In Pursuit or Flight from "holy insecurity" - Martin Buber's sum of his philosophy.
1998 or 9, I was in Mirepoix, France near the Pyrenees...went into the massive cathedral there and greatly enjoyed this seated character...I got a post card of him and knew that for me he represented the shadow of the psychoanalyst/therapist...if one counsels, shrinks, helps in such a capacity then one must must must locate this cat within, the shadow of counseling/counselor or he/she's bound to show up in session and then there's a whole lotta work to do.
So did, or started, earnest, burntish, TCHAIKOVSKY tattooed where sun ain't shown, "Pathetique" the middle name so, yeah. I did. To NYC from Blue Ridge broken edges fled. For Harlem, West 142nd, off Broadway. 1980 ought 1.
Forced out of orchards and streams to Hudson Rio nigh cuz someone or some malformed thing in me had to go, to flower-wither, to summarily croak, so plans were made whence and whither, lodgings arranged, Harlem 1980, Koch era, the internal wilderness wander further ensuing urbanly hardcore, Basho's book in my coat pocket just in case I needed a reminding map, in upper-upper Manhattan where mad Garcia Lorca once fled the sorrowful fountains of Spain to roam awhile before his return to yellow feathered assasins and an invisible grave,
"...some say the crime was in Granada" :
Friends, carve a monument
out of dream stone
for the poet in the Alhambra,
over a fountain where the grieving water
shall say forever:
The crime was in Granada, his Granada."
- Antonio Machado, from "The Crime Was In Granada"
I was "spelled" like Lorca by old bricks squalid beauty grimed, each a story told, a private gesture open to witness, mud memory mute and chrysos, sonambulant subway pitching interminably forward, graffiti scrawls clutching after a bit of fame or notoriety into what was still a pandemonium most pentecostal long ranting after dark, jazz, salsa, merengue nights gore and glory dispatched from cars, windows, stoops, sidewalks, "Thriller" and Tina Turner's question "what's love got tah do with it" my new enforced mountain-exile meditation - children's play, all ages, 3 a.m. hydrant fountains bodies hot hard in lamp glow orange apocalypse by river curl following apparitions native barks and Dutch long ships sails-full passing West 142nd, blocks south looms Cathedral Divine Saint John's hang, just beyond reach of workers, trabajadores, immigrant occupants who north of 116th street earnestly try to migrate joys few coins rolling in gutters, millions passed and passing by overlooking the Christ, hungry abject crowds, slogging for the American dream,
"I have the money and can pay for the past." - Richard Hugo
Wasn't all this redeemed/revalued a long Palestine ago? The crysos of Church and churches remains more that of fools and not of the Christos. There's much to blame. Still, I'm a gargoyle perched-a-ledge mis-churched and worn, God of the Western and American world stuck in my craw, a lightning bolt bolted to my left paw beside near-dead Aquinas-Saint about himself/his work lifelong, the Summa and more - the Church more in mind and himself in terms of the real value of all his theologizing - "All straw! All straw!" wrote he about all his writing a year before he died , and never spoke or wrote a word more.
only the gods to blame - they love a good
argument anyway. Why should I disappoint?
“... only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated, and the whole future is condemned to hopeless staleness.” - Carl Jung, from Symbols of Transformation
A Straw Man Cometh More Scare Than Crow
For this reason though, post-Christian, pre-Manhattan, I had hid, nay, sequestered mad-enough in mountains tall, stalled, a being-not-yet. Bequestered and confundidated. Hiding out in Nature's beauty was all I then could do. So I waited for Mister Godot. Until He showed up a cheap bordeaux would do. And reading the nights slowly through.
Till the "Go way" notice came.
And I went. Skidaddle n addled, "thrown" as Sartre would say, into voiditude despite uncountable and accounted for, meaning-wise, filler.
