First day of the Second month
Itinerant monk and master wood carver, Enku, cut more than 100,000 Buddhist figures over the span of his 63-year life. He carved whatever material he could come by and worked quickly hewing small-scale statues for temples, village shrines, and chessmen size figures for family homes.
Enku wrote after achieving his vow to carve 100,000 Buddhist figures, “Ten thousand Buddhas in this country, one hundred thousand Buddhas completed. 28thday, 9thmonth, 3rdyear of Genroku.”
My favorite carving is Plate 52 from Enku: Sculptor of a Hundred Thousand Buddhas by Kazuaki Tanahashi. Indara Taisho (Sanskrit Indra). 118 cm. Transitional period. Natayakushi-do, Nagoya city, Aichi prefecture (Owari Province). One of the Twelve Guardian Generals, with the ideogram for “serpent” carved on his forehead and the outline of a bow and arrows at his left side. A small heart is notched into the prominent arrowhead at the lower left of the carving. The height of the piece is accentuated by the vertical grain of the unfinished wood composing the middle portion of the figure’s flowing robes which feather out into arcs at the lower right hem, while the right hand of the figure is wrapped around the paralleling bowstring with the arm hidden behind the body of the bow itself and the fletching lines of the arrows at the top left. The face of the figure is smiling and confident with what seems to be a mask around the eyes.
Of the more than one thousand Kannon carvings Enku fashioned in his lifetime, on a 178.5 cm Eleven-Headed Kannon, dated 1689, Shiga prefecture, an area located at the foot of Mount Ibuki where Enku practiced Shugendo, a mountaineering form of Buddhism, the inscription reads: Cut wood on the fourth, prayed on the fifth, carved on the sixth, enshrined on the seventh. Monk Enku. Seventh day, third month, second year of Genroku. Some lines excerpted from the longer passage are in part:
All beings together
meeting the spring
even grass and trees
become the truth.
Wild cherry blossoms!
Itinerant. Traveling from place to place. On the road wandering free. Wide brimmed hat, staff, satchel, and a pair of straw sandals. There is a long tradition of pilgrimage and itinerant monks in Buddhism. Bodhidharma, founder of Ch’an Buddhism, came from the West, propagating the Way in China. The Way spread East to Korea and eventually reached Japan where it is known as Zen and Bodhidharma is called Daruma.
In the Lotus Sutra there is a phrase kosen-rufu meaning “to widely declare, flow, spread out, blanket.” Kosen-rufu refers to the continued propagation of Buddhism. Another way of propagation is to make copies of the sutras and other sacred texts and disseminate them or simply to read them out publicly. Enku directed the restoration of 600 volumes of the Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra and later undertook the recitation of that same sutra publicly.
Like Buddhism itself, propagation flows from many sources, taking the form of expressions of peace, work for the greater well-being of society, and individual example. Mindfulness propagates mindfulness.
This short concluding verse to the Buddhist wedding ceremony speaks to the topic:
We live in the world as if in the sky,
Just as the lotus blossom is not wetted
By the water that surrounds it.
Ikkyubanashi is the general term for biographical anecdotes and tales that were collected and compiled as a tribute to the life of a noted Buddhist monk. Named for the monk Ikkyu, the quintessential “mad” (eccentric) example, most tributes were recorded by students of the storied monk, students of students, or by other monastic relations. The tributes usually feature poems written by the monk himself revealing personal reflections on his path, from comments on spiritual practice to daily living. The tributes are often comic, moving, memorable, and enlightening—part character, part caricature. The celebration of life concluded with the author of the tribute presenting the death verse of the honored monk. Composing death verses was a tradition among Japanese Buddhist monks and poets, a farewell in the form of hokku or waka. Ryokan, a Buddhist monk of the Soto school, wrote:
Showing its back,
Showing its front,
A falling maple leaf
I wanted to board the plane with you, to show our boarding passes to the flight attendant together, eat the awful meal together, ask for our drinks together, sit side by side and talk until I put my head on your shoulder as you read and slept, and then wake up together and listen to music, watch
a movie, go to the bathroom…All I really want is to fly with you.
—Qiu Miaojin, Last Words From Montmartre
Around the world
I’ve searched for you
I traveled on
When hope was gone
To keep a rendezvous
I know, somewhere, sometime, somehow
You’d look at me
And I would see
The smile you’re smiling now
It might have been
In country town
Or in New York
In gay Paree
Or even London Town
No more will I
Go all around the world
For I have found
My world
In you.
So to the road thou shalt be reconciled,
And find the lady, and with the lady, Love.
