#31-40 (2/15/08)

31. [History is a Temptation]
32. [The Present is a Temptation]
33. [Contemplating Christ]
34. [Tony Blair]
35. [Ian Curtis & His Speakers]
36. [God & Atrocity]
37. [What About Everybody Else?]
38. [Crowds in the Gospel of Mark]
39. [The Mongols & the Pope, & Moby]
40. [Up, Down, Left, Right, Above, Below, Before, North, South, East, West]

31. [History is a Temptation]
History is a temptation, a distraction. Reading about St. Francis of Assisi, there was mention of a slip of paper (that apparently still exists) with his handwriting on it. My mind jumped at this, & when I got home I immediately went to see if a photo of it was online. But why? Why search for this rather than continue reading about him, what he said & did? He wasn’t known for slips of paper that had his handwriting on it, so that a piece of paper St. Francis wrote on, or wood from the actual cross Jesus was nailed to (&, actually, the entire Catholic tradition of relics), or some way of finding the actual tree the Buddha sat under when achieving enlightenment, or the actual spot along the Chebar River where Ezekiel suddenly had his visions of God—these things can so easily become only a distraction.

& while Seamus Heaney is still alive & well, being a poet he seems more a part of history than the present for me—he might as well be the author of Beowulf, not just its translator, & so awhile ago I was thrilled when, after ordering a used copy of one of his books, to find his signature on the title page. But why was I thrilled at his autograph, at the thought that Seamus Heaney held this book? Why did I waste the time it took to compare the signature to those from other books of his that’re selling on Ebay? Why didn’t I just get to reading his poetry?

Seamus Heaney is not known for his signature, after all, & even Jesus isn’t known for the cross he was nailed to, or the Buddha for the tree he sat under, or Ezekiel for the river he saw visions of God by—they are known, rather, for what they did with those things—what God did with those things, or what God did through them with those things. How many people did the Romans crucify, how many people everyday sit under a tree, or find themselves beside a river, & never have these experiences mean as much as what Jesus or the Buddha or Ezekiel did? & the same with Heaney, since the thrill of seeing his handwriting only came because it was this handwriting that wrote the poems of his I love. How many people scribble their signature everyday & never do anything more with the movement of their hands with a pen on paper?

What I think I mean to say is that the historical fact of an event doesn’t mean anything unless it’s so true & meaningful that its historicity is of no value at all. Only weak ideas need the prop of a date or a year to support them, while the truest & strongest things—while they may have literally happened at some point—are so true & so strong it’s irrelevant when that was, or whether, even, they happened at all. They are simply true, & strong, & supportive.

What I think I mean is this: I’ve been reading a bit on the history of early Christianity, & whoever you read has their own angle. There are Catholics, or more fundamentalist Christians, who want to debunk any validity that something like The Gospel of Thomas might hold, & then there are those scholars of Gnosticism who are “discovering” & “bringing to light” the “real” history of the early church to show how all these early versions of Christianity were eventually (& of course cruelly) squashed & crushed by the organized church that emerged. & both are sure that their side is “historically” accurate. But suppose that someday we find definitive historical proof that the Gospel of Thomas is a complete fabrication, that none of it was ever spoken by Jesus, etc.—would the following passage in it also lose its power (& truth):

His disciples questioned him, and they said to him:
“Do you want us to fast?
And how should we pray and give alms?
And what diet should we observe?”
Jesus says: “Do not lie. And do not do what you hate.”

If it were proven that Jesus never said a thing like this—in fact, that he said the opposite, or if it could be proved that he heard someone say this & condemned them immediately—are these words any less worthy of thought or meditation as a result? & the same with the four canonical gospels. Is there not wisdom there, the historical source of which is irrelevant? If someone with a propensity for lying or exaggeration were to tell you that you should Love your neighbor as yourself—don’t we have the ability to look beyond the person’s reputation & realize that what he’s saying probably isn’t a bad idea? Or would we get stuck on the fact that he’s a known liar? Words that speak some kind of truth to us have, actually, nothing at all to do with who said them, & when, & under what circumstances.

For instance, the historians of early Christianity can’t help but present a dozens of dizzyingly complex theories of how the three synoptic gospels were written: Matthew & Luke both repeats tons of material that appear in Mark—so did Mark come first, & Matthew & Luke borrow from him after? & the passages that Matthew & Luke share that aren’t in Mark—did they come from some source not around anymore (which scholars call Q)? & then some scholars pick apart these sayings that apparently came from the Q source, & arrange them to suggest how this text (a text that’s still hypothetical!) was itself perhaps edited, & further back we’re to wonder who wrote the Q gospel (or any of the gospels), & where they heard what they wrote, etc.—& finally we are asked, coming back to the more traditional Catholics or Fundamentalists, that this final organization, that this whole drama of previous texts, edited texts, & lost texts that can still partially be recovered from those that survived—that behind this a loving & all-knowing God was supervising the entire thing, somehow making sure that one text was lost, one was saved, or that one was lost only to be recovered, say, on some miraculous day in 2086.

