BUDDHA’S LADDER: A NOTEBOOK | COMMON PLACE NO. 22 | SPRING 2020
Looking for Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, I found a notebook with a set of observations written in 2003. I’ve edited as I’ve transcribed it, making use of 17 years of distance. The title, “Buddha’s Ladder,” refers to my sense that “the self just being the self” rescues us from those situations in our transitory lives when we feel boxed in.
BUDDHA’S LADDER: A NOTEBOOK 11 August 2003 Having and Being Having is the way of the world and since we live in the world, it has a certain inevitability. Thus, we have attachments, things, and even our own, finite life, once as big as the world seemed to be, a boundless expanse like the ocean or the evening sky, and then gradually smaller, more bounded, less full of possibilities. This is Having and, this being the world we live in, it has its necessity. Being is the other way of the world, the way that somehow transcends the categories and boundaries that having makes so explicit. Of the world because we are inescapably in the world, right up to the moment when, from our viewpoint, we are no longer—cease to be. We are in the world, which unfolds constantly. We stake our claims to having in or on or among its unfolding: my house, my marriage, my children, my friends, my books—all and everything that figures as mine, my territory within the world. Our tendency is to use them to fix our bearings, to delimit our being: this is me, a person of a certain description, defined less by who I am than what I have, what I have heaped up. There is some justice in being so judged, even in judging ourselves by our works, by the fruits of our labors, the opportunities life gives us to have, to love, to befriend, to create and procreate. Emanuel Swedenborg argues that life consists of these works—that such work is its purpose. We labor on into eternity, he says, doing the work of the Lord. Life in the world is an opportunity to embrace the good and see evil for what it is. We are what we love, he says. The Lord always coaxes us to do good and to shun evil, but in the world, we are left free to decide for one or the other. In Heaven, too, but Hell is marked by suppression, he says, the kind of state in which an excess of evil is persistently put down by force. In his Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake takes Swedenborg on, arguing that his view of Hell is too mechanistic, and seeing Hell instead as Heaven’s natural counterpart—man to its woman, you might say, or the reverse. He parodies Swedenborg’s reportorial style: “I heard two angels talking…” A bit more When love breaks off, the ego is exposed with unignorable clarity. In retrospect, seeing ego so clearly, experiencing its folly, can be as valuable as being in love. Love has two opposed aspects, and one sees the other as a possession rather than seeing possession as a momentary gift. Marriage seeks to have it both ways by turning Having into the mutual sharing of an expanding life. But marriage has its seasons. While traditionally viewed as a lifetime commitment, it has always had its temporal disjunctions, whether caused by the death of a spouse or the breakdown of the marriage. The sight of men in their fifties with toddlers born of younger wives is one version of this phenomenon. How then does Being fit with this? Living with whatever life throws at us deliberately and with equanimity, deciding what to act on and persevere with despite everything—this is the Way of Being in a marriage. Being is unfolding. The path is the Buddhist metaphor for it, but that word should be understood in a navigational sense, requiring continual adjustment. The Buddhist idea that being isn’t progress reflects its contingency. As with Cavafy’s poem Ithaka, the destination is a placeholder for the whole arc of life. The path is trackless, in reality. It can seem like a road or a path through the woods, but then it can turn treacherous—ravines or whirlpools when a crisis is in full force. It may or may not be of our own making, but our attitude toward it is ours to choose. This is why Being is a better refuge than Having. A crisis puts everything we have in jeopardy, whereas Being has no stake in its absence. We either are or we aren’t.
