DECEMBER 5, 2006

MY GRIEF, OUR GRIEF, THE GRIEF

Just got back from leading a Friday through Sunday residential workshop (at a retreat center nestled in deep snow in mountainous terrain just south of Whistler, BC). Many themes emerged as the group plunged ever deeper, usually beginning with one participant, but more and more quickly involving the entire group. The notion that each person’s work was everyone’s work quickly became not just an idea, but a vital obviousness, felt to the core. As the healing breakthroughs going on became more inclusive, tangibly cupping all, the flow of work, however stormy, made light of our boundaries, both honoring our individuality and our shared being-ness.

There was a lot of grief. It began as “my” grief, then became “our” grief, and finally “the” grief. Huge sadness, huge hurt, huge opening -- carrying us through sorrow to a spaciousness as naturally compassionate as it was vast. In that spaciousness, that exquisitely raw openness, there was, eventually, room for all.

Intimacy with that openness -- which was reached through nakedly going into it, no matter how much it hurt -- made room for a knowingness far more embodied than the knowingness attained through most meditative strategies. In “the” grief, we felt the totality of suffering, and let that feeling pervade us. This did not bring about more sorrow, but rather more love, love that remained itself even as it wept.

One woman, during a particularly deep piece of work, accessed “the” grief and in the midst of it cried out, in so many words, that there would be no real progress until we -- and she meant “we” on a much larger scale than that of our group -- fully grieved. Everyone wept or otherwise resonated with her (as they sat closely around her), knowing her words to be bedrock true.

A famous rabbi, when asked what could be done about the war between Israelis and Palestinians, once said, “Both sides have to grieve together.” Together. The deepest grief is, however solitary its expression, a communal event. It touches all. Its hurt blows the cover off its sky, carrying us far beyond the dramatics of sorrow.

Grief is a passion. Sadness is not a passion, nor is sorrow, but grief is. Like other passions -- rage, lust, ecstasy -- it has the power to overwhelm us, for better or for worse. Grief works best when it is uninhibited. So many want to hush it, to muzzle or mute it, perhaps so as to minimize any potential embarrassment -- such suppression is commonplace at funerals. Anyone who really wails, really lets it out, tends to be looked upon as behaving poorly or inconsiderately (the HBO series Six Feet Under covers this in wonderfully nuanced detail). And there are so many doing therapy years later, dealing with grief that was not expressed, or expressed fully enough, back then.

At the group, there was an abundance of expressive intensity, beautiful, wild, fierce, profoundly emotional and often far-from-quiet intensity -- music to my ears, nothing-held-back music, however rough, soaring into the depths, cutting through long-ago voices that said to be quiet, to keep it down, to shut up. This was not mere venting or emotional masturbation, nor self-indulgence, nor some sort of contrived scream therapy, nor a bid for attention, but rather just life-energy on the awakened loose, cutting new channels in the terrain of being, uprooting obsolete stands. A wild, wild storm it was, with us riding its waves, letting ourselves be carried into the heart of what-really-matters.

So many women have been trained to keep quiet, or to only speak in a sweet or harmonious or nonconfrontational way -- making nice -- or, even if they do get louder, to keep it as an emotional outpouring that’s all but devoid of real, gut-level power. Many women do not have full access to their true voice, and as a result have not sufficiently represented themselves, attracting situations and relationships that have only reinforced their inability to truly speak for themselves.

Being feminine is not commonly associated with getting really angry -- it’s no accident that we have far less flattering labels for female anger than male anger -- with the result that many women have cut themselves off from their capacity for full anger expression. They may do a bit of a Kali dance here and there, and get cranky here and there, but full-throttle anger, in-your-face anger, flaming hot anger? Not so likely. Too frigging scary or threatening for most men, who tend to revert to sperm suddenly trying to get away from the all-devouring ovum in an eggistential turnaround.

Needless to say, there was an abundance of anger coming from the women (and men) in the group, anger that quickly lost it aggression without, however, losing or disconnecting from its passion. Once the anger was unchained and really moving, a great sadness came, sometimes at the same time. And then such grief! Such a dark yet luminous outpouring, such a ripping of the heart, such a motiveless yet so, so deep embracing of the human condition.

Several times, the entire group spontaneously grieved together, with no directive to do so. And what a healing peace followed, not the oblivion of emotional exhaustion, but the deep, natural ease of simply being. Hearts opened until there was but the Great Heart. Our group room was a bit cold -- a blend of chilly weather (we were surrounded by snow) and poor heating -- but there was such shared warmth, such a camaraderie of being, not to mention the wonder of most participants not having known the others only a day ago.

