If the world is my oyster, it needs more garlic.
In my free time I feel restless, so I go out into the city and end up buying books with the intention of reading or studying them in my free time. But in my free time I feel restless, so I go out into the city and end up buying books... Perhaps I should head for the country. Perhaps I should move to a place where the feeling of restlessness can immediately be quelled by a 10 mile hike into the wilderness, and the dark, cold winters make one glad to be indoors. Take me, Isafjordur!
Even when you find what you're looking for, the compulsion to keep looking remains; the habit cannot be broken merely by being rendered unnecessary. So should life simply be embraced as a quest with no expectation of finding the hole-ridden grail? An endless search for clues leading to more clues like a bad Dan Brown usuel (my coinage for a novel which has nothing new about it. Or how about notvel; novalue (pronounced novel-you); or shitfest?).
Perhaps this writing about it is the thing to be doing. Should I turn inwards and examine the ennui in microscopic detail, then try and get the sightless insights published. No, the world is already drowning under the weight of words, and the weight of wordbuoys thrown in to help the drowning, but which end up merely helping the drowning.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Collapse of the 4th corner
What is this new feeling? And what are its roots?
I've been having feelings of contentment on and off for the past few months, but now there is also a budding of a sort of positive, active attitude towards the world. It is as if for a long time - perhaps the whole of my adult life - I have moved along a passive continuumm of resistance/acceptance, avoidance/tolerance. The best I could hope for was to avoid embarassment when with people and learn to make the best of my solitude. I was an old man in a hut, hiding from visitors and gathering scraps dropped by strangers. Now I have a sense that I am growing younger and could leave the hut if I wanted.
The passive introvert. To me this shelled up life has always felt like the norm. People who eat life are a different species. I find it amazing that there are people who actually have an energy which drives them to do things, be with other people, seek things from the world not for solace but for fun. Could I metamorphose into such a person?
This recent feeling of openness began, I think, with a shift, which will I think be very difficult to describe, in my perception of my relationship to the world. Based on this new feeling, I get the impression that I normally regard the world as a kind of surface out there, a wall or canvas on which everything happens, and on which I could imagine myself plotting a pathway, painting in a little area which would be my life. There's me, slowly filling the next 30 or 40 years of a small area of space, painting it with a degree in Chinese or a year in Vietnam or whatever.
The change in perception is something like realizing - not just intellectually but at a deeper, more intuitive level - that the canvas is not out there. The canvas is created in the act of looking, and all looking is in fact a looking inwards.... When I think about myself it is always me in the world, an agent interacting with other people or slabs of experience, doing things which will bring happiness, pain, boredom, etc. But now I sensed that this me-external world dichotomy could be further dissolved by turning inwards, exploring the contents of my mind without any reference to an external world and my place in it, not as an excercise in discursive meditation but rather as a fishing for creative seeds that might give birth to a poem or picture. Hmm, is this just a convoluted way of saying I've rediscovered the dimension of creative self-expression that's been absent from my life for a long time? Well, maybe. So what. Fuck it. I need a drink....
I've been having feelings of contentment on and off for the past few months, but now there is also a budding of a sort of positive, active attitude towards the world. It is as if for a long time - perhaps the whole of my adult life - I have moved along a passive continuumm of resistance/acceptance, avoidance/tolerance. The best I could hope for was to avoid embarassment when with people and learn to make the best of my solitude. I was an old man in a hut, hiding from visitors and gathering scraps dropped by strangers. Now I have a sense that I am growing younger and could leave the hut if I wanted.
The passive introvert. To me this shelled up life has always felt like the norm. People who eat life are a different species. I find it amazing that there are people who actually have an energy which drives them to do things, be with other people, seek things from the world not for solace but for fun. Could I metamorphose into such a person?
This recent feeling of openness began, I think, with a shift, which will I think be very difficult to describe, in my perception of my relationship to the world. Based on this new feeling, I get the impression that I normally regard the world as a kind of surface out there, a wall or canvas on which everything happens, and on which I could imagine myself plotting a pathway, painting in a little area which would be my life. There's me, slowly filling the next 30 or 40 years of a small area of space, painting it with a degree in Chinese or a year in Vietnam or whatever.
The change in perception is something like realizing - not just intellectually but at a deeper, more intuitive level - that the canvas is not out there. The canvas is created in the act of looking, and all looking is in fact a looking inwards.... When I think about myself it is always me in the world, an agent interacting with other people or slabs of experience, doing things which will bring happiness, pain, boredom, etc. But now I sensed that this me-external world dichotomy could be further dissolved by turning inwards, exploring the contents of my mind without any reference to an external world and my place in it, not as an excercise in discursive meditation but rather as a fishing for creative seeds that might give birth to a poem or picture. Hmm, is this just a convoluted way of saying I've rediscovered the dimension of creative self-expression that's been absent from my life for a long time? Well, maybe. So what. Fuck it. I need a drink....
