I. distraction

 

 

“I do not regret how my life has taken shape or spend any time wishing for other things, but I do acknowledge that I would have made other decisions, tried other things, if I had not been paralyzed by the past.   But even thinking this is of no value now.  I am who I am because of everything that has come before.  And I am happy to be here….At some point it did not matter where my fears and insecurities came from.   I was the owner of them.”  

 

In Tibetan Buddhism, regret is not tantamount to guilt.  Regret is the deepening of one’s understanding of wisdom and its counterpart ignorance, defined as the lack of understanding of the ultimate nature of reality.  Regret in Buddhism might look like this: but I do acknowledge that I would have made other decisions, tried other things, if I had not been paralyzed by the past.  This is a wisdom statement because it focuses on learning and understanding, not judgment or guilt.  It is a psychological statement, not a moralistic one.  That acknowledgement is a recognition, a re-cognizing of the way Emily thinks. 

 

And there is a recognition of causality: I am who I am because of everything that has come before.   Implicit in this statement is emptiness and dependent origination, the causal structuring of reality based on the myriad causes and conditions that create the appearance of who we seem to be and the karmic formations and resonance of that appearance.  And what makes it psychological in its ontology is its focus on development, an interior spiral, if you will, of thinking and the concomitant worldview that emerges from that development. 

 

 Now, as Emily intuitively knows, wisdom is never separated from compassion, and forgiveness one of the greatest signifiers of grace that is bestowed on mind. 

“Forgiveness for me is not about the other person.  It has always been about forgiving myself.  That came first.    That didn’t mean that I agree, like, or even want to be with someone who I believe caused me harm.   Forgiving releases me from the tangle of my anger.  Forgiveness is about me – it is about my healing.   I forgave for myself.  I forgave because I wanted to be free.  I forgave because I wanted to be able to have compassion for everyone.  But it started with me.  I needed to look in the mirror and say I forgive myself.”

 

Again, compassion never separates self from other because self and other represent a fusion of one inextricable webbed consciousness of manifestation infinitely arising, abiding and ceasing in change.

 

And out of that seeking and bringing together her wisdom and compassion, Emily unwittingly and humbly finds herself in the role of teacher:

 

“I usually ask these children to do one thing.  I ask them to ask themselves what kind of person they want to be.   When they answer that, they will choose how to act.  I tell them that they are not required to love their parents.  At this point, it is about who they are or wish to be and how they want to act in the world.   Some choose the anger.  Others take a step toward healing.  I honestly make no judgments.  In the beginning I did, but have grown beyond that.  What I do is witness the sadness and futility of people in mid-life and beyond  still struggling with the same issues, still unhappy,  who think, that when their parent dies they will be free.  In truth, there will only be a new battle; for their anger remains and still needs a place to go.”

These are some real thoughts about Emily.

 

 

I guess I have my own parsing peevish obsessions, too.  No doubt, for me, deconstruction in the form of critical analysis is the dismantling of not only reality as we order it, but the ordering itself as a process of reifying phenomena.  What I mean is that the content (reifications) of our world – what we see – occurs through a process of ordering (reifying) and, as such, necessarily distorts what is, as it is as perception and conception.  The reason this is supremely significant is that how we construct (order) reality is what causes suffering.  And to bring James’ poetic meditation into focus here, the afflictive outcome of our constructions is: distraction.  Whether James intentionally meant it or not, distraction, the loss of attentional focus, is a primary cause of loss of awareness (ignorance) and the concomitant suffering we experience moment to moment in the forms of identification, craving and grasping.   If we do not see an object as it is, we unwittingly identify with it, whether that object is material or mental (imagistic).  By identifying with it, we hold it up in our consciousness as “real,” as having independent and permanent existence (what is called reification, solidity), and consequently crave and grasp after its continued existence (or the opposite, if it instills fear or repulsion, its disappearance).

 

And so, again, I ask, what is `distraction’ about?  Well, it’s not really about anything, that is, any thing; it’s about relationship, once again.  It’s about negative states of mind and afflictive emotions, such as, isolation and shame, confusion and conflict, distance as absence and presence as intimacy; the deep body as the body of emotional life and the body as the vessel of love and death.  And as I said, it’s about time and space as perspectives from which to either isolate or hopefully integrate mental states, levels of awareness and language and experience.  On the surface structure, the poem is about a man trying to connect with a woman and with himself vis-à-vis the faculty of cognition, as an aesthetically driven search for beauty and love or, more accurately beauty in love. 

 

To explore some of these points, I will create a couple of my own categories of meaning, play spaces from which to order my thoughts and meditations on these meditations with the hope of giving the poem some of what it wishes and hopes for: connection.

