You Must Honor Illness

(a Spiral Dance essay)

I've felt pulled off-balance for so long, off-center and not-grounded, and for good reason. I had been ill for twenty years, although it hadn't been diagnosed as what it was till near the end of that time. Then the cure had its own pulls off center, a genuine cure but it comes with its own set of problems, changes and re-creations of what was and what can never be again. I still don't know what the new normal is. If there is one. If there will ever be again a sense of stability and direction.

I spend all this long day waiting, a day where nothing bad happened but I just couldn't get rid of that sense of darkness and void lurking just behind everything you see. Out of the corner of the eye the fabric is ripped away and the play is revealed for what it is, a painted backdrop over nothing. If you turn your head too quickly, the paper rips and you see through the world into that emptiness behind all manifest things.

And that's why I often feel off-balance and fogged out and ungrounded lately. It's just that I don't have any maps any more. All the old maps are useless or incomplete. When you've drifted this far out to sea, there's no sense of which direction to go to find land again. It's water heaving all around, and no smell of shore.

So in the past few days, after a summer's long pull down towards the smiling void, I find myself turning, or returning, to those sources that have given me a sense of center before, a center from which to extend. And so this morning I read, out of nothing that could remotely be called a coincidence, words that linger with me all this long day. Words that come back to me as I fail to find my center and extent once again this late night:

You must honor illness. It gives us time for reflection. As hard as it is, it helps us sort out our priorities. I know there's nothing worse then someone telling you, 'This illness of yours is a gift.' No, it's painful and discouraging. It's not a gift, but it is a time to pull back and take a closer look at one's life.

—Father Sergei, quoted in Mary Swander's luminous book The Desert Pilgrim: En route to mysticism and miracles.

I have tried hard, many times, to honor my illness, and my recovery. Illness has not been a gift. It's been a passage that more or less removed any chance of meeting whatever ambition I had felt years ago for purpose in this life. This doesn't mean there was no direction, but such maps as there were were never more than puzzle codexes in a lost language leading you away from treasure island. Illness sent me adrift and astray. The beneficial knowledge that comes from hindsight about this illness is knowing that in fact my failures in life, so labeled when they occurred, were not a failure of will, not a personality defect, nor a lack of focus. The life-force truly had been sucked out of my blood, blood which tastes like a lost ancestral ocean. I was neither too lazy nor unambitious, I was in truth waylaid by gravitational tides fully veiled until this recent complicated cure.

Still the recovery has been a time of reflection. My priorities, after almost dying, were reshuffled into a new configuration. I know what my purpose here is now, and I know upon reflection what I'm for, what I do best: I am a maker, a bard, an artist, who's really not very good at much else. Self-knowledge is not all roses and lilies, though, as I have discovered I lack any patience for idiocy that would further leech my essence. I know my mortality from the inside out, having almost lost my ability to live. I have a lot to do, and don't want to waste any more time doing it.

So that's the necessary distinction: My illness was no gift, yet it did provide me other gifts. Of self-awareness, of self-confidence in knowing what I'm good at and what I'm supposed to do with it. I'm still recovering. Not what was lost, but what I never had but dreamed. A dream wherein a map guides me no land that ever was, but an island come into being as one discovers it. There's nothing on the other side of those mountains till you cross their range and see what's there, the act of vision itself what solidifies void into form, light into mass. That effortless conversion of energy into matter.

Smile on the Void

A certain lushness in the field of remembrance, before
everything else kicks in and you're brought back to ground.
It's been a long time since Europe called, with scent, sound,
and long summers. Land so long inhabited by humans
that it sometimes loses its own way; but all you have to do is
scrape down to the lime bedrock, the acid soil under the vineyard,
magnificent pink granites of those hills, and it returns
to its own character, its rhythms indifferent of ours. Its own
way and blessing. Today after months of inner gouging
I feel for the first time scraped over, the top bitumen
of scar and sacrifice backhoed loose, exposing the granite under.
Normally I'm unsentimental regolith: where did this filigree
patterned topsoil come from? How long has it been
accumulating in my valleys, behind my curves and waysides?
How long have I been being eroded?

