hermit's thatch

The thin line between simplicity and eccentricity is easily crossed. Doubtless we have all discovered secrets of simplicity that others might deem eccentric. For example, I have discovered that certain brands of green tea will yield two cups per bag versus one. Composting kitchen scraps may seem a pointless fetish to some, while in Europe such small household efforts have yielded beneficial social, environmental, and economic results.

One writer I came across, who had grown up in the 1930’s U.S. economic depression, basked in her thriftiness — or miserliness — in getting a bargain at one store, driving to another for another sale, and so forth throughout her day, never totaling fuel and time into life’s equation.

For simplicity to succeed in one’s life there must be an ethical component. We must see consumption in relation to production. We must relate everything we do to everything others do for us or to us. And acknowledge the role of nature in this cycle, of which we are an inextricable part. By being conscious of the contrived human cycle of desire and consumption, we become aware of so many other aspects of society and culture. And in that process, we become better prepared to understand the deepest aspects of why we do what we do.

One of the characteristics of science is to reduce phenomena to a set of simple explanations. The medieval Occam’s razor was the inspiration for this process: shaving away extraneous causes and reducing processes to what is taken to be the most obvious explanation. This may seem wrong or inadequate or simplistic, but humanity conspires to prove this approach true. For despite the lofty and complex justifications from this or that temple of power, the unprecedented war and violence of human beings over the centuries points to nothing more simple than a primitive brain stem or amygdala.

It seems no longer possible for humanity as a whole to reach a point of peaceful equilibrium. Can humanity evolve to some point where mature brain functions of the cortex can overtake primitive instincts? We can call these instincts sin or ignorance. We can call our efforts ethics or philosophy or reason. Still, Occam’s razor wants to do away with the ideologies and the cultural superiorities and point to our collective incapacity.

Only enlightened individuals can at least begin the breakthrough in their own lives. This is what sages, regardless of what science they knew, have been telling us all aong.

Sound has the capacity to conjure sensibilities in us, or rather, we interpret sounds in certain ways. Perhaps the highest refinements of this giving of meaning to sound is in Japanese haiku poetry, where the cry of a bird or the rasp of cicadas in autumn take on a universe of meaning. Such an exercise reflects a self-conscious culture and a sensitivity to nature and emotion.

Music ought to be this high point of creativity as well, and music is often evoked for its ability to express or anticipate meaning. But music is always a cultural contrivance. Music reflects a collective culture, or subculture, from the primitive to the complex. It depends almost entirely on the technology of the moment as much as the composer’s affinities to the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Music imitates and overrides natural sounds, and in this there lies a caution: music can override the flow of responsiveness to natural sounds themselves, to nature itself. Of course, in an urban civilization, music is white noise.

We spend a life time cultivating likes and dislikes, points of view and threads of arguments, grooming how we appear to ourselves and to others. We are able to put up with habits and attitudes in ourselves that we would disdain or qualify in others. And yet, in moments of silence and meditation, when the noise and chatter abates, when nothing intrudes or disposes itself, we even forget who is there and wonder why any of this bundle of contingencies should matter more than any other bundle.

It used to be said that the ultimate philosophical question is “What would you do if you had 24 hours left to live?” This is the execution view of life, the invitation to put on a good party, say your farewells, and strap in. It begs the “eat, drink, and be merry” answer. But it is the wrong question. Because we always have death before us. That is not the issue. Stephen Batchelor phrases it more appropriately as something like this: “Because death is certain, and because the time of death is not certain, what are we to do?” It is as certain as is our birth, an inexhorable passage from one point to another. But it is not a matter of 24 hours or even 24 years but just a matter of life itself, of living itself. How do we choose, prioritize, assign value? How do we interpret, pursue, find a path? What are we to do with this consciousness we have? These are the questions that should occur to us as the ultimate philosophical questions.

Is it not the fate of hermits to fail in worldy standards of authority and persuasion? Their authority and their persuasiveness are only in their example, and cannot be transferred into the so-called “real” world. Like a sage, the good hermit expresses his virtues in daily life itself, silently, anonymously, without fanfare.

Ponder the fate of the eleventh-century hermit Pietro di Murrone, who took his name after his favorite place of seclusion in native Italy. There he thrived as a kind of John the Baptist, austere, roughly clad and fasting regularly. Inevitably he attracted followers, founded hermitages for them and called his followers Celestines. This apparent success and popularity attracted unscrupulous clerical factions. Given the political and ecclesiastical turmoil of the time, they managed to get Pietro elected pope (he was 79 years old) under the name of Celestine V. They created an order for themselves, also called Celestines, much to the confusion of historians. But Pietro despised the world, especially the world of ecclesiastical politics, and spent most of his time in reclusion. In contradiction, of course, to his administrative responsibilities. The new Celestines took advantage of him, as did the Holy Roman Emperor. For five months, chaos reigned, until a highly-placed cardinal persuaded Pietro to retire — not altruistically, because the same cardinal then declared himself Pope Boniface VIII and had Pietro imprisoned for the rest of his life.