I don’t mean to make a funny mess out of serious scholarship here, but in terms of simply living a good life, of finding a set a values to live by & doing so to the best of your ability—what does any of this historical research have to do with living that life? To echo what I said in an earlier post, if you really believe that one should do to others what you would have them do to you, & should love your neighbor as yourself—how can the suddenly proved validity of some text, or the sudden emergence of another, or the strident & ubiquitous arguments from scholars one way or another, alter this? & in the same way, suppose that the resurrection of Jesus could somehow be scientifically proven to have occurred (say that time machine is finally invented, & a camera is taken back to record the event), or that we can do the same & suddenly go back to a cave & actually record Mohammad receiving his revelations from an actually visible angel; or pick any religious event at all, & say that it can finally be historically verified—so what? If finally verifying the veracity of Mohammad’s words, or the Resurrection of Jesus, will only then be used for the believers of those faiths to hold their noses even higher, & condemn the nonbelievers even more than they already do to some hell, some punishment, some humiliation, & to finally assure the nonbeliever of their stupidity—is this really the best we can do? (In this sense I sometimes think humanity is in fact too weak to deal with the verifiable & proven nature of history, since we end up making atrocities like this out of it.)

Another example comes from the famous thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, where St. Paul says:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

That’s the translation from the New International Version. But the King James Version translates the Greek agape as “charity” not “love”—suggesting not romantic or sexual love, but love for one’s fellow human beings, love for strangers, for anybody, no matter who they are. It’s pointed out that agape is also used in 1 John 4:8 to say that “God is love,” & that when Jesus says to love your enemy, agapao is the word there. This might seem trivial, & even silly, since it’s not so unusual that one word is allowed to have many & various meanings, & that agape is perfectly able to mean romantic, neighborly, & divine love at the same time. But I even want to imagine a completely hypothetical scenario—imagine that at some point scholars conclude that agape in fact only means one of these things, imagine they conclude it’s proper to translate agape, in fact, to mean pancakes. This still wouldn’t change the fact that the glorious phrasing of “Love is patient, love is kind” & all the rest is so tremendous that even if romantic love isn’t meant, it means romantic love for those who want it to; or it means the love of God for those who want it to; it means the love of strangers & all humanity for those who want it to. What the actual text itself really means is entirely irrelevant. (& that, even, for those who don’t believe any of this to be true of love, those folks could just as well make their own life mantra by replacing it with money—since what’s the use of prophecy, surely, without a lot of money your wallet?)

Another example are Stephen Mitchell’s “versions” of many religious texts. Mitchell isn’t shy about saying he doesn’t know the languages of many of the texts he’s published—hence his books are usually called “versions” rather than “translations.” Now if I wanted to write an historical account of the development of Taoism, or of what the Tao Te Ching actually says & means, I would be wrong to use his “version” to do this, & would find an actual translation. But say that, even where Mitchell deviates from the original—if it has the ring of truth to it, so what? It isn’t Taoism, sure—but it’s still truth. 

Another writer known more for his “versions” is Coleman Barks, whose translated the Sufi poet Rumi to no end, even though Barks himself doesn’t know a bit of Rumi’s original Persian. One of Barks’ versions of Rumi, of a poem Barks has titled “The Seed-Market,” is a wonderful achievement:

The Seed-Market

Can you find another market like this?

Where,

with your one rose

you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?

Where,

for one seed,

you get a whole wilderness?

For one weak breath,

the divine wind?

You’ve been fearful

of being absorbed in the ground,

or drawn up by the air.

Now, your waterbead lets go

and drops into the Ocean,

where it came from.

It no longer has the form it had,

but it’s still water.

The essence is the same.

This giving up is not a repenting.

It’s a deep honouring of yourself.

When the Ocean comes to you as a lover,

marry, at once, quickly,

for God’s sake!

Don’t postpone it!

Existence has no better gift.

No amount of searching

will find this.

A perfect falcon, for no reason,

has landed on your shoulder,

and become yours.

Now this poem means a lot to my wife & I, & I doubt we would like it any less if it came out that Coleman Barks made this poem up & just attributed it to Rumi, or if the version he’s made has little to do with Rumi’s original. The value of the poem & the words & meaning we derive from it has nothing to do even with who wrote it at all, when it was written, or why. It simply speaks.

Or take the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita. One translation of it I have, The Bhagavad-Gita As It Is, by A.C. Bhaktivedanta, has in its introductory material a “discipilic succession” that traces the reception of the Gita from Krishna himself at the start, all the way—thirty-two names later—to Bhaktivedanta’s himself. If most readers of the Gita reject a claim like this, is the truth inherent in the scripture to be invalidated? If it could be proved not only that Bhaktivedanta’s lineage could not be traced back to Krishna, or even that the events of the Gita itself could be proved to have never happened at all, would the wisdom within it suddenly be ruined? & would the evocation of Arjuna’s pain at the prospect of having to go to war with his own relatives, or the tremendous power in the eleventh chapter when Krishna reveals his true form to Arjuna—would these things suddenly mean nothing at all—or would the power & truth apprehended from the words themselves be validation enough?

Of course what I’m getting at is that the actual-historical existence of anybody, but more specifically here, religious figures—from Jesus to Mohammad to Moses to Adam & Eve to Krishna to Buddha to Lao Tse to Confucius to Ahura-Mazda to Indra—is of extreme importance to historians interested in verifiable fact, but of very little relevance to those of faith. Or, to say that it is important, but not nearly as important as faith itself in the truth being expressed—a truth that is beyond history.

