Author: Meng-hu

Is silence the absence of sound and noise or is it something palpable, a substance, a “being”? Max Picard approached silence as a phenomenon and elicits in his reflective fashion all the characteristics of silence as real and independent. Like Heidegger, Picard presents silence as ultimately leading us to the issue of technology, for the noxious sounds and noises of modern technology suggest that the issue of silence is more pressing than ever.

In part the issue is pressing because silence is related to an internal psychological disposition or state. Meditation works best in ambient silence because it represents emptiness or nothingness, and the goal of meditation is to bring the mind into this state of being. There are meditation centers and old churches, etc., in large cities that must function with background sounds of emergency vehicles, the murmur of traffic, and occasional voices punctuating the air. But this is of necessity and clearly not optimal. Noise represents a deprivation of privacy, and is today paralleled by the increasing alienation from nature that urban children experience — and adults as well.

But the pace and scale of technology alone does not influence our view of silence or lack of it. Our perception of space has changed with the twentieth century, as our conceptions of outer space define black holes and dead stars and the enormous flux of energy. Silence is the absence of vibrating frequencies, we may say, and noise is disturbed energy. But silence is the nature and primordial being of space, and vibrating frequencies represent activity, not being, becoming not the substratum of what is. Modern technology has had the inadvertent effect of highlighting these facts, or indeed demonstrating them.

The pace and scale of modern technology is intended to disassemble not only privacy but independence of self, as it organizes and groups what is autonomous into what is controllable. Whether it be control of the atom and energy in the nuclear bomb to the manipulation of consumerism in electronic media to destruction of nature through highways and urban sprawl — modern technology is pressing the individual into a psychological and social confine. Silence is the enemy of modern technology and those who benefit from it. Silence is exterminated by increasing technology and its technology-dependent products and circumstances.

Silence frightens many people. They are content with the buzzing sounds of society around them and within them. It reassures them that they are not alone, that they will not see or sense the yawning emptiness that is reality. I don’t mean emptiness is any nihilistic sense. Whatever your tradition or philosophy, the universe is all the same stuff in different modes and manifestations. I only mean that many people don’t want to acknowledge this interconnectedness, this identity of all beings in a single reality, because it drives out the meaningfulness of their lives. Their lives are without meaning, dependent on contrivance, technology, the interplay of society and noise. Silence reminds us of this contrivance and puts radical thoughts in our heads.

Silence is the fullness of being. To enter silence is to enter fullness of self. As we disengage ever more from contrivance into solitude, from artificial culture into reflection and self-consciousness, we befriend silence.

In Jean-Paul Sartre’s drama No Exit, the character Garcin exclaims towards the end of the play:

So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the “burning marl.” Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is — other people!

The context of the play makes this statement almost a denouement, a recapitulation, as three characters stuck in the same place grow in hatred of one another, but as much of themselves to begin with. In the wider context of Nazi-occupied France, the concept of hell on earth becomes plausible but unnecessary as a background to the play and its theme, a sort of redundancy. The notion that hell is other people can stand on its own, let alone as a projection of life on earth with society, culture, and power being what it already is.

Is this statement absolute and universal? We know it is not. Friendship and honesty exists as counterparts to enmity and deception. But what the play is getting at is that self-deception is as much a hell as deceiving other people, being as it were the original sin, the original hatred.

Love of self has always sounded like a self-deception because it is a false counterpart to the injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Who can love the self that is a mere product of environment, socialization, culture? If that is all that we are, a series of miscalculations brought about from listening to others and to our popular culture, then, yes, hell is other people, because hell is society writ large. And hell is ourselves.

Everyone tries to shape themselves by what they think they like and what they think they do well. But if it turns out that this is based on the society of the moment and can disappear at the whim of that same contrived culture, we are bound to hate ourselves for “giving in” and hating others for “taking us in.”

How can we shape the self so that it does not depend on others, so that the self does not become a hell? We cannot escape socialization in childhood, nor the many influences of growing, maturing, and making our way in the world. But in a way we must be, like the characters in No Exit, “dead.” Not alive and torturing ourselves and others, not even dead and gone to hell to torture ourselves and others — but “dead” to society and culture, to the desires that stoke hatred, desire, delusion, self-deception, what Sartre calls “bad faith.”

