|
I am a spiritual being, with soul but not an immortal one. And I'm
without God, or whatever the appropriate name for the transcendent "I am"
may be. Since my soul will die alone and along with me, you may pity my
death. I too pity the notion of death, but I would not want to experience
death in any way that would permit a godhead to cast me up into a tedious
heaven whose "great square in the city is clear gold like diaphanous glass"
(Revelation 21.21), or down into miserable hell, "the lake burning with
fire and sulfur, which is the second death" (Revelation 21.8). All
those voyages I find beautiful as image, repugnant as thought, and silly
as a plausible sequel to life. If biblical God exists and is the author
of so many unfriendly acts--the worst being the holocaust of Noah In which
all but one family of the world are killed (as in the older Gilgamish legend
from which the Noah story derives), I do not wish grace from such a monstrous
deity. I take my chance on the wasteland of oblivion. Though I have worked
for decades as a Bible scholar and editor of gnostic and intertestamental
scriptures, have published translations of the biblical Song of Songs,
the Gospels, Apocalypse (Revelation), and the poems of the Spanish mystical
poet San Juan de la Cruz (Saint John of the Cross), I have not lost my
faith. I have not had faith to lose:
God in His Cunning World
My act of faith does not lead to your sky,
your cunning world inside my world, to shade,
light or wherever you hang out. You made
the others and yourself perhaps. Not my
mistake of birth. My faith is vague and dark
like a small coin that may or may not be
in my pants pocket, that might buy me hope
of knowing who I am. So I can cope
with time, it buys me time. For ordinary
failure, gloom, half love, I wander a park
at night, making it glass to glimpse the Jew
you sent as a white Christ you murdered or
(if he was you) who killed himself. I want more
than our lone dust. I need another you.
Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine poet, essayist and story writer once
got into a lot of trouble with the Bishop of Buenos Aires after publishing
a piece in La Prensa in which his belief in God was seen as questionable.
Borges answered the newspaper denunciation, observing that God has done
very well over the centuries without his belief, and for God to have one
like Borges abiding in him might even be a source of discomfort and surely
bring no luster to God's name. I share Borges's distance from the biblical
El Shaddai, the God of the Mountains (which is how "the Almighty" is called
in the Hebrew Bible). God lives in others, yet not in me, But like the
Argentine, I think that the spirit that God is said to bring to others
must be replaced. If not, we will all be passive TV hounds and, on our
feet, be walking hot dog commercials.
God and the Hope of Infidels
I have not played with God. God doesn't need
my faith. The cello of the opal spheres
rebounds lucid and white for those who read
salvation in a gleaming dove. But no one hears
the unplayed chords Inside for us who pray
to no one, who invent the soul, who know
our alien ghost is brain, fed by a ray
of air, and doomed. For us I have to grow
an alphabet of trees. So In this book
the past is born in black, the I of ink
remote from you, the empty page a white
promise of memory. For those who look
at God, my book is poor, a blurry wink
on earth of earth, a hope for earthly light.
As a secular Jew, the presumed faith, fears, and superstitions of
my ancestors are foreign to me. Such beliefs and fears are a blank wall
through which my eye sees nothing, sometimes admires the wondrous oddity
of that practice, but also wishes nothing. I share a sense of people identification
with Jews (as I do with Chinese, Spaniards, and Greeks), am familiar with
the theology, even the early Kabbalist and gnostic visions of medieval
Jews, but beyond some understanding, I do not participate.
Peddler and Tailor
My grandfathers come to me in an old film:
peddler and tailor going to the New World.
In the Old World the image blurs, unknown.
My bones, nose? I must be a bit like them.
Old photos say, look, here you were with a
black hat, white beard, dark faith in the one God.
But they stood dully in the light that day
in Haradok. Despised, it wasn't odd
a century ago to flee. They wandered here
in steerage, climbing seven flights, and sat
in safety in their tenements. I hear
a plane, a wasp groaning under the sun.
Below I'm undespised and free: the son
peddling a soul and wearing no black hat.
It is not pleasant to die in this material world. It is as terrible
as hell. And conventional religions take care of death as their Ace of Spades.
I face death as part of the strange drama of living. As for after death,
it doesn't hurt. Hurtful is to ponder and pause on the horror when time
and mind are gone. I write about that fact, perhaps too often, but death
as the other eternity (the first mute eternity that precedes birth) is
real, though I can only experience dying, not death's eternity. But others
will know my death took place, as I have known death, and its cost to the
living, through the death of others I've known and loved.
