Category: Philosophy/Religion

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

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Outline found on the backs of several napkins

Ideology of “Growth” (IOG)
– assumption of no limits: metastatis, envelopment rather than development
– only thing that increases over time is the PAST
– Past is intangible, inexhaustible, infinitely malleable (unlike real matter)
– IOG keeps focus on FUTURE – distract attention from what is happening in the present —> rapidly converted into more past
– consumer economy obliterates attention – should be numbered among:

EXTERNALIZED COSTS
– everything of actual (subsistence) value
– e.g. clean water, clean air, healthy soil, entire web of life
– also family/community values, public space
– some of these may soon only exist in the past

WHO IS THE CONSUMER?
– fiction of marketing
– spectator (rather than participant)
– temporary container of waste products
– permanent loser/debtor, b/c of externalized costs —> sucker
– transient human resource —> statistic
– target of crime, terrorism —> “body count”

BUT we are not consumers!!! To realize this is to bring about:

UN-TELEVISED REVOLUTION
– impossible
– essential
– any attempt to fill void w/out challenging void-creating machinery (i.e. “wants”) is FUTILE
– Love, God, Family, Community, Wilderness, etc. all equally susceptible to commodification, i.e. conversion into vacuums
– televised revolutionaries —> “Everything sucks” simply feeds the IOG

NEEDED: ANTIBODIES
– immune system works by beating invaders at own game
– examples: questions vs. answers, free love vs. lust/greed, public libraries vs. bookstores, wild places vs. zoos, playing games vs. watching sports, DIY networks vs. commerce
– laughter most effective weapon against void (IOG can’t be conquered through argumentation)
– spontaneous healing: logic of participation (“magic”) as full partner to discriminatory logic
– autopoiesis

HOW TO GET THERE
– build respect for authentic past (unknowable) & nature —> cultivate awe
– apophatic method: negative growth
– slow food, slow lane, living deliberately (not just “doing without”)
– more pleasure, not less —> more things give pleasure, giving itself is source of pleasure
– more “goods”, not fewer —> many small things/beings in place of one or two big abstractions
– plenty of energy

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Converse

ME conversen, fr. MF converser, fr. L conversari to live, keep company with, fr. conversus, pp. of convertere to turn around
(Merriam-Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary)

They’ve been talking for hours. Their conversation has passed through the usual stages of new acquaintances who find they hold many views in common: first the tenuous feeling out, the cautious groping for just the right word or phrase. As trust builds, the pleasure they feel in each other’s company gathers momentum. Nervous laughs give way to easy laughter, and their faces take on a kind of glow. Constant smiling loosens limbs as well as tongues. Initial motions of the head and hand gradually give way to full-body participation, bending from the hips, shifting slowly about in their seats like two trees in the grip of a single wind. It is a wholly improvised and unselfconscious dance; any audience – the stray eavesdropper or barista – is entirely incidental. They scarcely notice how often they talk over top of each other, how frequently they switch positions as the conversation veers madly from one topic to the next.

As connections are multiplied and reinforced, they draw closer and their conversation slows, deepens. They are listening intently, now, and speaking in turn. Grammatically normative sentence structure atrophies, leaving short-but-potent phrases, even single words buoyed by a laugh or expressive gesture, linguistic fragments swimming free in an ocean of light. They each glimpse apprehension in this new, provisional mirror, a joy that is afraid to speak its own name because how can you affix an identity to something so open, so almost not there?

They hang back as long as they can, reveling – then more than reveling. A kind of awe comes over them. The conversation ceases not because words are inadequate, but because they are no longer necessary. With the labyrinth behind them, why cling to the thread? Such a roundabout way to go to arrive at silence!

Signs
[an old poem]

She set her empty bottle down against mine without looking so they would rock together, ringing–whether with a peal or a toll I couldn’t tell. So that even before the words of welcome & the first fumbling for the right place, well in advance of the mingled cries and blessings, I would feel my skin turn to sky & my bones to living water.

Because her eyes held that exact and painful blue one only encounters over country churches–I mean those clapboard firetraps whose belfries offer sanctuary to the long-limbed owls, pale as Puritan angels, that go about their business at odd hours rarely observed in the modern liturgy. Except when some bored child, slipping under the pews, picks up a white wing feather missed by the custodian’s broom.

Let’s watch him as he waves it over his head, running up to the pulpit to show the startled minister. Whose flock shifts uneasily, the old pews creaking, Adam’s apples trembling on scented necks.

