4-22-24 

THE BEGINNING OF FAITH

 PHILIP LARKIN—AUBADE

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what's really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

--The good not done, the love not given, time

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And so; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is not a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can't escape,

Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

THE INNER LIFE AS A WINDOW

The title of Larkin's poem is a bit misleading. Aubade in dictionary terms is: a piece sung or played outdoors at dawn usually as a compliment to someone. The tone of this poem is more like a dirge. Larkin awakens to “soundless dark” and there isn't any other musical reference in this poem. This is the third Larkin poem in a short sequence I am parsing and all three are windows into his inner life and his relationship with formal religion as well as how he is drawn to reckon with his mortality. Religion has a way of doing this for the appropriately sensitive individual. And, in some ways, religion begs questions about this tumultuous life we live every day and what happens when all of that life ends. What do we imagine? What about this life prepares us for what happens after it?

I am coupling this poem with a short book by Mark Doty, Still Life With Oysters and Lemon. It is a memoir, a look at a still life painting by Jan Davidsz de Heem in the 1650s. His reflections, as with Larkin's, are seen through a window into his inner life. In both cases, however, there is a visit to memories and an effort to find some meaning in the granularity of daily toil. Larkin struggles with the idea of death, especially when “we are caught without people or drink.” His poem does begin in the early hours of the day, what seems to be the only connection with what an aubade is said to be. I do not find in it anyone whom he might be complimenting. In fact, the whole poem is a darkened landscape of mortal fears. There are references to: “unresting death,” “arid interrogation,” “dread of dying,” “being dead,” for instance.

Larkin imagines a place of “emptiness for ever,” “extinction,” and of being lost in this place “always.” He disparages the efforts of religion to assuage these feelings of horror and dread by pretending that people don't actually die. At different places in the poem he bumps up against what he feels is the finality of his physical life with nowhere else to go. It is the end of a sense-filled life where there is “nothing to love or link with/ the anesthetic from which none come round.”

And how does he respond to this dreadful situation? He relegates the “blur” of it to the margins of his consciousness. It is a realisation for him that no amount of courage or bravery or whining will save him from the final end. In the first stanza he awakens to the darkness of the day and later as it begins to get light “I see what's always there.” In the last stanza he returns to the room in which he is awakening to see the objects he expects to see and feels he has to make the decision to accept this mundane life with all its familiar objects and the work that “has to be done,” the very granular existence that we experience from day to day. He makes this choice to sound like a begrudging one, perhaps the most convenient default so as not to slip into the nothingness he imagines the next life to be. He doesn't entertain the idea that perhaps one can be transformed from one life venue into another of a very different nature. He does not seek any comfort from his bleak existence. Is he suggesting to us that in rejecting the darkness of death we are choosing life? Or is he preparing us, the readers, for just such a possibility by letting us see into his inner life? We, too, have choices to make about what our inner lives will tolerate when it comes to the unimaginable, the infinite possibilities that poets of all stripes have explored when they have considered mortality and death.

It is all too easy enough for me to read through this poem once and then discard it, thinking that its dark message that sits on the top of the poem leaves me with little to work with as far as enlightenment is concerned. But why should I expect a poet or anyone else to provide me with enlightenment? I try to reconcile with what I know and believe about this life and anything after it with what Larkin puts before me. After all, the title is about a musical form and there are references in the poem to light and the reality of every day life. Every day life is where all of us must begin, no matter how the monk, mystic, CEO, or UPS driver manages the day after arising. It is where new beginnings can also find us—or where we find them. To this point, I think Larkin's poem is his beginning and he leaves it unfinished to allow us to imagine what follows. In some way it introduces us to the exploration of Mark Doty and what he discovers looking and reflecting on a still life. I would like to think that Larkin's discordance is a prelude to experiencing some of the illuminations that capture Doty. Larkin's (the poet) life is a very still life, a dark one, but one with the potential for transcendence, as I feel everyone's life can be, always beginning with wardrobes, telephones, and “the uncaring/intricate rented world.”

It is at this point that I bring in the short memoir of Mark Doty, also a poet. His work explores ideas about time and its passing; the fragility of life, mortality, and death; the sensual life at its fullest; the functions of memory; and the meaning of objects we collect and carry. I found this book in some ways to be a completion of Larkin's poem (and the preceding two: “Church Going” and “Faith Healing”), an extension of an exploration and also a celebration of what living this life can mean when reflecting on the finality of it. It is a different view on an inner life that seems more vivid and hopeful, if only to find meaning in what we encounter by our senses. Larkin's “unfocused blur” turns into Doty's still life with delicious objects and color and light.

Here are some short passages from Doty's book that help illustrate what his inner life is witnessing. I include many short references because Doty's poetic identity brings to light and attention what is life-giving in daily life and in art.

“That there can never be too much of reality; that the attempt to draw nearer to it—which will fail—will not fail entirely, as it will give us not the fact of lemons and oysters but this, which is its own fact, its own brave assay toward what is.

“That description is an inexact, loving art, and a reflexive one; when we describe the world we come closer to saying what we are.”

“And something else, of course; there's always more, deep in art's pockets, far down in the chiaroscuro on which these foodstuffs rest: everything here has been transformed into feeling, as if by looking very hard at an object it suddenly comes that much closer to some realm where it isn't a thing at all but something just on the edge of dissolving.”

This seems like a poetic way to describe how we reveal our inner lives and our personal substance, opening a window to the morning allowing more light to enter.

“To think through things, that is the still life painter's work—and the poet's. Both sorts of artists require a tangible vocabulary, a worldly lexicon. A language of ideas is, in itself, a phantom language, lacking in the substance of worldly things, those containers of feeling and experience, memory and time. We are instructed by the objects that come to speak with us, those material presences. Why should we have been born knowing how to love the world? We require, again and again, these demonstrations.”

“Therein lies a large portion of the painting's poetry; these things form not a single whole but a concert, a community of separate presences; we are intended to compare their degrees of roundness, solidity, transparency, and opacity. They are each a separate city, a separate child in a field of silent children. They speak back and forth—do they?--across the distance between them.”

“The brink upon which still life rests is the brink of time, the edge of something about to happen. Everything that we know crosses this lip, over and over, like water over the edge of a fall, as what might happen does, as any of the endless variations of what might come true does so, and things fall into being, tumble through the progression of existing in time.”

“At first still life seems so entirely of this world—a clarification and celebration of what is—that it can have little to do with mortality. But in truth, the secret subject of these paintings is what they resist.

… Everything in the field of our vision is passing. ...Here intimacy seems to confront its opposite, which is the immensity of time.”

“[And then there is]...the adult recognition that the things of the world go on without us, that the meaning with which we invest them may not persist, may be visible to no one else, that even that which seems to us most profoundly saturated in passion and feeling may be swept away.”

“The most beautiful still lifes are never pristine, and herein lies one of their secrets.”

“I am learning to accept the flux and revision time and experience in variably make, but I am also learning to love what I wish to keep the same, something that nothing in my life has taught me until now; learning, that is, not to let go but to hold on. I hold on to the mended, exactly right old platter, fixed in its place, cherished, singular, at rest.”

“What is it that such a clear-eyed vision of the particular wishes to convey? A way to live, perhaps; a point of view, a stance toward things.”

“A still life is more like a poem than it is like a portrait.”

“Maybe [Garcia] Lorca has it right—we want thing to wash us clean, we crave the plainness of the unmediated, the directness of apples. If we could live with their solidity, with the apple's clear distinction between inner and outer, how the firm shine and protective color of the peel wraps seamlessly around that fragrant, nourishing core, so that it remains unbruised by air, ready to feed...Fit to carry the dark central star of the seeds into the world. In this sense, still life is refuge, consolation, place of quiet. The world becomes bearable, apprehensible because so many elements have been subtracted from it.”

“But these paintings fill me with the pleasure of being bound to the material, implicated, part of a community of attention-giving. That is what we do with sight, give it out, give it and give it away, in order to be filled.”

