Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings: An Appreciation

At the Goodwill retail thrift store in Delavan yesterday—a place I often find good stuff, especially good books—I found an old hardcover edition of Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld (trans. from the Swedish by Leif Sjöberg and W.H. Auden). (I also found new copies of Zen & Zen Classics, a redaction of R.H. Blyth's multi-volume work edited and with drawings by Frederick Franck; and Thomas Merton's Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.)



(I pause here to add that I think this is a beautifully designed and printed edition of this work. As a book it's been brought back into print several times, but the trade paperback editions most commonly available today do not have the solidity, heft, textured paper, or beautiful typeface used in this early hardcover edition, which I believe to be a later printing of the first edition. I photographed the cover, above, and a few pages from inside the book, below, to make this point more obvious.)

Hammaskjöld was one of those great minds of the first half of the 20th C., thinkers and writers who my parents revered. Growing up, there were always books around by Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, and Hammarskjöld's one famous book, published after his death. Many people of my parents' generation universally knew and admired all of these great men, as much for their social work as their scientific or artistic work. I grew up in a household where this thinking was available to me whenever I sought it out. The first time I read Markings I must have been in my teens; I remember liking it, but mostly intellectually. It was when I re-read it, probably just after college, when I was going through a personal crisis, that Markings first left a deep mark on me: I recognized in it a kindred spirit who was asking the same questions as I, and thus helped shepherd me towards some of my own answers.

Markings is an aphoristic journal, essentially a record of a man's spiritual progress. It contains almost no references to his daily life; it is an inward journal, a record of what he had learned that stayed with him as wisdom. This book remains a classic of 20th C. spiritual literature, appealing to non-religious New Agers and more conventionally religious thinkers alike. Hammarskjöld was a true ecumen. He described his book, which he had written for himself over many years, as a sort of white book concerning my negotiations with myself—and with God.

Dag Hammarskjöld was a Swedish national who spent his career as a public servant, first gaining prominence on the board of the directors of the Bank of Sweden. But he is best known for being a two-term Secretary-General of the United Nations, beginning in 1953. He was a Secretary-General who was widely admired and respected, and he was present for several important historical occasions and crises, which he participated in resolving. He died in 1961, in a plane crash in Africa, on his way to negotiate a cease-fire between UN and regional militia forces.

My family was in India at that time; we often received the news quite late, for example, Time magazine would get to us, sent by family, but months late. I have a young boy's memory of my parents being upset by the death of this man, when the news reached us finally

In re-reading Markings again, what strikes me now, this time, in the wake of my own life's major changes these past few years, is how very Zen-like Hammarskjöld's words can be. In this book, he is engaged with his inner "negotiations" and the outer world is barely mentioned. Death and life, and the wrestling with them to create meaning, are confronted again and again. But he also knew the still, calm center that one arrives at through meditation, through enlightenment experiences, or through contemplative prayer. He writes:

We all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence.

One of his short almost-poems in Markings reads:

Tomorrow we shall meet,
Death and I—
And he shall thrust his sword
Into one who is wide awake.

That could stand as a Zen master's death-poem, in the Japanese tradition of a final poem being dictated to one's disciple's from one's death-bed. It contains a warrior's stance, but also a spiritual master's stance. Both are true, in Hammarskjöld, both alive and awake. And in fact, he did die while engaged in his work as a spiritual warrior, journeying to engage in negotiations for peace. In the book, the line appears: In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action. That is a prophet's dictum, or a warrior-saint's.

There are hints in Markings that the writer was a visionary, hints that he may have had oceanic or mystical experience. Opening to a page almost at random, I find:

Now you know. When the worries over your work loosen their grip, then this experience of light, warmth, and power. From without—a sustaining element, like air to the glider or water to the swimmer. An intellectual hesitation which demands proofs and logical demonstration prevents me from "believing"—in this, too. Prevents me from expressing and interpreting this reality in intellectual terms. Yet, through me there flashes this vision of a magnetic field in the soul, created in a timeless present by unknown multitudes, living in holy obedience, whose words and actions are a timeless prayer.

I want to respond to this again, now, and I find I can only paraphrase. Yet this passage, among others, made me feel, during that aforementioned re-read of this book during my own difficult times, connected and less alone in my experiences. I may own a bit of my enduring sanity to Dag, simply because he validated me at a time I needed validation.

I have often opined that, at the core of every spiritual tradition or world organized religion, there originally lay a mystical experience of Union with the Divine. All the rest is local interpretation: we put things into words based on what we know, and often must use analogy or metaphor, or parable, to describe the Union. This is why so much poetic wisdom sounds the same, coming from so many different sources.

Hammarskjöld, who saw the universal in the individually human many times, affirms this insight:

The ultimate experience is the same for all.



He goes on to point out where Meister Eckhart, and the Taoists and Confucianists all same similar things. Elsewhere he re-frames this question as a swipe at the tendency in us, like the Pharisees, that seems to always want to ossify our morals into rigid codes:

Jesus' "lack of moral principles." He sat at table with publicans and sinners, he consorted with harlots. Did he do this to obtain their votes? Or did he think that, perhaps, he could convert them by such "appeasement"? Of was his humanity rich and deep enough to make contact, even in them, with that in human nature which is common to all men, indestructible, and upon which the future has to be built?

