The Heart of it

 I've been dipping in and out of Crow with No Mouth, a collection of Ikkyū's poems translated by Stephen Berg. Some of the poems are more accessible than others and I suspect I don't have the cultural framework to pick up some possible subtleties, but there's a wonderful directness which cuts through such notions anyway. Others are raw, earthy and communicate embodied joy. In those he shows himself gratefully wonderous  at the delights granted to sensual human existence. There are poems showing pain, poems showing his views on 'dead' 'spiritual' practice, poems about the transient nature of our lives... Indeed, there are poems pointing to life and death as flipsides. He's neither gross nor excessively refined. There's no 'spiritual bypassing' of life, no curtailment of the widest possible Eros, not merely the erotic (of which he's famous for), he's in life, but not blindly so. Already I feel I like this man. I suspect this collection of poems will bear reading time and again for even though they're short, I barely understand but a few.

I've had a few years now where times have been challenging. So challenging that it was better to be physically moving or resting rather than sitting formal zazen. I've generally tried to keep the meditation 'off the cushion' alive though. And always I've felt the need to stay tuned ready to return to formal sitting, and I do sit. In a way, reading Ikkyū reminds me of its value. His enjoyment of what some might regard as 'defilements', isn't that of the unenlightened mind dragged about by its cravings. No, it's the open alive engagement with the richness of what is. We should remember his poem illustrating the Heart Sutra:

            VOID IN FORM
            When, just as they are,
            White dewdrops gather
            On scarlet maple leaves,
            Regard the scarlet beads!

                *          *          * 

            FORM IN VOID
            The tree is stripped,
            All colour, fragrance gone,
            Yet already on the bough,
            Uncaring spring!

 Shortly DC and I will spend a week in the lake district on an Edward Carpenter Community gay men's week. I'm sure there will be much warmth. And I've been thinking about the soiree- what shall I perform? Not the opening to Richard III, not Hamlet considering suicide, not Jacques expounding 'All the world's a stage...' What I'm thinking is to take these, set a scene and segue through Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter to what ultimately brings us together as a group of men who love men. However grasping sexuality might start out, sooner or later it opens to a wider, heart energy, maybe a lot maybe a little, depending upon our journey. It's this axis which Whitman, Carpenter and many intentional communities have explored. The degree to which this is enmeshed in a person's spirituality, depends of course, upon how they view their nature. For Ikkyū, a Japanese medieval monk, this field must have been... what? That's an interesting question I think. In the forward to a Crow with No Mouth, Berg says 'They say everyone meets himself in Ikkyū, immediately, in his deep fund of passion.' So across centuries and cultures we're seeing the human condition. Shakespeare too, travels across centuries and cultures. But with him we're travelling the map of egoic duality. With Ikkyū we're being shown the dew drops turn red whilst they remain white. Maybe I can show Shekespeare draw a map, drop it on the stage, segue through the Whitman's 'I sing the body electric...' and read my poem Returning... Is that too audacious I wonder?

Timeless

 Last night DC and I attended the Theatre Royal Newcastle to see Our Friends in the North. This multi-themed production started as a play, was eventually a tv series and has now returned to the stage. I was wondering how such a vast production as the tv series would transfer but in fact found the production both gripping, and evocative. It was some time before the tv series was commissioned, the BBC feared prosecution as the stories are closely related to real life events. This and the scale of the tv series provide the contemporary backdrop to the return.

As well as the personal and political themes, class struggles, changing cultures and times play out as we follow (in this version) the characters from the 60's to the 80's. Sitting watching this in 2026, I recall vestigial memories of the 70's and 80's. My grandparents were working class and lived in council housing since moving out of Byker, where they remained culturally rooted. Growing up I felt both closely related to and distant from this working class Geordie ancestry. They had lived in a location which had held a tightly knitted community and was now... what? Shipyards, heavy engineering and mining together with all the activities that supported and were supported by these vast human endeavors had shaped my relatives and built the environment in which I was growing up. But it was all in decline, disjointed and transitional. Then came Thatcherism. Reams could be written about that but not here, not now. Suffice it to say, themes in Our Friends in the North were writ large. Yet growing up through them, and particularly with a relatively full grab bag of karma, they were just how it was. We don't see the backdrops so clearly when we're growing up, it's just 'normal', the way things are.

