Category: Philosophy/Religion

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

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Postscript on masochism vs. longing

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Longing: Anthology and Meditation

In partial answer to a point raised by Siona in the [now lost] comments to my fifth meditation on longing: “We’re all masochists. Look at the country we live in. Look at how we treat ourselves. Look at how we’re treated. At least those who’ve taken on the label are brave enough – or clear-eyed enough – to admit it. Or perhaps it’s that they’re taking ownership of their abuse.”

Yesterday morning, when I was pulling toast out of the toaster oven, the knuckle of my left index finger brushed the hot coil with an audible sizzle. Since I felt nothing, my immediate reaction was surprise followed by fascination, almost a childish pleasure, at the shape of the mark: a little hollow of melted flesh. I felt the same kind of interest I might bring to some mindless entertainment on television: “mindless” in the sense of absent-minded, the way one might strip the seeds from a blade of grass in passing. The scratching of an obscure itch – except that in the beginning, the scratching makes the itch. Five seconds ago I knew nothing about this; now I can’t look away. Hey, maybe there’s something better on the other channels . . .

I’m an ex-smoker. I know a little bit about how one can satisfy oneself to death. But it isn’t ourselves we’re killing – not intentionally. It’s time – a kind of time peculiar to a culture of disenchantment. The smoker’s habit grows out of the universal human urge to break up the otherwise too-uniform flow. To build dams, you might say, for the music and excitement of the falls as well as for the quiet pools that form behind them, and the immense power that can provide.

Now let’s kick it up a notch. What about deliberate self-torture, or consensual sado-masochism? I can well believe some people might suffer from such a monstrous itch that only this most extreme form of scratching offers relief – or better, release. Others say that giving themselves what they do not want is a route – even a religious practice – to the overcoming of wanting. Still others may feel, in an ownership society (as the new Republican buzzword has it), that masochism is a way to stake a claim on one’s own suffering, and thus to experience power rather than powerlessness. In any case, in the presence of great pain I would expect to feel something approaching pleasure through the achievement of almost-pure focus.

It’s probably a truism to say that masochism is all about breaking down the barriers between pleasure and pain. But to the extent that the masochist means to go beyond desire, any experience of pleasure could be self-defeating. Perhaps the point is to break one’s attachment to the experience of pleasure or pain, to train oneself to accept whatever comes with equanimity? But in that case, why go through all the agony? Just meditate, for crying out loud!

Ah, but I suppose it’s nothing but cultural prejudice that leads me to favor one technique for mental discipline over another. Cross-cultural comparisons strongly suggest that, in a properly sacred and ritualized context, starvation and self-torture (Plains Indians) can be as useful a tool for self-transcendence as strong drugs (much of native South America), trance-dancing (Kung, Balinese) or meditative practices (Tibet).

Absent such a context, however, the possibility of the supposedly transcended self simply beginning to inhabit the tool strikes me as a very potent danger. How to avoid taking pride in one’s deprivation? Self-abuse, vernacular wisdom calls the most ubiquitous form of self-indulgence. The release provided by an addict’s hit is like the freedom equated with slavery by the Ministry of Truth in 1984. This makes sense: the tyrant is to the body politic as the masochist is to his own body. That “almost-pure focus” would never seem quiet pure enough.

What the habit-bound mind considers freedom – the escape from craving or compulsion – is like the delusion of a small child who thinks that when she shuts her eyes she disappears. One often sees a similar behavior among tyrannical regimes . . .

“Just be!” say the less intellectual among seekers – if that’s still the right word for them. (Such, in fact, is my own inclination, simple-minded pseudo-Daoist that I am.) Whatever you do, focus on that. Enter fully into every task, every object of attention. But this is a little deceptive; the flow cannot be halted, and one blocks it at one’s peril, as I have suggested (arguing by analogy with water – I said I was a pseudo-Daoist!). Motion is intrinsic to the process of world/self discovery: “There was a child went forth,” the poem wisely begins.

With motion we have change in position, we have distance between self A and self B. We have, then, longing – as Sufis especially have always recognized. Longing becomes pen and palimpsest with which to inscribe something paradoxical: inhabiting no-place, aspiring to no-aspiration. What are we after, really? You say, perhaps, Emptiness. I say, tentatively, You. But we can’t know what we need until we find it – and who needs it then? When you get the far shore, you ditch the raft. And in any case (whispers the sadist on my right shoulder) it’s more than you deserve.

But then in my left ear: more is your birthright. Don’t you believe in grace? The door’s open. The table’s set. O taste and see.
__________

COMMENTS [reprinted from Haloscan]

Ah, finally you confront “it”, the subject of the longing you’ve been hitherto analogically circling.

But the thing, now, is whether “longing” and “wanting” are different things, whether “longing” is the desire of the self to be one with its self, while wanting is about aquisition, ownership, even when what is being owned is pained.

You would think the senseless difficulty of religion would be reason enough to abandon it but, truth be told, that is precisely the part of it that one misses the most. The pointless dumb interminable work of the spirit.

The title “the unbearable lightness of being” always made me uncomfortable. Now I’m wondering whether that isn’t because it was TRUE all along.

One cannot live blithely, or separately from the heaviness of things.

– elck

*

“even when what is being owned is pain”

– elck

*

‘Longing’ also has a pleasure/pain edge to it, as if a person might revel in it somewhat.

– Ivy

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it’s pleasure because longing sparks the imagination and away it runs. The fantasy is often enough.

the sylph

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Ms/Mr Sylph:

“The wanting binds you, but the longing sets you free,” shall we say? Sometimes, yes. Othertimes, I’m not so sure.

Though, now that I think on it, in that loevly quintipartite opus of his, Dave didn’t seem to make much of a distinction between “longing” and it’s cousin “wanting something real bad.” (“Real bad” in any sense of the words). So, there’s Hannah, desiring a child, and there’s Prince Karu who’s got the jones real bad for his own sister.

elck

*

Thanks for these very helpful comments.

But the thing, now, is whether “longing” and “wanting” are different things – that’s already more than one “thing/s”!

I’d say they both are and are not the same. (You know I always try to dance between an outright rejection of reductionism and a cautious acknowledgement of its power.) I have been using “wanting” to refer to shallower desires and “longing” for deeper ones, because I think usage reflects such a distinction. But we can certainly argue about the validity of such a distinction. In any case, as I have tried to show, the range of emotions included in this one word longing run the gamut from creative to destructive, enlightening to addictive to despair-inducing.

If I may go out on a limb for a moment, I’d like to suggest that one of the major ways in which institutionalized religion tends to get it wrong is in trying to design “one size fits all” ideologies and practices. If you take the attitude that religion is/should be MEDICINE, then clearly the message must be tailored to the needs of the seeker/patient. One person might find comfort in loss of control – and thus should be challenged to pursue a more disciplined path – while another tends to want to control everything – and thus would be better off with some version of the “watercourse way.”

One cannot live blithely, or separately from the heaviness of things. I agree.

‘Longing’ also has a pleasure/pain edge to it, as if a person might revel in it somewhat. Of course. (This postscript would’ve been stronger had I pointed that out).

it’s pleasure because longing sparks the imagination and away it runs. The fantasy is often enough.
But all fantasies must end – and then we are back with that heaviness elck spoke of, no?

Dave

*

For better or for worse, I took my cue from Mr. Hass: desire is full / of endless distances. The meaning changes somewhat if you pause at the end of the line, does it not? (Of course, poets revel in ambiguity. Japanese poetics recognizes and selects for words that do double duty, as “full” does here: they are called pivot words.)

Desire can seem full, sufficient. But in fact it is empty – or full of caesura, of the abyss, of the great wide open. Hence longing.

Dave

*

the heaviness will always be there. And it should be entertained but why let it control the psyche any longer than it’s necessary to “get a grip”…the spirit takes flight at will, at stimulae…let the imagination rule and be ever thankful for your faculties. Observe the present and get lost in it.

the sylph

*

I love talking about the impossible, the untalkable.
That we can shamelessly do so here is a chief pleasure of the Via.

(I’m saddened to see the number of blogs in this neighborhood that are taking down their comments boxes).

elck

*

Sylph: Amen!

elck – Thanks. But what else is there to talk about, really?

(I agree. I’m never quite sure what to do at a blog without comments. That’s one of the things i most like about the blogging medium – the way readers can become authors, and vice versa, the fact that we know we can be called to task for everything we write.)

Dave

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Yes but

dale

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sometimes I am crushed
trampled
burnt and scattered
with longing

It’s a little too easy to talk
Sometimes.

dale

*

( )

Dave

*

I think it’s interesting that the comment thread went more into the word heaviness and less into the preceeding word separately. I could be in a different space here but…

To me longing is simply the desire to be one with, rather than separate from. My version of this would be our soul longs to reconnect with the energy of all souls, that it was rended separate from by the birth of our existance. But you could also posit it is separation from the mother who we experienced our first moments of awakening inside of, or separation from our sense of true identity as culture pushes and pulls us away from our central spirit.

Then longing to me is about wanting reconnection, and wanting is about wishing to feel better when the reconnection has not happened, and religion is about telling people how to reconnect, and desire is wanting something to fill the hole left by the disconnection. Anything to distract us from being separate, whether it’s numbing or stuffing or deducting or compulsing, and the farther away we feel, the more addictive it becomes. I wonder if the pain in masochism isn’t the reminder that we must be connected for someone or something else to have created pain in our bodies or psyches?
On a side note, as much as I’ve tried to confront my biases about S&M practices, the ones where a lot of pain and humiliation is inflicted and the participants talk about the total trust strike me as simply a way for people to prove they are unworthy of being treated well, proving to themselves they deserve to be punished… because the people I’ve known in that community had huge self esteem issues and it didn’t seem to me that the community was healing those. But again, I am likely just biased.

susurra

*

I have a hard time venerating masochism. I engaged in my own forms of severe self-abnegation for far too long, and have had a little too much interaction with the world of SI (self-injurers). I don’t see masochistic practices as being that different, and I’d be inclined, again, to compare them more to the self-destructive impulses of caged animals than to something as clarifying as meditation. The essential drive might be similar (and, to a smaller extent, the focused intensity of the experience), but Westernized masochism is, I think, far more a distraction from an intolerable boredom or an intolerable fear than an searching for real insight.

