and do not know
who will soothe our tears
nor how many tears
we will hold unshed.
You seem to be you
and I seem to be me.
My sorrows are no greater
than your sorrows.
Thou art beautiful,
o my loves,
as tears are.
This is how we begin—in the morning with small birds near and echoing train yards in the distance—afraid. Exactly like one another. If the grass, the trees, the small birds, the snow, the wind, and all things living and inanimate belong each to themselves, to whom do we belong? I am you when you are alone and nameless, before any river or tree, when the darkness before the stars itself was fearless.
Unravel All This Interim
There is almost always
sometimes an answer.
Each summer day the cabbage-white
lives forever
and has no use
for the center of anything.
As for the dried stones of winter—
he’s been them all.
In a universe of so-called oneness, what is not the same? We want it to be us. And we do not want it. The Chilean poet Cecelia Vicuños writes: “In Nahuatl, one of the names for God is ‘nearness and togetherness.”’ We wish to be unique and together at once. It is a kind of sadness, this longing.
Voices in Your Understanding
After this sadness
there is another sadness
and it must be addressed
without mute
for it presses urgently
for utterance
the endlessness of our longing
to return once again
to where the body
is blue leaves of sky
torn by the wind.
There is a mathematician and glass artist I know who claims we are simply our bodies and that our bodies are our memories, not the magnetic tape computer model but an inchoate mass of all we have experienced, from which we select our particular past to be who we think we are. It is the latter part of this equation that is mutable. Jorge Luis Borges pushes this vision to the limit in his short story, “Funes the Memorious,” in which a boy comes to remember absolutely everything without any choosing and becomes incapable of thinking about who or what at all: “To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teaming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence . . . . Funes could continuously discern the tranquil advances of corruption, of decay, of fatigue. He could note the progress of death, of dampness. He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise world.” We are not our memories. We are not spectators. As Samuel Beckett writes, “Think about what you are saying. Do not think about what you are saying.”
There is a word that comes to us from the Middle Low German that means to be tongue-tied. Not so much that one cannot think what to say, but that the experience is so beyond words and the conditions defined by words and their reasoned order that the tongue is tied by expressing silence. It is mumchance. It is the experience one has confronting something beyond meaning. When something “means.” it means for us. I am tongue-tied when I confront what is, as it is, with no me as a referent. It is accepting a sense that is not our sense of the way a thing makes sense.
It has something to do with a new experience of faith. Not faith as one learns it: a compulsory belief in something one can’t really know. That was faith as an ideal. This is more of what a friend of mine in AA calls, “a willingness to take the next step even though you don’t know what will happen.” It is seeing the “truth” of every stone, every tree, every wind without concepts of truth or words to define it. The late Iris Murdoch suggests that concerned attention “effects a removal from the usual egotistic fuzz of self-protective anxiety. One may not be sure that those who observe stones and snails lovingly will also thus observe human beings, but such observation is a way, an act of respect for individuals, which is itself a virtue, and an image of virtue.” When I become without boundaries, I know without fear I am nobody.
Mumchance
It is not for understanding
nor clarity of meaning
I listen carefully to you,
late thrush
across the meadows.
The End of Perfection
The spiritual life is often described as being on a path. It implies direction, purpose, end. Even an endless path suggests to us an evolution toward some kind of perfection. One is either on it or off it. I think I can tell those who are on it from those who are not. I am not on it—or if I am, only tentatively, by default, an accident, or some mistake. Some day I’ll be found out and bumped off by those who deserve to belong on it. I can never reach perfection, though I assume it’s out there. In other words, despite being driven by my ego, it is difficult to accept that I can ever be free of the traps from which the spiritual path is supposed to lead me.
In Buddhism they sometimes refer to the wayless way or the pathless path. To enter the way of the Dharma is to enter a territory without maps. Maps and paths are concepts. Concepts no longer apply. This is terrifying to most of us, especially if we are trying to find our selves! The Lotus Sutra says the Buddha’s teachings are like the wind, powerful but without a discoverable source, leaving no trace in the sky.
There is a wonderful scene in the film Black Robe, a film about the coming of Jesuitical Christianity to Canada in the early seventeenth century. A group of people are traveling by canoe. They are a mix of trappers, Jesuit priests, and Native American guides (including a woman), the latter tentatively converted to Christianity. The canoes come around a bend. The spreading vista of a lake and deeply forested eastern mountains opens before them. It is a breathtaking scene of wilderness at the edge of winter, just before the first snows, before the grey waters freeze. Totally still, silent, vast, sleeping. One of the priests gasps. He curses the landscape as a God-forsaken, demon-ridden realm, wild, outside God’s laws. He is afraid. To him it is like death. It is without guarantees. It is without maps, wildly imperfect, without order, directionless, chaos. There is no reasoning with it. We desire acquired wisdom (science) to become infused wisdom (Dharma).
No Talk of Dying Well
When are you not afraid,
o my loves?
Go there to be born
a swirl of dust,
shadows of wind,
traceless cloud life.
Until recently, I thought I first met St. Nadie in a not very coherent poem I wrote about twenty years ago, also called “St. Nadie In Winter.” I did not recognize that the voice had always been with me. It is clear to me now I was only half listening to the voice all that time. The poem had some surprising bits in it that I did not understand but that I knew held the seeds of something interesting:
With a lamp and keys
Desire prowls among these trees
crippled with diseased soil.
Do not meet it.
It will eat any scrawny wish,
Then swallow you whole.
. . .
Is it only the Dead say something
worth remembering,
or is it each small soul bent,
huddled outside the enemy camp,