A Cup of Tea
Death governed once before and almost took
forever till its tyranny was up
and I was born. Yet the scene's hard to look
at with remorse. In a spaceless, vast cup
of nothing, a primordial tea was boiled
with spices making me, and now I see
the other nothing and my wait is spoiled
by brooding on that last eternity
of absence. Life is now. And so why care
about a time I'll never feel? Or night
that was when I was not? I drink a bell
of soul punch, a concoction made of light
from a dumb angel gasping in a hell
forever now. My faith keeps gulping air.
The formidable enemy of the threat of death is the strange and enormous
gift of life, which is centered in mind and body, and especially in mind.
Mind is precious. Deep mind, self-awareness, self-knowledge, all those
abstractions are good. We live better by an awareness of consciousness,
which I equate with spirit. These are words, I must add--mind, spirit,
consciousness, awareness, cognition--and while they have meaning, they
plop around freely in multiple signification and are limited by the limits
of language. There is also meaning under meaning, words under words, and
thought under thought. We sometimes feel these mind notions wordlessly,
and that feeling too I equate with spirit.
I pray for you
and me to talk
without words or
with words I pray
we will at last
go out moonless
and make a moon
Wittgenstein is wrong when he writes at the end of his Tractatus
(1921), "What cannot be said in words must be relegated to silence." Yet,
in a deep sense, and probably not his mysterious intention, what cannot
or is not said in words may exist only in silence. For under speech are
the causes of that splendid miracle of language; and those causes of the
speech miracles are not voiced at any level, and are closer not only to
what permits us to speak, but to be and generate dream and vision. Being
is obviously not restricted to language. And spirit seems to rise from
that silence rather than to echo out of speech. Yet words, with their own
logical powers to incite, may hopefully provoke that spiritual being to
rise and take over speech as in a great poem and, for the religious, in
a prayer. And below those literary or religious words that incite may be
something unconvertible into speech that is a lofty silence, which in poor
retelling may be called peace and hope. Below the word may be light:
Waking
I take my anti-death pill every night,
an aspirin, and then die into oblivion
or dream. But now my body in a fight
with me won't let me plunge and be forgiven.
Because I can't descend I try to wake.
To wake. To enter blur and find a drop
of sun inside. To go into the glow
of nothing but the blinding drop and stop
a while. It is invisible with no
way to translate as word or thought, and yet
a sun unseeable like stars I feel
in space, confirming us with light and breath.
It's now. A hidden fire I don't forget,
confined to brief eternity, yet real
as rust or burning marble under earth.
Almost two decades ago I came out with a book about ecstasy (Poetics
of Ecstasy), of being elsewhere in one's mind or in places that seem
to be outside one's mind. I have experienced what is commonly called mystical
experience, and I believe I know that ineffable, indescribable, wordless
experience intimately; but that transformation of mind I do not program
with, or translate as, the divine. For many there is obviously a spiritual
state associated with a knowledge and acceptance of God's divinity. How
is one spiritual without God? For me it is not only possible, but necessary
to roam the spiritual without God, to be alone in the world, and to die
alone into death. The notion of God destroys the dramatic adventure, the
intensity of experience, the joy and tragedy of a spiritual life.
I begin by the strange, inexplicable fact of my existence. There is
an enormous amount of life that is inexplicable--and I do not refer to
known and still unknown facts of science, but only to the one undeniable
fact of nature, which is each personal consciousness, each a unique phenomenon
in the universe, whose sudden and final shutdown is inevitably the unique
question and tragedy of being. I can't understand mind, the strange reality
of words popping out of nowhere onto my tongue and providing a voice to
the unconscious. I haven't a clue about the ongoing marvel of speech. But
the overwhelming mystery remains that consciousness befalls each living
one of us. So I never forget that I am I. I happened into being with a
name my parents found for me. I am trapped in my solitude and spend my
life transcending solitude through art and knowledge, and especially through
you. Given our loneliness, the next step is clearly transcendence, and
the adhering to, and merging and identifying with another, which is often
called love. Pondering these matters already moves us into the spiritual.
In the next glance in verse--since this expository stuff is only one way
of saying--I use the beautiful word "soul" in a traditional religious sense,
which was also Plato's, of a spirit that survives death. But more often
I give soul Aristotle's formulation, which is a spirit born with and residing
in the body, which it requires, and which disappears with one's death.
Abandonment on Earth
Why was I born as me? I cannot curse
or bless that supreme accident, unique
to each of us. I shower and the universe
is mine and not enough. The weak
curtain against the rain is like a tent
perched on an iceberg, or a tin fishhook
against a shark, or one bag of cement
to devise heaven's floor and know the book
of wisdom from that loft of blue. My head
is not enough. If there were God, at least
a soul, this tiny world of me would have
a dream of other circles. I'm the beast
who knows he is a beast, digging for love
to heat me with good light before I'm dead.