“They [the paintings] cannot be generalized about without diminishing them, but I can report on their lesson, which is to remind us of the strangeness and singularity of things, and therefore of ourselves. Singularity, they wish us to know, resides in the physical, the particular, the seen; this knowledge can be looked at, can be held. Here you are, the painters say, a body in the city of bodies, in concert, in the astonishing republic of things, the world of light, which is the same gray world sliding past the boat, lapping and chilly, alive with detail as the boat pushes forward, slipping away.”

“Sometimes I think these paintings seem full of secrets, full of unvoiced presences. And surely one of their secrets—somewhere close to their essence—lies in a sense of space that is unique to them. These things exist up close, against a background of burnished darkness. No wide vistas open behind them, no far-flung landscapes, no airy vastness of heaven. This is the space of the body, the space of our arms' reach. There is nothing before us here we could not touch, were these things not made of paint. The essential quality of them is their nearness. “

“What is documented, at last, is not the thing itself but the way of seeing—the object infused with the subject. The eye moving over the world like a lover. And so the boundary between self and world is elided, a bit, softened.”

“It [still life] is an art that points to the human by leaving the human out; nowhere visible, we're everywhere. It is an art that points to meaning through wordlessness, that points to timelessness through things permanently caught in time. That points to immensity through intimacy. An art of modest claims that seems perennial, inexhaustible.”

“Someone and no one. That, I think, is the deepest secret of these paintings, finally, although it seems just barely in the realm of saying, this feeling that beneath the attachments and appurtenances, the furnishings of selfhood, what we are is attention, a quick physical presence in the world, a bright point of consciousness in a wide field from which we are not really separate. That, in a field of light, we are intensifications of that light.”

“Still life. The deep pun hidden in the term: life with death in it, life after the knowledge of death, is, after all, still life.”

“What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable. There is no other way to say exactly this; it exists only in its own body of language, only in these words. I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing....It's the same with painting.

Part of what that poetry is, I think, is the inner life of the dead, held in suspension. It is still visible to us; you can look at the paintings and you can feel it. This is evidence that a long act of seeing might translate into something permanent, both of ourselves and curiously impersonal, sturdy, useful.

Of what use, exactly? As advocates of intimacy, as embodiments of paradox, as witnesses to earth, here, this moment, now. Evidence thus, that tenderness and style are still the best gestures we can make in the face of death.”

This is a long way around the subject of Larkin's poem but the path is a way of illuminating what alternate meanings might be. There is no way for me to know if Larkin might have shared Doty's impressions of still lifes and poetry if he had extended his reflections about life and death—and maybe even faith. Certainly, his mood is dark and sad in its losses and the doleful acceptance of a life of daily toil without respite. He does not seem to share Doty's view of shared objects and what intimacy they might proffer. He doesn't see the dazzle of light in the same way. He does not perceive his own poetry as “the best gesture we can make in the face of death”--or does he? Is Larkin making the distinction, by subtle contrast, between the mundane practicalities of life and what beauty can be found in them if looked for, as Doty does in his wonderful little book?

At various points in my life I have become fretful of the details of the routines and habits of daily toil, thinking them needlessly tedious. I have thought: if only I could escape them, then I could experience the freedom I can only taste fleetingly when I am awake enough to sense their presence. But I see these points now as Larkin moments. I see now that they were an opening to Doty moments where being attentive to life and life-giving sustenance attested to the necessity of beginning with “what we know/ have always known, know that we can't escape/ yet can't quite accept” (Larkin). I have learned to begin with what I know of daily toil and its tedium in order to make a leap of faith to a place where “in a field of light/ we are intensifications of that light” (Doty).

Here we have two poets viewing still lifes in very different ways. Sitting side by side, each is a contrast to the other and each enriches the perceptions of the other. One is of melancholy and disappointment and the other is of illumination and transcendence. Human life holds all of this. When we look at our own lives what do we see?

Beginning with the Larkin and then visiting Doty's essay brings light into the darkness, as “slowly light strengthens” (Larkin). It seems to me that what Doty says about still life painting and poetry applies as well to faith, or maybe a prayerful life. It all begins with a recognition of what is present for us in just this moment and extends out into a wider world of impressions, perceptions, interior condensations, reflections, and countless opportunities to experience our world's objects and their intimate connections to memory and dreams. And this is the beginning of peering through or under the veil that shields our eyes from more light and new life, full of beauty as well as sorrows and joys. Philip Larkin has done us a favor, as has Mark Doty.

 A PARABLE OF GULLIBILITY

4-6-24

PHILIP LARKIN—FAITH HEALING

Slowly the women file to where he stands

Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,

Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly

Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,

Within whose warm spring rain of loving care

Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,

What's wrong, the deep American voice demands,

And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer

Directing God about this eye, that knee,

Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled

Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some

Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives

Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud

With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb

And idiot child within them still survives

To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice

At last calls them alone, that hands have come

To lift them and lighten; and such joy arrives

Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd

Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice--

What's wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:

By now, all's wrong. In everyone there sleeps

A sense of life lived according to love.

To some it means the difference they could make

By loving others, but across most it sweeps

As all they might have done had they been loved.

That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,

As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,

Spreads slowly through them—that, and the voice above

Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.

This poem seemed so obvious to me at the outset but as I worked with it and its references and allusions it required more thought and even study. It didn't occur to me until much later that this poem is a parable for our times. I say this to remind myself what a poem can do and also my own sensitivities to how time changes perceptions and how time can sometimes stand still. This poem does both of those things: it comes to me as a piece of art from times past but its meaning also resonates in our own times. Let me explain by walking through what the poem seems to be saying and then reflect a bit on how I think it propels some important meanings for our own times. I think any good poem appeals to the reader for many reasons but also applies what is known about human behavior over the stretches of time.

“Faith Healing” is a tongue-in-cheek alert to what follows. If we know anything of Philip Larkin it is that he writes about religion and faith with a skeptic's eye and sensibility, never out of reach but never wholly into a zealous acceptance. In this case the sheepish candidates are women. I asked why Larkin would have made them the focus of this poem—and the healer a man. He is described as one slick authority with minions at his service. His voice is impatiently unctuous, giving each penitent just enough time to lay on hands and then dismiss them. The women move through as sheep in a herd with some straying to keen and gesticulate wildly with flailing arms, as we can imagine from the scene of healing.

By now we are into the second stanza of the poem and we now have some insight into the minds and expectations of the women. It seems their hope was to receive something from the healer that might restore them to a world of kindness and comfort, what Larkin refers to as the hopes of an “idiot child.” There is a moment when that seems possible, the remnants of their physical ecstasies clouding their minds or maybe just in a state of confusion. But here we hear the voice of the healer echoing from within them: What's wrong? Indeed, the earlier question seemed an invitation to release troubles as a preparation for the healing to come. The second time that question is posed it comes as an exclamation from the poet who observes something darker than an invitation for cure; a dissonance, an answer to the question the women might not have wanted to hear. The answer proposed is “all's wrong.”

I think there is always a mismatch between what we expect and what we can actually experience and that mismatch creates dissonance. This mismatch and the resulting dissonance often accompany loving and being loved. The poem says that loving others is only a source of dissonance for a minority. For the majority the expectation of being loved is the greater source of dissonance. Perhaps most of us feel we are not loved as much as we would expect. We imagine our lives as being different if only we were loved more. The poet feels this is the basis on which many of the women in the poem approach the healer. There is a search for more love and the comforts that will bring. They even imagine that their twenty second interactions with the healer, “within whose warm spring rain of loving care,” will bring them satisfaction. In some way, the healer's presence and presentiment are evidence of healing authority for the women. And they come to him as sheep might congregate as a scattered herd would to the calls of a shepherd.

The poet declares that there is nothing to cure the hollowed out loss of the love the women seek. In this final stanza “voice” returns but this time it isn't “the deep American voice” of the healer but one transcendent that only echoes the dear child of the healer but this time mocks the idea that the charlatan healer can provide what the women seek. Or, is this second voice, one from “above,” one that addresses the women with the mercy and understanding emanating from some spiritual whole, maybe from God? Perhaps the dear child of some pandering snake oil salesman becomes the Dear child (the capitalization here might be significant) of being held in a divinely focused gaze. The poet remains skeptical that even this might be the reality that lessens the dissonance the women experience. Who knows?