"Spilled" nor "spat", I di'nt stay where weren't wanted so packed the Chevy van and rattled north to Manhattan - a kind of suicide since having tried to leap off a cliff in the Blue Ridge intent to end it all,
when, sudden, just before stepping off to finish the "thrown" "spilled" "spatitudeinous-ness mess", I heard behind me a male voice say, OUTLOUD (twas in my head but externalized as psyche does do),
"You know you are a dead man already."
WHAT? WHO? WHERE? - me.
Spin stun spun (not spit or spat) around to see what man spoke so near to my right ear.
NO ONE THERE. NARY, I'll swan.
Sez he- "If you're ready to jump, and you are, the decision's made,
you are a dead man already.
Me (thinking) - OK (makes sense sorta re: to mortar or not) but what's going on? How can....
Sez he - "So you're dead, you've lost it all,
so what is the riskiest thing you can go after since you are now, dead, risking nothing.
Me - Hmmmmmm. I slow ponder, but in nanoseconds.
I finally hear myself say out loud - "New York City [really was/is a kind of suicide]."
"Well?" - sez He.
In that cliff's edge razzle I slowly backed away, be-stounded, relievéd, knew I would have to do "the deed", pack up my toil and tent and hie thee hence. Get off the barbed fence and head out, rust or bust, wing dinged and a pauper's prayer-ISH, for North. Or Nawth. Forsooth for forsaken missing a tooth, mawish, mawkish, van's spark plugs stuttering all the way. Cough cough chuggin' tepid roadside coughEE, Brewer and Shipley cassette on endless play - Rock Me On the Water:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpMuzOR3Z-w
My good friends there in Blue Ridge were not at all happy though they knew of my depression and grief.
Funny (I think it is) story re: them friends, a year after my bum's stagger and dodging in NYC, called me on the telly and asked me how my writing was going (I did then, do still) be a writer somehow:
"Great," I replied, "really great - I write checks and suicide notes but not necessarily in that order."
True dat.
I left for NYC 3 months after the VOICE intervened, January 2nd.
Now. The Edge Man at the cliff knew me intimately since he used the phrase re: "taking a risk, THE risk"which meant and still means much to me.
I had been reading Charles Olson's Maximus Poems for months, trying to ken what indeed he/they were all about but having at it despite befuddlement. I mostly jot down lines and such that rang out or in or sang to me.
One of the first, and fateful, lines that moved me to tears and a kind of shame gethering around me came towards the end of the first Maximus poem. when Olson writes:
"He can take no risk that matters / the risk of beauty most of all"
BAM. Olson has called me out and named the calling, quest for me, take "the risk that then and now matters" - the risk beauty most of all.
So, at the cliff's edge began the stagger, the stall, ever falling forward and, ofttimes, on my face, but toward beauty however that would shake or bake or show in terms of my own writerly and other thralls and palls of it, the "B".
SNIPT TEXTS for CONTEXT
"I am old enough now to realize we are all trying to live sufficiently long to see the self come true. None of us is likely to make it. Therefore we invent selves, we prance and pose and dream and labor, confirming what we might be by what others think we are and by what we see we have been."
- Dave Smith, "A Secret You Can't Break Free
"Humanity, is on the way, always moving towards something. At least, we should be. The classic theological concept for this is 'Homo Viator', or Man on the Way [Man the Flier]. For life is a journey, an adventure that we are always a part of. We do not choose to be on the way, it is our existential situation. We are not at home, we are are on the way home....We long to be at home, in a place of comfort, yet we are not." - Dan Jesse
'"... from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation.... A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the ' - James Joyce
"We go towards something that is not yet, and we come from something that is no more. We are what we are by what we came from. We have a beginning as we have an end. There was a time that was not our time. We hear of it from those who are older than we; we read about it in history books...It is hard for us to imagine our 'being-no-more.' It is equally difficult to imagine our 'being-not-yet'. " - Paul Tillich
That place among the rocks—Is is a cave,
Or a winding path? The edge is what I have. - Theodore Roethke"
"I have occasionally described my standpoint to my friends as the "narrow ridge,"’ writes Buber. ‘I wanted by this to express that I did not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a narrow rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but the certainty of meeting what remains undisclosed.’ (Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith [London: Kegan Paul, 1947] p.184). Perhaps no other phrase so aptly characterizes the quality and significance of Martin Buber’s life and thought as this one of the ‘narrow ridge.’ It expresses not only the ‘holy insecurity’ of his existentialist philosophy but also the ‘I-Thou,’ or dialogical, philosophy which he has formulated as a genuine third alternative to the insistent either-or’s of our age. Buber’s ‘narrow ridge’ is no ‘happy middle’ which ignores the reality of paradox and contradiction in order to escape from the suffering they produce. It is rather a paradoxical unity of what one usually understands only as alternatives -- I and Thou, love and justice, dependence and freedom, the love of God and the fear of God, passion and direction, good and evil, unity and duality." -- from Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue by Maurice S. Friedman.