Still more Not-being is of no concern to Being, while gain and loss are all that matter to Having. We’re conditioned in the everyday to count much as gains that in reality are ephemeral. Traditions bring them into view. We briefly assemble family and friends to mark and celebrate the bounty that our gains make possible, but the losses too are visible—our dead, absent friends, the heap of empty plates, pots, and pans at the feast’s end. When we experience a loss as final, it can be terrible. We’re left numb and raw, yet we usually live on. Being doesn’t cease because we have more or less. Memory brings moments of being into view. At first, they’re wrapped up in having. We remember a lover’s cries, all the attributes that made her what she was. We remember the places where she was and the gap she left, leaving. Any wrenching loss leaves us bereft. 12 August 2003 On paths George Gurdjieff, the Sufi dancing master, called it “intentional suffering.” For the Taoists, the Way is an attribute of the Zeitgeist or prevailing mood—the situation, and the attitude and approach it warrants. The idea of a path is true in one sense and misleading in another. The closeness between two people can feel like Being, but to imagine this is to fail to appreciate its transience. The path is changing life itself; every change asks us to respond, but we make a fetish of the parts of it that, once gone, we intensely miss. It can take a long time to reach the point when life’s unfolding is bearable again. In this state, we can act in ways that are self-destructive and destructive to love and friendship both. We return often to our previous condition, but everything about it takes on a phantom existence that contrasts more and more with actual, unfolding life around us. Our lives are haunted; we seem like ghosts, with a doubled vision. What is happening is that two competing narratives are tearing us apart. One is fiction, the other reality. We struggle to resolve this, and there’s only one way—simply to be, abandoning our desire to have. Only then does the world assume its actual form, unfolding with us in tandem. The phantoms finally vanish. Behind all of this is the notion of practice. I’m thinking of a painter friend who perseveres with her work no matter what. This is a practice that refused to bend to personal reversals, to the hindrances that come with life in the world. We could say it’s habitual, but a practice like this is really intentional. But it’s a particular type of intention that, even when it pictures an outcome, is willing to let it arrive. We may push, but we see quickly if this is a mistake. The arrival comes when it comes and is always a surprise.
Sought out This episode occurred in a gap in her otherwise orderly life. My role was to be the honorable one among her would-be suitors. In the background was her Odysseus, although his Penelope was in this case the one out exploring. As confidants, we were close in a way that resembled intimate friendship but wasn’t. It was momentary, a bridge. After she crossed it, she resumed her orderly life and our contact stopped. Not that we ceased to be friends, but her life became a closed book, as if our conversations never happened. You have to honor episodes like this and be grateful for them. They seem stillborn, but they were never meant to last, but only to be experienced. This can be hard to take, of course. One or another party can feel displeased or disappointed, yet there’s something there that, when remembered later, has a kind of luminosity. I was surprised to be asked to affirm what had always seemed clear to me, and the memory of being the gods’ messenger when it mattered to her stays with me. This was a gift to us both, in reality. There are friendships characterized by a constant taking up that never loses its source. That source is affection and sympathy. Something about the other triggers our empathetic self and enables us to find the thread in each successive encounter, despite gaps in conversation or correspondence. If they’re lucky families too have an innate familiarity that carries things along despite misunderstandings, their love for each other coming close to unconditional. A friend kept a connection with a son alive during his 10 years in the wilderness. Love—let’s call it that—opens us up and makes us receptive and insightful. If empathy falls away, we’re correspondingly less so. As we’re capable of every sort of behavior, it’s a mistake to attribute our actions to better and worse versions of ourselves. We’re all of it. What then is a practice? 13 August 2003 On my nature Charlatans is Claudio Naranjo’s summary of sevens, one of enneagram’s nine types. Sevens, of which I’m one, are caught up in planning and the avoidance of conflict and pain. They’re said to use charm to hold at a distance any situation that promises to be awkward, sticky, or worse. But why or how does this make them charlatans, I wondered? The word came from Oscar Ichazo, who taught the enneagram to Naranjo at sessions he convened in Arica, Chile. Charlatans implies that they aren’t who they seem—that they deceive others. But often the one they seek is to deceive is themselves. Preferring to live in the future, they’re not altogether here in the present. This distances them from authentic life. Such depictions of character are generalizations. When I mentioned that I was a seven to another seven, she countered that I was a five—a detached, potentially voyeuristic observer. But I recognized myself in aspects of Naranjo’s description of sevens. There are several ways to evade the present. Daydreaming is one—I was prone to this when younger. Making lists, while a valid exercise, are an evasion if the activities they describe never get done. But some sevens are charlatans who deliver. They produce what others want to gain sufficient autonomy to have some choice about the others’ presence. Sevens are readily subsumed into “creative employment” because this too is an evasion of the real task of doing their own creative work. What they create for others comes easily to them, is comfortable. Because observation is part of my nature, I drew on it for my own work as well as for work I did for others. Design Book Review is a project I took on initially for another’s sake, and then for the sake of the publication itself and its editors, writers, and readers. The role of publisher came naturally to me. It persisted, thanks to the good work of many hands, but was never really my creation. It was worthwhile, and I constantly saw its possibilities and worked to make it better. This is my personal talent, to further and refine. If I had any vision for it at the outset, it was to intuit an audience of literate professionals.