Rouault’s portrait of a clown is a self-portrait and yet a portrait of all of us. As Rouault himself said of the painting, “The clown?… but that’s me … that’s you … almost all of us.” The sadness looking out on the world, the ironic laughter dissolving into melancholy, the clown as different, outsider, stranger, solitary. Rouault is not depicting a fool, though the clown must play the fool to entertain others. He must play the fool and become complicitous with people, with society. Like the Italian pagliacci figure, he is on the brink of tears, not of self-pity or of loneliness and estrangement but over the cruelty and ignorance of others. The fool of the tarot is not conscious of what he ventures into, but the clown is painfully conscious of the role he must play in society. That is what makes him like “almost all of us.”

The shaman, who is the predecessor of the hermit, was always a risk-taker isolated from the clan or group, depending upon himself or herself for physical survival but, more importantly, for emotional and psychological well-being.

Today, with the enormous and faceless institutions and corporate entities that control everything from economics to education to environment, we sense the virtual impossibility of physical survival as a classic hermit. Instead we must focus on the same processes — if not physical conditions — that classic hermits have pursued, namely attentiveness to emotional and psychological survival, in our case in an increasingly crass and unethical technological world.

Our search for solitude may best succeed if we suspend the ideal quest for physical survival in wilderness solitude — if only because we don’t have the time. We must get busy distinguishing ourselves from those forces that most impact our emotional and psychological well-being. This means a concerted effort at being mindful of what we read, watch, listen to, eat, clothe ourselves with, consume, with whom we speak, how we pass our days. This is standard advice in the literature of sages, but we cannot keep it at an intellectual level. We have to monitor ourselves, change ourselves — not just think about it.

We may no longer have an organic link to a tribe or clan or community, but that need not be missed because that is why solitude appeals to us. And we may never satisfactorily live in a wilderness growing our own food or gazing at a forest or mountain sunset unimpeded by city landscapes — not that these settings automatically bring awareness or contentment. The one thing we can and must do as people inclined to solitude is to safeguard our emotional and psychological well-being, what is variously called the “soul,” not so much from evil but from the world, from what the Chinese call the “red dust” of the world.

The function of a wall is to demark, to separate two worlds. There are short boundary walls, enormous fortress walls, and great symbolic barrier walls as in ancient China. Society builds the walls, then induces us to bump up against their confines and test the outer limits of survival and pleasure. The confines of society are vast and wide, limitless, but it is we who maintain the walls, reinforce them with mortar. Society wants us, like conditioned animals, to press a button or pull a bellstring that drops the social reward top-down, always within the walls. We wage wars, compete, consume, dissipate, and lay waste within these walls, all for what we call right or truth or duty or mandate from the heavens. Freud was incomplete in defining pleasure as a survival mechanism. Pleasure is a serious social business, not infantile or subjective. It objectifies all phenomena. It makes all our superstructure of ideas sufficient. It justifies the walls.

Pleasure is a kind of necromancy, a pleasure in dead things, in contingent and impermanent things, exemplified by the petty pleasures that society manufactures for us as balm or as opiate. What an enormous effort, then, to put down the surfeit of pleasure and burst through these walls. The walls are not so impervious after all. In fact, they are familiar. Society has been erecting them around us from our earliest moments of life. Which is to say that throughout life we unconsciously maintain them, augment them, see them as inevitable. Even those who say they flout convention do so within the walls, do so with the tools society has already put into their hands.

We can pass through these walls, pass through them like ghosts. And once past these walls we can rush into the night sky of moon and stars, or the daylight where the unaccustomed sun dazzles our eyes. And we can drink deep draughts of fresh, revitalizing air. And we can wonder why we complicitously and cravenly put up those walls in the first place.

Though we are obviously socialized in order to function as human beings, our particular circumstances can override our logic, intuition and intelligence if we do not question and examine everything around us. What we consider good and moral must be built from our deepest convictions and not simply mimic our social settings, institutions, or education. Nationalism always overrides this personal and intuitive process. Nationalism appeals to the setting and not the thinking, to the baser group instincts and not the moral explorations of mindful individuals. Our best instinct should universalize the human experience, not tribalize it, not base it on the worst instincts of groups, crowds, or forceful personalities.

The hermit’s instinct has the potential to detect this play of power over our minds and hearts. The hermit’s insight is to perceive the universality of human needs and appeal directly to its moral call, refusing to accept that material or spiritual blessings should go exclusively to any one nation, culture, group, or tribe — nor to the epiphenomena of culture: religion, technology, science, political organization, etc.

Hence the simple but universal sentiment of the hermit Shabkar’s prayer:

May auspiciousness prevail in all countries!
May all diseases of humans and animals disappear!
May all enjoy long and healthy lives!
May crops be abundant and everyone be happy!