Harvey Milk Day

Happy Birthday to Harvey Milk, and also to his legacy.



A couple of years ago, I was inspired, and I'm sure I was one among many, by the anniversary of Harvey Milk's death, to write a piece of music based on his words, and in his honor. I chose to set to music, for a capella male chorus, words from his famous late speeches and recordings. The music was premiered approximately one year ago, in concert.

I share it here in continuous celebration of the life and legacy of Harvey Milk.

Words by Harvey Milk
Music by Arthur Durkee
Performed by Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus, Madison, WI
dir. by Ken Forney

You Gotta Give 'Em Hope    

I know that you can't live on hope alone.
But without it, life is not worth living.
And you— and you— and you gotta give 'em hope.



Hope will never be silent.

I cannot say enough what these words means to me: Hope will never be silent. I set these words to music, more than any other, in my piece. It is the refrain. You gotta give 'em hope—hope will never be silent. That is the message of the music. If I am at all a good composer, I hope that I have made the words come alive for you.

I am not by nature a positive thinker, a deeply hopeful person, or a Pollyanna optimist. Despite what many people who know me think, I am also not, therefore, a person who is by nature a negative thinker, or a cynic, or a pessimist. I am none of those. What I am not, however, is blindly or thoughtlessly optimistic, or a positive thinker who ignores reality. If you look at the record of history, you can see that hope is one of the most important dynamos of change. But it is not blind hope, it is activist and effective hope. It is the kind of hope that Harvey Milk embodied: laughing hope, refusal to despair, willingness to speak out in opposition to oppression, even thoughtless and ignorant but otherwise unintentional oppression. He could have despaired. He did not. He never gave up. He inspired many to keep fighting for what was right, past every obstacle, even past threats of death, and actual murder.



If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.
Burst down the closet doors once and for all,
and stand up and start to fight!

Harvey Milk continues to inspire me. For me, his words are a beacon of hope. And I struggle with hope. Hope doesn't easily to me—because all too often the kind of hope that is presented to me is toxic hope, built on fantasies and expectations, that in the end leads only to more disappointment and suffering. That's not the kind of hope Harvey Milk teaches me to follow: he teaches me to follow difficult hope. Earned hope. Hope that has been earned by struggle, and by an occasionally stubborn unwillingness to give in to all-too-available despair. I often struggle with this. Despair comes all to easily to someone who has been through the dark night of the soul, and who is (hopefully) intelligent enough to observe and report on life as it is, not just as we wish it was. Harvey Milk teaches me clear-eyed hope. Hope that is real because it acknowledges suffering, and is built on experience rather than fantasy or ideology. Harvey Milk gives me hope.

This is why I wrote this music.

Lessons from Having Been Bullied 5: the Dark Night

It's entirely possible to be someone who has gone through the dark night of the soul and at the same time do one's best to be a positive thinker. To wish to live in the light, and to share the values of most of the positive thinkers.

It is, however, not possible to have survived the dark night of the soul and still believe that positive thinking alone is enough, by itself, to get you through. It's not possible to be a Pollyanna wishful thinker. It's no longer possible to ignore that bad things do happen to good people.

It's no longer possible to pursue the light in denial or rejection of the dark, because you know the dark personally. You've become good friends. You've even moved in together and been roommates for awhile.

Sometimes it feels like at least some of the positive thinkers are infected with some kind of willful denial, a rejection. It just doesn't seem realistic.

Maybe it's because I've been through the dark night, or maybe it's because I was bullied a lot when young—one of the key lessons of that being that you know how people often conceal things even from themselves—and I cannot help but feel, sometimes, that some positive thinkers I've met are hiding something from themselves (or us), or suppressing it or denying. Or perhaps it's that people who have not survived the dark night—and I have met many just like this—really just have no comprehension of the more shadowy sides of life's colorful palette. They just don't get it, because they haven't experienced it. I don't know. I just wonder sometimes.

I've told my story of being bullied (for being gay, for being smart, for having grown up overseas, for just being different) to some of my friends who are dedicated to being positive in all aspects of their lives, and some of them just don't seem to get it. They're politely accepting, but you see it in their eyes, in how they won't look at you with real focus or conviction, like they really don't believe you, or maybe just don't want to.

This is not a criticism of any of my friends. It's just something you notice from time to time.

And when you tell someone you've been bullied, and they clearly don't believe you, even if they are polite about it, what are you supposed to do with that? It's looks too much like the people who didn't believe you when you were being bullied as a kid, and who did nothing to stop it, and often were in complete denial about it. When you've been bullied, one of the lasting effects is a distrust of figures of authority, because they were either clueless or powerless to stop the bullying, back then. When people deny that this happened to you, they sound a lot like the bullies themselves, who are really good at denying to the authority figures that they've done anything wrong, even when they're caught doing it. It creates substantial cognitive dissonance.

This all comes to mind because one sees the media talking heads right now asking how a big tough rookie football player in Miami could possibly have been bullied by his teammates. Neglecting to mention that they're just as big or bigger than he is. Or that rookies always get extra shit from the rest of the team. And then of course there are the comments that it's just boys being boys, roughhousing, hazing, all that stuff that serves as the usual excuses not to believe that bullying is going on, or to stop it. It's all just fun and games and you shouldn't take it seriously.

But that's the denial line. That's the rejection line. It's very odd to hear that line coming from someone who declares themselves to be a positive thinker. It makes you wonder if there's a man behind the curtain. It makes you wonder if there's denial.

One thing you learn from the dark night is just how common denial is. You don't learn this from the dark night itself, because what the dark night does is strip away illusions and denials and suppressions, leaving you naked and alone in the desert of your spirit. You learn about the commonness of denial when you return to and re-enter everyday life, when your experience has changed you and given you insight into what people do and say, most of which no longer seems real or substantial to you, after the dark night, but itself illusory. And then you try to articulate what you've been through, and no one wants to hear it. It's politely rejected, and denied, and ignored. Probably it makes most people uncomfortable. Which is all fine and good, until the moment their discomfort leads them to try to deny your experience. Incomprehension, cognitive dissonance, denial.

So, there are no answers here, just some observed realities, some speculations.

I'll say it again, just to be clear: I think positive thinking is great. It's just that it doesn't always ring true. If it's in denial of the darker shades of experience, it becomes shallow and one-sided to be believable. You can't really see Heaven till you've been standing in Hell. And that's how the dark night deepens the light side of experience. It gives it dimensionality. It gives it depth. And that matters, if you want to be whole.

Jan Garbarek: An Appreciation

Jan Garbarek, saxophonist, composer, bandleader, and musical shaman, has been one of my favorite musicians for several decades. I listen to his recordings with fresh ears every time, no matter how often I've played them before.

I'm not going to write a biography here, because those are available. Most of Garbarek's recordings on the ECM record label, most of them still in print and available. Indeed, Garbarek's characteristic musical style has had an important role in shaping the sound of the entire record label.

What I want to give here is my personal reactions to a music that has meant a great deal to me.

Garbarek can be lyrical, even softly beautiful. His early work with Keith Jarrett has many such moments. But his distinctive tone and compositional style, his signature if you will, is a soprano saxophone tone that is hard-edged, sustained, clear as winter ice, and gets under your skin in the most remarkable way. It's a northern sound—the sound of Arctic Circle winters, the sound of wintermind, the sound of ice in the soul.

There are albums of Garbarek's, such as Dis, that rip your skin off and leave you naked to world. That leave claw-marks on your soul. There are others, such as Twelve Moons, which are the healing mirrors of Dis, in which your ripped-apart soul is reassembled with lyrical attention, with elegiac grace. Sometimes all at once.

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Garbarek's music is a kind of improvised and composed music that, in the latter half of the 20th C., can only be described as shamanic. Spiritually, it follows in the footsteps of the late John Coltrane, of Albert Ayler. Like Coltrane's late work, this is music that transports, that transcends, but that doesn't ignore the suffering that led to transcendence. There is always a shadow of northern tragedy in Garbarek's music—this is almost a cliché to say, but it expresses it well—the same sense of tragic destiny and striving against the gods that one finds throughout the Norse Sagas. There is always, in the Sagas, a sense of the hero waging war on himself, as well as on others; of fate being simultaneously resisted and acknowledged.

A lot of Garbarek compositions are directly influenced by Norwegian folk music, and other Scandinavian folk music, including the shamanic chants of the living singers of Finland. There have been times when the music triggers a deep inner imagination, a kind of waking dream, that is very similar to shamanic journeying—at least for me. Perhaps that's because half of my personal ancestry comes from Norway, from north of the Arctic Circle. This music resonates deep in my bones.