Friday, October 9, 2009
Time
For we, the immortals, it seems a tragedy that so many of our fellow humans have died and will continue to die. Each of those lives was as precious and important to its owner as mine is to me, as yours is to you, and yet while their time on this Earth was limited, I (and perhaps you - we are few in number, and nobody reads my blog anyway...) will live on, watching the aeons pass, seeing civilizations rise and fall, miraculous discoveries and inventions made (I predict nanoscale wind turbines in the anal passage, powering embedded wetware which provides us with a continuous feed of everything that's happening everywhere right now on the ground as it happens. And sprout wars.), making my own philanthropic contributions here and there (... isn't this the plot of a Simone de Beauvoir novel? Ah yes, All Men Are Mortal (thanks memory)).
I often seek different perspectives as a way of crow-barring some meaning into life. Consider recent human history - or rather prehistory, preagriculture. Consider those generations of people who were anatomically and cognitively identical to modern humans, yet whose lives were lived in small groups of hunter gatherers (as some still do now in certain parts of the world). How would they have thought of the future and their relationship to it? We in the modern world are locked into the idea of progress and have been for centuries. There is a sense, so deeply ingrained that it has become invisible, that we are going somewhere, that our civilization will continue unbroken into the far future in a process not just of change but of improvement, improvement for everyone, eventually, probably.
Viewed from space there is merely, century after century, a change in the arrangement of physical matter (to borrow Beaty Russel's idea) on the surface of the earth, but for us down here these rearrangements are associated with our hopes and dreams, daily needs, work and play. When I think about my own life, my own possible futures, they must necessarily find their form within the larger forms of 'progress' to a better tomorrow - or at the very least the forms of 'maintenance' of what we have now. But when I think back to those nasty, idyllic, brutish, halcyon prehistoric hunter-gatherer days, I can't help feeling that that was the default form, the correct form, the non-aberrant form, which we must necessarily return to over and over as civilizations continue to collapse and reemerge. It is like a pulse, a leap to nowhere, a slow encrustation and sloughing off on the surface of the earth - civilization - primitive - civilization - primitive.
Of course, it is only from the perspective of a modern post-prehistoric mind that such thoughts can be had, but then I wouldn't need their solace if I was out worrying a wildebeest.
I often seek different perspectives as a way of crow-barring some meaning into life. Consider recent human history - or rather prehistory, preagriculture. Consider those generations of people who were anatomically and cognitively identical to modern humans, yet whose lives were lived in small groups of hunter gatherers (as some still do now in certain parts of the world). How would they have thought of the future and their relationship to it? We in the modern world are locked into the idea of progress and have been for centuries. There is a sense, so deeply ingrained that it has become invisible, that we are going somewhere, that our civilization will continue unbroken into the far future in a process not just of change but of improvement, improvement for everyone, eventually, probably.
Viewed from space there is merely, century after century, a change in the arrangement of physical matter (to borrow Beaty Russel's idea) on the surface of the earth, but for us down here these rearrangements are associated with our hopes and dreams, daily needs, work and play. When I think about my own life, my own possible futures, they must necessarily find their form within the larger forms of 'progress' to a better tomorrow - or at the very least the forms of 'maintenance' of what we have now. But when I think back to those nasty, idyllic, brutish, halcyon prehistoric hunter-gatherer days, I can't help feeling that that was the default form, the correct form, the non-aberrant form, which we must necessarily return to over and over as civilizations continue to collapse and reemerge. It is like a pulse, a leap to nowhere, a slow encrustation and sloughing off on the surface of the earth - civilization - primitive - civilization - primitive.
Of course, it is only from the perspective of a modern post-prehistoric mind that such thoughts can be had, but then I wouldn't need their solace if I was out worrying a wildebeest.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
If you fill things up it is because they are empty
What do I mean by this? Ah, the usual moderately interesting psychological experience...
For example, recently 'Zen' has taken up residence in my brain again. As well as the practice of just sitting and letting body and mind drop away, I'm feeling an attraction to the wabi and the sabi and all that lovely Japanese culture dripping with the blood of Zen - the calligraphy and haiku and honkyoku, all the signs and symbols of Zen. My big black zafu squats on my floor, Dogen's essays and Basho's Narrow Road sit on the sofa. These things, for me, have a kind of fullness. Their appearance satisfies me. They promise something. They will be my travelmates on a journey to a richer life.
