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| (i've seen his face before. it was my father's) |
the zen of fernando pessoa.
my so many nights with fernando pessoa
pessoa tells me that all life is vast existential futility.
we think, we feel, we know, we pretend to know, we feign, we pretend to feign that this is better than that. or at least somewhat preferable. but then, when we look closely, this is not this. in fact, there is no this! but that insight was also only an illusion.
this does not exist, not this and not that, and that is so, because there isn't anything except for this! "this is it!" as zen likes to say. or as the old wise indian wrote: "nothing is at it seems, neither it is otherwise."
nothing at all exists except for this whole-of-being. and how do we know this? we know this because the pain of this is real.
and we pray to god (to the gods?) because we know they do not exist. that is why we pray. but then we feign offense when we hear god insist ad-nauseum that it is us who do not exist. he is no nihilist, fernando pessoa, the portuguese also-marrano-jew-futilist poet is mad. mad as a shepherd in love. especially during the nights.
pessoa wrote: "everything that man explains or expresses is a note in the margin of a text that has been entirely erased. more or less from the sense of the note, we hit upon the sense that the text must have had. but there always remains a doubt, and the possible senses are numerous." in other words: pessoa is describing the futility of existence. again, this is not nihilism, its futilism. in the text of our lives, we only write on its margins, that is, we are essentially marginal to existence itself. and life itself, which is the text on which margins we scribble the story of our lives, by the time we get around to understand it or manifest it, it's no longer there. (more or less...)
fernando pessoa wrote: "whether they exist or not, we're slaves to the gods." true: we have corrupted freedom into an illusion, and this thing about us giving birth to gods, or proclaiming their death, makes no difference at all. and yet, (with pessoa there is always an "and yet") we are free to give birth and also to issue proclamations. pessoa also wrote his own "factless autobiography." think of it, only a fact-less autobiography can possibly tell the truth. we are not "facts," there is nothing to tell.
pessoa the poet wrote what i call "primordial zen". he said: "i realize that i was all error and deviation, that i never lived, that i existed only in so far as i filled time with consciousness and thought." to want to live one's life with something other than the interminable and inexhaustible contents of one's mind, is to want to live life in accordance to the existential understanding of the poet buddha. i'm referring to his concept of sunyata. pessoa wrote these singularly zen lines in one of his poems: "...why call water my sister if water isn’t my sister,? to feel it better,? i feel it better by drinking it than by calling it something, sister, or mother, or daughter, water is beautiful because it’s water...or, better yet, not to call it anything, but to drink it, to feel it on my wrists, and to look at it, without any names..." in zen they say that the more we name the less we know. or as buber would say, the more we say "it" the less we are.
this is all the wisdom we need to know: we proclaim the primacy of the immediacy of the encounter with a being, over the subsequent intellectual or religious processing of that experience. pessoa asks for the acceptance of the phenomenon as it presents itself to us, which is the confirmation of its "otherness" and the embrace of its "thouness."
emmanuel kant explained that there is no possibility of direct perception of reality "as-is." the mind cannot perceive the noumena, for it can only approach the world through its own pre-determined categories of phenomenal perception. that is to say, we cannot know what reality is "in reality." buddha was right. whatever it is we perceive, it is nothing other than internal contents of the perceiving mind. in kantian terms, direct unmediated perception of reality is an uninformed delusion of the mind.
but how do we know that we cannot know the world as-it-is? agnosticism is not an argument, it is an excuse. unknowability is also an attribute. why do we ever think that there is such thing as a world as-it-is, a noumena, an essence behind the physical things of the world? pessoa solves this issue: if we read the poet the way i suggest, the question of perception and reality does not arise. the key issue is not apprehension, but relationship. in other words, the immediacy of the between of i and thou is the place of reality, and we use the term reality not in an ontological sense, but strictly as an existential project. we create reality as we relate to the world, and the type of relationship we enter into, will determine the type of reality we apprehend.
similarly the poet g. k. chesterton reflected on the same exact idea and with similar words as pessoa's: "i do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as i do. the startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud." this is the zen of g.k. chesterton. allowing the phenomenon to name itself to us is the deed of refusing to say "it" to it. there is nothing within, nothing behind, nothing above or nothing below the phenomenon itself. as of late, (the now late) thich nhat hanh toiled to remind us that "this is it," and he drew mandalas with those words inscribed in them. and this-thing we call world, or life, is a beautiful thing because it is just "this." similarly to the wise indian saying: "tat tvam asi" "thou art that," which is an important principle of hindu philosophy. alan watts once wrote about listening to the sound of a bell and hearing the gong, and he said: "to the sound we will not give it a name." you named it? you can't hear it anymore.