My own experience, which others might construe as extreme self-discipline, was rather of a total loss of control into the ‘discipline.’ I would be inclined to believe that masochists feel something similar: they need that feeling of abasement and pain, and they need that fix. It’s not much a “technique for self discipline.” It’s true that the self is lost in these struggles, but in a horrible and twisted way. It’s hard to articulate: there’s a temporary reprieve, a release, from one’s being, but in the wrong direction. If I sound biased, it’s because I am: I’ve walked through that fire, and it’s not a Holy flame.

I am generalizing, though, and for that I apologize. I’ve also veered madly away from the direction of the other comments. So I’ll stop.

I do like, though, what susurra has to say about separateness and connection. I’d like to mention the importance of connection with others: masochistic communities would fill this need; too, we feel more than ever disconnected from those around us, from those with whom we share a country. No wonder longing is topical.

Siona

*

Susurra and Siona – thanks for the thoughtful remarks. I agree with most of what you have written here.

Eliade says all cultures have a myth of separation, a “fall from grace” if you will. This sense of separation from from the cosmos seems to be an integral part of human consciousness.

I would go so far as to say that it might be one way in which human consciousness differs from that of other animals – except that, as Siona rightly points out, caged animals and pets exhibit many human-like pathologies – including self-mutilation.

I’ve had friends who have talked enthusiastically about S&M experiences, but these were isolated transgressions, and in a social context (S&M parties), not habitual components of their day-to-day lives. But yeah, I haven’t made up my mind on the subject & don’t feel any great need to. Especially since I WANNA BE WHIPPED, RIGHT NOW!!

O.K., just kidding.

I definitely defer to Siona’s experience and insights here. I guess I should’ve made it clear in the essay that I was postulating a few possible mental states of masochists for the sake of the argument. I was trying to take on such a mindset, and see what it felt like. But I didn’t mean to suggest that the examples I gave covered all bases, or even that they were particularly representational.

AIM leader Russel Means, an Oglala Lakota, maintains that the origin of the Sun Dance lies in the belief that men should try to experience a pain comparable to what women go through in childbirth.

Re: veering, whatever gave you the idea that wasn’t welcome here?! Take another look at the yellow street sign at the top of the page. If you don’t veer, you’re dead!

Dave

*

On the subject of separation, Lorianne’s post of that title is a must-read.

Dave

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Longing (5): the narrow road

Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances.
Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”

*

Cue up Baaba Maal and Mansour Seck, “Djam Leeli” (“The Wayfarers”)

I want to begin this last installment with a salute to all casual or first-time readers: you who have just alighted briefly in the course of a Google search for something else entirely and are wondering, “What the hell’s all this, then?”, or you wanderers who have been whiling away a few hours in a maze of links. “Longing? You gotta be kidding! How can anyone blog longing? What’s to say?

“On the other hand, what’s not to say?”

This extended meditation/collation of texts was sparked by the close conjunction in my mind of two very dissimilar things. One was the Robert Hass quote with which I have been heading each installment. The other was a chilling series of graphic photos and journal entries purportedly from an S&M slave that I stumbled across online, just as some of you have now stumbled here. I don’t normally get too worked up thinking about what consenting adults might choose to do to each other in the privacy of their own homes. It’s a free country, right? What disturbed me about this site was the lucidity with which the self-described slave extolled her torture, humiliation, and loss of will.

One page contained a critique of desire that could almost have been written by an adherent of some more extreme world-denying religious sect – a modern-day Manichaean. Like most people, she said, I grew up in a soulless American suburb convinced that the key to happiness was to acquire more and more stuff and to indulge myself in every way possible. But I found that the more I fed my desires, the more insatiable they grew, and the unhappier I became. But since I found my master, I have become a completely new person. The person I used to be no longer exists, vanished along with all consideration of “happiness” or “fulfillment.” I no longer have any will or desires of my own apart from his. I am his whore, a possession for him to dispose of as he wishes. If he took me to the edge of a cliff and told me to jump, I would do so without a moment’s hesitation.

I’m paraphrasing because I can’t quite bring myself to go back there (the torture photos were kind of harsh). In the past I have encountered some equally disturbing blogs that explore these issues from both master and slave perspectives; they shouldn’t be hard to find if you’re curious.

The point is, a little while later when I read that poem by Hass, I had a bit of a “Eureka” moment and decided to launch what would be in effect a brief for unquenchable desire. I wanted to avoid moralizing as much as possible, concentrating instead on presenting a comprehensive epidemiology, if that’s the right word. Deciding which among untold thousands of applicable cases to include has been daunting. Many of the blogs I read (mole, Lekshe’s Mistake, The Coffee Sutras, the vernacular body and Nomen est Numen, among others) deal with themes of desire, suffering and impermanence on a regular basis, so I knew I could avoid the more obvious sources.

It’s not exactly an original subject. And as the 20th-century Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz maintained, it may be every poet’s most essential theme: “The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved,” he maintained. (English translations of his selected poems by Naomi Lazard have been published by Princeton University Press under the title The True Subject [1988].)

I guess if I had to articulate my own position, I would say that for societies or individuals to achieve health and harmony, they must seek a balance point between longing and satiety, transcendent and immanent forms of the divine. There must be a middle way, whether or not one follows the Buddha’s eightfold path. In this last installment, I want to celebrate the journey itself.

*

Cue up Bessie Smith, “Long Old Road”

Blues lyrics so often look flat and disappointing on the page. If you can’t actually hear Bessie Smith’s world-weary contralto balanced by Louis Armstrong’s horn, the drummer’s snare interpolated between the Empress’s phrases – call and response, I and Thou – then the words she happened to sing on that long-ago day at the beginning of the Great Depression might seem a little lacking. It would be like trying to intuit a tapestry merely from the warp on the loom.

The frank despair of “Long Old Road,” while it might conform to popular stereotypes about the blues by people unfamiliar with the music, is something rarely found in an art form that was intended, first and foremost, as catharsis – medicine, as so many blues performers have testified in recorded interviews. Blues music in the early and middle decades of the 20th century functioned as a kind of secular alternative to organized religion for African Americans struggling to escape the daily indignities of Jim Crow in the South and discrimination in the north. It was unusual for a singer to declare on record, as Smith did in one of the last recording sessions before her tragic and untimely death,

You can’t trust nobody, you might as well
be alone.
Found my long-lost friend, and I might as well
stayed at home.

It has always struck blues fans as darkly symbolic that Bessie Smith died in the heart of that vast, deltoid-shaped piece of floodplain known as the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, origin of what would become the most famous style of guitar blues. Actually, the Delta included several distinct musical traditions, but the one that people most identify with the region was invented in the environs of Clarksdale – the very place where Bessie Smith’s road reached its untimely end.

In the years following Bessie Smith’s death there were conflicting accounts of how she actually died. What is known is that after a late night performance somewhere in Mississippi, probably Natchez, Bessie headed for Memphis in a car driven by her boyfriend, Richard Morgan. In 1937 there were no expressways and Route 61 was a typical poorly lit, winding two-lane road. Near the outskirts of Clarksdale, in the early morning hours of that September day, their car, being driven at a high rate of speed, crashed into the back of a truck stopped on the side of the road.

A visit to this area two years ago finally gave me the images I needed to complete a poem I had been trying to write (and had even gotten published once, in an earlier version) for fifteen years.

LONG OLD ROAD
Bessie Smith, September 1937

From here to home an empty stretch
of Mississippi mud. Step on it,
driver. Ten years after the great flood
& everything still smells musty.
Could be
the Delta’s always like that–
overbearing sun fathering
cotton clear to the horizon,
rich black soil deeper than memory
& never a stone to throw.
The moody river & its serpent brood of bayous.

But I stay too long in any one place
& it heats up until I can hardly think
without boiling over, the fat
hits the fire & the whole
joint catches hell.

I need two bodies–the other
a refuge of Arctic relief for this
weary one, this jinxed & ginned
smoked glass-translucent skin
they spend a week’s wages to see
in the glare of gas lamps.
And the voice they skip revival for–
sure it’s mine. But the way
it takes hold of me sometimes
like a dog with a piece of old rag,
shakes me from head to foot,
I don’t know. That’s when I give
the word, hire a car
or hitch up with the next train out.

Keep moving. In all this flatness
I stand out like a bug.
But the moment I close my eyes
I’m stepping up to my house
back in Tennessee. With a sweet
soft absence of sound
I ease into the dark parlor,
my furs & silks whisper to the floor,
there’s the briefest of rattles as I slide
the deadbolt home.

*

Cue up Johnny Shines, “I Don’t Know”

Highway 61 was, even more than Route 66, a road to (relative) freedom. The northward migration of African Americans in the last century, flooding into the cities as economic refugees, was in many ways comparable to the earlier immigrations of peasants from Europe and China. U.S. Route 61 was the main north-south corridor between Mississippi and Chicago, and people, money, and music flowed in both directions. But even as some African American men were able finally to achieve a measure of security with a job from Henry Ford, their economic conditions remained still too marginal for many to provide for their wives or girlfriends, and those who had work as servants or cleaning ladies in the south were all too often unwilling to take their chances in a cold and alien north. In a country where employment was an essential accoutrement of manhood, the price for increased dignity and freedom was further instability in family relationships that had been fragile since slavery times.