The de-suppression of anger often catalyzes an undamming of grief, of a feeling of loss so immense and deep that it can, eventually, embrace other losses — losses that belong to all of us — thereby making deeply significant links not only across space, but also through time. Thus do we move from the interiorized community of voices that make up “I” to the community at large, widening the circle of our reach, our love, our caring.

In such an intensity of grief, however agonizing it might be, there usually emerges some sense of a sobering ease, the ease of simply being — not being this, not being that, but simply Being. This is not the bliss of immunity-seeking, fear-fueled transcendence, nor that resulting from any other flight from painful feeling, but rather is the natural joy of simply existing, equally at home with the high and the low, unable to be other than compassionate toward all.

Such is the prevailing condition of the heart that, though already broken, is nonetheless sufficiently open to have room for all that we are, however dark or lowly. In grief, the heart’s broken in the same way that a stream rushing down through a mountainside forest is broken — it’s still cohesive spiritually, still unified in essence, its elemental dying only strengthening and affirming its fundamental aliveness, its rough-and-tumble course only furthering its dynamic yet utterly vulnerable surrender.

Where reactive sorrow contracts and isolates us, unimpeded grief expands and connects us, grounding us in the very openness that realigns us with Being.

Grief can be as spacious as it is earthy, existing as a feeling of loss unpolluted by drama, a deeply personal yet also significantly transcendent sadness pervaded by a more-than-intellectual recognition of the inevitable passing of all that arises. As such, grief provides not only a bridge between the personal and transpersonal (with neither having a “higher” status than the other), but also between pain and love. That bridge awaits our step, our crossing.

Every loss must be felt right to the core
Or else there’s a greater loss
Sadness must leave its mind to become grief
Or else it’ll just settle for repressive relief
So let the pain sweep through
And the even truer ache
And especially the bare need
The love beyond love
The pure heartbreak

DECEMBER 8, 2006

WHEN FAMILIARITY VANISHES

Sometimes I’ll be talking with someone, and all familiarity will go, not gradually, but in a millisecond. Across from me will be sitting a uniquely embodied sentience, making sounds that miraculously somehow still make sense to me, even as I wonder how I can possibly generate any response, let alone a fitting one.

To my further astonishment, I don’t feel myself generating any response, but rather simply being aware of a response emerging all by itself, feeling my tongue, palate, throat, and breath all coordinating, seemingly independent of “me,” to produce sounds -- in less than a moment’s notice -- that aptly correspond to what has just been said to me. Even my astonishment is astonishing. No fear, no concern, just naked wonder, and a wonder beyond wonder. But within a few minutes or so, familiarity usually returns, and we continue on.

What’s most unastonishingly astonishing is the ever-present awareness that contains and effortlessly witnesses the whole show. Awareness of that awareness is not in itself astonishing, but simply an absolutely natural state. Totally unfabricated. And utterly and inescapably intimate with all that it is awaring (the paradox of which leaves the mind speechless or frothing somewhere past the far edge of meaning), right down to the most solid-appearing objects, which have seemingly vacuumed themselves free of interatomic space, unless they’ve been divested of their status quo familiarity and other such mirages. We are, to put it mildly, more than we can imagine.

I remember as a preschooler wandering through grassy meadows ablaze with sunlight, my mouth as open as my eyes, wonderstruck, curious, wide open, taking in the buttercup light, the wild green fragrance, the soft dark ground, the hulking oaks and maples, the cloud-covers, the sounds of horses and dogs and sudden breezes, almost seamlessly co-arising, pulsing with the very same energy and presence that was breathing me in and out, and walking me through it all.

Most things didn’t have names, and if they did, they meant almost nothing. Everything felt alive, highly charged, connected, like waves of a single great sea. I was the child of two children, but that only began to intrude on my consciousness when I was four or so, enduring my first forced immersion in kindergarten. I could barely speak, and then unintelligibly,except to my mother’s keenly attuned ear. Familiarity had yet to take hold of me, and I was in no hurry to quicken the arrival of its grip. Even when school began, I remained elsewhere internally, unable to assemble myself so as to fit in, even in the most rudimentary way. Within a year, though, I’d made the world as accepted by others my world, if only for survival reasons. Magic was still around, but vastly diluted.