I hear so many echoes in this of other wise minds of this past century: Frederick Franck; Thomas Merton; Albert Schwietzer; and many more. No matter what tradition of faith these minds were raised in, they all went past the parochial and achieved the universal, fully human. (Indeed, Franck explicitly discusses this process and goal in many of his books.)

Yet part of Hammarskjöld's complete humanity lies in his encounters, again and again, with the darker aspects of humanity; with the shadow; with pain and suffering. This is strongly reflected in Markings. A few sections pulled out of the book, again at semi-random:

That piece of pagan anthropomorphism: the belief that in order to educate us, God wishes us to suffer. How far from this is the assent to suffering when it strikes us because we have obeyed what we have seen to be God's will.



The pure, simple self at the hour of waking—and the first thing it sees—its grotesque image in the mirror of yesterday.

•

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.

A mere sampling: there are many other such passages, and others even darker, full of doubt and crisis. To be fully human means to live fully in the shadow as well as the light. You cannot strip part of the self and remain whole.

How am I to find the strength to live as a free man, detached from all that was unjust in my past and all that is petty in my person, and so, daily, to forgive myself?

Life will judge me by the measure of the love I myself am capable of, and with patience according to the measure of my honesty in attempting to meet its demands, and with an equity before which the feeble explanations and excuses of self-importance carry no weight whatsoever.

Yet he does not revel in such awareness of his own limits:

Not to brood over my pettiness with masochistic self-disgust, nor to take pride in admitting it—but to recognize it as a threat to my integrity of action, the moment I let it out of my sight.

This is the self-awareness of the spiritual warrior, one who knows both his strengths and limits, and monitors his self not out of obsessive self-regard but as a captain watches her troops. In order to maintain integrity of action, to act out of integrity, in a manner internally consistent with one's ethics and moral compass.

I'll end with one last quote from Markings, one that to me represents both the author's doubts about his purpose, and my own. This is a question I often find myself asking of myself. Hammarskjöld speaks to egoless action here, to right action, in a manner that again reminds me of Zen. He also reminds me of why I write my own journals and notes, and helps me remember the best, most natural way to accomplish that writing: not for glory, but as a way of remembering, and marking, the Way. I am humbled when I read this again, and reminded to keep in check my own tendencies towards spiritual pride and literary ambition, neither of which I really want to feed. I have not chosen to take Hammarskjöld's extreme option of waiting till after my death to let anyone read my writings—although there are a few in that category—yet I do share his urge towards egolessness of expression and away from vanity.

You ask yourself if these notes are not, after all, false to the very Way they are intended to mark.

These notes?—They were signposts you began to set up after you had reached a point where you needed them, a fixed point that was on no account to be lost sight of. And so they have remained. But your life has changed, and now you reckon with possible readers, even, perhaps, hope for them. Still, perhaps it may be of interest to somebody to learn about a path about which the traveler who was committed to it did not wish to speak while he was alive. Perhaps—but only if what you write has an honesty with no trace of vanity or self-regard.

Making Photographs

Trillium and fern fiddleheads, Robert H Treman State Park, Ithaca, NY

In his short essay, "A Personal Credo" (updated 1982, in The Unknown Ansel Adams), Ansel Adams writes about the difference between taking a photograph and making one. This is an important distinction.

I'm not sure when I first began watching my own language on this point, using making by preference; I may have been influenced by Adams directly, having read at some earlier time the original 1994 version of his Credo. I do know that I've been making this distinction in my own language for some time, and that reading it again in his updated Credo was both revelation and reminder.

Adams writes:

The relative importance of photographic craft and its expressive aspects must be clarified. We would not go to a concert to hear only scales performed—even if they were played with consummate skill—nor would we enjoy a sloppy rendition of great music. In photography, technique is frequently exalted for its own sake; or, worst of all, is renounced as an impediment to creative work. The unfortunate complement to this situation occurs when a serious and potentially important statement is rendered impotent by a photographer's inferior understanding of the mechanics of production. Sympathetic interpretation seldom evolves from a predatory attitude; the common term taking a picture is more than just an idiom; it is a symbol of exploitation. Making a picture implies a creative resonance essential to profound expression.

The difference is in the language itself: to hear photographers talk about grabbing a shot, or taking, or stealing an image, or capturing a moment—these are all aggressive, almost violent actions. The indicate the mindset of a conqueror, one who seeks to possess or own; as though taking a photo of a mountain peak meant you could own the mountain. There is present that inculcated grasping personality-ego in such language, such attitudes.