Dante, The New Life
Love is a great gift. Search it out. It’s in you.
“I am at the center of a circle to the which all parts of the circumference bear an equal relation…” Dante, The New Life
The root of Shakespearean comedy is love and romance with a wedding at the end. Just flip through The Tempest or A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The root of modern comedy is a pie in the face—it is a particular comeuppance that never fails to get a laugh and never gets old. Just listen to “Make ‘Em Laugh” from Singin’ in the Rain or take a look at Our Gang’s Shivering Shakespeare.
The wedding practice of the bride and groom cutting the cake is in my opinion beholden to both aforementioned roots of comedy—the culmination of romance wherein husband and wife lovingly pie the other with cake as one of the very first acts of married life. Some people laugh. Some cry. And the moment of mutual comeuppance is celebrated with photography, spontaneous images of the first fight that will be carefully placed into an album and put away for posterity. Perhaps hanging a Warholesque oversize portrait of this particular moment would serve as an aid for conflict resolution in the future—The choice between custard and cream is easy. Cream every time. “To the moon, Alice…”
Books on aesthetics are invariably expensive or out of print.
People view all things, all events in terms of what they value in life, with that as their standard. Taneda Santoka
In “Remember,” Christina Rossetti offers up a poem about love and loss “as high as nature’s skill can soar” to quote Dante. Here are the first and last verses of the sonnet:
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
The poet asks her lover to remember her after her death and predicting the pain of that parting, to quote Dante “memory cannot retain the image nor its operation,” pardons her lover from greater grief, secure in the knowledge that she was loved.
It bears repeating—Love is a great gift.
December 8, 1936
Haiku-like haiku aren’t particularly bad. But haiku that don’t seem haiku-like at all—nowadays that’s the kind I’m after.
Journal of Taneda Santoka
Finding freedom in an itinerant life and in free verse haiku, Taneda Santoka walked, taking life in—paucity and beauty, repetition of the road, repetition of sounds, snow falling on snow, loquats piled on loquats, feelings amassing, overwhelming the senses—tippling, avalanche.
Waiting for what?
Each day each day
More fallen leaves pile up
Nice inn
Mountains all around
Sake store in front
The leafless tree
Is drying
My tabi socks
Cuckoo
Tomorrow I’ll cross over
That mountain
Katydid katydid
Nothing to do
But cry
Alone
Crossing the mountain—
Another mountain
All you who read my poems
Guard your purity of heart
Let your greed be modesty
Your flattery be honesty
Put an end to evil karma
Trust your own true nature
Find your buddha body today
Do it as fast as an order
Translation of Cold Mountain by Red Pine
“Thus is the Tathagata seen by means of attributes that are not attributes.” Diamond Sutra
“Just so! Without letters or words is the true door beyond duality!”
Vimilakirti Sutra
“Thirty spokes converge on a hub / but it’s the emptiness / that makes a wheel work.” Lao-tzu
In the Lunar calendar there are 30 days between new moons. The emptiness. Nothing. And yet the moon is still the moon. Rumor has it we put a man up there.
Doing nothing often leads to the very best something. Pooh
Like a humming sort of day in Hundred Acre Wood—
To sit all the time constrains the body and doesn’t profit the understanding. Listen to my song:
Alive they sit, never resting
dead they rest never sitting
with a bunch of stinking bones
how can you start your practice?
Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch
A singing sort of day in Tientai Mountains—
Hundred Acre Wood and Heaven’s Terrace (Tientai) would both be wonderful places for a picnic tea, gazing at the sunset, moon-viewing, and greeting the sunrise. The very best something.
Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah, Zip-a-Dee Ay
“The joy of companionship never ends / who can sleep past dawn.” A line of poetry written by Cold Mountain, famous hermit of Tientai.
Wonderful feeling, wonderful day!
The idea of purity, with all that this word can imply for a Christian, took possession of me at the age of sixteen…when I was contemplating a mountain landscape. Simone Weil
The beauty of the world is almost the only way by which we can allow God to penetrate us. Simone Weil
Through every human being, unique space, intimate space, opens up to the world… Rainer Maria Rilke
Joy in the province of creation…music, images, words…work of praise.
Hate is bondage. Anger is chains.
