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.

 

Indigo

Last night's Prog at the BBC on BBC4 was excellent. Compilation of some of the greatest names and British bands in prog rock, filmed live in the BBC studios in the early 1970s. Featuring stadium names like Yes, Genesis and Emerson, Lake and Palmer alongside much-loved bands of the era, including Caravan, Family, Atomic Rooster and more. Found myself wondering if my resonance was just nostalgia for the '70's (ie pre Thatcher) but decided not. Then today DC and I visited the Granary gallery, Berwick to see the Joan Eardley: The Sea at Catterline exhibition also excellent. On the drive up and stopping for coffee DC and I continued a conversation about consciousness, basically as per previous post.

The following pictures are some from the exhibition:

 Turner came to mind but this has a quality of its own.

 

The sea seems to be about to run off the canvas.

Powerful sense of shore.

Raw white water.

The quality of the indigo is perfect in capturing the sky and sea.

Summer.

The bay, white water and elevation.

The pastel of indigo caught my attention - indigo is such a remarkable colour. Back in 2013 I wrote about the colour blue, its spacious, mind like, portal quality... And connecting with Prog at the BBC, the consciousness conversation, a sense from the '70's when I was a child, a certain quality almost like 'what is your nature, your particular flavour, what through you is being expressed?'... came to me... and does the name indigo capture that? I find it does in part.

Is there a hard problem?

Last Sunday I met a guy at dancing who has come to the UK to study / work with a respected name in panpsychism. One of the elements of this which he indicated he found appealing was that it might offer a way for people to treat the environment as not something to be (ab)used but rather as something which is in some sense conscious and thus not fundamentally different from ourselves. The basic warmth and understanding in this sentiment I resonate with and it stands irrespective of panpsychism's contribution to our understanding of consciousness I would say. The encounter made me reflect on various ways of looking at consciousness. I understand that panpsychism is a way to 'get over' the so called 'hard problem' - how does the physical neurology of a human being result in our conscious lived experience? But for me this 'problem' arises because of the assumption that things exist on their own as separate. And that these separate things are interacting and that this way of seeing still leaves some kind of gap in the explanation of consciousness which requires to be filled with a quality or effectively another thing like concept which is at play and is distributed as an aspect of smaller things. I would say that what IS is a totality beyond our full knowing as we are limited to paradigms afforded by our physical body. From the body we can know paradigms, those paradigms extending over the visceral and our conceptual frameworks - biology, physics, philosophy etc. For me reality is a process; things arrise interdependently and it's meaningless to separate an experience from the experiencer. Things appear in everyday experience. But when we look closely their roots go back beyond what can be named. This includes what we think of as ourselves. To me when we see this the 'hard problem' of consciousness disappears because the physical neurology and the experiences, etc. are all interdependently arising as the unfolding expression of what IS and the totality of that is not fully accessible from the paradigms available to us. Yet at the same time all that is in our reality is the full expression of that reality. Everything else is conceptual addition, not separate and thus part of that reality. The concept of consciousness is in this regard, the reason for the 'hard problem'. Whereas, like the diamonds in Indra's net, made of the reflections themselves, there IS but there is no external position, and the limits afforded by our body determine the reflections. Our body being an aspect of those wider reflections. In this sense the sentiment that we should treat the environment as no different from ourselves is entirely accurate since what we think of as separate is actually all the same process. The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao! Captured (I hope) in recent poems:

Twinkling

Indra's net, diamonds of the images they reflect
Movement cut through with stillness
Partial, image closes to itself
Time leaps up to fill the space
Sits in its own reflection, a twinkle in the diamonds
Reflected in partial's eye it calls
Hearing, partial folds and widens
Like time, in its own reflection
Lost it seeks the diamond
First through its own folds, then other's
It craves the field between folds
Meeting it becomes less and more
Reflected in other it widens
But time's eternal call sits in its eye twinkling in the diamonds