To hear photographers speak of making an image, though, changes the relationship utterly. The work becomes a collaboration, a partnership, a living relationship between subject, photographer, and viewer. The photographer is the first viewer of the image being made; later viewers can share in the photographer's experience of that moment, if the image is well-made, technically well-presented, and evocative of mood and feeling. Adams talked about feeling a lot. I find his use of musical metaphors makes a great deal of sense to me; possibly both we were both trained as musicians before taking up photography. Adams' use of a word like "resonance," an acoustic term that also applies to psychology, emotion, and thought, is one I often in the same way, in discussing poetry as well as art-making. Resonance is one of those elements of a work that takes us into an experience of the work, and perhaps an experience of what the artist felt that led to his or her making of the work; it is a door that opens further into mythic or archetypal awareness. So Adams' advice to use the word making in terms of photography is in part a recognition that there's more going on, in both the making of a photograph and in its later viewing, than meets the surface of the eye. Making includes the photographer's relationship with what is made, as well as with what the image was made from.

(One might add parenthetically that in poetry as in photography, technique is also frequently exalted for its own sake—or renounced—with results parallel in poetry to those Adams deplores in photography.)

Adams continues in his Credo:

Seeing, or visualization, is the fundamentally important element. A photograph is not an accident, it is a concept that exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative. From that point to the realization of the final print, the process is chiefly one of craft; the previsualized photograph is created by a series of procedures unique to the medium. true, changes and enhancements can be effective during these processes, but the fundamental thing that was "seen" is not altered in basic concept.

Both Adams and Edward Weston discuss the primacy of visualization in their work.

The only caveat, and it's a small one, I might have with pre-visualization as a practice is that I have made some of my best images by not looking through the viewfinder, but by trusting my hand and intuition to capture a moment. Discovering this is what led me to my practice of stealth photography. I can hear Adams arguing in rebuttal that in fact I still visualized the image I wanted to make, and I still saw what I wanted to photograph first, before releasing the shutter. Even in the case of photographs shot from the hip, without looking through the viewfinder, I had an idea of my subject, and what I wanted to discover. I could quibble, but Adams would probably be more right than not, in each case.

Also, Adams and Weston were concerned about fine art photography, of course, and their comments exist in the context of their times and their work: remember that, at the time, what they were doing—sharp-focus landscape and portrait photography, captured in a perfect moment after much seeing of the subject, with some of the interpretation occurring in the technical process of making the print—was considered radical at the time. Remember, too, that fine art photography is still somewhat sneered at by both critics and the uncomprehending public, unaware of its potential as an artform in the right hands.

Seeing, or visualization, inevitably leads me to consider another big influence on the way I operate as a photographer and artist. I refer to Frederick Franck, a self-described "image-maker" who I have come to realize has been a central influence on my adult art and life. Franck wrote:

Looking and seeing both start with sense perception, but there the similarity ends. When I "look" at the world and label its phenomena, I make immediate choices, instant appraisals—I like or I dislike, I accept or reject, what I look at, according to its usefulness to the "Me" . . . this me that I imagine myself to be, and that I try to impose on others.

The purpose of "looking" is to survive, to cope, to manipulate, to discern what is useful, agreeable, or threatening to the Me, what enhances or what diminishes the Me. This we are trained to do from our first day.

When, on the other hand, I see—suddenly I am all eyes, I forget this Me, am liberated from it and dive into the reality of what confronts me, become part of it, participate in it. I no longer label, no longer choose. ("Choosing is the sickness of the mind," says a sixth-century Chinese sage.)

It is in order to really see. to see ever deeper, ever more intensely, hence to be fully aware and alive, that I draw what the Chinese call "The Ten Thousand Things" around me. Drawing is the discipline by which I constantly rediscover the world.
—Frederick Franck, The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation (1973)

I can say the same thing for my photography: what I have not seen closely, taking time to see it, before making the photograph, I have not really seen. Once seen, though, in this way, it can stay with me for a very long time; perhaps even always.

I first read The Zen of Seeing so long ago that it feels like I've always known it; it must have been sometime in the 1908s, though, that I first encountered Franck's work. In recent years, as he has become ever more lucid and clear, working through his project towards its essence, I feel as if I have followed, also becoming every more lucid and clear. Perhaps this is just experience, the practice that leads to skill in one's craft. I do know now, regardless, that what began years ago as a practice I called a camera walk has become for me something much richer and deeper in recent years, and has improved both my seeing and my photographic craft.

In his photographic Credo, Adams says something so close to what Franck says above that it must have been a parallel insight—and we can read these side by side as individual accounts of the same insight, the same deep seeing. Adams wrote:

The making of a photograph implies an acute perception of detail in the subject, just as a fine print deserves more than superficial scrutiny. A photograph is usually looked at; it is seldom looked into. The experience of seeing a really fine print may be related to the experience of hearing symphony—appreciation of the broad melodic line, while important, is by no means all. The wealth of detail, forms and values, the minute but vital significances revealed so exquisitely by the lens, also deserve exploration and appreciation. A qualitative appreciation of a print may require only a glance by a practiced eye, but a fine image deserves more contemplative attention. It takes time to really see a fine print, to feel the almost endless revelation of poignant reality which, in our preoccupied haste, we have sadly neglected.