“A hateful seed produces a hateful fruit. And a hateful fruit produces a hateful seed.” Buddha
Jazz is rhythm and meaning. Henri Matisse from his book JAZZ
A Musician Once Said: In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled, and compressed. It is therefore necessary to present oneself with the greatest humility: white, pure, and candid with a mind as if empty…
Henri Matisse
Anonymity allows me to renounce myself, but in renouncing myself I come to affirm myself even more. In the same way that silence is a denial of noise, but as a result, the slightest noise in silence becomes enormous…practice makes me seek the noise hidden in silence, the movement in stillness, life in the inanimate, the infinite in the finite…
Joan Miro from I Work Like a Gardener
Making art for Matisse and Miro was to experience the sublime, not merely the beautiful. It was an act of direct contact with creation. Every time we take a breath, we too make direct contact with creation. Breathing. Life. Everyday reverence.
The world, we are told, was made especially for man—With such views of the Creator it is, of course, not surprising that erroneous views should be entertained of the creation.
Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?
It took more than three thousand years to make some of the oldest of the Sequoias, trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra.
I joyfully return to the immortal truth and immortal beauty of Nature.
John Muir
Facing the enormity of the Calaveras trees John Muir surely encountered the sublime. His reverence for Nature is evident in his heartfelt language. The rapid growth of right public opinion regarding the environmental movement has its roots in Muir’s writings.
Muir encourages us still, “While the iron of public sentiment is hot let us strike hard.”
In 1935, Webley Edwards began broadcasting a radio program called The Hawaii Calls Show.
The opening went flying through the air like so:
That is the sound of the waves here on the famous beach at Waikiki, and the sound of the waves means that this program is coming from Hawaii.
[These lines were repeated in Hawaiian and followed by a short musical intro.]
Welcome again to the island of Hawaii. You are now beneath the big Moana Banyan tree right on the beach at Waikiki for the music of the islands as Hawaii calls.
[This was followed by, “I Want to Go Back to My Little Grass Shack.”]
Soft voices and steel guitars—a memory of good friends and our people in the far off places and all of us wishing that you were here with us…Here in Hawaii, this fine day.
Edwards offered an acoustic postcard and nostalgic lei to his listeners. Some years later Edwards was the first to interview the pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. A memory flying through the air that forever endures as our loudest petition for world peace.
There will be much disillusionment after this war, and not only in Germany and Japan…That will be the moment in which the persecuted, repressed, and ostracized minorities from many countries, who have suffered humiliation in the name of human dignity, will speak and be heard.
Vera Brittain
On February 23, 1939, regular passenger service of Pan Am’s Honolulu Clipper between San Francisco and Honolulu, a 19-hour flight to an island paradise, began. The route quickly gained popularity with honeymooners. Speed and luxury…Boeing promised, Tomorrow’s airplanes today. The Boeing 314 flying boat was one of nine in service to Pan Am until America’s entry into the war in 1941.
Webley Edwards was the first to broadcast the attack on Pearl Harbor as it was happening.
After the war, the USS Arizona Memorial was constructed with a combination of public and private funds, including a significant $64,000 donation by Elvis Presley from a benefit concert in 1961, a year before the opening in 1962. Reached only by shuttle boat, the memorial is a tranquil place to reflect on the cost of war, the wreckage of a generation of lives lost across the globe.
All these years later, still popular for romance, Hawaii remains one of the most beautiful destinations on earth. Love brings them back—below a cliff, a lagoon holding its peace.
The mirror is empty, reflecting back to me no more than the falling away of my language as it gradually unrolls…it suffices that I speak, that my speech flow, for it to flow away. Roland Barthes
Will my memory survive my tomb? And should it do so, will there be, after the transformations effected, in a world changed and occupied with other things, will there be a public to listen to me? Will my shade be able to say as that of Virgil to Dante—Poeta fui et cantai—“I was a poet and have sung.” Francois-Rene Chateaubriand
Waterfalls, the very sound of exuberance, turbulent cataracts…life of life, flowing…memory and moment, gravity and time…a record
Waterfall, nothing can harm me at all,
My worries seem so very small
With my waterfall.
I can see my rainbow calling me
Through the misty breeze
Of my waterfall.
My worries seem so very small
With my waterfall.
I can see my rainbow calling me
Through the misty breeze
Of my waterfall.
May This Be Love, Jimi Hendrix
I beg you then to listen to what I ask—you will see that it is a small favor which you can easily grant. While I am denied your presence, give me at least through your words—of which you have enough and to spare—some sweet semblance of yourself. Letter of Heloise to Abelard
Everything we did and also the times and places are stamped on my heart along with your image, so that I live through it all again with you. Even in sleep I know no respite. Sometimes my thoughts are betrayed in a movement of my body, or they break out in an unguarded word.
