Resurrections

from The Surgery Diaries



I spent too much money on a short trip to Minnesota this past week. It was the first time I have been away from home any length of time since the surgery. It was partly a test: to see if I was up to traveling, to dealing with changing the ostomy bag when away from home, with lots of physical exertion when on the road, and so forth. I stayed at a best friend's place in Minneapolis, which was a safe place for all this pushing at my limits. I spent one entire day at the Minnesota State Fair, walking and making photos, and taking in the sights and sounds. And a bit of healthy eating; which you can do at the Fair if you pay attention and take your time. I spent another afternoon wandering with friends around the Renaissance Festival outside of the Twin Cities, which was another test of physical prowess. I got home after the long drive, and only then was I really exhausted. So this was a good trip, I enjoyed myself for the most part, I had fun with friends, and I wasn't overly tired. If anything, my energy is returning strongly enough that it's getting harder to tire myself out. And I spent too much money.

But then, it was one of those trips where I knew I would be going to places where I would be tempted to purchase, so I did budget for the spending. And some of that shopping was every-two-years shopping, not on impulse but planned. I needed a new belt for my pants, which I like to get at one particular leather-work vendor at the Ren Fest, for several reasons, mostly because of quality and durability.

I did a little thrift store shopping on the trips up and back, as I knew I would have to stop regularly when driving to give my body a chance to stretch and relax. I haven't driven like this for months, and I knew it would be a good way to unwind. So I stopped at some places I used to frequent, and didn't stop at others.

One of the books I found on one of my stops was The Wild Braid: A poet reflects on a century in the garden, by Stanley Kunitz, with Genine Lentine. This is a poet who has always gardened, who ahs lived a full century and more, who has always written poems in and about the garden, and who I feel has often had wisdom to pass on. Wisdom not only about writing, but about life.

During the preparation and process of this book, which was instigated by Genine Lentine as a series of interviews and excerpts from Kunitz's published and unpublished writings, Kunitz fell mysteriously ill, and as mysteriously recovered. This is what he says about that episode, words which resonate strongly with my own recent experience of surgery and recovery:

The garden instructs us in a principle of life and death and renewal. In its rhythms, it offers the closest analogue to the concept of resurrection that is available to us.

I feel I experienced a kind of resurrection and I'm absolutely grateful for having emerged and yet I have no delusions I've been promised anything but a period of survival, that's all. There is no pledge of survival beyond that.
—Stanley Kunitz

No pledge of survival. I have if anything become even more conscious of my limited time here in this incarnation, of how much I want to get done, of the limited time that is mortality, and that I am aware of my own mortality as never before. No time at all, it feels like some days, to get enough done.

I look for ways to revitalize myself right now. Some have to be new ways, because in some cases the old ways just don't work anymore. I look for a way to come back to life. With the help of some neighbors, I was finally able to thoroughly weed out and mulch the back gardens, where the plants I want there are few at the moment, but very much alive. Earlier in the year, I had thought the morning glories I had planted weren't going to make it; but now, not only have they come back to life, they're exploding with it.

I feel as though I'm a traveler exploring territory that may not be wholly new, but it has reverberations and images that seem to have a collective presence. It's still a feeling, a sensibility that is mysterious in many ways because I don't know exactly where I am at this moment, in terms of the imaginative, the creative process, but I know I am searching for something different from the terrain I was familiar with. And yet, it isn't simply a new landscape. When I finally come to grips with my night visitor, I'll know more clearly what it is I have in mind, which seems to be a new set of images, but connected very much with my whole history.
—Stanley Kunitz

That disorientation, that not-knowing where you are right now. There is a distinct before and after to my life, now. I find myself grieving for the person that I was, who is no more; grieving as well for the parts of my body that were taken away, but also for the vanished sense of integral wholeness. I constantly stumble, fog-brained, around my days and nights not knowing what to think: everything is new, there are no rules, I don't know what's the same and what's changed till I encounter a situation and find out by doing. It's all still very mysterious. Why is recovery so mysterious? I suppose because rebirth is, too, like birth itself.

Certainty is once again dissolved. All the old maps are useless. We seek new terrain to explore.

I've been through this before, in the dark night of the soul, when everything I thought I knew and believed was taken away, leaving a void in me that stayed empty for years. Every time you try to fill that void inside you, it dissolves back into hollowness, because it's a void that can't be filled with belief, only with experience. I've filled that void two or three times since that first voiding, which was the dark night of the senses, the first stage of the dark night. The kenosis of emptying came later, in the desert.

And now I am emptied again. Grieving again. Feeling often lost. As more than one friend has pointed out to me, even at my current diminished capacity I am doing better than most people do at their best. But it's not my own best, and I know it. I can tell I'm functioning well below one hundred percent. I strive in frustration to improve my functioning, and most days cannot. Moments of revelation happen, when suddenly my mind clears, my eyes clear and I see sharper, hear sharper, than I have in a long time. Everything comes into focus. But such moments are not enduring; I am constantly dragged back down the gravity well into rebellious solace.

