Placelore

Pilgrim

Through the thick darkness of the night I travel from Rishikesh, passing as I go thousands of chanting, flower-carrying pilgrims walking towards Haridwar, a city situated on the river Ganges. It is a holy place for Hindus, and millions come there to perform ritualistic bathing to wash away their sins and attain moksha, liberation from the cycle of birth and death.

I am shawl wrapped against the cold and arrive at the city’s railway station at 5am. There are hundreds of sleeping bodies lying casual almost in heaps spread across the floors of the station. There are queues outside the toilets, but the poor are deterred from access by an entry charge. A long train lumbers slowly out of the darkness and comes to a hissing halt alongside platform one. People stir to board the carriages of the cheapest class. Its doors are locked and its windows barred, and after several attempts to enter they uncomplainingly resettle into the shadows to wait. I too am part of the waiting, and an hour will pass before entry can be gained. I leave down my backpack and draw the woolen blanket tighter round my body. Waiting, I have learnt, is an art requiring the light of attention; should I wait for something I am no longer in the state of waiting, which in itself is a profoundly active, timeless state.  

After some minutes I observe an old woman hobbling slowly forward with a water can held in a thin, wrinkled left hand. Her body from the hips is bent downward into a painful decline. She moves towards a carriage, rests against it for a breath or two, then slides into a low squat, lifting her sari as she goes to a quiet defecation unto the tracks.

The smoker’s smoke, the sleeper’s sleep, the talker’s talk—here so much is seen, but no one encroaches upon her public privacy. Given the conditions of the situation, it is an elegant normality of which we are all a part. She washes between her years of legs then quietly rises and ambles away towards the shadows. In her wake the perception of my mortal eye yields to the omniscient eye of inner vision; all upon the platform then are as atoms spun into an atomic dawn, to be retouched in the darkroom of universal chemistry to re-emerge in other tones, other shades, and in other places. Later I board the train and travel south, bearing a strong impression of the dignified pilgrim woman not able to afford the few rupees for an official toilet.  

Through the Wound

Through the wound comes the healing:

a relationship formed

in the tenderness of loss,

the little girl lost

the little boy searching for God

 

their roots became twisted:

searching through the ages

towards a death un-relinquished

as they climbed the high mountain

towards a cross on a precipice 

offered long ago 

to the torment of the wind.

 

Atop stood a raven

ancient and humbled

being of the worlds

it plucked their false comfort

and wept,

for the death un-relinquished. 

The Dark Tower

1.

On August 6th 1945 at 8.15 in the morning a nuclear-solar energy that does not belong on this earth was released some 549 meters above Hiroshima "Such was the ferocity of the blast, eerie shadows of incinerated humans were left imprinted on steps, pavements and walls.” For days, weeks, months, even years after survivors searched for those missing.

 On first reading about this occurrence some fifty years ago I felt a haunting, periodically this feeling returns.

_____________________

II

(London, June 26th 2017, 8 AM) Although knowing it would be in the vicinity of my journey, nonetheless when I stepped out of Latimer Road station something inside me beckoned to turn around and there it was directly behind, less than 100 meters away, shocking in it's stark, brutal devastation; faintly in the atmosphere you could still hear it screaming … instantly brought in witness to the offering of some primitive form of solace I said aloud to all and to no one - my God  - such brief recognition of our utter helplessness. Momentarily we were, we are, all in that tower, and it stands there now terrifyingly sacred.

Around the area there are photos of those missing, messages, flowers, prayers upon stained paper, and there also written large in black letters the word Why? To that heartfelt question there will be answers of degree from investigations, commissions, politicians but there will be no words from the silence, from the sorrow of Being. 

The aftermath of this, and such an event as this that I have witnessed more directly previously, will follow a course … but for now there is a certain shock and awe felt in that street, in that neighbourhood, not the words shock and awe as uttered vindictively by a blundering former American president, but something closer to the root of the Dark Tower. 