* * *

Isn’t every conversation a potential conversion? In order to truly live together in what is called harmony, don’t we need to be continually turning about, looking at things through the eyes of another, converting strangers into friends?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Round

“When are you going to show us what your goddamned head looks like?” I said, and he doffed his black knit cap. Underneath it was just as I suspected: freshly shaved that morning. An odd thing to do in the middle of the winter, he admitted. But the bumps and ridges of his skull didn’t stand out as they would have on a white person; this was no bleak winter landscape. When we went out, he pulled a second cap over the first.

I thought of the phrenologists of a hundred years ago, their lying science one of the pillars of racism and eugenics. So sure were they of the superior cranial capacity of Europeans, Stephen Jay Gould tells us, they unconsciously packed the little measuring pebbles more tightly into any skull known to have belonged to someone with darker skin. The trouble is, there never was any demonstrable link between cranial capacity and intelligence. The largest skull ever measured belonged to a severely retarded man.

Last night the almost-full moon glowing through a thin cloud cover enticed me into taking a long walk down along Laurel Ridge and back up the hollow. It was very quiet, apart from the crunch of my boots in the thawed-and-refrozen snow. I couldn’t take my eyes off the yellow moon, more perfect perhaps for the veil that hid its mountains and craters. No wonder bald monastics revere the moon as a symbol of attainment – especially those whose skin is as pale as the skull beneath it. But an African monk might get the last laugh, I’m thinking, whenever the earth’s shadow blocks the sun and reveals the moon’s true face. I remember how it looked last October, that sepulchral orange.

There was no perceptible immigration of clouds from the west. It was a snow sky, thickening hour by hour like a Béchamel sauce on the lowest possible heat. When I went out again at 9:30 to empty the garbage, the moon had grown as blurry as a flashlight in the fog. By first light this morning, over an inch of fine snow had already fallen.

It’s bread day. I find myself paying attention to what my hands do as I knead, taking a generous pinch of the white flour I use to keep the dough from sticking to the board and swirling it always in a counter-clockwise direction with my right hand, then rolling the brown ball back with my left, pushing in with the heels of both hands, folding it over, giving it a half turn to the right, push, fold, turn. In less than ten repetitions the last trace of white has vanished and it’s beginning to stick again. I slide the scraper across the board and give the dough a few more kneads, but now it won’t let go of my fingers; it coats my skin.

More dusting, more kneading, until the dough reaches just the right level of resilience. Then back in the bowl it goes to rise, doubling and tripling in size within the course of an hour. Wooden spoon, wooden board, steel scraper, ceramic bowl, worn dishtowel: the bread draws charisma from plain and earthy tools.

By tonight, judging from the weather forecasts, a thick new layer of snow will erase the ground’s imperfections, burying odors, muffling all sounds. For those who live far from the woods, this storm will be just another dreary nuisance – the proverbial wet blanket. For true enchantment you need somewhere for the eye to rest: dark trunks. A scandal of limbs. In a world of pure white, they say, the Inuit hunter hallucinates moving shadows, slinking, stalking, swallowing the light.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Out of the eater

This past weekend, at our blogger conclave, I brought up the subject of positive valuations of female avoirdupois in country blues songs from the 20s and 30s. Since apparently the phrase “pigmeat mama” isn’t as widely known as it should be, I decided to Google it and came up with the following. Sexology and ethnography are always funnier in German – especially if, like me, you don’t actually know German.

Die Figur der Big Fat Mama ist dem oriental-afrikanischen Schönheitsideal entlehnt. Damit war keineswegs eine formlose und anerotisch-fettleibige Frau gemeint, sondern eher eine groíŸe, deren weibliche Kurven bis an die Grenze der Ertrí¤glichkeit ausgebildet waren. GroíŸer, schwingender Busen, ausgebildeter Bauchtí¤nzerinnen-Hüftspeck, breit ausladende, gebí¤rfreudige Hüften, massiv-pralle Schenkel, groíŸe FüíŸe und einen provokativ aufreizenden Gang. Tommy Johnson besang diesen Frauentyp folgenderart: “Big Fat Mama, meat shakin’ on her bones and everytime she shake it, some skinny girl goin’ lose the home”. Blind Lemon Jefferson singt von einer “Heavy Hip Mama”, die die Mí¤nner so lange ausnahm, bis ihr alles in der Nachbarschaft gehörte, wí¤hrend Ed Bell, ein Alabama-Bluesman von einer Frau berichtet: “She makes the blind man see and the dumb man call his name”. Auch Prediger und Geistliche waren vor der Unwiderstehlichkeit stramm-üppiger Weiblichkeit nicht gefeit: “She makes the preacher put his bible down” und Son House sang: “I got me religion on this very day, but womens and whisky would’nt let me pray”….