Authentic products Is it the right word? It may be “activities” I’m after—things I do that are native to me and reflect who I really am. Many of them occur without issue: life that’s experienced but only finds an echo in poems and possibly in other people’s memories. I write to give them resonance and meaning. What is authentically ours, most directly reflects our active shaping? The room in which I write this, once my third son’s bedroom, bears my stamp, although what’s here is largely the work of others. 14 August 2003 On marriage They prove to be true and not true. Take Marriage, which involves a lot of vows and preconceptions—an entire construct that doesn’t begin to account for what it throws at you. Love is wrapped up in it. The two together have proved to be an enduring topic. In light of it, I’ve developed a theory of marriage, although “theory” is too grand a word for some thoughts about it I’ve strung together. Nevertheless, here goes: Marriage is really the extension of family, perpetuating into adulthood a condition that we experience in childhood. To some extent we reverse roles, but it’s familiar territory. Passion and desire figure—they are needed if you hope to get a family going. But marriage evolves to something else. Property, children, and grandchildren figure, but behind them is a tie. Not all marriages have this inexplicable connection, but those that do have a better chance of surviving and even prospering. Marriage is rooted in Having. You marry and have children. You acquire a household to support the family and earn a living for its sake. Marriage is dynastic to the extent that each generation draws on the last and leaves something to the next. Marriage has to find a way to get from passion and desire to something else. Let’s call it “mutuality.” It isn’t just the tie between the founding couple that matters, but also the ties among the family, the sense of being “the same family” and able on this basis to love and support one another. We have a human need to feel supported by life, and an enduring marriage has this aim at its heart. It creates a small, overlapping world that those born or married into it inhabit. One task of marriage then is stewardship—tending to it. It’s this maintaining and cultivating that makes a marriage about more about Being than Having.
Back to Being What drives you to Being is the sheer futility of Having as a viable position when it comes to other people. Families too face the underlying reality that each one has her own trajectory. Her life’s meaning and your own are mutually incomprehensible. What we look for then is what we have in common—hoping that what we share makes our lives together meaningful. This is true of marriage, family, and friendship. The task of Being is to pay close attention to the circumstances as they evolve and to accept rather than resist their unfolding. Marriage demands this, and its horizons are broader than other relationships. 15 August 2003 About time The I Ching advises energetically doing something better, but the origin of my lethargy is not-Having. It leaves me with no energy to start, so I delay. The only antidote I can think of is to make myself work on whatever it is I resist, even if only for 30 minutes. Then do another activity, like running, and come back to it. It’s my own work I’m discussing here, for which there’s no external demand, and care for the self. An activity like walking or running opens us up. There’s a meditative quality to it. It also resembles equanimity or reinforces it. Lately, I’ve found that my own writing has the same effect. The rhythm that suits me is particular to myself. Left to my own devices, I alternate between pushing hard and collapsing, but I prefer to work in increments within a larger expanse of time. Time invites us to shape it to our needs. We set markers within it to know where we are, have been, might be. But time also asks us to be coherent within it—to devote ourselves entirely to what we’re doing. So often, I see people not being present when the situation demands it. It’s like the dimension of time eludes them and