’s naked shadow on the snow.

THE GOOD PEOPLE

The Ní»ñní«’hí¯ – Immortals – hide in plain view. They are no different from us, except that the eye of envy never comes among them. Their farms are disguised as wild forests, their homes as holes or mounds. Their invisible towns leave footprints on the highest mountains: bare, open spots where no trees grow. Sometimes their young women show up for dances, strangers circling with uncommon grace, their hair sweeping the ground. Love-struck boys who try to follow them home watch them turn sideways into a shimmer of air among the trees, where the road deteriorates into a rabbit track & disappears into a thicket. Lost hunters tell of hearing drums & flutes, a bewildering music that leads them in circles, unwitting dancers at a never-ending feast. Free of the fear of death, who wouldn’t dance?

UNBIDDEN FRUIT

The very first married couple in the world have their very first fight. What do they do? There’s no one to arbitrate, no story or proverb to point the way. The only road is the sun’s road, so the woman starts out on it, aiming for the sunrise – a fresh start. The sun, too, is a woman, & she minds everyone’s business. Her verdict can burn, but with the exception of one memorable incident, she always strives for balance, turns each small death into fuel for new growth. Do you want her back? she asks the husband, who trails mournfully behind. Yes! The sun makes a patch of huckleberries spring up in front of the woman, hoping to tempt her, but she walks right through it without a pause. Next comes a blackberry tangle, loaded with fruit: she walks around it. Pawpaws, service berries, peaches, all manner of fruit: nothing works. At last the sun thinks strawberries. Strawberries! The woman stops, her concentration broken. What fruit is this, the color of sunrise, of life itself? She tastes one, then another. She can’t stop eating them, can’t think of anything else. Then suddenly she remembers her husband. He would love these berries! she thinks. And he does. And they do.

MOON MAGIC

Scoop the moon out of the river, mix it with red clay & your own saliva. Paint yourself red, red. Young women will see your skin & immediately feel an ache between their thighs. They will long for fullness, banishing the moon’s red cycle. The sun-living-in-the-night looks kindly on human beings, who never squint at him the way they do for the sun-living-in-the-day. Red & blue are the same to him. Everyone looks their best in his forgiving light.

BUSYBODIES

The council of birds appoints the wren to go live among human beings and report back. Every time a baby is born, she twitters the news. If it’s a boy, she cries more arrows, more wounds! If it’s a girl, she sings more fields & bigger harvests! The six-legged tribe sends the cricket to spy. When a girl is born, he rubs his hollow belly & hops for joy.

TRANSPARENT

The great horned serpent Uktena has a blazing diamond in the middle of his forehead, clear but for a red streak running through its heart. This jewel, called Ulí»ñsí»’tí® – Transparent – is the most valuable thing in the world, but also the most dangerous to obtain & the hardest to keep. The serpent uses it to hypnotize his prey. When a hunter sees it, he throws down his weapons & rushes forward to die. Only one hunter ever succeeded in killing an Uktena, and its Ulí»ñsí»’tí® still resides with the eastern band of the Cherokee, wrapped in a deerskin and hidden deep in a cave. It has the power to satisfy every desire – brings success in hunting, rain making, love – but if its owner forgets to feed it twice a year with fresh blood, it turns into a ball of fire, a vengeful meteor. Of all crystals it is the best at showing the shape of things to come, as clearly as reflections in still water. It sees the way a serpent sees: all warm-blooded beings are transparent except for the red streak running straight through their hearts.

CHEROKEE PRINCESS (ancient Anglo legend)

The Cherokee Princess lives in a wigwam palace & gives orders to an army of spirit helpers: friendly woodland creatures with sad brown eyes. Her buckskin gown reaches only partway down her dusky leg, & her cheek is in permanent blush. The Cherokee Princess never worries her pretty little head about war or diplomacy. She must come from a different stock entirely from the Beloved Women whose words used to carry so much weight among those who called themselves Tsalagi. She is such a slight thing, she might well be made of posterboard, or even celluloid. But a vast & clamorous tribe claims descent from those insubstantial hips. Her destiny reaches far into the Darkening Land. Side by side with her handsome blue soldier she rides into the sunset, shedding tears of joy.

June 1, 2005February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Via negativa and the road to hell

Inside the exclosure, a bed of wildflowers. Outside: the deer park. Well-intentioned nature-lovers and humanists of the 19th century won government support for the elimination of all large carnivores from Penn’s Woods.

1. In time, any paradise would grow cloying; one would long for the imperfect and the unpredictable.

2. But paradise by definition is a place uniquely capable of satisfying desire. If it were imperfection and unpredictability the mind craved, it would find them there.

