Via Negativa

February 23, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Transformer

Nursing a head cold, I brood over books and email, unable to write. Outside the sky is overcast, but shortly after 8:00 a rift appears in the east and the sun pours through. I hurry outside with the camera, thinking to try and get a few landscape shots. But when I look at them later, they’re as blurry as the thoughts running through my head these past couple of days (see yesterday’s post).

Then I focus on the frenetically active birds, and my hands grow steadier. An American goldfinch in the wild apple tree, an eastern bluebird above it on the wire: they each pause. I pause. Two, tinny sneezes of the camera and the sun goes in. The clouds slowly lighten, the transformer box darkens, and soon they are the same dull white.

February 22, 2006March 16, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Notes for an idiolecture

My one year-old niece refutes the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein on a daily basis. What do I mean by “refute”? In the Life of Samuel Johnson, Boswell famously describes how Johnson responded to the philosophical solipsism of George Berkeley:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus.”

Though generations of Western philosophy students have derided this “refutation” as obtuse (see here, for example), I think they are the ones who are guilty of obtuseness for failing to appreciate the Zen-like adroitness of Dr. Johnson’s swift kick. Like a koan, it is best appreciated not as an isolated, universal statement, but as a spur-of-the-moment response to the student’s (Boswell’s) state of mind. They had just come out of the church, whose central drama reenacts the mystery of incarnation, however the bishop may try to resolve the paradox of Word-made-flesh. In Christianity, as in Buddhism, pain and suffering are awarded a quasi-ontological significance. The difference, I think, is that if Dr. Johnson had been a Zen master, he would’ve kicked Boswell; Christian charity dictated his choice of a stone scapegoat.

Buddhist philosophy includes a very Berkeleyan school called Vijñaptimí¢tra, “Representation-Only.” It was popular for a while in Tang- and Song-Dynasty China, and the Record of Master Yunmen (Ummon in Japanese) describes several instances where students question this most formidable of Zen teachers about it. Here’s one of them, in Urs App’s peerless annotated translation (#77):

Someone asked: “What is it like when [one realizes that] the three realms are nothing but mind, and the myriad things are merely [produced by one’s] cognition?”

The Master replied, “Hiding in one’s tongue.”

“And what is that like?”

The Master said, “Su-lu, su-lu.”

“This spell was among other things used for fending off evil spirits,” says App’s footnote to the last line. Thus can apparent nonsense be invested with a higher, non-symbolic sense.

My niece Elanor is what they call pre-verbal. But in fact she verbalizes constantly, and often quite loudly and insistently, accompanied by hand and head gestures. For example, last Friday afternoon she was sitting on her Grandpa’s lap while he read one of her favorite books to her. When he finished and closed the book, she turned it over, jabbed her right forefinger at the cover, looked him in the eye and let out a loud stream of syllables some ten seconds long, with falling intonation. We all laughed, and Grandpa read the book again.

I could relate many such incidents about her. A couple weeks ago, I did something to tease her – I forget just what. She got a stern look on her face and lectured me vociferously for a couple of minutes while everyone looked on. The gestural qualities of spoken language are evidently very appealing to her. Her mother gave her an old cell phone to play with, and she tells us that Elanor quite often holds it up to her ear and holds lengthy “conversations,” toddling back and forth from one end of their apartment to the other.

Her choice of syllables seems fairly arbitrary, though she gravitates toward some, such as dada and lalala, apparently because the sounds are agreeable to her ear. She has clearly grasped the link between speaking and self-assertion. At family gatherings, she often attempts to join in on supper-table conversations from where she sits like a potentate in her high chair. In her serenity and sovereignty, she brings to mind the Daodejing’s example of a (male) infant as the very embodiment of virtue or character (de). From the Ames and Hall translation, Chapter 55:

He screams through the entire day
And yet his voice does not get hoarse:
Such is height of harmony.

Though Elanor was never a screamer like that, I think it’s important to remember that her “pre-verbal” utterances and gestures are not an imperfect anticipation of “real,” systematic language. Rather, they constitute expressions of her state of mind closer to music or the songs of birds, which, though they rarely obey the laws of harmony, cannot fail to harmonize with the bird’s internal and external state, and thus sound pleasant to a third party.

In their commentary on Chapter 55, Ames and Hall make a point of some relevance to Johnson’s common sense-based “refutation” of representation-only:

The baby, unconsciously and without motivation, is the embodiment of harmony and equilibrium. Vitality, then, is sustaining this kind of balance in the rhythms of the day. Common sense – insight into the ordinary and everyday – is the relatively uncommon ability to maximize one’s quantum of life-energy by using it up in a measured way, remaining ever responsive to the cadence of one’s experience.