This was the backdrop for Johnny Shines’ masterpiece, “I Don’t Know.” Again, while the lyrics in themselves are suggestive, one needs to hear Shines’ plaintive-yet-booming tenor, his understated slide guitar behind it. It is an ostensibly hopeful, even joyful, song with just a hint of melancholy about it – the opposite of “Long Old Road.”

Well I’m goin’ on the high road,
Gonna cross over on the eastern side. (2 x)
I’m gonna flag every passerby
Til someone give me a ride.

Well I’m goin’ to Chicago,
that’s what I’m gonna do. (2x)
Make a couple of paydays,
send back here after you.

When I’m gone, if you get lonesome
and you want to have some fun, (2x)
Just go on over to West Memphis, baby,
that’s where they barrelhouse all night long.

Shines grew up just south of Memphis in the northern tip of the Delta, and traveled all over the country playing music on street corners in the company of Robert Johnson. A moderately religious man, he never had much time for people who considered blues “the Devil’s music,” as he told an interviewer shortly before his death in 1992:

You want me to tell you where that all came from? It ain’t nothing but bullshit. That was told to us as a way of scaring us into never leaving the farm. Them overseers tried to prey on our religion, whenever they might see us playing guitar or mouth harp or drums or singing, they saw it as us trying to liberate ourselves, and they didn’t like it. Especially anyone who was running to another plantation to play a gig. We was freeing ourselves, and they couldn’t stand for that. So they told us that if we sang anything else but gospel music, we would die and go to hell and burn by fire and brimstone forever and all that mess. They even got our own colored preachers believing that stuff, so they preached it to us, too. Now, if a man had spent his life on earth in hell, he sure don’t wanna die and go to hell, so he changes his ways. A lot of black people got so scared to sing the blues, they would find an example within the town who was, say a bluesman, and they’d make him an outcast, call him the devil’s tool. And they invented folklore about blues musicians going to the crossroads at midnight and letting the devil himself come up and tune their guitar (laughing), and selling their soul to play the blues. It’s all a lie, just a plain lie. And when Robert made that song about ‘I went to the Crossroads and fell down on my knees/ asked the lord above have mercy/ save poor Bob if you please’ – well, that was proof to them that he done sold his soul! Boy, they really gave Robert hell in those church towns. They told him he would burn.

Then, everybody wants to know what exactly he was singin’ about in that song? It was just some old crossroads in Mississippi – I think it’s probably where the Southern crosses the Yazoo Dog [Railroad], up there in Moorehead. He was mocking the myth, more than he was fearing it.

Shines eventually got a factory job in Chicago. Despite a great voice and virtuoso command of the acoustic and electric guitar, he was unwilling to accept what he considered the humiliating demands of the recording industry. Only with his “rediscovery” by white blues fans in the late 60s did he finally enjoy a second career as a full-time musician, but he remained very much his own man. Like Bessie Smith, Shines put a premium on originality, refusing to adapt his style to conform to anyone’s stereotype, no matter how flattering. Greil Marcus described the effect of his music in a review in Rolling Stone: “Shines steps outside himself, considers his place in the world, draws you into his body, and then, still standing a few steps off, tells you where you are: where, for the moment you live . . . ”

SOUTH SIDE VIEW
homage to Johnny Shines

blue ribbon of tar runs by
my baby’s door where
I am bound

make a couple
of paydays
play it tight

write: here’s luck
you can bell the cat & clip
the eagle’s wing

sing: everybody
talkin bout heaven
aint goin there

prayer: in this city lord
there’s no horizon
where can I rest my eye

cry: baby
on You

*

Cue up the Sabri Brothers, “Kali Kamaliya Wale”

I’ve never been very good at separating the physical from the spiritual. The distinction strikes me as a little phony, despite a few, millennia-long traditions that assert an unbridgeable distance between the two. I’m not even sure that the great comparative religionist Mircea Eliade’s distinction between the sacred and the profane represents a universal truth. (Haven’t we had enough of universalizing ideologies by now?)

Nevertheless, to me, heaven remains a very potent word, more signpost than destination, pointing beyond the objectives born of shallow cravings. A strong flavor of heaven attaches to the holy aspiration itself:

Shaykh Nizam al-Din said that in Kaithal there was a saint whom they call Sufi Badhni. He was so completely ascetical that he went about totally naked. Shayk Nizam al-Din comments that according to Islamic law, any person who abstains from the minimal amount of food and water required to keep the body functioning, or who does not wear at least enough clothing to cover the body parts . . . is commiting a punishable offense, but Sufi Badhni was a saint of such high character that he was exempt from these restrictions. . . .

Sufi Badhni loved the life of prayer. He sat in the mosque in front of the mihrab and had no other occupation but offering prayers day and night. One day some ‘ulama’ came to see him, as many people used to. The shaykh queried the ‘ulama’: “Will there be prayer in paradise?” They answered: “Paradise is the abode of reward, where no desire will go unsatisfied, no need unfulfilled. Devotions are only necessary in this world.” When Sufi Badhni heard that there would be no prayer in paradise, he exclaimed: “I’ll have nothing to do with a heaven where there is no prayer,” and then he added something in Hindi not fit to repeat.

“The Life of Sufi Badhni,” Bruce B. Lawrence, in John Renard, ed., Windows on the House of Islam (University of California Press, 1998)

The poems of the 16th-century Vishnavite saint Mirabai – a Rajput princess who renounced her title and privileges to live as a wandering beggar – remind us that the attempt to locate God or heaven is in some sense a game; we might as well enjoy it.

I’m like
the cloth
that someone dyed.

I’ll go now,
play at hide
and seek to please

my lord,
wearing five
teasing colours.

When found,
I will become
one-hued with light.

With lovers
away, girls write
line upon line.

My love,
he is here
inside.

He does not leave,
he doesn’t
need to arrive.

Says Meera, I gaze
at the path day and night.

(Shama Futehally, tr., In the Dark of the Heart: Songs of Meera, HarperCollins, 1994)

*

Cue up Toshiro Mayuzumi, “Mandala Symphony”

What about pilgrimage, then? What is being enacted when, after many hardships and reversals, the pilgrims finally arrive at the threshold of the very image of heaven – right on earth?

The peyoteros assembled in a line, in their proper order, facing the ever-brightening eastern sky while Ramón chanted, prayed, and gestured with his plumes, until he directed them to set down their bundles. Ramón, at the head of the line, then beckond forward the first pilgrim, Carlos. Ramón squatted beside the largest water hole and taking up some in his gourd bowl removed Carlos’ hat and poured water into it. He then touched both of Carlos’ eyes with his plumes, sprinkled water on his hed, and had him drink that remaining in the bowl. The ritual varied somewhat for the primeros [first-time pilgrims]. Ramón took more time and care with them, praying over them longer. After they had drunk the Sacred Water instead of sending them immediately back to their places in line he removed their blindfolds and urged them to gaze up and behold the sacred place to which they had returned as gods. He pointed out the important features of the landscape, the places the gods had stopped and rested, eaten, sung, or talked with the animals while traveling back to their homeland. Especially affecting were Ramón’s ministrations to [his wife] Lupe at this time. He carefully led her from her place to the water and she remained motionless for a moment after he had removed her blindfold. He bade her to lift her eyes, to behold the place of the Ancient Ones, where it all began, and she did so slowly, almost reluctantly. The sun struck her face fully. She seemed transfixed and tears spread evenly down the wrinkles of her rapturous face. Seeing her thus no one could help but know that she found the Sacred Land as beautiful as she had been told all her life. . . .

Offerings were then spread out by each pilgrim, lined up, and displayed . . . With great care, each peyotero laid out or held heavenward his treasures, displaying them to the ascending sun. Impassioned prayers by Ramón told the gods that these were the offerings being brought for the hikuri. Ramón drew from his bags tortillas which he blended in his gourd bowl with some of the Sacred Water, stirring the mixture with the end of his candle, and then placed some of the resultant mixture in each pilgrim’s mouth. This was the sacred food of the First People. All prayed aloud but independently with great emotion, weeping and shouting, waving plumes and feathers and candles to the sky and in the four directions, pointing out the beauty of their gifts to the gods. Even the shyest and youngest among them, Victoria and Pablo, were outspoken and animated, imploring the deities to give them success in their quest.

The mood changed after the consumption of the sacred food. Laughter and shouts of joy replaced the weeping and praying, this because the “deities” had glimpsed their homeland and had been promised a successful return and peyote hunt. There was now much capering and cavorting. Francisco leaped about the springs like a rabbit, dazzling everyone with his agility. He had the gift of surprising people usually by looking one moment like a wizened fragile old man who would break if he moved, then suddenly and without warning leaping straight up in the air or dancing a little jig without reason. The bottles and gourds were brought out and everyone moved among the springs to gather the Sacred Water . . .

(Barbara G. Myerhoff, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians, Cornell University Press, 1974)

*

Cue up Bela Bartok, “String Quartet No. 5, Movement IV (Andante)”

The months and days are wayfarers in eternity – wrote the aging poet-priest, echoing a long-ago preface to a poem by Li Bo – and as another year comes around it, too, turns vagabond. Those who float away their lives on boats or arrive on the threshold of old age leading a horse by the bit – traveling is a constant for them; they are at home wherever they end up. Many are the worthies who, in centuries past, met their deaths on the road, and for my part, it’s been years now since I first found myself unable to watch a solitary cloud drifting on the wind without succumbing to an aimless longing. Last year I wandered down along the coast, and in autumn when I returned to my hut along the river and swept out the cobwebs, I found the year already drawing rapidly to a close.

