hermit's thatch

A large grackle bangs into the window pane but flies off. I suppose the spider web decals put up last year have worked, for fewer birds strike the pane in their flight, unlike last year when many did and a cardinal died on impact.

The decals look somewhat like a spider web, but I tell myself that they wouldn’t fool me if I were a bird. Why, I’d probably fly straight into one and suffer the collision. If birds have better eyesight than humans, they would presumably detect the false web and ignore it.

Birds are smarter than I think. After all, who on a morning walk stumbles into a long spider’s thread laid out overnight from tree to shrub? At least a thread is not a web and easily reparable for the spider who must be watching in consternation at the clumsy destruction of his handiwork. And then, returning to the house after the morning foray of thread breaking, I glance at one of the spider web decals and imagine that an insect sitting on the pane has been “caught.”

I came across a “prayer against storms” the other day — not from medieval or scriptural time but one composed very recently by a well-meaning common person. It was an inadvertent admission of very unfortunate sentiments.

No one welcomes personal or property damage from a storm, of course, but we must nevertheless recognize that someone will suffer from it given population patterns, geography, or just plain statistics. To pray for one’s protection, then, while an honest desire to escape injury, can be an inadvertent wish that someone else suffer instead of or other than oneself. Perhaps silence and self-sufficiency should be our quiet response, with hearts extended to those who may suffer.

Then, too, this prayer calls the storm “evil” and “malevolent.” If the storm averts the petitioner, then presumably this confirms moral superiority. If the storm strikes someone (anyone), then it is due to sinfulness or inferiority. We can be glad to be spared a storm, but to petition for exceptions rather than watch for the patterns of nature and prepare for them as best one can seems sufficient. Let’s add tsunamis, earthquakes, fires, mudslides, and other natural disasters to the list. Soon, however, we must wonder whether human-made conditions through environmental degradation or living in precarious places contribute to our uneasiness on the planet. Science can inform us but also free us from cultural bias, the implicit premise of such a form of prayer.

Worse than a myopic view of nature, such a form of petition can be extrapolated to human events, justifying all kinds of actions based on averting “evil” or “malevolent” people, cultures, and events. Or when they happen, this mindset leads to the intention to strike back with equal malevolence, like a curse against God and fortune played out with vengeance. Like meteorology, there is a science of human affairs that will point out the causes and conditions that give rise to human “Sturm und Drang.”

We need to view nature as a context, not an object, as a setting, not a prop. Likewise we must view other people, cultures, and events as part of our context as beings on the same planet. Our status as recollected and thoughtful individuals — which ought to be the lot of the solitary — should give us a reflective and desireless heart. We are intrinsically within a context or setting as animate players on a grand and complex stage.

Of the classical Stoics, Seneca is appealing because he represents the tragic middle between Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Having risen from slavery to freedom, Epictetus is optimistic, while the emperor Marcus carries a gravitas difficult for us commoners to grasp, stemming as it does from his most private thoughts on the paradoxes of absolute power, morality, and the desire for solitude. Seneca’s famous line about chains includes all of us:

We are all chained to fortune: the chain of one is made of gold, and wide, while that of another is short and rusty. But what difference does it make? The same prison surrounds all of us, and even those who have bound others are bound themselves.

Seneca’s daily life and duty was to survive the household of the capricious and powerful emperor Nero with decorum not revulsion, to tolerate the sycophants around him while at the same time performing his duty as tutor and counselor with aplomb and detachment. His writings superbly capture this underlying tension, but never let on what his daily life is really like. Later critics have called him a hypocrite for it, but that would make all but the most thorough-going hermit among us so.

An anecdote (probably apocryphal) about another mad emperor, Caligula, reveals the delicate and impossible situation of such an advisor. On the evening of a full moon, Caligula flung open his window curtains to let the goddess Diana enter. “There she is!” he exclaims to Vitellius. “Do you not see her?” The wary Vitellius answers, “Alas, only you gods can see one another.” Alas, indeed. Seneca was forced by Nero to kill himself. Vitellius, however, was one of the first to proclaim Caligula a god, though also one of the leading conspirators in Caligula’s overthrowal and assassination.

Depak Chopra has written that “reality is formed by consciousness.” This is not eighteenth-century Bishop Berkeley’s idealism, but states a deceptively simple truth: we make reality through our perceptions, values, goals, and will.

Consciousness refers to the deepest part of our being. Reality is the insight elicited when consciousness comes into contact with events around us, in society, in culture, among people and animals and plants, with our physical environment. Of course, no single person can change events around them, so Chopra’s goal is to get all of us thinking in the right way, in a wise way, in order to change the malevolent events around us. Presumably, if the consciousness of enough people changes then the events change.