3. Then how does paradise differ from the present world? Solely in the incommensurability between desire and its realization. If only one could learn to learn to desire whatever time and chance send, one would find a paradise in the present.

4. But for that to happen, something would have to change in the way one desires. It could no longer consist of longing for something else, something beyond or outside the present moment.

5. How do we know that the category “desire” is as singular as human languages suggest? A craving for food is very different from a craving for sex, for truth, for music, for possessions, for an addictive drug, for excitement, for the sublime, and so forth. Paradises begin to multiply faster than fruit flies.

6. A whole family of related desires aims at something short of paradise, as traditionally conceived: comfort, security, tranquility. These cannot be trivial, since they seem to be the focus of a great deal of church- and temple-going.

7. “As traditionally conceived”: etymologically, a walled garden. And intrinsic to the idea of paradise, heaven, Buddha-realm, etc. is the notion that it has limits. It cannot be universal. Any attempt to make it so presumes the destruction of the present universe and everything in it. If history teaches anything, it is this: hell hath no fury like a utopian scorned.

8. Augustine thought that the chief joy of souls in heaven would consist in the contemplation of the suffering of the damned below, in hell. From the extremism of his youthful Manichaean beliefs, according to which spirit and matter, saintliness and sinfulness have absolutely nothing in common, he grew to see these things as in some measure symbiotic.

9. Without the possibility of evil, how can the good be good? If one fails to commit evil acts simply because the option is unavailable, how could any action be considered good? Those who long for a universe in which evil would be impossible, and those who fault Whomever for allowing evil to persist: aren’t they simply longing for totalitarianism?

10. Unlimited perfection is a logical impossibility, because for something to be understood as perfect, it must be commensurate with the limited human imagination. No matter how intricate and well working, a machine lacks soul: which is to say, the ability to transcend and defy its apparent purpose. A perfect world, as we understand such a thing, would be devoid of life.

11. At this point, the maze of arguments begins to seem endless. It seems to me that the harder one tries to find a solution that satisfies all cases, the more blind alleys one wanders into. That’s because the very premise of the search is flawed. If life is not machine-like, then it cannot have any comprehensible purpose or meaning.

12. But to stop there and declare that life is meaningless is equally foolish, because it simply reinforces attachment to the feeling that things should have easily comprehensible purposes. Life transcends all considerations of meaning or non-meaning. I could state that existence is inherently mysterious, but at this point, all essentialist statements begin to seem vacuous. Paradox is the only way forward – if forward is indeed where we want to go.

13. This fundamental capacity of nature to elude our grasp is precisely what makes this seemingly archaic notion of paradise or heaven so attractive to me: heaven not as an afterlife destination, but as something basically “at hand,” as Yeshua ben Yosef preached.

14. “Hell is other people,” said Sartre. But suppose one gives oneself up: not as a surrender, but as a conscious gift. This is the bodhisattva’s vow, to forestall one’s own transcendence until all sentient beings have achieved similar transcendence. “For the love of God,” Meister Eckhart advised, “get rid of God.”

15. Paradise is others. Paradise is the world in the midst of creation, which is on-going. The sabbath is not-yet.

16. Only hell is self-sufficient and bounded by walls that cannot be breached: the autonomous ego writ large. To those who inhabit it, it looks very much like paradise. It is safe and tranquil and every bad deed is punished, every good deed rewarded. All hearts beat as one, burning in the fires of unquenchable desire.

CASSANDRA’S LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

Limits?
There are no limits to this life.
The cup can be brimming over with pain
but there are always more chalices.

Don’t speak to me of soil when you mean shit.
Don’t exalt sacrifice
in the slaughterhouse.
Speak the truth if you can:
that the gods draw their strength
from the dead alone–like mushrooms,
like mold, like the must
that turns water to wine.

Listen you lovers of youth, an augury
Apollo would have me suppress:
Know others as thyself
if you crave ambrosia.

I leave you
intimate communion
with every breath.

April 28, 2005 by Dave Bonta

The flavor of a parable

An ephemeral pond in the Scotia Barrens, near State College, PA

From The Christian Century, April 5, 2005, “Century Marks” feature:

Thieves broke into an agency in Fostoria, Ohio, and made off with the safe. It turned out the safe was empty. And it turned out the director of the agency was pleased: she had been wanting to get rid of the safe, but it was too heavy to move (AP, March 9).