Or one final example. Out of all the religious writing I’ve recently read, I’ve grown incredibly attached to the lives & sayings of the Desert Fathers of early Christianity, men & women who took off to isolated areas of Egypt or elsewhere & lived largely in solitude. The stories about them are remarkable, full of general wisdom sayings, biography, & miracles. & again, if the historical veracity even of the most extreme of the miracles ascribed to them—even if these were proven to be entirely impossible, I wouldn’t see one reason to not love their writing, or writing about them, as much as I do now. To show the extent of their self-discipline, one of the many small anecdotes told about these hermits says simply, “They said of Sarah of blessed memory that for sixty years she lived on the bank of a river, and never looked at the water.” Does it really matter if, in fact, she may have taken a peek once a day or month or year or so? Does it really matter if Sarah ever existed at all, or is the anecdote told about her suggestive of a disciplined life, & of a truth so large that it makes even one sentence composed of twenty-five flimsy words enough to rise above any historical fact, & become something close to truth?

32. [The Present is a Temptation]

The present is a distraction & temptation too. Now that baseball is in the offseason, it’s so easy to get wrapped up in who will or won’t get traded, so easy to notice the morning paper that has to say something provocative so people will buy it, & so everyday in huge letters are phrases of such despair or glee that someone’s coming back, or they aren’t, or the owners will be talking to them soon, or they’re refusing to talk, or that while it’s been “reported” that they’re talking, the players themselves (or their agents) deny this entirely. What’s the use of knowing this? & even when what the papers have said comes true two weeks later (they were resigned, after all)—why couldn’t we have just waited patiently for two weeks to find out if the manager was fired or not, rather than having entire teams of sports writers theorizing & guessing & getting anonymous tips about all this? …The answer of course is that sports writers have families & lives to feed & maintain, & if they only wrote once every two weeks they would likely need other jobs. (The same for sportscasters, who spend such inordinate amounts of time predicting what will happen, then dissecting what did happen, then guessing why it happened, & then predicting what’ll happen tomorrow, etc.)

& ditto for every political pundit on TV or the radio; for a long time while I had a delivery job, I listened to talk radio at least three or four hours a day, & with only a handful of exceptions I can barely remember any of it now. Even the ones that pretended not to be primarily meant for entertainment—even these only spoke for thirty-five minutes out of every hour, since even this talk was interrupted with commercials & newsbreaks (the commercials filled with even smaller blips of even more ephemeral trends & fads, & the news largely filled with the same stuff, things that wouldn’t even be mentioned the next day). I often wondered how much more substantive it would all be if each of these hosts only had three hours a week (instead of a day) to talk. Instead—& since they too have families & lives—they go on & on for three hours a day, every day, dissecting a remark someone made, an opinion someone apparently holds, or an event that is of such great importance that, if you’re listening to the right station, will be discussed not just by the guy on from nine-till-noon, but also the fellow on from noon-till-three, & maybe even three-till-six.

Even more of a temptation is something like this blog, actually, which nowadays only seems to be updated every three months or so. It’s tough sometimes keeping myself from posting something everyday, which seems to be the nature of most blogs. I would’ve liked to have posted something back in December to say that I finally reached the end of To the House of the Sun & will now spend lots of time editing it, but to do this seemed kind of silly. & it’s taken me so long to write this post, in fact, that I had the end of the baseball season in mind in two paragraphs ago, & now want to rewrite the last one in light of the ridiculous but ubiquitous & unending cycle of prediction-discussion-denunciation that’s going on now during the Presidential primaries.

But this isn’t to disparage those who can update their blogs every day (or every hour)—this is wholly my own limitation, my own goofy aspiration to not waste any words, or to waste as little as possible, & as a result to hopefully focus on a few small things that seem to mean a great deal. & it seems the best place to do this, & to ensure that I’m not tempted to waste that many words after all, is in a blog that hardly anyone reads anyway.

33. [Contemplating Christ]

So many Catholic saints have said that there’s nothing more worthwhile than contemplating the life & death & the cross of Christ. & I have to agree, & sometimes can’t imagine a more beautiful story. Just look at what it says: that God, the creator of the world & of all life, a God both incomprehensibly vast as well as tender & intimate, came into the world he created and took the form of a child to ordinary parents, in some town in a province of the Roman Empire. He grew up, at some point began wandering around & preaching, & while he gathered a small following he never became very famous or rich in his lifetime. But because he offended a few with what he said, he was executed & died a horrible death. & yet this person was God; & even God has to suffer, even God has to suffer a horrible injustice (&, if he was God, the most awful injustice ever)—& yet in the face of this injustice, the anonymous & poor & simple way in which he lived went on to have more influence than any empire or ruler or person before or since, to the point that even history itself is marked by his life, & every event can only be said to have happened “before” or “after” he was around.

& it’s the humility of the Gospels & of Christianity (which doesn’t seem to be advertised or enacted very much) that gets me. & about this ultimate humility, nothing in the gospels strikes me more than a moment from the thirteenth chapter of John (2-5), which begins: “The evening meal was being served, and the devil had already prompted Judas Iscariot, son of Simon, to betray Jesus. Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God.” & what comes after this is tremendous. As John’s gospel was written in Greek, I imagine moments in Homer, or the Greek tragedies, when power & divinity of this kind are realized—or simply when Odysseus is being wily again & is about to trick people with his intelligence, & destroy them with his strength; or, remembering that when alive Jesus lived in an area of the world ruled by the Romans, I think of the dumb brute force of mere force & strength & conquest, & how emperors were deified, & all the rest, & I think of what a Greek or a Roman (or any political or corporate person today, or somebody with bland “goals” who is striving to “make it”) would do after having the thought in this thought in their head, the realization that they had come from God, & that God had put all things under their power, & that soon enough they would be returning to God. & then I read what Jesus did after this thought passed through his head: “so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.” How utterly tremendous.

