Video: bell ringing in an empty sky

bell ringing in an empty sky, a meditation video, 2012

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This was made using time-lapse photography, photographed at 1 frame per second, played back at variable frame rates. Shot using a tripod; the pan effects were made by turning the tripod slowly as the camera clicked through frames. The only lightsource was the candles in frame.

Another experiment in using tools to make style. We learn by doing. Sometimes the tools themselves give you a clue towards what the subject matter is, and the tone and style in which to present it. Artists need to listen to their tools, usually more than they do. There's a wisdom in the hands that often supersedes the egocentric directions of the head.

The Fire Sermon: a commentary

The Fire Sermon is an older poem, dating from the mid-80s. I wrote this poem partially during my Fulbright year in Indonesia, and finished it when back home in the Midwest. It’s an early example of a poem written at white heat. I hesitated to share it here, but when I was making the artwork that accompanies the poem, I realized that the art was meant to go with the poem, and it seemed essential to show them together. I have revised the poem slightly for this post, mostly trimming along the lines of my worst habit as a poet, too many “the”s and “and”s.

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Why did I post/publish this poem now? It's more than 25 years old in its original form, written in that period in the mid-80s when I was very convinced of the necessity to write out my philosophy and mystical experiences as poetry. More accurately, I was convinced that there was no better way to record those experiences for myself. I’ve practiced this mode of visionary poetry writing at several periods in my life, when it seemed most natural and appropriate, in part because I could find no better method. The flatness of even the most poetic of prose seemed to take the life out of the experience, to somehow denature it, to take away its power. It seems to me that poetry can capture or enhance the telling of these kinds of experiences of otherness and transcendence, because poetry is enhanced and powerful language itself: heightened speech, words taken to their edges.

When I lived in Indonesia for a year on a Fulbright, studying music, a whole chapbook or two came out of that year, as well as a lot of music. I was living in Java officially to study music, true, but really I was studying everything, thinking about everything. Nothing was insignificant. Everything mattered. I was involved in all the arts, not just music. I went looking for experience, and I found lots of it. Call it a wanderjahr, the classic time of walkabout. I look back on the poems I wrote back then, including the Fire Sermon, and I recognize the person who wrote them as someone who was trying to figure himself out, although I'm not that person anymore. I have a lot more experience now, although overall I believe I'm younger at heart.

This poem, although inspired by the Buddha’s famous “Fire Sermon,” a central doctrine of Buddhism, isn't canonically Buddhist. It actually rather turns the original message of the Fire Sermon upside down. The original sermon by the Buddha, as recorded by his disciples, was about how all of the senses are on fire, all of life is on fire, and how those flames need to be cooled and put out, by following the eight-fold path of dharma towards nirvana. I found, when I was writing the poem, that what I believed was that immolation, the refiner’s fire, the burning of the self in the fire of life, was the other path to enlightenment. The flames rather than the cooling. The immersion in existence in order to transcend it. Nowadays I recognize that as the Tantric path, although I did not formulate it as such back then. Still, I've had many visionary experiences involving light and fire and uplift, experiences I still encounter even now. So as a proper mystic, I suppose I would end up taking the path of fire anyway.

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Why did I post this older poem now? Partly it was because I made the accompanying artwork. Not knowing where the artwork was going, I was just playing with the images and processing. Fooling around. Improvising. As usual. People think that finished art is made with intention, but in my case as with some other artists it rarely is. I don't write an outline, I don't do sketches, I don’t plan everything out in advance. I just dive in.

The truth is, I've been having a real hard time lately. Call it depression, PTSD, feeling stuck, or worse, I lost most of today to feeling like crap and doing nothing. I’ve been feeling that way even on days when I can look back and tell you what I did accomplish. It didn't help that the day I made these images was cold and dreary and wet outside, which after weeks of unseasonably hot weather was doubly hard to take. Lots of people keep telling me that they think I'm doing well, on this current phase of my journey, and I'm starting to wonder if we're living in parallel universes. I do try to "think positive!" but sometimes you just want to punch the next overly cheerful New Ager when they chirp up about the power of positive thinking. I guess I've been good about hiding what I'm really feeling; I guess I have everyone snowed. The truth is, I feel like crap more often than not. More precisely, if not bad, then not good either. Quality of life has been lost under quantity of life, and quantity has been oppressive.