Spirit is from Latin spiritus, breath. However, among the Greek
gnostics, spirit (psyche) was equated with light and God, while earthbound
and temporal soul (peneuma) is of a lower order than eternal spirit
(psyche). Each field has its names for mind or consciousness or spirit,
assigning it different words, and it makes philosophy, psychology, and
literature all the more interesting that we can go off on many diversely
colored horses on our romp through time. For me they all work, as they
are all imperfect (and often contradictory). The perfect is a lie, perhaps
the only provably absolute lie, and quite boring. But the imperfect changes,
is alive with movement, and gives us voyage. So soul or spirit haunt us
as long as we live, because it is what we are inside and can never be perfectly
captured in speech or art. Like good art, when we encounter that inner
rumination, it keeps going after the first perception, without succumbing
to the freezing stasis of conclusion.
So ways to the spiritual are many. One is obviously art, which is
both a spiritual and physical activity. Words, voice, paint, and sound
are physical. Art's creation is a spiritual deed whose physical forms are
given to the receiver, who hopefully will take in deeply all these new
shadows of mind and world. But for the author, however pleased or displeased
at the reception of the work, the act of creation remains the essential
mystery, which is born of being elsewhere and every place.
Among the formal mystics who dwell on transcendence, the simile in
mystical theology for the spiritual lies in some form of the ecstatic (of
being elsewhere), and the common model of that exstasis is love. In the
West much of the tradition of ecstatic love derives from the biblical Song
of Songs, which is thought to derive from ancient secular Egyptian love
songs that passed into Hebrew dialogue and idyll. Love is a great simile
because it is an interior spiritual passion that carries us from our pillow
to dream, daydream, or elsewhere, into daydream or actual encounter out
in the world. Love floats us from solitude into the illusion of physical
and spiritual union. Love makes us dance on clouds of fulfillment or fall
into pits of despair (I use in the first instance the Chinese metaphor
for making love and in the second the Jewish notion of hell, Gehenna, that
dark garbage pit outside Jerusalem). We need these physical images to handle
ideas. Hence both art and philosophy resort to the particular, to clouds
and earth, to express a general proposition: in this instance, the notion
of spiritual union.
The Black Hill
There are two ways to fail. (And failure is
the providence we come to when in time
we tumble out of consciousness to mis-
erable extinction.) One way is to climb
inside. The hill is black on a plateau
where iron moondogs screech like cables. Light
can't understand that darkness, yet black snow
thinks, spreads like thunder where I saw a white
heaven of calm seconds. The other way
climbs out to you, gambling on bliss, begins
with a look, words, and our huge walk above
the city. We are drifting gulls, two pins
through a slow century. I choose the love
out there. Help me. To make the black hill day.
I have spoken of soul and spirit in solitude, and love as the way
of floating outside. As a poet, I may see that way first. But soul, and
poetry, also has an ethical side, of religious or political ethics,
and much of the world's great poetry, as Pindar, Herbert, Shelley, Hopkins,
Eliot, Mao know are of the politics of religion. The epic poems of Revelation
(Apocalypse), the medieval Islamic Mother of Books, Hopkins’s short
"Wreck of the Deutchland," and Eliot's "Four Quartets" all attest to the
marvelous mix of extreme ethical beliefs and eschatological vision--that
joining of the esthetic and the ethical in most art. Whatever the subject,
if the art is only esthetic it is an unconvincing exercise, and conversely
if the esthetic is ignored or dismissed, the work is propaganda. I must
quickly mention that the ethical, whether religious, political, psychological
or whatever, if it assumes any form of prescriptive dominion, the consequences
in society and art are normally disastrous. People make war for high ethical
purpose to kill the unrighteous. The dissenter, the different, is demonized,
and with crusading faith, fervor, and desire for profit, everything from
censorship to execution may await the heretic.
After this melancholy parenthesis on some unfriendly manners of the
spiritual, I return to astonishing spirituality, the mind of self-awareness,
which in the interior blur goes beyond its manifestation in art, love,
and the politics of state and religion. It is wrong to prescribe how to
practice spirituality as it is the creation of art. Some do reach the space
of meditation by following formal rules. They seem to work for many. I
am unfamiliar with the techniques and rules of meditation, and resist them.
