Quite without effort,
words coalesce: the bright brooch
of significance.
A wisp, a whisper
of wistfulness, of wanting …
gritted teeth, desire.
Breathing empties me;
a single candle flickers,
sparks a forest-fire.
All futures blossom
on one ancient tree; sways still
the eternal dance.
(08 February 2015)
untitled (Banksy and Baudrillard) (detail)
Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true. (Jean Baudrillard)
In hand, a bunch of diverse quotations, most of them having at least some bearing on the nature of reality. The Baudrillard piece seems to have appointed itself chief amongst them, but Einstein can be heard muttering in the background.
Not unexpectedly – given the two words, ‘obvious’ and ‘enigmatic’ – Google Images quickly finds a picture/text version of the Baudrillard quote. But more interesting by far, I think, is this Banksy art piece with which it is teamed up on the Particulate Matters blog.
Clearly, both Banksy and “cosmicdebris” (proprietor of Particulate Matters) are saying something about the teachings of the Christian Church – particularly, it seems, in relation to the indoctrination of children. Look elsewhere on the Particulate Matters blog and you will find links to other ‘indoctrination’ stories: for example, Monsanto indoctrinating kids at the zoo.
Actually, I’m inclined to suspect that indoctrination is integral to every aspect of living – and that everyone is routinely doing it and/or having it done to them. And it wouldn’t necessarily qualify as either brainwashing or catechism. Let’s put it more simply: we’re all inclined to push our ideas on others – and we call it marketing, persuasion, instruction, education, or teaching.
Be that all as it may, it is not really the main point of my post.
A few months ago, on |cross-ties| – the blog of “The Other” – there was a bit of back-and-forth about the nature of reality. A piece titled Taking a cycle trip led one reader to discuss Derrida’s ideas, noting that in language there is a gap between words and things. I would take this further, asserting that there is a gap between what we perceive and what is actually the case.
A similar gap yawns between the words of every witness and the occurrences they describe – what we thought we saw, the way it seems to us, what we believe to be true, and everything that is ‘obvious’. (And, by the way, since it’s that obvious, why can’t everyone see it our way?)
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus begins with the proposition that “the world is everything that is the case” and ends by reminding us that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Wittgenstein isn’t saying there’s stuff we can choose not to talk about; he’s actually pointing out that there are some things nobody can put into words.
Albert Einstein asserts that “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” Elsewhere, he declares, “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking.” He is not saying that nothing is real; what he means is that everything we experience as real is invented. “The human mind has first to construct forms, independently, before we can find them in things.” (Albert Einstein Essays in Science (1934), p27)
The way science talks about reality and truth is sounding more and more like the words of the ancient religions. For example, Geshe Rabten Rinpoche, a notable teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, says: “The ultimate truth of all conventional truths is their being void of inherent existence. Conventional truths, ie empirical phenomena, exist dependently upon causal conditions, parts and imputation; they have absolutely no existence apart from these conditioning factors.”
But “Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true,” wrote Francis Bacon (1560-1626). Called the creator of empiricism, “[Bacon] established and popularised inductive methodologies for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method, or simply the scientific method.” (GoodReads)
Ultimately, then, as Baudrillard says, whatever seems obvious is, in reality, the superficial manifestation of a profound mystery: the deeper you go into it, the less you are able to say about it.
In Poetry: This Death Is Incomplete (part one of an essay on poetry and death), Amy King talks about “spinning yarns to name things and claim power over them” – which, she reminds us, is not a new concept. In explication, King points us to Alice Notley’s The Book of Lies. The opening lines are especially apt: “Do you believe this stuff or is it a story? I believe every fucking word, but it is a story.”
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An ever-changing draft of this piece has been in my editor for months. There’s so much more I want to say, but it is long past time I got something posted.
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The ten thousand things are born of being.
Being is born of emptiness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein by Ben Richards (1947)
Thus, even the philosophical achievements of the Tractatus itself are nothing more than useful nonsense; once appreciated, they are themselves to be discarded. The book concludes with the lone statement: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” (Tractatus 7) This is a stark message indeed, for it renders literally unspeakable so much of human life. As Wittgenstein’s friend and colleague Frank Ramsey put it, “What we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either.” It was this carefully-delineated sense of what a logical language can properly express that influenced members of the Vienna Circle in their formulation of the principles of logical positivism. Wittgenstein himself supposed that there was nothing left for philosophers to do. True to this conviction, he abandoned the discipline for nearly a decade. (Garth Kemerling)
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The “spam queue” for this blog usually contains a high percentage of nonsense – including insincere and irrelevant compliments (often couched in broken English), or handfuls of disjunct excerpts nefariously grabbed from unrelated and unacknowledged sources – and including links to sites offering goods and services of no interest or value to me.
Once in a while, I find the material interesting – such as this excerpt from what turned out to be (thank-you, Google) an essay by Garth Kemerling dealing with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on a site calling itself Philosophy Pages.