pessoa possessed what zen master dogen insisted on "an ordinary mind, a beginner's mind." pessoa understood the nature of existence in its "suchness", the way zen does, only prior to, and beside the heavy conceptual infrastructure added to suchness when buddhism was transformed from a living practice and into a religion. this beginner's mind allowed pessoa to free himself from much of the emotional baggage and intellectual tainting that occurs once exposed to zen-as religion. suzuki roshi once said that it is possible one might attain, but not actually like, satori, the state of enlightenment. pessoa, may in fact be one such example. if he indeed had a zen understanding as expressed by many of his poems, and thereby we could safely regard him as an enlightened person, he did not exhibit a mind resting at blissful peace. it is similar to the great blues: one reason we like the blues is because they are blues and nothing other. it appears perhaps as a kind of paradox in conceptual terms, but not from an existential perspective.
but how can we live the life of the enlightened zen practitioner? zen, like poetry, (like god) is not only, nor principally, a way of feeling, or a way of seeing things differently. it is all that, but zen, like poetry (like god), is either a way of relationships with the whole of being or is nothing at all. the poet archibald macleish said it well: "a poem should not mean, but be."
our minds are composed of a number of different contents, most of which are based on values we'd do well to question. once we empty ourselves from these contents, what is it that is left? in the buddhist tradition the assumption is that this no-self that remains after we discard the accretions of external contents is our actual true self, the original, pristine, undefiled buddha nature. and so, what part of our daily lives are open for us to be lived in a dharma way, in the sunyata of the mind beyond the delusive contents drilled into us by the culture of capital accumulation? we live in a social and economic system in which each and every being has taken the attributes and predicates of a commodity with its corresponding commercial worth. living within such a system, how can we possibly empty our egos and free our trapped true selves? we can not, lest we lose all our social and economic resources, and with it, our very material survival. only the transformation of society from capitalism to dhammic socialism, as buddhadasa bhikkhu argued, will allow us to actualize zen in all its different aspects.
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| fernando pessoa |
in this context, paraphrasing gustav landauer's dictum about the source and the role of the nation-state, capitalism is a way of relationship between people, and we will only cease to create dukkha, or suffering for our own selves, once we change the ways of our relationships. to this also refers zen master thich nhat hanh with the community he founded under the auspices of his zen order of "interbeing." a creative translation of the term interbeing might be the zen order of the i and thou. but going back to pessoa's struggle, he believed in paradoxical futile endings. "and, like the great damned souls, i shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living" yes, living and thinking are in perpetual conflict, we refer to it as alienation, but the integration of both is possible once we transform our i-it interactions into i-thou relationships.
yogi berra paraphrased pessoa when he said "i can't think and hit the ball at the same time". but pessoa, never gives up, even when he says he does, he still dreams of a freedom project: "i'd like to write the encomium of a new incoherence that could serve as the negative charter for the new anarchy of souls." and i think he did write it, but he left it to us to organize the sentences of his book. we are the ones who need to write pessoa's book together with him. i propose the first sentence to be this one he wrote: "to know how to think with emotions and to feel with intellect." this is a paraphrase of spinoza's loving-knowledge. to know that which only love can teach.
there is a deep biblical sensibility in that last sentence of pessoa. biblical in the same sense of loving-knowledge the other portuguese jew, baruch spinoza, understood as well. we can start the process of freeing our beings by attempting the merging of intellect and emotions. buddha and bible. moses sitting zazen and buddha leading the slaves to freedom. the path to freedom we make as we walk, as antonio machado said, or pessoa himself said in words found somewhat repeated throughout the existentialist school. "life is what we make of it. travel is the traveler. what we see isn't what we see but what we are." perhaps the next to last sentence in the book we are writing together with pessoa could be this: "the inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart."
pessoa wrote to challenge us and to provoke us. all in all pessoa was not a pessimist, he was rather the master "futilist". i read his futility and know that we can finish his book because despite it all, failure is never the assured outcome. no guarantee of failure exists because, as he said, "there are no norms. all people are exceptions to a rule that doesn't exist." no rules and yet, there are exceptions, and for this koanic reason, there is no despair. only futility.