Backlit at dawn, ultraviolet morning glories creep up the windowpane.
There's something tenacious about the riot of color promoted
by flower gardens as riotous as Monet painted in his tilled
back yard. Something permanent in spirit if never in fact.
Always growing, the way you have to grow into a life, cultivate it,
master your own tendency to over-monitor, over-weed.
Let it be a little wild, that's best. The letters I'm writing
these days don't have much more to say than, I'm still here.
That might suffice, as much as I want to write in the margins,
I've survived, yet I need contact, give me constant reminders I live.
Breeze stirs two arbors, one wrapped in vines exploding with
ultraviolet flowers, the other with pink-and-white. Behind the flower
there's a mysterious green force. Lorca said it: Only mystery
allows us to live, only mystery. I cannot fathom this rich
floral bomb blast. I can only touch it, with eye, camera, memory,
while it never ceases exploding. Every day a different mystery.
I look through new glass at the world.

Under the house's foundations, soil slowly concretizes. It could
take me a million years to grow back what I lost. An eon
of grieving. Can you break free the stones in the dirt, fuse them
into a cemented mass, till they too find mountain streams
that will erode them? It all lies in those unfathomable shadows
under the seal, where sunlight never rows. Exposing the house
bedrock seems a blasphemy; although I constantly expose my own,
no, it's stripped away by time's bristled friction, faster than memory
can build calluses or scar over old wounds. Trace a line where flesh
has been erupted, blood seeping as slow as glowing molten rock
emerging at night from a shield volcano in the pelagic Pacific.
We conceal our hurts with florid lines like that. We use all our
verbal ecstasy to cover up one central frightener: it just hurts.
Agloom on Dover Beach, dodging between the legs of the ignorant army,
we weave a pattern into the sand that if we're lucky we can
memorize long enough to recreate in wool, or yarn, sewn squares.
Abolition and acknowledgment: coexisting cicatrice and cure.
Meanwhile the shadows lengthen on their own.

What salvages the summer from its long unavoided wasting
is the return of the year of the cicada. All night in the trees
surrounding the house, their long rise and fall of thrum, rasp,
and creak becomes a lullaby to soothe. This has been a peak year
for insect love. Walking at midnight under a moon trying to make
an imitation of a Japanese ink-case by flirting with cloud wisps
and the tree-line over the river, constant cicadas deafen.
In bed, later, window open, fan on, their clicks still dominate.
In the morning, a neighbor sweeps her driveway, an identical rasp.
Things fall silent when the thrum gets this loud. The noonday demon
emerges from chrysalis, climbs high, sonars. Inside this vast noise
there's an unquiet silence, an echo inside a cave, a whirled skirt of duende
inherent in van Gogh's crows over a wheatfield as the storm comes in.
Near the end, he stopped painting: the world became too vibrant,
an assault rather than a balm. Inside the summer he died, the summer
I too died, that insect hum fills all the world, while emptying it.
Beauty is only the beginning of terror, after all.
How do you back away from this constant re-emergence of void?
This morning I sense even inside the backlit flower a vast gap between
particles: even what we see as solid is more space than matter.
Light reflects off it, it seems determined whereas it's all just
indeterminate electron whorls, like van Gogh's skies, night or day.
You can see too much. The cicada rise and fall is the sound-call of
that very void, its own voice. I'm reminded perhaps too personally
of almost dying; then of actual dying. This reborn morning life
still uncertain, mapless, inexplicable, impossible to explore.
I'll wear a flower in my hair, attracting lifegiver bees, and hope
that's enough. Sing on, locust, sing.

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

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.

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.

George Herbert and the Dark Night

This is a favorite poem (transcribed here), one I feel close to because I feel I have lived it myself. I'm in the mood to re-read it today because the wind and rain are howling outside, big sheets of rain are striking the windows my writing desk is placed before, and the world is filtered as if by a wet windscreen. The trees are moving in the strong winds as though I was driving past at speed.

There is a great deal of literature available on George Herbert and his poetry; my purpose here is neither to reiterate nor rebut the scholarship. (I recommend to you especially C.A. Patrides' books on Herbert.) Of the Metaphysical Poets, Herbert and John Donne are my favorites, in that order. Both of them approach the experience of living with the Divine, and against the Divine, with passion, wit, and humility. My response to this poem, here and now, is a personal appreciation, and nothing scholarly.

What always speaks to me about Herbert's poems are their ability to make you feel as if it was all happening to you, right now. The poems draw you in, and you feel as though you were the actor in the poem, the speaker, the narrator. Herbert's poems were only published after his death, but obviously they spoke to readers then as they do to me now, as they were quickly reprinted a dozen times in as many years.

In The Collar, the spirit of rebellion against limitation and restriction is explicitly, even violently stated. Have we not all chafed similarly under some restriction? Have we not all tried to break free, push away, go out into the world on our own terms, by our own rules and laws, and reject the laws given to us by our forefathers? Have we not all questioned the received wisdom of our birth tribe, as we struggled to become individual, and develop our own ethic? Have we not all felt similar torment, and similar humility at the end? Have we not been so bitter, and so balmed?

