Thoughts in a Peet's Coffeehouse

Everyone is alike: we all use language (sometimes timidly and sometimes obnoxiously) to feel out our existence, our relationship to our world and to others. We act, and measure the effects and meaning of those actions through language. What has the world said about what I do, and how has it made my actions meaningful?, we ask. Here I am, awake in the language debris that's washing through a coffeehouse. Washy, washy. A poet, almost thirty, a woman who is so cold, a man who calms a cold woman quietly as he hands her a steaming tea, and a tattooed coffee-man, offering commentary on the Shawshank Redemption, keeping up an airy banter with the other less-articulate coffee-man, whom I can't hear very well.

Two Kinds of Love, pt. 2

Even this second love-- a love that’s died
and been reborn, a love that’s refused to look away--
even this love rises every day to clouds or sun,
coffee and a bowl of cereal. Both loves
meet their blear-eyed loved ones in the hallway,
at the kitchen counter half-asleep, mumbling
their love. Familiar morning meetings
when nothing comes to mind, none of the nights
spent sullenly, none of the grave-digging
or rebirth -- all forgotten. Even this love
whose name is Resurrection must wait
as the coffee drips. When the days are just normal,
when we don’t remember death. It isn’t hiding,
and maybe it’s okay. It’s what we have.

Two Kinds of Love, pt. 1

There is a love that hides behind illusion.
That love is good— it’s tender, it always wants
the best for the one who’s loved. That love
wouldn’t dream of tearing down the gentle nets
we’ve tied around ourselves, between ourselves,
to catch our falling. A fall like Adam took,
who was so happy while he still maintained
his innocent love of Eve, who was so happy
while she still had Adam free of Adam’s future.
It was good, God said, that simple life they lead
before they knew what life was, or could be after
much pain. Before they knew the kind of love
that’s been killed— a love that’s shown itself,
that doesn’t hide, that has kept on looking.

Who's Afraid of the Wolf?

At a Quaker meeting house a few years back, I picked up a little pamphlet-- it gave a frank defense of Quaker practices. Amidst a list of reasons for their movement away from mainstream Protestant traditions, the pamphlet said this:

"Most Protestant groups attributed to [the Bible's] words a finality & infallibility that more thoughtful examination would have rejected. The common desire for an external authoritative standard was too strong."

And so, the pamphlet argued, the Religious Society of Friends has developed a set of practices more suited to the humble state which creatures without an infallible guide find themselves in.

Having striven for a few years to walk away from various umbrellas of authority, I'm wondering now about living in "ignorance." Wendell Berry, who serves as one of my interim authority figures, said this to me (in a book of his):

"The question of how to act in ignorance is paramount."

Indeed. If you are alive, and don't claim to suck from the teet of infallibility, then you are left with the mess of words that the world buries you in, and with your own presence-in-the-world. When one begins to despair of being able to pull the pin-sized "true-way" out of the haystack, one begins to recognize that truth doesn't reside in words. One turns exclusively to one's presence-in-the-world. But it doesn't speak-- it just is.

And one begins to wonder how to act in this state of being-- one in which the designation of "truth" has been given to that which is disclosed to us in moments outside of everyday distraction, when we are aware of our own presence-in-the-world. I don't mean to say that people in this state find truth in experience-- when people claim to be empiricists, I think, they are connecting themselves to a certain authoritative standard, a certain way of talking about being. "Truth" for them is akin to scientific law. They don't think of themselves as ignorant, unless they recognize the fallibility of that way-of-speaking too.

The Specter of Ignorance then begins to rise. We are left with the realization that knowing is a way of operating in the world, and truth is what comes from being-in-the-world. Certainty is just foolishness.

I suppose that this is what they call enlightenment. But what do you do once you've been enlightened? They say that Buddha, upon achieving "enlightenment," ate some rice pudding. No special significance in that--he was just hungry.

Edward Albee wrote the play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," and meant by the title (and through the conversation of the play's characters) to ask: Who is afraid of recognizing our ignorance? Except, I suppose he would put it this way: Who is afraid of letting go of illusions? After letting go of knowing, fear of the unknown has more space to fill.

Regardless of the fallibility of any authority, we do have presence-in-the-world. And it's something-- more than something. I think presence-as-a-worldview is a way to live. It seems to me it would be something like this: 1. One recognizes one's fallibility, 2. One recognizes that one exists, 3. One recognizes that one will cease to exist, 4. One recognizes that other Beings are existing-in-the-world too, and that co-existence is what we have, 5. One recognizes that co-existence implies a meaning, a place (in the loose sense of the word) of being, and finally 6. One acts in ways that with perpetuate this co-existence-with-awareness.

That idea is enough to live on, albeit in a very humble fashion. I think a meeting of people who live in this knowledge would look something like the way the Friend's meetings go: a lot of silence, a lot of sitting there absorbing the light of meaningful presence.

An old poem...

