At the dentists

 In the waiting room at the dentists at the moment. Not the best place to be but it does beat waiting at bus stops - at least here a dentist will (I hope) eventually turn up, call my name and get out his drill. Then again, plenty now who are unable to access any dentist at all - all part of post-brexit "Global Britain" with the pot-holes, constant border delays, long National Health waiting lists and much else, where those responsible for the debacle, the lies and the misery, can look forward to appearances on "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here" for a payment of £350,000. Nice reward for causing the deaths of thousands in the UK's Care Homes during Covid. No shame! And dear old Liz Truss, who trashed the UK economy in a mere 45 days before being thrown out, now publishing a book "Ten Years to Save the West". Unbelievable, truly unbelievable. Save the West? 

Beware the Deep State!

Then we have dear old Donald Trump. To open his mouth is to lie. On trial now for some fraud  perpetrated back in 2016, widely tipped to become President once more of the "Leaders of the Free World", just so long as he can avoid the shackles of the "deep state" - the new bogey words for anything at all that thwarts pure ego-mania (I think Liz Truss uses the term) Standing in his way of course is Joe Biden, into his eighties. Is he capable of another 4 years before finally keeling over for good, once and for all? Can a once great nation produce nothing better than these two options. So much for the American Dream, where a farm boy can rise to the top by effort and a handful of dreams. 

Well, I am ranting. And while at it, this blog has now had over 18,000 hits, spread over many many countries. I do love to just waffle on while in McDonald's and in many ways it is simply therapeutic, irrespective of any response. But sometimes I just wish someone, somewhere, would make a comment. The option is available. I did ask at one point for any reader to offer some related quote of their own - I feed upon correspondences and associations. Simple enough to do. No one has to agree with me on anything.

But whatever, I will plough on, casting my words into the wind, into cyberspace. 

All the best to all my readers.

Thank you

 

The One I Love

 

Just thinking lately of another song, "The One I Love" by David Gray. I seem to remember mentioning it before somewhere, but at my age the memory is sometimes not what it used to be - some say it is the first thing to go, for me it is the second.

I'm trying to learn it on my guitar, simple chords, quite easy, and I will add to my repertoire of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and "The Wheels On the Bus". I first heard the song when on the night shift at Wilko's, when I was a Stock Replenishment Executive (AKA Shelf Filler) They played a tape each night and we all had our favorites. We all joined in with "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place" and "Do You Wanna Be In My Gang" (don't mention the name of the artist Pike!) We all dreaded the Christmas tape, which being in the retail trade, would start early November, two months after the first Xmas stock came in.

But I'm waffling again, in McDonald's with my coffee. But yes, "The One I Love", which I liked, and not listening intently to the lyrics - concentrating instead on making sure the AnuSol was placed on the correct shelf and aisle - took to be a simple "boy meets girl" love song. "You're the One I Love" yeah, yeah, yeah. Then some of the lyrics started to penetrate my mind/heart, words about bullets whispering through the grass, and tracers in the sky, of blood leaking out.

So I looked up the lyrics, and its about a guy breathing his last on some battlefield (take your pick, there's plenty to choose from) and with his dying breath his vision is not of heavens or hells, but of his first dance with his loved one, holding hands on the old dance floor. Or maybe his last dance. Gut wrenching, and now two weeks into kicking my anti-depressants, tear jerking. But somehow, strangely, tears more of affirmation than despair. Anyway, here is the song....

Gonna close my eyes
Girl and watch you go
Running through this life, darling
Like a field of snow
As the tracer glides
In its graceful arc
Send a little prayer out to ya
'Cross the falling dark

Tell the repo man
And the stars above
That you're the one I love, yeah

Perfect summers night
Not a wind that breathes
Just the bullets whispering gentle
'Mongst the new green leaves
There's things I might have said
Only wish I could
Now I'm leaking life faster
Then I'm leaking blood

Tell the repo man
And the stars above
That you're the one I love
You're the one I love
The one I love

Yee hee, yee hee

Don't see Elysium
Don't see no fiery hell
Just the lights up bright, baby
In the bay hotel
Next wave coming in
Like an ocean roar
Won't you take my hand darling
On that old dance floor

We can twist and shout
Do the turtle dove
And you're the one I love
You're the one I love
The one I love

Yee hee, yee hee

Not sure about the "yee hee, yee hee" bit, just might leave it out when I try entertaining the grandkids.

Who is the "repo man"? I see it as that love cannot be repossessed. Love is the hidden ground in which we live and move and have our being. Someone once said that love is the reason that there is something rather than nothing, and another (Meister Eckhart) said that "love has no why". So tell the repo man to stuff it.

Make of that what you will, meanwhile maybe think of the things "you might have said" to your own loved ones, and say them. Before you're shot down.

Mercy

 Maybe time to get back to my roots, i.e. a sequence of quotes strung together by a loose assembly of stray thought perhaps totally irrelevant. 

How to sum up how I see/understand/live things....

 "Love is why there is something rather than nothing" (Source unknown, but then, who cares?)

Those aghast at our world's suffering will find that difficult to square with the reality they inhabit, but there you go. 