For those who are unfamiliar with it, the Century is a good, liberal publication aimed mainly at Protestant clergy. The inclusion of this news item in a column otherwise concerned with news about politics and religion indicates to me that the editors recognized it for what it was: a found parable. Sermon fodder!

Imagine the thief, struggling with the thing, finally getting it to a safe place (pun intended) and prying or cutting it open: empty! Imagine the director going into her office expecting to see the safe in its usual spot: empty! The one expects to be rewarded and is frustrated; the other expects to be frustrated and is delighted. In both cases, says the Buddhist, isn’t it the same emptiness? And the monotheist wonders: who the heck is writing this script?

But actually the temptation to expound on stories such as this should probably be resisted. Or so claimed Idries Shah, who said about the teaching stories used heavily in his tradition (Naqshbandi Sufism) that they work best upon the unconscious if they are left as unsolved or insoluble puzzles for the conscious mind.

What the student can’t know – what none of us can know, barring enlightenment – is what we need to know in what order. This varies from one individual to the next; Shah was always full of scorn for religious institutions that promulgate a uniform course of study aimed primarily at enforcing orthodoxy. In terms of spiritual development, he said, what is necessary for one person to do or think might be downright harmful for the next.

It strikes me that there may be something almost universal about this insight into the pitfalls of universalism, however. The classic Chan (Zen) koans had to be recorded surreptitiously, without the knowledge or permission of the Tang and Song Dynasty teachers, who felt that more harm than good would come of preserving these spontaneous exchanges between teacher and student. Many of the Chan teachers spoke non-standard “dialects” of Chinese and frequently employed slang. Even the process of turning their exchanges into literary Chinese involved translation, and they probably anticipated the additional problems of interpretation that would arise as the centuries intervened and the language changed.

More than that, Chan teaching stories and conversations grew out of a cultural milieu that was, if not anti-intellectual, at least profoundly skeptical about the pretensions of literate culture. This may seem like a radical stance for an educated Chinese person to take, but it’s a reaction that goes back at least as far as the 4th century BCE and the teachings of the original Daoists. For highly literate people, words point to other words in an ever-spreading net of associations. One cannot contemplate the full moon without a host of preconceptions and allusions shaping what one sees – “the finger pointing at the moon,” in the well-worn Chan analogy.

Beyond that is the whole question of applicability touched on above.

Tradition has it that the Buddha, faced with questions of a metaphysical nature, once used a parable to explain his view: such questions, he said, were like those of a person wounded by an arrow who would like to know where the arrow came from, etc., rather than to seek to have it removed and the wound healed. His teaching, he said, was designed to heal, not to answer such questions. . . . [In Chan Buddhism] the content and methods of teaching are as strictly adapted to the particular circumstances and audience as a medicine to the illness it must remove.

Urs App, Master Yunmen (Kodansha, 1994)

Of course, the same could easily be said about the teaching of Yeshua ben Yosef, or any number of other inspired teachers.

For those of us lacking in such inspiration, and without inspired teachers, is it still possible to advance in knowledge? Let’s remember that in fact most physical healing does occur more or less on its own – if the mind gets out of the way, or if the consciousness can be somehow transformed, the body can heal itself. The difficulty of that “if,” however, means that doctors, shamans, therapists and the like do perform vital roles; the whole mysterious business of faith comes into play. Some doctors now prescribe placebos, recognizing that they are virtually as effective as expensive drugs. That in itself has the flavor of a parable, e.g.:

A man went to the doctor complaining of chest pains and shortness of breath. A series of tests pointed to the beginning stages of heart disease. The doctor prescribed a new diet and exercise regimen, and asked him if he’d like to participate in a clinical trial of a promising new therapy. “Whatever you recommend, doc,” the man said.

The doctor handed him a large, unmarked bottle full of off-white tablets. “Take only one a week,” he said. “They’re very powerful.”

The man was a conscientious sort and he followed the doctor’s orders, riding his bicycle to work, going for walks on his lunch hour, eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. And every time he took one of the pills, he felt especially invigorated.

In a few months’ time, he was already showing signs of improvement. A year later, the doctor gave him a clean bill of health, conditional on his continuing to exercise and eat well. “But you can stop taking the pills, now,” the doctor said.

“What were they? Will they be approved by the FDA, do you think?”

“Oh, they don’t need approval,” the doctor said carelessly. “They’re nothing new. It’s only their use in healing that is slightly controversial, especially among my more scientifically inclined colleagues.” He hesitated, seeing the trusting look in his erstwhile patient’s eyes. “You see, they’re sugar pills.”

The man grew angry. “I trusted you, doc! I was sick, and all you did was give me a placebo! I could’ve died!”

