The bum hip resulted from years of hard-ship athletics: competitive weightlifting, long-distance running, mountain climbing, and so forth. I spent substantial time in my (youthful) life ignoring the ancient call for moderation, shunning what the Buddha called the middle way. It was obsession or nothing, one obsession daisy chained to the next.

Two weeks prone in bed gives one opportunity for reflection.

* * *

“The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less,” writes Anne Dillard. I was greedy. Guilty. Moderation, the middle way–that is the new horizon and I consider it with something less than obsession and more akin to meditation, like a snake shedding its skin.

As I’ve mentioned before, the question is not how to live, but how to think. One precedes the other naturally, but the logic of such a thing too often escapes us and we trudge forward living only.

* * *

Anticipating the surgery, a wise friend asked, “What are you going to do with this opportunity?” What a marvelous question! And I mean marvelous in the sense that I marveled over it: direct and simple and challenging. I could not outline how I might wrestle this question into order, but I embraced it openly and without constriction. It was, and remains, my wide-sky mantra.

The thing is, a question sometimes carries more portent in suspension. The answered question loses potential in resolution. Perhaps that is why the big questions remain, being so big as to constantly provoke and unsettle, never giving the pilgrim respite.

To wit: What are you going to do with this opportunity called life?

My Maryland Woods

I spent some time over the weekend thinking about my best self as in, when have I realized my best self? I was in Maryland where I am selling some property, much of which consists of several acres of raw old woods, with trees bigger than I can get my arms around. I love these woods.

I do not use the word love lightly.

It was Mother’s Day evening and I was standing in a patch of woods where, four years ago, I scattered my mother’s ashes. The sun was setting. That’s when I started to reflect on those times when I experienced what I call my best self. My mother motivated me in a deep and profound way to seek such things of myself.

Also in these woods I roamed and meditated and worked with my beloved Maggie, a dog that meant more to me than I can talk about. Maggie died three years ago and walking the woods I could see her beautiful sleek athlete’s body fly like an arrow through the undergrowth. And over there, by the brook, is where I buried poor little Oscar, a rust-colored rescue cat that one night had a stroke. When I found him in the morning he did not resist my touch and his eyes no longer held life, though his heart was still beating.

These memories had the capacity to crush me as I walked my woods a last time. I was spared that, fortunately, though my heart was indeed heavy. Rather, I was grateful, a soaring and rare emotion. The animals of my life, my mother, the trees, the capacity for memory, these are things woven together by my aspiration for a better self, a best self. These are things loved and love will, by its very nature, guide a person to such heights.

I spent the day with him, at his bedside, and a measure of me hoped that he would be spared further suffering. But as the day wore on, he recovered. I fed him. I read to him. I held his hand.  Late in the day, I left him sleeping. I told the receptionist that I was leaving. She said they would check on him. When I returned a few hours later, he was in his chair, dressed, and trying to figure out his TV remote. We watched a bit of Deadliest Catch together.

The body fails us when we most desire otherwise. And, conversely, it stubbornly marches on when we have perhaps arrived at exhaustion and long for rest. The final act of existence is the release of breath–just as the first act was the gasp for it. There is nothing within our control, but for the thoughts in our head and even those, most precious and of our own design, run wild through the caverns of consciousness.  We carry on together.

* * *

#2) My absence (here at the “…house…”) cannot be well explained. Something is afoot, a sea change. I’ve observed this phenomeon before and when it happens, this shift, everything gets exciting and boring simultaneously, if you can image such a thing. I had a (sort of) vision a few days ago–I know, a vision!–and in it a massive mud-caked bubble burst through the earth’s core and exploded. And when this happened I realized the limitless continuity of all things….

This is not my given way of explaining things and appears squishy and unseemly–but I said that something is afoot.

* * *

1 + 2 = Susan Sontag:

“Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”

Gluttony by Jamie Wyeth

I was accosted while walking home from Flat Bread Pizza last night. The culprit was a three-pound herring gull intent on seeing what was in the left-over box. Slyly, I tore off a piece of crust and knelt down. I extended my arm, crust offered. The bird approached. I studied the beast as it cautiously waddled toward me. It’s breast was white, and broad, and the color of fresh dry snow, beautiful and reflective. I noticed for the first time how the nostrils of a gull are etched into its yellow-ivory beak, how delicate its knees, and the fine webbing of its feet.

The approaching bird turned its head side to side, back and forth, keeping one eye on me the other over the shoulder, scanning for danger. Each pausing step was accompanied by half a dozen head rotations. The eye was marble-like, reflective, and I noticed for the first time how the lid was rimmed in red, etched crimson against pristine feathers. Penetrating and unblinking. Beautiful. Then it tilted forward and looked at me, square, eye to level eye. The bird was perhaps two feet from my extended hand. Look at me, the gull demanded. Look into my eye. Do you see me now? You see me everyday, but you do not really see me. Look at me. Look!

She was a good teacher and I gave her amble crust offerings.