34. [Tony Blair]

My wife & I watched a documentary on Tony Blair recently, & they were talking about his charisma, his endless charisma & ability to connect with people of all kinds, of every class. & it was someone involved with his campaign, I think ,who had a great time relating an anecdote about him, how when he visited the more rich people he would proclaim in a stump speech that his favorite food was such-&-such, & while visiting with the more working-class people, suddenly his favorite food would be something else. & the guy laughed, & so did my wife & I—it seemed cute, it’s what politicians have to do, etc.—but the more I thought about it, it didn’t seem funny at all, or cute—it just seemed like a lie.

35. [Ian Curtis & His Speakers]

In an interview with Bernard Sumner on his fellow Joy Division bandmate Ian Curtis, he says this at one point: “But also, at his flat, he had these enormous speakers, really eccentric sounding, they were like five foot by four foot perforated metal panels, and he had a chair, and he would sit right in between these two speakers, and his sound would sound great on these speakers—but no one else in the world had those speakers. He was designing music that only sounded good on those speakers.”

At first I thought this was terribly sad, even pathetic, but over the past few years I’ve been lucky enough to come upon writers & artists whose tendencies are similar. There’s Wallace Stevens, working at the insurance company & walking there everyday composing poems in his head—& while he sounds jealous in letters that Robert Frost has gotten yet another honorary degree from someplace, he always seemed happy with the life he’d made; in another way there’s William Carlos Williams, who chose a life as a doctor in New Jersey while writing his poems—even though he was more public, & did go to Manhattan on the weekends, & did go to Paris in the twenties; there’s Cormac McCarthy, living in hotel rooms & making sure to bring a good lightbulb to write to, & storing his books in more than a few storage lockers, & refusing (at least before Oprah) to do many interviews, or to be public at all; there’s even Isaac Newton, bored & tired of arguing with other academics of his day, who retreated to his place to do the work he wanted; there’s the main character of James Chapman’s Stet, a Russian filmmaker whose work is so private & personal it’s even illegal in a way, & roundly judged & criticized & battered by everyone in the novel (even the narrator); & there’s James Chapman himself (I hope he won’t mind the mention) who, if anybody of these truly showed me the value of the anonymity & the value of the hidden creator (without which I wouldn’t have found any of the religious versions of all of these, the Egyptian monks of early Christianity, etc.), Jim Chapman who once described a bad review he’d gotten, & how it upset him for a moment, but immediately said, “But I have to remember how lucky I am,” & said that he’d much rather be invisible.

I don’t mean that all of these are the same. Perhaps Curtis wanted to be famous, I have no idea. But despite the assurance from all around us that fame is the final end to strive for, I tend to think the finest moments are these ones where the creation is happening, & nobody knows about it, where it’s still only known to the artist (& maybe their spouse or a few friends). Think of it this way: the teachings of the Buddha or of Jesus, while they later became of immense significance to billions of people, & added so much to the course of history—at the moment these teachings were being uttered or expounded, that future significance was nothing, & the value of what was said emerged from that immediate moment when those words came, when those realizations came, & whether they would have any significance for the world or the future at all was irrelevant at that moment—yet the significance & relevance of the words themselves were already there. Even if those words at first were only thoughts in their heads, & even though nobody ever heard those thoughts—even then the truth & relevance of those thoughts were there, days or weeks before they thought to utter them to their followers. It was only from that intense & personal & private moment that anything public at all could ever emerge.

& the anecdote from #22 comes to me again in light of this, where an archeologist witnesses the funerary rites of the Kogi Indians, & is able to understand their language, & mentions with a supposedly devastating blow at the end that future archeologists, only finding the bones, would have no sense of the ceremony whatsoever. & it’s this final realization that “I” would never understand the real significance of the funerary rites of the Kogi Indians is “devastating” in the same way that Ian Curtis & his speakers are “pathetic”—which is to say that the former is not devastating & the latter is not pathetic at all! The Kogi understood their rites, & honored their dead, & to them their rite had meaning & significance enough, regardless of whether or not I or anybody else ever understood it or its meaning—& in fact, just because we do have a record of what they did & said still adds nothing to what the ceremony meant to them, or the primary meaning & purpose of it, which was to honor the dead. & the same with Curtis, even though how his music sounded on his own speakers was only ever communicated to whoever was there to hear it, & not to an entire tribe—still, the mystery of the creative or revelatory act (& it is a mystery) was there, & it apparently had meaning & significance enough for him, even though the millions of people who own CDs of the music will never hear it that way.