Many poems of past times are products of the world that surrounds them and from which they are produced. They also tend to mirror our own times and that makes them timeless. I think I am particularly sensitive to these extensions across time. I thought of the showman P. T. Barnum when I first read this and the declaration of his livelihood that “there is a sucker born every minute.” It is our tendency to become suckers in the face of our deficiencies to seek out charlatans, self-proclaimed saviors and healers, quacks, impostors, and frauds. It is not unusual for them to wrap themselves in the raiment and auras of religiosity, if only to maintain their hold on the vulnerable. And aren't we all sheep at one time or another? Our times now see the global sweep of authoritarianism and the rise of nationalism and mass paranoia and fear. We are living in times of turmoil and shifting social structures with economic and political pressures that are not unknown in human history. But our troubles are of the same kind but different in their own complex ways. The vague sense of entropic forces at work has created a vacuum, a gap created by the disparity between our certainties and assumptions and what reality has to show us. This is not unlike the dissonance the women of this poem experienced. It is “an immense slackening ache/ as when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps.” Our landscape is also thawing and weeping.

There are any number of charlatans in every age and era and ours is not exception. Politics seems to breed such animals. Our newest and most dangerous charlatan is Donald Trump. Most faith healers are benign to the extent that they don't cause harm to their sheep, save what damage is done to their wallets. But politics today is breeding charlatans with power to cause institutions and norms to fall into pieces and be swept away by the winds of time. Our charlatans are capable of these destructions because they consolidate power and untruthfully corrupt and falsify reality, thus promising to heal whatever it is that causes suffering among the faithful. It is astounding to think that so many people could fall for such chicanery but then it is not surprising given the density and tenaciousness of the dissonance that now afflicts the lives of those who do not feel they are being heard or understood. Trump the narcissist demands loyalty/love from his followers and promises to dole out the same to his supporters, but don't all faith healers promise such things?

Another difficult point to ponder is how it is that so many people gravitate to people like Trump when his most grievous character traits are so transparent. I think, once again, it is important to reflect on how many of us are discomfited when it comes to how much love we crave and how little we actually receive. This is a normal human trait that is permanently embedded in so many psyches. Reversing this dissonance is not easy by persuasion or logic. It is an intuitive need, instinctual almost, I think. It seems to reside in the lower levels of consciousness, isolated from any realizations available to the wakeful state.

What began for me as a satirical pastiche evolved into a parable about thwarted expectations for love or cure, about blind trust, about human gullibility. What was at first a caricature of human behavior turned into a very sad acknowledgment of how all of us suffer in different ways and attempt in almost any way possible to relieve that suffering. We are in some sense “idiot children” turned into sheep with profound wants and needs. If our love is unrequited by the likes of faith healers, is it possible to find requited love in true faith? How must we behave to be awake to this possibility?

The poet has opened for us readers this possibility and made us fully aware of our gullibility. We are only human, after all. I have parsed this poem from the perspective of the poet who was an observer of the action, adding in his descriptions and interpretations (and maybe his judgments, too). When I thought about my own reactions to the poem, it became clear to me that I, too, was a gullible one, dependent on my own need to be loved. If, in fact, “faith healing” can come in more than one form, then my gullibility is based on an innocence of what the source of my faith really is. The source is clearly not a person selling something to solve my problems or my needs. I am not vulnerable to cultish rhetoric. I am, however, innocent, trustful, and curious, willing to put my faith in a Creator Spirit that is immanent and transcendent at the same time. It permeates and is eternal and I am open to knowing about it in ways that are not consistent with the scientific method. I believe that there are ways in which humans are able to channel its manifestations in their behavior, especially as we are able to love in a divine way all those whose lives resemble my own. I have no longing to belong to a cult or even to a dogmatic religious tradition. I trust more and more my own experience in a way modeled by William James and as he described it in his prescient and insightful The Varieties of Religious Experience. He made no claim to be a “believer” but was open to the ways in which other people found meaning in transcendent belief. He was willing to listen, to be curious, and to be present for the beliefs and experiences of those he interviewed. I think my approach is the same in many respects. I am more open to how my own experiences reveal a realm beyond the temporal, beyond politics and beyond “faith healing” that sells something.

My gullibility is not unlike that of the women (and men if they were willing to admit to such vulnerability) in this poem and for the poet himself. I think the second stanza of this poem indicates to me that he knows what the women seek and he shares in their search. Finding the source of love affirmed, of love beyond the leveraged or coerced forms, is problematic for most of us. In this all of us share a want and a need, examined or repressed. The search is very human and a matter of what it is to search for meaning, a lifelong pursuit and exploration.

 THE CHURCH AT AUCTION

Philip Larkin—Church Going

Once I am sure there's nothing going on

I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

Another church: matting, seats, stone,

And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut

For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff

Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;

And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,

Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off

My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.

From where I stand, the roof looks almost new--

Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know. I don't.

Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few

Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce

'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.

The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door

I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,

Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,

And always end much at a loss like this,

Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,

When churches will fall completely out of use

What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep

A few cathedrals chronically on show,

Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,

And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.

Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come

To make their children touch a particular stone;

Pick simples for a cancer; or on some

Advised night see walking a dead one?

Power of some sort will go on

In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;

But superstition, like belief, must die,

And what remains when disbelief has gone?

Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky.

A shape less recognizable each week,

A purpose more obscure. I wonder who

Will be the last, the very last, to seek

This place for what it was; one of the crew

That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?

Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,

Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff

Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?

Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt

Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground

Through suburb scrub because it held unsplit

So long and equably what since is found

Only in separation—marriage, and birth,

And death, and thoughts of these—for which was built

This special shell? For, though I've no idea

What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,

It pleases me to stand in silence here.

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

The more times I read this poem the more profound it seems to me. It seems to speak to me in a number of ways. First of all it is a story, a narrative of the poet's experience inside a church. It is a narrative of an inner voice exploring what it is to be alone in the church and to be open to its “purposes.” And it is a soft narrative about where we find ourselves often in the presence of a power we can't define, wrapped as it is in what we see and what we don't see, but feel or sense. Perhaps the best way to tackle the challenge of responding to this poet's experience is to go stanza by stanza in the story but first noting the words that stand out for me, words that are repeated for the emphasis the poet wants to place on them in different parts of his story.

The words I notice are:

silence

reverence

stop

loss

found

dead ones

ghosts

power

purpose

shell, house, barn

serious

The title invites some interpretation, given the tone of the first stanza. In “Church Going,” I hear “going, going, gone,” as if this were an auction and the auctioneer is signaling the final bid. But is it?

In the first stanza the poet is outwardly apologetic and somewhat nonchalant maybe insouciant (and maybe a bit embarrassed) about stopping by on his bicycle, on his way to somewhere else. He acknowledges the reverence of the place by removing his cycle-clips as a gesture of respect. This seems like a pro forma gesture, as if this were expected of anyone entering such a place, a habit observed by anyone entering a sacred house.

The second stanza has the poet focused on those structures, almost absent mindedly, structures that are more like an assessment of its strength and reacting almost with affront to the verses he sees carved into the stone, a portion of one ('here endeth') that emphasizes his impression that this is a place out of place in his modern world of business and action and maybe a foretelling of a silent end. He leaves a token sixpence, signs the guest register, and tells himself this stop was not worth his time, after all.

But he is caught up short in the third stanza by the realization that this is not the first time he has stopped here with the same similar results of pondering what the attraction is for him. He wonders what will happen to this ancient structure when all its “purposes” are spent. Will they be museum pieces, tourist stops, or even shelter for sheep?

The fourth stanza begins his “serious” consideration of what deeper and more profound purposes there might be for people of his generation attempting to make some sense of the history of the church's power in times past, even reflecting on the possibility that there might be ghosts appearing in the night or other visitors coming to satisfy their superstitions about the healing from disease. This superstition he derides as “random” games. But he believes that superstitions will die with belief and then the church will revert to the forces of nature.

Stanza five: Now, with this natural deterioration, the purposes will fall farther and farther into the past and then obscurity. And what will be left for the people of the street, homeless and addicted, who will come because they have always come for the reasons he has derided. And will they be his surrogates in such obedience (does he think of himself now as damaged)?