Fern fiddleheads, Robert H Treman State Park, Ithaca, NY

When I go out on a photographic (and/or videographic) journey nowadays, I always take some time to see my subject before I make the image. I might take a long time. I might take only a moment; in which case there is something happening rapidly, changing quickly, that I must see in the viewfinder before it's gone. With so much death amongst my family and friends recently, I've become acutely aware of the fragility of all things, how quickly and suddenly they can all be gone, or broken, or unsayable. But even the quick photographs are made after a moment or seeing. I don't claim this is true for all the images I make; it is true, without fail, for those that I feel are among my best. A moment of contemplation before releasing the shutter is never lost, and deepens and enriches our lives and ourselves, even before the image is printed so that others might view it too.

So, I have consciously chosen to use the word making in terms of photographs for some time now. yet I'm also aware of the creative aspects of my artistic work in general, not only in photography, all of which is Making—a collaboration with nature, or in co-creation with the divine. Creation-centered spirituality comes naturally to me, as what I've always known and felt, even before I had the theological or artistic language with which to express it. Co-creation is precisely what it is—the aspect of making that is collaborative with the subject of the photo, for example—because making is also giving back, or giving into creation: adding to Creation's articulate beauty.

A Pilgrimage of Arts & Letters

Trikaya, by Frederick Franck, at Pacem In Terris, Warwick, NY

When I set out on this last, most recent roadtrip, what I thought I had set out to do was not what happened. I thought I was going to drive East to visit the Atlantic Ocean at its northernmost continental US locales, in Maine, and make photographs of that place. I did accomplish that. But it turned out that was not the real purpose of the journey.

Very soon it became clear that this last, most recent roadtrip was to be a pilgrimage of arts and letters. That that was its true purpose.

It began and ended with visits to significant locales involving the contemporary art-glass movement. I also visited the home and final resting place of May Sarton in Nelson, New Hampshire; and Robert Frost's first home in New Hampshire, at Derry, where he failed as a farmer while writing the poems for his first books, later first published after the family had moved to England. I visited the locales in Maine and Pennsylvania where the family of painters named Wyeth spent much of their time and did much of their work. I visited Walt Whitman's final home in Camden, New Jersey; although it was closed at the time, and I didn't get to take the tour. Whitman had been with me for much this journey, nonetheless, much in my thoughts and aspirations. I paused at Lake George, New York, where Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe spent a great deal of time, together and separately, making paintings and photos. I spent a luminous afternoon at Pacem In Terris, Fredrick Franck's home in rural New York, a palce surrounded by the art he occasionally felt compelled to make; by the peace of a place dedicated to peace, to reminding us that peace is better than strife; that becoming truly, fully human means transcending the worst aspects of our selves and becoming our best. That visit was so important to me, that I can barely articulate what I experienced, even now. I will attempt it, nonetheless, a bit later.

This journey, to see and feel for myself the locales important and inspirational to several artists and writers who I deeply respect, was the roadtrip's true purpose, not revealed to me till I had already embarked. I wasted some frustration and angst on my intended plans going astray, till I realized what was really going on. After that, the travel was much clearer, if not always easier.

I thought I had set out to make more photographic and video images in natural settings, to discover the wilder places of New England, to visit the Ocean again. I thought I was going to have time to touch the northernmost point where the US touches the Atlantic Ocean, having touched the southernmost tip less than a year ago, at Key West, in Florida.

Well, I didn't make it all the way to the top of Maine. Perhaps another roadtrip. But I had never been to Maine before, and visiting that state was one of my main goals, achieved in the end by spending some time in and around Acadia National Park. And a very beautiful place Maine is. I encountered some friendly people during my visit, all of whom told me a similar story of how they had come to Maine to visit, and never left. I now understand the appeal. It's a beautiful land, if occasionally a harsh one, easy to plant roots in, easy to feel connected to. All the people I met in Maine were open and friendly to a wandering stranger; which is memorable, since not all places are so welcoming.

I thought I had set out to make photographs and video for my own ongoing artwork, my projects involving our series of ambient DVD videos, and for my own personal artistic work. I thought I might have a few quick visits to places along the way that were special, unique, beautiful. I thought I might write a few short poetic pieces about my travels, as usual. And I thought I would return home with a few golden nuggets of beauty in my memory, and in my cameras.

I was wrong on all counts. And that was the best gift of all.

For the trip was richer by far than anything I could have expected or imagined when I set out. There are still stone bells ringing in me, struck by surf, wind, and storm, still echoing inside, whose music I have barely begun to hear correctly, as music rather than noise, as melody rather than mere conversation.

This roadtrip became a necessary immersion in the art and writing that feeds my soul, that I need as much as breathing, that I have needed to reconnect with, to be more immersed in than ever before. The roadtrip became a pilgrimage to places almost sacred in their importance to my life and well-being and art-making. Places I needed to see, needed to be, needed to feel, to take in, to make part of my own memory. To make my own bonds and connections and links to the land law of those places important and sacred to those other artists and writers.

Is sacred too strong a word? No, I don't think so: it's a word necessary to understand the connection to place that some artists must have in order continue their lives. This is a lesson I am still thinking about, that requires more time to take in, outside as it is my usual semi-nomadic idea of myself. It's not that I am going to stop traveling: it's that the places I go to are to be places where I must make even stronger bonds, to their land law, their power, their inherent worth and beauty and trust.