 

CONVERBIAL

 

`Distraction’ seems to be a fetishtistic collectanea of body parts, each of which carries a separate hallucinogenic, trancelike power of its own: her mute-blue eyes,/holding themselves behind/dark pupils; her/little hand; her thin lips; her skin; cheeks, face, eyelashes; and tongue.   And like a Rodin sculpture, which only Rilke can give language to, the parts seem to have a life of their own, and a secret language that begs for decoding so that a complete existence can emerge through it.  And through these parts we find a seething panoply of sensorium seeking motion as if to animate desire.  Let’s take a look at some of the verbs and verb forms the poem uses in its and attempt to create connection: grumbling, seeing, holding, slipping, speaking, kissing,  approaching, overpowering, failing, noticing, withholding,  glimpsing,  looking,  thinking, thirsting,  desiring,  tasting, doing.   These movements free the meaning captive in the body, as the philosopher, Merleau-Ponty would see it, and the language of the body lets itself be taken apart and put together again by the desire of thought.  That the poem itself is a metaphoric or nameable body itself, its parts of which bring to life the need to experience what the body only gestures to. 

 

But, here is my point.  The poem’s obsessive inspection of parts necessarily misses the whole of the experience, the intuitive thrust of intimacy, and it knows it.  It is intended that way to bring the ultimate futility of reification into sharp relief.  It almost agonizingly unlayers the body, holding each part up to the light as if from an altar of worship, symbolically gesturing to a [Mother] God never to be felt but through Its absence.  And there is a painful discomfort in the realization that we really don’t know what we will experience.  And we desperately attempt to order the parts of experience that, if we just let go of the control, would actually just appear.  For it occurs outside the range of categories and can never be reduced to measurement or even physical observation because, as soon as it comes into view, it is not what it was.  Like light or sound waves, it is beyond our senses, though we know it exists.

 

THE PRAXIS OF QUESTIONING

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.  And the word streamed forth out of the body in the flow of blood. And in the flow was meaning.  And the meaning was light.  And in the light flowed forth the question. And the question was mind.  And mind asked the meaning as the body flowed forth in the stream of blood: Why is there nothing rather than something?

 

Another rhetorical treat James like to use in his poems is the question.  I don’t think there is anything more beautiful to me than a question.  The question is the very height of self seeking realization.  It is always pointing to the next level of awareness.  It is in fact the linguistic equivalent to evolution itself.  If I could choose a profession, I think I would choose one that requires questioning as it primary vehicle. But, I’m not sure that vocation exists. 

 

So, why does James use the question as poetic expression?  It seems to be for this very reason: as a way to open mind to its ultimate awareness through the very negations the questions unveil.

 

as i slip
from hunger to hunger
further distraction
and isn’t it all?

---------------

what else matters if
i am unable to speak that blue
        or at least
                to adore it?

--------------

what else is on my mind?

--------------------

how does one kiss those lips?

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       are they withholding
       or is there nothing more to say?
or are my eyes failing me?

 

are my organs failing
or am i my failing parents,
she my tool, my distraction
from just how disconnected
i am from her
toward-blue eyes, and me?

 

As I reflect on this poem (and perhaps all of his poems I’ve read), I become occupied with a line from one of my poems, `The King of Dots:’ “i realized that it was not the dots themselves, but the depth of the subject connecting them, that most defined truth.”  I could have said, "i realized that it was not the poems or phrases themselves, but the depth of the subject reflecting on them, that most defined truth.”  This truth is about spiritual praxis, what this poem and its questioning, both as methodologies, implicitly and ultimately point to, at least for me.

 

Spiritual praxis as I define it here is a complex self-critical activity by which one, through deep introspective immersion, discursive reflection, and action, becomes a critically conscious human being whose level of self-organization is trans-rational; that is, superordinate to rational thought in that she relies on both reason and the contemplative transparency of faith.

 

Thus, praxis is a process by which higher-order thinking transforms lived experience into a unifying structure of spiritual realization. In this way, philosophical, or abstract concepts are connected with lived reality.

 

As I say, praxis is an activity, a methodology from which higher levels of awareness will be realized.  Thus, the triple critique of deep introspective immersion, discursive reflection, and action reflect the pathways along which meaning is found, constructed and deployed as it evolves into realization. 

 

Introspective immersion is the psychoanalytic process of spiritual praxis.  As I once said, “by putting a psychoanalytic face on a philosophy of reflection, the hazard is prevented, of which [is the]… “suppression of the time-tied encounter with the Other.”  Discursive reflection is the philosophical act of subration, of which is beautifully exemplified in Advaita Vedanta.  Overall, praxis cannot take place without a relationship (i.e., teacher) because, as psychological/social beings, we can only learn “through” an Other. 

 

Transparency of faith refers to an absolute knowing or Awareness that is superordinate to rational thought because it is beyond that which can be known.  It is Rigpa, Realization, Being, Brahman, etc.  There is no knower, says this transparency.  It is a faith that cannot know because knowing is irrelevant; a faith that is beyond subration because subration is part of discursive reflection, and there is no longer reflection until mental activity co-arises.  I agree that listening and receptivity are critical components of spiritual praxis the way I envision it.  I would include these in the category of introspective immersion because you can’t introspect, look into, without the “receptor” and “receptiveness” of seeking.   