Flash

In each spark the lark ascending
Flesh of stardust betwixt heaven and earth
Separation and Oneness pretend to be opposites
Child of the Tao and father of the mind yet seen only in its eye
Circle of becoming and maker of time
Expelled from the womb, briefest flash
Who is the dweller and who is the home?
Mind in body or body in mind?
Fed by the earth and the mind's penetration
With each thing this body-mind mingles, to reach for tomorrow, tomorrow, today
Desire's kaleidoscope throws out its colours: come, expand
Eros in his manifold ways mingles in our mind, mingles in our body
Come tomorrow be with me today
The path shapes the foot and the foot shapes the path
Come tomorrow be with me today
Flesh grants love's majesty through all its forms
Come, come be with me in so many ways
Spark! I hear thee calling, who is the dweller who is the home?
Spark, you are the dweller you are the home
The wave in the water the light in the moon
Yet we are suspended, oh majesty in our firmament
Suspended yet rolling: each turn of the wheel
Sing lark, sing! Each turn of the wheel
Circle of becoming and maker of time
In each heart-mind bright moonlight dances on the ocean

I hope that the reader will 'see' the hard problem melting away.

Twinkling

Indra's net, diamonds of the images they reflect

Movement cut through with stillness

Partial, image closes to itself

Time leaps up to fill the space

Sits in its own reflection, a twinkle in the diamonds

Reflected in partial's eye it calls

Hearing, partial folds and widens

Like time, in its own reflection

Lost it seeks the diamond

First through its own folds, then other's

It craves the field between folds

Meeting it becomes less and more

Reflected in other it widens

But time's eternal call sits in its eye twinkling in the diamonds

Mmm

This morning I noticed I was tired, it could have been that the smoke alarm had a false alarm at 5am, presumably pollen and dust since the windows have been open  all summer... Or was it Monday's EMDR? It's possible that one of the biggest aspects of experience in those pre-coming out years was the shear exhaustion, gradually accumulated. Or perhaps not... It's all too easy to imagine connecting with some great fear, or other such powerful emotion. But maybe what is sitting there is too tired to feel much of anything. Or perhaps not... Nice lunch with a friend then off to a personal training session followed by a bit more working out in the gym. Certainly tired now! Tiredness is all too easily seen as insufficiency of available resource but in fact it is the in breath before and after the out breath. Back in those pre-coming out years with the mind so tightly wrapped around the body, I wonder... was it possible to fully breathe? Certain triggers in the present feel like little electric shocks, weights or tiny daggers at the chest... A breath is taken and slowly puffed out through pursed lips. The body's parasympathetic impulse. In a physical workout  it's important not to restrict the breath. It wasn't so clear back in the day that putting one foot in front of the other was a workout. And how often did I feel the alarm of hyper-vigilance go off? That's edgy. Tired and unknowing. In this process is anything loosened in the present or does the finger run around the rim scoring it deeper into the groove? It feels pathetic, what am I doing.  Is this the feel of then or now? Again, knowing is out of range. The future may show. All this is but shimmer through the day, a day mostly fine and enjoyable. Like those days putting one foot in front of the other...?

The sun had burnt away the clouds by mid-morning, just about the time the bin men followed by the window cleaner had been and gone and as I sat zazen. Then I folded my zabuton and put it aside with the zafu on top. It is good to be sitting more regularly again.  There was temptation to push, to look for something, insight from Monday's EMDR... or something in the itchy scratchy feeling. Things aren't as I'd like and I'm not getting them under control... or is it me? This is zazen, just sit, if it needs to arise it will, and then pass. The clouds of thought and pushing and looking moved through, the 30 minute timer elapsed. Mmm, itchy scratchy. Maybe I'll write something playful before going out to lunch. But it wasn't happening. Time to go... Walking in the shade as much as possible- really, in the UK? Hot, but wonderful cool air. Lunch, gym, home, writing... what?

Sitting patiently with not knowing. The shape of this shifts through so many forms, the simple and the complex, the short term and the chronic, the low level and the OCD level. The bright and the shade passing through. Zazen off the cushion, the zafu and zabuton support the empty mind which fills with not knowing.

Wow

 

This picture is from the Vivienne Westwood exhibition at the Bowes museum. It's quite different from the other items in the collection. And I found it rather striking. In the past in gay men's workshops I've been invited to find my 'inner woman'. I don't find that particularly easy to locate. But I think in that dress and a pair of heals, it would be natural to sashay through the room with an elegance sliding skilfully along the boundary of come over and don't even think about it!

It is displayed well against the blue and red framed background.