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Posted on by Dave Bonta

Otherwise

Friday catbird blogging

A foggy, rainy morning. While I’m drinking my coffee, the black cat pads down the driveway and up into the woods, seemingly invisible to the catbird, who’s holding forth from the vicinity of the springhouse, or the wood thrush caroling at the woods’ edge. But a couple minutes later, a gray squirrel goes apeshit. Oddly enough, this squirrel’s whiny alarm call doesn’t sound too different from the mewing of a catbird – or a cat. So often, it seems, we come to resemble those we fear. Imitation is the sincerest form of opposition.

*

Checking the log of keyword searches each night, I am often amused, as I expected I’d be when I signed up for statcounter. My extreme verbosity, combined with my decision to archive by month, makes Via Negativa a real sink for Google searches of every description. What I didn’t expect is this feeling of frustration that I couldn’t have been there somehow, standing at some virtual doorway or sitting behind a desk marked INFORMATION, ready to welcome visitors and send them where they need to go. Must be the influence of my father, a retired reference librarian. We’re all about service, you know? In the comment string to a recent post about search strings, my friend Peter flattered me by stating, “I go to Via Negativa instead of Wikipedia. Who the hell cares if the precise question gets answered.” In response, I wondered whether I should give the blog a new slogan: “With misinformation like this, who needs to know the truth?” From simple ignorance, perhaps, one can progress to full-fledged unknowing.

I collect some of the more memorable search strings (together with the pages where they ended up) and ponder how I might have handled them in person…

camp songs about feathers
lead to campy dreams about angels, which may not be suitable for all audiences.

origin, land of enchantment
virgin is for lovers
I [heart] You, Nork

egil vomit
Propulsive verse. Skald ick. Skoal.

st lucy eyeballs the cake before digging in. I’d give my eyetooth to see what it tastes like.

striation kidney bowels
Mm, haruspicy! Don’t believe the tripe.

how do i make a egg salad?
Slowly and carefully, so as not to break the eggs.

swallow hash slime and turn back into a handsome toad.

is the african art humanistic or religious
is the american imagination stunted or over-stimulated

i am a bright steak of light in the sky. i am made when a small piece of space rock enters the earth
and after an hour or two of sky-watching, you are a pain in the neck.

hanging gardens daily life
The hangman likes his job O.K., but doesn’t care for the long commute.

criticisms of the via negativa will be promptly deleted.

has pennsylvania’s mountain laurel bloomed in 2005
not in this blog.

analysis of the african proverb: when it rains, the roof always drips the same way
drip drip drip drip drip

coon dick toothpick
You’ns is ignernt.

catbird and thrush walk into a bar…

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Cibola 107

This entry is part 106 of 119 in the series Cibola

 

Marcos (6) (conclusion)

Well, no sense
in testing the patience of my guides
any further. I don’t know
at what distance the Act
would lose its efficacy: from this
promontory I ought to be able
to establish the crown’s claim to all
the souls in three directions.

This looks like a good spot for a cross, plenty
of oblong rocks to pile up. Odd,
though, how some look almost
like animals, six-knobbed–
like this gray-green stone
in my hand: a carver’s
discarded blank, I guess.
I turn it over

& over. These tensed limbs,
if that’s what they are, the low-
slung head & suggestion of a tail
put me in mind
of something swift & strong.
It slips easily
into my lambskin wallet:
a memento to cheer me on the long
road back.

I want to keep this clarity as long as I live.
__________

the Act: I.e., the Act of Possession. See here.

some look almost like animals: the Zuni regard their famed fetish stones more as found objects than works of art; their unfinished appearance is partly what identifies them as raw beings. They are believed to have once been living animals, turned to stone by bolts of lightning from the twin war gods in order to prevent them from ravaging human beings, and to give hunters access to their superior predatory power.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Default

Other cults taught enthusiasm, the possession of a soul by a god. What seems to be original in Orphism is that it interpreted this sudden alteration, this rapture, as an excursion from the body, as a voyage in the other world, rather than as a visitation or a possession. Ecstasy is now seen as manifesting the true nature of the soul, which daily existence hides.
– Paul Ricouer, The Symbolism of Evil (Beacon Press, 1967)

I’ve been reminded recently of a number of notions of Buddhist “pessimism,” & I think the root of all of them is missing an assumption we make: that when you remove the suffering and confusion, what you are left with is bliss. There’s no need to cultivate it or go anywhere to find it. So the process of achieving paradise is an entirely negative one. Delight is the spiritual default.
– Dale

Judaism is not about chasing the next great aesthetic high. It’s not about just having feel-good experiences where the sky opens up and you feel all, like, connected and spiritual. I’ve had them, lots of them, some really big ones. They’re fun. But they are not the point. The point is staying focused and present and connected to God in all the small moments, the hard moments, the drudge moments.
– Jerusalem Syndrome (via Velveteen Rabbi)

The candle is not there to illuminate itself.
– Nawab Jan-Fishan Khan (quoted by Idries Shah in The Way of the Sufi, Dutton, 1970)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Cibola 106

This entry is part 105 of 119 in the series Cibola

 

Marcos (6) (cont’d)

Beyond this bluff they say we’ll get
a view. There

on the plain. Fields
already green, a distant river glinting . . .