This latest stage version uses a chorus to guide the audience through time and plot. He invites us at one point to consider memory and then we encounter Felix whos Alzheimer's is gradually removing his, and Geordie whos memory is lost to alcoholism. We are invited to consider -'memory, is it any use?' whilst we're shown how essential it is. As DC lost his father to dementia and my own father is gradually succumbing to Alzheimer's these scenes are familiar. But it is the broader socioeconomic memories that give the play its emotive force. And in the present we might look out across a bewildering climatic and political landscape and wonder... did we see and forget, willfully not see, or was it all just too lost in the invisible backdrop as it was in childhood, hiding in plain sight? Or is the bigger picture simply that we place one foot in front of the other each day, relatively powerless to halt the repetition of themes which play out in humanity generation after generation?

The twenty first century Northeast of England is transformed from those twentieth century days. It's a mixed and not desperate picture. Newcastle has two universities, Durham and Sunderland each have a university and the region benefits hugely from them all. But there remain ex-mining villages that are difficult to gentrify and whos purpose is gone and without a replacement the communities are vulnerable. The miner's strike features in Our Friends in the North and I remember during the strike thinking that mining was no life for a modern human. I don't recall how clearly I appreciated the economic arguments but on the rare occasions I pass through those villages or go to see an exhibition of  Norman Cornish paintings... well, what about the people? As the years pass there are fewer and fewer people who remember why those villages are there...

Cultural memory was passed to to me through childhood but as indicated above the world I was living in was transitional and the stories seemed of limited value. This is a normal part of history, times change. But there was value, there was meaning and if nothing else there was some kind of grounding. The degree of transition, the pace of change and the associated degree of grounding all wax and wane through various historical periods but the lessons are often starkly familiar. This certainly came over in the performance of Out Friends in the North. It's a work which spans decades and invites us to recast the plot lines over contemporary figures. In this sense memory and belonging and our humanity are timeless. I think it is this timelessness in contrast with a strong sense of history which gives the play its power. 

Ripples, Whirlpools, Reflections and Candles

 Recently I've found my thoughts turning to the notion of 'mind-stream' - the chain of karma that runs through life times, rebirth after rebirth. The diamonds in Indra's net are only reflections, there are no separate diamonds. In the everyday we can see that we are who we are because of the connections and causes of our everyday life. Every aspect of this everyday can be investigated and found to be conditioned. We are conditioned creatures living conditioned world-lives. There are as many worlds in this sense as there are sentient beings. The effects of my actions are not limited to me alone - they affect other beings and vice versa. So how is an individual person (existing in the conventional sense) to be understood in terms of karma and 'mind-stream'? How do we understand the 'ownership' (not the best word but maybe it will do) of karma when we are both separate and interconnected? If we accept that it is the intention behind an act which is the product of and determines our subsequent mind state and ultimately karma, then we start to see a bifurcation- the states of the world and the states of our mind. But again, both the world and what we are calling our mind in this way, are conventional and not things existing in the absolute sense. But we need to take care here with these words. For world we might say field of experience, which hopefully invites an appreciation of an interplay of conditions generating moment after moment - reflections in Indra's net. The word mind is more tricky. It can refer to thoughts and sensations, habits of mental processes at various levels of subtlety, a notion of the 'space' in which this 'contents of mind' emerge, 'awareness', 'consciousness' and no doubt other descriptors. At this point it might be clear that the bifurcation collapses- the world we know and the mind we know and the sense of I, are not outside of or inside of each other, they are mutually arising- all reflections in the diamonds, including the diamonds. However, what has been pointed to here are ripples of intent, ripples of causality and circularities (or spirals) of intention in 'mental habits'. Ripples, whirlpools, reflections and the like are common metaphors in such discussions of the nature of our nature, as are candles lighting each other. But are we any closer to grasping how my intentions in this life time determine what happens post mortem? This is a deeper question than simply observing that in the everyday sense we have a legacy, what is being considered is the deepest nature of our existence. But such considerations are philosophical, arise out of our existing paradigm and by their very nature realise that this paradigm is conditioned and thus ultimately empty. In this regard, post mortem (probably like time) becomes less meaningful than we might have assumed. Or to put it another way, this paradigm throws up questions the answers to which are unavailable within the paradigm. And so I find I'm left with a vague feeling that I lack both the intense philosophical training and the intense spiritual training and 'attainment' to see all this much more clearly. All the while remembering that 'attainment' and 'more clearly' are traps. Does this matter? Practically, no. Living in accordance with the precepts and seeing their worth doesn't require clear evidence of post mortem conditions. And practically, yes, at least for me. The life of the (intellectual) mind is a valuable and enriching part of human existence and for me it presents as part of the koan. And whilst the koan can't be intellectually resolved, it can be honestly lived. And living is a bigger field than we fully know. In this sense I suspect that 'mind-stream' is yet one more convention... And as said in my last post - '...none of us know the the final cloth of our lives, for it extends beyond what we think of as our life.' I'd change that word 'final' now... it feels too abrupt. Who knows how far the ripples and reflections spread... The light is more than a single passing of a flame from candle to candle.