When I was living in the trailer in the New Mexico desert, going through my monastic experience of the dark night, I turned to this poem more than once. It reminded me that, even when I felt most cut off from my contact with the rest of creation, there were things I didn't know; forces in operation I could not know about, that were moving things along in a path towards eventual release. There are truths that are only revealed in hindsight. One of these is that, when I felt most alone, most abandoned, I was not. There was still a presence there, aiding me, even if I rejected it or could not sense it except briefly.

That awareness of presence is the core of the religious and mystical experience. I reject conventional spellings for this core experience, although it is one I have had several times. Every established religion has a way of talking about it, naming it, encapsulating it; they are all true, and they are all lies. (Because words can't really contain it.) I am not a member of any established religion, yet I recognize that this kind of experience lies at the root of most of them. In that, they are all separate paths to the same goal, and the goal is to go Home. Me thoughts I heard one calling, "Child"—and one must reply, in whatever words, or wordless waiting, one can muster.

Herbert in many ways was a better poet of divinity than any since; including Donne. He was in many ways the high mark to which we might all aspire. His freshness of approach and metaphor endure, and are still shocking. A collar—what is that, a dog's collar? a priest's collar? a leash on which the spirit lunges, only to be reined in? All of these, and more. What an incredible conceptualization of the relationship between God and poet. The very idea still stuns me, and I have read this poem a hundred times.

There are two older poems from years ago, not among my better poems, that I wrote out of this same experience, which I recognize as having parallels to The Collar. I can rarely approach Herbert's raw power, or even his violent fury in this poem. I've written my fair share of miserable angst-poems about being caught up in the dark night, in spiritual crisis, in acedia. I have looked long in that abyss, and have felt the abyss look back into me. I'll spare anyone from being subjected to these most miserable poems of mine; you probably have similar, or worse. The cri de coeur poem has as many problems, as a genre, as does the intellectual/philosophical poem; although they are different problems.

Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the year only lost to me?
Have I no bays to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.

Herbert speaks for all cris de couer with these few lines, that can be matched only by the limpid despair of Eccelsiastes, or by some few passages in Albert Camus' Exile and the Kingdom. Gerard Manley Hopkins comes close in some of his sonnets, but Hopkins was perhaps directly influenced by Herbert, and had surely read him.

The Collar ends with:

But as I rav'd, and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, "Child";
And I replied, "My Lord."

And the growing violence of the language, the writhing and clipped phrases, suddenly become still, quiet, centered, and contained. Are we reined in, or do we rein ourselves in, given that one word of calling? This is a symbol of what happens when you hear that inner voice calling: everything goes quiet, and the still small voice speaks clearly within you. The world takes on sudden brilliance, colors become brighter, your hearing sharpens as though your ears had become suddenly unblocked and you can hear the thoughts of Canadian geese across the drowned lawn.

Near the end of that dark night, in the desert, there was for me a similar quiet. A silence that appeared as, finally, everything else fell away. A silence that I can still find, in myself, a still point. It has become easier to locate it, even in the storm-stressed whirl of daily lists of things that really have to get done, or else. Even when I'm completely out of sorts, some part of me can still feel and hear that ringing silence that surrounds the call. Once you've heard it, it remains.

Still, I want to go back out to the desert, soon, and pull over to the side of a lost two-lane highway, stop the truck, get out and stand there just listening to the silence. That silence which is the most enduring poetry of all.

Notes & Quotes at Semi-Random 2

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
—Edith Wharton

This speaks to me about lit critic Harold Bloom's coinage of the anxiety of influence. No Bloom fan myself—in fact, I find most of his reactionary ideas about literature to be antithetical—the phrase sticks in the mind. It is about the confrontation of the modern artist (poet, composer) with his or her percursors, and the strength needed to attain one's own artistic "voice" in the face of the weight of art history.

What Wharton is saying here, though, is that even reflected light is still light, and still spreads light. A good performance is itself an experience: the performer matters as much as the composer, in that moment, because the orchestra brings the piece to life from its place on the page.

•

The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.
—Samuel Johnson

Not being a devoted fan of Dr. Johnson, the way many English-language writers are (and tell me I should be too), I nevertheless admire many of his comments, as quotes. This is a pithy one. It speaks to creativity as a balm. it speaks to the experience of art as solace. (Which then, for me, immediately calls to mind Scott Joplin's great piano composition, Solace.) It speaks directly to my own life's experience.