Rather than dismiss that possibility as hopeless, we must begin at a simpler level, with oneself. How, for example, do we perceive a tree? Is it a mere commodity, something expendable, something in our way? Or is it a living being with an identiy, projecting certain values that then resonate with our own values to create a relationship? This is a very simplistic notion of consciousness, but consciousness must begin with our most immediate environment. It is in this immediate place and time that we exist and act. How we perceive things really does matter to their fate, to our fate, and to the fate of the universe.

Such an exercise is essential for the solitary, for solitaries already have a propensity to cut off the standard plaudits of society and culture, to question their make-up — and therefore, to examine their “reality” and relevance to the real goal of our lives, which is the development of consciousness to the point of making us wise beings. Tall order this, but isn’t it merely an extrapolation of what we are already doing with our daily lives? We assign value and hierarchy to everyhing anyway. Why not do so consciously and reflectively? We may discover that reality changes for us, incrementally at least, in this sense: that while we find ourselves more at odds with the conventional world and its assumptions, we also, paradoxically, become more sensitive, more conscious, more in harmony with everything around us that is real.

A favorite Western counterpart to the story recounted by the Japanese Zen master Bassui (see June 14) is about Zeno, a Christian desert hermit, and runs like this:

In a certain village lived a man who fasted so much that he was called “the Faster.” Abba Zeno, hearing of him, had him come and visit, which the Faster did with alacrity. So together they sat down to pray in silence. This silence must have gone on for a little while, for the Faster grew restless until he finally told Zeno that he wanted to leave. Zeno asked why. The Faster said: “My heart is on fire. I don’t know what is the matter with me. When I am in the village and fast until nightfall, nothing like this ever happens to me.” The old man Zeno replied quietly, “That is because in the village you are fed through your ears. Go now, but from now on eat at the ninth hour and whatever you do, do it in secret.”

And so it happened that soon the Faster could not wait even until that hour to take a meal. He lost the esteem of the villagers, who had filled his ears with plaudits. They dismissed him now as possessed by a devil. When the Faster went to Zeno to tell him all this, Zeno replied, “This way is according to God.”

To be fed by the crowd and suspend natural virtues for the flattery and adulation of others is to deny the value of any virtue. It is better to conform to nature than to posture and pretend to virtue before others. Humility and self-effacement are better than the false esteem of others. Silence and solitude, like fasting, can have no end but rather are a means to a way or path that is — however we construe it — “according to God.”

Shafts of dawn sunlight through the primordial stone monoliths of Stonehenge are bound to draw expressions of awe from onlookers. Sunlight through the rose window of the cathedral of Chartres elicits the same awe. There is a splendor in symmetry, coincidence, expectation.

But when a bundle of dawn sunlight rays hits the wall behind me there is similar, though muted, awe. The wall is white and unpatterned — no precious crystal or amulet to refract the light, no geometric design or wallchart with a magic coincidence contrived like a sundial. Just the magic of affirmation, of silent but bright announcement: a new day, a confirmation of what makes the universe work. And then the shaft of light breaks up into a spray of light. No longer unusual, no long the character of a gift. Just sunlight, just me, wondering.

Tom Hodgkinson’s book How to Be Idle catches my attention because it reminds me of the fourteenth-century Japanese essayist Kenko’s Essays in Idleness (which Hodgkinson unfortunately does not mention among his roster of idle “idols”). Hodgkinson has that wry British sense of humor that leaves you wondering how serious he is about anything or is he just pulling your leg. His tone, witticisms and broad-minded reading is infectious, just right for perusing in — what else — idle moods and moments.

The book’s chapters are divided into the hours of the day, starting with “8 a.m.: Waking Up is Hard to Do.” Favorites are “5 p.m: The Ramble,” “Midnight: The Moon and the Stars,” and “4 a.m.: Meditation.”

I leave out the drinking and smoking and sex chapters. The whole mood is admittedly a bit too decadent, intentionally so. And the author is too slothful to fully press the logic behind his aversions to modern productivity, labor, technology, busyness, and the automotons that captains of authority want to make of us all.

The section on tea sums things nicely for me:

Coffee is for winners, go-getters, tea-ignorers, lunch-cancellers, early risers, guilt-ridden strivers, money obsessives, and status-driven spiritually empty lunatics. It is an enervative force. We should resist and embrace tea, the ancient drink of poets, philosophers and meditators.

Whether in childhood or later, many may wonder what their lives would be like under different accidents or circumstances. As a child traveling past houses and shops and neighborhoods, I wondered what it would be like to live there, or there, or over there. Would that as adults we could reflect, when looking at the whole world: “How must it be to live there, or there, or over there, under such conditions?”