And now, less than two weeks from my 59th birthday, the magic has been back for a long while, coexisting with all the rest of it, including the increasing busy-ness of my life. The ebb and flow of familiarity is mysteriously familiar to me, even comforting, increasing my acceptance of the passing of everything. Other worlds beckon, until I realize that this very world, this very ordinariness, is that otherness. Literally.

What we are looking for is looking through us at itself, playing peekaboo with its infinite creations. Everything is its mirror, its birthing place, its funeral pyre. These words are now like tracks, animal and otherwise, upon the immaculate white of my computer screen, tracks that speak of the whereabouts of stranger-than-strange doings, events, invitations, doors, reality-unlocking visitations, and much more, about which I have nothing more to say than a down-on-my-hands-and-knees hallelujah...

When cracks appear in reality
Admitting slivers of another locality
Injecting you with dark unfamiliarity
And reaching for another drink
Or changing how you think
Doesn’t help to get you back
You’ve a chance to ride a truer track
If you don’t get so zealous
Behind the wheel of ambition’s megabus
That you run over what’s always already here
Already more electrifying than fear
So let the cracks widen, let them spread
Let curiosity get the better of dread
Let the unknown dissolve in a deeper unknown
Let yourself see more than what is shown
The undoing that you fear is already here
The mystery of mysteries closer than near
Beyond all familiarity we eventually must go
This we fight, and this we know
When cracks appear in reality
Admitting slices of another locality
You may seem to be near insanity
But the light that streams through
The light that holds every view
Is none other than you

December 18 , 2006

ENDING SUFFERING BY ENTERING PAIN

Pain can be such a pain. For the past week I’ve had a near-constant pain camping out in my right shoulder, intense enough to keep me from getting much sleep. Various experts have had a go at my shoulder, but it’s only gotten worse. I’d get through my day, fighting my exhaustion, then go to bed as relaxed and open as possible, but within a minute of laying down, the pain would intensify, stabbing so hard and continuously that my efforts to find a sleeping position with less pain didn’t get very far. There was no escape. Taking Advil didn’t help. Nor did visualization, massage, or dips into self-pity. I had a visitor that wasn’t about to leave, less than a breath away.

My biggest challenge was to not turn my pain into suffering (I’ll describe the difference at the end of this piece). It’s had its pluses, especially in deepening my meditations -- there’s nothing like the intense electricity of near-continual nerve pain to bring the mind into sharp focus. I could either space out -- giving in, to take but one example, to the siren call of the television in the next room -- or I could go deeper. There was nothing heroic in my choosing to go deeper; the alternatives simply didn’t interest me. The further I went into my pain, the less I suffered; my shoulder still ached like hell, and I still felt wiped out, but I was not unhappy.

I’m remembering a time, almost 27 years ago, when I was in physical (and emotional) agony for what seemed like a very long time. I was in India for the second time (my first time, in 1972, had featured me getting very ill, from eating some tainted food), and in less than a week found myself holed up with amoebic dysentery in a dirty little hotel, spending almost all of my time in my room, a tiny cement cubicle with a hole-in-the-floor toilet, a single bare lightbulb overhead, and a single bed seemingly designed to torture whoever was foolish enough to try to sleep on it. The following poem is about that time...

DYSENTERY DHARMA

Two weeks I’ve lain in this dirty little room
Sweating out the stink and the hundred plus degrees
Coughing sneezing dizzily heaving
Staring through my ragged breathing
Jagged pain camping screaming drunk in my skull
Punching out my eyes from the inside
Outside is India in all its sublime glory and rot
Matted cries and fragrant dust and clattering color
Anchored by sledgehammer pain am I
Squatting over an unflushable latrine
Twenty or thirty times a day
Frying with fever am I
All day on my back covering my swollen eyes
Resting in the gaps between exhale and inhale
My room a hothouse overgrown with my illness
The ceiling fan cools me
No more than my dips into self-pity
I shiver and sweat and sometimes float
Agony my deep and secret intimate
The shape of my flesh burned onto my bedsheet
My focus straying no further than my feet
Ugliness in one hand, surrender in the other
My suffering now and then naked grace
Telling me to stop craving another place
Something’s coming ungripped here
Amidst the phlegmy barkings of dawn
And the too-bright daytime shows outside
As I awaken in this feverbox
This filthy cement cubicle
This groaning space
So uncomplainingly full of my labor
And the birthing I must face

Pain is fundamentally just unpleasant sensation. Suffering, on the other hand, is something we are doing with our pain.

