self-awareness

Well, Hello There: Touching Base With the Creature Within You

February 17, 2023 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Something Caught My Eye (and My Eye Caught It Back),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

Like many people, I think — at least, many people of a certain age — a lot of what I have always believed came to me through books and other reading. (My computer’s been carrying around a scanned copy of an old Smokey Stover cartoon for months now, just waiting for me to recognize the right occasion to spring it on the world.) Many of those beliefs were simply absorbed, without question, and in many cases I can even remember (i.e., think I remember) where or when or in what source I first encountered their expression.

So it is with “Namaste” — rather, with what “namaste” quote-unquote “means.”

I’m pretty sure I know which book told me that Namaste, especially when spoken with hands raised prayerfully before the speaker, translates to English as “I salute the light within you.” (I won’t share the title or author with you here, because I’m not positive I got it from that book.) It seems, though, that Namaste means nothing of the sort — that it means nothing more than “Hello.”

For what it’s worth, I just plugged the word into Google Translate, which offers Greetings! — including the exclamation point — as the literal meaning.

Now, from a certain hippy-dippy perspective, we could say that any greeting, in acknowledging the presence of someone else, salutes the light within them — salutes something within them, anyhow. A heartfelt Hello!, Howdy, ‘Morning!, etc., especially with the right facial expression and maybe a hug, says much more than I see and recognize you. It says I know some things about your inner self and they’re things which please me. So, yeah, I guess they’re all “saluting the light within [someone].” Even so, it’s a stretch to go from that hippy-dippy perspective to assert a literal translation.

Literal translations aside, there’s value in sometimes peeking beneath the surface even of strangers — even, especially, beneath the surface of the strangest of strangers: the surface of ourselves. We’re always in the process of remaking our “selves,” papering over unpleasant memories, inflating perfectly pleasant little balloons of flattery into the unsustainable blimp we call “praise,” retrofitting past sins in the camouflage of virtue, reworking limp verbal banter into dialogue worthy of Elmore Leonard or the Mark Brothers. But there’s other stuff buried deep inside — whether buried by the sheer weight of multiple self-delusions, or by simple forgetfulness… It’s a wonder we recognize ourselves at all.

And so we come to a couple of readings from the week, which touch on rediscovering or re-acknowledging something — light or otherwise — within us. We start, as usual, with a post from whiskey river‘s recent stream of consciousness:

I want to avoid preaching at you but I do want to convince you that the true and durable path into and through experience involves being true to the actual givens of your lives. True to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge. Because oddly enough, it is that intimate, deeply personal knowledge that links us most vitally and keeps us most reliably connected to one another.

And you will be sure to keep going in life on a far steadier keel and with far more radiant individuality if you navigate by that principle.

(Seamus Heaney [source])

And then, not from whiskey river but in the same spirit of lifting up the corner to peek below:

Raft

At the said-to-be bottomless pond
at the sand pit, the raft we discovered
was a heavy barn door, maybe ten feet
by twelve, halfway in, halfway out
of the water where others had left it,
probably older boys, always the first
to find something good, use it a while,
then leave it for us, Billy and Larry,
Danny and me, floating it out onto
the water, wading in after it, holding
onto its edge as we slid down the slope
up to our shoulders, then one by one
helped each other climb on, soaked
and shivering, standing to balance,
arms spread, each to a corner, facing
each other, frightened but laughing,
not a forethought among us for a pole
to push out with, nor a plank for an oar,
as we trusted that door as it floated
not on but just under the surface,
one corner sinking, then slowly lifting
as another went down, ankle deep
over the cold, bottomless darkness.
Seventy years later, I still feel that door
sinking under my weight, can still see
the white faces of Larry and Billy
and Danny looking across into mine
as we held our arms wide, as if to keep
some wild, free, invisible creature
there at the center from running away,
and at eighty I know what it was.

(Ted Kooser [source])

…and/or, in a lighter vein:

Chris has always fantasized about being the sort of man who might buy the red, yellow, and green peppers. The sort of man who would buy broccoli or ginger or beetroot out of choice. To Chris, the fruit and veg aisle at the supermarket was where he bought bananas and occasionally a bag of spinach to put at the top of his basket in case he bumped into anyone he knew. People always look into your basket, don’t they? Chris wanted to pretend he shopped and ate like a grown man. Slip the Kit-Kats under the spinach and no one’s any the wiser.

Chris thinks back to the day a cashier in Tesco’s was scanning his shopping. As she swiped through the chocolate, the crisps, the Diet Coke, the sausage rolls, she had looked up with a kind smile and said, “What is it, dear, a child’s birthday party?” Chris has used self-service checkouts ever since.

(Richard Osman [source])

Summoning a Phoenix, Seeing Your Self in the Flames

February 10, 2023 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Untitled (History Painting)” (2013), by Korakrit Arunanondchai. For his “History Painting” series, says the Nasher Museum of Art’s Web site, “Arunanondchai bleached scraps of denim and set them on fire. The flames were then photographed, printed and placed behind the burnt areas of the fabric, giving the illusion of a continuous, live burn. As documentation of the flames, the photographs function to capture a moment in the denim’s history. They also serve to mend the very holes caused by the fire.” The image shown here — a photograph of a photographic (etc.) mixed-media work — doesn’t begin to capture the impact of the work itself… which really does appear to be burning.]

