Just finishing off the wedding speech … found this quote
It is astonishing how little one feels alone when one loves. ~John Bulwer
… I very rarely feel alone because I think I have learned at some level to love. It is astonishing how often people live in fear of being alone and I think this is a force that drives a lot of relationships. Yet I do question myself a lot.
In a night club yesterday I proved to myself that really I do not fit in. When dancing for example my greatest pleasure has always been to dance to the music. This forms a relationship between myself and the music. It is like when one goes walking one dances to the sound of nature – it is a relationship between oneself and nature. Yet in a night club I was watching that actually people tend to form couples and dance with each other. I try to do this and I confirm yesterday what I have always felt that it feels wrong for me – I try to dance with a girl and I now have two masters: the music and her! Which is more important? I watch her and I try to see how she is interpreting the music and then I try to understand her interpretation to copy that and I find it boring, so I do my own interpretation and that is different from hers because I always change – I don’t ever stay in one time or with one motion – I am impossible to follow and I find following someone else boring. It is the same as playing in a band – I cannot listen to my own heart and the other musicians as well. I either play what I feel should come next or I am left trying to stay with them which is boring. What I have never mastered is think “with” someone else so that she and I think the same dance, the band thinks and plays the same music. I know in jazz this is considered the special moment that every free-form jazz group seeks when there is synergy between all players and that higher unity and emergent property is created that enriches the participants. This is indeed my dream of relationship – yet I never find it, it always seems so hackneyed, trivial and robotic in practice. I see girls and guys “on heat” and they dance together obvious driven by need for sex and driven by fear of loneliness and the music I fear is just a tool to these other instincts. Is there really a higher unity, an emergent property something greater? I believe so, but don’t find it myself.
3am (eternal) this morning after leaving the night club and doing night shift at the Buddha Birthday celebration I speak to an elderly gentleman about his marriage. I described how after 4 years living very closely with a girl I met her again after the relationship had ended and realised that even after all this time together she was like “another” person – a stranger and I felt that I never really knew her. He confirms what I guess I am beginning to realise: he says that he likes sport and his wife likes shopping. There is give and take in their relationship. He goes shopping and just sitting on a chair outside the shops with a newspaper catching up on sports results and at home he watches the sport and she goes about her other interests. This way they work together but he doesn’t really know her at all. My dream of some kind of unity of mind and spirit so that partners both think and work as entities joined in some kind a higher emergent property is maybe a myth. He said there are maybe those few partnerships that work like this – but I am reminded of what another friend said that women and men think differently. Indeed I realise they do - they have completely different interests and roles in creation. We are different.
But it all makes me question where the fault lies. Do I seek a myth? Am I somehow at fault – I feel on a completely different level to other people. In metaphor I was thinking I get bored by simply flowing together with other people; I like angles and edges with which to push off from and gain momentum and direction. It seems other people are happy to just forget things and ooze together in an amorphous amalgam. Is that the dissolution of self that I sort in “my muse”? Is that the ecstacy of the Bacchic dance? Or am I right to continue in the Apolloine mould and seek distinction and definition from the crowd – remaining true to my own instincts, directions, knowledge and integrity?
Maybe this is just the great question that faces Man. Do we seek entry to Eden again and be like the animals (like they do it on the Discovery Channel) or shall we eat from the tree and seek Self and Knowledge? One of the first things I wrote my muse was an extended image of two eagles encircling together over Eden on the rising thermals of that original sin… (before crashing to earth together – I do not know what that symbolised)… certainly it seems that my thoughts then are as they are now and awareness of this problem is once again being awoken.
Folding in the blog on houses and separateness and togetherness – there is allegory in the words that I write. Each word is very lonely being utterly separated from every other word. Yet “reading” creates an emergent property which provides a structure in which they are unified. Inancientgreeceandprobablymanyancientlanguagesspaceswerenotputbetweenwords. Separate the words from the continuous text then depended upon understand the meanings. There is a dialectic (more evident in the ancient from) that separateness is only possible when we look from the higher emergent level back at the “components” and vice versa unity is only comprehended when we see that the components really do compose the higher form. The true structure is actually both unity and separateness together.
So I say that in a night club I see people paired off in couples. I say that I see them dancing to the music and together. I say that I feel more together with the music than the partner I dance with. (I should add when I imagine dancing with a partner it is a much more formal arrangement of learned steps and agreed protocols). Really if I look more closely all this is only possible because of a very high level unity that is already present that determines which components I identity and also how they fit together. What I can’t figure out however is how “I” fit into that high level unity? I dance there on the dance floor watching and musing upon what I see unfolding around me – how am I related to unfolding events? In Vipassana meditation they would be just unfolding events with no witness (or maybe the unfolding philosophical thoughts about the witness and the nature of that witness). But can one really participate in a dance floor as a fully meditative monastic? What is dancing like when we meditate! What does our partner think! Needless to say my “partner” got as bored as I was and went back to her friend.