I find it sufficient to sit still, or perhaps move, and think. But I do
have formal knowledge of the Spanish mystics, who practiced their own third
eye, as Plato called the eye of self-knowledge. The Spaniards were the
sixteenth-century meditative poets, Teresa de Avila, Juan de la Cruz, and
Luis de Leon. I am taken by their ways, going from nothing to illumination
to union-- what Juan de la Cruz calls the via purgativa, via iluminativa,
via unitiva. We may recognize these spiritual ladders in precursors,
particularly in Plato's levels of cognition, in the writings and similes
of the Platonists Philo and Plotinus, and in the darkness and flight of
gnostic Hermes Trismegistus. All go from purging pain and darkness to the
light, and ultimately to union, which is the transcendent mingling with
another entity, usually in a discovered site within one's own mind.
Juan de la Cruz follows what he calls "the negative way" (la via
negativa), the way of knowing by not knowing, which some have called
"negative ecstasy."
Without a place and with a place
to rest--living darkly with no ray
of light--I burn my self away.
--Juan de la Cruz (1542-1591)
By a negative way, one escapes from nada in a dark night of the soul
that quiets the senses and annihilates the self; in the second stage of
illumination one sees and feels the presence of God; in the third one becomes
God, as one rises through ecstasy into union with the divinity. With luck,
one remains there in peace in a state of ineffable oblivion. Juan's metaphor
in the poems for union with God is the sexual climax of lovers, and the
speaker in the poems is the woman. There is the assumption that God, as
deity and lover, is a male figure, and it is discreet for I in the poems,
who makes love with God, who asks that her hymen be pierced and praises
him for bringing her breasts alive, be a woman. In "0 Living Flame of Love,"
the speaker tells God, the groom:
0 living flame of love,
how tenderly you wound
my soul to her profoundest core!
You are no longer shy.
Do it now, I ask you:
break the membrane of our sweet union.
0 soothing cautery!
0 wound that is a joy!
0 gentle hand! 0 delicate touch
tasting of eternity,
repaying every debt.
Killing, you turn my death to life.
In his own commentary on the poem, the Carmelite monk explained that
since words are inadequate to describe union with God, we must use a simile,
and human physical love is the best simile to express divine union. Between
the poetry of the Moors and Federico Garcia Lorca, San Juan's poetry is
the most explicitly erotic in the history of Spanish literature, and also
the most beautiful, plain, and transcendent, These stages of mystical ascendance
Juan describes in four book-length commentaries on his three major poems--
they are maddeningly tedious and force verbose explanation upon the lyrics--
but in the wonder of the poems, in which he enacts his experience of becoming
God in life, there is no philosophical or religious speech. So, however
interpreted, whether in sacred or secular paraphrase, his expression of
spirit convinces and overwhelms, as "On a Dark Night" (En una noche
oscura), which is known as poem "on the dark night of the soul" (a
rather clumsy title later added to the poem by a copyist).
In the first stanzas of "Dark Night," the soul escapes from the body
(the sleeping house), escapes down a stairway and out into the street,
where no one seems to be, to meet her love (the speaker in his three major
love poems is a woman). Light in her is stronger than noonday sun, the
lovers join, and all ceases as they fade. Juan's incantatory retelling
of the Song of Songs encounter is the best known and also the great mystico-
erotic poem of Western literature:
On a dark obscure night,
starving for love and deep in flame,
0 happy lucky flight!
unseen I slipped away,
my house at last was calm and safe.
And blackly free from light,
disguised and down a secret way.
0 happy lucky flight!
In darkness I escaped,
my house at last was calm and safe.
On that happy night--in
this planet's only birth and death,
unknown like everything. Saul lied about the light,
for no one rose again. We are alone,
alive with secret words. Then blackly free.
When I feel spirit coming to me--or myself moving to it--the difference
is slight--then I am free in a warm pond of detachment. I may be happy
a while, or despondent. I confront the notion of a short residence on earth.
I'm introspection. I drop wordlessly into thought, and sometimes below
it, lost in a disappearing well of being. That fall may be so deep that
hopelessness sets in. But the terror passes along with other illusions.
And falling and floating instruct. The flux of being, its inconstancy and
movement, keeps me voyaging. Plotinus understood the ephemerality of speech
and sight when, after being asked to pose for a portrait, he responded,
"Why paint an illusion of an illusion?" The Tibetans speak of impermanence.
We never arrive, and it is good. The absence of closure keeps me wanting
to know and be lost on the way to spirit. Should I ever say I know who
I am, how I have entered the unknown, I am lying.
Which may be, for a while, good news.
Gospel of Lies
Comrade illusion, I embrace you like
a tuba. Gold and false. My hero Don
Quijote rose up mad and set his pike
against the gales of mills and monsters on
the wasteland of La Mancha. Jesus al-
so toured, performing magic, and he gave
his life so we might drink the alcohol
of heaven, drink the light and be no slave
of truth. Even the Buddha found a way
to free the unsubstantial self and fly
inside a dream of sun. Until the sun
was gone Quijano lived the noble lie
of lunacy: the poor man with a day
of grace and fire. Then true oblivion.