“I knew you trusted me, ” said the doctor. “That’s why the placebo worked. If you’d been a more cynical person, I might’ve had to prescribe some drug or another, but who knows if that would’ve helped you? Cynics tend to be fatalists, defeatists. And of all organs, the heart is the most impervious to outside intervention. A doctor can only do so much. All I did was perceive that your heart was fundamentally sound, and simply needed to be exercised a bit more.

“Besides,” he said, seeing that the cloud had still not lifted from the man’s face, “Just between you and me – I am not entirely convinced that sugar pills have no therapeutic properties of their own. Sure, sugar’s bad for you in some ways, but all drugs have side effects of some kind. People have been eating sugar in one form or another for thousands of years, and going to great lengths to get it. And most people are healthy most of the time, aren’t they?

“You see,” he said, his voice falling to a conspiratorial whisper, “These aren’t just any sugar pills. They’re a well-balanced mixture of sucrose, glucose, dextrose and fructose, derived from all-natural, organic ingredients. The flavonids were extracted through a special process that preserves the natural goodness of sugar in its purest form. As I said last year, this a brand-new treatment.”

The man brightened up. “Well, it certainly worked on me!” he said.

Is any kind of spiritual advancement/healing really possible without the intervention of a teacher/doctor/guardian spirit? It seems as if the same thing that makes a placebo effective against disease – the mind’s amazing ability to outwit itself – perpetuates the division of mind against body, self against other, humans against nature – all things that appear to stand in the way of authentic healing or wholeness.

I would like to suggest that we are all students or disciples whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. Imperfect ones, to be sure. But then, it is only when a student finally learns how to be a real student that she becomes fully qualified to teach, at least in any intentional manner. In the meantime, I think we’re all just blundering along here, whether we belong to an established tradition or not.

That’s why I believe so strongly in serendipity. Whether you ascribe it to divinity or random chance, coincidence can be a powerful reminder to pay attention, to listen up. Teachers are everywhere, but we have to listen in such a way that we are able to let go of all our pretensions, preconceptions and prejudices. This can make even otherwise secure people feel naked and exposed.

If I say this with some apparent authority, it’s merely because this very morning I opened a book of poems at random and found the following:

On the Path

Nothing

not the white flame of wheat
nor the needles nailed to the pupils of birds
will tell you the word

Do not question do not ask
between reason and the turbulence of snow
there is no difference

Don’t gather slops your destiny is you

Take your clothes off
there is no other path

– Eugénio de Andrade, Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry, translated by Alexis Levitin (New Directions, 2003)

And last night, shortly after reading the note about the stolen safe in The Christian Century and beginning to wonder about “found parables,” I clicked on 3rd House Party and read the following, brief story. (It helps to know that the woman in question suffers from Alzheimer’s.)

Not gone but forgotten

Today she got up and saw lying on the spare bed the suitcase that she packed last night when she was going to leave him. She asked him if he was going somewhere.

“I’ve been like that,” I thought. “Or at least, I think I have – how would I know?”

After a few moments of puzzlement, I bowed deeply toward my computer monitor and got up to get a drink of water. It was delicious. “Tomorrow,” I said to myself, “I should write an entire post describing the taste of water, how good it is when you’re thirsty, how bland when you’re not.”

This is that post.

April 3, 2005May 30, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Lao Tzu’s Funeral

When Lao Dan died, Jin-I went to his funeral. He gave three shouts and walked out.

A disciple accosted him. “I thought you were the Master’s friend!”

“I was.”

“Then do you really think it’s proper to mourn him this way?”

“I do. I used to think of him as a great man, but no more. Just now when I went in to pay my respects, I saw old people crying as if they had just lost a son, and young people crying as if they’d lost their mother.

“In bringing them all together like this, surely he has led some people to say things they don’t really mean, and others to cry when they don’t really feel like crying. People who act like that are hiding from Heaven, turning away from their true nature. Ungrateful bastards! In the old days, they would have seen this kind of betrayal as its own punishment.

“In coming when he did, the Master was right on time. In leaving when he did, he was simply following the current. If you can wait calmly for the right moment and hold fast to the current, neither joy nor sorrow will ever unsettle your mind. The old-timers called this ‘being cut loose by God.’

“Do you cling to the firewood? When the fire passes from one piece to the next, do we not accept that ‘firewood’ has turned to ‘cinders’?”

– Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tzu), Chapter 3

This is my own version. Translations consulted include: Lin Yutang, Thomas Merton, Martin Palmer, Derek Lin and the Tao Study Group, Burton Watson, and A. C. Graham.