so they drift in it. They treat real time as unreal. With no sense of the boundary of the event, they fail to mark it. There’s often another—hungry for encounter, desirous to engage—who’s left disappointed. It’s usually a woman, but the man sees it as an interruption rather than an opportunity to better their relationship. One hazard of marriage is that we only acknowledge the big events—dinners out, weekends away, family vacations—while overlooking the smaller ones that are far more prevalent in the everyday. Moving through our lives in a rush, we miss these opportunities just to be ourselves, to engage one another and remake connection. Ironically, we’re often more careful in this respect of our clients and colleagues. In the context of work, we see the utility of engaging with others and the high price of failing to do so. 16 August 2003 Throwing hexagrams The results cluster around certain hexagrams, like 20, “Contemplation.” The second line, moving, talks about experiencing the outer world through a crack in the door, a narrow and possibly hidden, even voyeuristic viewpoint. This is humiliating even for one in a consciously constricted role, it adds. The changing line points to 59, “Dispersion or Dissolution,” which talks about how gentleness dissolves rigidity. (Life sometimes is like trying to swim while wearing heavy clothes, I wrote in a poem. We have to shed them quickly to save ourselves.) We can be situation-blind. This too is a narrow viewpoint. Hexagram 20 could be looked at through the lens of domesticity. The actual language suggests this. My outlook is often domestically rooted. I’m probably happiest living within the boundaries of the local.
The center of things For the Zen priest and commentator Kōshō Uchiyama, a near-contemporary of my father, “just the self being the self” was the ideal. If lovemaking is a form of being, the conversations in its intervals are moments when we’re at the center of our existence in an empathetic way. It can extend to other aspects of life, I believe, alone and with others. What’s connects them is being open to life as it happens, to remain present. I find that this is a sometime thing that often eludes me when I really need it. Yet we may as well make ourselves at home in these situations. Life is contingent. In many situations, we have little or no control. Doors open and close, in our minds. In reality, there’s no door, just the unfolding world. Death is this sense is people disappearing into its folds, just as they emerged from them. “Live out our days” captures our open-ended and utterly contingent existence. Reading the Dalai Lama, I finally understood the Buddhist slant on being—that because we arise, we exist but in a transitory way we can’t rely on. Swedenborg argues that we persist and that every temporal object corresponds to a spiritual one in Heaven or in Hell. The implication is that we make our Heaven or a Hell on earth first. Emerson chides himself, in his notebook, for not feeling more about the death of his first-born, but what he has really done is to accept it and allow life to resume its course. This is our human condition, the condition of our species and every transitory thing around us, whether it’s conscious or not of this: mountains, even the earth itself. 17 August 2003 On simplifying To launch into a new project, you have to clear away the debris of the last one and give it closure. This is true for relationships of all types. As they evolve, you have to consciously recast or redefine them. The shifts are sometimes painful, but it makes it possible to begin again, to create something new rather than trying to rebuild what was.
Marriage is an instance of this. As with Zen, it has gates or barriers to overcome. The household changes as children grow up and take their leave. You reclaim your house and finally rouse yourselves to reshape it for your own needs. New territories arise within it. Simplicity asserts itself, sometimes ruthlessly, as whatever no longer figures is cleared away. You both benefit when the process of simplification is ongoing, negotiation and curation.
