This "braided" presentation was made by me and google ai mode in "cooperation", an experiment. I must confess I am "human all too human" and ai mode drove me bonkers. When it glitches, it glitches, and I was/am pitched headlong into a battle of will (mine) and the didgit-al, hermetically programmed "immoveable object and force", AI the unbudge-able, thus a stalemate (it is so so #&## polite!) so I hereby name ai. "The Infernal UnBudgie". Verily bug-able it is. And when I insist that it is wrong or not working correctly (when it clearly has), It says,
"I will stand down now."
Full Stop.
It's like arguing with G-D, or Mount Everest, or a gnat - a "VOID of course" from the ancient Greek phrase kenodromeia, meaning "running in the emptiness" or "running in the void".
A losing situation. To AVOID!!
Now having vented, lost my (unfindable) Zen "cool" and "detachment", I shall humbly, mumbling as I go, go forward into what is below.
KATZ!
But first:
A Prologomena Humina Humina - A Prolonged Prologue On The Way To The Confessional Where East Meets Guest
for Joan
"behind a star the ash sings without self pity"
Crowned bairn of the barn, the chimney, the alley steep, wears the wreathed crown of pricks which downward brings blood, blood which affirms the reality, the here-ness thick, thusness of incarnate existence, wickedness a vital part, too, Eternity's lover, and vessel, and "shapely mind (consciousness)" with prehensile, yes, tail and hands/tales to give form and forth-ing to and of and for and with the "ten thousand things" which, O Buddha, sorry, are indeed real and not just false products of baseless mind, mere projections/ghosts, mere epiphenomena but rather these things, hard pressed down, provide, provisional, base mind and matter ever dividing the swarming swarm teeming torn between the one and the many which partake of each, one or many armed.
"Things that have hands take hands," says poet, Theodore Roethke, and thus eternity needs/makes hands/minds, takes hands/minds which take, too, take back, grasp, grab and delight/suffer the grubbiness of the reach, and the consummations thereof.
Love plays and is played out in sequences and ever hints to that which extends love, greater's love, the more. But to dwell in "Love Abstract" and not act in tongued and lunge-ed love, is a bore. White stones fall from heaven sure in the need for dirt and time. Love there in the muck and the wash is love all the more because not "pure".
One, then, grabs a little suchness from a falling altar in pretentious postures ("Pull down thy vanity"), a white stone in the hand suffices a mystery, leaves the fishbowl one has confused for the universe, is driven from or abandons yon local central hill and value, a centaur wandering in skivvies and bones, an orphan alone yet everywhere, Kansas (is) Kansas even though "Baltimore gleams in supernatural ecstasy" (Allen Ginsberg, HOWL) yet
"in woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons [C.G. Jung].”
In many myths and religions it is the small, devalued thing of little repute which accomplishes the large, the great task or goal. With me we shall see but I have suffered the disease of my culture, god-almightiness and the need for acclaim. I hope I am done with all that. The dust and the wheeze may indicate some arrival for the departure from Olympus to where I am now, a dusty studio apartment counting pocket change for Kraft macaroni, 4 boxes a dollar at the Dollar Store. Life is good. Cheesy.
Se
ems I am often enough departing things, grandiose religious schemes and structures even of the spiritually advanced (or so they think)...my dreams have me regressing or re-vancing or de-vancing, and my own ridiculous pomposity is, really now, to be laughed at. Last night's dream of the wellness doc/spiritual healing man with his destructive "daughter of the damned" makes short work of my loftiness...seems the healing is in the destruction of nothing less than everything, the wholeness is in the breaking apart, the departing. Into the hinterlands once again or perhaps just to take up simple residence where one is and give up the pretensions and insolent grasping. Either way, I gotta breathe. And deal with the old rags once too proudly worn. Perhaps the most appropriate things to place upon any altar anywhere. Dylan again, "The vagabond who’s rapping at your door Is standing in the clothes that you once wore..."
Fine with me. Perhaps tis Chaplin rapping, the repairman with his too long ladder and wobbly walk, very wary of ceilings, continually misspelling and misjudging gravity, who really makes me happy because human is all I ever am and shall be, an utter/eventual cloud of dust, scattered ashes, in Mexico at a highland spot most special to me. Thus, heretofore, or try, I'll be Chaplin-happy humping my way through the lumps and dumps carrying the remembrance stein/stone of the Self, even Its continual breaking apart into some other thingness held in the mind if not the hand which is memory unto wholeness/holdness with holes and cracks still here/there/somewhere or not, announced by a slight wheeze from too much collapsed altar and ceiling dust inbreathed, asthmatic and baby blue.
**
I am currently studying the work of Zen Buddhist philosophers of Japan, Keiji Nishida and Kitaro Nishitani (whose work comes a decade or so after Nishiida's). Given my forty years long study and applications of C. G. Jung's archetypal psychology I could not help but note that there are real parallels between these three men though culturally different and so utilized Google AI Mode to connect the dots I intuited/made as a "braid" of East and West via the views of what Nishida and Nishitani refer to as Absolute Nothingness and what Jung calls the "Self" which is not the ego or personal self but the transpersonal self which approximates Absolute Nothingness.
