Departure

On Friday evening DC and I watched the 2016 film Departure. We both enjoyed it and noted that it had way of getting under one's skin. So on Saturday I was musing just what is it that's resonating there. The film is about lots of currents in various relationships and is described in various reviews as a meditation on desire. Indeed one of the characters Elliot, a dreamy teenager with aspirations to be a writer says he wants to write about desire...'the way it runs through your fingers like water'. At this point I think it becomes clear that the writer is using the character for his own exploration of desire and there's a slight failure of film's plausibility. But this failure soon dissipates. Thinking about this line I note that for me desire might better be described as like water soaking into blotting paper and running through fingers like cream, coursing through the body like electricity, celebrated in Walt Whitman's I Sing the Body Electric... And here we have it, the resonance, the reality of our paradox - we are both all One and all separate, we long to be the fullest we can be, but we can't do it alone, we are our interactions. But this is not all that gets under the skin for gay men of our generation. Elliot is gay, and in the film we are invited to consider where he lies on the journey of realising, accepting and coming out. He doesn't appear to have much gap between realisation and acceptance, there's no indication of repression. Repression wounds. It amplifies separation in the human paradox. It holds us in the bud, denies flowering and turns us against ourselves. Eventually for most of us we break the bonds and out we come. But we carry grief for the lost years. This then is the added element getting under our skin. And we all have aspects of ourselves that get lost in our everyday lives... This meditation on desire then is wider than we can know... And that wideness gets under the skin...

The title of this blog is taken from case 5 Mumonkan and I consider that this case is basically asking us what are we and how do we live our life given that we can't ever capture the totality of the unfolding situation and neatly live it using only the power of our own reasoning. No, we can't control and be 'right' and just and true and free of pain in all moments. No amount of knowledge, planning, control and the like even with the best, kindest and 'highest' of intentions will do it. But the key is our intention. And here we return to desire. In 'spiritual' discourse desire, craving and similar words are often described in their problematic manifestation and indeed there are many ways in which we must see through their turns and snares. Less well explored and pointed to in the red thread koan, is desire's messy creative passionate compassion. Without this we are the withered tree hermit saved only when the old woman comes to chase us away and burn down our hut! We have shunned life and become trapped in a small selfish existence. But if we are to respond to life with warmth and an open hearted intention then its creativity, its desire to be, to flower, is an expression of that intention and vice versa. This is wider than we can know...

I sing the body electric,

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul...

And as I might have said to Elliot, Whitman's rather said it I think, but it's so sweet to see you try and how I would have liked to have been able to spare myself the wounding though its healing would repay the wound ten times and more.

A Handbag?!

Yesterday DC and I enjoyed the glorious spring sun walking along the beach from Alnmouth to Boulmer and back. Whilst walking (and reminding ourselves and each other to enjoy the sparkling sea) we discussed thoughts raised by our recent viewing of the BBC's The Great Philosophers (a history of western philosophers in 15 parts). We've not been watching in order but rather selecting episodes which look appealing. We will get round to watching them all I'm sure. The series dates from 1987 and is quite wonderful in its no nonsense, no frills straightforward serious approach. Just two erudite people sitting on a sofa illuminating at a reasonably high level the writings of some of the finest minds. No fancy camera shots, no trips around the globe, no pandering to short attention spans and competing for an audience. Much of our discussion was to reflect that one way or another we're all dancing around the same handbag of the empiricism v idealism conundrum, this ultimately leading through questions of causality towards the question of free will. But we decided to stop short of that question for we had quite done the rounds of something which had made it already a largely irrelevant question. I'd approached the ideas from a Buddhist perspective; interdependent origination which to me, through emptiness (śūnyatā) takes the handbag away.

We stopped at Boulmer and drank tea from a flask and enjoyed my mother's home made cake, which was lovely. That she and my dad are still despite their frailty able to make cake and that we all share so much love despite the inevitable frustrations of life is a constant source of amazement to me.

In the evening we watched the film Pride about the group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM). It's a feel-good movie as opposed to a detailed documentary but I think the take home message is not weakened by that - connection, community, acceptance, care and compassion are what give life joy. And as I write this a phrase which is a favourite of DC's comes to mind - "distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other" by Theodor W. Adorno. For my own part Adorno's “Greyness could not fill us with despair if our minds did not harbour the concept of different colours, scattered traces of which are not absent from the negative whole” reminds me that all my fears and frustrations must surely stem from the beauty of the possible. I should add at this point that I've not read the original works of any of these great thinkers and I'm grateful to those that both have and have produced works that I might appreciate. The film Pride covers the interaction of the LGBT and mining communities, a coming out story and the emergence of the AIDS epidemic. There's a moment when the fictional character Joe 'Bromley' is taken by the hand and kissed in a night club. The scene marks his initiation, is late in the whole story of his involvement with LGSM and is suffused with warmth and the ripening of his coming out. It is sharply contrasted by later scenes of his parents hostile response and the victimisation and queer bashing of other characters. But eventually we see Joe leave the parental home and thus take another step to come home to himself. The sound track to the film is a rich and joyous one and very much in harmony with my own dance inclinations. For me emptiness / śūnyatā doesn't take away our individuality it invites us to truly expand into it. It's an enormous ask - to truly respond with openness to each moment, not to shrink back in greed or fear from what is being asked but to be the living embodiment of the highest potential available to each of us. This is our humanity, our compassion, although it comes with clouds of confusion and fear and is inevitably way bigger than we can grasp or fully meet. To truly live is to dance this koan. It isn't enough to only read philosophy, or think about it in the abstract. Sooner or later we will be faced with the 'chopping wood and carrying water' of our everyday lives. But can we JUST chop the wood and carry the water - FULLY in response to that enormous ask? Can we live each apparent choice of our everyday lives in each arising moment as the bright colours of the distinct dancing with each other in mutual co-operation, support and enjoyment? In our everyday lives we are described by neither empiricism nor idealism, we are suspended between heaven and earth. We must not recoil like Lady Bracknell in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest exclaiming 'A handbag?!' for we are all in and dancing around the handbags of delusion. Much easier said than done. And even then always with our own little grab bag of karma...