Bourgeois married life is a process of near-constant accumulation, so a countervailing process of paring away—not only by removing things, but also tempering acquisition—is helpful. In our mediasoaked times, the new predominates and the idea of buying once, making things last a lifetime, is lost. Household things were handed down. Appliances and vehicles were built to be repaired, and were. As we get older, we get clearer about this. The household has a different math. Recycling reveals the carnage our disposable culture leaves, week in and week out. Part of simplifying is to let that culture go. A woman carefully peruses the shops, armed with her own taste, not the appropriation of someone else’s view of what to wear. What she buys can be varied—elements in a carefully chosen wardrobe. She attends to what she wants and needs, given who she is—a sensitivity to what fits and suits. The impulse to simplify reflects a desire to limit what we have to things that are essential or beautiful, life-giving in either case. William Morris suggested useful for essential—ideally, tied with beauty. In life, we observe how things perform and then make adjustments, seeking resilience and delight. But these are things. What about our own relationships? Do these others need to be both useful and beautiful to us? And are these qualities the criteria by which we form friendships and marriages, and perpetuate them? Virginia Woolf’s letter to Leonard Woolf, asking if would keep her on for another year, makes a joke of a couple’s shared desire that the relationship continue. Amusement and interest are good reasons to do so, an aspect of the complicity that’s woven into the close relationships—a mutual understanding of the essential things that make a good life possible. They are far more modest than is typically advertised. It begins with a place or places that we enjoy being in—the sources of our day-to-day enjoyments. On barriers We can apply the word to many different aspects of life—careers, relationships, friendships, our ways of being. The word suggests coming up against a hindrance, something that seems to block our path. These barriers are real enough, but aren’t. Still, we feel boxed in. This is the box of not-Having, felt acutely. 18 August 2003 On stability A conversation on the phone with my sister-in-law reminds me that one aspect of marriage—part of its importance—is to provide an element of stability in the lives of others. We have dinner with the son of old friends. We’ve known him since he was four or five, and now here he is with his new wife, a physician. These threads form a circle of friends and relations and their friends and relations—inner and outer rings. A marriage’s persistence owes something to the expectations of these others. Children are a crucial factor, adding a future tense to the whole proceeding. In some sense, marriage is a conspiracy between the generations that bracket the married couple to be the bridge that enables the family to continue. Although childless, Virginia Woolf was not without children in her life. Those of her remarkable sister Vanessa Bell especially benefited from her presence and to some extent carried on her work. Her sister notably sought to give desire a better domestic arrangement, a collectivity with those loved. This is rarely achieved, but she came as close as one can. If it was problematic for her daughter by Duncan Grant, this was because her parentage wasn’t openly acknowledged. That was a step too far for her mother (shown at Charleston, her country house in East Sussex, in Duncan Grant’s painting, top left).
Vanessa and Clive Bell used their marriage to give their independent lives a mantle of respectability. My sense is that they did it for the sake of others and also to preserve their privacy. Within their world of artists, intellectuals, and their patrons, their mode of life wasn’t hidden. Nor was attention drawn to it, of course. They remained in the category of “married with a family,” but more happily, I think, than others whose marriages were largely of convenience. Clive Bell frequently stayed at his wife’s country house, and was an affectionate father to all three of her children. Roger Fry sought to marry Vanessa Bell. They lived together at one point, and the failure of their “little marriage” caused him heartache. Having again. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s relationship wasn’t familial. They seemed bound together as two painters who admired each other’s work and sought each other’s autonomy, yet still formed something slightly larger that protected them both, preserved their creative independence. This is like the Woolf’s decision to start Hogarth Press, to free Virginia Woolf from publishers, especially her stepbrother, and give her full control of her work. What we see is their own work, their “authentic products,” even as they did work for others—decoration and furniture for Fry’s Omega Workshop, and reviews for the TLS. 19 August 2003 Two encounters An out-of-the-blue invitation to join a conversation, during which I foolishly had a glass of wine, pitched me into the past. I was tongue-tied on departing. No getting around the pain of this, and yet later, as I walked home, I encountered an older, dapper man, waiting for a bus. He was telling himself a story: “An eight-month pregnant woman got off a bus…” Somehow this brought me back to myself. Inevitably, we are who we are, each of us a separate person with a different life. We speak from our own experience, never sure if others want to hear it. It was this that left me at a loss for words. On practice In the past few days, I’ve recorded my activities—the time they take, for example—and been deliberate about doing them. At work, I was able to do exactly one thing by this method, and that took much more energy, I found, than comparable activities took at home. The weekend showed how relatively easy it was to get things done if I set my mind to it—how the main obstacles to doing are resistance and distraction. Compared to a household, once the children are self-organizing, the workplace is a hotbed of distraction.