Where pain is consciously felt hurt, suffering is the manipulation of that hurt into drama, a drama in which we’re likely so busy acting out — and being literally occupied by — our hurt role that we’ve little or no motivation to stand apart from it.

When we’re busy suffering, we lack healthy detachment. We’re then removed from the naked reality of our pain — our attention being more on our storyline than on the nonconceptual rawness of our pain — but not removed in a way that permits us to focus more clearly on what is actually going on.

Suffering is pain that’s gone to mind, pain that’s doing time in mental cells, mental hells.

Suffering may seem to keep us near to our pain, but it actually keeps us from getting as close to our pain as we need to, if we are to live a more liberated life.

Suffering houses pain, but keeps it in the dark.

When we turn on the lights, the dramatics of suffering become transparent. Then the uncensored reality of our pain gets our full attention, particularly at the level where it is but unpleasant sensation. Then we can enter our pain with care, clarity, and precision, getting to know it from the inside — its fluxing weave and interplay of shape, color, texture, intensity, pressure, location, layering, and so on.

Often when we say that we’re in pain, we’re not really in our pain, but rather are only closer to it than we’d like. But in fact, we’re still outside it.

As we become more intimate with our pain, we find that we are less and less troubled by it. Suffering is, among other things, a refusal to develop any intimacy with our pain. In fact, suffering only jails our pain.

But the cage door is open, already open, as we’ll see if we just turn around, away from the screens upon which our suffering projects its stories. Then we begin to awaken, to exit from our entrapping dreams. Awareness upstages suffering, dissolving its grip on us, taking us to the heart, the core, the epicenter, of our pain.

And there, in that place of hurt, we meet not more hurt, but more us. More healing, more peace, inviting us into awakening’s heartland.

If we want to end our suffering, we must enter our pain.

December 21 , 2006

MORE THAN ENTERTAINMENT: THE FOUNTAIN

I don’t think I’ve ever disagreed so strongly with so many movie critics over a film. Their distaste for and dismissal of Darren Aronofsky’s latest work, The Fountain, was not all that surprising, given that it’s a film that cannot be truly appreciated, let alone fully resonated with, unless one has already spent some quality time in spiritual bootcamp investigating -- and not just intellectually -- core issues like the nature of identity, love, being, and death, not to mention the means through which these can best be explored.

My guess is that if most of the critics who trashed The Fountain were to be presented, in all sincerity and minimal superficiality, with the question: “Who are you?” (a warmup for “What are you?”), their answer would probably be to supply their name and perhaps occupation. If pressed further, the result would likely be not more in-depth or mind-transcending responses, but rather only a turning away from or ridiculing of the question, as if it were just some sort of sophomoric navel-gazing exercise. Yet the very immaturity that they might attribute to such an enterprise simply exposes their immaturity and adult-erated take on topics that really matter.

Those who have not significantly explored their own depths -- psychological, spiritual, emotional, and otherwise -- are probably going to toss The Fountain into the same bin as What The Bleep Do We Know, What Dreams May Come, and other such movies (whether they liked them or not), confusing the regressively unitive and otherwise prerational elements of such films with the transrational (and transegoic) elements of The Fountain.

There is an ecstatic dimension -- sometimes shatteringly, heartbreakingly beautiful -- that shows up throughout The Fountain which is very different than conventional spiritual upliftment. My heart felt ripped open and raw watching it, as deep grief and an equally deep joy coursed through me, as if in fully embodied recognition of what we truly are. Instead of just providing some fascinating information (data-fodder, mystical and otherwise, for the mind) or a tasty bit of spiritualized entertainment, The Fountain provides us with a potentially transformative opportunity, through our unguarded participation in its multidimensional poetics, as well as its often epiphanous intimacy with the inherent paradoxes of Life.

Like good poetry, The Fountain doesn’t explain, but reveals. It raises profound questions, and offers something more real than answers. This may be an irritant to film critics who are busy doing time in their headquarters, but is a sublime balm, Life-affirming and succulently transcendent, to those who have begun to awaken to their true nature.

In The Fountain an edge is played that most other “spiritual” films don’t go near or even acknowledge, an edge that doesn’t console or provide spiritual robes for the conventional self, but that instead shakes it to the core before blasting it far beyond what can be imagined. This edge, lined with reality-unlocking implications, is touched, at least in its darker dimensions, by a few other films, such as Mulholland Drive, but The Fountain dares to bring deep relational love into it, without slipping into romanticism, spiritual and otherwise. The agony of love when death comes nearer than is wanted is honored as much as the bliss of love when everything lines up, even as a deeper love, a death-transcending love, is allowed to arise slowly but surely from the debris of all this, in eloquently nuanced detail and flow.