...that has special relevance again today, after taking the GRE Lit test.

-----

Standardized Tests


Finding that one does not have
a high hook
to hang one's hat on
(having guessed it already).

Finding that a single movement
unravels the knot you've fretted over
with trembling fingertips.

Finding that you are precisely
a man (nothing more,
nothing less).

Henrik Ibsen

This here wildly bearded fellow is Henrik Ibsen, whose name I'd heard many a time without complete recognition. Now I've just finished reading about him, and about his major plays. His characters are already having an effect on me. The Wild Duck is about a home, a family, that continues its existence by ignoring all the secrets and problems it hides below its daily distraction. A man takes it upon himself to shed the light of frank truth into the home, and this ultimately destroys the family. One character, a doctor who helped the family maintain its lies, apparently, before the truth-seeker came to town--I really shouldn't be writing about this without having read it, but momentum drives me onward--says this:

"Deprive the average human being of his life-lie, and you rob him of his happiness.”

Many similar proclamations have been made, especially around the turn of the century--philosophers, psychologists, writers, characters. And yet, they would say, to expose the life-lie is our regrettable duty.

Somehow this line, this notion of the duty to disillusion ourselves, to draw things out of shadowy fantasy, is breaking my little heart this afternoon. It is a little heart, mine. It sits on one edge of history's crater, and gapes, childishly.

Because I can't figure which end is up, which door is disillusionment. If being here were like being a child playing in a box. How to exit the box. Language, a useful tool, is utterly confusing as a compass. Which way of speaking about life isn't a fabrication? Don't words always represent life? A representation isn't the thing itself. And what is a thing other than a entity so named because of its participation in a system of being?

There are two moments when I really feel truth: in the moment of epiphany, and in the moment that so often accompanies epiphany, which is really the original meaning of epiphany--manifestation: when I become aware of myself as present, as a being here. When an object is manifested as not-objective, but as present. It feels like truth. My lamp in front of me, disclosing its being to me.

But I am a child, using the toys of other children to act out the world, inside my box.

Language causes to flow over me fluctuating waves of euphoria and humility.

Subject verb verb phrase prep phrase participial phrase as d/o prep phrase conjunction noun.

Liposuction

During Friday's class, liposuction came up--(now I'm imagining the word "lipsuction" in comical white block-letters floating up to the surface of a pool)-- as we were talking about pop culture, and the ways in which "image" pushes it, pop culture, along. I told them about the billboard I see everyday, which I will describe now: in standard san-serif 5 foot tall font is written "Forever Young" above an almost nude and obviously late-teen female body.

What I can't figure out is this: why don't we tear this shit down? You might say: because Americans are stupid, can't think for themselves, and believe whatever Blaxmart sticks through their eyes. And I say to that this:

You're wrong, but I can't figure out why. To be as definitive as possible. And this is why I'm perplexed-- I've read the papers of a few hundred regular-joe American students (from all our cultural enclaves--or those at least in so-Cal and the NW), and what I find in them is a lot wisdom, albeit sound-byte wisdom. It's humbling to read the paper of one of my supposedly stupid students and find a generations-old truth, and feel small, feel like I'm being taught. It happens, it's in their papers. And they seem to understand it.

There must be some... failure of communication between our brains and hearts. If we're dividing the human into meat chunks. Soul and spirit if we're making metaphysical distinctions. However we say it, blatantly false and entirely vapid advertising seems to work on us. If I have fat vacuumed out in clots, I'll look like a nymphet. A lolita.

And people like myself are complicit whether we want the legs of a fairy queen or not-- we take the Adamal bait: wife/girlfriend has legs sucked by Blaxmart the snake, while I learn a liking for licks from the lolita pop. Despite whatever well-polished truths have tumbled down the Heraclitean river of time to me.

My body has acclimated to the fog, and my mind switches off at the heart's fading.

Shall we rouse ourselves? Even Green Day is saying, "Yes, we should." Or so it seemed they were in the song I heard on the radio the other day. Even pop radio is demanding that we rise from the toxic slums of the corporate-driven post-christian image-obsessed apathy we've been been driven into, despite knowing better. We know better. My students do, in their papers.

Oh truth, you greener snake, sitting on the branch opposite the other snake. The same tree.

We're all going to die! Isn't that the most fascinating thing in the world?!

It is. My mind tells me this. My mind speaks in little aphoristic fragments. It says: love, and think about death. Let the love of those around you make the thought of death less... incapacitating... and then try to answer the question.

Which question? The one begged by a meaningful and sometimes-beautiful world wherein love happens, wherein there is consciousness of death, wherein there is a lack of specific knowledge about what will come after the utterly individual death each of us will find ourselves experiencing very soon.

And if we turn into fertilizer only... Shall I go down in a blaze of glory? Or shall I try to make the soil I will become a dirt that's free of mind-numbingly stupid chemicals? A living soil.

If my mind blinks out permanently. But I have stories in my heart that say otherwise.