Die manchmal respektlosen Bezeichnungen, die man Frauen zudachte, hatten oft mit ihrer Stellung in der lí¤ndlichen Gesellschaftsstruktur zu tun und waren nicht immer abwertend gemeint. Beginnt man mit der “Milkcow”, wie sie durch Kokomo Arnold, Big Bill Broonzy, oder Son House besungen wird, beschreibt durchaus eine Art von existentieller Wichtigkeit. “…ain’t had no milk an butter, since my cow been gone”, oder “…if you see my milkcow, please drive her home”. Milk and Butter konnte eine Sexmetapher sein, aber auch Liebe und persönliche Obsorge. Doch es hieíŸ auch “Strange bull in the pasture.”, wenn Gefahr von einem Rivalen drohte, oder die Angetraute im Verdacht stand, fremdzugehen. Ehemuffel, die sich bloíŸ auf den GenuíŸ erotischer Abenteuer beschrí¤nken wollten, meinten lakonisch: “Why buy a cow, if I can get milk under the fence”. Frauen, die eher nymphomanischen Charakter hatten, waren bloíŸ “Pigmeat”, Schweinefleisch. Aber was bedeutete die “Pigmeat Mama” bei Blind Lemon, wenn er sang:” I got a call this mornin’, my pigmeat mama was dead.” Lemon ruft den Doktor, aber der sagt, daíŸ sein Pigmeat ganz gesund sei, aber “…she done gone dead on you”, also ihre Liebe war gestorben. In einem anderen Lied stellt Blind Lemon fest:” I love my baby, just like a farmer loves his jersey cow…”, wohl eine Reizzeile für moderne Emanzen. Wer setzt da eine Kuh mit dem Wert und der Würde einer Frau gleich. Die Kuh war oft das Einzige, was ein armer Pí¤chter besaíŸ und eine Frau war oft leichter zu bekommen, als eine Kuh. Ob es Liebe im höheren Sinne gab, kann ich nicht sagen, denn das Leben war für die Schwarzen so hart, daíŸ sie mit dem Existenzkampf und dem Damoklesschwert des Rassismus soviel Probleme hatten, daíŸ der Alltag nur rudimentí¤r-primitives Denken zulieíŸ.

Here’s a translation by Babelfish. (The robot assumes that the entire text is German; thus, the quotes in English are also “translated” to the best of its ability.)

The figure of the Big Fat mummy is taken to the oriental African ideal of beauty. Thus by any means an informal and anerotisch fettleibige woman was not meant, but rather a large, whose female curves to to the border of the bearableness were trained. More largely, swinging bosom, trained Bauchtaenzerinnen Hueftspeck, broadly unloading, bear-joyful hips, substantial-solid thighs, large feet and a provocatively up-provoking course. Tommy Johnson besang this woman Mrs. the following following: “Big Fat mummy, meat shakin ‘ on ago bones and everytime she shake it, some skinny girl goin ‘ draws the home”. Blindly Lemon Jefferson sings from a “Heavy Hip mummy”, who excluded the men so for a long time, until you belonged everything in the neighbourhood, during OD Bell, a Alabama Bluesman reported of a woman: “She makes the blindly one lake and the dumb one call his name”. Also prediger and clergyman were not protected before the irresistibleness of stramm sumptuous femaleness: “She of makes the preacher PUT his bible down” and Son House sang: “I got ME religion on this very day, but womens and whisky would’nt let ME pray”….