Film critics who viewed most of the offerings of so-called spiritual cinema would probably be turned off by the terminally sweet tone, simplistic patter, shadow bypassing, and one-dimensional acting that pervades many of these. But to toss such lightweight, spiritually sentimental films into the same bin as The Fountain simply indicates an inability to distinguish pop spirituality from a deeper spirituality.

And what is that deeper spirituality? First of all, it cannot be known through merely rational means, however much the rational mind presumes to know it. Film critics who are identified with or holed up in their thinking minds, unquestioningly believing themselves to be who they think they are and confusing cleverness with intelligence, can only see prerational spirituality (that is, intellectually childish, superstitious, overly ritualistic spirituality), and so lump all spirituality into the same prerational basket, much as Freud famously did with religion, labeling it with facile ease as “New Age” or as some kind of metaphysical mush or babble.

The love in The Fountain is an ever-intensifying mix of everyday love, big love, and supreme love, unburdened by the solemnly clichéd pronouncements (i.e., “we’re all one” or “we’re all connected”) and sugary excesses that often pollute spiritual cinema. The agony and the ecstasy are both very much present -- and heart-rippingly easy to feel --along with a sense of tacit revelation that I found incredibly moving.

And threading through all of it is the presence of death, on many levels. Death that is fought, death that is the opposite of Life, death that is the enemy, death that is a disease, death that is but a doorway, death that serves and deepens Life, death that makes possible a deeper Life, death that enriches love and Love. There is so, so much that the protagonist (masterfully played by Hugh Jackman) is dying to see, and through him, through his struggle, his trio of apparent lifetimes, we become more intimate with what we are dying to see. And dying to be.

The Fountain invites us to die into a deeper Life -- not through some kind of teaching or transmission of information, but through wholeheartedly participating in the journey of the protagonist and his wife (beautifully played by Rachel Weisz). We are then less spectators watching a movie, and more initiates in a temple of revelation. And why not? Why can’t cinema serve our awakening?

To really get into this, we have to get naked, showing up in (and as) undressed Being, allowing ourselves a second innocence, an awakened innocence that strips us of our knowledge and automated certainties and deposits us in the Open Secret of the hyperbole-transcending Mystery of our existence. If our mouth drops open, so be it; if our buttoned-up case of mistaken identity starts to give up the ghost, so be it; if we’re brought to our knees, and prayer becomes not something we do but are, so be it.

Yes, The Fountain is just a movie, but it is also that rarest of creatures, a movie that has the power to transport us not just into the mystical but through the mystical, taking us into what we never really left, but only dreamt we did. Use it as a catalyst for touching what matters most of all; I can assure you that it is clean, free of harmful additives, non-addictive, and worth revisiting.

December 27 , 2006

The Death Of Cool

It’s getting decreasingly cool to be cool.

This doesn’t, however, mean that it’s cool to be uncool. The evaluative framing that is central to cool is slowly but surely coming unglued, leaving cool out in the cold, dying to chill, to somehow avoid being just more cultural roadkill.

Cool has been around for a long time, occasionally shoved into the background by upstart (and usually quickly dated) variations and offshoots -- like awesome, neat, hip, sweet, and bitchin’ -- but is being put out of business not by any of these, however cool they may be, but rather by its own operational core.

What this means is that the stylized detachment, emotional invulnerability, fashionable dissociation, engaging disengagement, and contrived appearance of immunity -- that in various combinations underlie and animate cool -- are now more signs of dysfunction than of having it together.

How cool is that? No more cool than wanting to be cool, but with one difference: Cool itself is losing its privileged status (“If the neighbors are doing it, it can’t be cool”), and is coming undone. The sense that cool ever really was where it’s at is fast unraveling. Cool is losing its cool, losing its composure, suffering a long overdue exposure.

Cool is run by shame, and not just run, but driven.

Of course, cool doesn’t look like it has anything to do with shame, other than perhaps to make others feel shame when they are in the presence of someone apparently cooler than them. But cool is shame that’s run about as far as you can get from shame. If we didn’t already feel shame -- which is the nastily gripping, self-shrinking sense of being seriously flawed in the eyes of a convincingly critical audience, outer or inner -- we wouldn’t have so much investment in being or acting cool. There are other tracks that shame can take, as when it is converted into aggression (both self-directed and other-directed) or withdrawal, but cool looks a lot better than these.