With the new year came skies filled with springtime haze, and I thought about crossing the Shirakawa Barrier into the far north. I became so possessed by wanderlust, it was as if the god of travelers himself had taken hold of me, and I couldn’t keep my mind on a single task.

So I patched up my tattered underwear, strung new cords on my bamboo rain hat, and had three moxa treatments on my legs. I couldn’t get the thought of the moon at Matsushima out of my head. I sold my patch of land and moved into temporary quarters at Sampu’s villa. When I left, I hung a poem on a post in my hut. It began,

Kusa no to mo sumikawara yo zo hina no ie.

Even a thatched hut with one turn of the wheel can become a house for dolls.

– Matsuo Basho, Oku no Hosomichi, “Narrow Road to the Far North” (1690)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Longing (4): mindfulness

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Longing: Anthology and Meditation

Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances.
Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”

1. Whale souls

Silent reading, as we know it in the West, is a relatively recent phenomenon, says Ivan Illich, popularized only in the 12th century by the influential French abbot Hugh of St. Victor. Prior to that time, even a monk reading alone in his cell would sound the words out. How else could their full power be felt?

The origin of silent prayer is not so easy to pinpoint. The practice of meditation in one form or another is probably as old as the hunter’s profession. Such meditations – of necessity silent, so as not to spook the game – need not be the especial province of men, either. A while back I quoted Tom Lowenstein (Ancient Land, Sacred Whale, FSG, 1993) about the bowhead hunt as formerly practiced by the Inuit of Tikigaq, in North Alaska. The male and female skinboat owners (umialik) had equally potent roles in visualizing and conjuring the prey animal:

In contrast to her “Raven” husband’s freedom on the sea, the woman umialik stayed at home in her iglu and did nothing for most of the whale hunt. This, in essence, was her mythic role. Secluded and overtly idle like the uiluaqtaq of the story, the umialik woman was completely passive. . . . Within this inertia lay shamanistic power. How this functioned may be seen in the umialik’s parallel actions.

The woman’s springtime ritual in fact started on the sea-ice. On the first day of the hunt, when the male crew left Tikigaq, the woman walked ahead to the open water. With the help of the woman the crew would have found a good place to wait, and the woman lay down on the ice with her head pointing toward Tikigaq while the men embarked and pushed off from the ice. After travelling a short distance the steersman brought his boat round and returned to the ice-edge. Silently, the harpooner leaned over the prow, dipped his weapon in the water opposite the woman and then touched her parka. When she had been “struck”, the woman got up and, without looking back, walked home.

The moment she reached her iglu the woman ceased activity, and for the rest of the hunt sat passively on the sleeping bench. . . . While her posture on the ice had resembled the rising whale and the position of her head indicated the direction from which the whale must come, woman had been the whale’s body. In her ritual tranquility she now enacted the whale’s soul. Not only did she transmit to the whales the generous passivity that whales were supposed to feel towards their hunters, but she already was the whale’s soul, resident within her Tikigaq iglu, suspended between the conditions of life and death that the hunt counterpoised and made sacred.

It is difficult for most of us to grasp the depth of affection one might feel toward an Animal whose body is not only food but also the Land itself. How the overtly active man and the overtly passive woman together contrive to weave a net of longing for the beloved animal was at the heart of the annual drama of the Tikigaq Inuit.

Quiet as the woman remains, she and her husband are in balanced partnership. . . . But the whale brought home through the shared operation implies a third partner in the myth-role. This third partner is the land itself. Land, like the woman, is externally quiet but dynamic within. And like all symbols of the whale hunt the land remains ambiguous. . . . Tikigaq [peninsula] is primal sea-beast, its iglus microcosmic versions of the whale and the sea-beast. When a Tikigaq harpooner strikes the land whale stirs; when the katak [iglu entrance hole] gives birth with the death of a bowhead the whale in the katak is both Tikigaq nuna [land], and bowhead, and just katak.

As Lowenstein’s informants put it:

Samaruna said:
These small whales, inutuqs,
small round fat ones
come to us from down there,
from their country south of us.

Asatchaq:
The women sit at home.
They are whale souls in their iglus.
The whales listen and sing.
They hear Tikigaq singing.

Samaruna:
Listen to the north wind!
Listen to the sea-ice!
Listen to the inutuq
rising, breathing!

2. A mindful god

According to Jewish tradition, silent prayer was invented by a woman.

Now there was a certain man of Ramathaimzophim, of mount Ephraim, and his name was Elkanah, the son of Jeroham, the son of Elihu, the son of Tohu, the son of Zuph, an Ephrathite. And he had two wives; the name of the one was Hannah, and the name of the other Peninnah: and Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children.

And this man went up out of his city yearly to worship and to sacrifice unto the LORD of hosts in Shiloh. And the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, the priests of the LORD, were there. And when the time was that Elkanah offered, he gave to Peninnah his wife, and to all her sons and her daughters, portions. But unto Hannah he gave a worthy portion; for he loved Hannah: but the LORD had shut up her womb.

And her adversary [i.e. Peninnah] also provoked her sore, for to make her fret, because the LORD had shut up her womb. And as he did so year by year, when she went up to the house of the LORD, so she provoked her; therefore she wept, and did not eat. Then said Elkanah her husband to her, Hannah, why weepest thou, and why eatest thou not, and why is thy heart grieved? Am not I better to thee than ten sons?

So Hannah rose up after they had eaten in Shiloh, and after they had drunk.

Now Eli the priest sat upon a seat by a post of the temple of the LORD.

And she was in bitterness of soul, and prayed unto the LORD, and wept sore. And she vowed a vow, and said, O LORD of hosts, if thou wilt indeed look on the affliction of thine handmaid, and remember me, and not forget thine handmaid, but wilt give unto thine handmaid a man child, then I will give him unto the LORD all the days of his life, and there shall no razor come upon his head.

And it came to pass, as she continued praying before the LORD, that Eli marked her mouth. Now Hannah, she spake in her heart; only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard: therefore Eli thought she had been drunken. And Eli said unto her, How long wilt thou be drunken? Put away thy wine from thee. And Hannah answered and said, No, my lord, I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit: I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but have poured out my soul before the LORD. Count not thine handmaid for a daughter of Belial: for out of the abundance of my complaint and grief have I spoken hitherto.

Then Eli answered and said, Go in peace: and the God of Israel grant thee thy petition that thou hast asked of him. And she said, Let thine handmaid find grace in thy sight. So the woman went her way, and did eat, and her countenance was no more sad.

And they rose up in the morning early, and worshipped before the LORD, and returned, and came to their house to Ramah: and Elkanah knew Hannah his wife; and the LORD remembered her.

Wherefore it came to pass, when the time was come about after Hannah had conceived, that she bare a son, and called his name Samuel, saying, Because I have asked him of the LORD. And the man Elkanah, and all his house, went up to offer unto the LORD the yearly sacrifice, and his vow. But Hannah went not up; for she said unto her husband, I will not go up until the child be weaned, and then I will bring him, that he may appear before the LORD, and there abide for ever. And Elkanah her husband said unto her, Do what seemeth thee good; tarry until thou have weaned him; only the LORD establish his word.

So the woman abode, and gave her son suck until she weaned him. And when she had weaned him, she took him up with her, with three bullocks, and one ephah of flour, and a bottle of wine, and brought him unto the house of the LORD in Shiloh: and the child was young. And they slew a bullock, and brought the child to Eli. And she said, Oh my lord, as thy soul liveth, my lord, I am the woman that stood by thee here, praying unto the LORD. For this child I prayed; and the LORD hath given me my petition which I asked of him. Therefore also I have lent him to the LORD; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the LORD. And he worshipped the LORD there.

Thus the King James Bible, 1 Samuel 1. For Hannah’s song of thanksgiving – model for Miriam’s song, the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) – let’s turn to the Anchor Bible translation by P. Kyle McCarter, Jr.

[Hannah] said:

My heart exults in Yahweh!
My horn is raised by my god!
My mouth is stretched over my enemies!
I rejoice in my vindication.
For there is no holy one like Yahweh,
And no mountain like our god!
Do not speak haughtily
Or let arrogance out of your mouth.
For Yahweh is a mindful god,
And a god who balances his actions:
The bows of the mighty are broken,
While the feeble are girded with armor;
The sated have hired out for bread,
While the hungry are fattened on food;
The childless wife has borne seven,
While the mother of many sons is bereaved.
It is Yahweh who slays and quickens,
Who sends down to Sheol and brings up.
It is Yahweh who makes poor and makes rich,
Who debases and also exalts;
Who raises the poor from the dust,
From the scrap heaps lifts the needy,
To give them a seat with noblemen
And grant them a chair of honor.
For the straits of the earth are Yahweh’s . . .

3. Red wedding

Behold, a female anthropologist married a god, a warrior diety of a people doubly exiled: first from Africa, then from Haiti. Like the god of Israel in exile ramifying into the ten-fold sefirot, this god too has subdivided.

As Sen Jak Majè (Saint James the Elder), Ogou is a “man of war” who fights for what is right and just. As Ogou Panama, he is a pèsònaj (an important person) who demands to be treated with ceremony and deference. As Ogou Ferray, he is fierce and uncompromising. As Ogou Badagri, he is shy, handsome, brave and loyal. Yet, as Ogou Yamson, he is an unreliable drunkard who finds power in booze and swaggering talk; and, as Ag&#232ou, he is a liar and beggar. And when Ogou is called by the names Achade or Shango (the two are sometimes conflated into one character), he is said to be a sorceror.
(Karen McCarthy Brown: Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, University of California Press, 1991)

There are many more Ogou besides these, says Brown. What qualities unite them?