The human desire to devour knowledge & to only see something as having “succeeded” when its creator achieves prominence & fame & the rewards attached to it, or when the creation itself is itself devoured by as many people as possible—this is ridiculous. It was nice to learn recently that in his lifetime Bach wasn’t primarily known as a composer, & that Aristotle was largely forgotten for close to a thousand years, this while a musician is said to fail if they don’t have a hit record one year, or a movie is certainly a failure if it doesn’t do well on opening weekend. & I read recently in a survey of world history about the “failure” of Buddhism to take hold in India the same way Hinduism had, & while I understood what was meant historically, I still had to wonder how it could be said that a religion could “fail.” Were the actual Buddhists around during this “failure”—were they “failing”? As they went about being Buddhists, were they aware that their religion was “failing”? & in the midst of meditation were they dragged down by a sense of “failure”? Again, I understand what was meant historically, but as I said in #31, in the prime & most meaningful moments of life—creation, religious belief, whatever it is—”what was meant historically” is of little value.

 
36. [God & Atrocity]

Sometimes I think there’s really nothing worth contemplating or reading or learning about besides God & atrocity. It makes perfect sense to me to go from reading something like “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by its Perpetrators and Bystanders, where we read from a journal of Dr. Kremer, who is at Auschwitz:

18 October 1942

Attended 11th Sonderaktion (Dutch) in cold wet weather this morning, Sunday. Horrible scenes with three naked women who begged us for their lives.

It’s something to see real inhumanity like this, one that admits with us that what’s going on are “horrible scenes” but still sees them as necessary & right; & even more to see the brief entry for the week after, an entry any of us might write on a weekend, after a few days rest from work:

25 October 1942

Today, Sunday, wonderful autumn weather, went on bike tour to Budy via Roisko. Wilhelmy back from his trip to Croatia (plum brandy).

—it makes perfect sense that I can go from reading that to John Cassian’s Conferences, where it says

This will be the case when every love, every desire, every effort, every undertaking, every thought of ours, everything that we live, that we speak, that we breathe, will be God, and when that unity which the Father now has with the Son and which the Son has with the Father will be carried over into our understanding and our mind, so that, just as he loves us with a sincere and pure and indissoluble love, we too may be joined to him with a perpetual and inseparable love and so united with him that whatever we breathe, whatever we understand, whatever we speak, may be God.

I don’t think either of these cancel the other out, & I think both need to be stared at directly. I don’t think reading the Gospels or the Bhagavad-Gita or the discourses of the Buddha cancel out eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust, or slavery, or Stalin’s purges, or the brutal history anywhere of invasion & slaughter. I don’t think these two sides of things cancel one another out—that some kind of flowery religiosity makes roses of brutality (especially by saying something as disgusting as It’ll all better in the afterlife), & nor do I think the brutality makes a mockery or sham of religion—if only because atrocity moves us beyond the notion of God as a Super Parent & suggests how demanding real faith might be, where we can no longer ask how God can “allow” such things, whatever they are.

All over the internet now we can find videos of hostages in the Middle East being beheaded; the only one I’ve seen has the murderers chanting Allah Akbar as they do so (& that’s another twist that even more learning can come from—atrocity done by those who believe they’re doing God’s work). Someday I’d like to sit down & watch as many of those videos as I can. I don’t think this is morbid. I understand people who won’t watch them at all, & I’ve always thought I was lucky to be able to watch it (& hear it—the sound of someone’s screams as their head is being sawed off), & that I shouldn’t avoid them just because of how awful they are. I want to be shown the worst that human beings are capable of, & I suppose that also reading religious texts shows me the best that we’re capable of—the kind of humility & love & discipline & happiness that, by & large, it seems a deep religious belief is able to foster like nothing else.

I need to be swung between both poles, from Love your neighbor as yourself, to the sudden eruption of neighbors who, realizing no one is going to stop them, can herd many of their neighbors into a square & beat them to death, one by one, with crowbars, while other neighbors stand around & cheer. Immersed in both of these—the image of Jesus taking a child into his arms & saying that of such is the Kingdom of God, & that we would do well to be like children—& the image from all over history, the ease with which children have been murdered in war or exploited in other ways—I need to see both of these, & write about them if I can.

37. [What About Everybody Else?]

& along these lines, the Buddha says,

Monks, even if bandits were to sever you savagely limb by limb with a two-handled saw, he who gave rise to a mind of hate toward them would not be carrying out my teaching. Herein, monks, you should train thus: ‘Our minds will remain unaffected, and we shall utter no bitter words; we shall abide compassionate for their welfare, with a mind of loving-kindness, never in a mood of hate. We shall abide pervading them with a mind imbued with loving-kindness; and starting with them, we shall abide pervading the all-encompassing world with a mind imbued with loving-kindness, abundant, exalted, immeasurable, without hostility, and without ill will.’ That is how you should train, monks.

That’s what he says, anyhow, & I don’t know how It’s possible. & the situation itself is even hard to imagine, to me alone, since I think of this kind of brutality being inflicted on a group that’s herded together to some remote place. So that, if it’s difficult for me to imagine suppressing my hatred for someone about to kill me, it’s even more difficult imagining myself suppressing my hatred for someone about to kill another person standing beside me—it’s even harder to imagine maintaining that kind of calm if someone else were beside me suffering the same.

I realize I’m making a huge mistake here, since the point of this kind of realization in Buddhism is to not have a Self that can be offended or hurt anymore, & to somehow have given that up & dissolved into everyone else. But the problem I always run into is this, & it’s the same problem I run into whenever I hear of a Christian who is sure they’re right & that they’re going to heaven. I want to say to them That’s great—but what about everybody else? Our own illumination & realization usually comes at the expense of that everybody else, who are left behind either un-enlightened or easily tossed into the category of the hell-bound.

