Tinian

Tinian
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843)
Translated by Glenn Wallis

Sweet it is to be nourished by the beauty
Of the world, and to feel life as do
The demi-gods or patriarchs sitting
In judgment. But they are not equal
To everything around them, especially life, humming
With heat and the echoes’ shade
As if gathered together at the heart
Of the blaze. It is a golden desert. Or like the fire steel
That strikes the life-warming hearth,
And then the night—strikes sparks out of the polished stone
Of day. And at dusk a lyre still sounds. Against the sea sizzles

Anti-myth

Anti-myth

Hart Crane (1899-1932) simultaneously enraptures and infuriates me. I once spent a period of time intensively re-reading his poem “Voyages.” The poem passed Emily Dickinson’s spontaneous test of determining what’s worth the effort: I felt “physically as if the top of my head were taken off.”

It is one and the same thing that elicits such contradictory responses to my reading of “Voyages.” In his “General Aims and Theories,” Crane as much as telecasts this possibility when he explains the function of “the logic of metaphor” in his art: “As to technical considerations: the motivation of the poem must be derived from the implicit emotional dynamics of the materials used, and the terms of expression employed are often selected less for their logical (literal) significance than for their associational meanings. Via this and their metaphorical inter-relationships, the entire construction of the poem is raised on the organic principle of a ‘logic of metaphor,’ which antedates our so-called pure logic, and which is the genetic basis of all speech, hence consciousness and thought-extension.”

Crane expanded on “the logic of metaphor” in what is now a well-known letter to Harriet Monroe (1860-1936), the founder and editor of Poetry. Crane was hoping to get published in the magazine, but Monroe had serious reservations.

Speculative Non-Buddhism

I am experimenting with a new blog. It is called “Speculative Non-Buddhism.” I am using it to flesh out some thinking I’ve been engaged in on the nature and prospects of Buddhism in 21st century North America. I see the blog as an exercise in critical-constructive inquiry. Here is an explanation of what I mean by “speculative.” It is from the blog, which can be see here. You will find there, as well, an explanation of what I mean by “non-Buddhism.” But please, don’t take it all too seriously. I am playing, jamming, experimenting, trying out, considering, and, most of all, just wondering . . .

Speculation as Rupture and Disruption
Glenn Wallis

What use is Buddhism in the 21st century? The ideas, doctrines, practices, and institutional structures of Buddhism are largely relics of the ancient and medieval past. The relevance of religious forms of Buddhism, with their dogmas, rites, rituals, priests, and monks, is particularly questionable. Doesn’t science provide more satisfying models for, for instance, perception and cognition, than does Buddhism? Doesn’t philosophy better articulate the questions that seem to animate Buddhist discourse on meaning, language, and being? Doesn’t psychology offer more effective forms and models of mental health? In short, is “Buddhism” an archaic relic of the past? Are its institutions and beliefs too cumbersome and unsophisticated to satisfy us today? Is Buddhism fit for modern life?

You Who Wish to Conquer Pain

I offer you here a moment’s respite from a world full of pompous bloviators. I offer you here the balm of humility, the elixir of not knowing. 

 

Leonard Cohen: You mean, why, why do the people come to see me?
German interviewer: Well, why are they so fascinated?
L.C: ……………………….I don’t know.
Interviewer: Is it because they understand, you think?
L.C: I mean, there are, you know, I, I, if you just stand on a corner there, and hold up a stick with a curious sign on it,

Threshold to Analytic Ruin

Threshold to Analytic Ruin:
An Essay for Architects (and Meditators)

Threshold: If you cross it, you just might discover something.
Analytic: The resolution of a complex entity into its simple elements. Unloosening, breaking up, rending, releasing, setting free.
Ruin: The crumbling of an edifice. Giving way and falling down. Collapse. Beauty.
Essay: “A loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece.” (Johnson’s Dictionary)
Architect: A master builder.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science)