Ogou teaches that to live one must fight. Pride, endurance, self-assertion, discipline, and a firm commitment to justice are qualities that bring success. But in one turn of the screw, pride can become braggadocio, endurance can become stubbornness, self-assertion fades into mere bullying, and discipline is transformed into tyranny. An overly developed sense of justice, one that is tempered neither by humor nor by graceful resignation, can lead to suicidal rage. . . . Because the constructive and destructive parts of Ogou’s character are so close together, none of the various Ogou is good or evil, right or wrong, in a simple, unqualified way. Each contains his own paradoxes of personality, which are teased out in possession-performance and in song. In July of 1979, for example, [Brown’s priestess] Alourdes’s community sang a lively song for all the Ogou:

Ki-ki-li-ki, o-ewa!
Papa Ogou, tou piti kon sa.
Papa Ogou, anraje.

Cock-a-doodle doo!
Papa Ogou, all children are like that.
Papa Ogou, enraged.

Such lean phrasing, replete with double and triple entendre, is characteristic of Vodou songs. From one perspective, Ogou is counseled in this song to show forbearance toward his children, his followers. From another, Ogou is a strutting banty rooster who throws childish tantrums when he cannot have his way.

As with the storm-god Yahweh’s evolution into the LORD of Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity, when the African gods crossed the ocean, they “submerged their connections to the natural world and elaborated their social messages.” But they did not at the same time retreat into an ever-more remote heaven, accessible only to true believers and only in the afterlife. Quite the opposite: the gods became more down-to-earth and accessible, entering directly into the bodies of their followers for frequent dramatic performances that mingled high seriousness and low comedy. And whereas the People of the Book stress the believer’s inner intention, all one needs to bring to the Vodou spirits (in addition to the appropriate offerings) is an open mind. “Try it and see if it work for you,” the priestess Alourdes urges her clients.

Vodou practitioners have little use for abstractions. “Vodou seldom halts its kinaesthetic and sensory drama to force its wisdom into concept or precept; proverbs, anecdotes, ancestral tales, and songs are the only vehicles subtle and flexible enough to cradle the messages when the truths of Vodou are put into words,” Brown notes. In this respect, it resembles indigenous and village-based religions the world over. In some sense, can we not agree with the ancient Chinese philosophers who argued that when religion has to promulgate formal precepts, it’s simply a sign that society has entered a crisis phase, a breakdown in communal norms? Viewed from the ethnocentric perspective of inhabitants of an urbanized civilization, we tend to view “tribal” religions as earlier stages in a progressive evolution leading (of course) to us, and perhaps beyond. But which kind of religion tends more closely to reflect the true, mind-boggling complexity of nature? Is the desert- or alpine-dweller’s longing for transcendent Godhead, moksha or nirvana automatically superior to the Vodou priestess’s regular experiences of immanence within a rainforest-like profusion of sacred roles?

But of course, there’s no reason to see transcendence and immanence as necessarily opposed; Haitians certainly don’t. Virtually all Vodou devotees consider themselves good Catholics. They would disagree strongly with my use of the term “god” for Ogou – he is considered a spirit.

Bondye (God) is singular and supreme in Haitian Vodou. He is a deity with roots in the Christian god as well as in the so-called high gods of West Africa. Yet in the Haitian view of things, Bondye, like his African models, rarely gets involved with individual human lives. Attention to the everyday drama of life is the work of his “angels,” the Vodou spirits. . . .

In Vodou, as in virtually all religions, “the spirits select their special devotees, not the reverse.” In fact, I suggest that if we are to draw any meaningful distinction whatsoever between religion and magic, this question of who selects whom would make an excellent criterion. The sorcerer commands and attempts to exert control over the animating forces of the universe with little concern for their own sovereignty or well-being. The religious person petitions, offers sacrifice, bows in thanksgiving, offers devotion. The religious person partakes; the sorceror consumes. For in many, many cultures the relationship to the sacred finds symbol and expression in the most essential forms of union: eating and making love.

Within Alourdes’s group of special spirits, one stands out. He is her mèt tèt (the master of her head), Ogou Badagri. But the dominance of Ogou Badagri in her life does not go unchecked. . . . For example, even if a situation has called out the aggression of the Ogou in Alourdes, Gede can possess her and put the matter in an entirely different light through his iconoclastic humor. . . .

Because Alourdes has gone through the Vodou marriage to Ogou Badagri, she calls him her “husband.” She sets aside one night a week for him. On this night, she receives the handsome soldier in dreams, and no human lover shares her bed. . . .

The most striking part of Ogou Badagri’s character is his ability to endure in the face of trials that would break many others. . . . Forsaking attack, Alourdes, like Badagri, chooses wakefulness. She draws her power around her like a cloak, holding it close to her body. She does not dream of extending herself outward and conquering the world. Rather, she controls what experience has taught her she is able to control – herself.

The anthropologist too has Ogou around her head. From the very beginning of her involvement with Vodou, she says, “every priest or priestess who chose to make a diagnosis told me that Papa Ogou was my mèt tèt.”

Although I had witnessed many Vodou marriages and been fascinated by them, I originally had no intention of going through the ritual myself. Then, one day in 1980 when I was alone in my apartment and full of rage (I had some things to be angry about at that period of my life), I found myself muttering, “Stop trying to make the anger go away. It only makes it worse. It’s yours. Marry it!” I picked up the phone and called Alourdes.

Brown resolved to do, as she put it, “fieldwork on my own psyche.” Alourdes performed divination, diagnosing her as suffering from a blockage of will or energy. She thinks too much, acts too timidly. As Brown explains, “a life of energy or flow” is the Vodou ideal. “The goal of all Vodou ritualizing is to echofe (heat things up) so that people and situations shift and move, and healing transformations can occur.”

The marriage took place the next month at Ogou’s regularly scheduled July birthday party. Around two o’clock in the morning, when the songs summoning Ogou began, I excused myself from the twenty-five or so people gathered around Alourdes’s sumptuous altar tables. I went upstairs to change into my wedding clothes – a bright red sundress purchased especially for the occasion and, on my head, a red satin scarf. When I came down the stairs half an hour later, everyone oohed and aahed over my fine attire. Everyone, that is, except Papa Ogou.

He had mounted Alourdes in my absence, and I found him decked out in his own finery, his red velvet military jacket with the gold epaulets. But Ogou ignored me. I stood by patiently while he talked to one person after another without acknowledging my presence. No matter how I maneuvered, he always managed to keep his back to me.

Everyone was getting nervous. One woman said, “Papa Ogou, your beautiful bride is here, behind you. Don’t you want to talk to her?” Ogou ignored the question. Then a man whispered in my ear, “Go on!” and gave me a shove in front of Ogou. The spirit looked at me with a cold eye. “What do you want?” he asked. I found my voice. “I am here to marry you. You promised you would marry me. You have made me wait a long time. I am ready.” Papa Ogou threw back his head and laughed. It was a deep, rich laugh. “Begin the ceremony!” he shouted, and, taking my arm, he propelled me toward the largest of the altar tables. Once again, Ogou had taught me the warrior’s lesson: know what you want and fight for it.

4. Pronouncing no name

The African American poet Lucille Clifton composed a moving series of poems on her husband Fred’s death from leukemia at the age of 49. They are included in her book Next (BOA Editions, 1987). Toward the end, Lucille’s own voice has become submerged in the voice of her dying husband:

leukemia as dream/ritual

it is night in my room.
the woman beside me is dying.
a small girl stands
at the foot of my bed.
she is crying and carrying wine
and a wafer.
her name is the name i would have given
the daughter i would have liked to have had.
she grieves for herself and
not for the woman.
she mourns the future and
not the past.
she offers me her small communion.
i roll the wafer and wine on my tongue.
i accept my body. i accept my blood.
eat she whispers. drink and eat.

*

chorus: lucille

something is growing in the strong man.
it is blooming, they say, but not a flower.
he has planted so much in me. so much.
i am not wiling, gardener, to give you up to this.

*

the death of fred clifton
11/10/84
age 49

i seemed to be drawn
to the center of myself
leaving the edges of me
in the hands of my wife
and i saw with the most amazing
clarity
so that i had not eyes but
sight,
and, rising and turning
through my skin,
there was all around not the
shapes of things
but oh, at last, the things
themselves

*

“i’m going back to my true identity”
fjc 11/84

i was ready to return
to my rightful name.
i saw it hovering near
in blazoned script
and, passing through fire,
i claimed it. here
is a box of stars
for my living wife.
tell her to scatter them
pronouncing no name.
tell her there is no deathless name
a body can pronounce.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Of fools and poets

A few days ago in The Middlewesterner, Tom was describing a minor discovery he made while visiting one of his target communities, L’Anse, Michigan:

That’s how they get the logs on those log trucks to look as if they have been loaded with such care! I see a fellow atop his load, sawing the logs to an even length along the driver’s side.

If my wife were with me, I suppose she’d say “I knew they did that.” Well, I didn’t know. She understands the world far better than I do. I think when poets like me are born, they’re not given the same program that everyone else gets. We don’t get a program coming in; we don’t get a score card; hell, they don’t even tell us what the game is.

This is a sentiment I can identify with wholeheartedly. My own incomprehension of the way things work remains acute, hard as I’ve tried to educate myself. For example, though licensed to drive, I rarely do, because I find it almost impossible to keep my eyes on the road – that’s where all the boring stuff is. (After reading Tom’s blog for a little while, I concluded that the only reason he avoids accidents is that he lives in a part of the country where the roads are flat and straight. Also, he seems to pull over every few miles to look around more thoroughly.)