That other people constitute hell is not self-evident. It means realizing that we gain nothing by intersecting with the mass of people and the products of society and culture. That realization is difficult enough, for it is what the average person will consider depressing, pessimistic, anti-social, a standard more difficult than loving your neighbor, whatever they may think that means. It is the first stage of solitude, of becoming what Nietzsche called a wanderer and a solitary.

But only in disengagement can the true self emerge, or even have a chance to do so. Nothing good can come out of abdicating the self to the world, for at a whim the world will drop what amused you and substitute something else to torture you. Then, up close, trapped like the characters of Sartre’s play, we will find hell.

Having identified the self as it really is — outside of the contrivances of people and culture — we can begin to strengthen that self, strengthening it to the point of being able to use it only for what is solitary and wise. And in our daily lives, even intersecting with others, we will then know what we are to do, and we can do it well. This “right doing” will give our lives meaning, a meaning that does not intersect with hell, but grazes it tangentially. It will then be at that point that Shunryn Suzuki describes:

When you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely. If you do not burn yourself completely, a trace of yourself will be left in what you do. Zen activity is activity which is completely burned out, with nothing remaining but ashes.

Late afternoon. In a clump of cypress flits a tiny bird. Surely a sparrow among these spreading trees. On looking closer I see a downy-headed woodpecker, all black and bright-headed, so small that spring has only just pushed him new into the world, into the space called living. A wee bird among ancient things, reckless, bold, curious, full of enthusiasm.

The bird circles the tree, rising like a spiral. But it will find nothing on the smooth firm bark. Better the pines with their knots and insect crevices and– I am teaching the little bird? Proffering instruction, advice, elementary science?

Already the bird is gone, bored with my lecture on self-sufficiency. I who wander to market for my food brought a thousand miles via terrible machines, unbearable noise, industrial stench that would drive off any sensible creature, like a little bird. I have lapsed into unctuous words, words without knots or crevices to catch nuance, irony, contradiction, hubris. Sticky words in which to trap thoughts. I stop, none too soon.

I wonder if the bird will come back, tomorrow or next spring. I hope so. That bird can teach me a thing or two.

Reading A World without Time: the Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein by Palle Yourgrau. The philosopher and scientist Kurt Godel was not only an intriguing personality but a revolutionary thinker who has been studied carefully by a few and ignored by most. Specifically ignored has been Godel’s theory that time does not exist in the universe considered from the viewpoint of Einstein’s theory of relativity. This theory has never been refuted, only ignored.

Though Godel has been described as the only person who could speak “on equal terms with Einstein,” Godel’s is a “forgotten legacy.” He was eccentric and depressive, especially towards the end of his life, as he saw colleagues pass away and his own health deteriorate.

Author Yourgrau has a stimulating and reflective set of passages towards the end of the book:

“We live in a world,” he [Godel] wrote, “in which ninety-nine per cent of all beautiful things are destroyed in the bud.” … “There are structural laws in the world which can’t be explained causally … Good things appear from time to time in single persons and events … but the general deveopment tends to be negative.”

Christianity, with which he was generally sympathetic, was no exception. It “was best at the beginning. Saints slow down the downward movement.” As Simone Weil puts it, although “since [Christ’s] day there have been no very noticeable changes in men’s behavior,” “drops of purity” appear from time to time. Philosophy, according to Godel, suffered a similar fate: “Philosophy tends to go down.” Indeed, “it is, at best, at the point where Babylonian mathematics was.”

The theme of “home” is a powerful psychological element in the lives of virtually everyone. It is enshrined in every culture because it represents the social evolution from hunter-gather to pastoralist to agrarian, which represents the trajectory from constant but purpose-driven migration and wandering to stable domesticity and physical security.

In the great cultural and literary expressions of the West, the transgressor of order is made to be a wanderer, homeless, insecure, like Cain. But not all who wander are lost (to quote Tolkien). Odysseus firmly intends to go home, and the Wanderer of the Old English elegy knows what he wants but has lost it irretrievably through no fault of his own. These two archetypes present dominant social models accepted as inevitable by Western culture: the purpose-driven “entrepreneur” and the hapless victim of circumstance. By this scheme, the only personalities are winners and losers.