See how that hill rears up
like the hull of a capsized galleon!

And floating in its lee, the long-
sought citadel.
From here it looks like four, five,
six–yes, seven layers
mounting up like clouds
swollen with rain,
shot through with light.

I’ve never seen such an absolutely clear,
such a clean air
as this! And it smells
so sweet, simply to breathe
could require a hundred Hail Marys
in penance. It makes
the city seem close, as if I could stretch
out a hand & pinch between finger
& thumb those ant-like figures
swarming up & down the walls–
Lord forgive me.

Was Mexico in its heyday ever
so salubrious, so full of industry?
St. Francis, I give this whole land
thy holy name. Perhaps
through its power these people
can be tempered
like the wolf of Gubbio.
God willing, thy mendicants
can come to all these principalities
& bring them under the gentle
yoke of Christ. Can instruct them
in the holy days & fast days,
the Sabbath, the communion.
Give them better
tools & crops, perhaps
even sheep . . .

Though they may be less
in need of correction than most.
Who can blame them for being hostile?
The Spanish have been in New Spain
for twenty years, they must’ve
heard something.

No doubt the Negro was simply
too bold, too wild. Too free
with the fair sex–though of course
no conquistador. And as much
as he claimed to cure
through faith, he sure
made a show of his prowess
with pagan rattles. It’s not
for me to judge, of course–
& Scripture shows
God sometimes
loves a scoundrel . . .
__________

it smells so sweet: Thanks to the recent thunderstorm. “I don’t know how a person could ever describe that scent. It certainly wasn’t sour, but it wasn’t sweet, either, not like a flower… To my mind it was like nothing so much as a wonderfully clean, scrubbed pine floor.” – Barabara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees

like the wolf of Gubbio: According to legend, St. Francis once tamed a wolf that had been preying on livestock and people around the Italian city of Gubbio, negotiating a peace deal whereby the wolf ceased all predation in return for regular feeding by people.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Via negativa and the road to hell


Inside the exclosure, a bed of wildflowers. Outside: the deer park. Well-intentioned nature-lovers and humanists of the 19th century won government support for the elimination of all large carnivores from Penn’s Woods.

1. In time, any paradise would grow cloying; one would long for the imperfect and the unpredictable.

2. But paradise by definition is a place uniquely capable of satisfying desire. If it were imperfection and unpredictability the mind craved, it would find them there.

3. Then how does paradise differ from the present world? Solely in the incommensurability between desire and its realization. If only one could learn to learn to desire whatever time and chance send, one would find a paradise in the present.

4. But for that to happen, something would have to change in the way one desires. It could no longer consist of longing for something else, something beyond or outside the present moment.

5. How do we know that the category “desire” is as singular as human languages suggest? A craving for food is very different from a craving for sex, for truth, for music, for possessions, for an addictive drug, for excitement, for the sublime, and so forth. Paradises begin to multiply faster than fruit flies.

6. A whole family of related desires aims at something short of paradise, as traditionally conceived: comfort, security, tranquility. These cannot be trivial, since they seem to be the focus of a great deal of church- and temple-going.

7. “As traditionally conceived”: etymologically, a walled garden. And intrinsic to the idea of paradise, heaven, Buddha-realm, etc. is the notion that it has limits. It cannot be universal. Any attempt to make it so presumes the destruction of the present universe and everything in it. If history teaches anything, it is this: hell hath no fury like a utopian scorned.

8. Augustine thought that the chief joy of souls in heaven would consist in the contemplation of the suffering of the damned below, in hell. From the extremism of his youthful Manichaean beliefs, according to which spirit and matter, saintliness and sinfulness have absolutely nothing in common, he grew to see these things as in some measure symbiotic.

9. Without the possibility of evil, how can the good be good? If one fails to commit evil acts simply because the option is unavailable, how could any action be considered good? Those who long for a universe in which evil would be impossible, and those who fault Whomever for allowing evil to persist: aren’t they simply longing for totalitarianism?

10. Unlimited perfection is a logical impossibility, because for something to be understood as perfect, it must be commensurate with the limited human imagination. No matter how intricate and well working, a machine lacks soul: which is to say, the ability to transcend and defy its apparent purpose. A perfect world, as we understand such a thing, would be devoid of life.

11. At this point, the maze of arguments begins to seem endless. It seems to me that the harder one tries to find a solution that satisfies all cases, the more blind alleys one wanders into. That’s because the very premise of the search is flawed. If life is not machine-like, then it cannot have any comprehensible purpose or meaning.

12. But to stop there and declare that life is meaningless is equally foolish, because it simply reinforces attachment to the feeling that things should have easily comprehensible purposes. Life transcends all considerations of meaning or non-meaning. I could state that existence is inherently mysterious, but at this point, all essentialist statements begin to seem vacuous. Paradox is the only way forward – if forward is indeed where we want to go.