Self-expression is said to arise spontaneously, which I find true of some things but not others. Poems can appear out of the air, and prose pieces sometimes write themselves, but writing in general requires a committed to practice to get things started and completed. Once established, there’s a certain pleasure to be had simply in practicing the art and craft, gaining the facility on which accomplishment depends. On planning I think back to a recent trip to Tokyo and how much time I squandered, unable to venture out alone or to organize my time to meet people and see things. All I managed to do was attend a conference and spend an enjoyable day with a friend visiting Kamakura and then Yokohama to see the new ferry terminal. A bit of planning, I concluded, prods me to act on my own behalf. Even if I end up foregoing or altering my plan, it gives my days a framework, structure and purpose. Otherwise I flail around and sink into lethargy. It seems so pointless and wasteful in retrospect, given the opportunities that travel affords. Life regularly invites us to explore space and time in a deliberate and curious way. This is the real meaning of encounter or its possibility. We only realize that potential when we give it sufficient energy that it opens up to us. We find that energy when something or someone resonates—also a contingency. Planning an expanse of time isn’t a question of thinking out exactly what I’ll do, but setting the stage so that interesting things will ensue. Life unfolds, but we can grease the skids a little. There’s much to be said for getting out and about, but this is hardest to do in periods of heartache or ennui. “Don’t get around much anymore,” as Louis Armstrong sang. I know people who are exemplary in this respect, regularly propelling themselves to one city or another, to movies and theater. I find it admirable and hard to do. My natural tendency is the opposite, and I often battle against inertia and its end point, depression. 20 August 2003 On noticing, etc. A feature of heterosexuality is that aspects of a woman that you’d like to know better drift in and out of view as she shifts her position across a table. Her hair frames her face and you wonder what she’d be like to kiss, how she’d be in bed—no matter what you’re discussing, this passes through your head. From having these idle thoughts to doing something about them is a considerable step. Taking it is timeconsuming and often ends badly. Yet there you are. You accept this as the price of entry or else convince yourself, against all experience, that this time it will somehow be different. Or you forego it altogether. Collaboration and marriage both can have sufficient intimacy that the participants can read and feel affection for each other. They have to be voluntary, mutual, a coincidence of intentions. Transgression and coercion are out of bounds. This pertains to all relationships, in my view. You also have to accept their evolution, whatever form it takes. Only marriage mentions “until death,” a meaningful difference. 21 August 2003 All that is solid Few are as consistently interesting to me, I realize, owing to her intelligence and her forthright and articulate stating of her views. Her prejudices are manifest, but it’s possible to have real conversations and we often do. Our close agreement on crucial things has made things solid that were once in peril. Although hard at times for both of us to accept, the independence of our lives seems always to have mattered. Whatever happened, we made room for it. No matter what, the conversations resumed.
21 August 2003 Planning again How little we trust in life’s unfolding, yet my argument here is not for passivity or fatalism. You have to do everything you can to move things in a good direction, and this means doing it with a certain trust in the outcomes, without trying to anticipate exactly what they are. Nor can the moving be too narrow in its object. Nothing may happen or the desired outcome may be rejected, and you just have to accept this. I have been incapable of doing this, pushing situations with the intent of making them better and only making them worse. It was an object lesson as well as a cause for regret. 23 August 2003 Recapitulation I tell my daughter (whose temporary writing desk from earlier in April 2020 is pictured by her above) about the practice I’ve made of writing. I’m unsure where it’s going, what’s really emerging here other than a stream of disconnected thoughts, so it may be useful to recapitulate. Having versus being is my nominal theme, but what I’ve written here touches on marriage, other relationships, friendships, and selfreliance. It considers work and extols productive or fulfilling activities as a source of energy. We assume that work takes energy, but to me, fulfilling work creates more energy than it expends, much as real passion enlarges our appetite and stamina, our desire simply to be with whatever or whoever gives rise to it. In a poem, I compared its unfolding to an explosion, like the universe first forming. It can feel that way, the expansiveness of passion’s here and now. But work gets done and entropy sets in. What one can do The I Ching advises me today to focus on doing good in small ways—that the accumulation of these acts is what matters. We sometimes say, in relation to a setback, that “nothing seems to help.” This doesn’t mean giving up and really doing nothing, but rather that if we leave off searching for a breakthrough that will somehow clear the air or remove the obstacle, then myriad small acts will appear, better suited to the actual circumstances we confront here and now. Our objective shifts from breaking through in some larger sense to doing some good in the present. And the best one can do sometimes is to do nothing.