To acknowledge this truth, the subject of philosophy must also recognize that he or she is already dead, and that philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation nor a source of justification, but rather the organon of extinction. (Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound)

Phenomenal selfhood originates in a lack of attentional, sub-symbolic self-knowledge. Phenomenal transparency is a special kind of darkness…

The Bracing Rush of the Source

The Bracing Rush of the Source

Buddhavacana: A Pali Reader

Modern-day North American Buddhist discourse is filled with bewildering renderings of classical Buddhist terminology. Ask most Buddhists what the goal of practice is and you’ll probably get “enlightenment.” Explain that there is absolutely no such counterpart in Pali, the language of classical Buddhism, and you will get blank stares. The word “enlightenment” is so tightly woven into our way of thinking about Buddhism that it would almost be pedantic to insist on another word. The same goes for “four noble truths,” “suffering,”“loving kindness,” and even “meditation.” All of these terms, and many more besides, not only miss the mark: they recklessly veer toward ideas that were foreign, even contrary, to Gotama’s (i.e., the Buddha’s) thought. The irony here, of course, is the fact that the misfiring terms are loosed in the very name of, as instances of, Gotama’s teachings.

(An aside, worthy to be expanded into a dissertation, or at least a future blog post: As bewildering as terms like “enlightenment” are, I know of none more vexing than “mindfulness.”

The True World

Philosophers—those teachers of life wisdom—in the day of Siddhattha Gotama, the Buddha (4th century B.C.E.), were expected to offer up a theory of The Absolute. (Come to think of it, they still are expected to do so; so let’s speak in the present tense here. I’ll return to Gotama in a moment.) An absolute is some Something from which all things ultimately emanate and to which all things ultimately return. Unlike the non-absolute actual world, The Absolute does not partake in the annoying and corrosive whims of change, difference, and indeterminacy. No, The Absolute is whole, complete, indivisible, and incorruptible. It is also invariably transcendent and/or pervasively immanent, indescribable, and ineffable (all claims that should raise one’s suspicions, I would think). In short, The Absolute reigns supreme as the Great And Irrefutable Explainer of The All. (You may have noticed: Absolutes tend toward Germanic capitals and Winnie-the-Poohian Monumentalityness.)

Now, you may be thinking: such a thing, an Absolute, is much too much for me; I do not deal in such grand things. But is that true? Are you sure?

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;

Gotama as Philosopher

Siddhattha Gotama as Philosopher

Because of his insistence on speaking of his achievement in the terms that he did—realization, freedom, ease, liberated consciousness, well being—Siddhattha Gotama (ca. 4th century B.C.E.; aka. the Buddha) invites a comparison to the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome. Like them, he considered clarification of the matters given in these terms to be an obvious and necessary human pursuit.

But what does it mean to call him a “philosopher”?

The Buddha and the Ant

The Buddha and the Ant
Glenn Wallis

A black ant brings him to his senses. It’s just a haze of various shades of green and brown, at first. Slowly, something—a speck of moving blackness no larger than a peppercorn—comes in to focus. It is an ant. And a moving leaf. No, the ant is carrying the leaf. The leaf is perpendicular to the ant’s body, rising vertically like the head sail on a reed boat. The ant is struggling to surmount a cluster of dried leaves with its leaf intact. As he observes the ant, he is vaguely aware that his left cheek is pressed hard against the forest floor. The sour stench of stale vomit fills his nose. He tastes blood on his lips. He squeezes his pulsating head. But he keeps his right eye trained on the ant, captivated by its furious determination. The ant thrusts forward; the leaf falls; the ant whips around, grabs the leaf; charges another fraction of an inch; darts, and dodges an onslaught of branches and leaves. The ant looses the leaf in the melee, clinches it, like a buccaneer, in its barbed mandibles, and charges again. This is the moment when he passes from the mental fog into self awareness. A simple but invigorating thought bolts through his mind—just drop the leaf, fool.