Legion (cover)
The human brain, three pounds of tissue, held more than a hundred billion brain cells and five hundred trillion synaptic connections. It dreamed and wrote music and Einstein’s equations, it created the language and the geometry and engines that probed the stars, and it cradled a mother asleep through a storm while it woke her at the faintest cry from her child. A computer that could handle all of its functions would cover the surface of the earth.
…
The hundreds of millions of years of evolution from paramecium to man didn’t solve the mystery, thought Kinderman. The mystery was evolution itself. The fundamental tendency of matter was toward a total disorganization, toward a final state of utter randomness from which the universe would never recover. Each moment its connections were becoming unthreaded as it flung itself headlong into the void in a reckless scattering of itself, impatient for the death of its cooling suns. And yet here was evolution, Kinderman marvelled, a hurricane piling up straw into haystacks, bundles of ever-increasing complexity that denied the very nature of their stuff. Evolution was a theorem written on a leaf that was floating against the direction of the river. A Designer was at work. So what else? It’s as plain as can be. When a man hears hoofbeats in Central Park, he shouldn’t be looking around for zebras. (William Peter Blatty, in Legion [pp104-5])
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Originally published by Simon & Schuster in 1983, and subsequently turned into what Rinker calls “a more than satisfactory sequel … Exorcist III (which, mercifully, has nothing to do with Exorcist II: The Heretic).” Legion appeared in a Tor paperback edition in 2011 (Tom Doherty Associates, New York).
ensō
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Everything is nothing with a twist. (Kurt Vonnegut, in Slaughterhouse Five)
On the surface, Kurt Vonnegut’s tricky little aphorism seems simple.
Mapping “zero” onto the “ensō” of Zen, the possibilities are endless.
I’m a fan of ex nihilo omnia fiunt … and I love this juicy brush-stroke.
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PS: I’ve no idea whose it is – the ensō, I mean.
PPS: Using Google Images, I found the following link: http://www.jingshen.co.uk/index.html , but it doesn’t attribute the image.
tree (Ansell Adams)
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Follow the thread through;
come ’round right where you began:
it’s a simple gift.
(02 Aug 2012)
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When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky. ([fake] Buddha)
Sky over Washington Monument
Bodhipaksa, a Buddhist teacher and author living in New Hampshire, considers that this now widely-known and popular saying “bears no resemblance to anything the Buddha’s recorded as having said.”
Bodhipaksa subsequently remarks that “Gautama doesn’t seem to have been big on laughter!”
To me, this fake Buddha quote certainly sounds like authentic Zen!
Commenting on the quote, Choying Lhundrap writes about the Tibetan teacher Minling Khandro Rinpoche, who, in her 2012 New Year address, combined it with words from Jean Houston:
“When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back
and laugh at the sky. At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of possibilities.”
Which, for me, gets right to the heart of the matter.
But let’s give the last word to Albert Einstein: “Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one.”
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George Draffan, responding to Bodhipaksa’s remarks, says it sounds like a stanza from a Tibetan Dzoghcen text that translates as:
Since everything is but an illusion,
Perfect in being what it is,
Having nothing to do with good or bad,
Acceptance or rejection,
One might as well burst out laughing!
(from chapter 1 of The Great Perfection’s Self-Liberation in the Nature of Mind, by Longchenpa, 1308-1364)
The pursuit of silence is dissimilar from other pursuits in that it begins with a surrender of the chase, the abandonment of efforts to impose our will and vision on the world. (George Prochnik)
The subtitle of George Prochnik’s latest book is “Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise”.
George Prochnik
“Between iPods, music-blasting restaurants, earsplitting sports stadiums, and endless air and road traffic, the place for quiet in our lives grows smaller by the day. In Pursuit of Silence gives context to our increasingly desperate sense that noise pollution is, in a very real way, an environmental catastrophe. Listening to doctors, neuroscientists, acoustical engineers, monks, activists, educators, marketers, and aggrieved citizens, George Prochnik examines why we began to be so loud as a society, and what it is that gets lost when we can no longer find quiet. He shows us the benefits of decluttering our sonic world.” (from the book description on Amazon)
“As we all know, absolute silence is impossible – it’s the ending of all vibrations, total death,” states Prochnik.
“Rather than just being against noise and telling people who have no experience of silence, ‘be quiet,’ people who at this point literally don’t know what the [word] means, we’ve got to start showing them what it means to be for silence,” Prochnik told us. “We’ve got to give them the space to do it and it’s got to be experiential.”
Zen trash (10 Oct 2011)
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Tomorrow it will be a fortnight since moving day. Most of the cardboard boxes have been sliced open and their contents assigned at least temporary positions in the jigsaw puzzle of my new home.
And what is to become of the large quantities of cardboard and newspaper, the bubble-wrap and the Styrofoam that ensured the safe transit of all my treasures?
Most of the boxes are already knocked down: friends, foreseeing their own future moving day, will store them in their attic. Little by little, the newspaper is going out for recycling. The bubble-wrap, too, has a destination and a purpose.
Perhaps if I put the sheets of Styrofoam out next to the green bins, someone else will pick them up and take them away – which is, of course, how I acquired them.
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The image dates back to October last year, when I noticed one particular stack of trash put out for recycling by a Wellington retailer.
a twisted pair 