My Dad and I often have opposite views about how or whether to carry out any given task. When, several years ago, I was redoing the guest bedroom, I thought that the thing to do would be to paint the walls white and turn them into a permanent record of our guests. We’d keep a supply of crayons in the room and invite everyone who stayed there to draw something, whatever they liked. I couldn’t – and still can’t – see a darn thing wrong with that idea. However, I wasn’t paying for the materials, and I don’t own the house. So the walls ended up papered, instead.

Actually, my Dad frequently solicits my opinion before doing a job, and we’ll joke about the likelihood that I will automatically disagree with whatever he says, and that he will go ahead and do it his way after hearing me out. But sometimes one of my ideas out of left field will strike his fancy. And sometimes, too, his more linear approach turns out to have been twice as crazy as anything I could’ve come up with, and I get to pick on him about it forever after.

It’s not so much that poets are fools, I think, as that natural-born fools are drawn to the practice of poetry and other creative arts. It wasn’t always so. Well into the Middle Ages, the court jester remained a very different person from the bard; the former was allowed far more leeway to criticize and satirize than the latter. Bards are the keepers of tradition and the eulogists of national and heroic exploits, and they tend to identify strongly with the interests of their patrons. (I use the present tense because this is still the case with the griots of West Africa.) I’ve always felt that had we grown up in a more traditional society, it would be my older brother, with his capacious memory and facility with languages, who’d be the poet. I would have been the fool. It’s only since the Romantic Revolt that creative artists have been able to make a virtue out of “marching to a different drummer,” as Thoreau put it. And in the 20th century, it became all but unthinkable for a poet in a free society not to stand with the downtrodden and the oppressed.

If some contemporary poets still act as griots, it is for social movements rather than for individuals: thus, for example, Adrienne Rich (feminism), Gary Snyder (environmentalism), Martin Espada (Puerto Rican nationalism), Linda Hogan (American Indian rights and consciousness), Mark Doty (gay rights and consciousness), etc. But the analogy is weak, because each of these poets is also a strong individualist with her or his own, unique perspective; they are hardly spokespeople. In fact, I think that the bards and poets laureate of centuries past would find their strongest analogue in the modern P.R. flunky.

I should really read up on the history of court jesters. Rulers have always sought the council of sages. When, where and why did it first become necessary to balance the influence of the wise by consulting a fool?

The authors of the Bible were unconfused about the difference between the wise man and the fool. “A thistle got stuck in a drunkard’s hand, and a proverb in the mouth of a fool,” says Proverbs 26:9 in James Kugel’s translation. Kugel, a noted Old Testament scholar, goes on to explain:

A fool, in the world of wisdom, is not someone who is stupid any more than a “sage” or “wise man” is necessarily brilliant. But just as the wise man is someone who walks the path of wisdom – following the canons of restraint and patience that were the pillars of the wisdom outlook – so the fool is someone who does not follow the wisdom outlook, who does not live in accordance with wisdom’s insights. Indeed, “foolish” and “wicked’ are virtual synonyms in Proverbs, as are “wise” and “righteous.” And just as humanity, according to the severe, abstract spirituality of this worldview, is uncompromisingly divided into the righteous and the wicked, so it is divided between the wise and the foolish, with no room in between for intermediates.
(The Great Poems of the Bible: A Reader’s Companion with New Translations, The Free Press, 1999)

Only with the great disillusionments of the Common Era, perhaps – the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, Christ’s failure to return, Imam Al-Askari’s failure to return – came the recognition that wisdom and foolishness were not so far apart, and that a fool might be worth listening to. Probably, too, some of the age-old Chinese traditions about crazy, eccentric and inebriated sages traveled west along the Silk Road. Be that as it may, each of the would-be world religions acquired its so-called holy fools. Just the other day I picked up a remaindered copy of Idries Shah’s The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin (Penguin Arkana, 1993), Sufi teaching stories credited to, or told about, the most famous fool of them all.

Nasrudin was a real person, a Naqshbandi Sufi from somewhere in Central Asia. (Click here for a lousy photo of a public statue of Mullah Nasrudin astride his donkey in downtown Bukhara, and follow the link to a site with some pretty good versions of Nasrudin stories.) Many of the sayings attributed to him are also credited to others, though, and it’s almost impossible to glean a coherent biography from the morass of inconsistent traditions about his life. According to one tradition, he even served as a court advisor to the conqueror Tamerlane. Another tradition has him serving as a judge:

The Mulla was made a magistrate. During his first case the plaintiff argued so persuasively that he exclaimed:
‘I believe you are right!’
The clerk of the Court begged him to restrain himself, for the defendant had not been heard yet.
Nasrudin was so carried away by the eloquence of the defendant that he cried out as soon as the man had finished his evidence:
‘I believe you are right!’
The clerk of the court could not allow this.
‘Your honor, they cannot both be right!’
‘I believe you are right!’ said Nasrudin.

In Nasrudin’s unique brand of foolishness, it’s not always immediately obvious that any serious point is being made.

Nasrudin entered the teahouse and declaimed:
‘The Moon is more useful than the Sun.’
‘Why, Mulla?’
‘We need the light more during the night than during the day.’

Though his humor was sometimes directed against the arrogant and the deluded, most often Nasrudin sought to teach by counter-example, as it were. Thus, while their perspectives may have been similar, Nasrudin’s approach was much subtler than Diogenes’. Instead of scorning others, he holds himself up for scorn. (As a sometime advisor to a despot, this may have been a simple survival strategy.)

‘I can see in the dark,’ boasted Nasrudin one day in the teahouse.
‘If that is so, why do we sometimes see you carrying a light through the streets?’
‘Only to prevent other people from colliding with me.’

The problem with being a sage or guru, it seems to me, is that other people would want to emulate you – to their and your own ultimate undoing. As the Sufis recognize more than anyone else, it’s all too easy to get up caught up in the inner logic of one’s own stories or beliefs, and forget that they most likely have little to do with the true Story.

The Mulla was walking down the village street deep in thought, when some urchins began to throw stones at him. He was taken by surprise, and besides he was not a big man.
‘Don’t do that, and I will tell you something of interest to you.’
‘All right, what is it? But no philosophy.’
‘The Emir is giving a banquet to all comers.’
The children ran off towards the Emir’s house as Nasrudin warmed to his theme, the delicacies and the delights of the entertainment . . .
He looked up and saw them disappearing into the distance. Suddenly he tucked up his robes and started to sprint after them. ‘I’d better go and see,’ he panted to himself, ‘because it might be true after all.’

Laugh all you want, but that sounds very much like something I would do.

*

Sir, I admit your general rule:
That every poet is a fool.
Though you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.
(attributed variously to Alexander Pope, Matthew Prior and Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

My eyes have been playing tricks on me lately. Yesterday I was walking across the lawn under the black walnut trees just as a breeze picked up. The yellow leaves started raining down, and I stood watching for a couple moments, entranced. One of the leaves had other ideas – it got to the ground, then took off again, twirling across the lawn. I finally realized it was actually a sulfur butterfly.

Then I took a detour through the shed yard to check on the progress of a clump of gorgeous New England asters. I’m intending to transplant them into my front garden after they die down. A couple of bees were busy pollinating. No wait – yellow jackets. No again: syrphid flies. Bees don’t hover. (You need two wings for that – four’s too many.)

Well, O.K., that’s actually a pretty common mistake; evolution has seen to that. But on Thursday, I thought I saw a college student with two heads. I had just descended the front steps of the library on Penn State’s University Park campus. I noticed a person or persons sitting with his/their back(s) to me on the lawn off to the right, with two heads that seemed almost fused together. My prurient interests were piqued, and I slowed down for a better look. I had to almost stop walking to verify that there was, in fact, only a single torso. Finally, I realized I was looking at a single head with a hell of a lot of very springy hair tied in a ponytail. The rounded ponytail was fully as large as the head.

Probably none of this will make it into a poem. Nor does it mean much of anything, I think. And now that I’ve put it out on the web, I feel my obligations to it are pretty much at an end. If you need any of it – a second head, I mean, or a leaf that turns into a butterfly – you’re more than welcome.

I like the web. You can find all sorts of things you’ve always wanted but not very much. It’s a great place to search for lost keys – not because there are more keys, but because there’s greater visibility. Sometimes I even think up things to lose, just for the joy of looking.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Bandana

I’m still working my way slowly through Bruce Kapferer’s tour de force on Sri Lankan sorcery practices, The Feast of the Sorcerer. I share with Kapferer the view that an accurate understanding of magic and sorcery offers more valuable insights into the nature of communities and the formation of human consciousness than any amount of social or psychological theory.

Almost every one of Kapferer’s generalizations jibes with what I’ve read about sorcery or witchcraft in other, very different societies (Pueblo, Nahuat, Songhai, Herero, Melanesia). It’s interesting to see how sorcery fits into a Buddhist worldview. The major word for the condition of being ensorcelled is huniyam or suniyam, also the name for the demonic deity most closely associated with sorcery practices. Its derivation is unclear, but

Aduras (exorcists) and some shrine priests (kapuralas) indicate that it is borrowed from the Tamil cuniyam. The lexical definition of this word, and its derivative compounds, carries many of the meanings of Sinhalese ritual and everyday usage: for example, such senses as barrenness, defilement, ruin. Some exorcists tell me that the word comes from the Sanskrit sunya, “void,” and this has similar meaning in Tamil, as, for example, “nonexistence, vacuum, nonentity, defilement.” The notion of sunya has much more resonance with the existential nature of sorcery elaborated in sorcery and antisorcery rites and in the experiences of sorcery victims.