]]> http://thehouseilivein.me/2013/04/02/5108/feed/ 2 dougbruns Gluttony by Jamie Wyeth http://thehouseilivein.me/2013/03/29/about-the-ultimate-destination/ http://thehouseilivein.me/2013/03/29/about-the-ultimate-destination/#comments Fri, 29 Mar 2013 10:00:55 +0000 A Journal of Life Pursued http://thehouseilivein.me/?p=4995 ]]> I’ve said this before, but (I think) it’s important so I will say it again. (The older I get, the more inclined to repeating myself I become.) We think from left to right. That is, we think in terms of a lineal progression, we think in terms of becoming. In reading, the eye moves across the page, as, to our way of thinking, the life progresses along the line. I think this has not served us well. Like a ship in sight of the harbor, the process of becoming delivers us from open water and secures us to the dock. It is safe and we can relax. But security is a lie….

Wait, let me start over. Let’s consider the shop-worn adage, Life is about the journey, not the destination. Since the ultimate destination is–duh–death, we should take this advice to heart. To say that life is about the journey is another way of recognizing that life is to be realized in the present tense. That’s good. However…

Returning to what I said at the outset, this business of “becoming.” Something about becoming suggests destination. I am suspect of destination thinking. Stay out of the harbor. Sail on.

Let’s leave it there for now.

* * *

I have no grudge with technology. However, I believe our nature is fundamentally simple and consequently I more appreciate artifacts of our simplicity than products of our science. I have an unattributed quote in my Moleskine that speaks to this: “The only possessions we feel good about are our books.” It is, of course, hyperbole, but hyperbole has its place.

* * *

I mentioned previously the book I’m reading, the John Cage biography, Where the Heart Beats. Two hundred pages in, the young composer finds himself misunderstood, his avant guard music scorned. He grows close to despair, questioning the very motive of writing music. Then Cage tells the following story:

“Two monks came to a stream. One was Hindu, the other Zen. The Indian began to cross the stream by walking on the surface of the water. The Japanese became excited and called to him to come back. ‘What’s the matter,’ said the Indian said. The Zen monk said, ‘That’s not the way to cross the stream. Follow me.’ He led him to a place where the water was shallow and they waded across.”

In other words, you have to do the work.

* * *

The Encyclopedia of Philosophy

I noted in a past post that my landlord was putting a new roof on the building, that my five-floor walk-up studio-office was subject to pounding and dust, disturbing both Lucy and me. Last week, while finishing the roof–slate, lots of it–we had rain and a wee bit trickled through the roof-top work and leaked into my place. It fell directly onto a stack of topographical maps collected on a crossbeam. The Little Bigelow Mtn. 7.5′ Quadrangle map took the brunt of it. What I today discovered, however, is that volume 1 and 2 of my eight volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy, also got wet. This is a pity.

Opened to the page of most damage we find the entry for “Culture and Civilization.” Despite the now warped pages, the entry begins:

“The word ‘civilization’ was derived from an actual social condition, that of the citizen (Latin, civis). The word ‘culture’ in its social, intellectual, and artistic senses is a metaphorical term derived from the act of cultivating the soil (Latin, cultura)….The cultivation of the mind was seen as a process comparable to the cultivation of the soil; hence, the early meanings of ‘culture,’ in this metaphorical sense, centered on a process; the culture of the mind,’ rather than an achieved state.”

To circle back to the beginning: cultivation is the journey, no matter the quality of the soil. Just do the work.

* * *

Two quotes, coming to my attention within two days of each other:

“I do not believe in God. But I am not an atheist.” ~ Albert Camus

and

“All is God and there is no God.” ~ D.T. Suzuki

* * *

I leave you with that. Make of it what you can. Have a nice weekend and thanks for visiting “…the house…”

d

Pride Parade, Portland, 2011, © Doug Bruns

I have loaded my camera–yes, “loaded my camera” means film, pilgrim–and am giving myself, again, to the streets. Beware, should you decide to stroll about in your bikini, I intend to find you.

* * *

It is always revision and editing–everything changing, always subject to more, to less. I wrote a week or so ago about art and discovery and Jackson Pollock. the piece was called The Practice of Discovery and I included this quote:

“Could Pollock’s late paintings result from his lifelong effort to excavate an image buried in all our brains?”

Picasso wrote an essay, Art as Individual Idea, published in 1923. He said, among other things, the following:

“I also often hear the word evolution. Repeatedly I am asked to explain how my painting evolved. To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was. Art does not evolve by itself, the ideas of people change and with them their mode of expression. When I hear people speak of the evolution of an artist, it seems to me that they are considering him standing between two mirrors that face each other and reproduce his image an infinite number of times, and that they contemplate the successive images of one mirror as his past, and the images of the other mirror as his future, while his real image is taken as his present. They do not consider that they all are the same images in different planes.”

I am arriving at the place of art’s ascension–the notion that art, like perhaps meditation, or nature, or drugs even, might render a revelatory state of consciousness. But what is art?