How does this refute Wittgenstein?

Wittgenstein, as you may recall, was anointed by Time magazine as the most important philosopher of the 20th century. He was a very serious man who liked to number his thoughts, and tried to give them an air of cohesion and importance by grouping some of them under a grand, Latin title – a practice which the author of this website heartily deplores. But it’s his later work, collected posthumously as Philosophical Investigations, that I want to call attention to here. As the Wikipedia article points out, this work permits a variety of interpretations. According to one of them, Wittgenstein maintained that “everyday language functions for the most part unproblematically and does not require correction by philosophers.”

Well and good! But it’s one of Wittgenstein’s subsidiary arguments – his famous digression about the possibility of a private language – that I think my niece’s behavior refutes. A private language is one in which “The words … are to refer to what can be known only to the speaker; to his immediate, private, sensations. So another cannot understand the language.”

This translation is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which goes on to explain that

This is not intended to cover (easily imaginable) cases of recording one’s experiences in a personal code, for such a code, however obscure in fact, could in principle be deciphered. What Wittgenstein had in mind is a language conceived as necessarily comprehensible only to its single originator because the things which define its vocabulary are necessarily inaccessible to others.

Immediately after introducing the idea, Wittgenstein goes on to argue that there cannot be such a language. The importance of drawing philosophers’ attention to a largely unheard-of notion and then arguing that it is unrealizable lies in the fact that an unformulated reliance on the possibility of a private language is arguably essential to mainstream epistemology, philosophy of mind and metaphysics from Descartes to versions of the representational theory of mind which became prominent in late twentieth century cognitive science. […]

[S]uch a so-called language would, necessarily, be unintelligible to its supposed originator too, for he would be unable to establish meanings for its putative signs.

You can click on the link and read about the debate Wittgenstein’s cryptic statements engendered if you wish. To me, the entire argument is flawed by the assumption that language is, at root, an intelligible system of signs – rather than, say, an endless flow of sounds and gestures, sense and nonsense, a river that constantly reshapes its bed. The earliest human language, like the languages of many non-human animals, has not yet become narrowed into the channel of representation-only, but floods and rushes wherever the questing mind wills. Its reach regularly exceeds its grasp, as the semiotically naive mind seeks intimate involvement in a world rich in numinous energy. Only at rare moments of great intensity in our adult lives are we reminded that what we call “meaning” was once pure gestalt.

The other thing I forgot to tell you about my niece is that she regularly interrupts whatever she is saying and doing to seek out physical contact with the nearest adult. A brief hug every five minutes or so seems to provide a kind of fuel for her explorations. And of course there’s no fooling a small child: any falsehood during such contacts would be detected almost immediately. It is on this template that the shared, “common sense” truth-assumptions of all social languages are built, I think. Soon enough, an escalating addiction to such physical/emotional response will lead to the standardization of her private language and its assimilation into the narrower but more powerful linguistic currents of her social milieu. Her favorite, all-purpose syllables dada will become less Dada and more Dad. Nonsense will become increasingly uncommon as she strives to make a commoner kind of sense. With time and luck, she may come to compete with her father or uncle for the title of fastest bullslinger in the West.

February 21, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Bí¤ume lebens

How we waste our afflictions!
We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance,
hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they’re really
our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one
of the seasons of the clandestine year . . .
RAINER MARIA RILKE, Duino Elegies, translated by Edward Snow (10th Elegy)

Look: the trees exist; the houses
we dwell in stand there stalwartly. Only we
pass by it all, like a rush of air.
And everything conspires to keep quiet about us,
half out of shame perhaps, half out of some secret hope.
Ibid. (2nd Elegy)

Nothing
is what it is. O childhood hours,
when behind each shape there was more
than mere past, and before us – not the future.
Ibid. (4th Elegy)

February 20, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Process

So I go to a planning meeting for an environmental group I’m active in. At one point, someone says, “What if, by some miracle, a piece of legislation is introduced which,” etc.

“Part of the planning process is writing out the miracles,” the chair responds.

February 20, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Trestle

An old railroad trestle from an abandoned spur line crosses the Little Juniata River right where our access road joins the highway on the other side of County Bridge 45.

I had to meet a ride down there yesterday morning around sunrise, so I brought my camera along.

It was the coldest morning of the year so far – 2 degrees Fahrenheit. This was a bit of a shock, coming right after several days of unseasonable warmth. But it meant that the air was as clear as it gets, and the river had a thin layer of freshly-knit ice along the shore.

When the sun rose, the surface of the water came alive with swirls and streamers of rising mist.

I took dozens of pictures, most of which completely failed to capture the beauty all around me. In the same way that writing poetry forces one to confront the limits of language, taking pictures makes one appreciate the gulf between icon and vision.