Cool doesn’t -- mustn’t -- look ruffled, not because it is courageous or knows how to get centered when there’s a crisis, but because it’s very attached to looking good, and ruffled just doesn’t look so good. Cool does not, does not, does not want to lose face -- and what is shame, but a painful loss of face?

Cool kicked in during the 1950s (getting overassociated with jazz), picked up steam in the 1960s (far out!) and 1970s, and really got rolling in the 1980s and 1990s, especially when it shacked up with postmodern thought and its self-fertilizing cleverness (and relegation of truth to a term only the ignorant used). Cool had come a long way since its early hipster pretensions, gradually infusing the mainstream, with The Simpsons’ “insider” cultural asides at the nicer end of the spectrum, and Pulp Fiction’s glamorous, ultra-hip violence at the other, and the smartly cutting, almost gleefully cynical patter of “serious” comedians like David Letterman somewhere in between, with the whiter, more fashionable shades of rap pervading it all. In an era of unprecedented collective psychic numbing, cool helped keep the numbness alive and dressed to kill.

Cool is autocannibalizing itself. The less cool it is to be cool -- so that it becomes cool not to be cool -- the more that cool will fade. When cool really sees itself, it doesn’t see cool, but shame in I’ve-got-it-together drag. Behind its shades, cool is losing its cool. The lid is coming off, as it must.

Perhaps cool’s biggest shortcoming is its lack of vulnerability (and its tacit pride in such lack). Cool doesn’t wear its feelings on its face or sleeve, or anywhere else. It instead simultaneously buries them and projects them onto the uncool. Getting emotional is a sign of failure for cool; blowing our cool is a fundamental no-no. When cool is in the presence of genuine love, it gets very uncomfortable, for such love could, like shame, cause it to lose face or control.

Cool is overdressed restraint and emotional removal, a style-driven standing apart that has no heart. As such, it is but the shortest of steps away from cynicism. But strip cool of its outward appearance -- after all, it’s all about exteriors -- and what is left? All the debris of its unexamined interiority, constellated around shame, shakiness, insecurity -- that is, an abundance of vulnerability.

To enter such states with openness and awakened attention requires that we let go of being cool, and start reembracing our bare humanity, our woundedness and shamed selfhood, so that it gets not just a token nod or some pharmaceutical help or the latest shades, but rather a depth of healing that puts us back on our feet and in our hearts, unseducible by the siren call of cool.

December 28 , 2006

IRONY COOL

After my review of The Fountain in my December 21st blog, I started thinking about the meaning of "cool" and the role of "cool" not only in filmcritic realms, but also in contemporary culture in general. Out of this emerged yesterday's blog ("The Death of Cool"), which hopefully won't get categorized as something cool. And out of these last two blogs comes yet another, zeroing in on a kind of irony -- which I'm calling "irony cool" -- that has insinuated its way into our midst, but is starting to show signs of decline...

The meaning of irony is generally constellated around a perceived incongruity between an expected outcome and an actual outcome, as well as in the use of words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning. For the purposes of this blog, however, irony will be considered as an attitudinal subset of the above, particularly in the form of a coolly detached, hypercerebral take on what appears to be contradictory or paradoxical.

When such irony points out and emphasizes some inconsistency or incongruity in something, it does so cuttingly, its speech faintly stained with undertones of dry superiority and, occasionally, a trace of humor, a cold, arid, and dismissive humor. Buttoned-up to the neck, it keeps itself occupied with looking down with carefully cultivated detachment and as much wit as possible at its subject matter, automatically presuming an intelligence that it does not actually have.

Irony as such is not much more than a dismissive pseudo-cynical summation, a criticalness-too-incisive-to-tolerate-rejoinders commentary, an unruffled cognitive super-sniper armed with postmodern dissection chic and an abundance of desiccated cleverness -- that is, “irony cool.”

The overuse of irony perhaps reached its peak in the 1990s (though it could be argued that it also peaked during Oscar Wilde’s times), during which time it did intellectual dirty work-- usually antiseptically delivered -- for those seeking a coolly clever removal from their subject matter. “How ironic that...” found its way into more and more conversations, until the irony of particular circumstances more often than not was given more emphasis and value than what was actually going on (as well as being confused with coincidence). As such, irony, whatever its acuity, simply served as a distraction, rather than a clarifier or insight-provider. It is still frequently enlisted in the same intellectual campaigns, but does not carry quite as much status.