Letter of Heloise to Abelard
Hearts and minds—Paris—an affair of letters, not unlike the passion, scarlet and reeling, that burned between Henry Miller and Anais Nin. The difference is that when their clandestine love was exposed Abelard entered a monastery, Heloise a nunnery. United by a higher love.
Sometimes she discarded her anxiety as nervousness…settling down…until some fragment of the movie story itself would reawaken it, if a lie were pictured, a false situation, exposure. Above all a spy story.
Anais Nin, A Spy in the House of Love
The sexual life is usually enveloped in many layers, for all of us—poets, writers, artists. It is a veiled woman, half-dreamed. Anais Nin
Love is why stars sing at night,
Listen with your eyes shut tight.
Love the dream and spectral light,
The sky is blue and it’s bright.
One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin…A man has to have his sleep…whenever I return to the hotel during the morning to write up my orders, those men [other traveling salesmen] are still having breakfast…If I weren’t holding back because of my parents, I would have given notice long ago, I would have marched straight up to the boss and told him off from the bottom of my heart…I haven’t abandoned all hope; once I’ve saved enough to pay off my parent’s debt to him…I’ll make a big, clean break! Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Naturally, Gregor Samsa did not make a big, clean break as his present condition dictated his absence from society. Yet despite his past sacrifices for the sake of his parents and his own deteriorating circumstances, he never failed to consider the fortunes of his family. Not without a heart, Gregor Samsa hoped for the best. He hoped in spite of hope, never succumbing to despair.
“Do not seek to understand in order to believe but believe that thou may understand.” St. Augustine
“I confess my weakness, I do not wish to fight in hope of victory, lest the day comes when I lose the battle. What need is there to forsake what is certain and pursue uncertainty?” St. Jerome
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
T.S. Eliot
The poetry of Rimbaud abounds in a richness of sensual images: in the spirit of amphimixis, from his words, I offer you the following formula—
“I inherit from my Gaulish ancestors my whitish-blue eye, my narrow skull…But I don’t butter my hair…Here I am on the Breton shore…I am leaving Europe. The sea air will scorch my lungs…I shall swim, stamp down the grass, hunt, above all smoke…free, smoking, risen from violet fogs, I who bored through the wall of the reddening sky which bears a sweetmeat good poets find delicious…Into the ferocious tide-rips, last winter, more absorbed than the minds of children, I ran…the yellow-blue awakening of singing phosphorus!”
All rivers run to the sea—these are the external facts.
[A] half-dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum.
The above statement is a simple summary of the Infinite Monkey Theorem which when taken to its fullest implication attributes to unceasing simian keystrokes the creation of every text that has been or shall be written.
The canonical British Museum Library has its beginnings in a gift of volumes from the personal collection of Hans Sloane who had purchased a great many of those books from the estate of Thomas Browne. In Musaeum Clausum, Thomas Browne enumerated a descriptive inventory of remarkable books, antiquities, pictures and rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living. Without exception each item Browne elaborated on with the utmost plausibility was a fiction—a wish or speculation engendered by his own erudite imagination. The inevitable playful contents were among the first compositions to be shelved at the nascent British Museum Library—a cabinet of curiosities or the curious work of monkeys.
Letizia Alvarez de Toledo has observed that the vast Library is pointless; strictly speaking, all that is required is a single volume, of the common size, printed in nine- or ten-point type, that would consist of an infinite number of infinitely thin pages. (In the early seventeenth century, Cavalieri stated that every solid body is the superposition of an infinite number of planes.) Using that silken vademecum would not be easy: each apparent page would open into other similar pages; the inconceivable middle page would have no "back." Jorge Borges, The Library of Babel
Time hath endlesse rarities, and shows of all varieties; which reveals old things in heaven, makes new discoveries in earth, and even earth it self a discovery. Thomas Browne
The kind of behavior that really is spiritual practice consists of refraining from falsehood and abiding by the truth, neither humiliating nor mocking others, being humble, and having a good heart and helping others.
It is very important to generate a good attitude, a good heart, as much as possible. From this, happiness in both the short term and the long term for both yourself and others will come.
The ultimate source of a happy life is warmheartedness. Even animals display some sense of compassion. When it comes to human beings, compassion can be combined with intelligence. Through the application of reason, compassion can be extended to all 7 billion human beings.
—Dalai Lama
On St. Valentine’s Day 1990, Earth was photographed from a distance of 3.7 billion miles by Voyager One. Our planet appeared as a Pale Blue Dot (the photograph title) no larger than a pixel. The reality of Earth in space, a vantage of ascension, seen in essence, in entire indivisibility—a unity beyond national boundaries and politics, status, gender, age—home and shelter to 7 billion human beings. That’s a love letter to all good hearts.