Was I looking for a reason to cheer myself up? Mostly art-making does that for me, or at least can often do that. Not lately, though. It's hard to feel like doing anything when you don't even want to get up in the morning. Depression. Whatever. Actually, depression can feel like The Big Whatever, an existential condition of anaesthesia and acedia. It's a fact that it can be hard to care. Sometimes I have to convince myself to care.

Fact is, I'm still under a lot of stress these days, Lots of people tell me I’m handling it well. I usually don’t feel like I am, so the external validation has been welcome. I don’t feel like I'm handling life very well at all. I feel overwhelmed and out of sorts most of the time. I can't always cope. I lose days to depression. I'm doing my best, and most days it’s an effort, feeling like an uphill battle, feeling like I have to force myself sometimes, feeling like even I don’t believe myself. I did make art today, out of this mood, as I've done before, but if it’s any good I can’t always tell. Nonetheless, a document of the moment, of the day, of the times. Life is difficult and complex enough right now, for many. There are several artistic projects and marketing and future career planning tasks on my To Do list, and having that list is good, because it gives me a reason to even bother trying to get moving up that hill yet again. I crossed a couple more items off the list today, yet as the witching hour approaches I don’t feel accomplished, I just feel tired.

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This poem, my Fire Sermon, spoken out of a very Kazantzakis-like or Elytis-like mode of theology and mystical experience, inundated by sunlight and drenched with heat, a theology of Light and fire spoken in this poem through the mouthpiece of the Great Awakened One, falls into a category of poems that is perhaps limited artistically but fundamentally important personally: poems I have written for myself, to express truths I needed to write down, not caring if the poems themselves were good or not, along the axes of art-for-art’s-sake, purely because I must write about what is in the poems. They may not be good Art, or good Poems; in fact I'm certain that some poets would say they're not.

I’m well aware that this kind of poem is hugely unfashionable, no matter what the current fashion might be. They’re not hip or ironic, they’re not intentionally obscure or deliberately vague, they don’t require a decoder ring or secret insider information to get inside of. They’re not technically amorphous or brilliantly original. They’re neither metrically traditional nor neo-formalist. Each poem has a unique poetic form that emerged from the poem itself, and from its contents. (Form follows function.) They use mostly plain speech, albeit compressed and heightened and focused towards white heat. (I do get comments, about some of these poems, that they do ignite some readers, that they do catch Light, that they do break down the walls around heart and soma. That’s all I could ask for, and more.)

They are poems many poets would reject purely because of the subject matter, my personal experience of the sacred and sacramental, while other poets would reject them because they’re personal but not emotionally or psychologically confessional. There’s no psychological pathology in these poems beyond what a reader might project onto them. (Shamanic experience has frequently been misperceived as pathology.) There’s nothing pathological about having sex with God unless you believe that God is dead and passion is a necrophiliac aberration that must be suppressed. Freud would condemn Rumi as schizophrenic, entirely missing the point. (Freud was remarkably wrongheaded about so much that is natural to transcendence and contemplative spirituality. Maslow by contrast gets it right, in his studies of peak experience, of oceanic experience. The poets of ekstasis get it right more often than anybody else.)

These poems would not satisfy the criteria of many creative writing workshops, because they’re not personal small-scale lyric poems in the approved workshop mode, nor are they abstract and philosophical or opaque, in the approved language-mannerist modes. These poems are too sincere on the one hand, and not awkwardly self-conscious enough on the other. There is almost nothing in them about human love relationships, except as such relationships are avenues of grace and fire and what we can call Tantra.

The poems in this category have almost universally been rejected, or over-praised, often for the same reasons. It's rare to hear a response to this kind of poem that is just so, just right on target. I don’t know if they’re Great Art. I’ve ceased caring either way. I do know that they are letters written from myself to myself, and to Whoever or Whatever else is listening. They are what is transcendentally universal that I can find in what is personally mine. Some of them are stories, and others are deep descriptions of instantaneous non-narrative moments. The Fire Sermon is perhaps the only poem I’ve ever written consciously as a sermon, as a speech written to be delivered to the gathered congregation. It's not even a didactic poem; it's a poem of praise.

