musing – Page 11 – Greg Blee

The art of Nelson

i have been remiss in my reporting duties. The meditation retreat summary has been weighing on my mind and, as usual, having something already in the pipeline jams up everything that’s coming up behind. So, for the record, my first impressions of Nelson:

I arrived on Sunday last, after a delightful drive with young Jessica, a co-meditator. Normally i dread long drives with strangers — the burden of six hours ofconversation is crippling — but i surprised myself by not just holding up my end, but enjoying it as well. Thinking of it, that’s something that has atrophied in Ukee all these years: the interest in and ability to swap liives and stories with strangers. Sometimes it’s good to get outta town.

The town itself seemed to be … closed. It was a novelty to see almost everything shut up for the Lord’s day. The few people who were out and about seemed busy and unhappy — fast walks and frowning faces, which surprised me. The impression i was expecting, based on the effusions of WestCoasters who have moved here (and there are several), was the opposite.

Another thing I was looking for is evidence of Nelson’s rep as an arts town. It bills itself as the “#1 small arts community in Canada” (which does beg the question of what “small arts” are). I’m not sure what i expected — opera singers practicing from top-floor apartment windows, impromptu improv on street corners — but the only evidence of arts i could see were a pretty healthy poster boards of events, mostly festivals held somewhere in the region. Still, it’s early days.

Spiritality

I’ve been wondering about this mysterious, apparently innate “spiritual” drive in people, that entirely shapes some lives and, at certain points in other lives, seems to seize them and impel them in directions they would not have otherwise taken — directions that often don’t make much logical sense on the surface.

Spirituality seems to be tied to (maybe even a function of) self-consciousness, in that we don’t seem to see animals engaged in this pursuit. And self-consciousness seems to be the trigger for psychic separation, for seeing oneself as a distinct “thing,” forever separate from everything else and (in the West, at least) pitted against it in eternal conflict (Man versus Nature and all that). Thus, perhaps, the yearning in some of us (maybe all of us) to reconnect to something beyond us, bigger than us — something to make the universe and our time in it not quite so cold and hostile.

These days I’m thinking of it as the “bag of skin” phenomenon: the drive to to make an intangible connection with something bigger that “just me” as this bag of skin, blown and battered by the world around it.

I’m far from versed in the field, but i see three main outs:

A belief in God: a father/protector super-person with grand designs, of which you are a part.
A belief in some human quality that transcends the individual: art, for example, or creativity in general. Science is another, being the highest expression of the church of rationality.
A belief in … this one’s hard to state … nothingness. A non-belief, really, that in the inscrutable Eastern way flips around to provide a solid platform on which to stand in this world.

Whatever works for you, i say. Number 3 is what i’m chasing these days, despite the admonitions of the sage that chasing guarantees not finding. But what else can i do to play this game?

Two quotes i happened upon today:

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. (Immanuel Kant, 1784)

The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and sense in which he has attained liberation from the self. (Albert Einstein)

All those people, all those agendas

A week in the city has my head spinning. Too much free time, with too little focus, plus too much concentration on the spiritual, has made everything lose meaning, in the same way that repeating a word over and over turns it into noise. All that talk and action, incessant around me … i hadn’t till now realized the salubrious effect of living on the coast — the mere proximity of the endless ocean, or the view of mountains not laced with streets and houses. There’s so little mental space in the city.

The people in the cafes never stop talking. All that burning interest — in their jobs, their ideas, their hopes, their friends’ jobs, ideas and hopes. Usually i eavesdrop, shamelessly, compulsively. So much they seem to be filling their lives with. Me, today i seem to be interested in almost nothing. I make a list. It’s short:

walking around and watching the world
banging on a drum (these days, one of Robert’s pot lids)
getting some kind of handle on my rootless, aimless existence

I feel stagnant, dysfunctional, inert, among these people burning up with passion all around me. I have nothing at all to say to them. The girls, every one of them, look beautiful, and i want them all. I want to hold them, envelop them, to have something substantial to hang onto.

I know that coming unmoored is part of the game, part of the process. You read about it in the Zen books (obliquely as always) — abandoning all fixed points of reference, becoming comfortable with rootlessness, embracing nothingness. I see now why the sages prefer natural surroundings. Being in the city, today, makes me feel like a failure.

