INTRODUCTION + POETRY + MUSIC + ESSAYS + TRAVEL + FICTION + TEXTILE ART + HAAG'S BIO
Recently, while recommending the book to someone, I thought to re-read it. I borrowed a copy from the public library. I still had trouble absorbing it. However, to slow my reading down -- having not long ago edited some books for another spiritual teacher -- I decided to go through it with the same thoroughness I would give to it if I were to edit it. Thus, I have read it at the rate of one chapter a day and, after each day's reading, I have written a poem -- the poem simply came after the reading. Therefore, in whatever way at whatever rate inspiration seeps through, these poems are "inspired" by Nisargadatta.
I AM THAT turned out to be a popular book at the library. I was not able to renew it. It took some days to decide to buy it and to find a new copy (I've owned and given it away many times). Thus the poems are divided into sections of eighteen poems -- because it was at poem #18 that the book became due at the library.
In addition, I have adopted that first enforced pause into the form of this series and have written Entre'actes between each 18-poem section -- poems about whatever ensorcelled me at that moment.
This particular series/ascesis/practice is one more step in the process of educating my soul. Nisargadatta speaks to the Western Soul perhaps more than other Eastern spiritual teachers I have read, because a lot of Westerners asked him a lot of Western question. I have not, so far, come across my favorite sentence again.
The poems are written in a diminishing Evolutionary Form derived from Kevin Kelly's Borgian library chapter(s) in OUT OF CONTROL.
Jan Haag
Seattle, Washington
June 15, 2002/January 14, 2007/October 19, 2009
I don't feel ready to write this.
I Am is the contemplation
--
like
a luminous arrow created
by the after image of staring
out the
window into the limitless
blue with clouds which exist no more
than
my illusions, all body-attached.
But the limitlessness, the blueness
--
ah even the blueness is an illusion --
only the limitlessness,
I
Am.
The caw of the crow falls into the void.
Neti neti, I am neither this nor that.
I lie in my bed defining nothing
but myself hearing the wind
howling
its emptiness round my
eyrie. That is too much content,
says
Nisargadatta, too much, says the wind.
The sky without the blue,
the
crow without the caw,
the concept without the thought, the
bemusement
of the "real" --
Let be!
Climb on the comfort of
warmth, high beyond
the southern curve's shadow of the Cascades, declining.
That quote is the kind that turns
my cynical mind to jelly.
Yet,
maybe I am not
so far from it: Think of the tears
that start at a
cat's sudden death,
or a mother's death, no
matter how old, the
mother
or the daughter. The heart leaps across
the rationalizing
abyss,
weeps for
no reason, no discernible reason. All that
lives
must die, even reasonable Hamlet wept between soliloquies.
"...you cannot find out why a thing
is as it is." Nor
can you stop
your need,
self-obstruction, satiety, greed; nor your joy, nor your
laughter in inappropriate places. The funny bone's
-- the
humerus's medial epicondyle's -- tingling pervades
the universe and is
as real,
more real, than the persistent radioactivity of
Hiroshima
even now.
The ionospheric
ions are permeable. "A thing is as it
is, because the universe is as it is."
Incapable of knowing the truth, even if
the spider-lady, inventor of
alphabets,
came up, nibbled the grain
at the tip of your tongue,
crawled into
your throat, spun her web on your
glottis, snapped your
life with her black-widowish
hunger. Even then, what is it
this
truth means? Will you look under rocks
for rattlers? Snakes
of
coral?
Truly, the choice is not simple, the way
is not easy. And why should it be?
James, growing up on Seattle's Sunnyside, once
said: "I know no
one
with a richer inner life
than you." I didn't know what he
meant.
I knew I was shy, withdrawn, self-conscious,
consciously,
continuously examining the contents of consciousness,
my own and
stymied by trying
to discern the (even probable) consciousness of
others.
I toiled in perpetual
semi-darkness like
the Lascaux/Chauvet
Cave painters. Nisargadatta says: bringing-to-consciousness is
dissolution, a release of energy, is, itself, a meditation.
Nisargadatta and I have Total Trust.
He always, me intermittently.
When
the poltergeists stop playing, when
Peter's First Principle
vacations, from time to time,
I trust that my memory will come
back as I stand in the middle
of my life with my hands
full of
shit, diamonds, and doodads wondering where
I meant to put
them.
Memory
has always returned before, no doubt it will
again and I'd like my hands free to be.
Just myself and the floating snowflakes,
the crackles of heat and
melt,
steadily studying confusion, listening quietly
to the
silence, tapping in a picture here
and there, mirroring my mind in the
computer's
mirror which mirrors the trees, the light,
the massive
vertical beam, the light
cross of the window's sash, the blank white
light of the day,
the white
of the walls, the blankness of
being, rise
and fall of breath, everything leads to undisturbed contemplation.
So let digestion begin. I wonder
what Nisargadatta means by that?