I've written before about the essentially pagan nature of environmentalism, which comes out of deep reverence for the land, out of feeling, not merely intellectual awareness that it's the right thing to do. It's difficult to summon the necessary will to protect something you don't love so deeply. So, for myself, each place I go to visit, even those I now know well from previous travels, it will important to deepen my own bonds with them: to see even more clearly and deeply, to wait a long time to hear the stones sing, before I even pick up the cameras, or put pen to paper. It will take more time.

I thought I had lost this. This connection to the land. I thought I had lost all of it in the flurry of human and personal and family drama that has dominated my life for the past few years: all the drama of my parents' passing, and my own illness, and moving house and home: endings and beginnings. I can barely speak of how it feels to know that I haven't lost my connection to the land, after all. That, rather than being lost, it has deepened, and changed, and become something even more powerful and wonderful and darkly beautiful than once it was. What I once thought was lost has, rather, changed, becoming yet more rich and strange, more vivid and colorful; sometimes shot through with darkness, but with moments of brightness all the more vivid for being outlined in black.

There were other places important to some artists and writers whose work I know well, that I thought to visit on this roadtrip, which did not come to pass, because of constraints on time, travel, and health. They will be visited on other journeys; and there will be other journeys to see those places, as well as to revisit the places I built bonds with on this last, most recent roadtrip. There will be more.

So what I once thought lost has been rediscovered. What I thought I had set out to do was nothing but pretense, a delusion, yet a good delusion because it got me where I needed to be. Now that I'm home again, I can see that I've never been more glad to be wrong about what my purpose was, to have my intentions so consistently derailed, to have suffered through the dark days in order to find the bright days, to be so utterly changed by touching places so many drive right on by never even knowing they're there. I give my infinite gratitude to those forces that waylay us from what we think we're supposed to be doing in order to direct us towards what we are actually supposed to be doing, to find our true purpose revealed.

To be so wrong about what I thought I knew, what I thought I was supposed to discover, and to have been given enough strong hints that even I, blind and dumb and slow-brained and stubborn, could eventually catch on—this too was the best gift of all.

Notes towards an egoless poetry 14: Nondual Awareness

Nondual awareness paradoxically goes by many names, many masks, many labels. Oneness; subject-subject consciousness; solitudes meeting; divine union; I and Thou; and many others. "Nondual" means not-two, implicitly stating that All Is One. Nondual, non-dual, not dual.

It's a truth and an experience that keeps getting re-discovered, re-invented, stumbled over, found. So many mystics and artists have said so many similar things that it's hard sometimes not to view art-making as a mystical Way, if only because the various observations by various participants seem to locate a unified core of shared revelation. Perhaps art is a Way; although comments like that tend to raise the ironic eyebrow of defensive distancing, in these latter, cynical, all-too-self-conscious days.

What's essential, though, in the essential root of the word "essence," is that nonduality is a human birthright. If it were a fluke, it wouldn't keep turning up. It would have been discovered and discarded. Instead, nondual awareness keeps getting mentioned, obliquely or directly, in writings and sayings of all human beings, in every era, in every land. It keeps re-appearing, as a fresh insight, a brand new awareness, that is also one of the oldest knowledges in the human toolkit. We all seem to be tapped into it. That is, if we don't run away from it, in fear of losing our little self inside a greater Self. That is a risk.

The little self, which is another name for the personality-ego, that grasping thing that likes to drive the vehicle of the self and isn't good at reading maps, the little self often fears its own dissolution. Even though its dissolution is into something greater, like a block of salt into the ocean, which does not change its essence but expands it, reveals it, complicates and transcends it.

Transpersonal psychologists discuss experiences of oceanic awareness, what Abraham Maslow called peak experiences, in which the little self seems to fall away, and the awareness expands to a cosmic level, being able to feel every grain of sand on a beach and the galaxy whirling at the same time. Oceanic experiences, it has been established by this branch of psychology, are not pathological: they are experiences of non-ordinary consciousness, but they are not aberrations. They are available to all; the only difference between how you or I might have such an experience is a matter of scale, or a matter of what triggers the experience. Different triggers, different levels of immersion. But we all have those quiet moments, in which everything becomes still, and that which is deepest within us seems to take a moment to contemplate itself, and its place in the Universe from which it is not separate, but part of the driving engine of life.

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
—William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

"Innocence" had a special meaning for Blake. It meant "openness" rather than naiveté, joy in experience rather repression of the senses (or the sensual). "Experience" meant expert's mind, which thinks it knows everything and has become jaundiced and cynical and hardened into fixed beliefs, while "innocence" meant beginner's mind, in which every experience is a new one, a fresh one. "Innocence" in Blake, especially in the long poem Auguries of Innocence, constructed in aphoristic quatrains, means nondual awareness. Hell, for Blake, as for many mystics, is a trap and a place one experiences in life, not in an afterlife: a place of fixed belief, rigid opinion, and stultifying mental walls that are closed to fresh light, fresh air. Heaven is also right here, right now, and Heaven is nondual.

