A Sufi's Stutter: Going, Going, Gone (into God, that is)

GOING

There is nothing
to turn from,
or to, no

way other
than forward, such
place as I mark

time. Let me
leave here a
mark, a

way through
my mind.

--Robert Creeley, "Words," Scribner's, New York, 1967, page 90

Early Sunday morning I finally found an emblem for the human condition as I have known it from my earliest memory of a self. It's the short poem above, "Gone," by Robert Creeley written in the mid-1960s when the poet was approaching 40, a time when shrill, chronic existential bifurcation singing like a tea kettle begins to be intolerable predicament.

Back then, the poem embodied enclosure in what Alan Watts called "the skin-encapsulated ego." Today, however, it serves as the starting point for my every dream and foreshadowing of non-duality. It is, from an ontological standpoint, autobiographical for anyone like me who reads it. A Cartesian well into which I once fell but from which I now drink. Hence Creeley's deep kinship with those of his regular readers who love him so because he speaks to our main frame of reference, our sense of a human condition conditioned by subject-object, I-Thou, awareness.

Having studied with a Sufi master, Bawa Muyhaiyaddeen, who posited an awareness in which solipsism is a trained, deeply impacted misreading of reality, the poem no longer speaks of entrapment but is part of reduction and refinement that increasingly seems transcendant. If I got no farther and further than positing this sense of an unstable, isolate self, I would now consider this lifetime a success.

To me, this past sweet Sunday morning, God became the deeper ingrained, ninja-nimble practise of the all-containing self whose only reason for existence--as well as highest efflorescence--is consciousness. It took me years to see/feel 'God' as the within without a without. It took me years to see where this stubborn exitistential sense of self was leading. Creeley pointed 'beyond' to the sense that my teacher embodied: God conjured to consciousness in the praise and prayer that is his highest and best use and sweetest exemplification. From liar to lyre, so to speak (in all senses of that phrase). Gnostic fire running backward and forward to what Kenneth Rexroth calls a "tinder of knowing."

That praise teaches love; that praise teaches us to always be ready to set another place at the table. One is more than two; two is half of One, or as my friend Lou Buetler points out, the one coin with two sides to it. I always thought that coin became one in the act of spinning. But it is one whether still or spinning--one just by fact of being itself, just by dint of being created, just by belonging to the assemblage. I want to thank Robert Creeley for providing early evidence of God. I thought I'd share the poem above as first anthem sung in my college days on the road to praise. 'I am' leading with i-am-bics of breath to "I am that I am." So words are like sparrows and their fate is the same within this breathtaking expanse called by, and met with, All-ah!