There is also a deep inner silence in this music, which also leads it towards that shamanic, vatic, visionary thread in late 20th C. art—a thread often dismissed or ridiculed by the mandarins of artistic culture, particularly in this narcissistic contemporary moment, but there nonetheless. Garbarek is, I believe, part of this often-unrecognized thread of art that speaks directly of vision, of the inner self, of the life of the soul. The music is part of the soundtrack to this thread. It's obviously a thread in art that matters to me, and which I place myself within, as an artist. This is art that is intentionally transformative.

The shamanic aspect is like shamanic initiation: the dismemberment experience found in so many shamanic traditions, in which the spirits rip you apart, symbolically, actually, rip your soul to shreds, then reassemble your body in a newer, stronger, more powerful form. Some of Garbarek's music feels exactly like that to me. I've been listening to it for literally decades, yet it still has the power to rip me to shreds, then put me back together. The feeling emotional cathartic release is quite profound in much of this music, and it has the power to recreate that catharsis in the listener.

That is my main point here. Others can discuss the music in terms of jazz history, music theory, or other forms of discourse. Sometimes those other discourses seem pallid to me, unable to really capture the heart of the music; descriptive words for this kind of music stumble and fall short. So others can talk about musicology and music history.

What I want to say is very simple: jan Garbarek's music has the power to change your life, again and again, if you let it. At least it has, for me. There have been some occasions, when I was close to the dark night, when listening to this music was the only thing that gave me the strength to go on, to get through the night, to make it till dawn, to survive the void and abyss. I have survived my own dark nights possessed by shadow and darkness, in part, because listening to this music gave me the will to endure. Simply to endure. It's something to hold onto, when all else fails.

The Dark Night

I am prompted to write by a brilliant commentary on the dark of the soul and the new atheists by the Maverick Philosopher. (Hat tip to Frank Wilson for the link.)

The Maverick Philosopher's short article takes on professional gadfly and contrarian, Christopher HItchens, one of the loudest voices of the so-called New Atheism:

Hitchens, like the other members of the 'Dawkins Gang' as I like to call them, does not have a religious bone in his body. He simply does not understand religion, and has no sympathy for it, so much so that he must dismiss it as nonsense.

Lack of religious sensibility is like lack of aesthetic sensibility. There are people who lack entirely any feel for poetry and music. They lack the 'spiritual organ' to appreciate them, and so their comments on them are of little interest except as indicative of the critics' own limitations. Others are bereft of philosophical sensibility. I have met mathematicians and scientists who have zero philosophical aptitude and sense and for whom philosophy cannot be anything other than empty verbiage. These people do not lack intelligence, they lack a certain 'spiritual organ,' a certain depth of personality. And of course there are those with no inkling of the austere beauty of mathematics and logic and (let's not leave out) chess. To speak of their beauty to such people would be a waste of time. They lack the requisite appreciative organs.

Hitchens is also, right now, dealing with esophageal cancer, a life-threatening illness with a low survival rate, despite chemotherapy, radiation treatment, etc. I've known other people dealing with esophageal cancer, and it very much depends on when they catch it, and if they are able to remove all the affected tissue.

No one expects Hitchens to have a religious conversion due to his illness, and no one expects him to be anything but continuously contrarian. I for one would never require any person to have a religious conversion, nor would I require them to change themselves in any way contrary to their nature. Nonetheless, serious illness promotes change. We have two usual responses to serious, life-threatening illness: one is to resist mightily and fight hard to retain our identity; the other is to give in to the process, float along with the changes, and emerge as a pilgrim on the other side, one who has undertaken the journey and emerged changed. As a natural part-time Taoist I tend to go with the flow, but there are times when I also fight hard to retain some sense of the self that I used to be.

However, just this morning an artist friend of mine sent me a quote relevant to her upcoming New York gallery show, on the topic of pilgrimage:

Only the walker who sets out toward ultimate things is a pilgrim. In this lies the difference between tourist and pilgrim. The tourist travels just as far, sometimes with great zeal and courage, gathering up acquisitions and returns the same person as the one who departed. The pilgrim resolves that the one who returns will not be the same person as the one who set out. The pilgrim must be prepared to shed the husk of personality or even the body like a worn out coat. For the pilgrim the road is home; reaching the destination seems nearly inconsequential.
—Andrew Schelling, poet and scholar, from the anthology Meeting the Buddha, edited by Molly Emma Aitken

It's hard not to view my last few years as a pilgrimage. This chromic illness that I have waded into full-body has elements of pilgrimage. I resist the New Age cliché that all experiences are teaching experiences, because that is too glib, as usual; nonetheless there have been lessons learned from my illness that are life-lessons, that have utterly changed the way I perceive the world, and my relationships. Many insubstantial relationships have fallen by the wayside, leaving me often alone, and just as often embraced within the circle of my closest friends. You know, those real friends who are there for you no matter what, and you return the favor.

I set out on each longer roadtrip, those trips of a month or more, with the hope of pilgrimage: the hope of returning changed. So far, so good. My last roadtrip out to the winter mountains and the stormy winter Pacific Ocean did accomplish this ambition, at least in part. You cannot expect your life to utterly change, when you go away and return: you also have to integrate the new experiences, somehow, into your returned, existing life. Re-entry to that normative life within the normative social order can be relatively painful, the more you have changed during a journey, the intense the pilgrimage has been, and sometimes the urge to just stay on the road and never go home seems unbearable. And when on a longer roadtrip I do function as a pilgrim, as Schelling says, when reaching the destination seems nearly inconsequential. I never feel freer than when I drive only so far in a day, and stop early, make camp in a state or national park, wander about seeing the sites, then make a meal slow-cooked over woodfire or the Coleman stove under the stars. I do some of my best thinking during those long drives. I sometimes settle life-long issues in heart and mind. More often, I find my own inner philosopher, the part of me who is able to articulate, often in poetry or essay, what most matters to my life. And I make dozens or hundreds of photos; the process of sorting might not begin till months after I return, but the process of making fresh images of favorite scenes, under the changing light, is itself a reward, itself a kind of pilgrimage.

And so I return to the Maverick Philosopher's point about sensibilities, aesthetic, philosophical, and religious: It is obvious that an aesthetic sensibility is in play when I'm out on the road, making photographs. I have had friends and other photographers question me, while watching me at work, about my working methods. My method is to look a long time before raising the camera to my eye and making a single image. I watch the light change till it's just perfect. A lot of my best photographs were made by being in the right place at the right time—often when no one else was around. Several good photographers looking at the same scene will often make very different images, since each sees through his or her own eye and experience and desire. This has been made obvious every time I've taught a photography class, and I do encourage it when teaching: the group scatters on location, and almost no one duplicates an image by another.

Nonetheless, I am often questioned as to why I don't make more images than I do, on location, and why I often contemplate a scene in nature for a long time before making an image. The answer I give in the moment is usually that I'm waiting for the right moment, waiting for the light. And while that's true, it's also true that I am waiting for my heart and soul to quiet and become still, as reflective as a still mountain pool reflecting the moon. I am waiting for my inner stillness to reflect the scene before me. At that point, I'm ready to get to work, because making a photograph for me is not about "artistic self-expression," it's about reflecting and responding to what is already there. This process has little place for egotism. I am often waiting, when I wait, for my ego to dissolve into some larger vessel, so that it doesn't get in the way of making the photograph. It's not that the "I" completely goes away—one still has to retain enough "I" to manage one's camera, and to be aware of where the trail approaches the cliff—it's that the "I" doesn't dominate the aesthetic experience, the artistic process.

With regard to the religious sensibility, which I must point out overlaps significantly with the aesthetic sensibility, at least for many artists and musicians of my acquaintance, as well as for myself, the Maverick Philosopher continues with the meat of his commentary:

Hitchens, who remains a man of the Left in his total lack of understanding of religion, doesn't seem to appreciate that [Mother] Teresa was a mystic and that her dark night of the soul was not a crisis of faith, where faith is construed as intellectual assent to certain dogmas, but an experiencing of the divine withdrawal, an experiencing of God as deus absconditus. A believing non-mystic might lose his faith after applying his reason to his religion's dogmatic content and then finding it impossible rationally to accept. Although I haven't read Teresa's letters, I suspect that this is not what happened in her case. After the fullness of her mystical experience, she experienced desolation when the mystical experiences subsided. So, contra Hitchens, it was not a realization of the "crushing unreasonableness" of Roman Catholic dogma that triggered Teresa's dark night, but her experience of the divine absence, an absence that is an expression of the divine transcendence.

I suggest that an atheist like Hitchens, for whom theism is simply not a live existential option, cannot understand the spititual life of a person like Mother Teresa. He can understand it only by caricaturing it.