The sometimes irreverent designations, which one zudachte women, had to do often with their position in the rural social structure and were not always devaluing meant. If one begins with the “Milkcow”, like her by Kokomo Arnold, Big Bill Broonzy, or Son House besungen become, a kind of vital importance quite describes. “… ain’t had NO milk at butter, since my cow been gone”, or “… if you lake my milkcow, please drive ago home”. Milk and butter could be a Sexmetapher, in addition, love and personal Obsorge. But it was called also “strand bulletin into the pasture.”, if danger of a rival threatened, or the Angetraute in the suspicion to foreignhappen. Ehemuffel, which wanted to be only limited to the benefit of erotischer adventures, meant laconic: “Why buy A cow, if I CAN GET milk more under the fence”. Women, who had a rather nymphomanischen character, were only “Pigmeat”, schweinefleisch. But which meant the “Pigmeat mummy” with blindly Lemon, if he sang: ” I got A call this mornin ‘, my pigmeat mummy which DEAD.” Lemon calls the doctor, but it says that its Pigmeat is completely healthy had thus died, but “… she done gone DEAD on you”, their love. In another song blindly Lemon determines: ” I love my baby, just like A more farmer loves his jersey cow… “, probably an attraction line for modern Emanzen. Who sets there a cow with the value and that became for a woman directly. The cow was often the only one, which a poor tenant possessed and a woman was often more easily to get, than a cow whether it to love in the higher sense gave, cannot I not say, because the life was for the black ones so hard that they had problems with the struggle for existence and the Damoklesschwert of the racingism as much that the everyday life permitted only rudimentary-primitive thinking.

Setting aside the question of whether characterizing a vital folk tradition as “rudimentary-primitive thinking” itself constitutes “racingism,” here’s another unintentionally humorous passage for the sake of contrast. It’s an excerpt from an excerpt of Carol J. Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, included in Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food, Deane W. Curtin and Lisa M. Heldke, eds. (Indiana University Press, 1992):

There are some incontrovertible assumptions that determine our approach to life: Stories have endings, meals have meat. Let us explore whether these statements are interchangeable – stories have meat, that is, meaning, and meals have endings. When vegetarians take meat out of the meal, they take the ending out of the story of meat. Vegetarians become caught within a structure they attempt to eliminate. Our experience of meat eating cannot be separated from our feelings about stories.

This last strikes me as a highly debatable and culturally biased assertion. The bias becomes even stronger in the next paragraph, where universality is assigned to Western storytelling conventions:

We are the species who tell stories. Through narrative we confer meaning upon life. Our histories are structured as stories that postulate beginnings, crises, resolutions; dramas and fictions animate our imagination with stories that obviously have a beginning and an end. Narrative, by definition, moves forward toward resolution…Often meaning can only be apprehended once the story is complete…

Meat eating is story applied to animals, it gives meaning to animals’ existence….Animals’ lives and bodies become material fit to receive humans’ stories: the word becomes flesh….

Vegetarians see themselves as providing an alternative ending, veggie burgers instead of hamburgers, but they are actually eviscerating the entire narrative. From the dominant perspective, vegetarianism is not only about something that is inconsequential, which lacks “meat,” and which fails to find closure through meat, but is a story about the acceptance of passivity, of that which has no meaning, of endorsing a “vegetable” way of living. In this it appears to be a feminist story that goes nowhere and accepts nothing.

Alternately, of course, it may appear to be bullshit. Which is, of course, entirely “vegetable” in origin. As are we, according to that most patriarchal of texts, the King James Bible: All flesh is grass.

In vernacular cultures the world over, the boundaries between bodies are never very clear-cut. It may be true, as I wrote yesterday, that every being is a slow fire. But we are also, potentially, food – a statement that can be seen as either tragic (the vegetarian assumption) or comic (the Rabelaisian position). In a new essay at Wild Thoughts, Hank Green has a great little essay about the experience of being tongue-kissed by a gray wolf. It begins:

As humans we have the capacity to be both predator and prey. Vegetarian or not, I promise you, get a good hunger started in your belly and cute and fuzzy things will look much less like companions and much more like corndogs. I’ve looked at squirrels that way and they can tell. Generally they are indifferent or curious, but when I’m real hungry…they keep back.

Just as animals that were once our prey can see my hunger and my intent in my eyes, we can see the same in animals that were once our competitors or our predators.

I remember my first time face to face with a lion. At one moment the gigantic thing was obviously concentrating very hard on a nearby leaf that had fluttered across his vision. They are, after all, still cats, still curious and cute. The next moment the lion locked eyes with me and my knees weakened. I knew what the squirrel felt like under my hungry gaze; to that lion, I was the corndog.