What is below are basic "notes" and approximations (perhaps even erroneous grasps of understanding. However, I find both Japanese existentialist philosophers extremely compelling in comparison to Western existentialism. Theirs is a Zen existentialism, their "nothingness" is not Western existialism's "nihilism but is, rather, Zen's "Absolute Nothingness".
"to build airy passages between all opposed things"
In the deep-tissue winter nights of Liber Novus, in the chamber of "Nox Quarta," Carl Jung’s soul delivers a command that acts as the permanent architectural manual for our generation:
“Airy passages should be built between all opposed things, light smooth streets should lead from one pole to the other... The door should be lifted off its hinges to provide a free passage between here and there, between yes and no, between above and below, between left and right.”
To lift the door off its hinges is not an elegant, disembodied intellectual trick; it is a brutal, agonizing labor of the flesh. The Western mind has spent centuries trapped in a vertical chasm, trying to separate the light from the dark, the pure spirit from the sallow meat, and the holy text from the vulgar pavement. It creates a pathological narcissism, a hyper-Calvinist fortress of armor and rules designed to keep the human animal safe from the unpredictable sways of the wild universe.
But when we lay Jung’s Western experiential Other flat on the planks next to the Kyoto School philosophy of Kitarō Nishida and Keiji Nishitani, the chasm transforms into an open, chiasmic crossing which is the reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases [as in a ABBA pattern] or clauses without repetition of words, it is across-crossing. The word comes for the greek letter Chi (X), which means "crossing". They are all staring into the exact same vertical abyss from opposite sides of the mountain.
A Note on the Trace: By "the trace," it is not meant as a cold, static mark or a dead forensic clue left behind on the pavement. The trace is a postmodern, minimalist glimmer—a flash of shifting light on a wet zinc counter, the smell of wood-smoke trapped inside a winter wool collar, or a simple green vine standing in a common jelly jar. It is an image-based, imaginal fragment that reveals what remains when our grand, totalizing systems of certain truth memory-traces finally deintegrate and fall away. The trace is the shadow of the absolute receding into the necessary darkness, inviting the watchman to look past literal meaning and track the vast, subterranean under-song of the universe through the minute particulars of the local dirt.
For Nishida, the ultimate reality is The Logic of Place (Bashō = Place)—the universal, pre-reflective field of Absolute Nothingness that encompasses both the subject and the object before the minded ego splits them apart. It is a spacious, maternal container that does not judge our flaws or demand perfection; it simply holds the room.
Nishitani pushes this field further into the dirt, showing that we touch this absolute clearing only when our private "plots" fail completely and we drop to the Bottom of Nihilism, discovering that we are not isolated monuments, but a fluid web of interconnected traces. The trace is the fingerprint of emptiness left upon the local world. It is the furtive grace that registers only when the aggressive, hypervigilant ego finally stops trying to control the room.
The proof of this grand, cross-continental synthesis is never found in a sanitized, bloodless lecture hall. It is lived strictly within the Minute Particulars and the sloppy "plod" of our everyday, location-by-thing-by-thing existence. It is caught from the window of a commuter train cutting through the New Jersey marshes toward the Philly tracks.
In my 2010 train journal, "Loose Train Haiku" linked just below, the transpersonal Other and the trace break through the horizontal static of the car without a single word of theory.
“For the blind woman
on the train every
journey is innerShe touches my shoulder,
moves just one seat ahead
feels the winter collarmetal ring pinned
to its shoulder
smiles when she touches it”
The blind woman doesn't see a polished, spiritual persona. She encounters a trace—the cold wool of a winter coat and the hard metal of a pin. In that single, tactile crossing, the separate worlds drop dead. There is no vertical hierarchy; there is only a shared, temporary Bashō where the absolute is registering its own weight through a passing touch on a train seat.
We try to escape this raw immediacy with our intellectual arrogance, our "zenny smartness" that tries to turn the moment into an abstract idea [0.1]. We act like the clean-cut preppies reading the Wall Street Journal ads about how "Yes-But-ters don't just kill ideas." But the moment we congratulate ourselves on our enlightenment, Zen Master Ummon steps out of the aisle and cracks his KATZ stick hard across our skulls. He beats the pretense right out of the bone, driving us back to the window to witness the literal incarnation of God—the trace of the infinite—written in the broken scenery:
“In Prison Windowa jelly jar, water poursman hands arranging
a little green vine”
This is James Hillman’s psychology in an image. The state prison wall is a brutal literal restriction, a hard block of human suffering. Yet those inmate hands arranging that tiny vine inside a cheap, repurposed jelly jar are performing a cosmic liturgical service. They are laboring well the Minute Particulars. They are taking the trace of life found in a ditch and bringing conscious, aesthetic care to it, converting a cell into a kiva to feed a "still unconscious god."