In the situation of me & somebody else being hacked to death, & where I was calm & the other was not (some hypothetical enlightened version of myself, sure!), I think the height of compassion would be to forget whatever calm or equanimity I’d attained, & to feel for them & feel with them as much as I could. (It seems a Christian, instead of judging someone they believe to be bound for hell, & instead of being angry & yelling at them for their various sins, would instead feel a great horror & sorrow for them—even if, as they say, “they’ve brought it on themselves”—since, what’s more sad than someone who has, by their own actions, sentenced themselves to eternal punishment & misery?) …But there doesn’t seem to be a better moment for compassion than someone who is at peace with themself feeling terrible for someone who is not; there doesn’t seem to be a better moment for compassion than for someone who had been a slave to their emotions or their attachments & everything else, who’d had a restless mind & every anxiety & who knows how it feels & how hard it is to break—there doesn’t seem to be a better moment for compassion than for that person to feel terribly for someone who hasn’t done this yet—so that in the middle of being hacked apart, in the middle of a situation where I might be completely detached, compassion suddenly demands that I become attached, that I feel horror for this person who doesn’t realize these things, who is utterly human & utterly bound to this earth & this body. Only after could I even imagine suggesting that such attachments might not be the best thing—which I suppose is what reincarnation is for.

(& if we’re to imagine a Personal God who is definitely Up There—isn’t this the kind of thing he does all the time? No one’s higher than God here, yet, in order to really be God, he has to constantly condescend to the limitations of humanity. This is what makes him God, I suppose, that he exists on this height yet can do little else but spend his time always coming down to help us out—to help us, surely enough, come back up with him. It’s human beings who find it hard to act this way, who take their Great Realizations about Whatever it is (God & all the rest), or their Great Achievements in Whatever it is, & can only look down from that height & sneer at those below them, at those worse off, at those who deserve to be worse off, at those who’re maybe no good anyway. It’s a remarkable thing about the Christian religion that its greatest figure after Christ, Saint Paul, is a murderer—& a murderer of Christians. This has struck me recently, of how accepting & forgiving Christianity can really be.)

But then, those guys on the videos getting their heads sawed off—they are going through this alone. In that situation would I be able to do as the Buddha said? I don’t know—which means, I’m sure, probably not. Which is why I’m even more in awe of the Dalai Lama, who has, on many occasions, thanked the Chinese for teaching him a great deal about patience and compassion.

38. [Crowds in the Gospel of Mark]

Rereading Mark’s gospel, I kept pausing at the many mentions of “them,” of “crowds” or “multitudes” of anonymous people from various places, & how they’re depicted reacting to the presence of Jesus, how they influenced the way Jesus’ enemies reacted to him, & how they were instrumental in his downfall (how they were easily “amazed” at Jesus, but easily turned the other way too). Only once, so far as I can tell from a quick reading, does Jesus let the presence of a Crowd affect him. Here are most of the instances of Crowds in the Gospel, organized hastily:

Only once does it seem that the reaction of the Crowds affects Jesus’ decision to do something, or not to do it:

9:23-25 Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. When Jesus saw that the people came running together [Lattimore’s has “seeing that the crowd was growing around him”], he rebuked the foul spirit, saying unto him, Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him.

Much of the time the Crowds flock to Jesus, & are astonished by him & happy with what he’s doing, & they seek him out:

1:22 And they were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one that had authority, and not as the scribes.

10:32 And they were in the way going up to Jerusalem; and Jesus went before them: and they were amazed; and as they followed, they were afraid.

Other times they are openly hostile to Jesus:

5:2-17 And when he was come out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, Who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains: Because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces: neither could any man tame him. And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones. But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshipped him, And cried with a loud voice, and said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God, that thou torment me not. For he said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit. And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many. And he besought him much that he would not send them away out of the country. Now there was there nigh unto the mountains a great herd of swine feeding. And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them. And forthwith Jesus gave them leave. And the unclean spirits went out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, (they were about two thousand;) and were choked in the sea. And they that fed the swine fled, and told it in the city, and in the country. And they went out to see what it was that was done. And they come to Jesus, and see him that was possessed with the devil, and had the legion, sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid. And they that saw it told them how it befell to him that was possessed with the devil, and also concerning the swine. And they began to pray him to depart out of their coasts.

14:66-72 And as Peter was beneath in the palace, there cometh one of the maids of the high priest: And when she saw Peter warming himself, she looked upon him, and said, And thou also wast with Jesus of Nazareth. But he denied, saying, I know not, neither understand I what thou sayest. And he went out into the porch; and the cock crew. And a maid saw him again, and began to say to them that stood by, This is one of them. And he denied it again. And a little after, they that stood by said again to Peter, Surely thou art one of them: for thou art a Galilaean, and thy speech agreeth thereto. But he began to curse and to swear, saying, I know not this man of whom ye speak. And the second time the cock crew. And Peter called to mind the word that Jesus said unto him, Before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice. And when he thought thereon, he wept.

15:29 And they that passed by railed on him, wagging their heads, and saying, Ah, thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three days, (30) Save thyself, and come down from the cross.

Other times he mentions the Crowds of people directly:

3:33-35 And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother, or my brethren? And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.

