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!