Shopping for Godot

Consumer paralysis afflicts me more and more these days. This afternoon i walked miles, from outdoor store to outdoor store along Broadway, seeking the perfect daypack to replace the perfectly good daypack i was carrying from store to store.

The one i’ve got, you see, is just one big bag with shoulder straps attached. No compartments or pockets, and, being a compulsively organized bloke, i like compartments and pockets. Everything in its place.

But i find it near impossible to justify the “upgrade.” Replacing what’s worn out is one thing, but ditching one functional item for another, slightly more functional one is … a wasteful, frivolous, indulgent consumer whim. (Which is, for me, in this day and age, a synonym for “sin.” But that’s another post.)

I know, i know, i could just give the old one away to someone who’ll like it and use it. But buying its replacement would mean one more brand new, nasty, non-biodegradable plastic item has started its inevitable journey to the landfill — needlessly. Aren’t we trying to break that vicious circle? Aren’t humans the most adaptable species on earth? Would it be such a hardship, in comparison with what other people on this planet endure, for me to continue digging items out of my one-compartment daypack?

I must have looked at a hundred packs; fondled two dozen; and gone thoroughly over six. All were pretty good, some were very good, and two were almost perfect for my needs. I even returned to two stores for a second look-and-feel. I could tell the salesmen in both stores were rolling their eyes at my agonizing over a hundred-dollar pack — a trinket, to them. A moral dilemma for me.

It put me in mind of the existentialist Samuel Beckett’s 1949 play, Waiting for Godot, in which … well, here:

THE plot of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is simple to relate. Two tramps are waiting by a sickly looking tree for the arrival of M. Godot. They quarrel, make up, contemplate suicide, try to sleep, eat a carrot and gnaw on some chicken bones. Two other characters appear, a master and a slave, who perform a grotesque scene in the middle of the play. A young boy arrives to say that M. Godot will not come today, but that he will come tomorrow. The play is a development of the title, Waiting for Godot. He does not come and the two tramps resume their vigil by the tree, which between the first and second day has sprouted a few leaves, the only symbol of a possible order in a thoroughly alienated world.

Nothing happens in the play, it takes bloody forever, yet somehow it’s riveting and screamingly funny. (The script, with some pictures, is here.) My consumer expeditions are of the same character, except substitute “feckless, time-wasting and pathetic” for “funny.”

In the end, with the stores on the brink of closing, i decided to make do with the existing pack, and maybe think up some ways i could alleviate some of its inconveniences. I felt better, as though i’d faced down a mighty cultural imperative and come through bowed but victorious. The wanting, though, hasn’t gone away, and there’s no guarantee i won’t be browsing more stores tomorrow.

Friend Caroline sent a message, three days ago:

Buddha was right … we suffer from desire to own, and once we own we suffer from the burden of ownership and fear of loss!

Krapp!

The case for lazy

More from Zen and the Beat Way (p. 22-24, emphases mine)

It seems to me in a way … that this emphasis on productivity goes back to the great age of scarcity, when if people did not work, they didn’t have anything to eat. We do not have that situation today. In fact, we are working hard against it…. We are deliberately creating an economy in which machines do our work for us, and an abundance of food is produced. So we have got to learn how to loaf….

In a culture where everybody has to keep producing, even though plenty is produced already, all kinds of propaganda have to be generated to get people to buy up the surplus production. But in order to find the means to buy it, they have got to create surplus production. Well, this is a vicious circle of major dimensions. And although we may not like … the role that the more irresponsible beatniks are playing, it is a role that in a way emerges almost of necessity in our particular kind of civilization.

In other words, people who are going to be nonproductive, who are going to be fundamentally lazy, are going to idealize a life of a certain kind of poverty. And they are going to explore realms of experience that solid citizens have not explored and are indeed afraid to explore — the inner world, the world of imagination and fantasy and the unconscious.

On a similar political note, all you surfer-dude and -dudette sympathizers, check out the Work Less Party, based in Vancouver and apparently contesting our next provincial election.