Painting Eyeballs on Chaos

[Image: “Piano-sunset,” originally shared by a Flickr user identified only as “Alecska.” Shared here under the same Creative Commons license she offered there.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

My foot slips on a narrow ledge: in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice, sun, fear, and self are one…

What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the lammergeier and the wolf, which, finding themselves at the center of things, have no need for any secret of true being. In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us, what one lama refers to as “the precision and openness and intelligence of the present.” The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life. “To be anywhere else is to paint eyeballs on chaos.”

(Peter Matthiessen [source])

…and:

Japanese Shape

The way it forces you to look
watching your step
so as not to turn your ankle
on a rock
or step into water nearby

The way it turns the torso
this way and that
view after view
spaces between spaces
and spaces between

The way it slows you down
step after step
no skipping between
there is no short cut
to the edge of this garden

The way it swirls the vision
into brown and black
and green and light with
sound in the air until
only a blanket remains

The way it stops the mind.

(Harry Palmer [source: none other found, alas!])

…and:

Everybody has seen an image of enfoldment: You fold up a sheet of paper, turn it into a small packet, make cuts in it, and then unfold it into a pattern. The parts that were close in the cuts unfold to be far away. This is like what happens in a hologram. Enfoldment is really very common in our experience. All the light in this room comes in so that the entire room is in effect folded into each part. If your eye looks, the light will be then unfolded by your eye and brain. As you look through a telescope or a camera, the whole universe of space and time is enfolded into each part, and that is unfolded to the eye. With an old-fashioned television set that’s not adjusted properly, the image enfolds into the screen and then can be unfolded by adjustment.

When you are talking to somebody, your whole intention to speak enfolds a large number of words. You don’t choose them one by one. There are any number of examples of the implicate order in our experience of consciousness. Any one word has behind it a whole range of meaning enfolded in thought.

Consciousness is unfolded in each individual. Clearly, it’s shared between people as they look at one object and verify that it’s the same. So any high level of consciousness is a social process. There may be some level of sensorimotor perception that is purely individual, but any abstract level depends on language, which is social. The word, which is outside, evokes the meaning, which is inside each person.

Meaning is the bridge between consciousness and matter. Any given array of matter has for any particular mind a significance. The other side of this is the relationship in which meaning is immediately effective in matter. Suppose you see a shadow on a dark night. If it means “assailant,” your adrenaline flows, your heart beats faster, blood pressure rises, and muscles tense. The body and all your thoughts are affected; everything about you has changed. If you see that it’s only a shadow, there’s an abrupt change again.

Meaning enfolds the whole world into me, and vice versa – that enfolded meaning is unfolded as action, through my body and then through the world.

(David Bohm [source])

From elsewhere:

In a 2016 TED talk, [ecologist Suzanne Simard] described the thrill of uncovering the interdependence of two tree species in her research on mycorrhizal networks—elaborate underground networks of fungi that connect individual plants and transfer water, carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients and minerals. Simard was studying the levels of carbon in two species of tree, the Douglas fir and the paper birch, when she discovered that the two species were engaged “in a lively two-way conversation.” In the summer months, when the fir needed more carbon, the birch sent more carbon to the fir; at other times when the fir was still growing but the birch needed more carbon because it was leafless, the fir sent more carbon to the birch—revealing that the two species were in fact interdependent.

(Annaka Harris [source; the book itself is here and elsewhere])

…and:

The Gate

I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world

would be the space my brother’s body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man

but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,

rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.

(Marie Howe [source])

…and:

# 26: An old magazine used to run a regular monthly feature: “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.” The language-learning principle it promoted, in a smaller font: Use a word three times, and it’s yours. Ideally, I guess, the word in question should be a word you know is a word, but have never used before.

So let’s try that now. Let’s try it with, say… three sentences using the word Thermopylae.

• Thermopylae was the site of a famous historic battle.
• The first and maybe only time I heard the word “Thermopylae” spoken aloud was in a high school or college Latin class.
• Thermopylae was in Greece, wasn’t it — Macedonia, maybe? Asia Minor?

Huh. Now let’s repeat the process, this time just in our heads… while changing the title phrase “Word Power” to “Memory,” and the slogan’s object from “a word” to “a moment.” (It pays to increase your memory… Use a moment three times, and it’s yours!) Ready? Go..!

[pause to construct the memory]

How about that? The moment slips into place almost effortlessly, like a leaf dropped from your fingertips in a windstorm… and then drops out of sight, snatched away in the cloud of moments around it. The moment is no more “yours” than the word Thermopylae was a (yes) moment ago.

Wonder what that could mean?

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)