Earlier today, I was feeling a little at loose ends. I had just gone out to bring afternoon tea to, and visit with, an elderly friend who is now at home, being cared for by Hospice, and slowly dying of cancer; she and her family are probably experiencing her last few weeks of life. I chose to divert myself by stopping in at the local drugstore, rather than going directly home. As I walked in the door of the drugstore, Chris Isaak's masterful song Wicked Game was playing on the store's music system. The mood of this song, both melancholy and quiet, perfectly suited me. I bought nothing, I didn't even browse, I just stood in the store listening to the song, and left as the last bars played. On deeper levels, the song's message is very dark and bleak, an existential song about loneliness and isolation: but paradoxically it is also about endurance, and in its romantic complaint, it promotes the very things it claims to deny. It matches the mood, for me, of solace, and of Solace.

And so we get to a deep meaning of Dr. Johnson's quote: merely the act of writing, and reading, of art-making or experiencing great art, can help one endure. And endurance, if you know it's endurance, can lead to enjoyment.

•

To choose against the culture is not merely to disobey; it is to "die." Against what the culture knows is real, true, and good, one has chosen the evil, the false, and the unreal. To be or not to be, that is the question. To choose against the culture is to experience nothingness.
—Michael Novak, The Experience of Nothingness (1970)

This is one of those books I keep returning to, for validation, and also for solace. It was written during a turbulent time, and is full of questions about society, self, and meaning. Novak has gone on, since then, in directions I don't agree with, but his early radical books still speak to me. (And I do still read him, even though I usually disagree with him, now, beacuse he's a gifted writer who presents his case brilliantly.)

But this book, The Experience of Nothingness, is a seminal book for me. I have re-read it several times. It speaks to my experience of the dark of the soul, as well to other events in my life.

This particular quote speaks directly to the role of the artist in modern life: most art-makers are, in our commerce-oriented culture, outcasts. Artists who don't "sell out" are unbelievers in the domineering, universal Religion Of Money. they are heretics, untrustworthy, and are often burned at the stake.

To choose against the culture is to experience nothingness.

And yet it is necessary to do so, if to do so you are following where your art leads you. I'm not trying to promote the stereotyped archetype of the Lonely Hero-Artist here, nor the Starving Artist—both are stereotypes I despise. What I'm promoting here is integrity to one's own vision: the guts to stand up for your art, even if it's unpopular. The mere fact that you have become an artist—against all odds, against family and tribal pressures that to this day constantly ask you "When are you going to get a real job?"—is in itself an act of tremendous courage.

Don't sell your courage short by dismissing it as nothing special. To be an artist in this culture is completely necessary, whether or not the mainstream culture admits it, and is an act of integrity and courage, even when it is overlooked. And it is, also, an experience of nothingness: because you'll be on your own, without your Tribe to support you and validate you. Those are things you will have to learn to gain from within.

•

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as time.
—Thomas Carlyle

Visionary Poetry 7: Orders of magnitude

There is perhaps a distinction between the infrequent Big Vision, which can be life-changing, and the ordinary visionary experience, which can be of lower dramatic content, but no less life-changing, over time. There are many legitimate mystics whose visions are quiet and personal. We hear most often about the dramatic experiences of the mystics, because in part we are addicted to drama, and think that all life-changing experiences have to come as rupture. Well, they might, but they're not required to. They can be slow and quiet, and grow over years into a restlessness that makes a person change his or her life because there is, finally, in the end, no other choice.

I think that the distinction being made between the Big Vision and the little vision(s) is a false one, an illusory one, because it it not in fact a difference in kind, but merely a difference in scale, intensity, volume. Either path of vision can lead us to where we want to arrive. And I think it also to be a mistake to think that little visions can give us only consolation (such a condescending word!), while only the Big Visions can be life-changing. I think that's a real misunderstanding that requires clarification at this point.

I am reminded of the tradition of quietism in contemplative meditation, which, over time, can lead to visionary experiences. But the root of the practice is to let all things rise, and let go of them, and let them pass on, without getting attached to them. This is Meditation 101, and forms of it appear in all of the world's sacred traditions; because it is so universal, it is not limited by or tied to any one religion, but in fact is fundamental to the human birthright. So, we can refer to it as spiritual technology.

Not everyone is temperamentally suited to having Big Visions, and in fact Big Visions can distract us from the Way, because they take up too much energy and attention, especially when other people start oohing and ahhing over them. The quiet mystic, who keeps seeing golden light in the garden of a calm afternoon, is no less a mystic, and the vision is no less a vision, for being less dramatic than having a blinding white light knock you off your horse (St. Paul), or angels dictate to you visual maps of cosmology (Hildegard of Bingen).