This is why the Kabbalist Banquet IS NOW, everyday on the pavement, not a delayed till the Messiah returns feast according to Kabbala belief. The Ain Soph—the boundless No-Thing—shattered its own sephirotic vessels again and again, causing them to crack and bleed until Malkuth was formed. Malkuth is this earth. It is the place where God incarnates, evolves, and learns from Its own creation through our eyes. We do not choose between the airy light and the muck; we eat the dirt.
As I wrote in my 2011 poem, aresponse to Bernadette Mayer, Response To Bernadette Mayer's 'First Turn To Me...':
“this is the only one we know
the one where we eat dirt
and swallow are filled and
swell belly up a meal to be
eaten when the Messiah comes
Leviathan our heavenly bridegroom
presses the banquet table with elbows”
The feast is the Leviathan—the dark, chaotic, and terrifying side of the Deity that cannot be neatly "healed" or bypass-ed, but must be consumed, chewed, and consciously related to over and over again at our local tables. Our physical afflictions, our sore knees on the zafu, and our stubborn skin rashes are that exact Leviathan—the hot, sub-surface trace of our history—insisting on its seat in the light.
The Western mind panics under this weight, falling into a nihilistic drive to destroy the planet’s countless forms of consciousness because it cannot tolerate its own lack of control. But the Chan-Taoist stance simply laughs its wild, teeth-baring laugh into the face of that envious heaven. As my 2013 Han Shan scroll declares,
“Undergarments even of Buddhas reveal
upon close inspection a holy stench
peculiar only to those who have sat long
on high mountains
ignoring the flies.
There is an odor to eternity... ”
upon close inspection a holy stench
peculiar only to those who have sat long
on high mountains
ignoring the flies.
There is an odor to eternity... ”
Eternity is in love with the productions of time]. The static Buddhas up on their pristine pedestals are dead stones; they need our human arms, our sallow meat, and our bleeding errors to leave a living trace in the world].
We do not lasso the national whirlwind, nor do we run from the dust of the world on our shoulders. We simply carry through our honest experiment, pack our change of draws, and keep a piece of broken mirror in our pocket. We look into the shards of our fragmented, sloppy lives, rehearse our grin for the gullible gods, and let the thin Indian ink track the trace of the Isness right into the spreading dirt:
Poem For Caravaggio - Contemplating "Conversion On The Way to Damascus" At 4 A.M:In the shorter light,
in the extended night of
cold and star-bright questions,
may you cast
clumsy net forward
into what it all might mean
to fretted you,
to me, stretched
canvas, though I will
not thrust these
words upon your
paint or palette but
make offering for
your own work
to feed us through
the eyes;
perhaps time
to remount the horse
and soldier on,
or to fall again,
gain Damascus perspective,
from one's
back watch vision
distort massive
horse
into a God
receding
into
necessary
darkness
foregoing
image,
see what may form in the spreading dirt,
what resurrection there is in the smell of paint.
***
Here's the extended quote of Jung, his last remarks at the Plaza Hotel in NYC at a reception for him after an lecture tour in America...he was asked to give some parting thoughts before the ending of the gala....this is the last part of his impromptu remarks in plain speech summing his view of the task of each person to "individuate" —
"make your own experiment":
Jung: Jesus, you know, was a boy born of an unmarried mother. Such a boy is called illegitimate, and there is a prejudice which puts him at a great disadvantage. He suffers from a terrible feeling of inferiority for which he is certain to have to compensate. Hence the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, in that the kingdom was offered to him. Here he met his worst enemy, the power devil; but he was able to see that, and to refuse. He said, "My kingdom is not of this world." But "kingdom" it was, all the same. And you remember that strange incident, the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The utter failure came at the Crucifixion in the tragic words, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" If you want to understand the full tragedy of those words you must realize what they meant: Christ saw that his whole life, devoted to truth according to his best conviction, had been a terrible illusion. He had lived it to the full absolutely sincerely, he had made his honest experiment, but it was nevertheless a compensation. On the Cross his mission deserted him. But because he had lived so fully and devotedly he won through to the Resurrection body.
We must all do just what Christ did. We must make our experiment. We must make mistakes. We must live out our own vision of life. And there will be error. If you avoid error you do not live; in a sense even it may be said that every life is a mistake, for no one has found the truth. When we live like this we know Christ as a brother, and God indeed becomes man. This sounds like a terrible blasphemy, but not so. For then only can we understand Christ as he would want to be understood, as a fellow man; then only does God become man in ourselves.
...And so the last thing I would say to each of you, my friends, is: Carry through your life as well as you can, even if it is based on error, because life has to be undone, and one often gets to truth through error. Then, like Christ, you will have accomplished your experiment. So, be human, seek understanding, seek insight, and make your hypothesis, your philosophy of life. Then we may recognize the Spirit alive in the unconscious of every individual. Then we become brothers of Christ."
—pages 97/98, from C.G. Jung Speaking, the chapter title is "Is Analytical Psychology a Religion?" Princeton University Press, 1972
You can access this book via the link. You can download Jung's entire Collected Works"
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