From Mythos to Logos--Finding Christ as Ground Zero, Once Again, With Help from Robert Creeley
Sometimes, Samuel Beckett has often taught me, you must lose all hope to see that it is inextinguishable, that the constant, howling 'I am' which is the current of consciousness is itself hope in the form of the Logos--egoized, as Jack Spicer said, into the "low ghost" of small-s Self. Heaven is never lost. Beckett's American son, Robert Creeley, taught me that this morning. And I needed Heaven's ineradicable affirmation, especially after seeing "Children of Men," the new British depiction of a racist Armaggedon and possible salvation (the movie ends with a Moses-like baby being taken out of the Egypt of modern England) that is a required art-sufferance for all sentient beings at this time.
I'm going to share a Creeley poem with you. It's called "A Reason," and it weds the 'I am' to that reckoning we attribute to God or conscience. Only here the 'I am' is not yet ready to reveal itself as the "I am that I am." It is prevented from doing so by being more burrowed and alone. In this poem, Creeley, as he most often does, is looking for a reason for this constant affliction of the isolate Carestian 'I am'--always engaged in outreach that fails. But Creeley's despair is diamond-tipped and it can bore through anything. Hence his poems have an existential spirituality--the way Beckett's novels do.
Years ago in college a friend told me, "Jews write God as G-d because those are our initials." I don't know if that's the official reason. I'm usually told that the middle letter is dropped out of respect for God's glory and enormity, his formlessness, his antecedence to any idea or conception of Him. Personally, I like the look of "G-d;" the word reminds me of lovers' initials carved in a tree. By the way, this friend also told me, "We have to go from Mythos to Logos if we are ever to actualize God." He, like me, loved Creeley. Maybe he even learned this truth or mission statement from the poet. I know that I have.
In any case, I mean 'actualize' both as in activate and reify. In this way, the son is the father to the man. Anyway, here's C reeley depiction of the tormented existential intimacy which generally precedes what Zen Buddhists call the Great Doubt Block. Here, duality dissolves like Pompeii pottery in Vesuvian lava. At times, this condition seems a miserable, hellish eternitude of bifurcated consciousness--in which the victim is plagued by unending subject/object, I-you consciousness.
A REASON
Each gesture
is a common one, a
black dog, crying, a
man, crying.
All alike, people
or things grow
fixed with what
happens to them.
I throw a stone.
It hits the wall,
it hits a dog,
it hits a child--
my sentimental
names for years
and years ago, from
something I've not become.
If I look
in the mirror,
the wall, I
see myself.
If I try
to do better
and better, I
do the same thing.
Let me hit you.
Will it hurt.
Your face is hurt
all the same.
--Robert Creeley, Words, Scribners, New York, 1967, page 93.
Creeley is an American Molloy, an embodiment of the irreducible, isolate self.."People grow fixed with what happens to them," Creeley writes to describe the accumulated sense of self and life we all share (i.e, "History is one damned thing after another."). It is one of the best definitions of karma I have ever seen: the fixity, the fixation on the things such as race and ethnicity and gender that we think define us. Incredible to think of the concepts, constructs and ideas with which we fill the void--as if the 'I am' were an echoing wind tunnel. Even more incredible to think of this howling 'I am' as part of a pact with God, a fulfillment of a collective bargain made with mankind to never allow erasure or amnesia of the authoring source. The 'I am' is an angel cry as well as Edenesque launch-point. Or so I heard my teacher describe.
I can see now why so many friends study Zen. It is the most exisitential of spiritual immolations. No Christ to die for our sins, to distract us from the pain and promise of the 'I am.' I consider myself a Sufi exisitentialist. Existence precedes essence when, of course, it should be the opposite. "If I look / in the mirror, / the wall, I / see myself," Creely says, seeing the 'I' as hardcore, unflinching fact. Like all of us after still another failure of our intention to break free or beyond, we come back to the stranded self sticking up like a reed in the water. But this is simply "Go" on the board. You have to land there and then go past it. It is transient, transtional. Like Tom Hanks in "Castaway" with his effigy-friend, it's all we have. Or think we have.
If I try
to do better
and better, I
see myself.