The fallacy of this bi-polar thinking is that it revolves around power: having, enhancing, maintaining and using power — or its opposite: not having it. No choice is involved, only a kind of Darwinian competition to gain moral credence for a culture of power.

Not that Darwin had to do with power. Evolution is not about power but rather about adaptability and accommodation with nature. It was the powerful elite in society who opposed the true meaning of evolution because it adaptability to nature contradicts the model of power. True evolution is about niches and harmonies and flights from power.

The solitary is gifted enough to recognize power as the basis of relationships. This idea is advanced by many, including the philosopher Foucault, an unlikely source, who gives the topic a deterministic spin, excluding individual will. The solitary knows that will is the only transcending mechanism, but that at a certain point the will is then abandoned because of its affinity for power.

The solitary exercises will in embracing the opposite of what culture wants: a quick submission to society and power, a getting-in-queue to be rationed what the culture considers important to mind and spirit but which the solitary knows is false.

To the solitary, “home” is something of the turtle’s shell, carried on one’s back, always with us as identical with the spirit. The solitary knows that however comfortable a physical residence and especially our room, these are things we cannot covet because they cannot last. Anymore than we can. Thus Ryokan and Basho wandered. not because they wanted to but because it reminded them of the tragic sense of life and the impermanence of our individual enterprise. They were not lost.

The medieval hermits were seen as dangerous to social stability, much like the homeless in urban centers today, who, like animals deprived of habitat and made to wander for circumstances likely not their making, especially their mental illness, these unwitting solitaries are a reminder of our ancient instability, our ancient dependent on sheer wits. There but for the grace of heaven do we all go.

But the “willful” solitary, not distracted by the entertainments and power-seeking of society and culture, recognizes nearly as much as the scholar-sociologist when it comes to how things work between people, especially between the powerful and the rest of us. Or at least could understand, given an open mind and heart. We must treasure the home that is our spirit, and hope that circumstances also grant us a physical place of peace and security.

The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.
It flows in places that people dislike, and so is like the Tao.
In dwelling, be close to the land.
In thought, go deep in the heart.
In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.
In speech, be true.
In governing, be just.
In affairs, be competent.
In action, be timely.
Only because it does not compete is it without fault.
— Lao-tzu, 8

In his The Tragic Sense of Life, Miguel de Unamuno identifies consciousness as the perception of suffering. He writes:

And how do we know that we exist if we do not suffer, little or much? How can we turn upon ourselves, acquire reflective consciousness, save by suffering?

This observation turns Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am) into the existential “I suffer, therefore I am.”

Unamuno’s sentiment (at this point though later he addresses more) does not quite appreciate the fact that animals suffer and are undoubtedly conscious of their suffering, however we want to define it. I have suggested elsewhere that perhaps less animate beings may be conscious of their suffering, albeit impossible for humans to perceive. That we cannot perceive something, of course, does not mean that it does not exist. In this case, our very lack of perception is a grave ethical warning that we ought not to tread into opting for human against any other definition of consciousness or perception.

Unamuno goes on:

When we enjoy ourselves we forget ourselves, forget that we exist; we pass over into another, an alien being, we alienate ourselves. And we become centered in ourselves again, we return to ourselves, only by suffering.

Thus to be other than human is to not suffer. Yet we are but human and are inhuman if we do not acknowledge suffering. This return to self is not of itself an enlightenment. Sorrow and suffering override the positive aspects of consciousness in this scheme. Even creativity as a form of transcendence can fall so short that it becomes a vanity. Unamuno quotes Herodotus: “The bitterest sorrow that one can know is to aspire to do much and to achieve nothing.” Part of the lesson (not palatable to Western thought) is to not aspire to do much, a philosophy of life exemplified by Eastern culture, where action is not necessarily a form of creativity. Death in the end, as a goal to the trajectory of suffering, makes even the grandest of achievements into nothing.

This whole conversation ought to remind us of the Buddha’s first noble truth: all is suffering. Indeed, consciousness of this truth becomes the equivalent of Unamuno’s awareness of suffering, and both would conclude that this consciousness is what makes for being human.