The reason this makes so much sense to me is that the Maverick Philosopher has put his finger on the experience of the dark night, and why it's not a merely intellectual or moral choice. It often strikes me that the New Atheists have no sense of life whatsoever beyond the intellectual. Do they ever actually stop to appreciate a sunset? Perhaps, but they never write about it (except to negatively claim that their enjoyment of a sunset didn't require God's presence), so there's no evidence of it.

Let me be clear: I have no use for most of organized religion. I am a person who has had numerous mystical experiences, including the dark night of the senses and the dark night of the soul. I have no more use for the organized Christian church than do the New Atheists. Where we differ is that I do have a religious sensibility, and have had mystical experiences. We also differ in that I don't attempt to explain away my experiences as mere brain chemistry, or with merely intellectual rhetoric. The Maverick Philosopher is quite correct that the New Atheists seem unable to even comprehend mysticism, even accept it as an existential possibility, and so they must do their best to denigrate it.

In the year 1990, for several years, I was lost in what St. John of the Cross termed the dark night of the senses. The religious sensibility was taken away from me. Everything I had ever believed, every idea or belief I had had about my personal spirituality and connection to the Divine, was removed from my sight. Everything was hollow, meaningless, pointless. I was terrified of the emptiness. I had had my first real vision of the Void, and I could hear its emptiness continuously, in every waking and sleeping moment, for about four years. I couldn't find belief, much less faith, anywhere. Everything crumbled as soon as I touched it. Every tenet became provisional. Nothing had any substance, any reasonable verity. it was all hollow and blank. You could try on a belief system, but it was exactly like trying on a coat: something you could shrug off again all too easily. During those years, I did indeed throw a lot of paint at the wall of spiritual practice and belief—but nothing stuck.

I continued to have what some would call visions, what others would call waking dreams, but which are so normal to me that just call them "Oh, you again." It was during this period that I realized the full truth of what Rilke wrote about in his Duino Elegies: that Every angel is terrifying. So one could say the messengers, the intermediaries, the animal spirits, the angels, were still tapping me on the shoulder. But nothing they had to say meant anything. At least not then.

And then it was over. About four years after my first vision of the Void, I had a second, even more powerful Vision of the void, which was curative and healing. It was the moment of Letting Go. Even though meaning did not suddenly flood back into the world, even though tenets and dogmas have remained always provisional, suddenly I was at peace. It didn't matter anymore what I or anyone else believed. It didn't even matter if they believed in anything. I had re-found, or more accurately I had been re-gifted, my own center. My tenets to this day do not require anyone to share them, nor even for anyone to believe in them, or in anything I have to say on the topic.

The great science fiction writer and philosopher Erik Frank Russell once defined our fundamental basic right as: "Every man has the basic right to go to hell in his own way." My approach to that tenet, which I largely agree with, is to have become ever less willing to intervene in anyone else's progress or process. Non-intervention. The Prime Directive. Individual destiny. Whatever you want to label it.

At the same time, my capacity for empathizing with the suffering of others, my capacity for compassion, was deepened by the visions of the Void, by my experience of the dark night of the senses. I am politically as well as naturally Taoist, yet the Vow of the Bodhisattva means a great deal to me: I vow to put off my own escape into nirvana until I have been able to assist in the enlightenment of all other sentient beings. In practical terms, this means you have to stand by while others fail, but bear witness to their lives, and be there to offer help if they ask for it. Some will never ask for help.

Have you ever noticed how so many of the New Atheists commit the sin of pride, if only by their extreme lack of humility in their opinion that they're right and everyone else is wrong? The New Atheists are as convinced of the rightness of their beliefs as are many religious fundamentalists; indeed the psychological parallels are noteworthy. (cf. Eric Hoffer's The True Believer for more on the psychology of political and philosophical fundamentalism) A genuine commitment to the truth cannot be hampered by ideological prejudice. You have to be open-minded enough to admit that you might be wrong. That's something I can't imagine Christopher Hitchens ever admitting, not even on his probable deathbed. His utter certainty about the verity of his own opinions leaves no tenet unprovisional. It is this very smug self-certainty that undermines everything the New Atheists have to say that I might otherwise agree with; after all, their critique of organized religion has some very valid points, some very harsh but true criticisms of the evils that organized religion has perpetrated on humanity. But in their utter certainty that religious belief itself is the cause of all this evil, and their total lack of religious sensibility, the New Atheists succeed in undermining themselves, and in the end convincing no one. (Except each other—which is one psychological characteristic equally shared by high school cliques and ideological cults.)

By contrast, even now, every tenet I hold remains provisional. This is the truth of mysticism: that unknowing is as important and valuable as knowing. After experiencing the dark night, I can never have total certainty again about any idea or belief. There remain a few certainties that I hold as valid and true, even if I might sometimes myself question them: That everything will die; that resisting entropy is nonetheless worth the fight; that I can discover beauty in almost anything if I look long enough; that there deep inside me, when you strip everything else away, something unbreakable, undefeatable, indestructible. During even my worst days and nights, when I'm ready to give up because I just can't take it anymore, I remember that despite all the times I might have died, I'm still here. I'm still here.

In 2004 I moved to New Mexico to live for six months in the desert outside Taos. I was lost again. I had hit a career dead end, and stagnation. I was laid off just before 9/11 and like the economy itself, I had never really recovered. So I pulled up stakes in the Midwest and tried to start over again in a new place. But this was the beginning of the period of my life, still ongoing, when things, no matter what I tried to do, seemed to only get worse.

In the desert of New Mexico, for six months, I experienced the dark night of the soul full force. Actually it lasted longer than that, in fact it's been revisiting me this past year of major illness, but my desert sojourn is a convenient marker for those who need bookends to every experience. The Presence of the Divine was withdrawn from my cognition. make no mistake: I have no use for the word "God" precisely because we all use it thinking it means the same thing when it never does; so it's a label I avoid. My desert dark night experience taught me that the truest, most potent name for the divine, at least for me, is Mystery. I thrive on the Unknowing, on not-knowing the true nature and depth of the divine. My tenets all remain provisional. It is not that I tolerate and put up with not having all the answers, it's rather that I actively and passionately embrace not having all the answers. My life's experience has given me many answers to specific situations, always somewhat provisional of course, that I find myself repeating when asked for them by someone I'm teaching or mentoring or discussing life with. But the last thing I'll claim is certainty that I have all the answers. I know that I do not, and never will, at least not while I still inhabit this flesh. Paradoxically, I suppose, I am certain that my certainty has severe limits.

How can you go through life not knowing all the answers?

An indirect yet very necessary response to that question is to point out that the idea that one can know all the answers is an intellectual, rational, logical-positivist idea, one which contains its own assumptions and ideological baggage. The New Atheists, many of whom are renowned scientists, seem unable to comprehend that their own position is an ideological position, and not representative of the way science is actually practiced: that is, experimentally and provisionally.

I trained in science from a young age and all through my college years. As a result, I am not likely to agree with the committed religious that science is the enemy, because they too misrepresent what science actually is: a method of study of the natural world that is based on observation and provisional questioning.

From my viewpoint, which is a mystic's viewpoint, both the New Atheists and the religious zealots who are their most profound mirrors, are wrong, and wrong-headed. Both of these opposing camps are certain of their own tenets. Both camps are sure they possess the truth, and no one else does. This accounts for their equal zeal in trying to convert others to their way of thinking—as well as their intolerance for internal dissent amongst their rank and file. Again, the psychology of each camp seems mirrored in the other.

A second response to the question, How can you go through life not knowing all the answers?, lies in the tenet that many spiritual traditions hold: That one must learn to be comfortable with uncertainty. Even, with practice, to make uncertainty into a positive value, not merely something one tolerates because one must. This is the way of Unknowing. It turns up as a mystic's wisdom expressed in all the world's major religions; it is as often expressed in Tibetan Buddhism as it is by the Medieval Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart and St. Teresa of Avila. The wisdom of uncertainty lies at the very root of Taoism, and therefore of Zen Buddhism, which is a blending of tenets that occurred when Indian Buddhism was brought to Confucian and Taoist China centuries past.

So it seems to me that one of the aspects of religious sensibility that the intellect-based New Atheists such as Hitchens cannot seem to ever comprehend is this very truth of Unknowing. Once again, they dismiss it as a merely intellectual belief. "Of course we can eventually know everything! That's the magic of human consciousness!" This intellectual certainty of the New Atheists' response to the tenet of uncertainty seems like an almost allergic reaction: an instant denial that is more knee-jerk than thoughtful, exactly like you how can't help sneezing when hay fever strikes.

