hermit's thatch

A too-popularized mysticism can parody suffering and dismiss its very ontological reality. This is the fine paradox risked by Eastern thought. Occasionally, it reaches virtual sleight of hand, as in Paramahansa Yogananda’s reconciling of suffering and evil with God. He insists that suffering is mere “divine play” of a dream-spinning God, just God’s “cosmic entertainment.” He advises those who suffer, those who live (all of us): “Watch yourself from the balcony of introspection.” We know that a truth lies at the core of this advice, but it is expressed in a flippant way that is more irritating than enlightening. Can we toss off easy nostrums to those who suffer violence, hunger, disease, or other human degradation? Does this nostrum address sorrow or unhappiness at the cruel twists of fate — especially at the hands of others?

We need to fully experience sorrow and suffering in order to credibly transcend it. But even then, we are not transcending something so much as enlightening ourselves, so that the source of sorrow, the memory of experience, does not go away but is understood and appreciated as a clue into the nature of reality. It may be that we resent that witness watching from the balcony as we grope, cringe, struggle, and sob. Yes, we will have to pick ourselves up in order to carry on. But we will also want to tell that witness on the balcony to come downstairs and join the living.

I wrote about my wooden bowl some time ago (August 2003). I related how a crack had appeared due to ignorance of the need to oil the bowl on a timely basis. The other day, in a moment of clumsiness, the bowl fell to the floor. Now the crack has extended half-way through, a little past the center. It may split in two and that will be its end. The wooden bowl has served me so well that I feel like Ryokan (the Japanese Zen poet and hermit) when he lamented in two poems:

Picking violets by the side of the road,
I forgot my begging bowl.
How sad you must be, my poor little bowl!

I forgot my bowl again!
Please, nobody pick it up,
my lonely little bowl.

Consciousness enables human beings to exercise volition or will. Consciousness gives humans the ability to guide events and circumstances, with the self as a kind of stage-manager. At least that is the mechanism as described by science.

Yet we always feel the awareness but never the control. Even when we decide to do or say or pursue something, even when our effort is successful and satisfying within the definition of what we are attempting, there is always an element of happenstance, of serendipity at best — or, when things don’t work out, an air of futility and regret. Consciousness is certainly the proverbial two-edged sword. Why is it usually the one side we are aware of at any given moment, the one side that haunts us even in our felicity?

This is not to say that a perpetual melancholy dominates our lives. It is only a keen sense of life’s fragility and impermanence, even in the midst of day-to-day accomplishements and the enjoyment of blessings. This keen awareness is a stumbling-block to those who enjoy social relations and worldly pursuits. It is interpeted as pessimism. Perhaps it is the undefined prerequisite to being a solitary, the mark of personality that identifies the solitary. But it is more than a morose cloud or pessimism. There is a psychological breakthrough here — dare one say ontological breakthrough.

The insight of the solitary is consciousness and awareness applied in a thorough and unambiguous fullness. It penetrates the facade of society and culture (and, potentially, self) to see nature, self, and universe as they are. It is the transformation of a raw physical capacity into a wondrous ability of the mind or soul to be aware, to distinguish, to be separate — and yet to be nothing but a piece of it all, nothing but a part of a whole.

Whatever objects are in a room, the characteristic aspect is always light. Hence, if we assign an activity or purpose to a room but do not rightly account for light, the activity is subtly undermined. Light is not just an issue of brightness or color but source. An artiificial source of light projects the artifice of the room’s purpose — or the artifice of its occupant’s activity.

A room is created by light, and as that light dims so to the activity that depended on light. The obvious example might be reading or something involving vision.

Light is relevant to our room because the solitary spends a great deal of effort accommodating to existence in a room. Whatever the size of the room, its intimacy for solitude makes the room reflect the degree of our projected thoughts. That is why open spaces outdoors in a natural setting can open our minds so much, while small and confined spaces of our own making can usefully allow us to concentrate our minds. Light can amplify the bad effects or compliment the good ones. Smaller spaces require less light for thought and concentrated light for concentration (as in reading or writing).

Natural light carries with it the sense of open space. All of the indoor settings of 17th-century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, for example, are full of natural light, which makes for a sense of harmony with whatever is just outside the window. The lighted space is not intimate as such but is connected. Or perhaps that sense of connection is what makes the room more intimate, or at least hospitable. Contrast this with a famous painting of Vincent van Gogh, where the source of light in the room is harsh, intrusive, overwhelming — as its occupant would doubtless have felt.