Work again What constitutes my real work? So much of what I do isn’t specifically mine, and yet when I look at it, I can see how my involvement with it, and the involvement of others, has made a difference. Our collective efforts have made it considerably better. In a dream I had, I found a gold ribbon in the middle of a London residential street. The ribbon read, “You are an editor.” That I found it there seems telling. My thread is part of the fabric of an everyday, ordinary and extraordinary at once—this seems to be the point of shifting it to London, to an everyday that’s both familiar and unfamiliar, the way a writing project can be, as well. The self just being the self is the most ordinary thing, the thread that runs through every single thing in its ubiquity and uniqueness. Whatever self I am, that’s the self that nature intended, in some sense, but pragmatically we live with inclinations that unfold in a present that demands we attend to it. We can get lost in its demands and also in our inclinations unless we keep them both in mind. To incline ourselves is less about moving toward something, and more about how and why we’re present, what we’re here to do. 24 August 2003 In the heat Late August beats down on Berkeley as I go to buy flowers for the house. The woman selling them complains that it’s unnatural, but I like the heat. I went down to get some coffee, some groceries, and the flowers, but more importantly to shake off a mood prompted by reading an account of a divorce. At the end, the article came back to love. The woman declined to comment and the man asserted that he still loved his former wife and felt they would continue to have some kind of connection. Their marriage failed over money, it said—her sense that he exploited her income to live as he pleased. People marry with expectations. If they go unmet, things can falter. Perceived imbalances can accentuate resentments. We live in a kind of continuous present; divorce, by seeming to put past and future into question, introduces discontinuity. This is true of all ruptures: they leave us feeling cut off from our own lives. In reality, we’re still “here and now.” The past remains what it was and the future hasn’t lost its possibility. Yet we’re bereft. We want what we’ve lost. We feel that the loss viscerally. Ours is a crisis of not-Having. Earlier, I surveyed the room in which I’m writing this, with its art and artifacts. How much daily life is spent in rooms like this? These rooms are familiar, backdrops to my earthly existence. Take them away, and I’m likely to suffer. Hestia, goddess of the household, guards the spirit of these familiar places. She’s opposed to divorce, has seen too much wreckage. Meanwhile, we carry some of these spirits with us. The rooms of childhood, of pleasure and transgression, are side altars in memory. As life unfolds, the most familiar places take on different meanings. We make and remake them, living in and with them. Inclination again Kōshō Uchiyama wrote that we have two possible ways of living: by accident or by vow. Only the second allows us to live freely as “the self that is just the self.” I’ve vowed to write and to “not push the river,” as Fritz Perls put it. 27 August 2003 Speculation When I’m 80, what then? Which of us will still be here? I stake out in advance my small territory of regrets.