Watching Peter Owen-Jones (POJ) on Friday who I think suffers from my problem but even worse. His shows are unmistakably about “himself”. This blog maybe is just about “me” not the search for some great truth in life at all. [Writing structure being abandoned]: I advised someone that he was a coward at the night shift as well – in him i saw myself – he was suffering in a relationship that he had agreed too out of convenience and hoped that he would end up loving his partner – of course he never has and now is trapped. He is a coward and maybe I am too because to be happy in a relationship one must first risk everything. The more one risks the greater the reward. If one risks ones life one receives Life back (that is the message of Christ). I think I risked everything for my muse – she has been the only girl I’ve said yes to and pursued, yet I held back because I didn’t want to risk hurting her through my own weakness (lack of money, career etc). Writing now I see that to say yes to her is really to say yes to “the world” as well. This is why I hold back. Something in the “world” is distasteful – that is what I need to resolve before any talk of relationships. Anyway he needs to meet a girl his feeling for who frightens him, and then to use that fear to risk everything. That is the way to growth and happiness. Maybe advice I should take one day … again. So Owen-Jones is following the life of Saint Francis and goes a step further than my own walking. When I walked my logic was to minimise my needs so that I could travel as far and as easily as possible. I carry a logic from my father not to burden those around me. Yet Saint Francis had it different. It is by placing oneself at the mercy of others and needing their charity that ones finds the mercy and charity in others! So he lived in a way that required the support of others entirely. Buddha did the same and by chance the husband of an ex-girlfriend at the Buddha’s Birthday event was explaining that UNESCO published a book on Barlaam and Josaphat which explains that early links between Christianity and Indian Buddhism probably gave the Christians their monastic traditions (as they did the Chinese). POJ said that he found it hard to live this way in UK today because of what he described as “fear”. I guess that “fear” comes from the attachment to property and possessions – we are unwilling to be charitable because we are scared of our possessions and security being damaged. Result being that we don’t see the good in others our self but rather the bad – see the nations consciousness i.e. the newspapers for more on that! POJ also saw a simple problem that I don’t understand yet. It is true that there is little difference between a “scrounger” and a “saint” in appearance. How do we know that our charity won’t breed a population of people who have no interest in seeing the good but are just lazy and undisciplined. This is the right wing argument. India is seeing this happening and the very old traditions of supporting travellers are being lost – monasticism in its original form is dying there. So it breeds by argument a culture where people cannot “connect as deeply” as POJ says living like that creates. Being self-sufficient it seems creates disregard for others rather than love. That I fear then is one of my great weaknesses. My walks were to some extent wasted because I never threw myself at the mercy of people. Instead I threw myself at the mercy of “Mother Earth” and I guess this is why I have strengthened my relationship with her (to the point of actually spiritually speaking to her once) – it is her I try to love. That is why my loneliness has gone, that I guess is my relationship – yet it is not as fulfilling as a relationship with a physical girl I fear. I need to throw myself at the mercy of a girl one day for that it seems – I never did that to “my muse” I thought it cruel for her as how do you respond to someone who seeks your mercy in love if you do not love them in return? Horrible. If you are weak and cowardly you will pretend to love them and that is evil. Can we really do this out of love for someone? The saints seem to… hmmmm
So no real conclusions yet but an exploration this weekend of unity,love and loneliness… back to the wedding speech (I’m sure all this thinking about marriage I’m being forced to do is for some kind of reason – or punishment ;-)
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We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person. ~W. Somerset Maugham
Just read this quote too. It is fascinating and I am rethinking all this like I used to with “my muse” that all the problems of existence are no better perceived that at the junction where two people meet. I wonder why my chance to explore all this was never available with “my muse”. I also think that my opportunity will never arise because also out of my musings this weekend is the thought that I am truly different from other people. People it seems are mostly quite lowly creatures – more akin to dogs and cats than saints and gods. It is a horrible thought but I must entertain it that the common state of mankind is actually virtually on a level of unconsciousness… this is too depressing a thought to be worth saying… anyway the place I wish to be not this but in the full brightness of an alert consciousness, fully aware and sensitive to things as they are. Any partner will simply have to be seeking the same to even show up on a radar… and there is never anyone on the radar because women seek material wealth and material child birth rather than the wealth of insight and brightness. Twice this week men have also expressed the importance of children – but ironically it is that strength of devotion to ones child that I understand blocks ones path to liberation. Buddha legendarily called his son Rahula (राहुल which looking up on Pitarau.com means able/efficient… I’m corrected from thinking it meant of “burden”.. in the west apparently it takes the form Ralph which is a middle name of myself by chance). But the legend does so that Buddha saw his love for his child as a hindrance to liberation simply because it makes one want to stay in the world of imperfection. If our child dies suddenly we see with unimaginable shock and misery the depth of Buddha’s realisation about our ignorance of impermanent forms. We can only pray that our child lives so that we are spared learning the truth of our ignorance, and can continue to maintain that love which is ignorant. I understand this is what he meant. Anyway S.Maugham sees in his relationship that most extraordinary feature of emergent properties that they can remain unchanged while their components are changed – viz the long discussions on the Argo before in this blog).
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I feel like I’m living in an Earnest Hemmingway novel now… I just looked up the name of “my muse” and it’s the Sanskrit for "melted, dissolved, vanished"… how odd and allegorical is that … how can that be :-(
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