Last 20 Moments

Time does strange things when you’re locked in a room, when even that window near the ceiling ceases to illuminate. It has been dark for years, or it’s just the same interminable night. They used to bring a pack of Marlboro’s daily, and seafood on the weekends, but that tapered off some point ago. Thankfully there’s this crust of bread I can nibble till kingdom come.

I like to think I did something wrong, trespassing maybe, or murder, that would be a reason. I like to think that Eleanor is waiting; when I get out we’ll go to the Dollar Theatre, camp at Treasure Lake, even take the kids like we used to. But maybe I’m just making that up, a story to keep my mind off this darkness. I don’t remember if I have kids, what Eleanor’s face looks like.

As long as I’m writing I know I’m at least alive, though I wish my neighbor were still here. He was a man like myself, that is, trapped, who up till Time stopped used to chat through the hole in the wall, my ear against the immobile stone, whispering his inconsistent fables. I’m afraid he’s rubbed off on me.

Now he’s back. He tried to break out. I asked why he returned. Well, there’s nothing left out there. What do you mean, has there been a war? No, unless a rather big one, I mean, there’s nothing left, no ground, no sun, just an immense whiteness, I was so scared to turn around that this room would be gone, at least these walls are safe. I found a pack of smokes though. Are you sure, I lit one of our last twenty moments, this is it then? That’s my story, he said, and this time I’m sticking to it.


(Some flash for an assignment for my advanced fiction class.)

Sufi Wisdom

"Fate continues. But on no account abandon your own intentions. For if your plans accord with the Supreme Will you will attain a plenitude of fulfillment for your heart."

-Anwar-iSuhaili, from Idries Shah's The Dermis Probe

Stumbling in the Search

The heart never suffers
when it goes in search of its dream,
because every moment of the search
is a step towards encountering
God and Eternity.

(Paulo Coelho, from "The Alchemist")

Zenarchy

[via technoccult]

“Zen anarchy? What could that be ? Some new variations on the koans, those classic proto-Dadaist Zen “riddles”? What is the Sound of One Hand making a Clenched Fist? If you see a Black Flag waving on the Flagpole, what moves? Does the flag move? Does the wind move? Does the revolutionary movement move? What is your original nature—before May ‘68, before the Spanish Revolution, before the Paris Commune?

Somehow this doesn’t seem quite right. And in fact, it’s unnecessary. From the beginning, Zen was more anarchic than anarchism. We can take it on its own terms. Just so you don’t think I’m making it all up, I’ll cite some of the greatest and most highly-respected (and respectfully ridiculed) figures in the history of Zen, including Hui-Neng (638-713), the Sixth Patriarch, Lin-Chi (d. 867), the founder of the Rinzai school, Mumon (1183-1260), the Rinzai master who assembled one of the most famous collections of koans, Dogen (1200-1253), the founder of Soto, the second major school, and Hakuin (1685-1768), the great Zen master, poet and artist who revitalized Zen practice.

I. Smashing States of Consciousness

This is what all the great teachers show: Zen is the practice of anarchy (an-archy) in the strictest and most super-orthodox sense. It rejects all “archys” or principles—supposedly transcendent sources of truth and reality, which are really no more than fixed ideas, mental habits and prejudices that help create the illusion of dominating reality. These “principles” are not mere innocuous ideas. They are Imperialistic Principalities that intrude their sovereign power into our very minds and spirits. As anti-statist as we may try to be, our efforts will come to little if our state of mind is a mind of state. Zen helps us dispose of the clutter of authoritarian ideological garbage that automatically collects in our normal, well-adjusted mind, so that we become free to experience and appreciate the world, nature, and the “Ten Thousand Things,” the myriad beings around us, rather than just using them as fuel for our ill-fated egoistic cravings.”

Part 2 and Part 3

On koans and rotting dogs

Erik Davis of Techgnosis on Jodorowsky's Spiritual Memoir:

"A friend recently asked me if I though Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain was a “good” movie, and I had to answer that, in the case of this surreal mythopoetic masterwork, the usual good/bad categorization does not apply. The film is truly beyond category; or rather, it is “terribly good.” While the first half of the movie—which was definitively released on DVD within the last year—is perhaps the greatest sustained expression of visionary psychedelic filmmaking ever, I can understand why people also find the exploding frogs repulsive and the mystagoguery redolent with all the erratic indulgence and hierophantic pretension that mark the more wayward domains of Seventies spiritual counterculture. But even that’s as much a plus as a minus, especially if, like me, you believe that the peculiar genius of this era provided mystical and hedonic conundrums that are still worthy of study and exploration.