Every act is seeming repetition, a multiple of one cotinuing attempt to go beyond. It's enough to make you scream, the all-inclusive one that is still minus everything and everyone else. No wonder some of us spend eight hours a day on cushions in meditation, hoping to dissolve the thin membrane of separation, to burst from the amneotic sac of enclosed consciousness, of fierce containment within ourselves. Remember Creeley's haiku?
In the courtyard
at midnight
the moon
is locked
in itself
to a man a
familiar thing
Let's go back to Mythos-Christ rather than the existential Logos-Christ. Mythos Christ slept in a tomb for three days after his physical death, then arose. This, Christians says, is what sets him apart from every other prophet and avatar. "No one else died and resurrected," preacher after preacher has told me, like it's some exclusive ingredient to his life that makes it the only one to worship and adore. Snce I believe imitation is the sincerest form of worship, I see Christ as one powerful instance of embodiment--but not the only one or the highest one. He is co-equal with the other emodiments. Right now, the Mythos Christ, made exclusive and supposedly supreme by resurrection, is under heavy attack. Christians who think they would die if Christ were anything less than the one-and-only Messiah are fidgeting with the crucifix Christ like it's a hot potato.
And right now it is.
Every day, news reaches us of a former world in which Christ was followed as far less, or other, than the resurrected one. They are even unearthing texts which suggest he may have had a wife and a kid. And yet domestic Jesus was still followed as fulfillment of God's prophecy.
Recently, Christian-dumb was rocked by a 2nd century telling of the Mythos Christ in which Judas is ordered by Chirst to betray him. Why? So that the Christ legend can begin? What legend? We all need to traffic in mythos with our gods and their sons. For me, mythos-making revolves around one question: What is the highest and best use of the Christ story? To free Jerusalem from infidels? To make everyone accept him as the only savior? Or is his mission more customized to the needs of his followers. If so, it becomes, as the early gospels show, an aggregate of teaching in which the Christ is some fountainhead students observe in their teacher and are led to in themselves. Then Christianity is, once again, a way of life and learning for those attracted to Christ for the sole or main purpose of liberation. In this case, everyone's middle name is Egypt.
I like this new telling because it puts the disciples back in the picture by making Judas a fairly realized student who is forced into an Abraham-like sacrifice of Ishmael (Christ) to proclaim the self-subsisting reality--the only one that can serve as life raft--of God. In the end of "Zen In The Art of Archery," the master gives his student his bow and tells him to bury it when he has finally learned to shoot. In this way, we are the tombs of our teachers, their last resting spot on the earth whose inhabitants' misery they seek to reduce. Continuance is the only church in which we can worship God. That church is all around us. There is no cross to bear other than our failure to find the Christ within.
Crucifixion can only be the culminating event in a Mythos passion play. This is what happens to the Christos when it is Mythos not Logos. The Easter Jesus who is sealed in a tomb then bursts forth fom it is, to me, a hostage of religion, trapped in unwilling codependence in a dysfunctional human family.
For me, personally, the only Christ I wish to receive and know is the one who brings ultimate salvation: the mentoring of the Bodhisattva. Otherwise that divinity on the cross is reduced to a Lenin in a tomb, a saint in an open casket. You can learn nothing from his agon-y (agon is Greek for dance) if you think it is his alone--suffered for, not by, you and me. "The cross," my teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen said, "is our own bodies. The five nails are enslavement to the five senses."
Sufism is teaching me to quit this cross. And Creeley has helped as much as Rumi. Existential Sufism has put me back in the garden on the night before the betrayal with the master who is asking only and always of me to "watch" with him, to see what he sees, and as he sees. Jesus is teacher first and foremost. If he must leave us, even for a second, it is in the garden practising the witnessing he taught us. THAT CHRIST CAN'T LEAVE US. WE CAN ONLY LEAVE HIM. And, say the mystics, that departure, or alienation, is an illusion. So faith in Jesus and God requires faith in the Self.
What is more important?" a former Jesuit asked a friend. "Faith in Jesus or the faith of Jesus?" When he knew it was the faith of Jesus he left the Catholic Church because Christianity preaches faith in Jesus as the Way (existence precedes essence). The former priest chose, as I have, Sufism. For Sufism is to learn and practice the faith of Jesus, to see him/me/us as what Hindus call the At-man. Creeley has taught me to keep looking in that mirror in the wall that takes in and reflects everything. Sufism has also taught me that God's deepest--or maybe I should say most practical, profound and immediate--embodiments are His virtues, which act to rub smooth the resistant bark of the small-s Self smooth. In the end, I am told by people whose lives are evidence of this truth, the seer is what is seen, and the enclosure of self becomes an embrace of all things.