Most ordinary consciousness, in which our awareness usually inhabits the little self, the personality-ego, is dualistic. Dualistic in structure and nature. The little self is always telling itself that it is unique, different, separate, valuable: an individual. But often an individual alienated from the rest of Self. This is subject-object consciousness, in which we are separate from what we view.

The glaring contrast between seeing and looking-at the world around us is immense; it is fateful. Everything in our society seems to conspire against our inborn human gift of seeing. We have become addicted to merely looking-at things and beings. The more we regress from seeing to looking-at the world—through the ever-more-perfected machinery of viewfinders, TV tubes, VCRs, microscopes, spectroscopes, stereoscopes—the less we see. The less we see, the more numbed we become to the joy and the pain of being alive, and the further estranged we become from ourselves and all others.
—Frederick Franck, Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing

Subject-subject consciousness is, rather, seeing that we are not-two. That in fact we are One. The spear in my brother's heart is the spear in my own heart: we are One. Empathy is the root of compassion for the Other. When we feel that we are both wounded in the heart, we can find common ground with the Other, with the Enemy, with the unknown and incomprehensible. This can take work, and be a risk.

If you want to preserve your little self in the encounter with the world, you might rephrase this as: Getting to know the Other as though it were oneself, a part of oneself, a close companion whose patterns one can at least come to recognize even if one resists identifying with them.

There may some value in preserving a corner of the little self, even as the rest dissolves. The fear of losing the self, and dissolving into something greater, however, should not become a fear of intimacy itself. Alienation is a meagre substitute for intimacy.

Rilke described love and marriage as two solitudes meeting. He wrote in a letter: I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other. The fourth of the Letters to a Young Poet is the one particlularly about solitude.

Rilke believed in preserving the self in its encounter with life. Perhaps that ability to observe, standing (as E.M. Forster described the poet Cavafy) at a slight angle to the universe, is the mark of a poet, an artist. One who is able to both participate fully, by immersion in the flow of the moment, and to reflect on that moment by re-creating it for others to also share in the re-created experience. Keeping a little bit of distance, Rilke argues when he says that we must protect each other's solitude, can make one a better artist, because one remains a more-dispassionate observer of the flow of life in which one is otherwise immersed.

Now we come to where many non-artists do not understand the artistic process. First, they see it as separate from themselves, as something they can't participate in. Second, they view art-making as an act of will, or desire, something consciously intended and intentional. Many adults who think this have simply forgotten how to play. Third, non-artists often misunderstand that art is not an activity, that one can set aside like a pair of scissors, but an immersive way of life, of being. They don't see that art-making is not something you can necessarily pick up and put down, like a hobby craft, but that it can be as necessary to the artist as breathing. The necessity of making is how art can become a Way: by becoming an immersive, continuous, even spiritual practice. Sometimes music is more important that food.

Frederick Franck thought the word "creativity" had become debased by being overused as a mere activity rather than a way of being—arts & crafts as a hobby rather than art as a practice—in the arena of dualistic, little-self consciousness. The last thing that art is, according to Franck, is mere self-expression. He stated this explicitly in a long interview near the end of his life:

Creativity is a pretentious word. Creativity, like so many other words, has been de-valued — 'I am more creative than thou.' 'My aunt is so creative.' 'My mother is an artist too!' There are a few words that immediately make my hair stand on end. The little hair that I have left. I do what I am doing because I can't do otherwise. If that results in books or drawings or sculptures, it is because I simply follow my nature. I can’t help it. If you want to call it creative, OK, but that is meaningless. I simply am a compulsive image-maker. I have to draw, paint whatever. Do I call myself an “artist”? No. I leave that up to the beholder. Artist is to me an honorific. “Ah, Rodin, what an artist! Rembrandt? An arch-artist!” But to be an “artist” is not to smear paint on a canvas, trace lines on a paper, have exhibitions, gain an honorable mention, sell. It is something quite different from being an “artist”. The only authentic artist is the artist-within.

Most non-artists view art-making as profoundly egoistic: they have bought into the post-Romantic myth of the lonely Hero-Artist. They think that art-making is primarily a function of consciousness, of intellect, of the little self. Subject, therefore, to rational control, an act of conscious will. But in the words of writer/teacher Julia Cameron: Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite: getting something down. Many artists and writers have said very similar things.

Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness—I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness. —Aaron Copland

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. —Thomas Merton

I am here to wonder. —Goethe

The greatest formal talent is worthless if it does not serve a creativity which is capable of shaping a cosmos.
The greatness of an artist lies in the building of an inner world, and in the ability to reconcile this inner world with the outer. —Albert Einstein

Whatever I want to express in its truest meaning must emerge from within me and pass through an inner form. It cannot come from outside to the inside but must emerge from within. —Meister Eckhart

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist. —Rene Magritte

Such artists and thinkers express, in these quotes, nondual awareness. They know that they have to wade in, elbows deep, then turn the art-making process over to Something else. There are lots of names for that Something. One of the best is the Self, the big self as opposed to the little self; another good name is the deep self, collective unconscious.