 "Love had no why" (Meister Eckhart)

Maybe "conclusions" and ardent beliefs can mess us up? Hang loose. 

As far as Reality, in our relationships, then the key word is "mercy". 

"When I speak well of myself and ill of others, the autumn wind chills my lips" (Buson)

When the autumn wind blows then, as Krishnamurti would say, "it is over". When seen, it is over. As Merton once wrote:-

The spiritual life is something that people worry about when they are so busy with something else they think they ought to be spiritual. Spiritual life is guilt. Up here in the woods is seen the New Testament: that is to say, the wind comes through the trees and you breathe it.

(from "Day of a Stranger")

 

So, love is why there is "something" rather than nothing; love has no why; and the key to life with others is Mercy. 

Merton again:-

The Cross is the sign of contradiction - destroying the seriousness of the Law, of the Empire, of the armies, of blood sacrifice, and of obsession.

But the magicians keep turning the Cross to their own purpose. Yes, it is for them too a sign of contradiction: the awful blasphemy of the religious magician who makes the Cross contradict mercy. This of course is the ultimate temptation of Christianity. To say that Christ has locked all doors, has given one answer, settled everything and departed, leaving all life enclosed in the frightful consistency of a system outside of which there is seriousness and damnation, inside of which there is the intolerable flippancy of the saved - while nowhere is there any place left for the mystery of the freedom of divine mercy which alone is truly serious, and worthy of being taken seriously.

 

A final word from Rumi:-

"Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation"

So be merciful towards my own translation.

Pop biographies etc

 Back in McDonald's (have I ever been away?) and some workman is repairing some piece of electrical set-up. Quite a shrieking of electric drilling, and it makes a change from children screaming. 

Well into pop biographies at the moment and one quote caught my eye...

I have always believed that rock ’n’ roll comes down to myth. There are no “facts.”  (Lester Bangs, in "Rod Stewart")

Not actually reading a Rod Stewart biography, but the quote was from another book sampled. No "facts". It makes me think of the art of translation......and it is an art. Samuel Beckett apparently suffered much as he sought to translate his own works, written in French, into English (or vice versa) Sometimes he gave up the job as impossible. Very easy to translate "the cat sat on the mat" but when you get down to nuances of expression within one language to translate/express the self-same thought/feeling into another becomes a daunting task. The implications of all this is far reaching. I leave it to you. 

For me it relates to "judgement", particularly of others. Reflect upon this:-

It’s difficult to be a legend. It’s hard for me to recognize me. You spend a lot of time trying to avoid it…. The way the world treats you is unbearable…. It’s unbearable because time is passing and you are not your legend, but you’re trapped in it. Nobody will let you out of it except other people who know what it is. But very few people have experienced it, know about it, and I think that can drive you mad. I know it can. I know it can.

 (James Baldwin, interviewed by Quincy Troupe)

It's difficult to be anybody in this world, where "hell is other people". In a preface to a bio of Elvis Presley I found this:-

“Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel,” Milan Kundera wrote in what could be taken as a challenge thrown down to history and biography, too. This suspension of judgment is the storyteller’s morality, “the morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding.” It is not that moral judgment is illegitimate; it is simply that it has no place in describing a life.

To be honest, thoughts on this bring me to tears, still being emotionally raw from ditching anti-depressants (into the second week now)

We are all living "lifes" and the judgements are terrible at times. "Judge not, lest you be judged". So true. We can know ourselves in the judgements we make of others, and we can therefore stand condemned while the one we judge rests in the mercy and grace of Reality.

But whatever, back to the biographies. Reading one on Charlie Watts at the moment. A good man, beautifully flawed as we all are......" there is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in" as Leonard Cohen sings in "Anthem". Just stop trying to make a perfect offering! 

As Keith Richards, his bandmate, said:-

He was a very private man. I always had the feeling that I wouldn’t necessarily step over or enquire about something, unless he wanted to talk about it. There was no side on him, there was no act to follow. Charlie was just what you got, which was Charlie. He was the realest guy I ever met.

So Charlie was just Charlie, which says it all, or says nothing. Take your pick. 

PS One story from the book made me laugh, about Keith Richards in his library, on steps reaching and stretching up to get a book on anatomy by Leonardo da Vinci from the shelves. He slipped and did his collar bone. Keith reports that while he never got the book, he learnt a lot about anatomy! 

 

 

 

No tiles above your head

 Everything progresses even as it stays the same. One eminent philosopher said that reality is a "constant advance into novelty" and so it is! We stay with our "selves" at our peril. 

Very much an admirer of Alan Watts and his work at the moment (along with Candy Crush Soda Saga, for which I can proudly claim to be at level 4445) He had his problems with drink but hey, we all have our problems. Fix your own.

Reading his "The Way of Zen" at the moment. This from his introduction:-

Western thought has changed so rapidly in this century that we are in a state of considerable confusion. Not only are there serious difficulties of communication between the intellectual and the general public, but the course of our thinking and of our very history has seriously undermined the common-sense assumptions which lie at the roots of our social conventions and institutions. Familiar concepts of space, time, and motion, of nature and natural law, of history and social change, and of human personality itself have dissolved, and we find ourselves adrift without landmarks in a universe which more and more resembles the Buddhist principle of the “Great Void.”