Irony looks smart, and wants to look smart, but is sorely lacking in smarts. It is simply too lopsided, superficial, and marooned from the raw stuff of life (including its own interiority) to possess any real overview or depth of knowingness. Irony makes a meal out of facts, stuffing itself too full to have any room left for truth (“truth” being a word that usually makes the irony-inclined very, very uncomfortable), not being able to see that what appears to the mind as paradox appears to the heart as truth.

Irony’s logic is not that of a clear mind, but that of a mind bereft of true witness. Those who indulge in irony are literally stuck in their headquarters, comforting themselves with cleverness, illusory superiority, sarcasm-tinged summations, the sanitized payoffs of disembodied rationality, and denial of their egoic investment in what they are doing.

Those who cling to irony are, among other things, failed romantics, having replaced the sentimentality of romance with cynicism, and the false innocence of romance with false knowingness. Where romanticism is illusory intimacy, fleshed-out with mounting expectations, irony is illusory understanding, fleshed-out with inflationary relevance. Both romanticism and irony are not only symptoms of self-fragmentation, but also compensations -- and apparent solutions -- for that very fragmentation (or lack of integration).

In its obsessive coolness, subtly sardonic remove, and ersatz authority, irony denies itself access to the heat (and therefore also the light) of the awakening process, preferring imprisonment in its ultra-abstract, sterile apartment.

But what happens when irony is flamed through and cut loose? What happens when irony is stripped of its pretensions? What happens when irony transcends cynicism, sarcasm, and every other belittling species of ism? It then becomes but embodied insight and clarification, compassionately exposing and addressing its subject matter, abandoning its cool remove for much better seats, ones that are closer to the action.

Thus does irony cool yield to an irony that can actually see, an irony that does not make too much of a difference out of differences, an irony that cares, an irony that makes for better poetry, deeper insight, clearer living.

December 30 , 2006

O BREATHE US

In my November 29th blog, I talked about coming up with the lyrics for one more song for the CD Diane is currently putting together (based on poems of mine that she’s setting to music). The poem/song, entitled O Breathe Us, felt pretty good to me, but I didn’t know how singable it was. Diane had taken the chorus -- O Breathe us deep, breathe us strong/ O Breathe us full, breathe us home -- and had made it into a thing of striking beauty, but there were, she let me know, some problems with the rest of it.

A number of lines read well, but just didn’t sing well. There was a rhythm we were looking for, and not just an obviously musical rhythm, and the lines that didn’t have it or didn’t have enough of it had to line up at the chopping block for beheading (maybe I’m using this verb because we’ve just passed the peak of Christmas season, an occasion for millions of turkey heads being separated from their bodies) -- or, to put it more gently and perhaps also more accurately -- revisioning.

So we played with the lines off and on for the next three or four weeks. We got right down to each syllable, testing each new line which I came up with for both melody and meaningful fit with the rest of the song. Last night we finally got a version that we both really liked, one that clearly belonged with the other seven songs.

So here’s the latest (and in my humble opinion, the last) incarnation of O Breathe Us:

The waves arrive one by one
Sparkling with remembered sun
Ancient songs seizing our tongue
The temple rising out of the blue
Broken pillars now solid and true
O Breathe us deep, breathe us strong
O Breathe us full, breathe us home

The waves arise with shining grace
Stained with dawn’s crimson face
We won’t leave this broken place
Until we release our golden chains
Bursting through the slumber and pain
O Breathe us deep, breathe us strong
O Breathe us full, breathe us home

It is time to turn from the old
It’s time to come in from the cold
Frozen pain will bind our soul
Until we’re freed from our tomorrows
No longer chained to old sorrows
O Breathe us deep, breathe us strong
O Breathe us full, breathe us home

And once again here we are
Gathered together from afar
Each of us a spark from a dying star
Our awakening heart is the clearing
For the Holy Deep we are nearing
O Breathe us deep, breathe us strong
O Breathe us full, breathe us home

In changing a poem into something singable, the words usually get simpler and the lines a bit shorter and trimmer, with abstract phrases often being replaced by more obviously visceral or image-suggesting ones (I love words and phrases that carry some connection with their preconceptual roots). Through this, it might seem that a certain complexity that was essential to the meaning of the poem has been lost, wholly or partially, in the conversion to a song.