(BTW: The essay noted above is from The Modern Tradition by Richard Ellmann (the great biographer) and Charles Feidelson, Jr. If there is one book, albeit thick and with small print, that captures the thinking of the modern and the post-modern era, this is the book. I strongly recommend it if this period of great creativity interests you.)

* * *

Epiphany upon going to bed:

I’ve pursued the wrong question, it’s not How to Live? It’s How to Think?

How did I not realize this earlier?

* * *

A friend wrote to ask what I’m reading. I’m reading Where the Heart Beats, John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, by Kay Larson. The book came to my attention thanks to Brain Pickings and the omniscient Maria Popova.

I’m also about to start, The Inward Morning, A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form, by Henry Bugbee. Thanks to “…house…” member Geetha for this recommendation. I have not  yet cracked the cover. Here is a note from the back cover:

“The Inward Morning is a boldly original and lyrical philosophy of wilderness. Touching variously on poetry, fly fishing, Thoreau, and contemporary philosophers, this work is erudite and intimate. Henry Bugbee blends East and West, nature and culture, the personal and the universal. This reissue of an underground classic…will inform and inspire both contemporary philosophers and readers interested in an everyday philosophy of nature.”

–sounds like the book I was supposed to write…

______________________________________

“There is properly no history; only biography” ~ Emerson

My first choice of reading material is often biography. The biography holds everything: entertainment, knowledge, history, story-telling, insight, and possibly even wisdom. As best I can recall, the first biography I ever read was Mark Twain, though now that I think about it, I believe it was his autobiography, the genre-cousin of biography. I was in elementary school and I recall that it took a very long time to complete–I’m a slow reader. It was a big book written for grown-ups. And I wasn’t–grown-up, that is. I remember I had to write a book report and my teacher checked everyday on my progress, the book being thick and me being slow, and the report not coming when due, and the pressure, oh the pressure…

Young’s Biography, Nietzsche, A Philosophical Biography

As an adult I am still a slow reader and still a reader who loves biography. So it was that I saved up my pennies and sprang for the first new book (“new”: not a used book, or a library sale book, or a freebie review book) in quite some time: Friedrich Nietzsche, A Philosophical Biography by Julian Young. Young is Professor of Philosophy, University of Auckland, and the book is published by Cambridge University Press. I was turned onto it by a glowing review by Francis Fukuyam in the New York Times Book Review.  Fukuyam includes this line:

“Whether we acknowledge it or not, we continue to live within the intellectual shadow cast by Nietzsche. Postmodernism, deconstructionism, cultural relativism, the “free spirit” scorning bourgeois morality, even New Age festivals like Burning Man can all ultimately be traced to him.”

I have always been fascinated by this enigmatic thinker. Here’s how the biography opens:

“Nietzsche’s greatest inspiration, he believed, was the idea that if one is in a state of perfect mental health one should be able to survey one’s entire life and then, rising ecstatically to one’s feet, shout ‘Da capo!–Once more! Once More! Back to the beginning!–to ‘the whole play and performance’. In perfect health one would ‘crave nothing more fervently’ than the ‘eternal return’ of one’s life throughout infinite time–not the expurgated version with the bad bits left out, but exactly the same life, down to the very last detail, however painful or shameful.”

This idea stops me cold.

Brad Listi, the editor of The Nervous Breakdown (where I used to contribute), commenting on one of my essays once said,

“the internet is hell on writing in a lot of ways….[it] has neuro-chemical implications that haven’t been totally quantified yet.”

I think I am having a neuro-chemical writing breakdown today. I am certain it has nothing to do with (all) the Irish whisky I drank last night with friends, Susan and Harry. Certain. Damn good stuff that, though.

Let’s leave it at that. Perhaps the neuro-chemical balance thing will self-rectify soon.

The Maine Woods

We still have snow here in places, especially in the north, and certainly in the woods where the pine-tree canopy  shades the forest floor. I took a little hike yesterday and there is nothing like a crunching late-season snow, blue-bird sky, and scent of pine to fine-tune a person.

Not a lot came of this fine-tuning and maybe that is the best result of all. Maybe a walk in the woods should remain largely and exactly that: a walk in the woods. As Thoreau relates in his essay, Walking, “When a traveller asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, ‘Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.’”

In anther essay–to me, his most important, Life Without Principal–Thoreau writes:

“If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”

Two paragraphs above this passage, the sage of Walden, invites us to “consider the way in which we spend our lives.”

_____________

Library of America, Thoreau

I brought my copy of Thoreau to my desk this afternoon because I wanted to say something about activism to perhaps refute my comment of last week, “We have mostly rolled over.” I wanted to suggest that perhaps we have not, indeed, rolled over, now that I think more on it. I brought Henry David with me because he usually has guidance when I most need it. I was certain he would point the way in his essay Civil Disobedience. But I never made it there, lost instead in my reverie of a walk in the woods.

And as you can see, I found his guidance, just not the guidance I expected. He would approve, nonetheless, I think.

]]> http://thehouseilivein.me/2013/03/18/snow-under-boot/feed/ 8 dougbruns The Maine Woods imgres-1