Daughter of a cabinet maker, Mary Anning (1800-1847) grew up combing the sand and shore near her home in Lyme Regis, England for fossils. Holiday makers visiting the coast delighted in the curiosities, frequently buying specimens from the “fossiler” stand to carry home as a souvenir or for a collection. One day young Mary sold an ammonite—her skill in finding and identifying fossils supported her family after the death of her father. As she matured, her honed eye and distinguished intellect led on to a lifetime of greater discoveries like pre-historic skeletons of icthyosaurus, plesiosaurus, and pterodactyle which are now housed in the British Museum.
Beyond the bones, there is a memorial stained glass window at St. Michael’s Church in Lyme Regis inscribed to her memory—Benevolence of heart and integrity of life.
The bivalve mollusc genus Anningella was posthumously named after her.
She also inspired the popular children’s rhyme, “She sells seashells by the seashore.”
A sea shell emanates from a mollusk…As to the elementary process of this emanation scientists tell us many things that they have seen under the microscope. They add a number of other things which I think they have not seen: some are inconceivable, though that scarcely precludes discoursing about them; others would require observation over hundreds of millions of years, for that much time is needed to change anything into anything. Paul Valery, Sea Shells
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
In his poem “To the Virgins to Make the Most of Time,” Robert Herrick (1591-1674) famously and gently admonished maids to marry.
Days of Being Wild (1990): Directed by Wong Kar-wai
Setting: Stainless steel industrial galley. Round, institutional wall clock ticking loudly. Moody and cool lighting contrasts with the casual intensity of the dialogue and physical interaction between a man (Leslie Cheung) and a woman (Maggie Cheung) just finishing her work. The two are alone in the quiet kitchen, talking over the ticking.
W: What do you want?
M: I just want to make friends with you.
W: Why should I?
M: Look at my watch! [Man slowly leans into the woman, resting his arm
on the counter behind her revealing his wristwatch]
W: Why should I?
M: Just one minute, OK? [The woman looks. Camera pans from wristwatch
to hold on wall clock]
W: Time’s up, speak now
M: Today is…
W: 16th
M: 16th…April 16. April 16th, 1960. One minute before 3 PM. You are with
me. Because of you I’ll remember that one minute. From now on, we’re
friends of one minute. This is fact, you can’t deny it. Cause it’s past.
I’ll come tomorrow. [Man exits]
W: [with a lingering look, takes a few steps after him] Haven’t he
remember that minute for me? I don’t know. But I’ve memorized
this guy. Later on, he did come everyday. We became friends,
started from that minute…to 2 minutes. Later, we dated at least
an hour a day.
I can hear a woman rustling inside the church.
She is a dancer, so she speaks with her hands.
I hear her rise, sweetly
from her knees to her feet.
This means she believes
in dreams. I hear her
slide her hand, sweetly
along her hair. This means
she believes in the sun.
I hear her move towards me
and place her open palm on the door.
This means she welcomes me.
This means she believes
in the miracle of possibility.
Lee Herrick
Minute by minute, gathering time. Smiling. Wild. Anything is possible. This is your life.
The events of birth and death among the Indians [Indigenous Americans] have retained more of their ancient associations and customs than any other; because these events are not changed by outward influences, like the life which lies between them; they are not matters of fashion passing with its breath. The oldest name beneath an Indian [Indigenous American] roof is still conferred on an infant as an honour, that of its grandmother for example, for names always descend in the maternal line. From that moment the child occupies the place of the woman whose name has been given to it; and in speaking to it [the child], it is addressed by the degree of parentage revived by its name; thus an uncle may salute his nephew by the title of grandmother. This custom…brings those who are gone to life again: it reproduces the weakness of age in that of infancy; it connects the extremes of life, the beginning and the end of a family; it communicates a kind of immortality to the ancestors, and supposes them present amidst their posterity.
Francois-Rene Chateaubriand
To remember where we come from is to remember who we are. Sometimes we feel lost, alone…we fall into despair. Elisapie, a Canadian singer-songwriter of Inuit heritage, voiced just such a spiritual crisis and journey back in her song “Darkness Bring the Light”:
Of the wonders of nature the wild the dust the waters and the light
Oh the wonders of retreats and open spaces lived only by the fearless
The fearless
Where will my heart go now?
Where will my heart go now?