"The narrow ridge is the place where I and Thou meet," he [Buber] added. When I asked him to clarify this symbolism to me, he replied...'If you like, you can think of the narrow ridge as a region within yourself where you cannot be touched. Because there you have found yourself: and so you are not vulnerable."
CODA Chinois
I discovered Chinese poets of yore in those mouuts, welcomed me for a while then kicked me OUT. Found a book at the bookstore in Asheville, NC, new, Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry, an anthology of around one thousand Chinese poems translated into English. Thumbed through it, wow wow wow, purchased it though it meant peanut butter sandwiches for the rest of the week, a worthy sacrifice it was, a thick heavy tome carried with me on hikes for dips in, Chinese poets of old to savor and, happily, quickly, paging here and there, one poet, now a thoughtful lifelong companion through all cycles so far lived, Liu Tsung-yuan (773 - 819), became, and still is, for me a human homing-device, an in-the-moment course correction when intercourse with the world, and my pitiable self, was then, and betimes still is (like NOW) just too too much to bear.
In the late '70's old Liu would lift me out of pathetic self muck, gather my scattered bones from the sandy bottom of Scowler's Creek as he, Liu, did the flood scattered bones of old Heng the faithful hired hand whose name means "persevering," and orient p-p-perseverating me toward the western woods,
Feeling Old Age
I've always known that old age would arrive,
and suddenly now I witness its encroach.
This year, luckily, I've not weakened much
but gradually it comes to seek me out.
Teeth scattered, hair grown short,
To run or hurry, I haven't the strength.
So, I cry, what's to be done!
And yet, why should I suffer?
P'eng-tsu and Lao Tzu no more exist',
Chuang Tzu and K'ung Tzu too are gone.
Of those whom the ancients called 'immortal saints'
not one is left today.
I only wish for fine wine
and friends who will often help me pour.
Now that spring is drawing to a close -
and peach and plum produce abundant shade
and the sun lights up the azure sky and
far, far, the homeward goose cries,
I step outside, greeting those I love,
and climb to the western woods with the aid of my staff.
Singing out loud is enough to cheer me up;
the ancient hymns have overtones.
Fragment for old Han Shan whose name is Cold Mountain -
[Dates of his life are uncertain, anywhere from 5th to 9th century A.D.]
If stopped and questioned at the Gate to
Yellow Spring, I'll blame you, old Ghost
of too many former selves, a meandering
rumor still muttering the old hymns, who
grants me permission the entrance to boldly storm.
Between what these final breaths remain and
the horizon closing in, my fingers still work.
On behalf of all sentient beings I will plead
the case.
I'll write until the quill is taken from my cold hand.
Even then I shall be dirty with righteous indigence,
only the gods to blame - they love a good
argument anyway. Why should I disappoint?
In dying I become human through and through
which comes from doing.
Be damned and done with mirrors and pockets,
a man can curse at the end having earned the
right to do so -
a wink and a
grin rehearsed,
then come the flies.
Whose hands shall
shoo them, whose
hands un-shoe him
and run quickly
into day?
I leave my poems just as they are.
When I'm gone let the worms correct
spelling and punctuation.
Meanwhile beneath willow tips
I will tease slowly the grasses to laughter
