metonymy4u

The point is that if we liberals give up on ultimate concerns, for fear of getting it “wrong,” (or getting it “right” even!) then others less sympathetic to the liberal agenda (the end of cruelty) will take over. And I don’t think we’ll like what they’ve done with the place.

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For Kierkgaard, irony stood out most splendidly in the modes of aesthetic and ethical self creation. In these areas we routinely see figures dedicating themselves unqusestioning and unquestioned, to the realization of public hope in private vision. The artist who struggles against every poverty of the flesh, painting or playing their instrument to the end, the jurist who battles the law’s delay and the insolence of the prideful, holding fast the ethics of a universal good will, these we know and have a place for in our hearts, our lives. But the pious? Those pious who pair word and deed, heart and hand, where do we keep them now? With all their strange, scary, sacred ideas coming and going all day and all night? Too often I think (mea culpa) they are seen as the fanatics, the deluded, the “over the top,” and those who might have a vision of the good life are therefore afraid of speaking out too much. What secular visionary have we had, since Dr. King? And where along the way did we lose the public idea of meaning, of effort, of commitment? Does it always have to be sacrificed to the consequences of cruelty and narrowness of hope?

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The field of irony is vast and often submerged beneath our everyday existence. Kierkegaard wrote about committment in human affairs as a way of bemoaning the loss of meaning in modern life. For him the most astounding fact of modernity was the loss of interest in irony, which is self creation. Especially in the realm of piety, he saw humanity on a destruction course. In a post Renaissance age when the arts, sciences and philosophy were all flourishing like never before, he nevertheless felt a gnawing hubris at work in the spiritual places. The enlightenment, its infatuation with reason, had purported to sweep away faith in the suprasensible. What was left was a self-conscious irony of art, of music, poetry, and a calculus of moral revolution designed to remove all earthly corruption and cruelty. All reverence for that liberal hope, certainly! But it seems odd that we in the modern world should applaud so easily the long work of the artist who strives to the last to re-describe herself again and again, surpassing all her prior creations, that we would accept art or the social revolutionary, even “personal self discovery” as the tasks of a lifetime, but not accord the same to piety. Nowadays, as Kierkegaard predicted, it seems to me that communal striving towards a suprasensible vision gets subsumed in the watered down sanctimony of “spiritual” or “personal” growth, never to be overspoken or over emphasized, lest someone be offended, or distracted. Now we all must pledge obedience at the altar of self-actualization and seek the blessing of the non-directive, and the politically correct. The problem is that this all too often cedes the field of pious effort to fundamentalist groups and their crusades to rescue various holy lands from contemporary infidels (e.g. the “gays” of California).

When our sense of the pious, of the reverential, of the revealed and the sacred lies forever beneath a public gauze of humiliation and shame, when we are afraid to display our hopes, our dreams, our desires and our vision of the good life, what will we say when the world is made over in another’s image? If we do not send the team out now, to embody a religion of compassion, what rough beast will take the field in our name, bend our will, and slink carelessly toward Bethlehem to be born?

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My current project is to notice and amplify emotional flexibility. What does that mean, specifically? To be emotionally flexible is to be intimate with an emotion without reacting to it in a urge-full and impulsive manner. The idea is to be able to validate the emotion, and not be ruled by it. An example for me would involve validating anger when someone behaves in a way that I experience as violent or threatening, and not reacting in kind. It’s a matter of validating my emotions about someone jumping off a cliff right in front of me, without having to jump off with them. For my own emotional health, I need to find a different path to validation. From now on I want my question to be, always, “how can I respond rather than react, to this important event?”

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Question for the day: how can I be more compassionate, more intimate, more kind, more aware and more courageous with whatever I’m feeling right now?

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One of the most enduring dialectics of human reason is the polarity between necessity and contingency. That is, the distinction between that which must be and that which may be otherwise. On this basis we conceive God, the soul, the atom, the big bang, time and space, freedom and love. On the other hand we think of bodies, motion, mass, energy and hell. The avoidable and the unavoidable. That which endures and that which is equivocal. But are they not all of the same world? Does the universe not contain everything we name or could possibly name? The rational and the irrational? The explainable and the unappreciated? Heaven and hell? Can we really say that what the mind conceives, exists therefore? That the most knowable is the most real? When we forget ourselves, that is when I think we fall into error. When we divide ourselves against ourselves, that is when we re-member suffering. That is when dis-ease seems necessary, once more.

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a key part of being open to all experiences is being able to encounter them with compassion. thinking of an image of a dog whimpering because a stone kicked up by a passing car’s tire just hit her in the nose, i cannot feel anything but compassion for her. she did not put her nose in the path of the stone. it just hit her and she is hurting. that same feeling, turned towards my own experience, allows me to see that i did not create the causes and conditions of my own suffering. with this new understanding, i can then turn towards suffering with less indifference, and more connection. neither did i create the conditions of my suffering, nor am i powerless in the face of them. dialectics being held in common, the way is no longer disguised. sure, like everyone i would prefer life not hit me on the nose with rocks and stones. however the concern is not that i have preferences, but that i often believe that preferences are the source of the problem. this is delusion. clinging and lack of compassion are the problem.

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what i learned at tonight’s sitting was that difficulty can be a road to myself. so that when i notice something i don’t like, i’m simultaneously learning about what i do like. dis-satisfaction, strangely, leading to enlightenment. suddenly, the road to disaster and ruin was also filled with discovery. likewise, i realized that if my arm hurts, i might also notice that my foot does not hurt. it was amazing to me this evening how both of those could be true at the same time. i suspect much of what we call suffering is actually a process of forgetting. forgetting what else is also true, in the moment of pain.

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Just as every image-fiction is a response to a visuo-spatial challenge, so every poem-fiction is a response to a verbo-logical challenge. Both also live in the land of the personal-historical challenge.

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For me koan practice is about being aware of my response to the wordy events of my life. It is about developing a different relationship to the sentences that fill our world. Sentences like, “wouldn’t a burger and fries be great right now?” or “do you really want a president who is soft on crime?” The problem, I think, is that we so often confuse activity with action. And sentences like these often bully us into error. So learning to sit with a question like “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” or “what is the one of one?” helps me re-focus my attention on experience as it is in this moment. Investigation is redirected—to seek an appropriate action, given the nature of the way things are, and not the way they “should” be. Control is released, in favor of a helpful response. So often we believe acceptance and action are incompatible. That acceptance is synonymous with passivity. In fact, I think that acceptance is the very action of effort.

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