Note that the very ambiguity of the concept of “void” serves its purpose here. The “negative emptiness” of nihilism – a very different, perhaps opposite goal from the “positive emptiness” of nirvana – is of course what is invoked, because

The ultimate effect of sorcery is the radical extinction or obliteration of the victim or the whole circumstance of the victim’s existence, the social relations and the means whereby victims sustain their life world. The fear that people have of sorcery is that it strikes at both the victim and the ground of the victim’s being. The major myths and rites of sorcery express themes of cosmic destruction and renewal. They indicate the condition of sorcery as being a virtual return to the void from which existence springs. Sorcery projects death, actual physical extinction, which is also a chief metaphor for the anguish of sorcery as a kind of death in the midst of life, a living death. The extinction threatened by sorcery is not a release from existence, the source of suffering, as in the achievement of nibbana (nirvana), but an obliteration in the continuity of existence. Again in the myths and major antisorcery rites, the force of the sorcerer and of sorcery is ranged against the Buddha teaching and the ultimate release from existence and suffering. The figure with whom sorcery and the destructive powers of Suniyama are often associated with is Devadatta, a kinsman and follower of Gautama Buddha who broke with his teaching.

“An obliteration in the continuity of existence”: whereas in other societies the ultimate horror involves simple erasure of being (and descendents), the Buddhist influence here makes the situation more complex and – I would have to say – perhaps more accurate. Whether one lives in a relatively atomized, modern urban environment or in a more traditional village setting, one’s reality as a social being arises from one’s participation in a complex web of interactions and attachments. The trick is to interact without getting too caught up in one’s attachments, without surrendering to negative emotions like envy and jealousy, which, in some circumstances, can ensorcell all by themselves. “People may not be aware of the dangers of their talk or realize the envy of their thoughts, but such action can nonetheless cause harm and in effect is sorcery.” Attention and intention are everything.

The notion of binding or tying (bandana,* vb. bandinava) is basic to sorcery action. Sorcerers tie their charms to their victims or bind their victims to their destructive work. The idea of binding or tying has strong associations of union with the sorcerer and of constraint to the terms of a relation dictated by the sorcerer. The term hira bandana (tight or marriage bond) is a sorcery trope that indicates the controlling intimacy of the destructive sorcerer and his victim. Sorcery is infused with the metaphors of sexuality, and these express the intense intimacy of sorcery’s relations as well as its capacity to strike at the core of generative being. . . .

The bond of sorcery limits and denies life. In effect, it is an antirelation, and in the rites to overcome sorcery, the aim is to cut (kapanava) such bonds. . . . The ultimate object of [antisorcery] rites is to tie or bind victims back into the life-regenerative aspects of their life world and to break the life-threatening bond that sorcerers and their demonic agents have established with them. Indeed, the bonds of the sorcerer must be broken, and sorcerers must themselves be bound and contained. Several ritual experts in antisorcery have described to me how they capture the essence of the agents of sorcery in bottles and throw them into the sea. At Kabalava, a major shrine to Suniyam, his destructive potency is understood to be constrained in a book (Kabala Patuna) bound by nine threads.

As I have argued here before, the intimacy of lovers and the intimacy of predator and prey are not necessarily as far apart as we would like to believe. “You either live in love, or you live in fear,” Einstein proclaimed. But we shouldn’t be so naive to assume that this can be a simple, polar opposition. There is a bit of fear even in the strongest love relationship. As the new-to-me blogger Doc Rock (thanks, Tom and Beth!) wrote just yesterday,

War is a conventional, convenient (and until recently all-male) anvil on which to try Character. But it’s not the ultimate test. Not really. Experience has recently taught me that Love is a far greater test of character than War. In Love, one is even more vulnerable, even more at risk, even more fragile, than in War.

And all this talk of binding and testing brings me back to the Bible, once again, and that brief, disquieting story about a boy and his aged father traveling up into the mountains with a load of brushwood . . .
__________

*Yes, this is a cognate with the Hindi word from which the English bandanna derives.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The devil in the details

All weekend the air hangs thick and heavy. On rare occasions when the sun peeks through the clouds, the woods and lawn turn into a Turkish steam bath. With barely a breeze at ground level or aloft, the numerous thunderstorms move at a snail’s pace, like clipper ships becalmed in the Sargasso Sea. From Saturday afternoon on, one can hear an almost constant rumbling from storms in every direction.

When the storms hit, they bring brief downpours of monsoon strength. I sit on my porch and enjoy the tempest, teacup in hand. It’s just as well that I decide to take a break from blogging on Sunday – the computer is off more often than it’s on. My link to the web is through a wireless, so-called ethernet connection between here and my parent’s house, and my father has learned the hard way – through two fried modems – always to unplug the jack from the wall at the first hint of a storm. The surge protector can’t save the modem from a burst of electrons along the telephone line.

Yesterday afternoon we had two lightning strikes that almost certainly would have cooked the modem had it been connected. This wasn’t one of those storms with lots of cloud-to-cloud lightning, “sound and fury signifying nothing.” It was a thunderstorm that meant business: sheets of rain, long minutes between bolts of lightning that went straight to earth (or in fact, straight to sky, but I’m talking more about perception than reality here). The second close strike hit right behind my parent’s house with an earsplitting crash. Ah, adrenalin! I do love a good storm . . .

I was attempting to read a book called The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power, by Bruce Kapferer (University of Chicago Press, 1997), but it wasn’t easy. The author plunges right into a dense, theoretical discussion in the Introduction, then proceeds to survey the entire field of “Sorcery in Anthropology” in Chapter 1. Only in the second chapter does he begin to get into the nitty-gritty, with descriptions of actual practices in the area where he has conducted fieldwork – among the Sinhalese Buddhists of Sri Lanka. Finally, my head stops hurting and I start finding passages I can sink my teeth into:

The supplicants to the shrines of Suniyam and the other demon-deities unite with the forces of magnified, transcendent, godlike human action. They join with the capacity of this action as a force in the destruction and re-creation of human realities, as a dynamic in the energies of exclusion and inclusion in the orders and relations of the life world, and as the expressive force of alienated and alienating power. When people visit the shrines to Suniyam and the other demon-deities or sorcery gods (usually to ask for assistance for some immediate practical matter concerning their everyday lives), they enter into the vertices of the turbulent power of human being. There they draw upon the magicality of human being and extend themselves into its magicality. This extraordinary potency of human beings is as apparent in lack and dispossession as in possession, to which Suniyam and other demon-deities give marvelous expression. I refer to the capacity of human beings to direct their consciousness actively and transformationally into the world, to make and unmake the realities of themselves and their fellows, to become intimate and influential in the actions of others, and even, as it were, to become consubstantial with the very bodily being of others. This is the potency of sorcery.

It occurs to me that a key phrase in all this is “as it were.” With that last crash of thunder still echoing in my ears, I’m wondering in my usual way just how much it really amounts to, this “magicality” – Sartre’s expression for the power of human intentionality arising from the formation of social bonds. How can you really compare the sparks from a human encounter with the awesome power of Nature? What do “godlike human action” and “the expressive force of alienated or alienating power” really amount to?

But then I remind myself of just how much destruction has been wrought by human beings since their adoption of the mechanistic worldview in the 17th century. Once alienated from the true wellsprings of Creation, the engineers, managers and economists, caught up in their boundless faith in the power and rightness of the human will, have indeed forged a terrifying global reality in which even the weather cannot now be ascribed solely to God or Nature.

The storm moves slowly off. With the last rumbles dying away in the east, it’s time to reconnect the Plummer’s Hollow intranet. But something’s wrong; I can’t get through. I use the pinging software installed by my techie cousin Jeff, and sure enough, there’s nothing passing between the houses. I buzz my Dad on the intercom: is the modem working? Yep, no problem, he says. I run back and forth between the houses, trying this and that, dodging the ever-more-rampant tear-thumb – a moisture-loving plant that has taken over much of the lawn this summer.

We try our usual gambit when the connection fails: turn the main computer off and let it rest for a few minutes before restarting. Neither of us has any idea why this works, but usually it does. No dice this time, though. Finally, it occurs to me to try unplugging and reconnecting both wireless units. I reason that since they are plugged into unprotected circuits, a power surge from the lightning must have somehow knocked them off alignment, even though all their little lights are still glowing green.

It works! Or so the “WS Ping ProPack” suggests. I have to signal my dad to reconnect the modem briefly in order to verify the restoration of my connection. Another storm has already begun to move in.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Comparative religion: a brief exercise

1.
Jesus wept.
Sarah laughed.
Gautama touched the ground.

2.
The Messiah came, and is expected to return.
The Messiah will come when all hearts are ready, when all minds have turned.
The future Buddha is still a bodhisattva, but you can visualize him as a Buddha in the present if it helps.

3.
With God, all things are possible.
With God, all things are possible except the forgiveness that only the person you have wronged can give.
With bodhi-mind, all things are as they are: impossible.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The ineffable, with a sore bottom

For Beth, because she liked it

You sit, spine arrow-
straight, aiming at
the center of each
ripple: that spot where
a mayfly guttered,
where a thought-
fish rose. Unwatched,
your face begins to show
its phylogeny, relaxing
against the skull’s
inverted cup. You start
to glow, like any primate
being groomed – though
there’s no other.
The preceptor’s long-
ago story has set
root: how the only guard
on duty left her post
because she forgot the
watchword, bought
herself a bottle &
drank & drank until
she forgot her own
name. So the city
was overrun: that’s
how you’re sitting.
Through the open window
the sound of rain like
the body’s finest hairs
whispering with static.
You sit as if you were
no longer waiting
for anything, as if your
bones were tired of talking
among themselves,
as if they could climb
an upside-down tree
of lightning.
If only they weren’t
sewn up in a bag like
field mice in their
cave of grass: all flesh,
all blister. I mean
this grab bag,
this very poem
so far from where
you sit.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The head cook’s instructions for Dogen

(Dogen’s Tenzo Kyokun, “Instructions for the Head Cook,” became a central text for the Soto school of Zen, which he founded in the 13th century. In a beautiful series of images, Dogen urges his monks to exercise the tender care of a parent or grandparent toward each other, toward themselves, toward all things, animate or otherwise. “Handle the grains of rice as if they were your own eyes,” Dogen preached. I started thinking, what a pain in the ass he must have been if they ever actually let him in the kitchen!)