Joining

 This weekend saw DC and me take my elderly and vulnerable parents to their grandson's wedding. My mother was determined to go despite the time travelling by car and the overnight stay required. My dad, who has Alzheimer's, followed most of what was going on but was clearly confused about relationships between people. He's less and less located in time, place and person. By contrast, my mother retains an encyclopedic mental map of who's who. She's always been bitterly disappointed that my brother moved to his wife's home city and they raised two boys alongside his wife's family. She knows names, life events and relationships of that family but feels she missed being a grandmother to the boys in the way she wanted. Not a great fan of weddings, I wasn't keen to go, but without me her dream of being at the wedding with all the fantasy she'd created around it would be dashed. Little choice then for me there. The wedding, in a castle complete with deconsecrated chapel, ticked all the 'fantasy' secular elements... readers can imagine! For DC and me the wish to take part in such an affair is something of a mystery. Gone are the days when married life commenced in the church and the couple started to build a life together after the ceremony. These days couples are more often than not already wedded in real life and the ceremony is just a 'rubber stamp'. As a gay men in a relationship of over three decades I've had to negotiate a time when there was effectively no legal recognition of the life I was building. In fact, in the days of Clause and Section 28 it was described as 'pretended'. Pretended! Thankfully those days are gone and same sex couples have the options of marriage, civil partnership or continuing as before with or without living wills, various ways of owning property etc. And so it was that I remembered my brother's wedding back in 1990. At that time I was still trying to put together the pieces of the jigsaw of my own incongruent masculinity without the picture on the box lid and without knowledge that a) there were happy viable alternatives to the closely policed norms and b) the process of putting the pieces together isn't the same as for the congruent. Soon after, I would hear gay men observe that we can and indeed have to make our own rules. Except of course, that isn't exactly so. More accurately, we had to determine the nature of the water through which the congruent swim blindly, and navigate the amphibian shores upon which we might find fertile ground to grow our lives. The decades have passed, and observing my nephew's wedding in this context I was struck by the polished appearance of all these young people. They could have been chosen to be on the cover of a wedding magazine. Whereas, back in the day we were all more a mixture, now, gym toned, immaculately groomed and dressed, the young are Facebook trained. A tyranny I was spared. Yes, certainly masculinity was policed far more closely than today, but our general lives weren't expected to be performed on social media. And so it was that I contemplated how it feels to be in the second half of life surrounded by this first half of life energy. My sense was that it isn't so much age as the vast web of contingency that we really feel at such gatherings. For my mother the wedding was a day of immense importance and her being there a measure of her function as a grandmother and in some way a person. For me it was a bubble upon which images were projected and fantasies aired. Much the same could be said of a lot of what we think of as reality, but here for a day there were people believing in a future based upon love. The script still seems to say that belief needs a classic wedding to be celebrated, but in our hearts we know that the celebration has been going on every day of the ten years the bride and groom have already been together. And TOGETHER is the word of the day really. Gathering together people feel part-of rather than apart-from. Except that together isn't a geographical thing, it's a heart thing. And that's the thing about my attendance at my brother's wedding. I wasn't really at home with myself and I wasn't really much of a part of his life. In this respect I wasn't together-with, I was there, which isn't the same at all. Hopefully my mother feels she was together-with at her grandson's wedding, because that is why it was so important to her.