Everyone seems to think I'm doing very well indeed, but I don't feel that way at all. I still feel very messed up, very uncertain and insecure. I feel sometimes very abandoned, analogous to a person who has been widowed, and is comforted by all her friends for awhile, but all too soon her friends want her to get on with life, stop mourning her loss, and resume. That can make you feel even more alone than you did before, because the support you still need isn't there any more. People think you're fine now, and they can go on. Often enough this isn't really about you. There are two kinds of support, or solace, that people give: the first kind is the support and comfort they give you when you really need it; the second kind is the kind they give themselves, because they're not comfortable with your process. As though grief had a timetable or schedule to be followed.

I find solace for myself in fewer and fewer things. Some days it's hard to find any solace at all. Sometimes you survive purely by distraction and escapism—for once, escapism is not pathological because it's in support of your survival, not an avoidance of engagement with life. I constantly seek new strategies to find and maintain meaning and purpose in my life, which for now remains uncertain and insecure and mysteriously difficult to like. I've heard that some people who go through an near-death experience are troubled by being brought back, they don't want to be here anymore, and sometimes it's just not a very nice place to be. Pain hurts. Some days it takes all my energy to maintain anything remotely near a positive attitude. It can be a real uphill struggle.

Most days, lately, making art does help. Taking a short roadtrip up to Minnesota did help.

But then I had to come home. Right back into the old patterns and enables. Getting pulled right back into the bucket, surrounded by useless black crabs who won't let go. It's depressing just to have to go home when being away is much more life-affirming. It's cabin fever, to be sure, but it's also knowing how easy it is to let discipline and practice slide when lounging about at home. Days you don't feel motivated become an excuse to do nothing. But forward momentum is necessary, if I'm to get anywhere. I need to break out, I need to make this work somehow. Right now, it's not working. I have to find a solution. But all the old maps are useless. I don't know if I have the strength yet to make yet another new map, fill the void one more time. Only time will tell—paradoxically, since time is also the hell we live in, some days.

What's the point? What purpose is there to any of this? I read Stanley Kunitz's book of poems and thoughts and garlands from his garden, and near the end of his book I find this sublime paragraph, and somehow it all seems to make sense, for now, and to give me reason to go on, for now.

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. And I think the world tends to forget that this is the ultimate significance of the body of work each artist produces. That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.
—Stanley Kunitz

Notes towards an egoless poetry 11: Kenosis

Up front, I just want to be clear that I neither endorse nor rebel against any kind of organized religion. I tend naturally towards Taoism at times, and Zen Buddhism, and panentheism. I am an eclectic practicing mystic, with strong elements in my idiosyncratic and highly personal spiritual practice that come from shamanism, Zen Buddhism, Native American rituals, and the Medieval Christian mystics. The cosmology around which my spirituality is based owes much to Meister Eckhart, to Rumi, to the Navajo creation cycle, to Jim Marion, to Caroline Myss, to MSIA, and to others. Yet I belong to no organized religious groups. I’ve occasionally said that I prefer disorganized religions; which is a mildly humorous, mildly blasphemous formulation I like.

My sources here are primarily those that I have found who articulate things I already knew, but wasn’t clear that I knew, and that I hadn’t yet put into words or formal concepts. My Zen is more of an attitude than a strict practice; I like Dogen’s comment that you don’t need a meditation pillow to practice Zen, your ass will do just fine. I tend to steer clear of words like “God” because they have a tremendous amount of baggage accrued to them. I don’t go to church mostly because I don’t like church politics. I invent new terminologies for the sacred and the divine on a regular basis, which is a visionary poet’s right and pleasure. Lately, because I’ve been on the front lines of caring for my ailing parents, I have felt drawn more powerfully towards the Buddhist aspects of my practice.

As a lifelong mystic, I have most often focused on the common ground and identical concepts that arise independently in so many of the world’s religions. (I find it no coincidence that all of the world’s mystics, in all the world’s cultures, in every era, have all said very similar things.) I find it horrifying that so many conflicts have been fought about small disagreements around religious beliefs and practices. That we as a species are so willing and able to kill each other over sectarian differences saddens me beyond my ability to express in words.

Having said all this by way of preface, it’s time to return to poetry. I prefaced my remarks this way by way leading up to revealing that I read a lot of theology. I get a lot out of reading theology, even when it’s as parochial and self-referential as Western Christian theology can sometimes be.

(I read much more than Christian theology, however. In the original Greek, theos refers to all things divine, and can refer to the thousand little local gods, the greater demiurges, and hierarchy or pantheon of deities one choose to list, and the silent Godhead behind them all, for which they are all masks. It can also refer to the representatives of god, or the gods, which are the Powers That Be or many different functions and names. Theos can refer to Shiva, Vishnu, Mahakala, and Quan Yin just as readily as it can to the God of the three Abrahamic religions.)

So, in my recent readings in theology, I came across the idea of kenosis, introduced to me by a very remarkable short book: Kenosis: Emptying self and the path of Christian Service, by Kevin M. Cronin, a Franciscan priest. (Published in 1992 by Continuum, New York, a publisher whose books I frequently find of great interest and utility.) Fr. Cronin first defines kenosis in his book’s introduction as a resolute divesting of the person of every claim of self-interest so as to be ready to live the Gospel of Christ in every aspect of living, freed from the dictates of personal preference.