A coherent philosophy of food would have to take account of predation, sex, sacrifice, gathering, hunting, cultivation, and diverse methods of food production, including those that involve animal and fungal helpers (dairy products, honey, beer, yeast bread, etc.). It would have to develop aesthetic systems for all five senses. Why has Western philosophy so limited itself to the world perceived by the mind’s eye? “The sage is for the belly, not for the eye,” says the Daodejing. That’s because “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing,” as Qoheleth observed. But the belly – the belly knows its limits. It’s not a question of narratives and endings, really, but of emptiness and fullness. Or as Memphis Minnie put it, “Keep on eating, baby, till you get enough.”
__________

For more in this vein, see Our booty, ourselves.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The bloggers


The universe (tiandi) doesn’t play favorites;
it treats all phenomena as if they were straw dogs.
The sage doesn’t play favorites;
he treats the people as if they were straw dogs.

– Daodejing Chapter 5 (my version). According to the Zhuangzi, straw dogs were sacrificial artifacts, treated with the utmost deference before they were used in the offering, and discarded afterwards.

*

The found object: how did it come to be born here, in the hand & in the eye? What does it ask of us? What might it become?

It passes slowly from hand to hand. We speak for it, taking turns. “I fell from the sky.” “I was thrown.” “I was dropped.” “I was laid down.” “I formed here, like dew.” “I sprouted.” “I popped out.” (What a bunch of jokers!)

We still think we’re the only ones here. Our word people means “human beings only.” Animal, mineral, or vegetable, we chant at the start of every game of Twenty Questions. There’s a campfire, of course. We’re singing, A, b, c, double x, y, z. Cat’s in the cupboard & he can’t see me. (Schrödinger never really cared about that poor cat, but we do!)

Well, let’s say someone gets up and tosses it on the fire. Yes. She drops it in the hottest part of the fire. “Now we’ll see!” (Will it burn? Will it burst?)

“Charcoal!”

“Cinders!”

“Ash!”

“Slag!”

(We pass the bottle, now. We fall asleep.)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The forger

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Antiphony: Daodejing

Radiant way-making (dao) seems obscured,
Advancing way-making seems to be receding,
Smooth way-making seems to have bumps,
The highest character (de) seems like a deep gorge,
The most brilliant white seems sullied . . .
The most pristine and authentic seems defiled.
The greatest square has no corners,
The greatest vessel is last to be attended to,
The greatest sound is ever so faint,
The greatest image has no shape.

Daodejing Chapter 41 (Ames and Hall version)

*

Picture an artist’s studio in Montreal. The middle-aged, male artist is chatting with a new female model a few years younger than himself. Many artists he knows prefer to sketch or paint in silence. But how can you paint somebody you don’t know?

“I’m through with slogans and campaigns,” he says when the subject of politics comes up. The causes of his parents’ generation strike him as sad and futile. “‘Never forget?’ As if memory could forestall the ultimate dissolution of all things! Sure, collective memory is a powerful thing. But humanity won’t last forever. Even this planet will be swallowed up by the sun someday.”

“But you do seem to have quite an appetite for the news,” says the model.

As usual, he has the shortwave radio on in the studio. It’s tuned to the BBC World Service, and he keeps it at a fairly low volume so it won’t dominate the conversation – or the play of his own thoughts when he’s alone. Mostly, it’s the sound of the voices that appeals to him, that ceaseless murmur.

“They call it news, but by the time it hits the wires it’s already a little old, you know? The bluebirds continue to perch out there on the electric line as if nothing were happening, even on the coldest days. Now that’s news!”

“What I don’t like,” she says, “is the way different stories of hugely different magnitudes are made to seem like they’re equivalent, just by the way they’re placed side by side in a newspaper, or one after another on the radio or TV.”

“Mmm,” he says. And after a moment: “But that’s not exactly new, is it? And I wonder what the alternative would be? Just yesterday I went for a walk in the country, and was puzzling over the odd conjunctions of animal tracks in the snow. A coyote accompanying three unhurried deer? Raccoon and fox in a pas de deux? Careful, now! This isn’t some tawdry scandal sheet! But when you see a line of small rodent tracks suddenly cease in the middle of a pair of wing prints – well, that’s clearly genuine Page 1 material. Or so I would like to think.”

“You have to be true to your own vision, I guess,” the model says vaguely. But the artist is still warming to his theme.

“My vision? Who says it’s mine? How do I know that? Turn back this way please – right there. Great!”

An hour later, they continue the conversation at a cafe down the street. “I just don’t understand how you can so dismissive of the power of memory,” she says. “Don’t you want to be remembered?”

“Part of me does, yes. But when I paint, I have to put that part aside. I have to forget.”