I've said in the past of DC and me that we've woven together three cloths - the life and personhood of each of us and a shared life of our relationship. We are who we are because of those we've been with - no man is an island. The task before us is to weave with love, but so often I know that for my own part fear has driven the shuttle. Which, provided that wisdom is picking the thread, might not be as much a problem as it can seem. But none of us know the the final cloth of our lives, for it extends beyond what we think of as our life. Maybe in a secular wedding, without the overarching notion of something greater than ourselves, this very aspect of our humanity can be lost more easily. But hopefully, we can all remember often enough that we're not as separate as we think.

Circle

 Last week, the third week with my new employer, I found myself standing in the main switchroom for a substantial part of a local district general hospital looking at the distribution schematic and associated switchboard. I recognised it as my own work from about 35 years ago. It was my first electrical distribution design. I was working for the regional health authority and amongst smaller projects was occupied with a major expansion of this district general hospital. As I contemplate the approach towards the later chapters of my career, working fewer hours and in possibly more supportive and steering rather than driving roles, there was a strange timelessness to looking at something substantial that I produced at the start of my career in the construction industry. I'd had a couple of years in other parts of the vast field that is electrical and electronic engineering but this was really the point where I 'took root' in my career direction. The combination of a recent  change in employment and this part of the past coming into the present had a feeling of circularity and I noticed my mind looking for meaning in it. Beyond any story it might construct there is.... what? I can't say. Maybe the strongest strand amongst a number that might want expression is this.... that we are so much more connected across everything and every time than we can ever really know. And that what seem like things are moments. Moments formed of connections. In Indra's net the diamonds sparkle. 35 years ago I couldn't have dreamt I'd write a sentence like that, yet if I think of the little boy who was fascinated with electricity and magnetism and who was somehow aware and sensitive to.... then it seems a natural unfolding. But such is the nature of autobiography. Everyday we write the story of the past and sow the seeds of the future.  I can't help but have a strange sense that it's all happening at once and that maybe, some no place and no time, all places and all times, all beyond the paradigm of our daily lives, where the diamonds which are only their own reflections turn in stillness, just in that moment as 'I' recognising 'my' own work from 35 years ago, the diamonds winked at each other. Or maybe not.

Grasping

Some days ago I was feeling very stressed by what seems to be on my plate. DC is always there with me as I am with him and that let's me know logically that it is our collective plate. But my nervous system seems unable to absorb what logic can see. However much psychological work I have done (and I have done a lot) the body does seem to keep the score. (I've a copy of The body keeps the score by Bessel van der Kolk waiting to be read.) It's odd that even as I approach sixty events from childhood compounded with a basically hyper-sensitive nervous system, should continue to play out through fear. Such is karma. And yet twenty years of zen practice does still shine though this. It very difficult to describe this 'shining', and it's nothing special or particularly bright. And it certainly doesn't stop the intense emotional overwhelm which can flare up. And so it was that I found myself trying to come back to a more grounded and spacious awareness asking what is it...? Or to return to the title of this blog what needs to let go? I remember decades ago hearing someone say that it can be quite difficult to find the attachments. Indeed... we are such complex creatures. Things settled and my thoughts turned to the wisdom that can shine through the pain. There is a kind of rock that shines whilst the sands of life shift. As my friend RM Mugo reminds me 'one foot on rock one on shifting sand'. In some way I think, my deepest fear is basically that everything I value will fall away and leave a broken egoic self unable to be the rock and unable to separate pain and suffering. Poetically, and thus in words and thus partial and... my mind... I glimpse...still, flowing, brilliant darkness, burning flame, motionless, illuminated by that which it illuminates... I doubt that I've glimpsed, but there it is a deep trust. It fades but as yet isn't lost. DC might remind me "costing not less than everything" from the final section of "Little Gidding", the last poem in the Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot.