EPILOGUE In transcribing and editing this discovered notebook, written in August 2003, I tried not to interject my current thoughts as I went through it. My process was unusual in that I didn’t read it through first, but simply plunged in, moving from one entry to another. A lot of it was prompted by heartache, the experience of which led me to read several books that were helpful in making sense of what I felt—grief and anxiety in particular: Stephen Batchelor’s Alone with Others (1983), A.H. Almaas’s Point of Existence and Facets of Unity (2000), Claudio Naranjo’s Enneatype Structures (1990), and Kōshō Uchiyama’s How to Cook Your Life (1983). Number 4 of Common Place, “Marriage, Family & Friendship,” draws on these same sources and grew out of a typed manuscript of “Buddha’s Ladder” that I abandoned. I’m not really sure which manuscript came first, but probably it’s the notebook, which appears to have been written partly on the train. When I worked on number 4 in 2011, I came back to the typed manuscript, but felt that it was too derivative of the books I’d read. The notebook version is more consistently about my own reflections on what I’d experienced. When I wrote it, I was about a year past the nadir of September 21, 2002, which I remember vividly, like a vignette in a film. It’s odd how dates stay with me and how a decade later, you mark the interval. I’ll probably do it again in 2022. A few other dates have this character, brought along as fragments of things that fell apart. Heaven & Hell Although it was tangential, reading Emanuel Swedenborg’s epic Heaven & Hell (originally 1758 in Latin; mine is 1984) also helped me cross through the ravines, as I called them. The book is an account of the Swedish mining engineer’s multiple visits to the afterlife, enabled by Christ Himself, who visited Swedenborg in a London hotel. Whether one believes this or not, the book riffs magisterially on the theme, “As above, so below.” He argued that everything we experience here corresponds to what we will experience there, except there’s no dissembling. We arrive in the afterlife intact, in a kind of vestibule where angels try to help us. Those who love evil can’t bear the light of Heaven, so they make their way to Hell. And Hell is a hellish place, but the Lord lets the evil ones persist in their delusions—they look fine to themselves; it’s only those in Heaven who see them as they really are. In Heaven, Swedenborg stressed, people also find their desired communities and take pleasure in their productive lives. They pair up, sometimes with a more spiritually appropriate partner, and their goodness makes them grow younger. The progeny of these marriages are the souls who merge with living children, he posited. In short, a singular theology.
Theory and practice Going through the notebook manuscript, I was struck by its contradictions. Desire vies with other things that are possibly more important. And yet. We tend to read desire as a creature of ego, but desire is innate. It arises in a way that feels primordial, although eons of civilization, ideally, stifle its reptilian expression. Where ego comes in is the aftermath, when it all burns away and you’re left with what feels like nothing, or maybe less than nothing. The raging, grief, or terrors of ego—the crisis of not-Having—is tied up in this feeling of devastating destitution. As the notebook records, the price of acting on desire is clear. It’s probably clear quite early in our lives that much of what we want from life involves sacrifices of one kind or another. We make vows, then try to skirt them. And desire is addictive. It sets off a sensory chain that’s so close to Being that we think it’s the real thing. A drug. Experience makes us wary of the aftermath, and that wariness crimps desire. Finally, you no longer act on it. In 2011, I wrote what amounted to a theory of marriage. I argued that as traditionally framed, it puts too great a burden on the couple, who need relief, other people and other rooms, to thrive. I agree and disagree with this, in retrospect. The notebook is clearer about the impracticality of acting on desire, given the nature of our existence. That we plunge in reflects the other alternative, also spelled out: this time it will be different, against all odds. I’ve learned that it takes two experiences of a “life proposition”—something we take up with the conviction that it’s what we should do, given who we think we are—to conclude decisively that we were wrong. This is me. Others tell me they don’t repeat the same mistake twice. To me, a “life proposition” isn’t really a mistake. Often there’s strong evidence that it’s the right move. If there’s another party inviting you to plunge in, there’s a sense that your instincts have been confirmed. It seems like destiny until life proves otherwise again. It seems like destiny and it may be. I feel that destiny does actually influence our lives, but with no assurance that we’ll know what to do with it. We have our intuitions to guide us, but they’re not really much help. To embark on a relationship is to enter a zone of improvisation in which the best intentions don’t seem to count for much. A marriage or a close but Platonic friendship, affectionate but not consummated, makes these best intentions count. They make it possible to sustain and deepen the connection. Life, hemmed in by space and time, affords us that.
A poem I wrote that riffs on the life of Cy Twombly.
Common Place No. 22 | Š 2020 by John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com