This is something she hasn’t heard before in all her years of working with Tormented Artists, and it goes very much against the grain of her Jewish upbringing. Which may be why she finds herself wondering whether it’s time to rethink that rule about never sleeping with her clients. The problem with artists, though, is that they’re always so distracted.

“So you think it’s better to forget?”

“No, I never said that! It’s not a question of one or the other. Let the “t” off and what do you get? A forge! In here” – he taps his chest – “or here” – his head – “or maybe – I don’t know. Maybe nowhere!”

“So it’s forgeries you’re after, then!” she exclaims, laughing. “Forgetting does entail a kind of forgery, doesn’t it?”

“No, I think it’s the other way around,” says the painter – who, it might be worth pointing out, gathers a substantial income from the sale of perfect reproductions of the Old Masters, many of which now hang in place of the originals in museums around the world. She doesn’t know this yet, of course. But her interest in the argument intrigues him. He could use an assistant.

“Because, look, at any given moment, the snow is mute. To forge a story from its maze of tracks, you have to forget the present, calculate melt time at various temperatures in the last 24 hours, and weigh the likely scenarios. Even if you set up cameras to record everything as it takes place, whatever narrative you derive from that is still a condensation, an imposition – a forgery.

“But! The patterns visible in the present do have something to say in their own right, I think. And that something changes from one moment to the next, as the sun beats down or more snow falls or another creature forges through the snow.”

“And what if that creature is you?”

“Or you! Imagine this: Imagine if every time you looked at a painting, everywhere your gaze tracked it would leave an impression in indelible paint. Imagine if we couldn’t look at anything without overwriting it, without leaving our own tracks. Not only would paintings become wholly transient things – or happenings, really – but the distinction between artist and non-artist would largely disappear. Museums would lose their separation from the rest of the world.”

“But surely you can’t want that!”

He smiles. “What makes you think it isn’t already true? Every time we look at something, we’re changed in some way ourselves, yes? And as we change, from one moment to the next, our perception changes. We do leave tracks, even if they are visible only to ourselves.”

“Okay. But something tells me that if seeing were as physically consequential as you seem to wish, that things would develop very thick layers of paint in some areas, and thin to nonexistent layers in others. Any artistry a painting might have at first – or, I mean, right after someone with real artistic vision interacted with it – would quickly be overwhelmed by the untrained gaze of the mob.”

“Would it? I don’t know. I have a hunch that those unpainted areas would quickly develop their own charism, so to speak, and that the feedback loops formed by such interactive gazing, in combination with an ordinary intelligence, would eventually lead almost everyone to become expert in the art of forgery.”

She laughs. “So you would save nothing – no artifact of anyone’s private vision?”

“Oh, I would! But paintings age just as we do. The colors fade. Grime collects. The paint cracks. They change, and our collective evaluations – our memories – change with them. I mean, the act of restoration can be highly controversial. Restore it to what?”

“Oh c’mon. It’s not that bad!”

“It can be. Think of how the great cave paintings in France and Spain were threatened by the mere presence of visitors: not only the molds and spores we carry with us, but the very carbon dioxide we exhale was profoundly damaging to them. In order to preserve anything at all, they had to be completely sealed away again. Faithful reproductions were created with the help of digital imaging so visitors would have something to look at in their stead.”

“If you don’t want immortality, what do you want?” she asks softly.

“I want to immerse myself in that forging,” he says, his eyes flashing. “That’s all! Not to be an artist. Not to be anything! Simply to become a part of everything that is beautiful, spontaneous, original!”

He touches her hand. “You and I – we’re nothing. Mayflies. Soap bubbles. There’s no great Artist in the sky. There’s only . . . ”

She places a sudden finger across his lips. They slowly get to their feet, put their coats on and pay the bill without another word. Outside, the streets are glistening with melting snow.

__________

Thanks to Susan, whose typo in a recent comment thread prompted this little exercise in philosophical fakery.
UPDATE (Feb. 4): Thanks to Siona for suggesting some additional insights.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The smoker

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Antiphony: Daodejing

In concentrating your qi and making it pliant,
Are you able to become the newborn babe?
In scrubbing and cleansing your profound mirror,
Are you able to rid it of all imperfections?
In loving the common people and breathing life into the state,
Are you able to do it without recourse to wisdom?
With nature’s gates swinging open and closed,
Are you able to remain the female?

– Daodejing Chapter 10 (Ames and Hall, tr.)