Jaded,
like me? With everything? Done
it all? Has he consumed
enough to simply
gestate until eternity comes to meet him face
to
face? Once eaten, the world is
forgotten. Digested, it is inevitably
absorbed,
yet contributes, just as inevitably, to internal
nourishment
and external activity, an
aid to, the life
blood
of the body. I, God, pump red
blood; man's karma must watch itself in God's mirror.
"Consider," Nisargadatta goes on to instruct,
"what you are not." But
sleep
lies heavy on my eyes.
Too late in the day I have begun
my
poem. Night comes; my energies have fled,
along with desire, into the
lateness, into sorrow,
the ineptness of not enough desire,
not
enough time. Where shall I find enlightenment --
and why? What
will
it be? What conceivable use
will it be? -- lost, as I am, in
bliss at noon and the ceaseless chaos of life?
I find I am wrong, most
of the time -- lately. Always? I
look up
a page in
a book, the reference is not there, I
turn back to the
referee and, eventually, find,
I have turned to the wrong page. I
ask a question in class and am gently
informed I'm on the wrong
subject -- more often
than I care to
remember. Repetitions of this
all
day long and into the night -- each night.
It wasn't always this way. Is it now? Forever?
Like listening to the radio, who
needs to be interested or not
interested?
Everyday news is the same
and no matter how accurately
one might think
one's way into the stark tragedy of another,
still, in the scheme of things, one more
cup of blood is one more
cup of
blood, nothing more, nothing less. We're ever so
ready to
say it is
the nature of things, human
nature, until it is my
child! That feeling,
too, shall pass in the numberless waves of consciousness.
"Succumbing to the most grievous form
of the mystery of evil" -- said
the Pope
regarding sexuality, the preying of priests
on little boys
-- usually. Sometimes girls. He didn't
of course mention the sanctioning of it by
The Church from time immemorial, the cover-ups,
the relocations, the pay-offs. I try to keep
my mind on
consciousness, but what does diddling
little alter boys have to
do
with enlightenment? Indeed what
does The Church have to do with
enlightenment?
Unreachable by words, who decries the act, who's harmed?
Forgetting about the world seems to imply
inertia, energylessness,
sleepiness, lethargy, depression, listlessness, loitering in
and
around nothingness, silence, the void.
My vegetable brother is
desireless, untainted by wants.
Is this the Buddha? He fills the void
with television, overeating, with lack of desire to
imagine a
different world. Is this the Buddha?
Nothing has a cause, everything
has no cause.
Life and death -- these ideas
are of no use to me.
Change is. Life is. Light is. Energy is.
Nonetheless work, work to your heart's content. Write poems.
Nobody exists in my world and nothing happens.
It is relentlessly
quiet, the heat pipes crackle.
There are strange movements and
pains
in my body, this rented shell which I
pay for with patience,
anguish and slow-dawning awareness.
"Only," says Nisargadatta, "the
unexpected and unpredictable is
real." I sit at the edge of
meditation.
I stroll the softness of skin, the brightness
of blood,
the illusion of breath.
The pressure in my ears against
my skull
shifts, changes, my heart is steady
and silent. There is no remorse. The sun shines.
I sit on the edge of delight, at times
it shines -- like the sun in
Seattle: suddenly,
blindingly brilliant, brighter than the
daffodils.
Wet grass and black mud between my toes,
I stroll the
only place in Seattle where, barefoot,
one can stride up and down past
budding
cherry and plum, upon, momentarily, the periwinkle-blue
Veronica.
I undulate along Azalea Way, past the pools
with ducks
and -- later in life --
dragonflies, contemplating delight, wonder,
desirelessness, enlightenment,
liberation, realization, all dancing to
the dawning awareness:
"I am...the beginning and...end of all endeavor."
Bliss begins at five o'clock. The light peeps in.
The body rouses from
its spent, dream-troubled, nighttime
hours. Crows stand ready to
announce
the sun. They caw even for a sunless
dawn. Present in
the world, desiring none of it,
enjoying minutes of the world, needing
none of it.
Heavy, blank with the breathing weight of nothingness,
the bog of the mind solidifies into peat,
blackishness. Bodies of
tanned leather turn
up from time to time, having spent
half of
eternity in darkness. The mind shakes
free for the simpleness, the delight of ominous day.
"...without memory, what are you?" It doesn't seem to
matter. All of
matter and the trees exist
without memory. The wind exists without a
body.
Space exists, turns blue or white or gold
or orange, but it is
never here, there, anywhere.
"I am" -- even as a body in a
cave,
even as consciousness mute, deaf, blind, infirm,
invisible.
Can you sit in a cave without influence?
Who breathes the
air after you?
Why bother with such ennui-inducing questions?
You
can retreat to the cave, become rock, but --
say it: "Because of you, there is a world."
Entr'acte I
INTRODUCTION + POETRY + MUSIC + ESSAYS + TRAVEL + FICTION + TEXTILE ART