Stanza six: These wretched few will be as uninformed as he is but still seeking what there has always been within the structure built on the pattern of the cross and standing sturdily for ages and representing a mockery of the separations that define human life, the separations and losses. Our poet is at once comfortable in the silence he experiences among the aging bones of the church.

Stanza seven: Here the poet comes down to being serious about his stop. He sees that what drives people, like him, to come to this church is for comfort in the face of what each believes is an individual destiny. “And that much never can be obsolete.” He speaks about his own “hunger” to be serious about his own purposes within what he experiences to be the purposes of this place. And he finishes his visit by reflecting on the wisdom that such a church can teach and finding the sources of wisdom in the dead, those who have found similar wisdom here over the centuries of the church's life.

Could all the dead, the ghosts, have been wrong about the purposes of this place? Could he in his uninformed state be one who will connect in some way with the wisdom of the dead? This brings to mind what meanings there are in the honoring of a lineage. Even though the poet comes alone and is met with the silence of the church (only emphasizing his solitary presence), he becomes aware of the ghosts of those who have worshiped here in times past, a community of spirit that extends across all time.

The implication in the title that this is a building on the auction block, a building that will be sold for new purposes and maybe even for demolition ('this accoutred frowsty barn', 'a shape less recognizable each week') and perhaps becoming only “serious ground” eventually lost to “grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky.” Such musings beg the question about where people will go for the silence and serious purposes and wisdom where reverence can be expressed. The poet doesn't give an answer except to let us know from the beginning that he has come to this church often, always wondering what to look for, always seeking among the ruins and empty pews the one thing that will satisfy his serious search. Is this his way of being spiritual but not religious, as it is the custom to affirm in our times? Is this really an expression of what the heart wants and needs as it hungers for something more serious? Can the poet find this satisfaction in the ground that has been sanctified? Can he find it in the sacred moment, in Nature, in the community of saints now dead but alive in spirit?

This poem is more profound than what a once-through might reveal. I think that the poet was himself surprised at the end of the poem for the serious world he discovered after beginning his visit with such a casual and take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Yet, he had the feeling from the beginning that this might be a visit of revelation, calling from him upon entering an “awkward reverence.” The awkwardness doesn't dissipate entirely by the end of the poem but, in fact, defines the experience of how God's purposes through the formal structures of an ancient place emerge over time, in an enlarging lineage of those who have sought the ground with similar intentions. Here is a place that has held “so long and equably” even in (especially in) the face of death, as death separates us from the very structures that have gifted us comfort and wisdom. Where and how can we satisfy our hunger?

There seems to be a distinction made in the poem between what is heritage and what is lineage. In some ways objects, structures, icons, statutes, churches will eventually give in to the ravages of time and deterioration, as sacred as they may have been at some point in time. Lineage, on the other hand, is the vast community of the faithful (ghosts, maybe) who have found within the walls of churches, such as the one in this poem, a certain consolation and comfort focused on eternal and transcendent meanings. And it is in this eternal community that the poet finds what will last of the church's remains. Out of the ruins of time there will persist and even endure what is eternal, mysterious and yet available.

HOW TO THINK ABOUT A BIRD

The bird was there on the ground one morning, tucked into the corner of the little alcove garden just outside the bathroom window. The habit of flossing my teeth mindlessly had me staring out of the window and seeing that bird. At first, I thought the little creature (what kind of bird is it?) was just resting, maybe sleeping there. Do birds sleep on the ground? Each time, morning and night (I am a twice a day flosser) I would look out at the bird and find it interesting that it hadn't moved from one day to the next, except for almost imperceptible shifts in the way the visible wing moved, so unlike how we picture birds “on the wing.” It was as if the bird was dead but not dead. It was “not dead” as it lay there moving so slowly, changing position so subtly that only staring at it during a flossing routine would reveal how it had moved. Its head was into the wall but the wing I could see was ever so slowly changing position.

Here it is important to know that I, too, had a self perception of being dead but not dead. I had recently been diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer and was awaiting the surgery that was anticipated to be curative. From day to day I found myself relating to the bird in the corner as a being in a state of change, of being perceived in one way by habit and in another way by the pressure of a new realization. As I thought about the bird and me, its life became a metaphor for my own. Of course, faced with such a dramatic diagnosis there was the implication of limited mortality and this came to mind twice a day while flossing my teeth.

The little bird itself opened up for me all the observations and perceptions and metaphors that accumulate for all of us over a lifetime. What is it like to be a bird and how could a dead bird in any way resemble me? Birds in poems and prose and in Nature herself are the creatures that soar and perch and fly in those mysterious and astounding murmurations. This is what a bird “means” to so many of us. We don't picture many birds on the ground and we certainly don't think of them falling to the earth in death by natural means or the victim of an over zealous flight colliding with a window (I am not thinking of birds shot out of the air for human enjoyment). They are meant to be forever in the air and as eternal and free as anything we might imagine. They are meant to be joyous in song and deft in flight. They are so often cited for their songs bringing joy to our hearts and their vivid colors substance to the artist's palette. We see them in groups and flocks and are reminded of what a community (and maybe a family) is.

On the other hand, to complement the joy and freedom we assign to birds, there are birds that don't feed on the seeds we put out for them but feed on those little birds themselves. There are the birds that hoard our trash and valuables alike. There are birds that feed upon the road kill carrion as well the bodies of those in the Buddhist world laid out in the Himalayan skyways to illustrate how our skin and bones recycle for grander purposes, food for great birds hunched just to make us their meal. There are the devious birds that substitute their eggs in a borrowed nest or even eat the eggs of a trusting nesting mother. We make judgments and anthropomorphize bird behavior as if it were similar to our own, yet feeling superior as the end product of some unchanging evolutionary process. There are “good” birds and “bad” ones. But we are always the “good guys.”

When I watched the dead bird over many weeks and in my mind became more and more of a dead bird myself, I began to wonder about mortality and how it affects all living things and beings. I wondered about my own mortality and how my wishes for a green burial would resemble the slow and shifting deterioration of the little bird of my life. I thought more about symbols and metaphors and what birds mean and have meant over the millennia to the poets and oracles and ornithologists. How as young students do we come to know about birds and relate to them? What, then, do different birds “mean”? Can they mean more than one thing at a time? Can they be dead but not dead? Can that be true for us as humans? In the grand system of cosmic meaning, aren't all of us creatures the same in soulful ways? If God notices the fallen sparrow, are we not all of us fallen sparrows in the end?If birds are messengers or prophets, why don't we notice them and heed them?

Psalm 84:3: Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may have her young—a place near your altar, Lord Almighty, my king and my God. Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they are ever praising you.

Matthew 10: 29-31: His eye is on the sparrow. And I know he watches over me. God cares for all the birds and all the animals that walk this earth. Not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.

The accretions of time have added meanings to birds as symbols. Some of them are:

Sparrow: God's love and care, humility, love and loyalty, fertility, new beginnings, hope,

productivity, diligence, creativity

Dove: God, Holy Spirit, peace

Goldfinch: Jesus

Cardinal: God's messenger, the spirit of the departed, faith, balance, romance

Crow: intelligence, curiosity, adaptation

Crane: blessings, good luck

Eagle: courage, rebirth, power

Owl: insight, wisdom, death

Swan: light, romance, purity

Nightingale: anticipation, love, secrets

Hummingbird: joy, love, healing

Falcon: longevity, victory, nobility

Bluebird: joy, honesty, harmony

Swallow: safe passage

Starling: spiritual unity, family relationships, community, cooperation, prosperity

(Here I reference Lyanda Lynn Haupt's Mozart's Starling)

As I read over the list it seems to me we assign characteristics to birds that align with elements of the human being, often reaching the level of the highest virtues.

Of course, among the many features we think about when we think about a bird are freedom, perhaps spiritual flight, flocks and community, migrations and navigations, the ecological losses of species, accelerated climate change and the slow pace of evolutionary adaptations, the effects on the natural world of pollution and population density and technological changes including light pollution and giant wind turbines with their disorienting blades.