Darkness bring the light
Darkness bring my light
The birth of a child is the renew of one’s soul it’s a connection, connection
The death of my father is not to be feared for
He lives in you my child becomes once again my guide
She is a living link. Present in her blood is the history of a people and proud culture that has not perished despite the epic clash with European civilizations. Far from disappearing, Indigenous American cultures live on in songs, stories, dance, and languages—cultures born of the land and heart of open spaces, a history not forgotten in mounds and tombs.
Misfortune and inexplicable suffering are as familiar a theme in life as in literature.
Book of Job, Chapter 30:
22 Thou liftest me up to the wind; thou causest me to ride upon it, and dissolvest my substance.
27 My bowels boiled, and rested not: the days of affliction prevented me.
30 My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat.
He who from fate receives but blow on blow,
Who, like myself in her disfavour stands,
Although he had a hundred mighty hands,
Would vainly strive for riches here below.
Who, like myself in her disfavour stands,
Although he had a hundred mighty hands,
Would vainly strive for riches here below.
His paths are strewn with thorns where'er he go;
And where he looks for home there soon expands
A sea of woes: against its stormy strands
Waves roll and splash in unremitting flow.
And where he looks for home there soon expands
A sea of woes: against its stormy strands
Waves roll and splash in unremitting flow.
Pursued and tossed about by Care, by Need,
He finds no peace from worries on his road,
Though to the farthest place his search may lead.
He finds no peace from worries on his road,
Though to the farthest place his search may lead.
And only in the quiet, cold abode,
Which after weary life's span is decreed,
Will death relieve him of his toilsome load.
Which after weary life's span is decreed,
Will death relieve him of his toilsome load.
Slovenian poet France Preseren, Sonnets of Misfortune
Heinrich Heine, widely respected German poet of Jewish lineage and contemporary of Preseren, continued to write though paralyzing illness confined him to bed, which he called his ‘mattress grave,’ for the last eight years of his life. Despite failing health, his mind and disposition remained bright and sunny. Zum Lazarus (2) is a rare exception:
The dark dark lady held my head
To her heart that tender way.
But where her trickling tears were shed
My hair was streaked with grey.
She kissed me lame, she kissed me ill,
She kissed the sight from my eye;
She wildly mouthed my backbone till
She’d sucked the marrow dry.
My body’s a corpse, a prison where
The ghost waits for the grave:
Sometimes it feels so grumpy there
It must run mad and rave.
Impotent curses! The most violent
Drives not one fly away.
Put up with fate: try to be silent
Whether you snivel or pray.
Notably, by explicit direction Heine’s publishers printed a single separate volume of his works especially for his mother that made no mention whatsoever of his infirmity.
Book of Job, Chapter 38:
24 By what way is the light parted, which scattereth the east wind upon the earth?
36 Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? or who hath given understanding to the heart?
Longevity
Simple wildflowers
Incense, palms together, mind
At ease, calm, peaceful
That is what I heard: worry,
Wrath—grief unto early death
One of the fundamental conditions of mutual respect between peoples of different race is surely a thorough acquaintance with the more important features of their mode of life, with their history and their intellectual achievements…There can be no doubt that indigenous achievements of this nature in Africa have remained, up to the present, almost unknown to the outside world.
The adornment of the walls of the Ntanda [ceremonial hut] with drawings and paintings* is traditional and the inside walls are made smooth for this purpose. It would be an over-simplification to say that the purpose of these paintings is purely didactic. It is no doubt so in the sense that they teach something to the pupils, but the whole theme of the lessons taught is not knowledge, but faith. The novice is made conversant through this means with a different world—a world of which he becomes a citizen through initiation.
*The inside of a hut is in semi-darkness even at midday and the photography of paintings made with soot, red ochre and white clay or python excrement under these conditions was never even contemplated.
H. Cory, Wall-Paintings by Snake Charmers in Tanganyika
I. The Sun
“Who in this place is having a difference of opinion?
The task is to reconcile the novices,
To reconcile them and enlighten them.
They have had a number of lessons;
Today there will follow others.”
II. Darkness
“In night and darkness
Who does see?
They can see, who are our teachers,
They closed the door
And will open it
When they think the time has come.”
14. SANA
This is another personification of the dawn. While the Kifinda [elder spiritual guide] makes this drawing the novices are taught the following song: “Watwikuliraga Biswe Bose.” [You have made us all free.]
“Haha Tulifuma.” [Now we are coming out.]
Sana is holding a medicine bag in one hand and a magic wand in the other. He is supposed to have great medical knowledge and to be able to cure any disease. This is proved by the fact that all sick people feel better in the morning; that the improvement does not always last as the day wears on is due to the various evil influences which gain strength when Sana has gone.