So that’s what it is. The other reason I present it now is because intuition says it’s necessary. The timing must somehow be right. I must be brave enough, right now, to be naked and vulnerable. Opening the heart is also a Tantric practice. Who is the Beloved to whom I send my song? He alone who knows my heart.

the Fire Sermon

the Fire Sermon

the Buddha addresses his followers in the Quiet Grove,
a stand of old white trees overlooking the Summer Sea.



the birds flash in the fever of living,
dark forms chattering around the boughs
of the summer tree, the first bird speaking in its crown,
sunlight and shade dappling the green into many greens,
a cool blue haze under the canopy,
leaves whispering in the ocean breeze;
they burn with the inner word,
flames of the inmost seeker
that touch the tongue and burn
into articulate speech, the first word,
the genesis tongue. the sun
flames whitely at zenith, standing guard
above distant mountains and the sea;
in the drowsy heat we forget ourselves,
our words, we sleep; birds flicker around us,
their calls breaking the air,
turning and whispering in wild unknowing.
they pattern the air, eclipsing themselves
in restless hunger,
consuming small insect fires, chattering
their words like flames.
the world is fire.

from dark hills broken by rivers
down to rocks breaking the sand,
the eye sees not stones but frozen music,
the dance burning so fast and slow
that to our short-seeing eyes it seems motionless,
more solid to the touch than the hand itself.
but the stones are dancing
in Shiva’s fire; they vibrate in place
like shivering lakes dancing in rain,
humming to themselves of roaring fires,
each atom remembering the forge of exploding suns,
the refuge light of the sky’s red underglow;
the eye sees vibrating chalices of light
and believes it sees silent stone,
but the stone burns.
the world is fire.



in the blue canopy of trees
sulfur butterflies hum, wings rhythmically beating,
pulsing so fast that face-on, edge-on, face-on,
they seem to blink in and out of being,
a flicker in blue air;
the butterfly swims in the hot sea of unknowing,
the forever thirst that sends it flickering
and blinking from flower to leaf to flower,
drinking passionate wine, never replete, never filled;
sulfur and black, mute and restive,
feel the burning, feel what makes them quickly breathe
until they breathlessly fall, mouthparts and mandibles
never still, never motionlessly poised and waiting
like the silent hunter mantis, always flowering
and flickering from point to point
on the burning matrix of day.
they dance, unknowing, breaking themselves
on the sun, the hard white edges of the air.
the world is fire.

the patient mantis well knows the fire
and remains poised, still,
waiting, knowing that the fireflow
will bring the prayer close by,
when it will strike with speed that beats the eye.
the mantis sees the fireflow itself through infinite eyes,
all things as they truly are,
knots of fire flowing in the fields of fire,
bright lines in matrices of shivering flame,
tossed here and there by the field’s hard dancing;
though all believe they give themselves direction, they do not.
the mantis without motion is the observer of all that moves
in Shiva’s dancing, light, the play of flames,
the god’s burning gaze; the mantis is most reverent audience.
this is what it knows; this is why it prays.
the mantis without eyes sees deeper than the eyes of fire.
this is why we fear the mantis: it knows
the world is fire.



as we move beneath the trees, as the breeze stirs its branches,
the sun dapples through sheltering leaves
shatter in our eyes, blinding us with spatters of light;
the greater glare beyond, reflected light blazing on still water,
blazes white in the eye, burning vision black;
the moon is lit by the sun, and lights the sunless plains;
the finger points to the moon, and foolishly
we imagine there is a connection
between the moon and the pointing finger; looking away,
red and green afterimages spin in our gaze,
the field of vision darkens, bluely, dizzily,
like the sky during an eclipse, smothering death of light.
an eclipse of fire is the sun floating in fire,
moon floating between, a knotted light,
darkening, and we imagine it opaque.
light into shadow into light.
lightning spills over into visibility
and we are blinded and deaf, we do not look
upon the god with wonder.
but the trees have not moved, except as they always move,
we have moved through the light beneath them.
is it the wind that trembles their leaves,
or the leaves that make the wind? it is the mind’s moving
that shapes the air, that the leaves turn within.
our eyes drown in their light; our feet
burn on the fiery sands.
the world is fire.