There’s a trick to genuinely knowing yourself, I think — a trick of balancing: balancing on a knife edge between seeing yourself (and your effects, your influence) everywhere, and seeing yourself (and your effects, your influence) not at all. I don’t know that I’ll ever master the trick (I stand, wobbling, on that blade, certain that only with very great luck will I never slip and fall astraddle it (yeesh)). But, yeah, I’m aware of the trick. And I sometimes have to remind myself of it, especially when I encounter philosophical statements which seem to encourage me to disappear, to let myself be absorbed into the cosmos, carrying or expressing no self at all.

All of which came to mind as I read this selection from whiskey river (which quoted the last stanza alone):

Another Night in the Ruins

1

In the evening
haze darkening on the hills,
purple of the eternal,
a last bird crosses over,
‘flop flop,’ adoring
only the instant.

2

Nine years ago,
in a plane that rumbled all night
above the Atlantic,
I could see, lit up
by lightning bolts jumping out of it,
a thunderhead formed like the face
of my brother, looking down
on blue,
lightning-flashed moments of the Atlantic.

3

He used to tell me,
“What good is the day?
On some hill of despair
the bonfire
you kindle can light the great sky—
though it’s true, of course, to make it burn
you have to throw yourself in…”

4

Wind tears itself hollow
in the eaves of these ruins, ghost-flute
of snowdrifts
that build out there in the dark:
upside-down ravines
into which night sweeps
our cast wings, our ink-spattered feathers.

5

I listen.
I hear nothing. Only
the cow, the cow of such
hollowness, mooing
down the bones.

6

Is that a
rooster? He
thrashes in the snow
for a grain. Finds
it. Rips
it into
flames. Flaps. Crows.
Flames
bursting out of his brow.

7

How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?

(Galway Kinnell [source])

And then I read this passage in Diane Ackerman’s Deep Play (not, of course, from whiskey river):

Once, at an artists’ colony on a Florida estuary, thirty of us gathered to celebrate the summer solstice with song and ritual. In stilted-up cottages connected by raised walkways, we lived along the estuary like a troupe of wild macaques nestled among the green bosoms of the trees, high above a dense forest floor that leprosy-prone armadillos shared with wild pigs, raccoons, foxes, and pine snakes. Spanish moss hung everywhere like scribbles of DNA. Gathering outside my house to celebrate summer solstice, we each wrote a wish on a small pennant of paper, and tossed the chits into the fire, where they burst into flames and danced on hot vapors into the night. Like fireflies, our unspoken hopes flashed toward heaven. Seated at that solstice campfire, I watched each paper wish tremble into flame for a moment and kite higher and higher until it joined the others in a bouquet of sparks, then mingled with the constellations and vanished into night.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

Fire carries such powerful metaphorical weight: safety (in the form of light and warmth) from the outside world, danger, power, the flickering transience of life… Maybe we need to give fire a rest, instead of requiring it to carry our selves as well as a symbol of so much else.

I Recognize Me

July 24, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[Untitled image — a collage — by artist Todd Hewitt, among several in his Flickr album called “Pareidolia.” (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) As he explains in several blog posts over the course of several months in 2010, for this series he paired snapshots with old magazine images which just happen to mimic, in part, each other’s shape/coloration. I think this is one of his more successful matchups.]

From whiskey river (second stanza):

Opus Posthumous III
Mid-August meltdown, Assurbanipal in the west,
Scorched cloud-towers, crumbling thrones—
The ancients knew to expect a balance at the end of things,
The burning heart against the burning feather of truth.
Sweet-mouthed,
Big ibis-eyed, in the maple’s hieroglyphs, I write it down.
All my life I’ve looked for this slow light, this smallish light
Starting to seep, coppery blue,
out of the upper right-hand corner of things,
Down through the trees and off the back yard,
Rising and falling at the same time, now rising, now falling,
Inside the lapis lazuli of late afternoon.
Until the clouds stop, and hush.
Until the left hedge and the right hedge,
the insects and short dogs,
The back porch and barn swallows grain-out and disappear.
Until the bypass is blown with silence, until the grass grieves.
Until there is nothing else.

(Charles Wright [source])

…and (italicized passage):

I love the common miracles—the murmur of my friends at evening, the clay fires of smudgy juniper, the coarse dull food, the hardship and simplicity, the contentment of doing one thing at a time… gradually my mind has cleared itself, and wind and sun pour through my head, as through a bell. Though we talk little here, I am never lonely; I am returned into myself.
…In another life—this isn’t what I know, but how I feel—these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon—the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the supper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again to the sky.

(Peter Matthiesen [source])

…and:

Today we are all doing penance every day. We’re working hard, trying to make money to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table, trying to maintain a good relationship or marriage, trying to keep our children safe and happy and educated, trying to keep the world from blowing itself up. We don’t need any more penance. We need some joy, an ideal, encouragement, a philosophy worthy of us, a real community, neighbors to keep us from having to go it alone. We need our own religion: our sources of inspiration, hope, and healing.

(Thomas Moore [source])

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