Sufism, as texts I have studied make clear, is a record of this transcendance. Re-enactments galore.
But first, and this is where Creeley has been such a benefactor, you must strip bare, renounce or take less seriously all so-called essentials but the essence.
All alike, people
or things grow
fixed with what
happens to them.
You must, as my teacher said, stand naked and alone. At such penultimatye moments, I have been locked in and exhausted by habit and habitualness. My whole life became a prayer for release. Creeley's poems are prayers for this release.
I throw a stone.
It hits the wall,
it hits a dog,
it hits a child--
This is the last, enduring gasp of the particulate world, a world with no end or beginning, just the intransitive 'I am' filling time and space.
my sentimental
names for years
and years ago, from
something I've not become.
Yet this place is a meeting ground of God and Man and one of its names is Logos, nicknamed Christ by Christians, Buddha by Buddhists, Moses by Jews, Muhammed by Muslims. The Quran says that all who truly practice their faith are "in [the state of] Islam." Christos-Christ, a/k/a Nur Mahammed is prepping us for deliverance from the protective burden of the indestructible, hard-scrabble small-s Self. This is the daily koan of the seed that must be tough enough to grow anywhere and yet perishable enough to sprout into a tree. And so, as dear Emily Dickinson said, we are finally "seded" from the first birth into the second true one. Only that 'person' can sit on the throne. The throne is that seat of consciousness.
"Let me hit you," Creeley says like a Zen meditation captain asking for permission to strike you with a staff. "Will it hurt," he says, not bothering to pose it as a question. Of course, it will hurt. But if the master does not strike, the pain is even worse and more irremediable. Creeley is also husband/father/friend/poet here, describing something he's see all too often before, and knowing the usual outcome: "Your face is hurt / all the same."
You may not believe this, but Creeley no longer has a stone in his hand. Just a pen--as in o-pen--to remind us of the human condition we all share whether enlightened or ignorant. This poem makes me want heaven as much as Rumi or Rilke ever have. This poem makes another second in any place but paradise unbearable. This poem delivers me both into and from hell. This poem makes liberation the purpose of living once again. Nine bows, dear Creeley--even in the heavy midst of mall and maya traffic.
I'm going to share a Creeley poem with you. It's called "A Reason," and it weds the 'I am' to that reckoning we attribute to God or conscience. Only here the 'I am' is not yet ready to reveal itself as the "I am that I am." It is prevented from doing so by being more burrowed and alone. In this poem, Creeley, as he most often does, is looking for a reason for this constant affliction of the isolate Carestian 'I am'--always engaged in outreach that fails. But Creeley's despair is diamond-tipped and it can bore through anything. Hence his poems have an existential spirituality--the way Beckett's novels do.
Years ago in college a friend told me, "Jews write God as G-d because those are our initials." I don't know if that's the official reason. I'm usually told that the middle letter is dropped out of respect for God's glory and enormity, his formlessness, his antecedence to any idea or conception of Him. Personally, I like the look of "G-d;" the word reminds me of lovers' initials carved in a tree. By the way, this friend also told me, "We have to go from Mythos to Logos if we are ever to actualize God." He, like me, loved Creeley. Maybe he even learned this truth or mission statement from the poet. I know that I have.
In any case, I mean 'actualize' both as in activate and reify. In this way, the son is the father to the man. Anyway, here's C reeley depiction of the tormented existential intimacy which generally precedes what Zen Buddhists call the Great Doubt Block. Here, duality dissolves like Pompeii pottery in Vesuvian lava. At times, this condition seems a miserable, hellish eternitude of bifurcated consciousness--in which the victim is plagued by unending subject/object, I-you consciousness.
A REASON
Each gesture
is a common one, a
black dog, crying, a
man, crying.
All alike, people
or things grow
fixed with what
happens to them.
I throw a stone.
It hits the wall,
it hits a dog,
it hits a child--
my sentimental
names for years
and years ago, from
something I've not become.
If I look
in the mirror,
the wall, I
see myself.
If I try
to do better
and better, I
do the same thing.
Let me hit you.
Will it hurt.
Your face is hurt
all the same.
--Robert Creeley, Words, Scribners, New York, 1967, page 93.
Creeley is an American Molloy, an embodiment of the irreducible, isolate self.."People grow fixed with what happens to them," Creeley writes to describe the accumulated sense of self and life we all share (i.e, "History is one damned thing after another."). It is one of the best definitions of karma I have ever seen: the fixity, the fixation on the things such as race and ethnicity and gender that we think define us. Incredible to think of the concepts, constructs and ideas with which we fill the void--as if the 'I am' were an echoing wind tunnel. Even more incredible to think of this howling 'I am' as part of a pact with God, a fulfillment of a collective bargain made with mankind to never allow erasure or amnesia of the authoring source. The 'I am' is an angel cry as well as Edenesque launch-point. Or so I heard my teacher describe.
I can see now why so many friends study Zen. It is the most exisitential of spiritual immolations. No Christ to die for our sins, to distract us from the pain and promise of the 'I am.' I consider myself a Sufi exisitentialist. Existence precedes essence when, of course, it should be the opposite. "If I look / in the mirror, / the wall, I / see myself," Creely says, seeing the 'I' as hardcore, unflinching fact. Like all of us after still another failure of our intention to break free or beyond, we come back to the stranded self sticking up like a reed in the water. But this is simply "Go" on the board. You have to land there and then go past it. It is transient, transtional. Like Tom Hanks in "Castaway" with his effigy-friend, it's all we have. Or think we have.
If I try
to do better
and better, I
see myself.
Every act is seeming repetition, a multiple of one cotinuing attempt to go beyond. It's enough to make you scream, the all-inclusive one that is still minus everything and everyone else. No wonder some of us spend eight hours a day on cushions in meditation, hoping to dissolve the thin membrane of separation, to burst from the amneotic sac of enclosed consciousness, of fierce containment within ourselves. Remember Creeley's haiku?
In the courtyard
at midnight
the moon
is locked
in itself
to a man a
familiar thing
Let's go back to Mythos-Christ rather than the existential Logos-Christ. Mythos Christ slept in a tomb for three days after his physical death, then arose. This, Christians says, is what sets him apart from every other prophet and avatar. "No one else died and resurrected," preacher after preacher has told me, like it's some exclusive ingredient to his life that makes it the only one to worship and adore. Snce I believe imitation is the sincerest form of worship, I see Christ as one powerful instance of embodiment--but not the only one or the highest one. He is co-equal with the other emodiments. Right now, the Mythos Christ, made exclusive and supposedly supreme by resurrection, is under heavy attack. Christians who think they would die if Christ were anything less than the one-and-only Messiah are fidgeting with the crucifix Christ like it's a hot potato.
And right now it is.
Every day, news reaches us of a former world in which Christ was followed as far less, or other, than the resurrected one. They are even unearthing texts which suggest he may have had a wife and a kid. And yet domestic Jesus was still followed as fulfillment of God's prophecy.
Recently, Christian-dumb was rocked by a 2nd century telling of the Mythos Christ in which Judas is ordered by Chirst to betray him. Why? So that the Christ legend can begin? What legend? We all need to traffic in mythos with our gods and their sons. For me, mythos-making revolves around one question: What is the highest and best use of the Christ story? To free Jerusalem from infidels? To make everyone accept him as the only savior? Or is his mission more customized to the needs of his followers. If so, it becomes, as the early gospels show, an aggregate of teaching in which the Christ is some fountainhead students observe in their teacher and are led to in themselves. Then Christianity is, once again, a way of life and learning for those attracted to Christ for the sole or main purpose of liberation. In this case, everyone's middle name is Egypt.
I like this new telling because it puts the disciples back in the picture by making Judas a fairly realized student who is forced into an Abraham-like sacrifice of Ishmael (Christ) to proclaim the self-subsisting reality--the only one that can serve as life raft--of God. In the end of "Zen In The Art of Archery," the master gives his student his bow and tells him to bury it when he has finally learned to shoot. In this way, we are the tombs of our teachers, their last resting spot on the earth whose inhabitants' misery they seek to reduce. Continuance is the only church in which we can worship God. That church is all around us. There is no cross to bear other than our failure to find the Christ within.
Crucifixion can only be the culminating event in a Mythos passion play. This is what happens to the Christos when it is Mythos not Logos. The Easter Jesus who is sealed in a tomb then bursts forth fom it is, to me, a hostage of religion, trapped in unwilling codependence in a dysfunctional human family.
For me, personally, the only Christ I wish to receive and know is the one who brings ultimate salvation: the mentoring of the Bodhisattva. Otherwise that divinity on the cross is reduced to a Lenin in a tomb, a saint in an open casket. You can learn nothing from his agon-y (agon is Greek for dance) if you think it is his alone--suffered for, not by, you and me. "The cross," my teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen said, "is our own bodies. The five nails are enslavement to the five senses."
Sufism is teaching me to quit this cross. And Creeley has helped as much as Rumi. Existential Sufism has put me back in the garden on the night before the betrayal with the master who is asking only and always of me to "watch" with him, to see what he sees, and as he sees. Jesus is teacher first and foremost. If he must leave us, even for a second, it is in the garden practising the witnessing he taught us. THAT CHRIST CAN'T LEAVE US. WE CAN ONLY LEAVE HIM. And, say the mystics, that departure, or alienation, is an illusion. So faith in Jesus and God requires faith in the Self.
What is more important?" a former Jesuit asked a friend. "Faith in Jesus or the faith of Jesus?" When he knew it was the faith of Jesus he left the Catholic Church because Christianity preaches faith in Jesus as the Way (existence precedes essence). The former priest chose, as I have, Sufism. For Sufism is to learn and practice the faith of Jesus, to see him/me/us as what Hindus call the At-man. Creeley has taught me to keep looking in that mirror in the wall that takes in and reflects everything. Sufism has also taught me that God's deepest--or maybe I should say most practical, profound and immediate--embodiments are His virtues, which act to rub smooth the resistant bark of the small-s Self smooth. In the end, I am told by people whose lives are evidence of this truth, the seer is what is seen, and the enclosure of self becomes an embrace of all things.
Sufism, as texts I have studied make clear, is a record of this transcendance. Re-enactments galore.
But first, and this is where Creeley has been such a benefactor, you must strip bare, renounce or take less seriously all so-called essentials but the essence.
All alike, people
or things grow
fixed with what
happens to them.
You must, as my teacher said, stand naked and alone. At such penultimatye moments, I have been locked in and exhausted by habit and habitualness. My whole life became a prayer for release. Creeley's poems are prayers for this release.
I throw a stone.
It hits the wall,
it hits a dog,
it hits a child--
This is the last, enduring gasp of the particulate world, a world with no end or beginning, just the intransitive 'I am' filling time and space.
my sentimental
names for years
and years ago, from
something I've not become.
Yet this place is a meeting ground of God and Man and one of its names is Logos, nicknamed Christ by Christians, Buddha by Buddhists, Moses by Jews, Muhammed by Muslims. The Quran says that all who truly practice their faith are "in [the state of] Islam." Christos-Christ, a/k/a Nur Mahammed is prepping us for deliverance from the protective burden of the indestructible, hard-scrabble small-s Self. This is the daily koan of the seed that must be tough enough to grow anywhere and yet perishable enough to sprout into a tree. And so, as dear Emily Dickinson said, we are finally "seded" from the first birth into the second true one. Only that 'person' can sit on the throne. The throne is that seat of consciousness.
"Let me hit you," Creeley says like a Zen meditation captain asking for permission to strike you with a staff. "Will it hurt," he says, not bothering to pose it as a question. Of course, it will hurt. But if the master does not strike, the pain is even worse and more irremediable. Creeley is also husband/father/friend/poet here, describing something he's see all too often before, and knowing the usual outcome: "Your face is hurt / all the same."
You may not believe this, but Creeley no longer has a stone in his hand. Just a pen--as in o-pen--to remind us of the human condition we all share whether enlightened or ignorant. This poem makes me want heaven as much as Rumi or Rilke ever have. This poem makes another second in any place but paradise unbearable. This poem delivers me both into and from hell. This poem makes liberation the purpose of living once again. Nine bows, dear Creeley--even in the heavy midst of mall and maya traffic.
posted by David Federman @ 7:39 AM
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