Oh childless father,
let me tell you about
this Grandmother
Mind: she slices.
She minces.
She chops.
She makes short work
of fat monks.
Go to the Dojo.
If you want to eat
on time, let
me nap.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Therapy and the face in the mirror

In the comments thread to yesterday’s post, N. (the blogger formerly known as Savoradin) wonders how psychotherapy might be different if Sigmund Freud had drawn upon the story of Quetzalcoatl and the mirror rather than the Greek myth of Narcissus.

I gather that the image of Narcissus interests N. quite a bit. He uses a painting of Narcissus as the heading for his new blog A Glinting Web, which features his own writing and photography, and one of the first essays he linked to in his quotation blog, Immolation.org, compares Narcissus with Orpheus. Both, says the essayist, journey into an underworld of sorts. This observation is highly compatible with Mesoamerican thought, in which a large portion of the underworld is in fact aquatic – the most paradisiacal of its four quadrants, which are symbolically represented by the petals of a cross-shaped flower.

With its roots deep in the fertile pond–the depths of inner being–Narcissus, flower and consciousness, rises toward the sun realm of upper selfhood but the flower-head bows in reverence to the depths below that nurtured the up-shooting flower. The flower Narcissus continues to reflect itself on the waters, but the visual reflection can now be extended to a contemplative ritual, the mind’s act of reflection.

I don’t know much about Freudian psychotherapy, unfortunately. But I offer the following generalization, based on my reading of myths and legends from both the Old World and the New: the idea that mirrors or other reflective surfaces are passive or neutral is distinctly modern. Mirrors – like crystals – are widely considered to have divinatory and normative and/or transformative qualities. With the help of mirrors, bowls of water, and so forth, the diviner can extend the power of his or her vision, perceiving events at temporal and geographic distances. Since in many cultures the whole purpose of divination is to help the client decide on a course of action, it’s important to realize that the “reflections” viewed in the mirror are never inevitable. Diviners are, first and foremost, therapists – when they aren’t practicing negative magic (sorcery), such as Tezcatlipoca performed on Quetzalcoatl.

The mirror in that story was two-sided – literally ambiguous. Its subtly convex surface showed the aging king a very unflattering portrait, which through the power of suggestion (“this is your body”) he accepted as an accurate depiction of his tonal, the aspect of the soul “equated with the spark of life, fate, or luck of an individual”(glossary in Timothy J. Knab, A War of Witches: A Journey into the Underworld of the Contemporary Aztecs, HarperSanFrancisco, 1995) – our self-image, the part of the consciousness that travels in dreams. By accepting this distorted tonal as his own, the aged king condemned his life force (yollo), equated with heart and blood, to inexorable decline.

In the cyclic worldview of the pre-Columbian Mexica, individuals, like the world itself, were considered always to be either ascendant or descendant. At noon, the sun itself was captured in a celestial mirror – the sun’s dark doppelganger – and it is this mirror we see in the afternoon, while the real sun retraces its path of the morning, unseen. The dark mirror had both lunar and telluric aspects; its descent into the underworld reflected both mythic and personal dimensions. In a foundational myth, the Lord of the Smoking Mirror united with the goddess of the volcano Popocatepetl, symbolic of the entire earth (including land and water, aboveground and below). In so doing, Tezcatlipoca lost his foot and gained his sorcerer’s mirror, becoming with its aid the master of fates, an Eshu or Loki possessing the classic trickster personality that has led most Christian commentators to equate him with Satan. At one time, Nahua peoples viewed the surface of the earth itself as a form of the sorcerer’s mirror.

The sun’s mirror double also suggests the nahual (nagual in modern Nahuat): the alter ego acquired by each individual at birth. This is similar to the Northern European concept of the fetch, except that it is visualized as an animal inhabiting the underworld (which is where our tonal travels in dreams). When it dies, its human counterpart also dies.

One of Knab’s informants, an elderly healer named Rubia, outlines the modern Nahua conception of the self:

The yollo is the heart that is returned to the earth when life is finished. The heart is the seed, the core of life. From it, life sprouts forth. In the heat and light of the sun, the tonal sprouts and grows. The tonal gives us our life when we are born, our luck and our fate. The tonal is the part of us that goes everywhere. It lives in Talocan [the underworld]; it lives in the earth, in Taltipac. It lives in the sky in Ilhuiac, but it is only well on earth or in the sky with the sun. The tonal is the spark of life that is in us. It is what makes you you and me me. The nagual is the other self. It is the other me, or the other you, and you share your life, and your tonal, with it. It is the nagual that you must know, and the tonal that you need to find, because it is your tonal that moves about in dreams. You must know what the heart, the tonal, sees to find the nagual, the animal.

And only with this power can one successfully ward off attacks from a nagualli, “a witch or transforming shaman with multiple naguals capable of both good and evil,” according to Knab, who learns from his informants how to interpret his own dreams according to the unique topography of Talocan until he, too, becomes a terrifyingly lucid dreamer and nagualli.

As always, the distinction between witch or sorcerer and shaman remains largely subjective, depending on one’s judgement about the intent and effect of the practitioner’s acts. Another interesting example of the use of trickery and a distorting mirror to change another person comes from the traditional oral history of the Iroquois, as contained in the Deganawidah Epic. Deganawidah was a prophet – that is, a shaman and diviner of immense social significance – who apparently flourished sometime between the mid-15th and early 16th centuries. At that time, the tribes that were to become the Iroquois Confederacy had been embroiled in internecine conflict for centuries. Deganawidah, like Gandhi after him, decided to use his own religious charisma to try and create social harmony and a new sense of national identity. Key to this effort was a change in funerary customs, so that feelings of compassion and fraternity could be ritually substituted for the debilitating and devisive emotions of grief and rage. That’s a subject for another post, however. Today, I want to close with the story of Deganawidah’s first convert, Hiawatha (not to be confused with the protagonist of the poem by Longfellow, who for some reason used Iroquois names in an otherwise Algonquian story cycle).

As Matthew Dennis, in Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America (Cornell U.P., 1993), notes,

Nothing more symbolizes the self-destructive violence and disorder of the world Deganawidah found than the practice of cannibalism. When the prophet and reformer first encountered Hiawatha, Deganawidah observed him as “one who eats human flesh.” Through trickery and supernatural power, Deganawidah transformed Hiawatha into a civil man of peace. While the cannibal was away on a hunt, Deganawidah concealed himself on the roof of Hiawatha’s lodge. From that vantage point, the prophet watched the cannibal return with a human body, which he butchered and set boiling in a noxious stew. As Hiawatha looked into the clay pot, preparing to ladle its contents into a bowl, Deganawidah himself peered down from above. The cannibal was amazed to see the beautiful reflection; he saw a man of wisdom, righteousness, and strength. It was not “the face of a man who eats humans.”

Someone I read recently – an anthropologist, but I can’t remember who – observed that the main difference between a modern psychotherapist and a shaman lies in how much work each is willing to do on the patient’s behalf. Whereas in modern therapy, as I understand it, the patient is guided through a hopefully healing process in which he or she must play the leading role, in most traditional therapeutic systems the shaman, diviner or priest takes the lead, and the patient remains largely passive. Rather than work to construct a narrative centered on the patient, the shaman creates an extemporaneous drama in which he or she is the sole or chief performer, acting in the patient’s stead to defeat whatever demons or diseases are found to be responsible for the malaise.*

This pattern may be seen even in Kung healing, where religious specialization is kept to a minimum and the healing energy is perceived to be an unlimited resource equally available to all. Only the most powerful healers are thought capable of practicing on themselves. What I think generally happens in any kind of healing is that some kind of synergy is created. If the patient can see himself in the healer – and vice versa – a new, more harmonious whole, bigger than the sum of its parts, can be forged from the formerly atomized elements at war with each other. Such healing is, of course, fraught with difficulty and danger – so everyone from the Nahua to the Iroquois to the Kung aver. Deganawidah risks his own murder and dissolution in the stew when he substitutes his face for Hiawatha’s.

From a rationalist/reductionist perspective, there is always a sleight-of-hand at work in religion and traditional healing. The diviner says, “This is how things will be,” when what she really means is, “This is how they could be, if you accept the divination.” And a Deganawidah, a Jesus or a Buddha says: I take your place, you can take mine – for we are both perfect from the beginning, created in the image of divinity. Things are more than what they seem. Samsara is already nirvana. The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
__________

*Obviously, this is the crudest of generalizations. Many diviners in fact occupy a semi-active position part-way between these two extremes. And possession ceremonies, meditation and similar techniques are predicated upon an even more radical rewriting of the three-way relationship between patient, healer and divinity.

I’ve written a number of other posts dealing with mirrors and doppelgangers. Probably the most relevant is the brief essay/poem Consulting the mirror. I wrote about the the Old Norse conception of fate and the self (as best as it can be determined from surviving documents) here. And for the ultimate mind-bending example of the mirrored or doubled soul, see The truth about conjoined twins.