___________________________

III

 There are a few books, which I return to read every few years, one of them is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. The title of the book is derived from the Abattoir "Schlachthof-fünf” in Dresden where Vonnegut and other Allied prisoners were incarcerated in February 1945. Throughout the book there is a recurring line: "So It goes." The words appear each time a death occurs and what they imply lies at the centre of any understanding of Vonnegut's work: fatalism, stoicism and the acceptance that nothing worthwhile will come from denying or shrinking away from difficult situations or when the worst has happened. Questioned repeatedly over the decades about whether he thought Dresden should have been bombed, Vonnegut's most meaningful response was that the city had been bombed; the question for him was how one behaved now. "If one of his aims was to provide a voice for those innocent, his method of making himself heard was both courageous and effective; he told us the hardest of truths, but in the gentlest, funniest and most amiable way he knew how." 

 

 

Turning Point

Before and After

Thirty-six years have passed since I crossed over a cold sea, ship-bound for Liverpool. Again I was leaving, searching for a returning. A dilapidated bus bearing the company name “Magic” carried me through what was then England’s industrial midlands, travelling south towards London.

Some few miles to the west of London (Londinium) a city established by the Romans lies the old parish of Harmondsworth which derived its name from Heremod’s enclosure. Millions of people from around the world traverse this landscape, for here, where now exists a large international airport, stood the old village of Heathrow.

In January1981 I was due to board an aircraft at Heathrow bound for Sydney. As the time neared departure, I felt a magnetic current drawing me towards a posture of waiting, an “inner voice” counselled me not to go aboard the plane. This call was clear, accompanied by a vision of what the future held should my life be moulded solely by the world of outside appearances. I could see that it would not matter how many or how good personal relationships might be, how great or important the job I might have, how much money I might earn, how many material possessions I might acquire, on its own all of this would amount to nothing. There and then I realised that to go solely forward and inevitably one way down into that “outside future” was to commit myself to a terrible existence.

The aircraft left without me.

What now, I said to myself? Three days later I met a man who received me into his care and began to direct me back and up. It is said when the pupil is ready the teacher appears. To be offered the guidance of a teacher and to be open enough to receive what he or she has to offer is a grace. To accept then the conditions necessary to begin preparation, to be worked upon, so as to be moved towards submission. Submission to a higher influence often evokes in us a deep fear of the unknown. What is going to become of me if such a step is taken?

After having passed through a repetitive painful process that had allowed something in me to give up I was brought to this turning point. To have given up for a time even the desire for change and what I had searched for over the years had unknowingly placed me for a few vital moments in a mysterious stillness wherein I distinctively felt my life being weighed. As has happened to others, I experienced a compelling need to come deeper into my inner self and there repose until through a blessed reorientation I found myself in silent witness opening towards the compassionate heart at the centre of my being.

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"The moment one commits oneself, then providence moves, too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never have otherwise occurred. A whole stream of events; all manner of unforeseen incidents and chance meetings and material assistance come forth which no one could have dreamt would appear."

Johan Wolfgang VonGoethe

 

Remembrance

 Moving With God 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03s69dg  

"Dance Me To The End Of Love" 

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin

Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in

Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the end of love

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone

Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon

Show me slowly what I only know the limits of

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the end of love

 

Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on

Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long

We're both of us beneath our love, we're both of us above

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the end of love

 

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born

Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn

Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn

Dance me to the end of love

 

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin

Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in

Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the end of love 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zjLBWnZGTU

Although structured as a love song, "Dance Me to the End Of Love" was in fact inspired by the Holocaust.

In an interview, Cohen said of the song:

“Dance Me to the End Of Love' ... it's curious how songs begin because the origin of the song, every song, has a kind of grain or seed that somebody hands you or the world hands you and that's why the process is so mysterious about writing a song. But that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria, in certain of the death camps, a string quartet was pressed into performance while this horror was going on, those were the people whose fate was this horror also. And they would be playing classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burnt. So, that music, "Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin," meaning the beauty there of being the consummation of life, the end of this existence and of the passionate element in that consummation. But, it is the same language that we use for surrender to the beloved, so that the song — it's not important that anybody knows the genesis of it, because if the language comes from that passionate resource, it will be able to embrace all passionate activity.”  Leonard Cohen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Holocaust_Remembrance_Day