And so another turn around the spiral. Onwards, one foot at a time, moment by moment. All is well. Ring out the bells of Norwich... Let go the bough...

The merit of this post is offered to DC.

A week of the arts

Last week DC and I spent a few days in Edinburgh attending various events at the main festival and the fringe. We saw street theatre, Chinese pole work physical theatre depicting aspects of sex, relationship and the AIDS crisis (a very intense and amazing show), an very complex and full clown satire of USA politics, a number of short plays (each nicely put together), Samuel Beckett's Crap's last tape (very good), a viola and piano concert, a shakuhachi concert, and on our first evening an exhibit of work by Sadao Hasegawa with a talk by two academics who have studied his and other's work in the same field. Hasegawa's work is rich and complex and he's known for homoerotic fetish art. To me he exaggerates fetish and indeed desire so as to be so ridiculous it becomes both transparent and transcendent. In this way he shows the deep humanity and connection at the heart of sex. His work draws on various cultural traditions and stories and he blends them in a unique way. And as one of the guys giving the talk pointed out he often sends threads out off the page... As a number of us in the audience noted there's softness in the work beyond the outrageous. A few pictures below:

It was as a result of sharing these with a friend that I got a recommendation to go to see the Making waves woodblock prints exhibition at York. And so DC and I visited that yesterday. Stunning! Such a vast number of exquisite prints, but a few stood out to me as described below:

This print depicts a cat looking out through the window of a courtesan's room at the free birds over Mt. Fuji, to the right is a rinsing bowl and a towel on the sill. I found this such a poignant image. Courtesans were often sold into the sex trade and must have had a harsh life. The bowl and towel allude to this and the cat looking out at free birds seems to mirror the captivity of the courtesans.

By comparison this depiction of a shrine in a snowy landscape has an open fresh feeling in which I can almost feel the cool air and hear the snow and the silence. When I put all the above works together like this I see a search for transcendence and the traps we can fall into.


Staying with landscape the following three prints showing falling water are so powerful in their depiction of the force and scale of the water. Again, to me the final one has a transcendent quality, but maybe that's just because it reminds me of the way I've seen the nineth picture of the ten ox herding pictures, reaching the source, drawn. I'd like to know more about the third print.

 

 

 

The following print is of a folklore character, Kintaro, a heroic boy and his bear. He is shown watching a fight between two mountain spirits. There's a wonderful softness in the bear, a weariness in the boy and to me this is an intimate study in how we humans loose our basic warmth and humanity and make unnecessary war.

For the colour, texture (I can almost feel and smell the cast metal) and composition the following is just delightful. The white and red is a tea bowl and wrapping paper:

From Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's One Hundered Aspects of the Moon the following are so intimate and touch our longing deeply:

 The loyal servant watches the princes escape disguised as women, by moonlight.

 An old woman in the moonlight.

 A man drives his boat through high seas in the moonlight.

 That's the leg of a daemon this poor fellow has been wrestling with in the moonlight!

For the power in the fire, the night, the ships and the sea:

 

And for the playfulness and joy of the artist:

All these images require close and careful consideration, they're intimate, display our nature and are immensely skilful. If I had a mind to I could write about sex, spirituality, nature, human nature and so much more that is conveyed by these works. But really they speak for themselves and all I'd be doing is writing my own story. What I admire in the works and in those who have skill in the visual arts is that they take the messy wonder of life and show it for the splendour it wants to be, not divorced from the difficult but not absent. Each of the works above is rich in what is being conveyed, yet succinct. Some are challenging but all sit well with the other art forms DC and I have seen over the past week. One print I didn't photo but which nicely ties the week back to itself was one of a Komusō, a wandering non-monastic lay Buddhist from the warrior-class who were noted for wearing straw basket hats called tengai and playing the shakuhachi. The shakuhachi musician who's concert we attended entered the room wearing traditional costume and a straw hat. And I like that Sadao Hasegawa, a twentieth century Japanese graphic artist, was the link to an exhibition of Edo period woodblock. There were so many more wonderful prints, here are but a few.