We are attached to Big Visions simply because we are attached to drama. Ego likes drama. Psyche does not require it, however.

Meditation, or contemplation, or quietism, is spiritual practice via several practical techniques of meditation practice, the gradual calming and silencing of the mind and the ego's need for drama and self-display. This is a variety of visionary experience: but it is, in the words of Meister Eckhart, "a sinking and cooling," an experience of the void of nothingness, of silence, of non-action. It is the opposite of Big Visions, but no less life-changing. The experience of nothingness, the Void itself, was one of my own key Big Visions, and it was truly horrifying, at first, to feel such emptiness. It was the loss of meaning, of the roots of everything I had believed to that date, and I struggled for years after that vision of the Void to try to find or create a meaning for my existence. (I wrote three Sutras about it, in that series of spiritual-exercise poems.) But the Void is also the place where there's nothing to be done, no big agenda, no great missions or purposes—and that is a relief, as well. The second vision of the Void that was given to me, was of a place of rest, calm, and tranquility. Nothing exists, and there is not meaning, so there is nothing to be done. What a relief!

I think it's possible to get too attached to the Big Vision, and the big dramas around big visions, and come to think that only Big Visions can be life-changing. Experience, and the mystical record, have shown us otherwise. Hollywood is very attached to the Big Vision; yet how much more profound are most small visions, such Little Mysteries.

Now here's a paradox for you: I personally am prone to Big Visions; I've had several in this lifetime, and written about them in various poems over the years; and yes, they've been life-changing experiences. Two of my spiritual teachers, who I view as much further down the path than I, and both of whom are very wise individuals—neither of them have Big Visions. They're both very intuitive, even clairvoyant, if you will, but neither experiences the drama of Red-Sea-parting visions that I experience. So, what's the lesson here? The lesson is simple: intuition is a birthright of us all; guidance is ordinary; visionary and mystical experiences are common and no big deal; they happen to everybody. My Big Visions, which I still get, are no longer so life-changing; they're cumulative, for one thing, and while the first few can seem like a Big Deal, after awhile they're all No Big Deal. The Big Vision becomes the ordinary, everyday little vision.

The whole purpose of practice, according to some visionaries, is to let go of the Big Visions, as well, and realize that visionary experiences are all very ordinary. The secret of enlightenment is really very plain and simple: chop wood, carry water. You don't need to do anything different after the Vision. You don't need to go announce it in the streets, and proclaim it from the hills. You can quietly create ripples of mindful action that have, in the end, perhaps more power to make the world a finer place, because it all goes on quite normally, behind the scenes, below the radar, out of the spotlight. The divine has in more than one tradition been described as "the still small voice," after all the Big Drama has passed on. And you can write poems about your experiences, and the ways your life has changed as a result: quiet, creative responses that create ripples that spread in all directions.

A good sourcebook for reading the mystics and visionary poets, as well as a guide to the mystical pathway, is Matthew Fox's Original Blessing. Each chapter is prefaced by lengthy quotations from various mystics from various traditions, and the annotated bibliography itself is worth the price of admission, and can serve as a reading guide for anyone who wants to pursue this topic. Numerous poets are included in Fox' listings, too, including but not limited to: Rilke, Yeats, Whitman, Vallejo, Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, D.H. Lawrence, Dante, others.

The first stage of the experience of the Void, the experience of Nothingness, is letting go of images and letting silence be silence. Silence doesn't need to be filled: not by our clamoring voices; not by anything. I have noticed, after all I've been through, that I am quite comfortable being silent with my friends; when we are looking at a beautiful sky, just being silent is enough. The vast majority of people can't bear the silence, and need, it seems, to fill that void with chatter.

Meister Eckhart:

God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by a process of subtraction.

The ground of the soul is dark.

Nothing in Creation is so like God as stillness.

Tao Te Ching: The Tao is beyond words and beyond things. It is not expressed either by word or in silence. Where there is no longer word or silence Tao is apprehended.

The paradox, then, is that behind the veil of drama that is the surface of every Big Vision, which we imagine must be life-changing in order to be authentic, is the quiet, even silent, slow absence of drama, and that is where the truly life-changing truthes lie, and are activated.

It is possible to become enlightened while peeling an orange. It is possible to achieve true mindfulness while doing nothing special. It is possible to find such inner stillness that Spirit floods in, with no hindrances made by oir filters and assumptions. All these things happen, every day.