pessoa was primordial zen. as we saw before, for pessoa things are things and there is nothing behind or within the phenomenology of things. the thing itself, as is, is all there is. naming is creating and naming is owning. by naming a thing we make it into what we want and need it to be. what we need to do however, is stop this "itification" process and allow the thing to name itself and be what the thing wants to be. we have to stop owning and letting be. it is the question erik fromm asked: to have or to be. this is exactly what buber said about the mental act of dissecting and analyzing the things of the world. by avoiding the immediacy of the encounter, we make things into "its" for our ownership and use. we can't altogether avoid using, but our logos in life ought to be to marshal the will and grace to make all beings our "thous". that is to say. we need to confirm them as they are, and to meet them in dialogue. buber wrote: "the work produced is a thing among things, able to be experienced and described as a sum of qualities (as 'it'). but from time to time it can face the receptive beholder in its whole embodied form (as 'thou')."
same applies to the act of naming god. it has been suggested by jewish sages that it's best to call god "ha-shem" ("the name"), or in other words, we should not give it a name. but of course, ha-shem is also a manner of naming. samuel becket expressed a similar idea about the conversion of objects into "its" rather than "thous." he wrote: "when the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment." and that was pessoa's struggle, that is, to relate to the world in the immediacy of a dialogical encounter, a struggle motivated in him was by his primordial zen understanding.
perhaps it was miguel de unamuno who connected the dialogical-zen perspective to a stronger emotional content: "my dear friend" wrote unamuno, "the mind seeks the dead as the living escapes it. it wants to trap within your head the flowing currents, wants to fix it in place. to understand something we must kill it, it needs to become stiffed in our minds. my own thoughts tumultuous and agitated in the bosom of my mind, are cut off from their warm roots and discharged into this paper and as they are set in their unaltered form, they are already dead thoughts. how then will reason be able to be open to the revelation of life? it's a tragic combat, it's the background of all tragedy, the struggle of life with reason". buddhism speaks of the impermanence of all things, and looking at impermanence with a pessoa and buber and spinoza outlook, we can say that impermanence is permanent becoming and unfolding, and the desire to grasp and hold on to things, this making everything into an "it", is the greatest of delusions and source of all dukkha. only through impermanence, like jesus on the cross, life becomes eternal. the buddha said that explicitly. the i-thou is the attempt to relate to all beings in the manner in which they are in their true nature, alive, and this is the essence of the existence of all beings in the phenomenological manner in which they are.
it took religious theologies and rituals to come up with images, names, terms, concepts and words to futilely attempt to offer some form of description to what is, in essence, this ineffable primordial encounter with the being of nature. and on account of this, since then, we may have irretrievably lost our intimacy with nature. pessoa's poems are a reversal of sorts, as his is a zen unencumbered by the doctrinal teachings about zen, or any other religious interference for that matter.
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| h.m. |
some poems by fernando pessoa
today someone read me st. francis of assisi.
i listened and couldn’t believe my ears.
how could a man who was so fond of things
never have looked at them or understood what they were?
why call water my sister if water isn’t my sister?
to feel it better?
i feel it better by drinking it than by calling it something –
sister, or mother, or daughter.
water is beautiful because it’s water.
if I call it my sister,
i can see, even as I call it that, that it’s not my sister
and that it’s best to call it water, since that’s what it is,
or, better yet, not to call it anything
but to drink it, to feel it on my wrists, and to look at it,
without any names.
-------
the mystery of things – where is it?
why doesn't it come out
to show us at least that it's mystery?
what do the river and the tree know about it?
and what do I, who am no more than they, know about it?
whenever I look at things and think about what people think of them,
i laugh like a brook cleanly plashing against a rock.
for the only hidden meaning of things
is that they have no hidden meaning.
it's the strangest thing of all,
stranger than all poets' dreams
and all philosophers' thoughts,
that things are really what they seem to be
and there's nothing to understand.
yes, this is what my senses learned on their own:
things have no meaning: they exist.
things are the only hidden meaning of things.
-------
the washwoman beats the laundry
against the stone in the tank.
she sings because she sings and is sad
For she sings because she exists:
thus she is also happy.
if i could do in verses
what she does with laundry,
perhaps i would lose
my diversity of fates.
ah, the tremendous unity
of beating laundry in reality,
singing songs in whole or in part
without any thought or reason!
but who will wash my heart?