But then occasionally, as for example yesterday, a nausea overcomes me. The objects are suddenly exsanguinated of their meaning, and just as the sight of a corpse might suddenly shatter the youth's feeling of immortality, I am returned to the meaninglessness and futility of all things and the indifference of the world outside to my internal world. Actually it's similar to the experience I used to have sometimes in the days of girlfriends, of suddenly seeing - not as a result of jealousy or argument, but just a spontaneous flipping of perception - my beloved with utter detachment and indifference, just a person, barely a perrson. A skinsack.
It always fades, and I am soon back in the world of illusory fullness. In our impermanent non-selves, any object of attachment is an incompatible organ transplant which must inevitably face rejection. But the world is a donor of infinite generosity.
For example, recently 'Zen' has taken up residence in my brain again. As well as the practice of just sitting and letting body and mind drop away, I'm feeling an attraction to the wabi and the sabi and all that lovely Japanese culture dripping with the blood of Zen - the calligraphy and haiku and honkyoku, all the signs and symbols of Zen. My big black zafu squats on my floor, Dogen's essays and Basho's Narrow Road sit on the sofa. These things, for me, have a kind of fullness. Their appearance satisfies me. They promise something. They will be my travelmates on a journey to a richer life.
But then occasionally, as for example yesterday, a nausea overcomes me. The objects are suddenly exsanguinated of their meaning, and just as the sight of a corpse might suddenly shatter the youth's feeling of immortality, I am returned to the meaninglessness and futility of all things and the indifference of the world outside to my internal world. Actually it's similar to the experience I used to have sometimes in the days of girlfriends, of suddenly seeing - not as a result of jealousy or argument, but just a spontaneous flipping of perception - my beloved with utter detachment and indifference, just a person, barely a perrson. A skinsack.
It always fades, and I am soon back in the world of illusory fullness. In our impermanent non-selves, any object of attachment is an incompatible organ transplant which must inevitably face rejection. But the world is a donor of infinite generosity.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Stumbling along the eightfold path
Recently I have been re-engaging with Buddhism and trying to apply its teachings to my life. (I even started a couple of blogs on the subject but found I had nothing interesting to say). In many ways I have already stumbled a certain way along the eightfold path: my mind is empty most of the time, so when I meditate I am rarely troubled by the sorts of streams of thought that apparently bedevil other meditators; I have few worldy attachments, drives or desires that could bring me into conflict with other people; my livelihood is quite right; I have a shaved head...
But for me the important issue is, as ever, living with or without motivation and goals. If I am to follow the Boddhisattva ideal and strive to lead all living beings to enlightenment (in principle at least, since in practice it obviously ain't gonna happen) or, more realistically, to make the lives of other people (and cats, otters and wasps) better without seeking anything for myself, does this mean I have a duty not just to dwell in the four immeasurables (compassion, loving kindness, sympathetic joy, equanimity) and apply these ideals to situations and people as and when I encounter them, but also to actively reorient my life so that I get involved in beneficial activities such as volunteering or teaching dharma or even retraining to be a doctor?
...because that's all rather against my 'nature'. As a studious introvert, when I think about walking the Buddhist path I am naturally drawn towards adorning my own life by studying the languages of the Buddhist canon, maybe doing a PhD in Buddhist studies, memorizing and chanting sutras, practicing Zen calligraphy or blowing the shakuhachi - all things which can be safely done with minimal or no encounter with other people, and which certainly don't obviously directly benefit others - though indirectly if they lead me towards a more enlightened state then through my (minimal) encounter with others their benefits will manifest.
But of course even these activities are not necessary to practicing Buddhism, they are just potentials that appear on my horizon, and on the contrary they may simply be a case of enchantment with the beautiful grain of the raft while losing sight of the farther shore.
If I believed that my studying classical Chinese, for example, could really help other people (!!!) then my natural interest in the subject would be in alignment with the Boddhisattva ideal and there would be no conflict. As it is, I am drawn to the subject, but believe it to be fairly useless, and I know that this awareness will gradually undermine my motivation to study the language. But at the same time unless I am able to radically alter my introvert nature, I shall not be helping the needy in the meantime. Not doing what I want because I don't feel that I ought, not doing what I ought because I don't feel that I want to, I end up doing nothing.
But at least this gives me more time to sit in my garden and enjoy the trees.