One the chief lessons of the dark night of the soul is that one must become comfortable with uncertainty. There really is no choice. It's one of the profound lessons of the experience: because you don't know what's going on, or why, you are forced to accept that you may never know what's going on, and may never know why. When you're in the dark night, it's impossible to see the exit. There is no exit. There is only the dark night. It is a self-contained experience, and it takes place inside a container with no doors, no windows.

Eventually, someday, a little light comes in. I knew that I had begun to emerge from the dark night, or at least from that period of the dark night, when it didn't matter to me anymore that I couldn't feel the divine presence anymore. All I could perceive was Mystery, and that was as it should be. The dark night is key to the mystical path of the via negative, the Negative Way, which is the Way of Letting Go, the Way of Unknowing. You have to learn to trust and surrender to the experience of the darkness itself. This is a profoundly non-intellectual experience, because if there is one thing the ego and the intellect have difficulty doing, it's surrender and trust. In the dark night you discover that "trust" and "surrender" and "faith" are all the same thing: just different labels for the same attitude, the same feeling, the same groping, the same experience. I still struggle with this. It's hard for me to trust that "All shall be well again" one those days when the only truth I can confront with certainty is that "pain hurts." This isn't a matter of belief. It's a matter of the religious sensibility.

For myself, one way I have managed to survive the dark night is by discovering that for me, as for many other artists and musicians, the aesthetic sensibility and the religious sensibility overlap to a great extent. My practice of faith is in my art-making, in my music. Johann Sebastian Bach signed every one of his musical manuscripts, Deo gratias, "To the glory of God." I don't have a relationship with the straightforward Christian God, even though like Bach I was raised in and participated in the Lutheran church. It's not that I had an atheistic conversion and left the Lutheran church in a huff of annoyed resentment, it's rather than I outgrew the tenets I had been raised with. The version of the Lutheran church that I was raised in was a very rational church—miracles only happened in the Biblical era, and in our contemporary world they had no more existence. So what was the Lutheran church to do with a boy who started having visions of angels and other worlds from the age of five? I hold no resentment, and I held no resentment back then; rather, I think I just outgrew the Lutherans. By the time I had my first vision of the Void, and the dark night of the senses that followed, I had long since moved on.

(The only point of resentment and distrust between myself and the church I was raised in centered on the issue of my homosexuality. I don't want to make that big a deal out of this. I was not cast out or dramatically condemned the way so many other gay men were; I don't carry those anti-Christian wounds that many gay men suffer for decades after being vilified and ejected from their home churches. My Lutherans were far too rational and liberal-minded for that sort of casting-out and hatred. They were at most just uncomfortable and perturbed. I did leave the church in part, it's true, because I was gay, and felt I had no place there anymore; that was part of my coming out process, as for many other gay and bisexual men. But again I don't want to make it into more than it was. The deeper reason I left was because I had outgrown it. There was no rejection, but rather a realization on my part that I would never really fit in. It was also about my lack of interest in group worship, as opposed to solitary spiritual practice, my preferred mode. About twelve years after I had left my church, I first started seriously reading Thomas Merton, the contemporary writer and mystic. It was through Merton's mysticism and example and writings that I found my way to accepting that the Christian church was not all bad, in fact it had some good aspects. Merton was my path to genuine acceptance, and perhaps forgiveness. I remain unaffiliated with any organized religion, and I remain a maverick, fitting poorly into group worship situations, preferring to follow my own idiosyncratic path wherever the visions have led.)

So for me, making music, making art, making poems, is very much akin to a religious practice. It is a daily practice: I make something every day, even though I don't write a poem every day, or record a piece of music every day. I know a lot of the musicians I work with would agree that most of their spiritual awareness and experience goes into their music. Few of them would frame this using any variety of religious language. Most of them would squirm at the very idea. But some would agree with me that the aesthetic experience and the religious experience are sometimes indistinguishable. One or two might even frame the overlap between the aesthetic and the religious as I have here.

Pity the poor atheists, who have nothing in them that allows them to partake of the aesthetic sensibility, the religious sensibility, or the philosophical sensibility. I express neither judgmentalism nor pity when I say that I would find such a life hellishly empty and excruciatingly hollow, devoid of even a sense of sacredness of place, or of the solace of art-making.

Uphill Struggle Against All Odds

Most people don't realize how much your health colors your perceptions, much less your ability to be creative. Most people don't ever think about it, until confronted with it. Most people who are generally healthy, barring the occasional cold or flu virus, have no clue how those who aren't feel, day to day. They take for granted that normal activity means you can do just about anything you want to. There's nothing intentionally malicious in this, yet things assumed in ignorance can be just as hurtful. One thing healthy people don't ever think of: there are days you cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel, and you have no belief whatsoever that you'll ever get well again. Another thing healthy people never seem able to understand (perhaps till they get sick themselves) is that each day can be an uphill fight, and they take for granted that you can do things that maybe you can't. When you're enduring a chronic illness, having to spend a lot of precious daily energy budget on educating the ignorant can be frustrating, taxing you beyond endurance. But you're stuck with it: education is the only way to get folks to comprehend. (Empathy is usually too much to hope for, but you have to start somewhere.) You're not allowed to just complain, though: you have to be stoic, righteous, and teach. Pity and sympathy are offensive: they're shallow, sentimental, and self-serving, and do not evince real understanding. A lot of the time in life, people listen to your words but they don't hear you.

The past few weeks I've been so weak and sick I've only been out of the house a few times, and never for a long time. For someone who loves spending his time in the outdoors, camera in hand, that can be pure torture. Thank all the gods for my garden. One of the reasons I've been developing a dense, lush garden since I bought my home is to use it to make photographs. But another reason is to be surrounded by half-wild greenery, so that even on a day when I'm too weak to do much I can still walk around the house and get lost in the greening. Gardening is a ripe spiritual practice, full of potential and healing. The lilacs are in full bloom right now; I trimmed a few flowers and put them in a vase in the dining room, their scent permeating the air, the scent of May Day, of Beltane, of spring. Yesterday, before it began raining again, I did some weeding. A half hour of intense on-your-knees work and I was panting hard, heart racing, and had to stop: such is the curse of a chronic illness that produces debilitating tiredness. Any exertion, literally any exertion, can leave you panting.

A few months after my father died, and a few months before my mother also died, I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis coupled with irritable bowel syndrome. (Principal side-effects are debilitating tiredness, a lot of colonic bleeding that can produce anemia, and a severely touchy digestion.) Those are all literally life-changing events; if you think they don't affect how you make art, or affect the art you make, you're fooling yourself. (Medical trivia: if your doctors call it a "syndrome" that means they recognize the symptoms, but they don't know what causes it, and they don't know how to cure it.) I also went on a gluten-free diet at that time. That's all tied together: a very touchy digestive system, with the goal to still eat well while at the same time removing as many irritants from the diet as possible. I also had to cut way back on certain vegetables that are irritants, like broccoli. (I won't miss cabbage; I hate cabbage anyway. The only good cabbage is that which is placed in a clay pot with peppers and other ingredients and buried in the ground for weeks or months, to make authentic Korean kimchee.) There is a stress component to ulcerative colitis: high stress can bring on a flare-up, or relapse, or whatever you want to call it. It's no wonder an attack came on after Dad died. Last fall, a flare-up which is still in progress was brought on by the stress of dealing with my uncle's death, and my aunt's very nasty passage into Alzheimer's. I was able to build up enough strength to go on a roadtrip to California and Oregon this past February, but since I got back home I've been mostly sick. Chronic illness means you can be sick for months at a time; I'm going on seven months of illness right now. It's hard to feel like it will ever stop. I've learned not to talk about it, even when asked, because people want to hear that you're doing fine, not that you're not. No one likes a complainer.

Your appetite goes away, but you might not lose any weight, because you're unable to undertake even normal exercise. You're just too weak. Sometimes I live vicariously. I often enjoy watching Anthony Bourdain's television show No Reservations, which is sort of a punk-foodie show. If Julia Child was the classic American foodie show, the very first foodie show on US television, the equivalent of classical music or French accordion restaurant music, then Tony's show is the foodie equivalent of punk rock, with maybe a little heavy metal thrown in. Even though I'm classically trained, a composer with degrees in music, I've always been more of a punk rocker in attitude than a music-conservatory high-art snob. All music is good, though—as are all things foodie. (Is Alice Waters the Chopin of foodies? Is Ferran Adria more akin to Charles Ives or to Olivier Messiaen? Are raw-food ideologues more akin to bad hip-hop or to bad lounge music? I merely speculate; just because it's fun.) What I love about TV shows like No Reservations is that Tony Bourdain loves life, loves food, isn't afraid to be wrong or look stupid, and lives life at full speed. There are days when I can barely get through the day's chores, and it saves me to be reminded that you can still life with relish, with gusto, with joie de vivre! even when you're not able to do much more than boil rice and fry bacon. I have a small shelf of cookbooks, which I love to keep on hand and sample from with sensual pleasure, even though most days I don't have the strength to cook anything very fancy. Some days plain-and-simple and well-loved beats any four-star restaurant.