8:1-3 In those days the multitude being very great, and having nothing to eat, Jesus called his disciples unto him, and saith unto them, I have compassion on the multitude, because they have now been with me three days, and have nothing to eat: And if I send them away fasting to their own houses, they will faint by the way: for divers of them came from far.

12:41-44 And Jesus sat over against the treasury, and beheld how the people cast money into the treasury: and many that were rich cast in much. And there came a certain poor widow, and she threw in two mites, which make a farthing. And he called unto him his disciples, and saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That this poor widow hath cast more in, than all they which have cast into the treasury: For all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living.

Sometimes the text simply has Jesus preaching to “Them”:

4:1 And he began again to teach by the sea side: and there was gathered unto him a great multitude, so that he entered into a ship, and sat in the sea; and the whole multitude was by the sea on the land.

7:14-15 And when he had called all the people unto him, he said unto them, Hearken unto me every one of you, and understand: There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.

12:35-37 And Jesus answered and said, while he taught in the temple, How say the scribes that Christ is the son of David? For David himself said by the Holy Ghost, The LORD said to my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool. David therefore himself calleth him Lord; and whence is he then his son? And the common people heard him gladly.

Other times the Crowds are a distraction, it seems, & Mark specifically has him leaving the people to heal someone:

7:33-34 And he took him aside from the multitude, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue; And looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.

8:22-26 And he cometh to Bethsaida; and they bring a blind man unto him, and besought him to touch him. And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought. And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking. After that he put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly. And he sent him away to his house, saying, Neither go into the town, nor tell it to any in the town.

& finally Jesus’ enemies (the high-priests, scribes, elders, etc.), & in the end even Pontius Pilate, base their decisions on how to act towards Jesus on how they imagine the Crowds will react, or how they actually do react (or, Herod consents to the beheading of John the Baptist partly “for their sakes which sat with him”):

6:21-28 And when a convenient day was come, that Herod on his birthday made a supper to his lords, high captains, and chief estates of Galilee; And when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee. And he sware unto her, Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom. And she went forth, and said unto her mother, What shall I ask? And she said, The head of John the Baptist. And she came in straightway with haste unto the king, and asked, saying, I will that thou give me by and by in a charger the head of John the Baptist. And the king was exceeding sorry; yet for his oath’s sake, and for their sakes which sat with him, he would not reject her. And immediately the king sent an executioner, and commanded his head to be brought: and he went and beheaded him in the prison, And brought his head in a charger, and gave it to the damsel: and the damsel gave it to her mother.

11:15-18 And they come to Jerusalem: and Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves; And would not suffer that any man should carry any vessel through the temple. And he taught, saying unto them, Is it not written, My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer? but ye have made it a den of thieves. And the scribes and chief priests heard it, and sought how they might destroy him: for they feared him, because all the people was astonished at his doctrine.

11:27-33 And they come again to Jerusalem: and as he was walking in the temple, there come to him the chief priests, and the scribes, and the elders, And say unto him, By what authority doest thou these things? and who gave thee this authority to do these things? And Jesus answered and said unto them, I will also ask of you one question, and answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things. The baptism of John, was it from heaven, or of men? answer me. And they reasoned with themselves, saying, If we shall say, From heaven; he will say, Why then did ye not believe him? But if we shall say, Of men; they feared the people: for all men counted John, that he was a prophet indeed. And they answered and said unto Jesus, We cannot tell. And Jesus answering saith unto them, Neither do I tell you by what authority I do these things.

12:12 And they sought to lay hold on him, but feared the people: for they knew that he had spoken the parable against them: and they left him, and went their way.

14:1-2 After two days was the feast of the passover, and of unleavened bread: and the chief priests and the scribes sought how they might take him by craft, and put him to death. But they said, Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar of the people.

15:7-15 And there was one named Barabbas, which lay bound with them that had made insurrection with him, who had committed murder in the insurrection. And the multitude crying aloud began to desire him to do as he had ever done unto them. But Pilate answered them, saying, Will ye that I release unto you the King of the Jews? For he knew that the chief priests had delivered him for envy. But the chief priests moved the people, that he should rather release Barabbas unto them. And Pilate answered and said again unto them, What will ye then that I shall do unto him whom ye call the King of the Jews? And they cried out again, Crucify him. Then Pilate said unto them, Why, what evil hath he done? And they cried out the more exceedingly, Crucify him. And so Pilate, willing to content the people, released Barabbas unto them, and delivered Jesus, when he had scourged him, to be crucified.

          39. [The Mongols & the Pope, & Moby]

40. [Up, Down, Left, Right, Above, Below, Before, North, South, East, West]

Awhile ago I remember hearing a Native American prayer that said, “Oh, beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty to the right of me, beauty to the left of me, beauty above me, beauty below me, I’m on the pollen path.” And when I was reading a bunch of religious texts last year I kept coming across the four directions, or the actions of rising up or falling down, looking back or looking ahead, etc., & how, depending on the context, each could mean total transcendence of some kind (God encompassing all space) or dread & terror (your enemies are coming from all directions), or how the same action could mean two different things—either being flung to the ground in defeat, or bowing voluntarily & with reverence, etc. So here are the notes I found, limited as they by what little I was able to read (only one excerpt from the Mahabarata! etc.), & limited even further by what I found, so much more probably gone right by me.