*

The mother crouches, bears down. Focuses all her energy on her abdomen, where her body’s snake lies coiled. The baby slips down the birth canal and out. It glistens; it glows. Buzzed on adrenaline, it is more fully awake now than it will ever be again, with a few possible exceptions.

The mother cleans this new creature, suddenly not-her but not yet a wholly distinct presence in the world. She eats the umbilicus and the neither/nor substance that follows the birth, returning them to her abdomen. The infant’s initial luster fades a bit, and the flame-like pattern of its pelt blends with the splashes of sunlight in this forest clearing. Choosing her steps cautiously – a leap here, a circling dance step there – the mother moves off.

Lying in a bed of ferns, the newborn knows nothing of fear or danger. The stimuli entering its ears, eyes and nostrils are all equally strange and wonderful. A few of the sounds seem familiar, though this side of the womb they are much more distinct. Weeks will pass before it begins to discriminate, to learn which things are the most desirable. But in just a few days, it will learn to flee from anything out of the ordinary. Excitement will become linked with fear; good things are bland and filling, like mother’s milk.

Flies don’t land on it yet. As the day warms up, hornets begin exiting their underground hive through a hole just inches away from its rear end, but there’s nothing to excite them about this new warm object. The mother stands a hundred feet away on high alert. Any predator that might happen to wander into the vicinity will smell only her, and with luck, can be coaxed into giving chase.

The human being who has been watching all this through binoculars from a nearby blind is astonished. She is on assignment from Conservation International and the Bronx Zoo to track down rumors of a deer-like animal unknown to Western science, deep in the forested headwaters of three great rivers. Now she debates whether she should report this discovery at all. The publicity might attract poachers, and who knows what else.

All around the birthing area, the air shimmers, like the air above a lake on a sunny day. I wonder if it’s true, what they say – that it can walk on grass without bending a blade, even walk on water? Because the Han Chinese villagers who farm upland rice in this region call the creature by its ancient name Qilin. They want so badly to believe that a new era of peace and prosperity is on its way!

But what could be more natural than to accept that it might be true? Here in these mountains, where nation-states are a far-off rumor and the global market a semi-legendary beast, anything seems possible.

She wouldn’t realize for several hours yet that her craving for nicotine has suddenly, finally evaporated – or, more likely, returned to whatever creative nothingness it had originated in, years before. How can one notice something no longer present? But as she watched the birth unfold, she had felt something loosening in her own abdomen and sat up straighter, breathing all the way from her heels. It smelled like spring.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The drinker

Without setting foot outside your door, you can know everything under heaven.
Without looking out the window, you can grasp how Nature works.
The farther one goes,
the less one knows.

Thus the sage knows without stirring,
recognizes without seeing,
accomplishes without making any particular effort.

Daodejing Chapter 47 (translation mine)

*

Sunlight pours in through the bow window of his apartment in the assisted living facility. He sits in a pool of it, luxuriating in the warmth and the full-belly feeling that follows a hearty breakfast. The latest issue of Time magazine is open on his lap – an amusing read, he thinks, so long as one doesn’t allow oneself to get angry at the enormous presumption of its name, its absurd and undeserved sense of cultural significance.

He skims a two-page excerpt of Christine Todd Whitman’s new book, It’s My Party, Too – ah, the rage of the privileged classes! Then his eye alights on a full-page ad for “DoubleTree, A Member of the Hilton Family of Hotels.” More family values? Well, maybe.

The ad is an obviously fake photo of a couple kissing underneath a pair of saplings pruned in the shape of popsickles. Behind them a sturdy-looking fence guards the edge of a precipice, and an ocean at sunset stretches beyond. Off to one side, a coin-operated telescope points stiffly up and in the opposite direction from the couple. The man is dressed like a businessman – white dress shirt and creased slacks – and she like a school girl: knee-length skirt, light sweater, hair in a ponytail. The copy reads,

Warm.
Familiar.
A place where you’ll be well taken care of and comfortable.

So you can focus on something else.
Or everything else.

The twin trees’ foliage blends together directly above the merged heads of the couple. In fact, if the man were to straighten up, his head would be caught in the leaves. She, of course, is craning on her tip-toes to reach him. There’s the faintest suggestion of a bulge in the front of his pants.