To become a successful hermit, paradoxically, we must broaden our empathy and our compassion for the plight of others. By equalizing the humanity of others different from ourselves, we can begin to rid ourselves of those cultural and social characteristics that we inherit without questioning and which later lock us tightly in the embrace of the group, the collectivity. Perhaps the Pharisee’s boast: “Thank you, Lord, for making me what I am … ” should warn us, should prompt our humility, and prepare us for a more compassionate view of the plight of others, if only because it will allow us to make less of ourselves.

The trajectory of life is not predictable. Is the life into which we have invested so much time and energy, now so familiar and comfortable — does it seem inevitable, even sacrosanct? Necessity seems the product of karma or predestination, not something over which we have any ultimate control. We inherit genes and personality and parents and environment, and wonder what degree of change is possible. But the continuity of self makes speculation a dangerous game. Responsibilities and moral parameters have grown with us like extensions of our psyche, but so too have biases and fears and egotistical feelings. We are responsible for what we have become, if not responsible for what we could have or didn’t become. That is the urgency that confronts us, especially we who want the peace and simplicity of the hermit.

For the hermit or solitary, it is not the fine-tuning of the self so much as the disengagement from the world that is the only possible way of refining and changinng for the better. Our encounters with the world are colored by our personality and our predisposed conclusions about people. True enough, as it is true for anybody, solitary or not. But we need not only to disengage from the world but to disengage from our very interactions with the world. The paradox is not to ignore or scoff at the world but to see it for what it is, the vanity, the struggle for power, the hypocrisy. So I mean “world” in the sense of red dust, as defilement, as society and culture. We cannot claim to be solitaries disengaged from daily life in the world but imbibing its culture and products in what we see, hear, read, think, or consume.

The world as nature, as benignity, as simplicity, as identity with the universe, as love — this world is ourselves turned inside out, the universe turned outside inward. Speculate about what it would be like to live here, or there, or over there? We must get to the realization that we already do live “there” and “there” and even over “there.”

A big green fly is buzzing angrily at the window screen. Perhaps he wants to get into the house. I go to another room and there he is again, buzzing angrily. If he were to come inside, I am sure that he would be buzzing angrily at the window screen from within, this time demanding to get out.

The green fly reminds me of ourselves. How often do we stand like a waif in our youth (more embarassingly so in later age) looking through the window inside where people chat and laugh, music drifts in the background, glasses tinkle. We want to get in, to be part of this company, to “make it” with these people who are so important, persuasive, ideal. Maybe some of us make it inside, and are lost thereafter in the many cavernous rooms of the mansion. Or some soon want to get out and can’t, not having the will or the method or the luck. We buzz or whimper to get in, and then do the same — if we get that far — to get out.

The lesson for solitaries has always been there but been hard to justify or rationalize to ourselves, let alone to others. No wonder that most solitaries, while made early in life, don’t realize or accept the nature of things until rather late in life. The break from culture and society need not be radical, but if getting out has repercussions of money, status, respectability, then it will be harder to get out than to have gotten in. Sort of like hell. And probably nobody else cares about our predicament, as the little childhood rhyme goes — and we can apply it to our big green fly: “Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! I wonder what he does.”

Fourteenth-century Zen master Bassui relates the story of a certain patriarch who took one meal a day, never lay down, spent the day in worshipful practice, and lived a life free of impurity or desire. His disciples considered him to surely have attained the Way. But an older patriarch told the disciples of this man something that startled them. On the contrary, he said, the teacher’s practice is merely “the foundations of delusion.” The disciples challenged the old man. “What deeds allow you to slander our teacher?” they demanded to know. The old patriarch replied thusly:

I neither follow the Way nor depart from it. I neither worship the Buddha nor have contempt for him. I neither sit long hours in meditation nor sit idle. I neither eat just one meal a day nor am I greedy for more. I desire nothing, and that is what I call the Way.

When the younger patriarch learned of this reply, he rejoiced, was grateful, and considered this statement his enlightenment. So concludes Bassui.

When our path is not a means but an end, the necessity of defining our object no longer has any urgency. Such an object would have been separate from one’s life, remote, like a far-off object of worship or any object engendering desire. Desire is desire for something that one does not have and considers separate from oneself. To desire is to create a dichotomy between oneself and everything else. This is what is today called spiritual materialism because it parallels so closely that vain desire to possess and enjoy material objects. When we neither desire ends nor cultivate means that are but rote practices, then our daily life is both sufficient and meaningful enough that we have no need to separate what we do from what we ought to do.