BUDDHISM

(All sayings of the Buddha from In the Buddha's Words; Heinrich Zimmer quote from Joseph Campbell's The Mythic Image)

THE BUDDHA:

I heard and learned from the Blessed One’s own lips: ‘As soon as the Bodhisatta was born, he stood firmly with his feet on the ground; then he took seven steps facing north, and with a white parasol held over him, he surveyed each quarter and uttered the words of the leader of the herd: “I am the highest in the world; I am the best in the world; I am the foremost in the world. This is my last birth; now there is no renewed existence for me.”

These six things are to be regarded as the six directions. The east denotes the mother and father. The south denotes teachers. The west denotes wife and children. The north denotes friends and companions. The nadir denotes servants, workers, and helpers. The zenith denotes ascetics and brahmins.

“If someone were to ask you, Vaccha: ‘When that fire before you was extinguished, to which direction did it go: to the east, the west, the north, or the south?’—being asked thus, what would you answer?”

        “That does not apply, Master Gotama. The fire burned in dependence on its fuel of grass and sticks. When that is used up, if it does not get any more fuel, being without fuel, it is reckoned as extinguished.”

        “So too, Vaccha, the Tathagata has abandoned that form by which one describing the Tathagata might describe him; he has cut it off at the root, made it like a palm stump, done away with it so that it is no longer subject to future arising.”

Suppose, friend, there were stone pillar sixteen meters long, eight meters sunk in the ground and eight meters above the ground. Then a powerful rainstorm would come from the east: the pillar would not budge, would not shake, would not tremble. Then a powerful rainstorm would come from the north … from the west … from the south … the pillar would not budge, would not shake, would not tremble. Why? Because of the depth of the base and because the stone pillar bas been deeply planted. So too for a monk thus liberated in mind, if powerful sense objects come into range, they do not obsess his mind; his mind remains uncontaminated, steady, attained to imperturbability, and he contemplates their fall.

Above, across, and below,

Delight is no more found in them.

They boldly sound their lion’s roar:

“The enlightened are supreme in the world.”

HEINRICH ZIMMER:

“[The Mahayana Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara] is the personification of the highest ideal of the Mahayana Buddhist career. His legend recounts that when, following a series of eminently virtuous incarnations, he was about to enter into the surcease of nirvana, an uproar, like the sound of a general thunder, rose in all the worlds. The great being knew that this was a wail of lament uttered by all created things—the rocks and stones as well as the trees, insects, gods, animals, demons, and human beings of all the spheres of the universes—at the prospect of his imminent departure from the realms of birth. And so, in his compassion, he renounced for himself the boon of nirvana until all beings without exception should be prepared to enter in before him—like the good shepherd who permits his flock to pass first through the gate and then goes through himself, closing it behind

him.”

CHRISTIANITY

(Quotes from the canonical Gospels--Matthew, Mark, Luke, John--from the King James Version; those from the Gospel of Thomas & the Nag Hammadi from The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: International Edition; those from the Desert Fathers from The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks; all others--a few infancy gospels, etc.--from The Complete Gospels: Annotated Scholars Version)

The Desert Fathers:

A hermit once visited Mount Sinai. When he was going away, a brother met him, and groaned, saying, ‘Abba, we are afflicted by drought. There has been no rain.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you pray and ask God for it?’ He replied, ‘We’ve been praying and asking God constantly, and still there is no rain.’ The hermit said, ‘I don’t think you are praying earnestly enough. Shall we see whether that is the case? Let us stand and pray together.’ He stretched out his hands to heaven and prayed; and at once rain fell. The brother was afraid at the sight, and fell down and worshipped him. But the hermit fled from that place.

The Emperor said to him, ‘Do you know who I am?’ He said, ‘God knows who you are.’ The Emperor said, ‘I am the Emperor Theodosius.’ The monk at once fell down before him and did humble obeisance. The Emperor said, ‘Blessed are you, for you have an untroubled life, without thought of the world. I tell you truly, I was born an emperor and I have never enjoyed bread and water as I have today: I have eaten with real pleasure.’ He began to do honour to the monk, so the hermit went out, and fled back to Egypt.

A brother felt hungry at dawn, and struggled not to eat till nine o’clock. When nine o’clock came, he made himself wait till noon. At noon he dipped his bread and sat down to eat, but then got up again, saying, ‘I will wait till three.’ At three o’clock he prayed, and saw the devil’s work going out of him like smoke; and his hunger ceased.

The Gospel of John:

John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me. And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace. (1:15-16)

Jesus answered, If I honour myself, my honour is nothing: it is my Father that honoureth me; of whom ye say, that he is your God: Yet ye have not known him; but I know him: and if I should say, I know him not, I shall be a liar like unto you: but I know him, and keep his saying. Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad. Then said the Jews unto him, Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham? Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by. (8:54-59)

The Gospel of Luke:

And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, Being forty days tempted of the devil. And in those days he did eat nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungered. And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread. And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God. And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. (4:1-8)

And he said also to the people, When ye see a cloud rise out of the west, straightway ye say, There cometh a shower; and so it is. And when ye see the south wind blow, ye say, There will be heat; and it cometh to pass. Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time? Yea, and why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right? (12:54-57)

And he said unto them, Ye are they which justify yourselves before men; but God knoweth your hearts: for that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God. (16:15)

And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried; And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. (16:22-25)

The Gospel of Matthew:

And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. (3:16-17)