"So it was with great excitement that I read the recent translation of Jodorowsky’s spiritual autobiography, entitled—hold onto your hats—The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Like his films, it is a puzzling, wonderous, grotesque, and sometimes tedious book, but it does confirm the sense I get from his films that he is not fucking around with the mysteries. In the Sixties and Seventies, Jodorowsky was a serious practitioner of Zen, studying and meditating with a Japanese priest in Mexico City named Ejo Takata. Their koan combat is the most steady thread of this book, a male-buddy-cognitive conversation that forms a counterpoint with the other figures in the book, all of whom are women who offer Jodo various modes of initiation—artistic, sexual, magical, energetic. These women include the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, who sounds as wacky brilliant as Dali, and a goat-killing silicone-implanted Mexican actress known as La Tigress."

On Being a Young Poet

Every few years I find myself set adrift, for one reason or another placed in an emotional or moral position somewhat off center and in need of guidance. It is in times like these when invariably someone reminds me about Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet."

I first came across this text, and Rilke at all, in my first year of my first attempt at college, ten years ago. It was a required text for incoming freshmen! Of course, I was too young, too headstrong at the time, probably like any other kid fresh out in the world, to admit that there were deep issues, dark questions, that one might need advice, not in answering, but in living. As Rilke puts it, "be patient to all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point it, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

This quote has been a favorite for many years, though I still don't fully understand it. Another thing that it's taken me a long time to wrap my head around is the necessity of solitude, something that Rilke stresses on almost every page of his letters. Solitude in order to go into yourself, to find your reason to write and to seek out the dreams, memories, impressions that make one's internal world. Solitude in order to find the patience to allow everything to gestate, the acceptance of doing what is difficult and therefor necessary, the clarity of the senses beneath the surface and multiplicity of the world where one can actually create. Solitude in order to grow into one that can love and be loved, a "love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other."

These days I exist mostly in a happy solitude, with my stories and new kitten Ruby and lots of music, a happiness that is mainly broken only when other people are involved. It is strange to think that for years I sought out the company of others, not because I actually wanted to be around them, but because I was under the impression that I should, because it was easier to become involved in order to hide from myself and my possibilities behind the social masks of sex, drugs, rock and roll. One of the few kinds of occasions I would actually enjoy myself in public in was being on stage, playing a show. Talk about the performance of everyday life. Which isn't to say that I don't enjoy being around other people, but that I have learned that I require a much more immense amount of time to myself, which when I have it allows me to interact with others in a much more reciprocal and centered way, as well as get a lot of writing done.

"Love your solitude and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation the suffering it causes you. For those who are near you are far, you say, and that shows it is beginning to grow wide about you. And when what is near you is far, then your distance is already among the stars."

It is also interesting, and immensely inspiring, to think that Rilke was twenty-eight, my age, when he wrote these letters, and yet so wise (or so precocious with the weight of the world, though one feels that he really felt and bore that weight in its fullest understanding). I can only bow my head.

[quotes from M.D. Herter Norton's translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet," though the Stephen Mitchell translation I linked to above is far superior, as Mitchell gets the emotional necessity of Rilke's writing.]

Review: "Youth Without Youth" by Mircea Eliade

When I saw the Coppola adaptation of this book I somewhat understood why the movie had received so many negative reviews: it was not the action-packed, World War II movie that it's setting might have lent itself towards. Instead, and in true fashion to Eliade's work, the movie dealt primarily with the metaphysical, spiritual, and even paranormal possibilities lurking behind every age, when the aging Romanian professor Dominic Matei is struck by lightning and suddenly rejuvenated, not just physically but with an hypermnesia that allows him to know anything he desires. However, I was somewhat displeased, as much of this came off as slightly removed from the action of the story itself, as if the plot was but an ill-fitting coat hanger for the ideas presented.

As far as Eliade's novella, there is perhaps even less action and drama, and more focus on the possibility of ideas, including a random side adventure into Ireland to witness the Committee to Celebrate the Centennial of the Commemoration of the Death of Irish Poet, Magus, and Irredentist Sean Bran, a scene that seems entirely unrelated to the rest of the book, was dropped from the movie, and yet is one of the more enjoyable sections. "Youth Without Youth" reads more like a synopsis than a fleshed out work of fiction; one could easily imagine it expanded into a tome much like his masterful "Forbidden Forest." However, it also seems possible (the notorious "death of the author" aside) that as this was written at the end of Eliade's life he may have been slightly more concerned with getting the ideas down rather than developing them. If anything it could be a dying scholar and storyteller's wish to have one more chance at life to complete his work, while at the same time realizing the futility of that desire, here cast in terms of Chaungtzu's butterfly parable. Dominic Matei, perhaps Eliade himself, is an old man dreaming that he is a young man dreaming that he is every man, eventually falling into Eliade's spiritual catch-22 of the Eternal Return, bringing the still youthful Matei full circle to die where he had originally desired to commit suicide, having still not completed his life's work but learned to love life in the process.

Principles Against The Spirit Of The Age

A manifesto to live for (in its entirety):

Walk places, don't just drive.
Listen to albums, not just songs.
Read books, not just articles.
Watch films, not just clips.
Have sex, not just orgasms.
Take time, don't just kill it.