13. This fundamental capacity of nature to elude our grasp is precisely what makes this seemingly archaic notion of paradise or heaven so attractive to me: heaven not as an afterlife destination, but as something basically “at hand,” as Yeshua ben Yosef preached.

14. “Hell is other people,” said Sartre. But suppose one gives oneself up: not as a surrender, but as a conscious gift. This is the bodhisattva’s vow, to forestall one’s own transcendence until all sentient beings have achieved similar transcendence. “For the love of God,” Meister Eckhart advised, “get rid of God.”

15. Paradise is others. Paradise is the world in the midst of creation, which is on-going. The sabbath is not-yet.

16. Only hell is self-sufficient and bounded by walls that cannot be breached: the autonomous ego writ large. To those who inhabit it, it looks very much like paradise. It is safe and tranquil and every bad deed is punished, every good deed rewarded. All hearts beat as one, burning in the fires of unquenchable desire.

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CASSANDRA’S LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

Limits?
There are no limits to this life.
The cup can be brimming over with pain
but there are always more chalices.

Don’t speak to me of soil when you mean shit.
Don’t exalt sacrifice
in the slaughterhouse.
Speak the truth if you can:
that the gods draw their strength
from the dead alone–like mushrooms,
like mold, like the must
that turns water to wine.

Listen you lovers of youth, an augury
Apollo would have me suppress:
Know others as thyself
if you crave ambrosia.

I leave you
intimate communion
with every breath.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Cibola 105

This entry is part 104 of 119 in the series Cibola

 

Marcos (6)

Spirit, guide me now,
direct my steps.
Out of the thirty elders who joined us
for the last leg of the trip–crossing
this high despoblado lousy
with lightning-scarred little trees
tortured by the wind–
only two have stayed with me.
They scarcely bother to hide
their disgust.
As if I, from a week’s
journey away, could’ve saved
their townsmen from the Cibolans’
clubs & arrows!
Every time I move my lips in prayer
I get black looks. Good thing
that thunderstorm hit when it did,
the downpour turning the embers
of rage to melancholy.

If I die short of completing this mission
& submitting a final report, no matter.
Others will come & see
what I’ve seen–a mission field
fertile beyond belief. I know
my Redeemer liveth . . .

But these poor Indians
so many hundreds of leagues
from their homes–& so far,
yet, from the blessed
assurance of heaven–I can’t
abandon myself to God
while their souls still need my guidance.
Faithful beyond any I’ve
missionized among, these Sonorans.

And when Coronado comes,
he won’t be merciful
if I’m not alive
to stay his hand: so even
these other Indians, little though
they know it, need me,
a living dog.
__________

when Coronado comes: Marcos will in fact accompany the Coronado expedition to Cibola the following year, and will suffer humiliation and ostracism when “Cibola” turns out to hold no treasures whatsoever, contrary to his glowing report. He will, however, help to prevent Coronado from wreaking vengeance on the Ashiwi for their initial resistance to conquest.

a living dog: “For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.” Ecclesiastes 9:4.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Right then

The iodized salt psychic has a framed certificate from the board of health mounted behind his rickety office desk. Why, I wonder, is my imagination cluttered with such useless things? Why do I remember that dead leaf on the driveway, turning over like the page of a well-thumbed volume perused by the wind? What does it mean – if anything – that a black cat not merely crosses my path day and night, but is raising three kittens in the barn, all as feral as she? Are all of them black? Yes, as black as the jack of diamonds – aside from the parts that are white, of course. Have you been missing any songbirds? How many should we have? How many do you hear? All of them, I think. But sometimes I sleep with my windows shut.

This morning it was chilly but beautiful. I woke late and sat out on the porch watching, well, everything there was to watch. It’s not as easy as it sounds, because my attention kept wandering back to an erotic dream I’d had. You know. It had me whispering sweet nothings in the morning’s ear: “All my life has been nothing but a preparation for this moment.” Which one? The sun works its way down the side of my house, but I keep my eyes on the woods. Dew drips from the eaves. Yesterday I went to an auction of old farm tools and was thrilled and mesmerized by the auctioneer’s cadence, but I’m not thinking about that right now. I’ve gone 180 degrees, in fact: I’m busy jotting down some haiku in my little reporter’s notebook, which all day long at the auction never left my pocket.

Cool morning.
Crystal-clear air carries
a whiff of sewage.

Indigo bunting,
yellow warbler trade songs –
same syllable count.

Chilly morning.
A chipmunk stops to scold
in a patch of sunlight.

One drums, the other yammers:
the pileateds agree
to disagree.

When the sun clears the top
of the tall maple
I’ll go get breakfast.

And I do. Inside, it’s just another morning. Are there really still these same four walls? How strange! But I have work to do. I need to stop thinking about what I’ve been thinking about and think about something else, I think, and at the very moment I’m thinking this, something goes bump in the crawl space under the floor. Bump, it goes. Gee, thanks, Doc! I’m glad you agree.