Do humans find what they need in life through natural forms, imitating or appropriating or exploiting? While we see among birds the life imperative and free-floating ethereal ease, do we not also see them as targets and attempt to dominate them by hunting quotas and trapping? Do birds live only in our imaginations as free spirits? Do we attempt to bring them down to Earth one way or another to fulfill the Biblical prophecy that “man” shall dominate all creatures?

The bird I observed over many days was at once an anachronism in its fallen state but at the same time in a state in which all humans will find themselves at one time or another—impermanent and subject to the forces of natural transformation, decayed and recycled. I think the bird I studied reminded me of the great forces of life that include not only great freedom of flight, of high virtue and of grand color and song, but also great dignity and accommodation to the forces of death. And it is in seeing death in this body of life lying so still that I was brought back to my own sense of still living. It didn't seem complete enough to relate to the freedom and beauty of flight without also seeing how all things change and all living beings will eventually die and how this is how it should be.

Now, when I see a balletic murmuration forming and reforming over the tawny fields of grass on a fall day, I am with them in spirit as they rise and fall just as I was with the fallen bird in spirit. But it was more than an observer and the observed. There was more to the association than science is able to describe. My consciousness is now able to comprehend in a mysterious way flight as spiritual flight.

How to think about a bird is about how to think about myself as capable of free flight but also capable of becoming something else in a natural transformation of cells and atoms. But just as I will become recycling material, I will also retain in some amorphous way the freedom of flight—because I experienced it and the flight of any bird will be the flight and freedom of all beings caught on the wing. It is an arising. And if God notices the fallen sparrow, will he not also notice me in my loneliness, my cancer, my grounding, my death? Will I not rise with the next bird spirit that takes wing from the branches of the tree outside the bathroom window?

Imagination intrudes into these thoughts about birds and mortality and my life. I know only my imagination allows me to experience the flight of birds and to somehow or other identify with them whether they perch, sing, dip and soar, nest in peace and security. If I can project onto birds virtuous traits, then do I do so because I am not able to find them as defining traits of the human species? Are these traits humanized in birds? Or were they originally theirs and for us to borrow, “avianized” as it were?

There is so much about the flying and Earthbound beauty of birds to return us to the great beauty and miracles of this world. What am I to make of the fallen bird? I refer to the metaphor of the fallen bird as an expression of mortality, shattering the iconic bird living in eternal spiritual flight. But if interdependence means anything it means that all living things and beings will at some time perish. It was interdependence that came to mind as I studied the fallen bird outside the window. It was about rising and falling, it was about living and dying, it was change and transformation, it was about body and soul, about light and flight.

There was a great amount of comfort for me as I reflected on how much and how deeply I related to the dead bird. I noticed its death. And, in the noticing, I recalled the Biblical passages that told me about God seeing each little bird in its life and death. And about God caring about the bird and about me. There is nothing more isolating than physical illness and disability. The world contracts down around the pain and suffering that disease brings to all of us. We tend to isolate ourselves as separate beings from those around us as we focus on our ailing minds and bodies. Our pain even separates us from the mental and spiritual lives that might have played such an important and fulfilling part of our lives. It is only natural that this happens as a way for our bodies to heal. I think I was more susceptible to the little fallen bird and what its life and death beheld. This was a way, in some small way, to escape from the burdens of my diagnosis and physical pain. And isn't this what we naturally do when we yearn for healing from physical and mental illness? Do we not crave flight, even spiritual flight?

It was not such a great stretch to incorporate the metaphor of the fallen bird in my thoughts to include, also, my reflections on the meaning of life and death in the person of Jesus. In the story of the life of Jesus there is also falling and rising. There is the spiritual flight as well as the enacting of great virtues on Earth. Jesus was God's bird. Even the image of Jesus on the cross brings to mind the spread of wings before flight.

Play of the imagination allows for a wide variety of associations and allusions. Metaphors abound in the realm of the imagination. Metaphors in this case of the fallen bird were healing for me and helped me reconnect with a fuller life beyond diagnosis and disease and pain. Metaphors of grace and beauty are healing. It is possible that metaphors do, in fact, represent a reality beyond mere association. They may emerge from the principle of interdependence. We may live inside the lives and bodies of creatures considered lower in the hierarchies of taxonomy. The fallen bird was giving up its body to the Earth from which it came. And the same is true for our species. However much we try to push thoughts of mortality from our minds, we, too, will one day give ourselves up to the Earth. For me, realizing this was meaningful and meant an eventual intermingling with a cosmic realm that contains all things and beings that have come before me. This made the plans for a green burial all that more meaningful.

If my life has been motivated in part by a desire to serve others, then what could represent such service more than giving my cells and atoms back to the Earth for recycling? Many of us think that end-of-life “strategies” are complete when we have signed papers and made arrangements for distribution of property. But the real contribution to the world in which we live is to lay ourselves down in the Earth once we have fallen from our human flights and to give ourselves over to the wisdom of the Great Mother from whom all of us have come. And for us to release our spirits, as if a bird in flight, to the eternal spiritual beyond.

Now, when I see even the smallest murmuration, I am held in a cosmos of such vast dimensions and I know that when I fall I will be as the fallen bird outside the bathroom window—noticed and released and embraced.
 

HOW TO THINK ABOUT ANYTHING

If the effort in writing and, thus, thinking are to make sense of a complex world, then it seems valuable to develop a way to think about anything that occurs in all of the complexity. It also seems valuable (but maybe a bit more ambitious) to have a simplified model from which to work. It seems to me that there are many mental models proposed by folks who are intent on what I am trying to do and that is to make simple work of something that is innately hard. It is hard to put pieces of a puzzle together if they are scattered all about and then to see what meaning there is to the puzzle itself. It is in the order of things these days to comment on how dizzying the pace of life has become, how distracted we are in our daily lives, how we are challenged to make connections when we are so driven. I think all of these things are true but they don't obviate the opportunity to make some sense of the puzzle.

I begin my own puzzle-making by setting the intention to be curious. Curiosity is really all about inquiry, asking questions to frame out the context and relationships of what it is that puzzles. Or it may be a situation that is the basic point of interest. No matter what the context is, it involves human behavior and human responses, for it is humans caught up in the tangle of uncertainty. I have asked myself what mental model would fit the need I have to solve the puzzles that occupy me? What simple formulation is available to assist me? This leads me to a very familiar source, the Buddha.

The Buddha taught many things about existential life but the most helpful for me are his Four Noble Truths and where they lead. The Four Truths state that: There is suffering. There are causes of suffering. There is a method to deal with the suffering. And the method is the Eightfold Path. This seems very simple but, as with many simple observations, within it lie all the considerations one might make of human behavior. He is, after all, addressing his monks and nuns in the context of their lives and how they might address the needs of the people they will be serving. Over the millennia he continues to address the faithful Buddhists but also offers his teaching to anyone willing to listen and absorb it.

His observation about suffering is a universal given. In these days we pair suffering with the pain that precedes it. So often we do not get beyond the pains of our lives and get stuck in a fixed mindset. We are beset with the pain and cannot move beyond it or the suffering we bring to it. Pain is also a universal given for human beings. Pain will come into everyone's life, be it physical, mental/emotional, or spiritual. There will be suffering as we layer onto the pain our complicated emotional responses within the context of our individual lives. The Buddha suggested a few of the causes of our suffering that include greed, anger, and delusion. But one could make a very long list of those human behavioral characteristics that cause suffering, including those that on their face appear to be desirable reactions. There is a Buddhist teaching that there can be two arrows afflicting us in any event of trauma. The first arrow is the pain of the experience. The second arrow is the suffering we concoct because of the pain. The first arrow is a condition of human existence. The second arrow is optional. We get to choose how to experience our pain and can decide not to take the second arrow, one we inflict on ourselves.

The Eightfold Path has just a few steps on it, each one connected to all the others so that someone traveling can step forward or back no matter which step he takes. They are in an order that begins to make sense and the order begins with Right View. Here I want to suggest that what has traditionally been a reference to “right” is not really carving out the duality of right and wrong. I don't think the Buddha would have been so dogmatic. What makes sense to me is to use the word “appropriate,” as that references context and relationships, just the way I think it helps to discern the pieces of any puzzle.