There is eros and thanatos in every life experience, including that of being ill. Some things that have no cure come to be recognized as bearing gifts. Focus too much on pathology and you become pathological. (You cannot look into the Void too long without the Void also looking into you.) It's not a matter of trying to figure out the "purpose" or "meaning" of an illness, as though it were a puzzle to be solved; rather, it's about learning to create meaning within the sphere of having to cope with and endure your illness. In other words, how you continue to live life with pleasure and love even when it's a constant uphill battle and you often feel like you're sliding back down no matter what you do. Find "meaning" in that. There are those among the generally-healthy who will try to encourage you by telling you to seek the lesson in the wound: a new age quest for meaning in all things. But such pseudo-wisdom ignores the dark gods, the dark night of the soul, acedia, and the as-yet-untransformed aspects of deity. There are other who quote the Nietzschean doctrine of "Whatever doesn't kill you, makes you stronger." I knew a cancer survivor once who rephrased that, with delicate and forceful relish, as "Whatever doesn't kill you, missed." Period.

Living is not just an act of will. Nor is it a purely intellectual exercise. (Well, I suppose for some writers it is, those whose lives are tepid and lukewarm and untroubled by actual sorrow, for whom is more virtual than real. Long may they wave.) Being sick brings you into an intense awareness of your body unlike any other process; except perhaps open-hearted, little-toe-curling, fulfilling, tantric sex. Healthy people take for granted that they can have sex any time they want to, that the flesh will always be as willing to perform as the soul is to contemplate. Sensual pleasure, even sexual arousal, is available to me even in my nights and days of debilitating tiredness—eros is always present—but fulfillment may have to be postponed. I tire out more easily than I used to; I need to take pauses to get my breath back. I'll state for the record this truth about love and sex, which I have learned from being sick and tired all the time: lovers who expect me to go out of my way, and do all the work of relationship, will no longer be placed first among equals. If you can't do at least half of the work to meet me halfway, you cost me too much effort, and I can't afford to waste my time on you. Period.

I pause for a moment to make something iconic. A piece of digital art, perhaps, or a literal icon. Yesterday as I was out driving around town doing some shopping errands, an idea for a multimedia series of images came to me. All the same image, but presented in several ways, showcasing the various media I work in. A series of small icons, to be tucked away in the corner of the gallery, where some might not even notice. People ordinarily overlook the small corners, anyway, and focus on the oversized, prominent, gaudy big art in the middle of the wall. Big and loud is better, they say; even when it's not.

I know I'm still alive, despite all my worries about not having the strength to work for a living, despite whatever internal bad weather my body is putting me through today, despite shivering on even warmish days because I'm anemic—despite all that, I know I'm still alive because I can still make art. I can still write something, whether a poem or a small rambling essay. I can spend a few hours seated at my worktable transcribing, proofreading and correcting a musical score. I can get out the Dremel rotary tool and carve something, an icon, or a symbol, or a simple picture, into a slab of wood. I can garden as much as I can till I have to stop. I can draw something. If I've become a better writer, more fluid and focused, it's because I've had a lot of practice from having nothing better to do on those days when I've been forced to sit on my ass all day. Of course, now that I've been booted out of, or chosen to leave, every writing community I've ever participated in, I could also be going down a dead-end path in my writing, and not know it. On the other hand, those who booted me out displayed exactly the same sort of intolerant, judgmental ignorance that the worst of the generally-healthy display towards the chronically-ill: since we're not supposed to "dwell on" or otherwise talk about being sick, we get blamed for being unable to live up to the ignorant expectations who don't want to know what's really been going on. Call that judgmentalism whatever you will: some psychologists call it pathological narcissism. Everybody has a shadow side.

One other aspect of this chronic illness is that it's not blatantly obvious. To most people I don't look like I'm disabled, or sick. It's largely invisible to them, until I get into a situation where I really have to sit down, right now, and then they get alarmed. But that's how it is: you can be going along fairly okay, and suddenly you hit that wall of exhaustion, and you have to stop, right now. There's no choice. It's not something you can just push through or tough out in some macho-man fantasy of playing through the pain. For one thing, if you try to just push through it by sheer force of will, you make it physically worse, and you might need two days to recover rather than one. There are always consequences. For another thing, you have to learn how to manage your daily energy budget, or suffer those consequences. So you have to learn to say "No" to things that you do want to do—there's no getting around it, you have to say No sometimes to one thing so that you can say Yes to something else. It becomes a matter of forging priorities.

I pause again to necessarily visit my most familiar walls in the house: the bathroom. I'm thinking about installing bookshelves. Maybe a favorite photograph or two to look at. Perhaps a small self-contained stereo with a CD player. Things to keep the mind engaged while you pass the time where out of necessity you must pass the time.

You have to talk yourself into doing what you want to do. It's an uphill struggle to hook up to that inspiration, to keep your life positive and affirming. Making art is one of the few things I know to do which never fails to improve my day. Even on my worst, most challenging days, making some kind of art, making anything, keeps me feeling like life is worth living. Perhaps most generally-healthy people don't understand how important even such a small thing can be, to give you a reason to go on living. When the quality of suffering is high, the mercy of small gods is deep.

Is it worth it? It can be. It can be worth it just to have gotten through the day feeling reasonably okay about yourself, ready to wake up tomorrow and see what's changed. The uphill struggle against all odds can be worth it, even on those days when you feel like you've just been treading water, not getting anywhere, if you can remember to look back on the day and say: look, an icon; a poem; a piece of music. I bloody well did that! That's good enough.

Acedia & Writer's Block

I am struggling a great deal with acedia. I have a great deal more to write about the topic, to think about, to work on, although I'm not sure I'll share all of it. I'm not going to define my terms at the moment; either I will explicitly do so, later, or I'll let definitions accrue by example, so that they remain organic rather than intellectual. It's too easy to compartmentalize definitions in this intellectual age: to label them is to quickly dismiss and disregard them. We might call it moving on and not dwelling on a topic, but we might also call it by its other true names, avoidance and denial.

Acedia is a very unpopular topic in modern life. It is a word known mostly to religious, rather than to the general public. I have only ever found three or four books that openly discuss acedia by that name, or by its more poetic name, used by the Desert Fathers in the early centuries of the Christian era: the noonday demon. We can be as poetic as we like about acedia: those how have experienced it will recognize it immediately, no matter how metaphoric or obscure I wax. In discussing acedia, my intent to is undertake (again, periodic) self-examination, a true looking-inward as poets of the self must do. Those who have never experienced acedia will all too readily dismiss it as neurotic self-denial, or chronic depression, or narcissistic asceticism. Even monastics, who should know better, have mis-diagnosed acedia in these ways.

What I've learned, without being able to create a narrative of cause-and-effect, is that acedia appears often in those who've undergone the dark night of the senses, and the dark night of the soul. Does it come over one before, during, or after those deeper forms of spiritual shadow crisis? From my own memory, which is usually a good memory, I can't truly decide. I can date when I passed through the dark night; and I can date again, from looking in my journals, when I sank into the dark night again, later. One is apparently prone to periodic relapse, if one has gone through that door. But now, I am on the verge of questioning whether these relapses have not in fact been bouts of acedia, which in the spiritual literature (lectio divina: my morning practice involves reading in the world's spiritual literature, among other practices) is recognized as an aftermath of the dark night. Little tremblors after the big earthquake. Aftershocks that can take years to unwind.

Acedia is not depression or despair, it's more than ennui or a lack of fulfillment in life. It arises in ways that contrast strongly with all of those; and it has other, usually spiritual, treatments. Whether or not one maintains any kind of faith in, or connection to, a spiritual community, acedia is something that can arise in any spiritually-inclined person, at any time, for no apparent reason. In the monastic literature, it is considered a vice: not to judge or condemn it, but to acknowledge it as a temptation that can powerfully distract one from one's own true path. In those lay monastics such as myself, who continually catch ourselves reveling in spiritual ambition and spiritual materialism, acedia can be a blessing as well as a vice. I had a terrifically horrible day yesterday, feeling punched down by life under a bloody full moon, feeling victimized and lame; yet the horrible, familiar, deadly, dangerous, beloved anger that I luxuriated in all day long had, by morning's light after a long night of uncomforting and disturbed sleep, revealed itself to be another bout of acedia. This morning I can recognize yesterday's helpless anger and despair as part of a cycle, not a fatal end in itself. I am sure that I am hard on my friends at those times when I can see no way out, no future possibility of happiness or joy, no exit to the hell I find myself in. I can only endure; and at the darkest hours of those dark cycles, I endure not because I can see any light at the end of the tunnel, or any reason to go on living, but because I'm a stubborn bastard who out of sheer perversity won't give in. At my irreducible core there's a stubbornness and determination that has so far kept me alive, no matter how close to despair's suicidal cliffs I have skirted. That irreducible core, which sometimes presents itself to me as a fierceness and loyalty to life beyond anything I can ever put into words, contains a strength that I identify with the Warrior archetype, which so often chooses the harder path because it is the right path, the right thing to do.