One doesn’t have to be a designer to appreciate light in our rooms. How light makes us feel is enough of a criterion.

Within the spectrum of solitaries there is great diversity. Perhaps the anchorites present the greatest paradox. Our daily routine may seem solitary enough, but we grant ourselves the freedom to move about, to choose our food, our books, our music, our hours, the freedom to daydream, to seek creative outlets, to enter the world of work or society as we see fit or as life and circumstances dictate. We may take our freedom of thought and movement for granted, our pursuits as necessary for our well-being, our obligations as inevitable, yet still respect our ideals of solitude and silence.

But the anchorite willingly renounces all this, perceiving a different order or vision, one that makes this freedom unnecessary, purposeless, and without value. The anchorite gives this up, wants to die to all of it. Thus, historically, was the anchorite’s dwelling considered a tomb, and the ritual of the church that confirmed the anchoritic life was the funerary ritual, the burial of the dead.

Solitary life is a spectrum. The physical isolation and dependence on others seem to contradict the goals of solitude and silence. But are we not dependent on others even in our daily lives: our food, our income, our fuel, our intellectual needs? Is it the chafing against this literal dependency that further drives us to solitude, a drive that the anchorite merely accepts and crafts to herself, turning it on its head?

The anchorite makes of dependence the dependence of others on herself or himself. Others have a moral obligation to the anchorite. Others have an obligation to feed and clothe, to service the dwelling and put off the curious, the disrespectful, the thief. Others have the burden of prayer and remembrance and esteem and justification, not the anchorite. Meanwhile, the anchorite can die to dependency, while other solitaries go on struggling with complex social and interpersonal necessities.

The anchorite shows us that dependency is a relative thing, that to die to smugness and attachment is more important than to strive for a complete lack of dependence on others. Yet, seen in this psychological and moral light, the anchorite is not alone among those who have directly confronted the issue of dependency. Mendicants and wanderers and wilderness hermits may share this insight, which may be conscious or tacit.

The solitary is more interested in rooms than in houses. The room is the focus of as many activities as possible, designed and adapted to personal interest, while a house is usually designed and built by someone else, a faceless builder constructing to conform with social convention, profitability, and municipal codes.

The rooms of a house have been given social functions based on an ideal of socializing. Thus a dining room for dining, a kitchen for cooking, etc. More status is reflected by houses with more functions to their space — in other words, more rooms, so-called family rooms, entertainment rooms, drawing rooms, foyers, libraries, and the like.

House occupancy or ownership presupposes a higher social and economic status in the first place. Throughout history, people around the world have lived in one large room. Their functions were defined by nature and their family role, not by rooms. No wonder that hermits in these societies have always sought out a cottage, a cell, or a cave, while the majority of people sought out the marketplace, the community well, and gregarious places.

Solitaries may live in buildings where sets of rooms are “apart,” (i.e., apartments) and where scale and partitions make intimate spaces more of a challenge, but the idea of house versus room is the same. Even within the smallest spaces, the solitary finds a smaller one and makes of it an intimacy.

Ultimately, rooms project individuality whereas houses project social faces. Rooms look inward; houses look outward. Rooms are where we live while houses are where we dwell. Rooms are intimate and personal while houses are concessions to functional containers with spaces occupied occasionally for particular functions. We don’t want visitors to our room but we accept visitors into our houses. We display tokens of our beliefs and personalities in houses but keep our originals within our private space. If we invite someone into our room it is as if we have invited them to glimpse our souls.

The solitary does not automatically expend wisdom to others, in part following the Gospel expression of not throwing “pearls to swine.” Discernment determines when counsel to others is best. The only tool should be the likely efficacy of offering something to others, never the desire to promote abstractions, however good, and never to promote the self or one’s personal example or experience outside this efficacy and integrity.

However altruistic, avoidance of counseling means avoiding the easy temptation to pedagogy and proselytizing. Pedagogy and prosyelytizing sap the virtues, build ego, and wear away integrity.

Humility ought to be the prime virtue of the solitary because it keeps the person’s harmony with reality at its tacit and unspoken edge, where the universe itself rests, without speech, without lesson. We let others take their course not because it is a good course or a bad one but because we realize that an inevitable reckoning or balance will come to them.