LABIAL

 

In the second section of the poem, entitled `labial,’ the narrator, after finding some relief in the knowability of the senses (“it is enough to observe”), that reified part of consciousness that leaves very little to mystery, asks, in an invocatively Rilkean manner, a series of questions about that other aspect of consciousness, which emerges from the body, namely, mind:

how do i feel her skin
though i have yet to touch even her hands?

                -----------------

what is it i lose
when i lose myself
holding her face in my hands –
just to grace her cheeks, has there
ever been a face of such sensitive consistency?

       -------------------------

how does her glance remain so open
all the while sharing so little…
her skin is not inviting, though it is welcoming,
have you seen the way her eyelashes flutter?

                ------------------

The questioning itself, as we have noted, is how mind seeks meaning, but as a vaster space than body, and intangible, and “it can be difficult to observe,” which implies a greater uncertainty of knowing.  Because we cannot look into each other’s mind (and often not even our own), there is something more difficult to trust and so a need “to inquire anxiously.” 

 

And so, given the terror of the unknowability of the Other, I begin my pilgrimage through the body, part by part.  There is something in the body parts that seem to symbolize a golden chain of fetishistic desire, the parts themselves of which represent locks to be opened as if in some oracular way as to reveal a metynomic cynosure of intimacy.  Underlying this revelation however, is a bedrock of erotic submission waiting penetration.  The receptacle of that penetration: mind.  The penetrator: the imagination.  And what will I, the narrator, find when imagination finally penetrates mind’s desire to know?

 

I see your body as the ultimate fiction, and in its being fiction as distinguishable from both reality and from history.  That is, I see its distance from these models and thus this distance is the very condition by which it can be true.  I see your body as God’s sign, as analogy to the structure of evolution and history; and history too is God’s work.  I see your body as imitating the best possible model, the truest existence known to me.  And thus, by the principle of analogy affirmed, could not be truer.

 

I see your body as fiction though your body never declares that it is fiction. You see, the fiction of your body is that it is not fiction.  And your body guards this truth exquisitely behind the veil of desire and reification.  You do not present your body as a vision or dream, nor anything else for that matter; you just open your lips or legs like a sea parting.  Your body is, and I, who have tasted its flesh, in my flesh now have returned; and set down the record like early hunters in the caves of Les Trois-Freres in Ariege, the red of your blood like the red ochre of the earth, forming the figures on the dimly lit cavernous wall of my mind.  I am language emerging in my first religion, my drawings my first ritual in the flail of survival, the entoptic image of your body etched in my eyes as if trying to release forms imprisoned in a rock. 

 

And you, the beholder of this body, for sure, are the Muse of inspiration invoked, inspiration which comes from you, and from above beyond and within, from the deepest layers of Consciousness, and in my very need of inspiration.  And it is this inspiration that allows me to record the fact.  And, as fiction, I protect your body from any undermining awareness of illusion, for to acknowledge it as fiction, your body will no longer be my poem or prayer, it would merely merge with the existence lying around it, and I would lose what is most precious to me: a form which detaches itself from ambient existence by mirroring it, by staging before the mind-in-form-objectified its relation to that existence. 

hey -- it's a fairly busy time for me at the moment, so i'm sorry i've not been more present on the blog lately. i'll try and get here more consistently.

 

Megan, i'm not quite sure what you mean by this question. can you tease it out a little bit more for me? in the meantime, i think perhaps the distinction between reality and dreams, or even reality and irreality, is insufficient. i like the way the Advaitins go about it, sublating (subrating) lower levels of reality upon the experience of higher levels of reality. (this system does indeed include unreality, by the way.) ... to speak to sort of the inverse of part of your question: what there is to lose in an exciting way, what i am eager to lose, is the lower level of re(a)lationship that i experience in mere dream or mere thought. for example, you quote: "did i dream her so many times, or think of her each time i woke up?" this sort of epistemological question is almost tautological... what would be the big difference, whether i am dreaming her throughout the night or waking up consistently and having her as the first thought on my mind before falling back asleep? it's not as though i'm asking, "did i dream her, or was she lying in my bed?" "did i see her eyes, or were we looking inside each other's looking?" these are the sorts of questions that seem to distinguish between reality and dreams, or relationship and fantasy, or a higher level and a lower level, etc. my question -- not to limit it only to this -- in the poem can be seen as something like a statement: i'm obsessing. or, at the very least, i'm dwelling on this. (then, of course, there's the seeming difference between a dream image and a thought--)

 

but you also point out three particular lines, which all share a certain feeling in common. i'll wait for your next post to go on a bit, cuz otherwise i'll just start ramblin' away.