It is helpful to use an example that is right at hand today. We are in the middle of a string of very hot weather with temperatures nearing 100 degrees on some days. What has been called climate change is really climate disruption and its true nature is a complicated puzzle for scientists to unravel and interpret. Unfortunately, it has become a political football that has ideological and economic implications for some people and especially the people in power who control legislation and the financial means to work on climate disruption mitigation (if that is still possible). What it means to me is that the heat causes pain and suffering. In times past, I have been greatly affected by heat. It has never been a situation in which recreation is possible. The pain of the heat has stimulated reactions of frustration and even anger that it had to occur in the first place. It has resulted in thinking about investing in air conditioning for this old farmhouse or about where in the country one might move to escape the heat of summer. Each day that heats up now brings the suffering of mental torpor and physical sloth. When this happens, I feel guilty for having wasted precious time and I am more aware as I age how time is shortening and how I want to insert into time various projects that seem important to me, like this blog post. But this thinking has me bypassing the first step in the Eightfold Path that could give me a different perspective, a perspective that in the long run will lead to and support a growth mindset, the opposite of a fixed one that has me wallowing in suffering.

What is an appropriate view of heat and climate disruption? I think such a view eliminates all the emotional reactions that lead to suffering in the context of the heat and natural processes. It seems clear that human activity and ongoing choices are bringing us to this global environment that has disrupted the natural processes of the jet stream and also the magnificent and little understood oceanic tides. This is an appropriate view of the context and relationships of what we experience as a hotter Earth. What this means to me is that, instead of reacting against the heat by adding to the problem yet one more home appliance with energy-sucking technology in the form of air conditioning, it is more important to think about ways in which I can learn to live with the heat and, perhaps, learn to condition my body to adapt to it. So, the suffering is gone and in its place is an intention to work within the context of weather patterns to see my own place in the natural world as someone who can adapt rather than as a victim of forces out of my control. It may be that climate disruption is now beyond human abilities to alter its path, but that isn't clear to me yet. What I do know is that climate disruption and this string of very hot days is part of my present context of living and I can choose to willingly participate in adapting to it and not railing and ranting about how little is being done to “fix” it.

It sounds naive, and it is, to say that I now sit in front of a fan that uses far less energy than air conditioning would and, while I still sweat and dial down my physical pace, I hydrate better and do not feel victimized by the heat. It is summer and if summers in the future are to be more like this one, then it seems prudent to learn better ways of adapting to them. If nothing else, it is a bit liberating to be able to see a previous pain with its suffering in a new light and to feel that I still belong on this Earth with its own patterns and changing responses to environmental forces and pressures. I will not be able to fix global climate disruption but I can contribute to its mitigation and at the same time alter my own perception of how humans can respond to it without pain and suffering.

Having said that, I believe there is another way to interpret the Buddha's Four Noble Truths. He does note that our lives are universally afflicted with pain and suffering. He assumes that all pains will be accompanied by suffering and so offers his Eightfold Path as a methodology for relief. But my questions are: What if we really accept the idea that the suffering is optional? What if the universality of painful events is coupled with joy? In a cross-spiritual reference, I am thinking about the life of Saint Francis and how his life might offer a different way to view the common human existential condition (and maybe this is an “appropriate view,” in the Buddha's formulation). Saint Francis lived a life of radical love that was simple and pure. The physical pains he experienced were not accompanied by suffering, inasmuch as it blocked a more expansive expression of his love. The love he aspired to was his interpretation of the love he was given by the God who animated his life. When he experienced the worldly pains of physical and emotional traumas, he returned love. His greatest joy was in being able to bless the perpetrators for bringing him back to the path of pure love, the love that he felt was channeled through him. He did not think of himself as special or chosen or powerful because of this relationship, but tried ever harder to include the most cruel and evil as well as the most displaced and marginalized and oppressed humans in his universe of love, for he believed that all things and beings were creations of God and so embodied God's flame of life and love.

So, I think it is possible to re-do the Buddha's initial formulation and replace suffering with the joy that Saint Francis offers as an expression of pure, simple, and radical love.

I think over time thoughtful human beings have dealt with pain and suffering in millions of ways, perhaps billions of ways. Because it is a universal state of being, they come to all of us in one form or another. I am curious to learn how individuals whose lives can be publicly accessed have defined the context and relationships that have led to a growth mindset. I am thinking of poets and those I call “notables” in my painting sketch project. I am eager to see what I can learn from their unique perspectives and how they spent their lives in “appropriate livelihood,” another of the eight steps on the Path.

So, my intention is to highlight those individuals who illustrate how to think about the world in which they live/d and to see where that led them. In a way, it is to see how they might have managed pain and suffering as a path to personal growth. I think this is what intrigues me about my own life and think it must also be true for so many others. The present times are an incubator for how a growth mindset is possible when so many puzzles lie before us and we find ourselves confused and tangled in fact, fiction, technological changes, social disconnections, distractions, temptations, and exhaustion. The Buddha continues to offer a methodology for tackling the pain and suffering that weigh on all of us one way or another. In the back of my mind I have the intention of offering these little essays to children in my grandchildren's cohort when they are faced with the conundrums of discernment and their personal agency in a world that is continually changing and challenging. The stories to be told about the Buddha and by the Buddha are intergenerational gems that can be treasured as a resource for engaging in a turbulent and sometimes fearful (but always joyful) world.

 

 

THE METAPHYSICS OF GANDHI

The book by Ved Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles, was written at a time when some of Gandhi's apostles were still alive and able to tell their stories about relationships with Gandhi. The book is more down to earth than many I have read over the years, not all complementary. This book looks at Gandhi's life without psychologizing or analyzing or judging it. It is refreshing from that point of view. I suppose I was expecting more mythologizing. Instead, it is a book about the granularity and contradictions of his life and what his legacy was for those who followed him.

I am looking at Gandhi's life through Mehta's eyes as well as the Zen lens I apply to many of my own observations. Mehta offers details that allow the reader to see Gandhi's life and draw conclusions from an individual perspective. I have done that and I have tried to read the details and read between the lines as well as subjecting them to a brighter light. I know from my own experience that I am reading this book now differently than I would have several decades ago when I was in a different place in my life and needing different things from my reading and especially needing different things from the biographies of icons I sought out. I am also aware that I am reading books now with a background of exposure to a changed social and historical world inhabited by figures that have changed my mind about human behavior (I am thinking here primarily of Donald Trump and other authoritarian figures of the mid to late 20^th century). What I have observed of these changes and the effects on large swaths of the population continues to baffle me and lead me on to sources that might explain them. I have grappled with the details that seem so present but, at the same time, attempting to establish a way to think about them (rather than being told what to think).

More and more as I age, I am intent on drawing insights from this changed world of ours, a world that continues to change (as it has throughout history and evolution) and also to cultivate curiosity about those changes. I have found that it is useful to have some intellectual infrastructure to work with in order to frame and evaluate change. It has become more important for me to examine assumptions more closely—those of others and my own. It is important to know when myths and reality are in opposition and to discern a sharper truth. I have tried to do this with Gandhi's biography and now find that some of the myths I had once subscribed to are myths that existed within the contexts of Gandhi's life and of his apostolic circle but that no longer fit into a narrative that has emerged for all of us in a post-pandemic era and in a world where authoritarianism is on the rise across the globe.

Gandhi has always been a fascinating figure for me because of the image of him built around the ideas of sacrifice, simplicity, discipline, and a revolutionary approach to social activism. His ethics were admirable and worth imitating for a younger me. Perhaps I am more jaded now and less easily subject to popular formulations of celebrity. Perhaps I am more skeptical of assertions made by others and also more curious about exploring my own sources of information. In any case, how to think about Gandhi and his legacy is a metaphysical exploration, in part, using a Zen lens to contrast not only Mehta's descriptions of Gandhi's life but also those of his apostles decades after his death—and to use the Zen lens of my perspective to explore my sense of his life within the context of the 21^st century. Of course, so much has changed since the 1940s but certain aspects of human behavior and motivations are universally timeless and are the subject of the Buddha's teachings over several thousand years ago, for example. Contemporary psychology and neuroscience are more sophisticated in their approaches but the basic experimental subject, the human species, remains an open source of information and continuing mystery.