24. MANGA WA SOLO
He is the pupil of the very famous Manga Ntale, by name Kulama Ngarami (to agree to health). He became famous for the powerful amulet called ‘Solo’ which he prepared for his customers. It consists of a small transparent stone wrapped in strips made from the bark of the ‘muhoja’ tree (sterculia sp.) and carried on a string round the neck. The amulet is handed over to the customer with the following explanation: “A stone is by nature not subject to influences. If you feel uneasiness or depression, remember the stone round your neck. It will take away your worries. Your soul will find peace.” Manga wa Solo carries in his left hand a medicine bag and in his right a spear used in rites of ancestor worship.
Mysteries of faith. Spiritual healers. Traditional medicines.
The Way of the World
If you’ve got plenty, then you’ll soon
Be adding more to it.
If hardly anything, you’ll lose
Even that little bit.
But if you’ve got damn all, my friend,
Well, let them bury you:
To have the right to live you have
To have a thing or two. Heinrich Heine, Lazarus 1851
In February 1848, out of the economic, social, and cultural climate in France, a people’s movement emerged, protesters in the streets demanding rights and reforms to address disparities in suffrage and unemployment. The French uprising sparked similar revolts throughout Europe among peasants, workers, and middle classes agitating for better conditions in Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Denmark. In France, Louis Blanc advocated for the right to work together with politician and romantic poet Lamartine, who also secured the abolition of both slavery and the death penalty. Across Europe the wave of revolutions in 1848 largely succeeded in advancing the causes of the people—gaining essential freedoms of expression and participation as citizens in more democratic and representative forms of government.
I am not a ward of America. I am not an object of missionary charity. I am one of the people who built the country. Until this moment there is scarcely any hope for the American dream because the people who are denied participation in it by their very presence will wreck it.
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
Calypso, originating in Trinidad before its independence from Britain, is an art form with a political conscience.
It’s easy to remember the bad things people do.
The good things never show up because they are so few,
And so this world is filled with hatred
For it is man’s desire to conquer, seek revenge, and plunder and become wealthier…
No equality, racial unity, only slavery and complete misery—
That is what I’m speaking of—no love.
Mighty Sparrow, lyrics of No Love
It’s a shame, it’s unfair,
But what can you do?
The color of your skin makes it hard for you.
You can toe the world, you still will get no place,
Every door is shut in your face.
So boys if you’re brown, they say you can’t stick around.
If you white, well, everything’s all right.
Lord Kitchener, lyrics of If You’re Brown
Suffice to say, simply and sincerely, we are ONE people.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. James Baldwin
To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. James Baldwin
One does not have one heart for Man and one for animals. One has a heart or one does not.
Alphonse de Lamartine
Nakedness, the vulnerable state of nature into which we are born—the primordial passageway to life, the vulva.
Callipygian Venus, translated Venus of the beautiful buttocks, is an ancient Roman marble of a woman looking back and down over her right shoulder while raising her draped dress to reveal her bare hips, buttocks, and legs. The beguiling stance is an example of anasyrma, self-exposure of the genitals, perhaps provocative but not merely so since the mystery of conception resides in the feminine fulfilled through maternity.
A she-wolf nursed human infants Romulus and Remus, the future founders of Rome, within her cave Lupercal. The image of the twins suckling at the she-wolf was a symbol of Rome, commonly depicted on coins. Lupercalia, also called dies Februatus, was an annual fertility festival celebrating this myth of the foundlings and where we take the name of our month of February.
But ask the animals, and they will teach you,
or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you;
or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,
or let the fish in the sea inform you.
or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you;
or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,
or let the fish in the sea inform you.
Job 12:7-8
Teaching the glory of interdependence, the tale of our own ecology.
28thday of the Second month
In a drunken frenzy Maenads fell upon Orpheus tearing him to pieces.
The Sonnets To Orpheus [I:vii]
Praising is what matters! He was summoned for that,
and came to us like the ore from a stone’s
silence. His mortal heart presses out
a deathless, inexhaustible wine.
Whenever he feels the god’s paradigm grip
his throat, the voice does not die in his mouth.
All becomes vineyard, all becomes grape,
ripened on the hills of his sensuous South.
Neither decay in the sepulchre of kings
nor any shadow that has fallen from the gods
can ever detract from his glorious praising.
For he is a herald who is with us always,
holding far into the doors of the dead
a bowl with ripe fruit worthy of praise.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Beyond grief for his beloved Eurydice, Orpheus took his own life.