Last summer, some of the local kids turned the river below the trestle into a swimming hole. They climbed all over the trestle, too, and fought boredom by vandalizing the railings of “our” bridge. During the colder months, the area around the bridge becomes much quieter – a good, out-of-the-way place for a variety of illicit transactions, most of which occur after dark. People seek transcendence in all kinds of ways, most of them as fruitless as my attempts to cling to ephemera through words or pixels. As for the trestle, it ends abruptly at the far side of the river, the victim of a highway widening project some fifteen years ago. Not even a ghost train could cross it now.

February 18, 2006May 30, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Lost in thought: poems of Lady Izumi

This morning, for no particular reason, I thought I’d try my hand at some translations of tanka by the Japanese court poet Izumi Shikibu (fl. ca. 1000 CE). I included versions of the first two tanka in earlier posts, back in January and February of 2004.

UPDATE (Feb. 22): I’ve revised the first of these in response to the astute critique and observations of reader Hari Prasad (no web address) in the comments [subsequently lost]

If the one I wait for came now,
what would I do?
Gazing at my garden,
I’m loathe to see anything spoil
its trackless snow.

We hold the flowers
in our thoughts
after we pass,
entrusting ourselves completely
to the oblivious horses.

If I could see you one more time,
even if only by lightning flash
in a night-time storm –
visible, invisible –
it would ease my longing.

(Mourning a deceased lover.)

Once we’re beyond this world,
there’s nothing to cling to –
so thinking, I imagine
you here once again, your reply,
that give-&-take.

Which of us
would she miss the most?
She would miss her children
as I am missing mine,
my own dead daughter.

To be here to find
your name freshly written,
instead of moldering beside you
under the moss –
it’s hard to bear.

(After receiving a piece of mail addressed to her dead daughter.)

Lost in thought,
watching a firefly rise
out of the marsh
as if from my own body,
as if it were me.

February 17, 2006September 17, 2015 by Dave Bonta

Night

This entry is part 40 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’ve been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own. This is the twenty-fourth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of Zweig’s Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or two to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

The Taking Away
by Paul Zweig

The close-fitting sleepless night,
Everything still: the woodchuck in its hole
Under the rock pile, the apple tree outside my window.
[…]

* * * *

Outside In

A night of wind
& the smell of thawed soil,
rustle of nightcrawlers
tugging leaves down
under the earth,
rapid footfalls of rain.
At the woods’ edge,
a constant creaking
& groaning, as if
from doors swinging
loose on their hinges,
which are stiff with rust
from a lifetime in
the open air. I sleep
without dreaming,
wake without waking up.
Two more hairs turn white
according to schedule.
The house shakes
with the effort to keep
from flying apart.

February 16, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Genius loci

Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.
Pablo Neruda, Walking Around, Residencia en la Tierra, II – translation here

It’s a little disconcerting to me how, lately, the moment I step outside, something happens. Tuesday late morning, for example, two squadrons of geese came honking low over the trees just as I started out on a walk, and mid-morning yesterday, a pair of A-10 Warthogs thundered overhead seconds after I walked out on the porch to pitch an apple core. This morning at 5:05, no sooner had I sat down outside with my coffee when the resident feral cat, whom I call Coyote Bait (C. B. for short), trotted up the driveway in the moonlight like a detachable shadow. It was so still, I could hear her paws on the gravel: a soft rattle, like the sound the stream makes during a prolonged drought.

Why should this surprise me? Only because I sit inside gazing at the computer monitor like a shaman peering into a crystal, where the merest flicker might foreshadow some fundamental shift in the heart’s climate. Everything seems significant at first, but after a while, it all blends into a gray sea of information, and I begin to tire of the whole human race – our never-ending chatter and busyness, our genius for exploitation.

Outside, meanwhile, the unseasonable warmth returns to melt the snow from last weekend’s storm. Late in the morning, when I finally go out with the camera, a bluebird is singing up by the barn, and a black-capped chickadee fresh from its bath is drying itself out in the lilac bush, puffing out its breast feathers and shaking its wings.

The black-capped chickadee, Parus atricapillus L., is in the tit family (Paridae). Tits are “small, plump, small-billed birds; acrobatic when feeding. Often roam in little bands. Sexes alike,” says Peterson. Though they may appear comical to us, I think chickadees probably take themselves fairly seriously: witness the strict hierarchy maintained within their winter-long foraging flocks. Witness also their tendency to act as scouts in larger, mixed-species flocks and around bird feeders. When they sound the tocsin, all the other birds freeze, and when they issue an all-clear signal, everyone goes back to feeding. They’re like the boy scouts of the bird world. I remember once when I was burning trash, three or four chickadees flying in as close as they could to scold the leaping flames.