I want to isolate some ideas and impressions I derived from Mehta's book and examine them, realizing that the story of Gandhi's life is a seamless narrative over time, as is the life of each one of us. But there are some threads in the fabric that interested me. The first one is that of his early life when he was trying to find his path in the Indian caste system, the British colonialization of India, his family dynamics, and the Hindu religion. At one point or another he rebelled against all of them and how he managed psychological balance is an interesting sketch.

Gandhi's early life was a restless one. He was not altogether committed to an educational experience, save what it could contribute to earning a living. He moved in and out of India and finally went to South Africa where he got involved in local politics by fits and starts. Over his early life he experimented with breaking Hindu taboos against eating meat and extramarital relationships. At one point he was tending to his dying father but left him to have intercourse with his pregnant wife, another Hindu prohibition. While all of that was going on in the bedroom, his father died and this event, evidence of his uncontrolled lust and abandonment of his father, weighed heavily on him for the rest of his life and helped demarcate how he thought of lust/celibacy and the guilt and shame that can accompany abandonment. What resulted, for him, was to embed personal hygiene and mutual dependence as concepts in his ethic and to insist on them for all of his followers. Interestingly, so heavy was the temptation to waver from swearing off sexual activity that to the end of his life he had young women, clothed and unclothed, sleep with him, a version of self-flagellation I suppose. All the women who did this for him claimed that the gesture was one of a celibate nature. Gandhi used women in all phases of his life. The word “used” is carefully chosen, as he was consciously oppressive in his relationship with his wife, Kasturbai. He used her to procreate and recreate and opposed any educational opportunities for her, even though she sought them.

This brings up another of Gandhi's contradictions and that is his insistence that his followers remain dutifully attentive to native crafts (spinning and weaving) at the expense of furthering any efforts to improve educational opportunities for them. Gandhi said this was the way of simplicity but it seemed to me more a symbol of the simple life than it was in actuality. He was said to spin every day but only as a example to his followers of what he expected of them. His emphasis on bodily hygiene included almost daily enemas to eliminate toxins but this was an extension of his dedication to naturopathy and the idea that cleansing the mind and body of pollutants was enough to ward off illnesses and diseases. He eschewed personal privacy and expected his followers to share their most intimate moments with others without embarrassment or withholding. So, his spirituality was directed to a daily routine of cleansing and detoxifying. He had an aversion to medical science and technology in general. Outdoor latrines were good enough for him and he imagined they were good enough for everyone.

What strikes me about all of this is how Gandhi's compulsions and repressions found expression in his dogmatic teachings and expectations for people around him. There is no question in my mind that he accepted his role as a guru to his people and formulated a dogma for them to follow. Thousands and thousands did follow him. But my impression of dogma is that it leads to rigid rules of behavior and those rules can sometimes become a prison for those following them. I think I saw that in the last portion of Mehta's book in which he interviewed a few of the “apostles” who survived Gandhi. Some of them were now older women and men who had participated as willing subjects for his experiments with celibacy, called brahmacharya, and with truth, called ahimsa. The men had become close associates of Gandhi in the political struggle for Indian independence but they, too, had become stuck in what their roles had been decades before and remained loyal to the symbol of Gandhi. Gandhi, in the last years of his life, was not able to persuade as easily the thousands that had followed him without reservation. The forces of history were much larger than Gandhi's movement and eventually swamped it as the British left the scene of a former colony and its dangerous partition into two states in conflict (India as Hindu and Pakistan as Muslim). As his stature waned in the public realm, the vacuum was filled with others who had agendas and plans driven by their own egos, often conflicting with Gandhi's experiments and sometimes with active dissension resulting in personal animus or outright violence.

As Gandhi's influence increased, he embraced the power that it laid on him. It is said that all power is about coercion. Gandhi's power as head of a patriarchal household also involved coercion, as his relationship with his wife showed. It also applied to his relationships with his children whom he coerced to follow his path. One son rebelled and was later separated from his father only to become wanton and addicted and lost. Gandhi's power in the public sphere was also coercive, as his relationships with his followers resulted in dogmatic teachings and expectations and behavior. He insisted that native simple arts replace education as a lifetime commitment, thus embedding in society ignorance and diminished initiative and, ultimately, left them encased in caste and poverty. Those closest to him were expected to follow his dogma and were purposely expelled when they resisted.

Brahmacharya (celibacy), ahimsa (truth and non-violence), and satyagraha (passive resistance) were the three pillars of his dogma. All three of them were designed to lift his followers out of ignorance and poverty and to gain self-determination in the face of British rule and its oppressive laws. They were lofty goals and tactics that only symbolically served to unite the people while the forces of history were pushing in Gandhi's favor. However, it seems to me that they didn't change the hearts and minds of so many because they carried within them so many contradictions, not the least of which was an unrealistic idea about how human beings behave. Gandhi's agenda based on the context of his own life was not one that could sustain itself over time. Passive resistance (fastings, the salt march to the sea, sit-ins leading to imprisonment), for instance, was a social activist tactic that served by way of calling attention to restrictive laws but not as a tactic to bring greater advantages to many thousands. The needs of those thousands remained during Gandhi's life and persisted after his assassination and persist even to this day, despite global economic advances.

It is no surprise to me that the ego of a guru or any other celebrity with power can result in coercion and reactive repression. The context of a guru's life differs from those of followers even though followers adopt dogmatic agendas laid on them. His compulsions and needs were not identical to those of his followers. It is this aspect of human behavior that still baffles me. I can't understand how intentions for good (or evil) can result in herd behavior at the expense of rational thought or compassionate action or personal agency. There seems to be some basic need to belong to a cause, even if the cause is only cosmetically altruistic. It seems to me that attention to dogmatic rhetoric and behavior would reveal inconsistencies and contradictions and be rejected to avoid the imprisonment that authoritarianism necessarily incorporates within its structures. Gandhi used his own version of coercion with the British authorities in a physical way but also as psychological coercive tactics with his followers. Throughout his active adulthood he pandered to the British, seemingly based on his exposure to what he gained from his educational experiences in England as well as his early flirtation with British styles and culture. This was another of his contradictions but it shows how it might have weakened his satyagraha campaigns in the eyes of his own Indian colleagues. Of course, the presence of contradictions imply inconsistencies and all of us are subject to them in our own lives. It is how they are defined and dealt with that matter. To have expectations for others that we don't adhere to ourselves can become the fodder for resentment and rebellion. Gandhi was assassinated by a man who felt Gandhi was not true enough to his Hindu faith. His wife rebelled and some of his children and close followers rebelled. But millions did not and it is those whose devotion to Gandhi baffles me. Gandhi's satyagraha movement was fashioned in his own image and that was his allure and also his limitation. There are always more contradictions to explore.

Now in these days of rising authoritarian figures around the world (including in India with Narendra Modi) it is worth exploring what relevance all of this has for me. I think what Gandhi represents for me is the idealized vision he presented to the world that doesn't take into account his contradictions and inconsistencies and faults. This is what appealed to me in my younger adulthood when I might have been looking for an icon to guide me through personal difficulties and a world of social tumult (Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, always identity challenges related to the wider world). I think this attraction to a guru always overlooks what might very well be transparently obvious but rejected in need of the icon figure for one reason or another.

Today we have a situation in America in which Trump, possessed of an oversized and dangerous ego, has a grip on the consciousness of millions of citizens—again, to my bafflement. But I suppose they adhere to him in the same way I have held onto the icon persona of Gandhi over the years. Maybe it is the way Gandhiism has been shaped by his followers, just as how Trumpism has been shaped by his. I do not and have never viewed Trump as an icon of ideal vision. But to what extent was Gandhi's vision true? Again, I think it matters what the contexts and relationships are that we examine. In some ways, an authoritarian figure infantilizes his followers and serves as a patriarchal symbol of truth and authority, expecting obedience and commitment. It is this way in families and in the wider social sphere of politics and economics and wherever celebrity spills over into the public consciousness. It is how cults are formed. Strong personalities can attract attention and the ego makes its own path.