And yet, the gods tend to provide one with what one needs in life, even if one doesn't know one needed it.



So it is that just a few days ago I came across a copy of Kathleen Norris' book Acedia & Me: A marriage, monks, and a writer's life. Norris is a writer who has a knack for synthesizing very old wisdom with a very modern sensibility. Her books are firmly set in the present day, and when she talks about herself, it's usually to point out how old wisdom is still very applicable to modern life. (Unlike writers for whom confession equates with narcissism, Norris never strikes me as presenting an inflated ego.) Most of her books deal in one way or another with ancient monastic wisdom and experience, as transmitted to us via the historic writings of Christian, Buddhist, and other masters. I like Norris' tendency to pull a lot of disparate materials together to show how in fact they're all talking about aspects of the same thing. I recognize this essay style as similar to my own.

So it is that, after a bad day and night fighting the noonday demon, sipping my usual morning glass of orange juice and deciding what aspect of my start-the-day practice to do, I sat on the porch and began to read Acedia & Me. Within a few pages of reading, I encountered this passage:

Disgust with life often has to do with the life one has chosen, and when the bad thought of acedia attacks one's very identity, it causes great pain. The Benedictine monk Gabriel Bunge has noted that doubts about the validity of one's vocation may start small, and only slowly creep into the consciousness. But "with the passage of time [they] erode one's inner certainty, like constant dripping on a stone." This may correspond to what psychiatry observes as the cumulative effect of episodes of severe depression, and its effects—the numbing of the soul, and an increased inability to conceive of ever being happy again, let alone stable—are no doubt similar.

Writers often doubt their vocation and find themselves in droughts that, unlike the normal rhythms of arid seasons and more productive ones, can cause unnatural silences. Joan Acocella observes that "writer's block" is a modern phenomenon, the result of a change in perceptions of artistic inspiration. "Before," she states, "writers regarded what they did as a rational, purposeful activity which they controlled. By contrast, the early Romantics came to see poetry as something externally, and magically, conferred," and were convinced that they would produce their best work in their early years. Wordsworth spoke of poets in their youth, who "begin in gladness," but "thereof come in the end despondency and madness." Later, Acocella points out, the French Symbolists became known for not writing at all.

Another poet, Coleridge, sounds as if he may have been suffering from both acedia and despair when he lamented in a notebook from 1804: "Yesterday was my Birth Day. . . . So completely has a whole year passed, with scarcely the fruits of a month. O Sorrow and Shame . . . I have done nothing!" For young writers the pressure of having to make a living can diminish their ability to concentrate on the work that matters most to them, while older writers fear that they have used up their material and have little left to offer. Writers are also blocked by alcoholism, but Acocella reports that therapists who work with them are finding that many are drinking less and exercising more. It is good to know that I am not alone in this regard. . . .

Acocella finds that some practitioners are baffled by their writer patients' attitudes towards therapy. One expressed disappointment that his patients so rarely wanted to discuss their art. They had sought practical help with a range of mundane issues, including "noisy children [and] obtuse reviewers. And, once [the doctor] helped them deal with these matters, they quit treatment." The therapists was surprised by what I suspect many artists would take for granted, that they "didn't care what underlay their creative functions. They just wanted to get back to it, as long as it lasted." This seems reasonable to me, and thoroughly sane. To Edmund Bergler, the twentieth-century analyst who coined the term "writer's block," and once remarked that he had "never seen a 'normal' writer," I can honestly reply: That's all right. I am not certain I have ever seen a "normal" psychiatrist.
—Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, pp. 148–150

My inner certainties have been eroded, or just taken away, more than once in this lifetime. I've had episodes of severe depression; but not, I think, chronic depression. I actually find it really annoying when friends, doctors, and others suggest that I undertake a drug treatment for chronic depression: it's annoying because it misses the mark about what's really going, and also because it is something other people want you do because it would make them feel more comfortable around you. So what if I don't always cope ideally or perfectly with life, paying the bills, and other mundane, ordinary tasks: who does, really? It's never a good idea to collapse into perfectionism when the spirit is involved. On the one hand one encounters the whirlpool of medication to support social conformity (reputable insider psychiatric studies have indicated that patients are diagnosed with depression at least 25 percent more often than necessary, and dosed with medication for chronic depression at the same rates), and on the other hand the clashing rocks of perfectionism and the expectations one carries about one's own behavior and idealized social and romantic interactions. Medicated social conformity reduces to peer pressure to adhere to an arbitrary set of behavioral norms; perfectionism about idealized images of what people are supposed to be like reduces to internalized self-hatred and bullying. So while I affirm that I've experienced severe depression several times in life, sometimes from being directly targeted by bullies and other forces, every fibre of my intuition continues to raise neon flashing warning signs whenever someone suggests a long-term drug-related cure for an essentially spiritual condition. Monastics have long recognized that both physical and spiritual illnesses will arise within a cloistered community; discernment must be used for treating each appropriately. Look, if you break an ankle, there's no-one better at treating it than an emergency-room doctor or nurse. But if your heart has been broken, there may be other, better treatments than what allopathic medicine can provide. Medicine is very good at applying physical, mechanical solutions to mechanical, physical problems; yet it remains not so very good at holistic approaches to healing.

The issue here is that what we consider "normal" (or normative) is almost universally illusory and defined more by the exceptions than the norm. As a writer who manifests and engages with several non-normative aspects of self, biography, spiritual practice, and sexuality, who has often been defined as an outsider by others even while desiring nothing more than to be accepted, I can testify that it is the distance between our expectations of what we consider to be normative, and who we actually are, that trips us up every time.

After the continuous run of profound, life-changing, spiritual, familial and social crises that I've been dealing with for the past four years, I do not find it mysterious that I continue to have to battle with acedia, or that I continue to have flashbacks to the dark night experience. But what I am not, is numbed-out, drugged into dispassion (I don't even self-medicate with alcohol the way so many writers do), or incapable of ecstasy. I do have long periods where I feel incapable of ever being happy again—but then, happiness is not my goal. I view happiness as a byproduct of life, not a civil right. And I do experience profound joys. I do continue to struggle with high-amplitude waves of ups and downs, good days and bad days, that roller-coaster of emotion and rational response. Some days all I want is to feel is a steady, even keel, or to float at the surface of the waters, rather than sink beneath them. I'm not at all concerned with "the pursuit of happiness," that most pernicious myth built into our culture at its founding—as though happiness, whatever that is, were a godsgiven civil right to which everyone is entitled at birth. The ideology of entitlement is a dangerous set of expectations that lead directly to disappointment, dismay, and even despair. How many people think they're depressed simply because their lives didn't work out they expected them to? It's an uncertain universe, and it's unwise to trap oneself into expectations of guarantees and certainties. People need to learn to ride the wavs of change rather than condemn them as, well, depressing.

It's fascinating to think of writer's block as a modern phenomenon—there is so much truth in that. Writer's block can be so rooted in expectation, in stereotype, that many writers simply aren't self-aware about. Artistic inspiration can be a problem when inspiration goes away; but the problem for the writer might simply be that they perceive a temporary condition (a fallow period, an arid season between seasons of life-giving) as permanent (i.e. the Muses have abandoned one). This is a confusion of expectations, not of sources. I find I don't experience writer's block, because the world itself is so full of inspiration that even on those days approaching my darkest I seem able to write a haiku about something I've observed, or experienced.

At the risk of being labeled a post-Romantic, I typically side in this debate about writer's block with those who extoll the sources of inspiration, rather than with those writers who view writing, in the pre-Romantic manner, as a dominantly rational, purposeful activity. It's all very well to view writing as a rational activity when one writes within a fixed tradition with known and solid rules that define what is poetry and what is prose. But while that could work for poets 300 years ago, today we must somehow come to grips with what has happened since, both historically and literarily. Some view the current lack of a determinative literary-cultural mainstream as chaotic and too frightening (these tend to evolve into formalist poets), while others view the loss of guideposts as liberating (these tend to write among the avant-garde). Both viewpoints have validity, but neither is complete in itself—just as pure inspiration is incomplete without knowledge of the writer's craft, just as rational, purposeful writing that emphasizes the mechanics of craft is incomplete if it has nothing to say, to have been written for or about. Being possessed by the Muses can end in narcissism and confessionalism, but writing without inspiration can end directly in the aridness of acedia at its worst. No wonder poetry and literature are experiencing an existential crisis nowadays of major proportions: no-one seems to be aware of why they're feeling hollow and unfulfilled. Yet treatments for writer's block will remain ineffective as long as writers continue to confuse acedia with depression.

