give up on logic.

Harold Kushner writes:

When we stop searching for The Great Answer, The Immortal Deed which will give our lives ongoing meaning, and instead concentrate on filling our individual days with moments that gratify us, then we will find the only possible answer to the question, what is life about?  It is not about writing great books, amassing great wealth, achieving great power. It is about loving and being loved.

That bit of truth is a lot to swallow. And it’s a truth I bump into again and again like a brainless house fly – when we stop searching for the answer, the answer is there. Not a Great Answer, just an answer. Those tiny things that make us grateful and assemble over the course of a day or a year to make up what looks, when we turn back to see it, like a little trip we’ve been on without even realizing it. An exhilarating little trip. Those things are there.

Make a quick list of some things that make you happy and you’ll see.  Here’s mine for today:

notebook paper, pony tail holders, Dunkin Donuts’ coffee with cream, footie pajamas, furniture polish, my toe ring, voice mail, the smell of my son’s shampoo, an easily peeled orange, trampolines, hot water, the clink of the radiators at night, the neighbor’s outdoor Christmas lights, spelling homework, the baby’s tight grip on his pacifier, shoe laces, a fully inflated basketball.

You have to stop and catch your breath after all that. And that’s just today. Kushner is right. When we stop searching, what is there? Mostly this paradoxical combination of insignificant little pleasures and unbearable love. All totaled, this small stuff makes up a strange answer, incomprehesible, but an answer still. Probably the only answer we’ve got if we’re honest…and fearless. 

Einstein, while explaining that he did not believe in a traditional concept of a rewarding and punishing God, said, “let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny…” Tiny bits of reason made him happy, adding up to something marvelous and mysterious that I don’t think he ever hoped to fully understand.

He could be satisfied without being comforted by one big explainable answer. He found small meanings in the midst of a great mystery. He never found The Great Answer, and in fact, most of his work probably served to disprove the very idea. It seems that what he left us with are tangible little bits of something marvelous. Is that Faith? I don’t know, but it’s not NOT faith.         

Kushner also writes:  If logic tells us that life is a meaningless accident, says Ecclesiastes at the end of his journey, don’t give up on life. Give up on logic.

I think that where logic ends, where the search ends, those bits of love and that something marvelous is waiting. It’s patient. It never leaves. So that every time we try something big and we fail, every time we think we’ve found true love and then loose it or destroy it just trying to hold onto it, every time we reach our limits and get lost, we find out again that it’s ok to give up. Give up on logic. Some small things, better and more astounding than we would have believed, will be there still, and will be more than enough. 

you become a plant.

Thich Nhat Hanh:

Community and time are the two ingredients of the universal medicine. If you can take that medicine every day for a number of years, then you have a chance. You become a plant, a tree, deeply rooted in soil. Happiness and love become possible. And then you can go back and help your own blood family, your own spiritual community, and your society.

I’m only beginning to understand this prescription for love and happiness, this idea of taking time and community as medicine. It’s an intriguing analogy. More and more, being in community effectively seems to be the point of all this. And Hahn reminds us here of the need to approach the job of building and maintaining good community with discipline and diligence and courage.

 I see it this way:  it’s as if one’s life is a wide meandering river, and our job is to build little villages along the shores of it. What will those villages produce? Who will inhabit them? What underlying structures will support them? Those are some of the questions we must address for every little village that we build… a family environment, a job environment, a friendship environment, to name a few. And there are precious few directions.

The formal mechanism of community, like everything else, is in constant flux. I grew up on a farm in eastern North Carolina, the same farm on which my father was raised, the farm on which his father was raised. Around that farm, in the 70′s when I was a kid, there was a community. It was called Perry Town. Perry Town even had a community building, for herring suppers and pig pickins. It had a volunteer fire department and I remember a few street dances there in the summer, where the adults tried to be subtle about their drinking and us kids ran around getting wild-haired, chasing each other like puppies.