Hey Good Lookin’
Say, hey, good lookin'
Whatcha got cookin'?
How's about cookin' somethin' up with me?
Hey, sweet baby
Don't you think maybe
We could find us a brand new recipe?
Whatcha got cookin'?
How's about cookin' somethin' up with me?
Hey, sweet baby
Don't you think maybe
We could find us a brand new recipe?
I'm free and ready
So we can go steady
How's about savin' all your time for me?
No more lookin'
I know I've been tooken
How's about keepin' steady company?
So we can go steady
How's about savin' all your time for me?
No more lookin'
I know I've been tooken
How's about keepin' steady company?
I'm gonna throw my date-book over the fence
And find me one for five or ten cents
I'll keep it 'til it's covered with age
'Cause I'm writin' your name down on every page
Say, hey, good lookin'
Whatcha got cookin'?
How's about cookin' somethin' up with me?
And find me one for five or ten cents
I'll keep it 'til it's covered with age
'Cause I'm writin' your name down on every page
Say, hey, good lookin'
Whatcha got cookin'?
How's about cookin' somethin' up with me?
Hank Williams, Sr.
The truth is that addiction is a violent, self-inflicted, deadening descent, tearing away at the music of life until the instrument falls silent.
Joy in the song. “Waiting for an illness to appear before taking medicine is like waiting until you’re thirsty to dig a well.” Su Wen of Huangdi Neijing
Man’s Medley
Hark, how the birds do sing,
and woods do ring.
All creatures have their joy: and man hath his.
and woods do ring.
All creatures have their joy: and man hath his.
------
To this life things of sense
Make their pretense:
In th'other Angels have a right by birth:
Man ties them both alone,
And makes them one,
With th'one hand touching heav'n, with th'other earth.
Make their pretense:
In th'other Angels have a right by birth:
Man ties them both alone,
And makes them one,
With th'one hand touching heav'n, with th'other earth.
In soul he mounts and flies,
In flesh he dies.
He wears a stuff whose thread is coarse and round,
But trimm'd with curious lace
And should take place
After the trimming, not the stuff and ground.
In flesh he dies.
He wears a stuff whose thread is coarse and round,
But trimm'd with curious lace
And should take place
After the trimming, not the stuff and ground.
------
Yet ev'n the greatest griefs
May be reliefs,
Could he but take them right, and in their ways.
Happy is he, whose heart
Hath found the art
To turn his double pains to double praise.
May be reliefs,
Could he but take them right, and in their ways.
Happy is he, whose heart
Hath found the art
To turn his double pains to double praise.
George Herbert
I once read an Italian novel in which there was a street sweeper who swung his broom with the majestic gesture of a reaper. In his daydream he was reaping an imaginary field on the asphalt, a wide field in real nature in which he recaptured his youth and the noble calling of reaper under the rising sun. Gaston Bachelard
Joy is praise, praise joy,—all ye need to sow.
Latin for tiny little nails, ‘gumphis subtilibus’ is a medieval metaphysical concept propounding how the soul was joined to the body—the permanent tacked inside the impermanent.
Aristotle resolved this body/soul relationship in terms of potentiality and actuality with the construct ‘entelechia’. Potential or energy takes expression working toward the completion of a possible outcome while the outcome itself is actuality or real. The impermanent is engaged in realizing the permanent, and the permanent is the expression of being, underpinned by a greater thinking intellect.
Under the dome of the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence stands Michelangelo’s David, undoubtedly the most known marble statue in the world. Somewhat less imposing are four unfinished Michelangelo marbles in a separate hall. Those statues, collectively called the Captives, were meant to be part of a tomb for Pope Julius II but the project was abandoned. Visualize the diligent hammer and deft chisel of Michelangelo repeatedly striking, shaping those bulky Carrara blocks, releasing the figures inside. But the expression of the four sculptures is incomplete—they are truly captives, yet as such they transcend a more poignant fate of fully formed slaves of human weakness thereby achieving a freedom that they would otherwise never have attained.
Realization occurs unexpectedly.
Existence is whole, but it is not complete, never complete. Occurrence begins and ends here in the beginning…Presence is simply the empirical universe: the ten thousand things in constant transformation, existence vast and deep, everything and everywhere. And Absence is the generative void from which this ever-changing realm of Presence perpetually emerges…This is a return to the elemental mystery of creation; and at the same time, it reveals consciousness as an integral part of the cosmological tissue: thought, memory, identity, all moving with the same dynamic energy as the Cosmos itself. And once thought falls silent, that dwelling deepens… David Hinton, Existence
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