Unamuno evens moves from knowledge (of suffering) to what is translated as pity but is more fully understood as compassion.

It is our reservoir of pity, eager to diffuse itself over everything, that makes us discover the likeness of things within ourselves, the common bond that unites us with everything in suffering.

Here is the convergence, using separate language and experience, of Western and Eastern perception, for the Buddha, too, sees the discovery of being in everything to form a bond and identity. From this experience can arise an ethic and philosophy of life, leaving aside as less urgent a metaphysics. The Buddha often taught (as in the parable of the poisoned arrow told to Malunkyaputta) that metaphysics could not be the first priority or motivation but rather the addressing of suffering and the implementation of a solution to suffering was the priority. Addressing suffering lies not in metaphysics but in the the mechanics of daily life and consciousness — in this case the Eightfold Noble Path.

The growth of consciousness in an individual is first an intensification of the awareness of suffering. It is a form of knowledge and suffering in itself, with a decidedly ethical component if the truths sought are genuinely reflective of reality and not projections of ego. But secondly, or in the second stage, consciousness is the emptying of ego in the intensification of that ethical component, which eventually becomes compassion, coupled with a strong will and ascetic component. Hence the paradox highlighted by historian Gavin Flood: the necessity to build a strong ego and will in order to understand, but also in order to renounce.

Reading Angelic Mistakes: the Art of Thomas Merton, edited by Roger Lipsey (2006). The heart of the book is the collection of images of Merton’s inkbrush work, with selected passages from his writings. The untitled art works are expressionist, and towards the end of Merton’s life, despite the increasing influence of Eastern thought, his work still reflected the untrained dilettante working for his own creativity.

One can see why, as editor Lipsey notes, these works should remain fairly obscure except for Merton devotees. Although born of artist parents, Merton had no formal training and nearly despaired of attempting to work out a theory of art within his Catholic tradition, which did not address non-religious art, especially not expressionist or modern.

Not until the mid-sixties did two confluences encourage Merton: his achievement of hermit status, with his own quarters as a hermit, and his discovery of Zen calligraphy and D. T. Suzuki.

As to Merton’s hermit status, Lipsey concludes: “It was the solitude of the hermitage. Had there been no hermitage, there would have been no art.” As to the influence of Zen on his art, Merton described his works as “neither rustic nor urbane, Eastern nor Western, perhaps can be called … Zen Catholicism” — here using Aelred Graham’s famous book title.

The book does not delve into the effect of being a hermit (well, Merton was never completely a hermit) on Merton’s art, but choice passages from his writings do show this effect. “It is true,” Merton wrote in his Turning Towards the World, “places and situations are not supposed to matter. This one [referring to his hermitage] makes a tremendous difference. Real silence. Real solitude. Peace.” So much so that in the Notebooks, Merton came to refer to his sessions working on art as “collaborations with solitude.”

The presence of Zen in his awareness was transformative, and we will never know how far Merton would have taken it. It was certainly transformative for his creativity: “What really matters to me is meditation — and whatever creative work really springs from it,” he wrote in The Other Side of the Mountain.

Zen and his Christianity, Zen and his creativity, Zen and his whole personality — this was uppermost in his last years. Merton nearly predicted where he was going: “Suddenly there is a point where religion becomes laughable. Then you decide that you are nevertheless religious.”

For a long time I have collected rocks from nearby that looked interesting, not from an interest in geology but to watch them weather nicely. Some prop fence posts or make borders here and there, or just sit assembled with several other rocks, never quite striking the aesthetic presentation I originally wanted.

The rocks turn brown, even black, and some have taken on a fuzzy green from living plant life growing on them. Some rocks in groupings have come to serve as homes for lizards, bugs, little toads and frogs, probably scorpions, maybe even snakes, though I have not ventured to disturb the rocks in order to verify.

But most of all I am impressed by the simplicity, the stolidness, and the silence that rocks represent. I realize that I am projecting these virtues onto inanimate objects, but at the same time, I want to see how far our environment, the things around us, made by humans or not, can go to represent meaning in itself, versus whatever meaning I assign it or think is there.