But for me the important issue is, as ever, living with or without motivation and goals. If I am to follow the Boddhisattva ideal and strive to lead all living beings to enlightenment (in principle at least, since in practice it obviously ain't gonna happen) or, more realistically, to make the lives of other people (and cats, otters and wasps) better without seeking anything for myself, does this mean I have a duty not just to dwell in the four immeasurables (compassion, loving kindness, sympathetic joy, equanimity) and apply these ideals to situations and people as and when I encounter them, but also to actively reorient my life so that I get involved in beneficial activities such as volunteering or teaching dharma or even retraining to be a doctor?
...because that's all rather against my 'nature'. As a studious introvert, when I think about walking the Buddhist path I am naturally drawn towards adorning my own life by studying the languages of the Buddhist canon, maybe doing a PhD in Buddhist studies, memorizing and chanting sutras, practicing Zen calligraphy or blowing the shakuhachi - all things which can be safely done with minimal or no encounter with other people, and which certainly don't obviously directly benefit others - though indirectly if they lead me towards a more enlightened state then through my (minimal) encounter with others their benefits will manifest.
But of course even these activities are not necessary to practicing Buddhism, they are just potentials that appear on my horizon, and on the contrary they may simply be a case of enchantment with the beautiful grain of the raft while losing sight of the farther shore.
If I believed that my studying classical Chinese, for example, could really help other people (!!!) then my natural interest in the subject would be in alignment with the Boddhisattva ideal and there would be no conflict. As it is, I am drawn to the subject, but believe it to be fairly useless, and I know that this awareness will gradually undermine my motivation to study the language. But at the same time unless I am able to radically alter my introvert nature, I shall not be helping the needy in the meantime. Not doing what I want because I don't feel that I ought, not doing what I ought because I don't feel that I want to, I end up doing nothing.
But at least this gives me more time to sit in my garden and enjoy the trees.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Start as you mean to, go on
I started 2008 with a sense of new possibility as I realized that I was well established in my profession and could basically earn enough money to do what I pleased.
I begin 2009 with my friend pointlessness sat upon my head like a squatty toad.
What do I do? A job comes in, I do the job. When I have no work to do, I can do what I like, but I have no passions or even interests really.
So I resolve to use some of my free time for jobby improvement - studying the subjects that come up in my work, enhancing my profile, making myself known to more potential work-givers. This is a dependent motivation, do B to do A better. If there was no A, B would be pointless. Also, I only do A to earn money. If this was not necessary, I would happily never do A again, and would probably let the supporting skills and connections wither.
Why earn the money? Independence. Self esteem. The foundations of a tolerable life.
I don't seek much for myself, yet I have little to offer other people, except the skill I use in my job - but in this I am merely aiding the flow of communication, not touching the lives of individuals. Is that what I want to do - touch the lives of individuals? Maybe with a long stick.
I begin 2009 with my friend pointlessness sat upon my head like a squatty toad.
What do I do? A job comes in, I do the job. When I have no work to do, I can do what I like, but I have no passions or even interests really.
So I resolve to use some of my free time for jobby improvement - studying the subjects that come up in my work, enhancing my profile, making myself known to more potential work-givers. This is a dependent motivation, do B to do A better. If there was no A, B would be pointless. Also, I only do A to earn money. If this was not necessary, I would happily never do A again, and would probably let the supporting skills and connections wither.
Why earn the money? Independence. Self esteem. The foundations of a tolerable life.
I don't seek much for myself, yet I have little to offer other people, except the skill I use in my job - but in this I am merely aiding the flow of communication, not touching the lives of individuals. Is that what I want to do - touch the lives of individuals? Maybe with a long stick.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
The ideal death sentence
What would you do if you were told that you only had one week left to live?
What about if you only had a month to live?
What if it was a year?
What about 5 years, 10 years.
And so on
What if you only had one lifetime to live?
Live every day as if it were the only one and you will never amount to anything. This is the problem for people who have seen through the red dust of the world but still, for whatever reason, continue to breath it in. Life is a miracle, the sky is an endless dream of colours, grass sings on the slopes of a volcano, a dragonfly hovers for a moment before alighting on a child's outstretched finger.
But still we must eat, shelter, mate, trade, and write our theses on symbolism in medieval Mongolian love poetry.
What about if you only had a month to live?
What if it was a year?
What about 5 years, 10 years.
And so on
What if you only had one lifetime to live?
Live every day as if it were the only one and you will never amount to anything. This is the problem for people who have seen through the red dust of the world but still, for whatever reason, continue to breath it in. Life is a miracle, the sky is an endless dream of colours, grass sings on the slopes of a volcano, a dragonfly hovers for a moment before alighting on a child's outstretched finger.
But still we must eat, shelter, mate, trade, and write our theses on symbolism in medieval Mongolian love poetry.
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