But that meaning-making complexity has not really been lost, except perhaps on paper, for when the words are sung, and harmonies and instruments brought in, the meaning is often deepened and given more substance. When I write, I can emphasize a certain word or phrase for the reader by italicizing it, but this is at best only a quantitative shift (hopefully causing the reader to both notice and feel what is being emphasized) -- but when Diane sings it, the emphasis is not just quantitative, but also qualitative: In the stretching, multileveled arc of a single syllable, whole new meanings and sub-meanings, eloquently interwoven, are suggested and conveyed, too rich -- and, yes, also too complex -- for translation (except at the most superficial of levels).

The message is there, but cannot be adequately explained (for to break it into what we assume are its constituent parts only maroons us from it), anymore than the scent of jasmine or melissa or sandalwood can be accurately described. What I love here is the marriage of meaning and sound, the shaping and painting of lines with exquisitely nuanced emotion, emotion as impassioned as it is subtle, emotion that is as seamlessly intimate with the meaning and spirit of the written words as it is with the actual music.

In between prose and song is poetry. Great prose is poetic, as are great songs. Lyrics often mean little in a song, their frequent banality and generic framing often being overwhelmed or even drowned out by the music; it’s astonishing how badly worded most pop songs are, saying the same old things over and over, as if in hope of hooking a ride on some AM or FM train to the promised land of bigbucks fame. But there are other lyrics that are simply stunning, lyrics that are complemented rather than run over by their music.

And sometimes the lyrics occupy the foreground, with the music simply keeping the rhythm alive somewhere behind the action, like a drummer in the shadows. Consider Leonard Cohen’s songs, for example: More than a few of them are masterpieces of writing, lyrically stunning, and not just stunning, but deep, cutting-right-to-the-marrow deep, existing not just to entertain the listener. Leonard doesn’t have the greatest singing voice, to put it charitably, but he has a fantastic reading voice; when he sings, the elocutionary super-resonant baritone and been-through-it-all magnificence of his reading voice comes through, with far from perfect pitch, but enough real feeling and existential invitation to make the song a true work of art, something that can genuinely move us (as opposed to just sentimentally stirring or energetically amping us), rather than merely manipulate us.

Check out his song Hallelujah -- he sings it in a rough, seasoned, intimate-with-pain voice that mixes having hit rock bottom with deep surrender (And even though it all went wrong/ I’ll stand before the Lord of Song/ With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah). Many others -- over a hundred -- have done covers of Hallelujah, but few have even come close to capturing its essence. My favorite cover is Jeff Buckley’s; when he did it (a few years before his death), he was less than half Leonard’s age, but he sings it with heartbreaking beauty and originality, in a voice that can soar like few others. In his other songs, Jeff’s lyrics aren’t usually that easy to make out, but in Hallelujah, his every word is clear, so that the poetry of the song and its music really work together.

As I write this, I can hear Diane singing the chorus of O Breathe Us (with a Celtic echo), even though she’s miles away picking up some sockeye salmon for dinner. She sings it with an abundance of lift and downswoop in her voice, as if riding the waves of some ancient sea, plucking just the right notes out of its white thunder and broken roll into some dark and stony shore.

When I write, I often hear music -- no, not hear but feel music -- that sets a kind of template for my emerging sentences to flow into and from. When the music gets especially strong, I sometimes find myself rhyming more, even in my drier pieces, rearranging my words not necessarily to further clarify some meaning, but rather just because I find it more esthetically pleasing, more sensual, more alive.

Thus does poetry emerge. Where prose reports, poetry unveils. Where prose makes sense, poetry makes more than sense. Poetry -- esthetically translated epiphany in spoken form -- should not be so much read as imbibed, perhaps after releasing its juices with an unapologetically deep bite or two. No bibs. No napkined abyss. Don’t touch poetry with gloves or cool remove; seize it, hold it close, smell and taste it, go skin-to-skin with it, squeeze into its silences, navigate and ride its waves, get intimate with its infinite mystery, making room for some messiness and turbulence in your relationship with it. Get into it until it is no longer an it.

And if Music is the Poetry of Sound, and Art the Poetry of Creativity, and Intimacy the Poetry of Love, and Beauty the Poetry of Revelation, and Life the Poetry of Being, then how can we live without Poetry?

O Breathe us deep, breathe us strong
O Breathe us full, breathe us home