Ancient peoples everywhere have tended to attribute some level of not only meaning but what we call “life” to even the most inanimate of objects. Rocks were logically the most challenging objects for assuming that some sort of spirit-life is within them. But rocks are just slightly less animate than plants and trees, which, of course, grow, but in an unobtrusive way. This absence of fanfare and difference in mobility and motility are what groups rocks and plants together in terms of natural character, versus animals.

The Shinto of Japan perceived these shared characteristics and influenced Zen in its conceptual garden, where rocks and stones function in the same way as plants. Shinto, like the Druidism of Europe, assigned different spirit beings as either guardians or inhabitants of these natural objects. This belief gave humans a new and benign way of seeing their universe and the relations between its many manifestations, whether “living” or not.

Hunter-gatherers had rituals to assure the fertile return of the animals they killed for food, but today that process of killing is an assembly line where the only ritual is the end-product of eating. If most people barely think of the meaning of animals, what of plants and rocks? What do we think when we witness the destruction of old-growth forests or ancient mountains stripped for coal or minerals? There is in the objects we abuse a part of our character and virtue that is not merely disrespected but lost, devalued, forgotten, destroyed, even as culture exploits the organs and tissues of inanimate or less animate beings.

A conceit of the Romantic period was the sentimental interest in ruins, what the British writer Rose Macaulay might call the “pleasure of ruins.” Wordsworth’s depiction of “Tintern Abbey” and Shelley’s famous poem “Ozymandias” are examples. There is a reminder of impermanence and human fate in reflecting on the ruins of long-ago-and-far-away civilizations.

I once had an idea of creating a calendar, like those ubiquitous themed twelve-month calendars, the ones so quickly marked down for sale after the beginning of January. There are twelve photographs to accompany each month. These calendars are always pleasant and inspirational. I suppose mine would be slightly less so. My pictures would be of ancient ruins representing major civilizations of antiquity, something like this:

1. Egyptian
2. Babylonian
3. Phoenician
4. Persian
5. Indian
6. Chinese
7. Cambodian (Angkor Wat)
8. Greek
9. Roman
10. North African
11. British (Stonehenge?)
12. a medieval European castle, or just Tintern Abbey, with its wonderful purple flowers in spring

There is a reason why ruins of antiquity rather than contemporary ruins would be cited, and even the Romantics would have understood this. We have a plethora of contemporary ruins, made not by the passage of time but by human iniquity (not that violence and power did not exist in antiquity). One could cite such ruins of today: Dresden, Hiroshima, Baghdad … this list could go on, of course.

There is always a fine line between sentimentality and moroseness, between information and morbid curiosity, between moral persuasion and the cloyingly didactic. Reflecting upon ruins of antiquity can be an historical exercise, like reading historical fiction, or a philosophical musing on the passage of time. But the same exercise is made to be political and controversial when the object of reflection is contemporary. Yet the point of both exercises is the same. We ought to conjure the same mingling of moral and intellectual insight from the past as from the present: that the culture around us is destined to pass away even as we dwell in its presence and wrestle with the moral confines of its ignorant architects and its built-in impermanence.

The front of the house is a garden of forking paths. Not so sinister as in the short story of that tile by Jorge Luis Borges. Well, it isn’t really a garden, either — that’s on the other side of the house.

A little path of flagstones diverted in one direction, the original “path.” But with the expansion of bamboo, trees, and other plantings, the flagstone path ended up leading to nowhere, or became too hard to follow out. Now the flagstones have sunk to a perfect ground level and are nicely weathered. Their aimlessness and obscurity have become their charm. An old set of chimes, a bird feeder, and a few oversized pots and the path is an invitation to stay and not go that way.

On the other side of the bamboo is a dirt path worn in the grass, unprotected, charmless, and unoriginal. Such is the “fork” and the “paths.”

Something about paths always lures travelers, hikers, and the observant. A path represents both someone else’s effort but potentially someone else’s failures, too. Efforts fail, paths lead to nowhere, and two forks in a path don’t mean two solutions or sides to every coin — to extend the metaphor. Sometimes the comfort of trodding in someone’s previous path is offset by the sensation that this isn’t where we want to go after all

It is inevitable, then, that the best statements about “paths” come from kindred souls like the Buddha or Thoreau. Here is a neat summary by the latter:

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.