Ironic self-consciousness is inherently dualistic. One might say, inherently competitive. Ironic distancing is at root a defense mechanism against participation. To participate fully is to risk, and many little selves fear this risk. To preserve the little self, it needs to be kept aloof, cut off, distances, overlooking the field of play but not wading into it. Its end-product is intellectual and analytical dryness, a sort of creative acedia. Wordsworth's dictum that Poetry is emotion reflected in tranquility has become, in the Modernist context, all tranquility and no emotion.

One reason I find so much mainstream fiction that is so highly praised (by whom, one must always consider) to be so unreadable is because so much of it is blandly divorced from emotion. It makes you think, but it doesn't make you feel, feel an experience in your own body; and when it is intended to make you feel, the scaffolding of emotional manipulation is often obvious and plainly exposed; most novels in most popular media book clubs, such as Oprah's, never rise above this level. Analytical psychology in the lead character's internal monologue does not pull me in; nor does literary gloss. I find Bret Easton Ellis and Philip Roth equally superficial; both preserve the little self in all its labyrinthine knots; neither approach nondual awareness. (Both could stand to read less Freud and more Laing, for that matter.) Perhaps neither writer believes that nondual awareness exists; it's certainly the case that most post-Freudian-influenced literature is so mired in psychological explanation and biographical motivation that it leaves no room for contemplation, or the mysterious. E.M. Forster always had room for the mysterious in his novels and stories; most best-selling novels nowadays are puzzle-box novels, wherein a "satisfying" read always seems to mean a clear-cut ending with all the loose ends tied up neatly. As though every novel were a mystery to be solved by the last line. (This neatness of concept, this lack of dangling threads, was exactly what Virginia Woolf rebelled against in her stream-of-consciousness writing, so the trend is nothing new.) Nondual awareness is available in mainstream American literature, but usually only in small does; one of its literary masters, although I explode several literary myths to say so, was Ernest Hemingway, who more than once opined that what he left out of his stories was what mattered most; some of his stories such as "Big Two-Hearted River" are masterful evocations of nondual awareness that pull the reader into the experience rather than merely describing it. Talking about nondual awareness can be a defense mechanism because it keeps us from having to actively experience it: Roth and Ellis and novelists of their ilk only ever talk about it, they don't recreate an experience of it in the reader. American literature is dominated by this distancing and little-self ego-inflation; one of its most marked practitioners was Norman Mailer, who worked far too hard to present himself as the Hero-Author; many Big City New England celebrity-authors have fallen into similar traps, and these are mostly what we get as "mainstream fiction" nowadays. In a very different but parallel way, the "new journalism" as authored by Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson, for all their stylistic innovations and contributions to literature as a whole, is also about little-self ego-inflation. When authors and news-readers and reporters become celebrities in their own rite, this is symptomatic of a culture gone hog-wild for little-self ego-inflation. Very little journalism remains unimpressed by the emperor's new clothes. Is it any wonder the readers have become as cynical and ironically distanced as the reporters, neither of whom trust the other any longer?

After trudging through this competitive and egoistic literary arena, William Blake once again provides a breath of fresh air:

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro' the eye,
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.
—William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

Blake reminds us that our condition is circumscribed by our pre-judgments. We are born to sweet delight when we are open to what innocence opens unto us; we exist in hell and misery if we let the world dictate to us who we are.

In my opinion the most pernicious belief that non-artists carry about art-making is one already mentioned: that it requires nothing more than an act of will; that it is a mostly mental exercise, rather than a full-body process; that it is something you can just stop, when there bills to pay, because it's really nothing more than a frivolous hobby that can be set aside when there are More Important Things To Do.

But an artist can never stop. Sometimes drawing is more important than food. Food can be put off till later, when you must get the image down before it evaporates. If you can set it aside, and one must not judge those who do for they may have good reasons for doing so, then you risk turning your art-making into a hobby alone. Frederick Franck called himself an image-maker rather than an artist, but in every way he knew and experienced, and was able to communicate in his writings. this need that artists experience to make art. it's as necessary as breathing.

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. —Claude Monet

People don't realize what they have when they own a picture by me. Each picture is a phial with my blood. That is what has gone into it. —Pablo Picasso

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. —Rumi

To return to an earlier point, we must remember that nondual awareness is our human birthright. This means that it is not meant to be marked off as a special experience available only to a select few. There are levels and degrees of nondual awareness. Not everyone is going to have big Red-Sea-parting visions; the vision of unity with one's dead parents that one feels when one cooks anew a favorite family meal is also a kind of nondual awareness. There are many small things that remind us of our Oneness. Simple empathy can be a good place to start one's practice, as that can lead to general compassion. There is no need to feel dualistically separated from nondual awareness as though it were special. It's very ordinary, and blessedly so. It doesn't have to be big visions that lead to mystical experiences that lead to great poetry or sublime art. It can be as simple, and as sincere, as a family gathering in a beloved setting, wherein everyone present feels that they share a common desire to be together.