The void! Positive or negative. Some fear the void, some embrace it. 

Alan Watts then goes on to quote an old zen saying:-

Above, not a tile to cover the head; below, not an inch of ground for the foot.

He then says that such language should not actually be so unfamiliar to us, were we truly prepared to accept the meaning of “the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.”

Nowhere to lay our heads! Most prefer "beliefs", even to the point of claiming that their own set the parameters of an "only way". Quite tragic. Is there an "only way" set in stone, found in a book, that can actually set us free? Gives us the "peace that passes understanding"? More often than not the peace I see in others is all too understandable! 

As Thomas Merton once said, the only way is in fact "no way at all", a "way" where we in fact become as good as lost. But - as he says again - such a way is not a way out! 

Well, I waffle. 

Samuel Beckett

 

Here I am in McDonald's with burger and coffee prior to my stint on the tills at Oxfam. Enjoying a holiday from "heavy" books and reading a biography of Samuel Beckett, "Damned to Fame". So good. In fact it seems to do all that any "heavy" book tries to do, but by way of no-calculation, which is in fact very Becketish the more I think about it (which I try not to do......) Well, I waffle.

Some light moments in the book, a story told of an order for a pair of trousers from a Paris tailor:-

The reference to the world and the pair of trousers alludes to the story of a tailor, who takes many weeks to make a pair of trousers for a customer. The client objects that it took God only seven days to make the entire world. But, replies the tailor, ‘look at the world and look at my trousers’!

Well, it made me laugh, which doesn't come cheap.

The book is by no means hagiographic, but for me Beckett comes shining through as a fine human being. Compassionate without self-consciousness of being so, and actually reaching deep into others even when lost in his own solitude. "Nothing to be done" - yet he does it! All providing a counterpoint, perhaps more an illumination, of much of Dogen. Having immersed myself in Dogen for a while, the life and thought of Beckett is a feast of "east/west" perceptions and inter-relationships. Much insight into:-

......flowers fall even though we love them; weeds grow even though we dislike them. Conveying oneself toward all things to carry out practice-enlightenment is delusion. All things coming and carrying out practice-enlightenment through the self is realization. (Words from "Genjokoan", the "actualisation of reality)

Beckett was all against the creation of "order", of "answers", of any "system" that will inevitably stifle our spontaneous on-going life. His prose and plays are in many ways a sheer chaos. Yet:-

There's a way out there, there's a way out somewhere, the rest would come, the other words, sooner or later, and the power to get there, and the way to get there, and pass out, and see the beauties of the skies, and see the stars again. (Samuel Beckett, ninth monologue, "Texts for Nothing", as spoken by a tramp-like waif as he contemplates death)

"There's a way out", but keep quiet about it! Don't even think of it. Thomas Merton's "there is no key, no door" - don't ever think that you have the key!

Beckett could have remained safe as a neutral Irish citizen in Paris during WW2 and the German occupation. But he joined the French Resistance and narrowly avoided capture by the Gestapo. I've now reached the post-war years, when his literary creativity exploded. "Waiting for Godot" is soon to come!

 "Nothing to be done"! Creative nihilism.

The sound of the marketplace

 Poems are not ephemeral things. At best they travel heart to heart. Maybe they can also bring forth true communion, the deepest form of communication. The finger that points at the moon becomes the moon itself.

Reading the various details of Dogen's life in 13th century Japan (a time of great turmoil and social change), of his travels to China, can illuminate his poems, tie them to moments of doubt, to moments of his own illuminations, in time and space.

From Dogen's collection of poetry:-

Attaining the heart
Of the sutra,
The sounds of the
Bustling marketplace
Preach the Dharma

In my own Pure Land path of "no-calculation" the "marketplace" is the dojo (training ground), and everyone you meet is a "master". If not so, we can end up merely meeting ourselves, time and time again.

 

Moving back "west'......

James Joyce writes in "Ulysses":-

"God is a shout in the street"

From one or two commentaries on the works of James Joyce:-

Bloom (Leopold Bloom of Ulysses) is no perfect hero, but perfection is overrated. Give me a honest human being embracing their mundane humanity any day over a person striving after perfection".

Joyce does not present us with the illusion of a perfect life in this book, a life without pain and sorrow, but in all his honesty Joyce shows us that life as it is and not as we think it should be is worth saying Yes to. The sorrows and difficulties faced in Ulysses are included in Joyce’s affirmation of life, because what good would such an affirmation be if it did not include all of life?

Joyce offers a new litmus test for what we call the hero, not gigantic feats of strength, but small and simple feats of kindness.

And finally:-

An epiphany was not a miraculous dispensation from above but, as Joyce defined it, an insight into 'the soul of the commonest object'

(Kevin Birmingham, from "The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle For James Joyce's Ulysses.")

 

Simple feats and acts of kindness. So easy to miss, to become deaf and blind to.