on the beach, rocks break from white sand
like dolphins arcing into sky,
the sun crashes on stones,
sands white and fierce as snow,
snow blind and white like the disused eyes of a beggar child,
like the mute glow of the cave salamander that has never seen,
that would die in the light;
mountain snow softening and melted
by its own trapped heat and the sun’s hammer,
raging white, turning to clear crystal rivers
dancing with searing points of reflected sun,
flowing cold enough to burn the skin
where you bathe in the headwaters by the ice,
river breaking on the stones, flowing closer
till it spills into the summer sea,
warm now with long light, the body’s own endless fever.
light breaks water into vapor,
hot sun feeds the trees that hold the riverbank,
filling the air with cool sweet exhalation;
now, beneath the sun, ocean steams,
and there will come soft rains out of the burning clouds,
falling everywhere and always, washing away like tears.
the world is fire.



like prayers spoken in the wind,
the whale sings, the fish thrum,
songs hot in the ocean’s cold ground;
waters cannot cool them, though they freeze.
they dance in the blazing waters
and are blind.
cold salt wind burns the lungs, is bracing on the skin,
to hold ice burns the hand;
in the shores of ice, shoals of krill
reef and blow in cold currents,
endlessly swimming like seabirds diving through the air,
glowing with inner harvest light, engulfed by the feeding whale;
whale sighs as it sings, breathes deep,
rolls and dives, crying, mourning those who dance
to Shiva’s drum and do not know they dance,
whirling in the heartbeat light till sweat bursts out, skin burns
with fever, they glow to the fiery heat of the dance,
and collapsing wonder why the world spins about them;
the whale knows how they fall off the crest of the wave
and believe the world has gone awry, gone out beneath them,
because they feel it moving now
and do not ride with it; in that moment,
the falling, the fainting, they see,
see truly, just a flash, one terrible moment,
see what the mantis sees.
the whale hears, and sings it; the song will always ring,
even when the whale has gone. even from the edge of the fire desert,
the god hears; the god drums it, eyes glowing red and hot.
the world is fire.



we too, we too, we also.
we also rise and turn and look about in flames,
stone coals in the earthlight;
we feel it through the veil of flames,
perhaps only one forever awful moment,
when we sit beneath the canopies of trees
by the oceanside, where cold salt winds
drift in to mute the hot, heavy sunlight
and the searing blue sky, young birds crying,
butterflies in the blossoms overhead,
when we sit and see whales breaching in the bay,
in the silent blue distance across the wind-cut water,
and do not hear them in the silence of sun and breeze and surf,
though they hear us, hearing instead the deeper roar
of the world’s slow unwinding, down to deeper silence
and dark cold, mountains slowly ringing,
crumbling in the light, when we begin to look through the cracks
in the wall of the world, that wall the eye built
to have something to see—look through the cracks
and find a door, a window, a changing of the light,
a view into what the falling have seen
as they fall, see what the mantis sees;
the fire burns us and we shiver with inner cold.

one said that we must learn to put the fire out.
another said it is the refiner’s fire,
the hot forging that would harden and reshape us.
i do not know; some days the flames are cooling,
some days incandescent. i have burned my feet
upon the icy plain of wind-shaped stones
and must now sit quietly.
but Shiva never stops dancing, never stops smiling,
the drum and bell pulse in the blood forever,
and the god’s eyes glow fiery as he gazes out on us,
the flames dancing in his hand.
it is not cruelty, or anger, or passionate love.
it is not pain, not joy, not weeping, not peace or war.
it is what stands behind all these,
the fire of living, the power under life.
it is the fire.
the world is fire.

The Wrathful Deities

image from the Asian Art Musuem, San Francisco, CA, February 2010



I am drawn to the Hindu-Buddhist deities who express wrath, rage, horror, and anger—as tools for enlightenment. That is the essence of Tantra: the harnessing of the powerful, negative, corrosive emotions as fuel for liberation and release. The wrathful deities are fearsome and frightening, yet their purpose is to guide you towards enlightenment. Perhaps it is because as a young boy I was raised in southern India, surrounded by Hindu temples, gods, and minor deities. Perhaps it's because I perceive a truth and reality in Tibetan Buddhist (Tantric) psychology that is insightful and logical; the logic of the collective unconscious mind, even the soul, which carries forward from the basement floors of our selves into everyday life.



