The Sail of Ulysses

The Sail of Ulysses
Wallace Stevens

Under the shape of his sail, Ulysses,
Symbol of the seeker, crossing by night
The giant sea, read his own mind.
He said, “As I know, I am and have
The right to be.” Guiding his boat
Under the middle stars, he said:

If knowledge and the thing known are one
So that to know a man is to be
That man, to know a place is to be
That place, and it seems to come to that;
And if to know one man is to know all
And if one’s sense of a single spot
Is what one knows of the universe,
Then knowledge is the only life,
The only sun of the only day,
The only access to true ease,
The deep comfort of the world and fate.

There is a human loneliness;
A part of space and solitude,
In which knowledge cannot be denied,
In which nothing of knowledge fails,
The luminous companion, the hand,
The fortifying arm, the profound
Response, the completely answering voice,
That which is more than anything else
The right within us and about us,
Joined, the triumphant vigor, felt,
The inner direction on which we depend,
That which keeps us the little that we are,
The aid of greatness to be and the force.
…
There is no map of paradise.
The great omnium descends on us.
As a free race, we know it one
By one in the right of all. Each man
Is an approach to the vigilance
In which the litter of truths becomes
A whole, the day on which the last star
Has been counted, the genealogy
Of gods and men destroyed, the right
To know established as the right to be.

_____________________

Let’s view Stevens’ Ulysses as a symbol of the meditator. (Identical, perhaps, to a symbol of the seeker.) What can we learn?

As a meditator, you sit in stillness, silence, and simple awareness. The place and time of your sitting are right under the contours of your breath, under the shape of your sail. Your breath animates your body, your being. Like the boat’s sail in relation to the wind and the sea, your breath both symbolizes and constitutes your passage through life.

To sit like this is to cross the giant sea of your existence by night. For, what will be your guiding light? Normally, the interplay of cognition and language is. But sitting in stillness, silence, and simple awareness necessarily corrodes the primacy of language as your means of knowing. Haven’t you come to distrust your language—your naming, valuing, judging, categorizing, hierarchizing, thising, and thating? As a meditator, you have learned to view the internal flow of discursiveness in the same light as the whoosh of a passing car or the twitter of a bird. In what light is that? Without language, by what signs will you be guided?

Ulysses looks for light in his own mind, reads it. The middle stars are not beyond the sphere of heaven. Their light is visible from earth. The meditator, like Ulysses, sees, and thus, knows the totality before him. He observes, that is, this light of the omnium, the plenum, this fullness that is an abyss of impermanance, this resplendence of the all that appears to him. As grandiose as this may sound, it speaks of nothing other than the simple sway of phenomena that rise and fall in, through, with, alongside (does any preposition fit?) your mind, your conscious awareness. The meditator recognizes that only as he knows just this, he is, and has the right to be. Being is not reasoning about being. It certainly is not weaving metaphysical embroidery about what may lie beyond the middle stars. Such knowing is not the result of new information about the world processed through language-cognition. Ulysses’s/the meditator’s knowing is not analogous to an “optical” apprehension. It is not the case that there is a subject who sees an object, all three of which (the seeing included) remain unaffected by the relation. What, then?

Knowledge and the thing known are one. Gotama, the great meditator, said something similar:

In the seeing (and in the hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking; in,that is, our continually unfolding sensorial knowing) let there be just the seeing, etc. When for you, this is the case, then you will not identify with the seen, the heard, the smelled, the tasted, the felt, the thought. And if you do not so identify, then you will not be located in them. If you are not located in them, then there will be no here, no there, no in-between. And this will be the end of unease. (Udāna 1.10, Bahiya Sutta)

This end of unease is a big claim, isn’t it? Ulysses, though, claims, too, that such knowing is The only access to true ease/The deep comfort of the world and fate—our fate to be human beings and all that that being entails. What kind of knowing is this that marks the beginning of true ease? It is a knowing that is intimately attentive to the continuous transition we name “life.” It is neither a static inventory of the being of settled, nameable things nor a mythologized account of some teleological becoming. No, the knowing is this full-bodied sense of a single spot (the universe is always “here,” always “now”). This knowledge is the only life there is. For what other could there be? (Do you wish to separate your life from your life?)

Every meditator knows well the human loneliness that sitting entails. Yes, it may turn out that you come to know—to experience intimately—the inseparable interconnectedness of self and environment. But you will come to this awareness through the loneliness of sitting in silence, alone (even when with others), facing a wall, in near darkness. What the meditator comes to realize in sitting like this, though, is the real source of loneliness: there is no map of paradise. The meditator begins to see—sometimes to her horror—that her secret chart to the buried treasure has yellowed beyond recognition. She is then left with nothing but the light of her immediate awareness to guide her. Eventually, the meditator begins to value this loneliness as A part of space and solitude/In which knowledge cannot be denied. How could any of the knowledge as articulated above be denied or fail? For the vivifying, invigorating, life-giving knowledge the meditator seeks is precisely of the luminous companions coursing through experience, appearing, however fleetingly, before the reading mind. From here, from passing through this lonely space, the meditator develops the inner direction that determines her next step.

You can find no substitute on this journey. No one can stand in for you and no other journey will do. Ulysses proclaims that in engaging this work, in undertaking the (meditative) journey, you are taking your place as a member of the free race (free, as opposed to bound?—and by what?). Doing so, the all, the whole of experience as it unfolds—the great omnium—will settle before you. And you, through the vigilance of practice, will become the very instrument through which fragmented, atomized, fractured reality—the litter of truths—will coalesce into a whole existence. It will mean that you have counted the last star, have finished with your incessant valuation of reality’s inventory. The cost is dear, though: the genealogy/Of gods and men destroyed. What entails this destruction is the meditator’s inability to maintain his subscription to the program, to persist in agreement with the group, to adhere to society’s forms of meaning-making myth. Only once we perform this genealogical undoing have we earned the right/To know established as the right to be.

Only then can the meditator genuinely say, along with Ulysses: As I know, I am and have/The right to be.

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