The point here—the treatment for writer's block, if you will—is to change your expectations, to reframe your "writer's block" as a necessary fallow period, and thereby to stop making it worse by obsessing about it. Just let it go. And also let go of any worries that your ability to write won't return, eventually. Nothing prevents inspiration from returning like dwelling on one's ideas of what it should look like, based on what it used to look like.

Metaphorically, artistic creativity has always for me been a watery, fluid experience. As the Tao Te Ching says, referring to water, What is of all things most yielding, can overcome that which is most hard. The term "dryness" used in association with acedia is for me a literal dryness, like the dry, arid season between harvesting and new planting in agricultural cycles. I don't suffer from writer's block, in part, because I view fallow periods as impermanent as everything else. The Buddhist viewpoint is that everything is impermanent, which means that all things change. It also implies that dryness is also impermanent. Acedia is not forever.

This morning, I paused in reading Acedia & Me to reflect poetically on my state of mind yesterday. I wrote two short haiku-like poems in my journal, and a near-monastic laundry-list of points detailing where I was guilty in my expectations of spiritual ambition, materialism, and pride. The virtue of pride is self-awareness, as opposed to blind hubris. Of these writings this morning, here's the short poem I think might be worth keeping; I won't bore you with the rest.

the master sits
silent on the lakeside dock—
the only moving thing is
his fly-whisk

•

Below is a short list of books that deal directly or indirectly with acedia. These are books every afflicted writer can get benefit from reading. None of them are writer's guides, none of them address the tools of the trade, none of them are books of comfort and support-group platitudes. Rather the opposite. What all of these books have in common is an unflinching, necessary exploration of the questions that arise from the encounter with the darker aspects of the self—I won't say creative self, both because the experience is universal, but also because much of this literature assumes that we are all creative selves, one way or another—based on experience, literature, and introspection.

Michael Novak, The Experience of Nothingness. (1970)

Novak interestingly devotes an entire chapter to an experience of nothingness written about by William James in his classic book, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Andrew Solomon: The Noonday Demon: An atlas of depression. (2001)

Kathleen Norris: Acedia & Me: A marriage, monks, and a writer's life. (2008)

Matthew Fox: Original Blessing, particularly the section of the book on the Via Negativa. (1983)

Robert Jingen Gunn: Journeys into Emptiness: Dogen, Merton, Jung and the quest for transformation. (2000)

Very few other books, excepting the traditional monastic literature, are available that address, or even mention, acedia. There are some other spiritual book collections that discuss dryness, sloth, and other aspects of acedia. But this is still new territory. I suspect more writers than every before will come to recognize their own experience of acedia in this still-largely-unknown literature.

Transformations

Transformative writing is more than just changing one's mind on one or two issues. That remains all in the head, all intellectual. Transformative writing needs to be more than just a superficial change. Writing, when it's a process of self-discovery, has the potential to transform the writer, just as with all engaged creative processes; the reader comes along as a voyeur, watching over the writer's shoulder.

Like every other kind of writing process, writing begins with reading. Transformative writing begins with transformative reading. Reading in which you, the reader, are utterly changed. I don't think I ever wrote anything worth reading until I had encountered, and survived, numerous life-changing experiences, including life-changing reading. (I recently drafted a quickly-written list of books that have stuck with me; one can pick out several life-changing reads from that list.) Life-changing reads change not only the shape of your mind, but the shape of your life. Decisions and choices cascade from experience, leading one down paths previously unsuspected. A truly powerful personal experience can completely change your life's directions, and make you discard your plans and expectations, replacing your dreams with new ones. For writers, such experiences can come from reading as well as from life itself.

It needs to be remembered that reading is an inward journey, but no less of a journey than a physical pilgrimage. I've done both, so take my word for it. I do some of my best thinking when on long drives through empty lands—pilgrimages to the desert, to wilderness, to the ocean's wild coast, to the empty spaces. I continue doing my best thinking when I pause in those travels, and begin to write about what I've seen and thought. I write longhand in my road journals when camping at night, between day-long drives. That's often when insights and poems emerge. Others emerge later, when I'm back home, reflecting upon the journey.

There is a mental silence to driving all day long across the Nevada desert, across Arizona under a cloudless sky, across the open prairie states, across northern New England. One must honor this mental silence by not listening to the radio or blasting loud music. Out of this mental silence arises the quietest and most inward of one's own voices. Sometimes when I'm traveling on a train or an airplane, I put my iPod headphones in my ears not to listen to music, but to let other travelers know that I'm being inward, that I don't want to partake in casual conversation, or watch the in-flight movie, or be otherwise interrupted. It's a boundary-marker for an inward focus.

Far too many people use conversation or the radio and TV or their iPods to fill the silences; as a culture, we are afraid of silence, of its unknowing. People fill the silence with distractions that keep them safe from hearing their own inner voices, that arise whenever there is silence. Most people seem uncomfortable with the voices that arise in such silence. It brings them too close to that terrifying Void.

But I've been unable to avoid becoming a Void-diver. I've been thrown into deep water by life so many times, that I've been required to learn how to become a diver, a spelunker, a swimmer. In my mind's eye, there is an underground river of black water that occasionally breaks through to the surface, flowing hard and fast with a lot of power. In my dreams, there are often tidal waves rising up out of lakes, or wells, or fountains, to inundate the land: I've come to recognize these inner symbols for what they are: the power of the unconscious about to break through into the light. When I have these dreams I know I am being put on notice: watch out, something's going to come through soon.

I've had more than one vision of the Void. The first vision was incredibly traumatic; it was kenotic. It ripped away everything I believed, and thought I knew, and left me with nothing. I literally saw the ground fall away under my feet, leaving me suspended above an abyss. The second vision of the Void, which came exactly 4 years 3 months and 14 days after the first vision, healed the first vision of the Void for me. It was during and after the process of these visions, that I first began to write a group of poems I called the Sutras. This writing was also directed and inspired by transformative reading I engaged with during the Void process, between the two visions.

I later realized, from my theology readings, that I had been through what St. John of the Cross called the dark night of the senses, which is characterized by three interrelated spiritual indications:

1. The soul finds no satisfaction in either the things of God or in other creatures. One cannot connect anything; it's all meaningless.
2. The soul is troubled by the impression that it has turned away from God; it interprets its distaste for the things of God as a falling away from Him. There is no satisfaction in any familiar spiritual or religious practice, ritual, or aphorism. The words and actions are all hollow and empty, meaning precisely nothing.
3. The soul finds itself no longer capable of meditating and using the imagination in its prayer, despite fervent attempts to do so. Dryness and acedia are common.

In my case, the two visions of the Void bracketed this experience. The second vision healed the first, I said above: meaning, it gave solace at last, in a mysterious and symbolic way I can only describe poetically, to the feelings of alienation, abandonment, and isolation I had been living with continuously for over four years. It was a balm. I came away from the second vision with no idea that anything new had come in to replace the emptiness, and with no glib words to articulate how I felt, but with a sense that now, again, connections could be made to happen again. The first vision ripped away every idea or belief I had held to that time; the second did not replace what had been taken away, or return them. The second vision did nothing to fill the Void: only now, the Void was no longer terrifying, no longer an existential crisis. There was nothing that needed to be filled.

Since then, periodically over time, I've been required to strip away every idea and belief habitually accumulated from experience, to wipe the slate clean, and start over again. To know nothing is to experience the process of unknowing, of unnaming. This has happened several times in my life since these first two, rather dramatic visions. Each time, the process of stripping away my assumptions and beliefs has been difficult and sometimes painful—we do so love to cling to our ideas about life—but it's been made easier by knowing what was going on. Oh, it's the Void again: the same old familiar kenosis, that old blues empty feeling. Hello there. What's new?

By the way: Let go of the "God" language, if it gets in your way. The dark night of the senses is all about letting go of what we think we know about the Divine, about our images of the Divine (imago dei), about what we imagine the Divine is. One has to rid oneself of these illusions, or delusions, before one can see what's really there. Meister Eckhart once encapsulated this truth in a memorable aphorism: I pray to God to rid me of 'God.'