-------
notes for my conversation with fernando pessoa, poet:
never does a hand hold another without being held at that same moment. we forget poetry, and this is our fault. we invent gods to compensate, and that's fine, but its not wisdom. we stumble to old age having learned nothing of what we already knew only too well: poetry is not in the writing if it is not in the living. poetry we write in poetic deeds, and at times we may scribble some words too. beautiful words spoken in moments of between. poets are the eternal unrequited lovers of words. and vice-versa. reality does not exist outside of the relationship, for we create reality as we relate to each other and to the world. i told pessoa what the poet martin buber explained: the type of relationship we enter into, either i-thou or i-it, will determine the type of reality we will apprehend. pessoa smiled and said "yes my friend guardador de rebanhos! i wrote those same words in my fact-less autobiography"
the portuguese, part-marrano poet fernando pessoa wrote what i call "primordial zen." he said: "i realize that i was all error and deviation, that i never lived, that i existed only in so far as i filled time with consciousness and thought." to want to live one's life with something other than the interminable and inexhaustible contents of one's mind, is to want to live life in accordance to the existential understanding of the buddha's concept of sunyata.
the portuguese, part-marrano poet fernando pessoa wrote what i call "primordial zen." he said: "i realize that i was all error and deviation, that i never lived, that i existed only in so far as i filled time with consciousness and thought." to want to live one's life with something other than the interminable and inexhaustible contents of one's mind, is to want to live life in accordance to the existential understanding of the buddha's concept of sunyata.
pessoa made this clear with these singularly zen lines in one of his poems: "...why call water my sister if water isn’t my sister?, to feel it better?, i feel it better by drinking it than by calling it something, sister, or mother, or daughter, water is beautiful because it’s water...or, better yet, not to call it anything, but to drink it, to feel it on my wrists, and to look at it, without any names..." this is all the wisdom we need to know: we proclaim the primacy of the immediacy of the encounter with a being over the subsequent intellectual or psychological processing of that experience. pessoa asks for the acceptance of the phenomenon as it presents itself to us, which is the confirmation of its "otherness," and the embrace of the possibility of its "thouness".
emmanuel kant explained that there is no possibility of direct perception of reality "as-is." the mind cannot perceive the noumena, for it can only approach the world through its own pre-determined categories of phenomenal perception. that is to say, we cannot know what reality is "in-reality". whatever it is we perceive, it is the filtered and colored through the internal mechanics of the perceiving mind. in kantian terms, direct unmediated perception of reality is an unexamined delusion of the mind. "no-mind" is not a concept kant entertained, and i presumed he'd be amused by the recklessness of that verbal construction. but if we read pessoa's zen intuitions, the dichotomy of perception and reality does not arise. the key issue is not apprehension, but relationship. in other words, the immediacy of the between of i and thou is the place of reality, and we use the term reality not in an ontological sense, but strictly as an existential project. we create reality as we relate to the world, and as martin buber explained, the type of relationship we enter into, be that i-thou or i-it, will determine the type of reality we will apprehend.
similarly the poet g. k. chesterton reflected on the same exact idea: "i do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as i do. the startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud." this is the zen of g.k. chesterton. allowing the phenomenon to name itself to us is the deed of refusing to say "it" to it.
pessoa was the poet-master "futilist". pessoa was not a nihilist, he was a futilist. and this deep recognition of the futility of life cannot possibly fill one's heart with happiness, although sadness, if that's the opposite of happiness, is not what pessoa's heart felt either. what did pessoa feel? well, why give it a name? in other words: to deny a moment of happiness for it is impermanent, it is to understand little about happiness and even less about the nature of time. eternity is in this one moment of impermanent time. it depends on whether we say thou to the presence. poets know that. to accept an uninterrupted succession of sadness, that is to say, to close the open windows precisely at that fleeting moment when the sun shines through in an otherwise dark and cloudy sky, it is to become oneself a cause of this darkness. it is to accept fate rather than freedom. it is to let "it"make us its willing collaborators. and to let it do it again.
pessoa tells me that all life is vast existential futility. we think, we feel, we know, we pretend to know, we feign, we pretend to feign that this is better than that. (at least preferable). but then, when we look closely, this is not this. in fact, there is no this! and that was only an illusion. this does not exist, not this and not that. and that is so, because there isn't anything except for this! this is it! nothing at all exists except for this. and how do we know this? because the pain of this is real. and we pray to god because we know it does not exist. that is why we pray. but then we feign offense when we hear god insist ad-nauseam that it is us who do not exist. he is no nihilist, fernando pessoa, the portuguese also-marrano-jew-futilist poet is poetically mad. poetically mad as a shepherd in love. especially during the nights.