Corporate mergers are in the news again, and perhaps there’s some kind of subtext here designed to appeal to the business traveler. It’s very well done, really, the old man murmurs, stroking his chin. A shower of dandruff cascades onto the page. Amused, he strokes harder. The lower half of the ad rapidly becomes buried in white. He cackles with glee. “Time for another whiskey, my boy!” he says in his best Studs Terkel voice.

Halfway around the world, the lovers are just drawing apart, just opening their eyes and beginning to focus on the world around them. She lets out a little cry. “My God!” says the businessman. “It’s snowing!”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The plagiarist

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Antiphony: Daodejing

Credible words are not eloquent,
Eloquent words are not credible.

– Daodejing Chapter 81 (Ames and Hall, tr.)

*

One line a day, he thinks, just like Dylan Thomas. But his project differs radically from the old drunk wordsmith’s, who hammered out each word in the forge of whatever. He has no use for such self-conscious perfection – in fact, he’s not sure he wants to write anything particularly memorable at all. He aspires instead to the perfection of the found object, whose charm would consist solely in being removed from its originating context and placed in another. Each line like a grain of sand struck from some granite headland, rolled in the waves until smooth, and deposited on a beach. Perhaps it is true that a visionary might see the universe in a grain of sand. But most people just want to walk along the edge of the ocean in their bare feet, letting the waves curl around their ankles. And certain ankles are worth dying for, he thinks – far more so than any art. Just ask Proust.

There’s no first line. How can there be? He starts at random and works in both directions, and after a while he sees that new lines can be inserted at various points in the growing text. Not that they’re interchangeable, of course. His poor memory works for him as often as it works against him, because he finds himself returning often to the same or similar themes – just as an elderly person will retell the same story over and over. But it’s not the same story, if you listen. And poetry is nothing if not a supreme effort at listening, on the part of author and audience alike. Repetition in a poem is one of several tried-and-true methods for seducing the ear.

Seduction: that’s the goal. To charm, to re-enchant. Without some kind of poetry in our lives, is true love even possible? Without persuasion, the lonely soul can only connect with others through brutality, through hatred. Get that down, he says to himself. Child soldiers in a guerrilla army he’s read about, who chop the hands off other children for no reason. Someday, perhaps, a look or touch of wholly undeserved compassion (is there any other kind?) will shatter them. Put that in.

Time is on his side, because that’s where he likes it – close enough to keep an eye on. His theme, to the extent that he can be said to have one, is simply: things happen. Not shit, never. Sometimes he does feel that way, but those lines never see daylight. Line by line he comes to feel – not merely to understand, but to know in his bones – how much of a role time plays in everything. It’s the ultimate context, from which no escape is possible or even desirable. What makes the ordinary seem extraordinary is just this consciousness of the extreme unlikelihood of its ever coming to be. One line at a time.

Then one day, out of the blue, he hears a whisper in his ear and feels a warm breath on the back of his neck. Thank you for writing my poem, the voice says. In a flash, he sees that every single line he thought he had written had in fact been borrowed, and that now it’s time to return them to their rightful owner. He turns slowly around. I thought you’d never find me, he says.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Knot

I wrote this yesterday afternoon.

Above and below the Road to the Far Field, the wreckage of a woods. Big sugar maples, black cherries, red maples, shagbark hickories – all ripped down by the ice. But the view! On this clear, cold day, Sinking Valley is a glaze of white between ridges that mix brown and blue: the brown of tree trunks, the blue of their shadows against the snow.

The giant chestnut oak at the bend of the trail casts a peculiar shadow, though. Its stumpy limbs bristle with last year’s sprouts, and fresh tracks in the snow show that again this winter the ridgetop porcupine has returned for more pollarding of her favorite tree. There are thousands of chestnut oaks on the mountain, but for some reason it’s the very oldest ones that seem to draw the porcupines. The sweetness of age, perhaps? Or is it simply that, being old, they are less efficient at producing tannins in response to overbrowsing? An absence of bitterness in itself can seem plenty sweet, I know.

Now here’s another misshapen shadow: a cherry the ice storm didn’t touch. Most of its branches have been truncated by the fungal infection that foresters call black knot. I wonder if this thorough amputation of twigs and smaller branches isn’t what saved it, preventing the ice from reaching critical mass? In such extreme conditions, a handicap can turn into an advantageous trait. The chronically ill sometimes are the fittest, the ones who survive the longest, bear the most young. Pain is their legacy, and it is the most precious gift imaginable. Without it, imagine how brittle we’d be – how terribly unequal to the task of love.