The paradox of a path is that we are on a path whether we choose to be or not. Perhaps we come to a fork representative of a choice of two or more separate paths. The path becomes more conscious to us in moments of crisis or decision or disillusionment. The path is best disclosed to us in silence and solitude.

The paradox is that we give the path a name as if it were our path. We cannot insist on this name, for by naming it we may create a new, different, even unexpected path diverting away from the one we chose. Or, perhaps, finding ourselves on a path we thought familiar and comfortable, the path changes, it grows dark and full of thickets and bogs. We cannot look back and see the fork nor hope for another change to take us on a different path. Change can represent a change of path or a change in perspective. The same path can be seen differently, or a different path can end up being the same because of our lack of conscious change. In any case, we must remember that we are always on a path.

How, then, do we deal with this paradoxical image or metaphor, which seems to create more problems than it solves?

The image of a path or way is such a universal metaphor that it is difficult to not build a sense of momentum or progress into the image. That is, we see the stars follow a path, we see animals following a path, we marvel at how birds can migrate across entire continents with minimal consciousness of a path. But when we scrutinize these linear paths of nature, we discover that however great in time and space, these paths double over themselves many times. Paths of nature are more like circles than lines, more circumscribed than progressive. We lose the image of clarity and purpose when we give up the image of a path as a more-or-less straight line.

The unfolding of the universe and of all living beings is neither linear nor circular but like an outward spiral, building on a foundation but progressing outwardly. (Hence the attraction of the labyrinth.) The universe expands but is directional. The rings of the tree are circular, but the tree grows outward and directionally. Such is the pattern of seed into flower, of cocoon into butterfly, of egg into animal and human being. So, too, our life’s path is neither a straight line full of progress and demarcations nor is it a concentric circle of fruitless experiences or inversions. (Although the latter is common when we look at individual lives.) Our life’s path must be a spiral, revisiting each stage, taking something vital each time, leaving something behind, but slowly and cumulatively ascending a path.

The painting by Marc Chagall entitled “Solitude” is an example of a cultural treatment of alienation and not solitude as usually understood with reference to a person. The intention of Chagall is to represent Jewish culture at the momentous turn of 1933 Europe. The sacrificial ox, the image of God’s messenger, the Torah or scriptural scroll, the traditional headdress, the image of an historical rabbi or elder personifiying Judaism, make this clear.

The painting’s title of “Solitude” may raise the question of why eremitism hardly exists in Jewish traditions. The biblical image of Ezechiel as hermit never served as a model for Jewish eremitism. The medieval Carmelities presented it as an historical precedent for their presence in Palestine, but this analogy was only theoretical.

In part, the post-diaspora experience of Judaism did not permit a cohesively independent cultural identity with any particular geography. The absence of intermarriage with a larger culture or other social relations intensified alienation. The mythic proportions of “chosenness” and of a “holy land,” and the complex theological (and other) relations with Christianity and Islam has only exacerbated the absence of an eremitic tradition. As with Islam and other indigenous nomadic peoples, the cultural model is the social group, and this identity with cultural authority has persisted as a survival mechanism in Judaism and other groups considered anthropologically.

The immediacy of Chagall’s Europe in 1933 is expressed by the forlorn image seen in “Solitude.” But “solitude” at both the personal and cultural level haunts the viewer of Chagall’s work. For the conscious or intentional solitary, it emphasizes the tragedy of culture and society.

We have a tendency to analyze when we look at things in daily life. We think, “She looks old today,” or “The light is too strong for me,” or “That flower is starting to fade,” and the like. We tell ourselves that we are just trying to understand what goes on around us, that we want to be attentive. We may even imagine that, after all, don’t artists and creative people spend hours analyzing things? That even resumes are praised for traits like “detail-oriented.”

But while we are busy extracting detail we are also engaging a faculty that assumes a certain standard, a certain norm to which the object of our scrutiny does not conform. Thus we see the fading flower in contrast to the fresh one. We can trap ourselves into assuming that only the flower at a certin point is truly a flower, not realizing that what is fading is still a flower, too.

When we recognize that what is before us is as real as what we consider its norm, that the flower is always fading — or, better, that the flower always was what it was — then we will be able to appreciate everything so much more at whatever “stage” it represents to us. We will be able to just look.