It is one thing for an iconic figure to teach and present dogma, but another to exhibit real ownership of those teachings. It is one thing for an authoritarian figure to present one face to the crowds and another thing to use a different mask in his/her own life. Eventually the disconnect from the reality of life shows up and gurus lose their luster—and sometimes their lives and sometimes their freedom.

All of this raises the question for me about whether I am true to the expectations I have for other people and how I judge them, all the while refraining from examining my own motivations. It is humbling to see in myself some of the same tendencies I associate with and brand others. What I looked for in Gandhi is probably not too far from what Trump's followers see in him. I think it is true that all of us have needs to belong, to overcome the loneliness of disconnected relationships and losses, to follow someone who promises a different, if not a new, life of advantage as defined by a dogmatic vision. It is not easy at times to discern contradictions and inconsistencies in our guru figures and perhaps we don't want to see them after all. Perhaps we in our basic needs of belonging and identity can blind us and bind us to figures that don't care about us. How do we find this out? How do we go about building a stronger personal infrastructure of self-trust, of right and wrong, of interdependence, altruism, self- discipline, of truth and goodness, of bodily health, of spiritual “muscle,” and compassion? How do we transcend the grittiness of this worldly existence to experience the metaphysical perspective and equanimity?

The metaphysics of Gandhi involves broadening out the context of his life and what we know about it. It is seeing in his life, in all its various contexts and relationships, forces and vectors that are at play in our own lives and to realize that contradictions and inconsistencies are a part of every life and the passage of time shapes them and us. I think metaphysics has to do with exploration, discernment, and non-judging and to see in the granularity of life its capacity to transcend even the most obvious flaws. Perhaps it is because of and not in spite of them that we are able to appreciate metaphysical energy.

The metaphysics of Gandhi also include ideas about how one approaches a life from the ground level up. It is about using the details and granularity of daily toil as steps on a path that might lead to liberation. I can imagine that this was a difficult task for Gandhi in his satyagraha work, recruiting enough people to help him in what he considered a grand struggle, a struggle that often consigned his followers to actions of sacrifice and sometimes imprisonment. If I look at this task more closely and with a more compassionate eye, then I see how he was able to use his own contradictions and inconsistencies as the only true platform available to him to enlist the energies of his followers. It does seem to me now that his efforts were not contributions to his ego as much as they were driven by it with a higher purpose in mind. He wanted autonomy for his people and felt that individual identity and preferences needed to take a back seat to the common needs of a society bound by colonial oppression, effects of which were known to all people considered subjects of colonial occupation.

I think Gandhi's contradictions and inconsistencies are what have held him in my life for so many decades. At times I have been too quick to judge and to see his lifeways as calculating and negative, even harmful, as the initial part of this piece indicates. But when I put aside the noise of current media tones that seem to resound so loudly, I find room for using the Zen lens optics. Seeing contradictions and inconsistencies in his life and knowing of my own, I admire what he was able to do. He has been idolized and criticized at different times not only in his lifetime but also in the decades since his death. I don't think he is at the center of media attention today, in times that could use his life and message to organize and inspire social changes.

If I consider the rise of authoritarianism in societies across the globe, I see where a stubborn and humble approach, that of Gandhi, could strike a chord of commonality. His satyagraha tactics could be studied for what they offer in America, now so heavily armed and subject to violent crimes, mass murders on a daily basis. Gandhi was not a Zen Buddhist but his movement had elements shared with Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists alike. These elements derive from knowing the human behavior of others by understanding one's own behavior. It seems to me that progress toward commonly shared social change requires nothing less than patience and persistent effort to unite people rather than to divide them.

I understand how we have come to know the situation in America today as a deeply divided nation along fault lines that have existed for centuries and now form dogmas that drive people apart and cause them to adhere to superficial ideas about what a shared society should look like. The idea of sharing space with people with whom you disagree is uncommon today in the world of politics. The idea of a shared common public space begins with nascent concepts of inclusion, human dignity, contradictions and inconsistencies that can be shaped to serve as well as to reconstruct what we might agree on as beneficial or all citizens. I think Gandhi had these concepts in mind with his satyagraha movement and how he was able to capture the imagination of so many millions of people.

I no longer wish for a knight on a white horse to come from lands of myth to save us from ourselves. I now believe what saving is to be done begins in the soil of the Earth from which all of us derive our lives. It involves salt and devotion and walking barefoot miles to the sea. It involves attention to bodily hygiene and emptying chamber pots every day. It is making simple choices in a complicated world all too readily willing to defend prestige, power, profit, and pleasure. In fact, we need to beware the self-proclaimed knights that sit top white steeds. They will not save us from ourselves. We will be saved by making common cause in the service of those whose lives are full of contradictions and inconsistencies but also full of potential energy for discovering truth, goodness, and beauty. Gandhi's metaphysics are as simple and complicated as that.

The picture of Gandhi's life would not be complete without a rounded out sketch of the metaphysics that includes foibles, sorrows, and flaws (maybe all the more obvious to us in retrospect than to him in his own life, as it is with many of us) as well as what brought him satisfaction and joy. This is the story of everyone's life at its core. We are often strangers to ourselves when we are often obvious to others. Beginning to practice how to think about our inner lives and the shell of life around us will lead us naturally to what to think of it all.

It is appropriate to explore what metaphysics means to me. In essence, it is about context and relationships with a backdrop of functional form. It is impermanence and change set against a formulation of not “anything goes,” but of “what is it?” it is an appreciation of sets and tableaux that are produced and being replaced. It is about streaming. It is about all of that in my life and appreciating it in the lives of others. To that extent, it is about imagining a space for others' lives, just as I imagine a space of my own in the context of change and the relationships that always accompany it. It is about seeing contexts anew and watching them change through a Zen lens that is distanced from both the phenomenal (the world of beings and things) and the noumenal (the realm of spirit and spirituality) but originating from them.

Metaphysics is not one thing, fixed and rigid. It is a streaming process without rules. It is, for me, a way to understand more deeply the contexts and relationships that constitute what we perceive as reality. Because reality is difficult to apprehend, it calls forth the use of metaphors to bind it to what we actually experience in our daily lives. The metaphors are, in a way, translations of reality and can help others participate in conversations about it using their own experiences as a basis for relationships.

I was reminded that one of the Zen precepts is not to criticize or find fault with others and so I was brought up short thinking that I had done Gandhi a disservice in finding such fault with the events of his life and surmising what it was that he was thinking and feeling and then attaching a judgment to them. But when I surveyed the whole of my attempts to understand him and to formulate what I have called his metaphysics, I see that I have done what I intended and that is to work up from the granular details of his life to a more overarching concept of what his life meant to me. In other words, the metaphysical approach that this blog piece represents is one of how to think about him rather than what to think of his ideas and behavior and, yes, his successes and failures. I persist in making this distinction because it emphasizes the importance of supporting the concepts of impermanence, not knowing, bearing witness without judging. Focusing on the streaming of contexts and relationships involves a good bit of humility on my part and makes me more aware of how one person lives is not like that of any other person. Criticizing and judging separate me from the other and reify my truth over someone else's. But how we see the truth of anything is part of the streaming flow of life and that always means change and motion and surprising twists and turns that don't always signify linearity or consistency. I am left appreciating the contradictions and inconsistencies of Gandhi's life and work and stand in awe that he was able to accomplish what he did.

This has been a long essay on Gandhi and his life. He and his memory have emerged at different times of my life, attesting to the power of his historical presence. I could not be a Gandhi even with similar intentions to address the fear, anxieties, hate, and violence that now undermine this culture's sense of safety and peace. Hoping that one day we might once again revive his desire for a purer concept of bodily health, a pursuit of truth and nonviolence, and passive resistance leading to social reforms that benefit all people, understanding more about his life and its deeper meanings is useful. It has been useful for me to explore not only his life's trajectory, but also to understand better my own response to it and my own relationship to a changing world in the 21^st century.