The wrathful deities are aspects of the peaceful deities—you could think of them as the "tough love" deities of enlightenment, who shock you awake if the meditative quiet of the peaceful deities hasn't done so. What does it take to wake you: a quiet tap on the shoulder, or a head slap? I admit I'm prone to needing a head slap. Life can distract me all too easily, and I lose focus.



The wrathful deities are also protectors. In Japanese Buddhist lore, there are wrathful-seeming temple guardians at the gates of every major temple. These are the fudo, protectors, whose angry and violent ways were won over by the Buddha's teachings. Now they turn their scary visages outwards, ensuring the peace and sanctity of what lies within. They keep the demons out. In Balinese Hindu-Buddhism, there is a belief that demons can only travel in straight lines; so the entrance to the temple always has a blocking wall, or a maze, which humans can dance around, but which prevents demons entry. And the demons who have been converted to the side of the light stand on either side of the deflecting walls, further keeping the sacred precincts safe and whole.



All of this innately makes sense to me. Perhaps it's my childhood in India that makes it so. Perhaps it's the logic of Jungian psychology, which affirms the reality and power of those shadow forces within us that have such deific power, and who, via the work of integration and self-knowledge, become allies rather than adversaries. If you are afraid of those aspects of your self that seem wrathful and filled with violence, if you try to deny them, they will come to own you, you will become the puppet of your own suppressed inner forces. We are all both angels and demons: the truth of human life lies in finding a balance.



"Buddha" means The Awakened One, and the underlying message of Buddhism has always been, no matter what form it takes: "Wake up!" There are avenues of peace, that involve meditation, prayer, and quieting the mind. There are avenues of action, non-violent at their core yet seemingly frightening and wrathful. The realization of Tantric Buddhism is that all these avenues work: they are all effective means. If one means does not seem to work for you, as an individual, there remain other means.



One of the Hindu deities that I feel closest to, whose attributes and story speak directly to me, is Ganesha. Ganesh is the Lord of the Crossroads, of travelers. He is Lord of Obstacles, who both removes spiritual and material obstacles from out path, and also places them there, if there is something to be learned from being blocked. He is the elephant-headed god, the scribe of lore and learning, the keeper of the gods' diaries. He is often seen as a cheerful figure, a laughing and humorous god with a playful sense of humor. It is easy to like Ganesh. For regular travelers, keeping a talisman or icon of Ganesh in your vehicle or travel bags is soothing.



The Hindu-Buddhist aspect of my personal, idiosyncratic spirituality tends to come forward when I'm dealing with my own personal psychological and spiritual crises. I have my own temple guardians, and keepers of hearth and home. Even the Hindus know that all the gods are emanations of some deeper Mystery. They are masks of god—for me, they are particularly easy masks of god to relate to. The peaceful deities are as much masks as the wrathful deities. Sometimes it's easier to relate to the wrathful deities when you feel wrathful yourself. You realize that rage is just another fuel for liberation, that there is nothing inherently bad about it. The effectiveness of wrath lies in where you apply it, where you direct it: you can turn it inward self-destructively, or you can direct it at the inner predators who need to be slain, so that the whole person may be freed and brought into the light. The peaceful and wrathful deities are emanations of each other, as well as of the silent and hidden divine godhead from which everything arises. The self can move back and forth between perceiving the necessity for compassionate action as something that soothes and something that is a yoke to be borne. Avalokiteshvara becomes Mahakala, who dissolves back into Kwan Yin. Each are mutual aspects of each other, once you realize that all are One.



For me, the wrathful deities serve as guardians of my own inner temple, as slayers of the inner predators that would lead me into unrelieved and terminal darkness, as teachers and reminders that I must be fierce and strong myself, whenever I am faced with those darker forces within the self. Perhaps eventually I will be able to face down the inner predators with the calm smile of a peaceful deity; yet for now, I am more often required to be the Warrior than the Buddha. Yet everything is change, and even the most stubborn among us may evolve. Those doors are always left open, guarded on either side by the converted aspects of our own wrath. The interior castle lies within.