Giving up hope is encouragement to stick with yourself, to make friends with yourself, to not run away from yourself, to return to the bare bones, no matter what's going on. Fear of death is the background of the whole thing. It's why we feel restless, why we panic, why there's anxiety. But if we totally experience hopelessness, giving up all hope of alternatives to the present moment, we can have a joyful relationship with our lives, an honest, direct relationship, one that no longer ignores the reality of impermanence and death.
I was still thinking about that one a lot the next day when I picked up Barometer Rising to continue reading it for my book club. You probably already know this, but it's a historical novel by Hugh MacLennan that takes place in Halifax during the week of the first world war when the Halifax Explosion occurred. I hadn't gotten to the catastrophic event yet, but I was enjoying the description of Neil MacRae's lonely wanderings around the town on a misty December morning — as well as the familiar view of the Halifax Harbour he encounters — when I came to this passage:
Spread below him, the town lay with the mist concealing every ugly thing, and the splendour of its outline seemed the most perfect, natural composition he had ever seen. He thought now that a man could only know the meaning of peace when he no longer reached after the torment of hope. He had lost Penny, with whom there might have been happiness. Now there was no need to argue or justify himself any more; unhappiness could no longer have meaning, for there was no longer anything positive for him to be unhappy about. There was nothing to worry him. Last night he had relinquished the last thread of ambition which had held worries tight in his mind. But the beauty of the world remained and he found himself able to enjoy it; it stayed a constant in spite of all mankind's hideous attempts to master it.
Besides the obvious connection to the first quote and the eerie similarity to my own surroundings and recent mood, the resemblance of this selection, in the context of the Pema Chödrön reading, to some lyrics I wrote years ago for an Our Igloo song called "Note to Self" also immediately struck me:
The body in your bed, it isn't you.
It might as well be dead; it isn't you.
I know it tells you what to feel.
I know that others tell you too,
But they're not you.
This winter morning is a dream.
Look at the harbour — it's a bowl of steam.
Pretty weird, right? Something is definitely trying to tell me something, was all I could think.
Then this morning I was reading an essay by Jorge Luis Borges, himself possibly the king of farfetched connections. It was a short piece called "The Wall and the Books," about the emperor who built the Great Wall of China and also burned massive numbers of books in an attempt to eradicate the country's history before his rule. The last sentence of the essay seems to come from nowhere:
Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces molded by time, certain twilights and certain places — all these are trying to tell us something, or have told us something that we should not have missed, or are about to tell us something; that imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced is, perhaps, the aesthetic reality.
That one was enough to inspire a short poem and a long music mix in me. Enjoy! (The title links to the mix download, all in one file. Track listing below.)
Out of the mystery we unfold,
Wait,
And patiently behold our history
That we might penetrate the mystery.
Imminent Revelation
1. Black Mystery Has Been Revealed - Roland Kirk
2. New Grass - Talk Talk
3. In a Silent Way - Miles Davis
4. Lonely Woman - Ornette Coleman
5. Undo - Björk
6. Kalimanko Denko - Bulgarian Women's Choir
7. Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli: Kyrie - Jeremy Summerly
8. How to Bring a Blush to the Snow - Cocteau Twins
9. Touched - My Bloody Valentine
10. Blue Jay Way - The Beatles
11. Irene - Caribou
12. Giuggi - Alessandro Brugnolin
13. Lacunar Amnesia - The Caretaker
14. If - The Flaming Lips
15. Bonus Track 1 - Jonathan Richman
16. No One Asked to Dance - Deerhoof
17. Don't Let It Bring You Down - Neil Young
18. Debussy's Arabesque No. 1 - Isao Tomita
19. Oceanic Beloved - Alice Coltrane
20. The Big Ship - Brian Eno
21. The Colour of Spring - Mark Hollis
2 comments:
Hi And,
I'm worried about you. You sound very sad and seem to feel that the only way to feel better is to give up hope. That doesn't sound very encouraging to me. It does sometimes feel better to look inward when we go through hard times, but we need people and I think we need hope. Just hoping you're ok.
Dana
I know that hope is generally seen as a good thing, but the point here is that it's really just the flip-side of fear. I.e. a desire for the future to be a certain way that hinders us from fully experiencing reality as it is, in the present — the only place we can ever find reality.
Here's a bit more of what Pema has to say about it:
"For those who want something to hold onto, life is... inconvenient. From this point of view, theism is an addiction. We're all addicted to hope — hope that the doubt and the mystery will go away. This addiction has a painful effect on society: a society based on lots of people addicted to getting ground under their feet is not a very compassionate place.
"The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn't mean that something is wrong. What a relief. Finally somebody told the truth. Suffering is part of life, and we don't have to feel it's happening because we personally made the wrong move. In reality, however, when we feel suffering, we think that something is wrong. As long as we're addicted to hope, we feel that we can tone our experience down or liven it up or change it somehow, and we continue to suffer a lot."
So yes, I AM very sad, at least sometimes, and I'm trying to move into that sadness when it exists, to see what it has to tell me, without making it into a problem. Hoping that something will happen to take away the sadness prevents me from doing that, and also from enjoying the mystery of not knowing what the next moment holds.
Thanks for being concerned about me, and for noticing how I feel and expressing it back to me. Feels really good.
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