I find I prefer Fr. Cronin’s very Franciscan descriptions of kenosis as a process and a way of life over the dry, academic doctrinal definitions found in, for instance, the Catholic Encyclopedia or other dry technical discussions that seem involved more in the letter of doctrine than in its spirit. The traditional doctrinal definitions refer often to Paul’s epistle to the Philippians in the New Testament, specifically the remark: Jesus made himself nothing or emptied himself. The verb is ekenosen, which means “to empty,” that is, to empty the self. One pours out one’s existence on the ground, and gives up everything, only to be fulfilled.

(The section of Paul’s epistle in which this word appears is sometimes referred to as The Kenosis Hymn, or Prayer. An interesting discussion of kenosis from this perspective is The Poured-Out Life.)

Fr. Cronin describes how to put the principle into action. His book is partly memoir, partly meditation: his theology is grounded in practice and encounter, rather than in philosophy, for which we may all be grateful. As I have recently spent a great deal of time in hospitals, in Alzheimer’s care facilities, and with hospice patients, what Fr. Cronin describes as a process of emptying the self to be of service to others to have a great deal of resonance in my current daily life. I serve best when I get out of my own way, and live in the moment, and deal with what’s right in front of; I serve much less well when I dwell on what-ifs and might-bes and nebulous plans for a future that will never arrive except in the usual way, one minute at a time.

Although the concept and word kenosis are borrowed from Catholic theology, let us no set aside any sectarian doctrinal undercurrents and keep our attention here on how kenosis applies to poetry. If you like, set aside the God-language of doctrinal theology and substitute your own words for That which is greater than yourself. You can call it God, Goddess, Higher Self, Higher Power, the Powers That Be, Spirit, or any of a million other masks of god that are known by many other names. The point here is to recognize the archetypal universality of the human encounter with the transpersonal, whether we frame it as the Divine, or as some force that arises within the unknown parts of our own minds (and knowing that these might be the same thing).

Perhaps I am merely repeating myself, or circling around to approach the same island from a different direction. Syncretism and synchronicity are no strangers here, though, but regular visitors who drop around for tea and cookies.

Kenosis is the removal of the self so as to be open for the movement of Spirit to come in. This could be a description of the process of inspiration, of a Greek philosopher describing how the artist is “taken by the Muse.” It speaks directly to removing the “I” of the poet from the poetry.

Kenosis leads to egolessness. We’ve already discussed in this series how the ego tends to fight against being given up, as the ego can only perceive that as its own death; we’ve also discussed poetry’s relation, if any, to mental illness. Kenosis may be a more specific practice, rather than a new one, for achieving an egoless poetry.

Kenosis is a humbling, an emptying, a letting-go. It is transforming. As Fr. Cronin puts it: It’s the secret nature continually reveals every spring after winter; in rainbows after the rain; in butterflies after cocoons. . . . New life after dying to self. In the Peace prayer: “It is in dying that we are born!” (This could be a Buddhist as well as a Christian saying.)

Kenosis in poetry means emptying the mind so that the poem can come in. It means emptying the self to leave room from Something Else to come in; maybe that something else is the poem, or maybe it’s inspiration. Maybe it’s psychological, maybe it’s spiritual. I’m sure it doesn’t matter how you formulate it, as long as it is happening.

There’s a technique I’ve learned over the years for removing memories that are difficult, painful, disgusting, horrifying, but removing them without suppressing them or stuffing them into the shadow, to re-emerge elsewhere as a neurosis. The technique is to visualize a void, like a whole torn in the middle of a book page, a void where the fear or disgust used to be. But the important thing is to hold the void as long as you can, and let the hole be empty: don’t let it fill up; don’t let what was there before flow back in; and don’t try to fill it the way many people will try to fill in a silence in a conversation merely because they are uncomfortable with silence. Let the void be empty, for as long as you can sustain. You’ll find, then, as your mind turns inevitably to other things, that what once bothered you is gone, yet something new has come into you, perhaps from a completely unnoticed direction, and what has come in is often a gift of grace.

Emptying the self in poetry means emptying yourself of plans, intentions, expectations, detailed outlines, thought-forms, desires, structures and forms. The void will get refilled all by itself; you don’t have to do a thing. And your record of the experience is what becomes the poem. Emptying yourself of forms doesn’t mean you’ll stop writing sonnets, but it does mean you’ll look at the sonnet form in a new way: with the scales of expectation and habit removed from your eyes, you will see what’s actually there, rather than what you thought was there. (And that is the goal of all meditation practices, including zazen and monastic contemplative prayer alike: removal of the scales from the eyes.) Maintaining the void in yourself, emptying the self, means letting go of old habits of thought that may not serve you anymore. It means seeing what’s really there, without the filters and thought-forms we usually look through. Buddhist and Christian and Sufi and Taoist teachers alike have all yelled, Wake up! You’ve been asleep you entire life! So wake up!

Kenosis is letting go of what you thought you knew, and waking up to what really is. It leaves a place in you for grace to come in. And sometimes grace looks like a poem.