Black-capped chickadees are among the brainiest of songbirds. Their social structure is complex; non-breeding chickadees can have memberships in several different foraging flocks at the same time, with different positions in the dominance hierarchies of each. Their simple-sounding songs contain much more complexity than unaided human ears can detect, enabling the communication of quite detailed information. Most astonishing of all, perhaps, are their memories. Chickadees have been known to hoard a thousand seeds and dead insects each day, tucking them into knotholes, under loose pieces of bark, even up inside clusters of pine needles. And researchers have found that they can remember which item is stored where for at least a month. Think of it: 30,000 or more distinct caches within a home range of twenty to fifty acres in size. Not even the most obsessed of human geographers can ever hope to know a landscape in such intimate detail.

What of their ecological niche? Chickadees are foragers and scavengers par excellance. They can digest carrion from a gut pile as easily as goldenrod seeds, spiders, or wild grapes. Specialized leg muscles permit the acrobatics for which they are justly famous, and these contortions enable the gleaning of food that other birds can’t get at. I also can’t help supposing that their year-round, life-long residence in an area, following juvenile dispersal, contributes to their ability to exploit all available resources. With much denser plumage than other species of a comparable size, they are well suited to the vagaries of a northern climate. Each fall, they grow a fresh set of feathers, and portions of their unusually large hippocampus – key to their prodigious memories – also regrow.

Large brains; organization into small bands; physiological adaptations to permit scavenging in an array of habitats: we could almost be talking about Homo sapiens here. But a vanishingly small percentage of the human race retains any experience of what it might mean to become so local as to begin to resemble the very spirit of a place.

Con mi mano rodeo la nueva sombra del ala que crece:
la raíz y la pluma que mañana formarán la espesura.
Neruda, Naciendo en los Bosques, Tercera Residencia – translation here

February 15, 2006February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Losing control

elsewhere

Start from the knowledge that control is lost. Here, now, I’ve lost it, I’m naked. Breathe that in.

So his front end leaps over curbs, and his back end stumbles, and he falls in the street. If he walked, he would be fine. He just doesn’t know how.

He gave us the look that he always gives when he has just found himself on the floor: Why did you guys put me here?

(Thought: [if] otter hell is the life of a three-toed sloth, then sloth hell must be the life of an otter?)

What if we can’t stop the suffering? How do we practice from that point?

Blogging is a strange affair. On the one hand, in my experience it can be an effective aspect of practice; on the other hand, it can easily slip into what the Pali texts call papanca: the proliferation of thoughts, spreading out in all directions, without any prospect of finding a limit. The trouble with papanca is that it begets further papanca, and this can go on forever.

It was a fifteen mile drive to the graveyard, and I was still in the thick of a torrential acid trip and an escalating storm. I took it slow. Driving while tripping on acid requires incredible concentration. You really have to squelch all distortions of your perceptions and see what is really there. Do or die. You have to focus on your motor skills and reactions, and also, there’s the fear. THE FEAR. Just the routine underlying fear that’s always there when you’re tripping on acid. You are in an alternative state of mind where you really can’t be sure whether every atom in your body will suddenly unravel and fly apart sending electrons spinning off into space with the release of such intense energy that your brain can’t even comprehend what the end is like . . . but . . . I made it out there. I stood there in an ice storm looking down at the graves of my mom and my brother. I was completely wasted.

Who knew there were such mysteries inherent in taking out the garbage? Who knew that a lemon peel was so central not only to my sense of self, but also in the binding of a contract that delimits myself in relation to others? Who knew that taking out the garbage was a form of reassurance that “for one more day I have been a producer of detritus and not detritus myself”?

Snow all the way into the distance: I feel like a man losing his sight. The world dims with snow.

Teetering nervously in the gateway of an unknown garden where I’ve ventured only a few times, in the extremes of love and fear and grief that I’ve mostly managed to avoid. Could I, dare I, come here more often?

February 14, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Scraps from the scriptorium

The morning starts out gray, dull as a stone in the driveway. “The stone is a mirror which works poorly,” Charles Simic once wrote. But mirrors of any kind bore me. They always give the same answer.

The structure of the wood must influence how the bark beetles excavate their galleries, I think. Is this the tree’s calligraphy, or the insect’s? I pore over my images with the intensity of a Medieval monk.

The sky starts to clear. Icicles formed by a waterfall’s spray dangle trumpet-shaped toes above the current.

A swayback mare and her foal graze at the edge of a snowy pasture. The rusty trailer, too, was once a blank white.

I spot a ribbon – the kind used to wrap presents – winding through the branches of a ridgetop oak. A balloon must’ve brought it here. The last blue scrap of it almost disappears into the sky.