 

 Approach to Auschwitz 1945

 

Holocaust Remembrance Day, 27 January

 

 

Dublin - Dirty Old Town

                   Christ Church Cathedral 

On a recent visit to Dublin I had the impression that it had become once again the dirty old town that I had lived in decades ago. The remains of what was euphemistically called the Celtic Tiger, a fantasy of bubble blown wealth is wasting away but leaves a gobbling hunger of generational debt. Down by the walled-in Liffey, beggars line the quays. There is renewed large-scale emigration, unemployment, and social deprivation, while across the river in the Four Courts with its wigged barristers, several of the leading speculators who were blindly driven to excess by the lure of easy millions, sling blame.  

Dublin is small enough to be a town, large enough to be a city; some parts of it are an assimilation of villages and, like the area of Rathmines, retain such an atmosphere. For a period Dublin was the second largest city in the British Empire and fifth largest in Europe. Throughout the 18th century it aspired–through the building of fine, measured squares; parks; and town houses–to Georgian grandeur. Its then Protestant ascendancy had, for a time, a form of home rule, and the sun (maybe) shone for a short while. But the opportunity was sold away through bribery and corruption culminating in a mismatched political and economic union with London in 1801. The city then gradually decayed and became for many a place of stagnation, poverty, and expanding slums, which were compared to the worst of Calcutta.

In visits throughout the recent decade of boom, I would on occasion step away from the potholes of glamour, the new wine bars, the overcharging restaurants, the flaunting of insecure wealth, to walk along the grim back streets near Mountjoy Square or through parts of the Liberties to be met by the wrecks of black heroin, raging cocaine, and desperate prostitution. Had anything changed from my youth, when on the same streets I spoke with fractured men, their insides disintegrating from drinking cheap meths and melted boot–polish? Then and now damp, speckled weather bore down on ragged alleyways strewn with broken glass and the stench of ammoniated urine. There it was and remains a hard life for poor inner city Dubliners who try in the midst of it all to raise their children well, to steer them away from the fierce, killing gangs of criminality.

I always associate Phil Coulter‘s song, ‘The Town I Loved so Well', with Dublin (especially when I hear the singing of it by Luke Kelly), and although there were times when I fled the city something corresponds, keeps drawing me back for there is something about it that has a rough beauty, and if one opens to it, a poetic expression cherished by old Dubliners who value the spoken charity that allows for the crack between the words that helps the radiant light to fall lightly upon the grey. They are helped too (as it aids me) by a dark, bawdy, communal humor which strips down pretension and releases the laughter embedded in the psyche so that for a brief while it blends with the haunting cry of seagulls as they soar in a wild roving wind over Christchurch Cathedral. 

 

Krishnamurti angry, and fear

I have seen Krishnamurti quite angry thus I was touched to read what Benjamin Weinniger related about Krishnamurti and fear,

“Well, I have seen Krishnamurti fearful and I think it’s an important thing to describe the circumstances under which it happened. When he was talking to the psychiatrists and psychoanalysts for the first time in Washington, D.C, he came to me and he was shaking with fear. He said, “I’m scared.” And I tried to reassure him that it would be alright, and then when he went in to the talk, I realized he was able to drop the fear. He allowed himself to experience the fear fully and then let it go. Most of us don’t do that, we stay with the fears instead of letting it go. This is what he means when he says, I have no fear. I also asked him, “Would you be afraid if you were dying?” and he said, “I don’t know, I would have to see, I would have to be aware to see whether I was afraid.”

 In 1946 Krishnamurti visited the home of psychiatrist Benjamim Weinniger who introduced him to all the psychoanalysts of the Washington Psychoanalytic Society, over a period of a week Krishnamurti spoke with them each day. 

 Blau, Evelyne, Krishnamurti 100 Years p.124.