I don’t have or know one piece of that community that I can pass on to my kids today. It seems completely gone to me now, the formal structure of it disintegrated. For my father, though nothing had escaped time and change, the framework was still there when he raised his kids…the same families, the same farms and houses, the same stories were still being told. For me, the framework is gone. 

 Wendell Berry describes a concept of community that “consists of the accumulation of local knowledge in place, generation after generation, children learning the visions and failures, stories and songs, names, ways, and skills of their elders, so that the cost of individual trial-and-error learning can be lived with and repaid, and the community thus enabled to preserve both itself and its natural place and neighborhood.” It’s a beautiful concept. I don’t know if the concept has tangible existence anywhere any more, but, by its definition, the community of Perry Town did not survive.

And so those of us who grew up there, and in places like it, have a challenge: to operate without a framework, and build communities in our lives seemingly from scratch. Hahn gives us a hint as to how to go about it. We take time and place like medicine. every day. We can’t push it aside, leave it in the bottle, or pour it down the sink because it tastes bad. We must swallow it. His direction tells us to drink it in, that constant flow of time and that odd concoction of people and material that make up the place in which we find ourselves. He’s telling us not to resist or to shut it out, but to drink it and allow it to work on us, to allow it to change us. This will take courage.

I ‘m beginning to understand what Hahn means by, “you become a plant.” A plant is open. It drinks from its surroundings or it dies. Everything, its color, its shape and size, its direction of growth, depends on what it takes in. And in turn the plant impacts its place. It’s accountable for its effects. There is no hit and run in plant life. The plant stays. And not in a static way. It joins up to its place. It breaths and is breathed by.

I’ll have to revise my village building concept: the word build seems too aggressive now. A plant both builds and is built. Perhaps we don’t do the building exactly, but it happens in a more cumulative, sedimentary way. You stay, and stay open. You hold, and are held. You avoid rigidity, but maintain discipline. You remain. Accountable. Your kids grow alongside you and learn to do the same. Community happens. You drink. You become a plant. 

adventures in doubt.

Victor Frankl:

Questing for a meaning to life…questioning, doubting…is rather a human achievement than a neurotic symptom. No animal will ever raise the question of whether or not its existence has a meaning. But man does – and even more, it’s a privilege, a prerogative of YOU – boldly daring adventure to challenge that there IS a meaning to life rather than taking it for granted. In other words, it’s an intellectual honesty and sincerity, but no neurotic disease.

(phew!)

at rest in the same way.

There is in Buddhism a vow called the Bodhisattva vow. It goes like this:  as long as space endures, and as long as there are any beings to be found, may I continue likewise throughout all my lives to become more and more capable of driving away the sorrows of the world.

To which any sane person would say, holy shit. It seems an overwhelming goal, and it is. But it is such a straightforward, beautiful thing, some find it irresistible…to become more and more capable of driving away the sorrows of the world. Can you think of a better use of energy, were such an astounding and lovely thing possible?

It’s like this: the other day, in one of those bursts of organizational energy that rarely lasts, I made a to-do list.  Not a clip-toenails-empty-dead-bugs-out-of-light-fixtures to-do list, but a life-is-short-and-i’m-getting-old kind of to-do list. The top goal? Develop a Vision Statement and Goal Plan for My Life, I wrote.  Like that, with caps, in black ink.  And then I instantly realized, who am I kidding? A vision statement and goal plan for my LIFE? I can’t even develop a vision statement and goal plan for my DINNER. What I’m saying is, we fall short, a lot. We make lists, we scratch them out and crumple them up. We make new lists of things we’ve already done, just so we can check things off.

We make Big plans sometimes, even while our lives are made up of mostly little things. Little things like dishes, junk mail, ball point pens, apples, dead batteries, nail clippers, bread crumbs, toe-less socks, school calendars, pumpkin carving kits, and empty fast food cups.  