The transformative reading I encountered during this period of my life—a period in which I was probably more susceptible than usual to being transformed, by experience, by reading—can be listed here, however inadequately, as the book titles that gave me life-changing reading experiences at that time:

Nikos Kazantsakis: The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises
Michael Novak: The Experience of Nothingness
Lyall Watson: Gifts of Unknown Things
Albert Camus: Lyrical & Critical Essays
Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies and Letters to a Young Poet
(some of these I'd read before, yet re-reading them during this period went much deeper)

All this led, almost immediately upon the heels of the second vision of the Void, to a flood of writing longer poetic "spiritual exercises" more akin to Kazantzakis' small book listed above than to the poems I had previously written to date. Life-changing experiences change your art, as well as your artistic process. I wrote a moderately bad chapbook, with one or two good poems salvageable from the mire; I wrote a lot of haiku; and I worked on the Sutras. Actually, for a period of about 18 months surrounding the second vision of the Void, I wrote no poems at all; except a few scattered haiku. That was an important fallow period at the time, which led to new directions, and within a few years my first real poems (in my opinion) in a mature style, in a more mature poetic voice.

I noticed, eventually, that one result of the life-changing experience of the Void, and of the life-changing reading I was doing (especially via the first three titles on the list above), was that I could now recognize the Void in the writings of others. It's like you develop the ability to hear an octave of music, or see a painterly content, that had been previously inaccessible to you. It was always there, perhaps, but now you are able to recognize it. I could see where the Void had touched Dickinson, Whitman, Rilke, and many other poets; I could recognize the Void experience in short stories, in novels. An artist friend of mine once confided that, after she had taken LSD a couple of times, she could see in the art of other artists whether or not they had ever taken LSD; those doors of perception had been opened. My experience was very parallel to hers, although no drugs were ever involved, just the presence of the Void.

I haven't finished the Sutras, as a purely literary work. I don't know that I ever will. There now exist about 40 poems in the cycle, which I have only loosely gathered, and which have as yet no final edited order or structure. I'm still rewriting a few individual poems, while others are in as finalized a form as I can achieve. (Paul Eluard's comment, A poem is never finished, only abandoned, is very relevant to this body of work.) Some dedicated poets I have shown these writings to refuse to label them as poems. (One wonders, in hindsight, if this wasn't the beginning of my eventual move towards refusing to label my writing as "prose" and "poetry," to let those overlap and blend however they will.) I accept that they're not typical "poems," and that in a purely literary sense I have written much better poems elsewhere.

I've ceased to claim any literary quality for the Sutras, therefore, because I have come to understand that Kazantzakis' subtitle, Spiritual Exercises, is precise with regard to the Sutras. I wrote them out of necessity: they were transformative writings. The issue of literary quality is beside the point; the Sutras are as well-written as I can make them, without crossing over that line into "fine art literary poetry" that would dilute their impact as (let's be honest) personal attempts at writing Scripture. In many ways, the Sutras are epistolic: letters to the faithful, letters to myself, to an errant congregation of one. They are transformative writing; their intent was scriptural. They are the records of visions, or visionary encounters and experiences. They are one brand of visionary poetry that I engage with, which transforms me during the writing.

Several of the Sutras are poems of embodiment; in fact, one or two of them are explicitly sexual. But the sexual is the spiritual. That's one truth both the visions of the Void and the process of writing about them revealed. Perhaps it was part of my coming-out process—but a process as much about spiritual experience as about sexual orientation. One "rule" I required of myself when writing the Sutras was complete, even ruthless honesty: no poetic evasions or literary obfuscations; no hiding behind words; no diversions or tactics of concealment. The purpose of this "rule" was to be completely honest with myself: I was, after all, writing to understand, to transform, to reveal myself to myself. I began to study Tantra because I had had spiritual and psychic awakenings during sex, and I needed to understand what was happening; and writing about some of these experiences in the Sutras transformed my understanding of events. How do we heal the past? By changing our interpretations of events.

I have come to believe that, if making a work of art doesn't transform the artist, too, then it hasn't achieved its highest potential as art. I realize that this will be readily misconstrued as art-therapy-speak by some, as fringe blasphemy by others. It's a very highfalutin' critical standard, perhaps quite impossible to live up to. I do not mean that artworks that don't live up to this very high standard have no quality or merit. I mean, as near as I can articulate, that this level is perhaps the next level beyond; the next higher level of art, and art-making.

Some will no doubt claim that examples of this transformational art must be very rare. Yet I find examples of transformational art in all media, all the time; it all seems to so obvious to me, now. Perhaps, like the experience of the Void, or of my friend's experience of LSD, one isn't ready or able to see it in the artworks or writings of others until one has experienced it for oneself. Perhaps, one must be open to the possibility of perceiving a new octave of color shades, in order to be able to actually see them.

Shopping for a New Creative Process 2

Breaking out of the ruts. Changing patterns. Feeling stale, uninspired, static, stuck.

I confess to sympathy about feeling stale creatively, as I do occasionally feel that way. But then, if I'm not feeling poetic, I turn to music, or artwork; and when I'm feeling stuck in music, I turn to poetry. I know from experience that I write the most number of poems at those times when I'm feeling musically unsatisfied. If I'm deep into the music, I hardly write any poems at all. I use Joni Mitchell's idea of crop rotation: do more than one art form, and when one isn't working, switch to another.

As to what to read in these fallow periods (and they are fallow periods, rather than blocks), I avoid reading poetry. I will read science fiction, mysteries, other fiction (but rarely do I read no-brainer bestsellers, for the same reasons I don't eat fast food: healthy nutrition), or a lot of nonfiction. I read about science a lot, or pick up a book on fractals to learn the math behind the art images. That sort of thing.

In other words, to quote Monty Python: And now for something completely different. It works.

But the question might then be asked: But do you never lose the desire to create? Not so much changes in the direction of output, but the switch being turned on or off?

Yes, I've lost the desire to create—but only once or twice in my life, and it was when life was so hard and dark at those extreme times that I actually felt suicidally depressed. (If that's what you're going through, please do go see someone about it.)

Now, normally, I'm not actively suicidal, ever. I've had days where I don't care if I live or die, but it's passive not active. I've also had extreme times where I put my survival in the hands of the Powers That Be—and I'm still here. (So, They must still want me to be here.) I've had some very dark times in my past, and I found myself unable to create during some of those times. But even during the dark night, I have usually still been able to write, or make art, or record music.

Being creative was actually one of my principle ways out of that dark night. I wrote a lot in my journal, most of which is unreadable and not for public consumption. The shamanic music and artwork I do grew out of those experiences (some of which have been written about as visionary poems), and the healing work that I do for others also grows out of having Been There, Done That, myself.

In the past several years, even on my darkest days, I still usually feel creative, because I've learned to convert those times to energy for creativity. (Which is what Tantra is about: it's not just about sex, as most people think, it's about the conversion of whatever energies you're currently dealing with, as they arise, into fuel for awakening.) I then use that energy for making things. Sometimes what I make sucks, sometimes it's great, sometimes it's blah. (Further evidence that the quality of the art we make is not directly correlated to the state of being we were in when we made it.) But I am making something, rather than stewing in my own juices. The process of making is more important than the product. For my own well-being, I have learned to get up and just do something, anything, whatever it is, no matter how boring it is, whether I feel like doing it or not. Cleaning house during those periods is actually very productive, and I do feel better afterwards, because I can see the results of my doing right there in front of me.

Sometimes I think writing is too intangible an artform for us to feel like we've ever actually accomplished or finished something: so I recommend yardwork, or sculpture, or taking a walk long enough to feel tired when done. Something tangible as a result. If you want to feel tangible as a writer, don't do it at the computer, but use a journal book and a pen, and count the pages you've filled after you spewed out everything you were feeling. Do your poems as calligraphy; turn your lines into artwork.

There is a dis-ease of the spirit that was well-known by the Medieval monastics, called acedia. It literally means, dryness of the soul. (It is also means depression, and its Medieval nickname was the noonday demon: the demon that attacks in the light of day, drying us up and making us feel helpless.) Acedia is treatable, by meditation, by doing other things rather than focusing on whatever is making you feel blah, and even by prayer. But sometimes you just have to endure the dry spell, and come out the other side. There is always a reason for acedia, even if we don't know what it is. (Sometimes we never get to know it is.) Maybe you were just pushing yourself too hard, and you needed to stop and do nothing for awhile.

Doing nothing is not a sin. Who says we have to write all the time? That's a heavy load to put on ourselves, for so intangible a product. So, if you're in a fallow period, and you feel stuck, yes, you can change your routines to shakes yourself up an get unstuck. You can also choose to stay with the dryness, and endure it, and see what lessons it has to teach you. You might be a different writer when you emerge from the other side.