So while there is breath, the voyage is endless, and I care intensely
to live the illusions. The way passes on seas of synchronicity, as the
now pops around simultaneously through past and imagination. In finite
time are flashes of all time and no time. In silence is the roar of spirit.
At mini-spaces from the brain lies the world. The globe is not negligible.
Through the powers of the mind, the globe is our outer body, our larger
overcoat. The intimate coat worn over the mind is our personal body, which
we keep on for life.
These flashes or seconds of spirit are a cottage of solitude worth
more than a living God who can favor us with eternity or condemn us to
ice and fire. The gnostics say that God exists in the spirit in us in the
flash of now, and, through the knowledge of light, we need not wait until
death to be God. I agree about the nowness, though I prefer not to associate
that life force with an omnipotent and omniscient figure, by any of his
regular names. And this nameless spirit of now is a million times better
than the emptiness of God's absence. Yet I also know and accept that nothing
is the beginning of all. In Wang Wei only an empty mountain waits for rain.
Juan de la Cruz said de nada a todo, from nothingness to everything.
On a clean page I can make marks. In a blank mind I may feel spirit. Feeling
a bit of spirit, the stuttering wonder of spirit, is the good walk through
time, which is mortal for us, unbounded for the cosmos. Our aim, at least
mine, is to make instants of our mortality unbounded. With that I can know
peace.
Yes, I know that flashes of eternity are there. That solitary activity
and knowledge of it should be enough to get through life. Then I think
all things at once. It is wondrous to be, but better to be not only in
one self. And then I know the spirit has time. It has time to remember
and to suppose ahead.
An incident occurred just this week to confirm many coincidences of
time. I was sitting on a bench in North Oakland, waiting for a friend.
There are so many homeless these days that even sitting in casual but decent
clothing outside, ruminating on a French past when I lived as a nomadic
student in Paris, I thought of others sitting like me, saying spare change?
Then, as another mirrored face of contemporary life, a friend in a tea
place introduced me to his friend who clearly had a contemporary disease.
All this helped the spirit make sense and prove once again that I have
time to spend on earth, peaceful or not, waiting. What is better than to
be waiting for spirit to materialize?
Spare Change
Outside Ferrari, an Italian deli
on Piedmont, I am sitting on a bench,
thoughtless. Spare change? I've got nothing to sell
and don't look odd. I slump back to a French
cafe on Bonaparte where I would sit
an afternoon. Where would I sleep tonight?
l’Hotel des Reves? Cheapo and smelly, it
was good. Then dead asleep, after midnight,
men banged the door to check my papers, but
they stopped pounding after a while. My friend
Marc introduced me yesterday to Dave,
his friend, well into AIDS, so thin I got
a chill of sorrow. He was smiling. Brave
I say, spare change? Sunwarm I've time to spend.
There is time. But time is up and down. Often my dream is being with
another, as was my favorite heretic Juan de la Cruz, who even when he was
dying in a black cell in a monastery in Ubeda In northern Andalusia, In
he drank the science of his obscure love, who came, who joined him and
serenely fell with him untellably. The black above the earth was daybreak
in his blood as he sat on the floor, babbled, and lived beyond words, felicitous.
I steal Juan's vision and make it my light. De nada a todo.
From nothing to all.
Yet being in no monastery, and simply on a bench outside a deli shop
window, my faith wavers. Juan might come by. I recall his poem saying how
only when he feels sore and beaten down at noon, so low he drops below
night earth, can he float high and blind into the sun. Yet with all that,
I often live a solitude when nothing works and mind is terror and boredom.
But I'm a lucky person. I pitch from pole to pole, as I am doing now, a
few hours after midnight, while trying to end this shaky declaration of
how a godless being brims with spirit. I lose myself and stumble down to
nowhere. There is no way. Then you appear where no one seems to be. Whoever
you are, I am saved by you. Joy drops in, and curiously you are me, I you,
and we are one diamond of flesh.
And through our closed eyelids we are light.
Bibliography
Barnstone, Willis. The New Covenant: The Gospels and Apocalypse.
New York: Riverhead/Penguin-Putnam, 2001.
__________. The Other Bible. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1980.
__________. The Poems of Saint John of the Cross. Intro & translation
by Willis Barnstone. New York: New Directions, 1979.
__________. The Poetics of Ecstasy: From Sappho to Borges. New York:
Holmes & Meier, 1983.
__________. The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets. Dartmouth: University
Press of New England, 1996.
|