The Bodhissatva vow is a Big thing, at first glance.  But the beauty of Buddhist teachings and the practice of meditation is that ideas of scale fall away. When you meditate with discipline you get a taste of it. You’re sitting in one spot, trying to be still.  It’s torture, your mind is racing. then thoughts stop, and peace happens for a moment. And in that moment, the tiny nothing things that lie around you, they fill you up…a blade of grass, the shadow of a fly, one shaking leaf on a limb, the sensation of sky. These things take on grand proportions, and all we’ve done is remove from them the weights and measures that we normally apply. The grand proportions have been there all along.

Dag Hammarskjold wrote, “In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses.”

So maybe the vow isn’t so big after all.  Maybe it’s as simple as removing the weights and measures that we tend to apply. Maybe it’s achieved through very small acts.  Small, quiet, unimportant acts like the act of meditation, or the act of listening. acts that are the very opposite of the busy, distracting, fast worlds of money and media which are constantly vying for and buying our attention.

I believe we can cultivate a taste for peace. By looking for that point of rest again and again, and finding the point of rest here and there, we become familiar with it. We get to know it. And it seems possible that we would soon prefer it. As Hammerskjold pointed out, amazing things are happening there. In my life what happens there is the infectious laugh of a six-year-old, the smell of a man’s worn shirt, the sweat on a cold glass of water, the purring breath of a sleeping baby, the traveling whiff of a passing cigar.

In seems possible that peace could fill us up, and in doing so could drive out sorrow and its residual cravings. Then one bread crumb, one baby breath, one dirty shirt at a time, in driving away our own distraction and discontentedness, we might find we are fulfilling the vow. Becoming more and more capable of driving away the sorrows of the world or something small like that. 

              

art tries.

Most of the time things are cloudy, uncertain, hard to make out. The windshield that we all look through to see meaning and truth is coated with the dirt and dead bugs of a thousand-mile roadtrip. We’ve grown accustomed to this grime-vision. It’s thrilling, and frustrating too. We could be anywhere, really. What looks mundane could be magical after all. Fabulous and unusual things probably lurk there behind the bug guts, we just can’t quite make them out. That we’re missing something is a given, but the possiblity of that something, it’s comforting. 

And then there are those times, rare, very very rare, when clarity shows up. We try at seeing just like we always have. We squint, we prepare ourselves for the effort, and suddenly no effort is needed. Suddenly, the windshield is clean and clear and nothing separates us any more from what is there on the other side. Then it turns out that what’s there on the other side is just that. It’s there, just sort of looking back at us while we’re looking at it. Nothing happens.

Pema Chodron puts it differently. She writes: “The truth, said an ancient Chinese master, is neither like this nor like that. It is like a dog leaning over a bowl of burning oil. He can’t leave it, becuase it is too desirable, and he can’t lick it, because it is too hot.” It’s a sort of stunning nothingness as I see it.

Clarity and confusion.  Two different states of being, coming and going like weather or seasons, or something else very natural and yet slightly bullyish. It’s not that one state is hopeful and the other is devoid of hope. It’s that one state is, well hopeful yes, and desperate but familiar, while the other is completely free of desperation but at the same time terrifying and disturbing in its foreign transparency.

Given the choice, which state would we really choose, the clarity or the confusion? I don’t think we know. Maybe it’s best that we don’t really get to choose (the weather thing).

Then along comes the artist. 

I have stood in front of a painting on a wall inside the Art Institute of Chicago for what seemed at the time like hours. The painting was Ice by Gerhardt Richter. It’s a layered thing, peeling and worn in some places, sparkling like crystal in others, and monstrously beautiful like life. What you might see when you look at it is the windshield, the bug guts, the dust, the grease, the grime, and the clear parts where things stare back at you. All of it. All at once.  

Ultimately, of course, we see ourselves in art. We see art struggle and miss and stumble into some frightening clarity that doesn’t do what it was supposed to do. We see art run back into comfortable confusion. We see ourselves in that stumbling and running. Ourselves, but from a tender and compassionate place where we look beautiful and dignified and tattered and majestic all at once.