India is Within

I met Bléischú early in the morning by the Arabian Sea and in a natural silence sat beside him upon the beach. Later he said, “The holy ground of India is within us and in the now is all of one’s life. All of what has occurred and apparently has passed is recorded and is within the body in a finer, quieter place; should you be in the now then the highest levels of the teaching will gradually be revealed.”

I recalled some words that I had learnt from the Maori tradition: “The future which is known lies behind us, the unknown past lies before us, continuity provides ancestral ties.”

In response to this he quoted from the Emerald Tablet: “What is above is like what is below, and what is below is like that which is above. To make the miracle of the one thing. And as all things were made from contemplation of one, so all things were born from one adaptation.”

After a pause he continued, “Should one bear up for the witness of now alchemically separating out the finer from the coarse, then there is no need to go further in search of any master or teaching, be it in a monastery, ashram, or a cave in a faraway high mountain.” He indicated that it is a noble state to stay before the shock, often painful, of being inwardly seen, coming to realize all that you believe yourself to be is false–he who thinks himself a saint is often in fact a pornographer.

I mentioned some words of Oscar Wilde a friend had sent: “The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, every sinner has a future.” He smiled. The sun rose in the east, casting its glowing lightness through the sounding of waves.

In time some men came down from the village and squatted to defecate along the shoreline. “This too,” he said, “is India. In the west you are just more clever at moving your shit about.”

I am, I am not, I am.

Seamus Heaney 1939 – 2013

I watched over the internet the funeral service for Seamus Heaney and was impressed by the eulogy offered by his fellow poet and old friend Paul Muldoon. He touched the being of his beauty that gentle giant of man. As he spoke I felt yet again that it is the North men and women who will draw Ireland upwards from the level of ruinous loss and graveyard tears that emanate from the borders of division.

The last time I heard Seamus was in London's South bank. He read from Human Chain, as fine a collection as any that went before. (I suppose because it was the first published and first I read, Death of A Naturalist remains my favorite.) He was majestic as he spoke that night in the cathedral of poetry. He spoke for all poetry, for all poets, for all who may have wished to become poets, and for all who cherish the sacred inner silence to which true poetry aspires.

When Paul Muldoon arrived at Belfast's international airport on his way to the service to be celebrated in Dublin, the following exchange took place:

Border Control Officer: Where have you come from?

Paul Muldooon: The USA.

BCO: And what do you do there?

PM: I teach poetry.

BCO: You must feel devastated!

I know of no other country nowadays where such an exchange would take place. As Muldoon related this story, I could hear the lilting, Ulster voices of the two; so it remains in that wet, windy, word-spun land. I did not feel devastated to hear the news of Heaney’s death, but I felt, as did many others, the timing loss of separateness. His poetry was about memory and called us to search for the ancestral memory of earthly blood that rivers its way through the stones of thoughts, some which we select and cast to skim over dark pools of still water, causing widening ripples before sinking to the gravelly bottom. As children we dived there, caught between fear and wonder, feeling for the mystery of the deep, then buoyed up again to breath in the sunlight. And so it goes, generation upon generation upon generation, as the song sings the bird. I am, I am not, I am.

Go by a way in which you are not

The Zen enso, a symbol of the interplay between Form and Void

 

To be a self, one must also be nothing. To know oneself, one must be able to know nothing.

 Ursula K Le Guin – Changing Planes

 

 "I know that I know nothing" or "I know one thing: that I know nothing"

 The Socratic Paradox

 

To reach satisfaction in all

Desire satisfaction in nothing.

To come to possess all

Desire the possession of nothing.

To arrive at being all 

Desire to be nothing.

To come to the knowledge of all

Desire the knowledge of nothing.

 

To come to enjoy what you have not

You must go by a way in which you enjoy not.

To come to the knowledge you have not

You must go by a way in which you know not.

To come to the possession you have not

You must go by a way in which you possess not.

To come to be what you are not

You must go by a way in which you are not.

 

St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mt. Carmel, Book 1 CHAPTER XIII

 

We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.

 ~ Kalu Rinpoche

 

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

 ―  Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace 

 

Wisdom is knowing I am nothing,
Love is knowing I am everything,
and between the two my life moves.

 ― Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj