The Agony of Self-Perception

Jumping Jack Trash
for B.C. on the occasion of his public breakdown

1
We're twos, not ones, of a kind.
And we both know
you can't run from God.
This mind has no turning radius.
Distance to or from any point
is an illusion that clearly violates
house rules. No one but God
can subtract. No one but God
can count to One. I-Thou, Him-Us
is not reduction of this torment
to manageable proportions.

2
Cry like a baby for God
but it's still just an audition tape
you're playing for the crime bosses
of non-duality. By the way,
I've been sent to inform you
you got the job. You open
for the Pope in June.

3
What did he tell us over and over?
Cling to any word, notion, title, concept
and you can't make good your escape,
can't even make a single semblance of good
come of it, come out of it,
come from the hiding place
that never concealed one goddamned thing.

4
Listening to your bellows this morning
I realized that even the word 'sinner'
is a swaddling, suffocating title that drowns
the man it owns or circumscribes
more quickly than words like 'priest' or 'guru.'

5
The only DNA your dust matches
is that of Jesus Christ. Shit, the coroner said,
today even Nevada is grail country.

6
Cling to the word 'God'
like it was worth 100 points in a game of Scrabble.
Hold on to Him
like we could lose Him at any moment.
When I see birds everywhere
I know there is no end in sight
of me or the God I am told
I could become once this town
is no longer big enough
for the two of us.

7
The ego is no more valuable
than Christ's foreskin
and ten thousand times
harder to lose.
Bet on Foreskin
in the first at Pimlico
this sabbath Sunday.

8
Like you, I was waterboarded
in a baptismal pool of sorrow
immersed in Arctic tap waters and
forced to admit to sins I was never guilty of
by men who knew the shame
of almost drowning would, over time,
be mistaken for cleansing.
Like you, I chose religion over revelation.
Like you, I prefer faith in Him
to the fact of Him. Like you,
only death seems able to stop us
from staying put in obdurate flesh.

9
Has anybody ever gone to Lourdes
and begged the Mother of God
to be cured of the congenital affliction
of duality? Has anybody asked
the crying statue of Scranton
to be restored
to that primal wholeness
hearts have no words for
other than the distant but devouring
scrape of butterfly wing
against temple bell?

--David Federman, December 30, 2007

A Map of Transcendance--Courtesy of Wallace Stevens

"All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, selfperception maintains in being. Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception." --Samuel Beckett

I love Samuel Beckett. He voiced the hub 'I Am' howling at the expense of all else. His works represent a refinement of consciousness to a comic-tragic toxic point that still leaves one stranded in dualistic fixity of perception and purpose. Beckett spent a lifetime listening to that ineradicable primal Descartes-like voice. He is the greatest teaching monastic poet of the last century: a dualist in search of monism. His is a dry Irish drunkenness--carousing in longing for non-being. What makes him so enjoyable for me is the scoffing, scowling consolation of seeing and feeling the 'I am' as migraine, tormenting filament of seemingly indissoluble I-awareness. No wonder a friend who studied in Honolulu with a Japanese Zen Master c. 1964/5 said that evenings were spent reading Beckett's novels aloud and laughing uncontrollably at their depiction of every meditator's plight--the unvanguishable 'I' that is the core of duality. Bifurcation, they call it.

How do we transcend this duality? Can we? If we believe the words of Buddha and Christ, yes, we can. If we believe (in my case, on faith and not yet fact) that the "laillahah" of Muhammad's kalima leads to 'Illallahu," then yes, there is union/unity possible on this side of death. Here is the most recent pronouncement/prophecy of this possibility/reality I have found--this time from Wallace Stevens' "Credences of Summer":

II
Postpone the anatomy of summer, as
The physical pine, the metaphysical pine,
Let's see the very thing and nothing else.
Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight.
Burn everything not part of it to ash.

Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky
Without evasion by a single metaphor.
Look at it in its essential barrenness
And say this, this is the centre that I seek.
Fix it in an eternal foliage

And fill the foliage with arrested peace,
Joy of such permanence, right ignorance
Of change still possible. Exile desire
For what is not. This is the barrenness
Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.

The words "hottest fire of sight" are like none that I have ever seen before. That intensity of sight is commanded to "Burn everything not part of it [i.e., intransitive seeing] to ash." From there, Stevens attains "essential barrenness" that is much friendlier as well as foreboding than it is in Beckett. So he abandons the quest for knowledge "of change still possible," subsiding into a contentment that is so absolute, complete and rugged it releases him from all bondage to ideas, concepts, etc.

There is no narrative for Steven's pilgrimage of extinction. He is a poet, not, as in Beckett's case, a poetic writer. After refusing the temptation of either a physical or metaphysical pine, as well as 'exiling desire / for what is not', and finding the center in pure/purified sentience, he is released into a non-dualistic repose where the pine (remember, Stevens is Basho's American heir), is eternal because it is filled with "arrested peace." This isn't peace prevented, postponed, blocked, damaged or in any way incomplete; it is peace beyond any desire for it, giving both "joy of such permanence" and "right ignorance / Of change still possible."

Stevens has described a place bereft of Beckett's chronic "self perception;" he has taken "the flight of the alone to the Alone." Here the barrenness is "the fertile thing that can attain no more." Here all is radiant self-sufficiency. "Here," as Stevens writes in Part III, "the sun, / Sleepless, inhales his proper air, and rests. / This is the refuge that the end creates."

I intend to share more of this poem--as great, in my opinion, as Rilke's Duino Elegies--with you soon. Stevens has as many answers as Rumi--for me, at least, because his is a poetry of practice not simply the sentiments that occur naturally to an enlightened man. It is a record of the ascent itself, important because it reeks with proximity to Sinai where bushes burned--or, should I say, self-ignited?-- with perception. All are moths before the fires of such immanence.

Happy New Day instead of New Year!

Winter Music In Words

Some of my fellow bloggers are starting to offer poems as well as music as we get closer to Christmas and deeper into winter. The essence of winter, of the attention it teaches and demands, is captured in this immortal poem by Wallace Stevens called "The Snow Man."

When I read it again for the first time in decades, it cast a light on these lines by Jack Spicer that have long haunted me from his poem, "The Birth of Venus":

Everything destroyed must be thrown away
If it were even an emotion
The seashell would be fake.

In other words, things as they are, uncolored, unclouded. "The mind of winter."

Winter is a season of essence, essences. The withdrawal it prompts is simply to an unused but familiar place which Robert Creeley describes as thus in his poem, "Thinking of Wallace Stevens":

So it is the dullness of mind one cannot live without,
this place returned to, this place that was never left.

I read "dullness" as pure passive, autonomic receptivity. The snow man, if correlative for anything, is practiced mindfulness in the stern but peaceful quietude that winter brings. I love the lines "not to think / Of any misery in the sound of wind / In the sound of a few leaves."

This poem takes us so far beyond cold and loneliness to what Stevens calls

. . . the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place,

incapable now, by transformation of our sentience, of howling in a way that re-minds us of desolation or despair. The poem reaches a pure essenced and essential place of non-brooding where we see everything ("nothing that is not there'') and through surrender "the nothing that is." Note how the mind and mood of the poem is pure Basho.

The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.