Because art tries, we see that we try. And we see that trying and missing can be astounding. For a moment, an hour even, we are astounded by us all.        

art is on my side.

Mark Rothko was surely on our side.

Mark Rothko Underground Fantasy [Subway], c. 1940

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1989

fear. art. god.

At some point all voracious readers and habitual writers get existential about what they do and ask the questions, “who cares?” and “what’s the point?” Inevitably, unable to conjure up a satisfactory answer, we decide once and for all to chuck the written word and opt for something more tangible. It always happens, it never lasts, this foray into attempted wordlessness, and we can’t help ourselves – we come back to the written word like a dog’s nose to the ground.

It seems we must believe this idea that words make us human. I admit it. I think they stretch us, enrich and enlarge our humanness. To me a new word or combination of words encountered is like the unfolding of a crease in my mental space. It feels important, this little event, and not just that learning has taken place, but that new ground for nurturing thought has been cleared. Without that new word or phrase, a whole piece of life would have remained inaccessible.     

The three words that make up the title above, fear. art. god., in that combination, lowercase and all, constitute my reasons for writing. (that is not God with the white beard who frowns on dirty dancing, but god: mysterious, biological, universal life force god)  Three big motivating factors in life, they are, and of all the motivating factors (money, recognition, hunger, etc.) they remain for me the most omnipresent. I can’t shake them, even for a moment. It’s my belief that as these three forces weave themselves in and out of our lives, for many of us, the strands become inseparable. 

fear.   

At times the litany of things to fear in this life can lull us into a catatonic state…death, disease, decapitation, being buried alive, resistant staphylococcus, anthrax powder in our mailbox, public humiliation, mental deterioration, just to name a few. But the biggest most powerful fear of our lives probably isn’t attached to any one specific thing at a time.  It’s too primordial, too amorphous, too overwhelming for us to let it rest on anything long enough.  It’s always there, but we keep it detached, just barely at bay like some monster tenacious mosquito.

In a dream I have, an enormous roaring crowd of people, an ocean of angry people, is chasing me.  They are enraged, their hatred pushes them across a vast plain toward me. It’s like that. And the way that I handle that dream is this: I lie there, after I wake up, heart pounding, and envision myself running from the crowd. Then I stop running. I turn around and face them, and stand alone, waiting for them to overcome me. I will not survive and I know it. But I stand alone and wait, and I have one thing to tell them.  I shout this one thing at them as hard as I can shout,”There’s nothing to be afraid of!”

Art can be like that.  The simplest faith in some kind of god can be like that.

art. god.

By its very nature, art resists fear, turns on it and drives it back. In her book, Art Objects, Jeanette Winterson says,”Art is my rod and staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only. For art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them.” (20) 

One of the many places to which I turn for wisdom and inspiration is the Bible. And it has much to say about turning on fear. How many times in our lives, those of us who devour books and absorb paintings and poems, has a piece of art acted as David to some Goliath of fear in our present circumstances? 

In the story, before David takes Goliath out, and after he declares boldly that, “I will strike you down and cut off your head,” he explains his strength to the mocking Goliath. He explains that the battle is not David’s at all, ”the battle is the Lord’s.” We can say the same about art. 

Take a walk through a gallery or museum, stand before each piece for a moment, the sweat and ingenuity and strokes of each artist, and then on to the next, and the next.  Or flip through a volume of modern poetry, stopping to rest with Whitman, then Williams, Moore, Pound, Stevens, and it becomes very clear. We sense that the battle against fear and all things fearful, like complacency and resignation and stagnation, is not our battle, rather it is this Art Force battling through us all.

Also in the Bible, Psalm 56:10 dismisses fear, saying, “This I know: God is on my side.” Here’s Whitman:

Long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams,/ Now I wash the gum from your eyes,/ You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life./ Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,/ Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,/ To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.

And this, too, I know, Art is on my side.