Nondual awareness does not strip away our differences, our unique and individual humanness. To the contrary. What nondual awareness does do, is make all our differences valuable and worth supporting. It makes our diversity into something worth exploring, anticipating, enjoying, and celebrating. How dull indeed it would be if we were all alike. We are alike in that we're all unique. But nondual awareness shows us that while we are individual, we are One. I can celebrate your differences from me, and appreciate them with joy; and vice versa.

What I seek in poetry, in art in general, perhaps, is less ego and more nondual awareness. One wearies of self-expressive displays of the little self advertising its separateness: one tires of art that is "self-expression" and nothing more. Maybe that's good therapy, but it doesn't mean it's art. Analytical psychology has infiltrated artistic criticism to the point where everything is suspect; only irony is critically acceptable; only hidden agendas are considered authentic. Where in this is there room for sincerity? There's something wrong with an art-making culture that has become so self-conscious, in the painful way that adolescents are self-conscious, that it cannot even acknowledge sincerity without labeling it as kitsch, or worse; the literary world has become far too similar to high school. If all art is is kitsch or self-expression, where is there room for the transcendent? for the sublime? for those little experiences of nondual awareness that wake us up to a world bigger than ourselves?

That world is not outside ourselves, it is within us. Great art helps remind us it's still there. And it remains available. It never went away; it stayed at home; we're the ones who went out for a walk.

At the entrance to the meditation hall, where one leaves one's footwear before entering the hall, there is a plain little sign with a very aware message: Leave your ego with your shoes.

Seeing what's right there, now

Poet friend Beth Vieira posted me a poem from Lew Welch, that is something of a challenge:

Step out onto the Planet.
Draw a circle a hundred feet round.

Inside the circle are
300 things nobody understands, and, maybe
nobody's ever really seen.

How many can you find?

I read this as a simple statement of a mindfulness meditation practice. It's not much of a poem. It doesn't pull me into an experience, and make me somatically feel the experience in my own self. It's declarative, not empathic. It's all statement, no description. You know, those usual things we look at when looking at poems, to declare or not that they are or are not poems. Lots of people still subscribe to the "show, don't tell" philosophy of poetry writing; I generally fall into that camp, too.

This poemlet is, however, a strong idea stated poetically. Whether one reads it like this, or re-arranges it as simple prose, it has that twinkle of the master challenging the monks to go out and actually, for once, SEE what is around them, without filters, without expectations, without judgments—and thus, see things as if for the first time. How many times walking by that moss-patch on that tree without actually having seen it? How many times walking by that person, that house, without actually having seen either? How many years being unaware of what is really going on around you, instead of what you think is going on? How many years drowned in that internal monologue, and missing the details of what's going on all around you?

Don't get hung up on the number 300—that's an arbitrary number. It could have been 18, 1000, a million, or 1. The point is to look, because when really looking, one will soon discover an infinity of things not seen before.

So, this is like the Zen classic The Abbot Instructs the Cook, in that it's a master's instruction to the community. At the time Welch wrote it, it was probably a radical thought to most of the poetry audience in the West. So, there are reasons we might not want to call it a poem, but it is a poetic way of expressing this instruction. Not a poem, but poetic? Perhaps.

Now, let's come at it from the opposite direction: If this is an exhortation to practice mindfulness meditation, even poets can learn to use this as a starting place for observing the world before we set down to write about it.

For me, not only the haiku that I write, but all poems typically start for me in this observation. So does the music and photography, and finished art. Of course, it may veer off, but it starts there. That's the whole basis of the camera-walk, for me.

I think seeing things one has never seen before is easy. I think the poem means, that we have never seen before, because each time a person sees something anew, it is a new seeing, a first time. When one is in the open mind without judgment, even things we saw yesterday are new today. This is "beginner's mind," and it's a powerful place from which to begin creativity. It is the place we naturally begin, as children; the practice of minfulness is, in many ways, a return to something we already knew, and had forgotten, rather than something entirely new and alien to our experience.

A few days ago I saw a dozen robins eating the black berries in the ivy covering the back fence. I just stood at the sink window and watched for awhile. That was a new one, to me.

Another way into seeing is through drawing. I refer the interested reader to several books by Frederick Franck, starting with The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as meditation. This book, like its successors, is drawn and handwritten by the artist. His handwritten style is almost calligraphic, and a good thing, because the fact that it's handwritten rather than typeset slows the reader down just enough to be able to savor every detail. (Publishers take note: there may be something to calligraphic presentation, rather than universal typesetting.) Franck writes:

Looking and seeing both start with sense perception, but there the similarity ends. When I "look" at the world and label its phenomena, I make immediate choices, instant appraisals—I like or I dislike; I accept or reject, what I look at, according to its usefulness to the "Me," this ME that I imagine myself to be, and that I try to impose on others.

The purpose of "looking" is to survive, to cope, to manipulate, to discern what is useful, agreeable, or threatening to the Me, what enhances or what diminishes the Me. This we are trained to do from our first day.

When, on the other hand, I SEE—suddenly I am all eyes, I forget this Me, am liberated from it and dive into the reality of what confronts me, become part of it, participate in it. I no longer label, no longer choose. ("Choosing is the sickness of the mind," says a sixth century Chinese sage.)