pessoa tells me that all life is vast existential futility. we think, we feel, we know, we pretend to know, we feign, we pretend to feign that this is better than that. (at least preferable). but then, when we look closely, this is not this. in fact, there is no this! and that was only an illusion. this does not exist, not this and not that. and that is so, because there isn't anything except for this! this is it! nothing at all exists except for this. and how do we know this? because the pain of this is real. and we pray to god because we know it does not exist. that is why we pray. but then we feign offense when we hear god insist ad-nauseam that it is us who do not exist. he is no nihilist, fernando pessoa, the portuguese also-marrano-jew-futilist poet is poetically mad. poetically mad as a shepherd in love. especially during the nights.
pessoa wrote: "everything that man explains or expresses is a note in the margin of a text that has been entirely erased. more or less, from the sense of the note, we hit upon the sense that the text must have had. but there always remains a doubt, and the possible senses are numerous". in other words: pessoa is bemoaning the futility of our long and often tortuous life efforts. this is not nihilism, it is futilism. in the days of our lives we often fail to respond to the call that emanates from god-nature. in other words: we are essentially marginal to existence itself. and life itself, which is the text on which margins we scribble the story of our lives, by the time we get around to understand it or manifest it, it's no longer there.
pessoa said: "whether they exist or not, we're slaves to the gods". true: submission is our sad fate, and giving birth to gods, or proclaiming their death, makes no existential difference. and yet, (with pessoa there is always an "and yet") we are free to give birth and to proclaim freedom if we wish to give our marginal lives at least one of the numerous possible senses. pessoa also wrote his own "factless autobiography". think of it, only a fact-less autobiography can possibly tell the truth. we are not "facts": there is nothing to tell.
-------
today someone read me st. francis of assisi.
i listened and couldn’t believe my ears.
how could a man who was so fond of things
never have looked at them or understood what they were?
why call water my sister if water isn’t my sister?
to feel it better?
i feel it better by drinking it than by calling it something –
sister, or mother, or daughter.
water is beautiful because it’s water.
if I call it my sister,
i can see, even as I call it that, that it’s not my sister
and that it’s best to call it water, since that’s what it is,
or, better yet, not to call it anything
but to drink it, to feel it on my wrists, and to look at it,
without any names.
-------
the mystery of things – where is it?
why doesn't it come out
to show us at least that it's mystery?
what do the river and the tree know about it?
and what do I, who am no more than they, know about it?
whenever I look at things and think about what people think of them,
i laugh like a brook cleanly plashing against a rock.
for the only hidden meaning of things
is that they have no hidden meaning.
it's the strangest thing of all,
stranger than all poets' dreams
and all philosophers' thoughts,
that things are really what they seem to be
and there's nothing to understand.
yes, this is what my senses learned on their own:
things have no meaning: they exist.
things are the only hidden meaning of things.
-------
the washwoman beats the laundry
against the stone in the tank.
she sings because she sings and is sad
For she sings because she exists:
thus she is also happy.
if i could do in verses
what she does with laundry,
perhaps i would lose
my diversity of fates.
ah, the tremendous unity
of beating laundry in reality,
singing songs in whole or in part
without any thought or reason!
but who will wash my heart?
-------
meditations on pessoa and language.
what is the difference between the terms universe and existence? we know, from kant, that existence is not a predicate. therefore universe is all there is. i, for once, know absolutely not a thing about anything at-all that is transcendent to the universe that exists. wills and minds are things of our own realm, and therefore i can only hope to gain some understanding as to what those words seek to describe. and i will do that by employing both words and direct intuitive experience. and for that, all i can do is look at my here and my now and ask my mind to tell me what the will of my being is at both this present moment, and on these, my four spans of land. and that's not a very easy thing to do.
i say this, owing a great deal to the poet g. k. chesterton, that simply because i've had an experience of something, it does not follow that i necessarily believe in it. nor can i necessarily describe it so that someone else might get a glimpse as to what for me was immediate and direct. i must rely on the fact that what i experience as being my love for you, is the same experience you describe as being your love for me. that is to say: despite the fact that even if words are unable to convey the full nature of the presence, both of us know it to be the same whole-being experience.
but "mu" is a word! so it helps. and we have given it a meaning, even if we don't agree with it. and for that our conversation might be less utilitarian than it might have otherwise been. but utility is not the point of every conversation. so the question to go back to is if this is a problem with a universe which is just too-wide to be contained within a narrow language, or is it that we keep language intentionally narrow so as to make room for the concept of ineffability? it can always be the case that our minds are not creative enough to burst the artificial limits of a limited vocabulary. i suspect we need the ineffable, and we intuit that words get in the way. even mu.
i think we can do "better" with language. take the case of the word "god". we invented a word to express the ineffably infinite and eternal. why stop at that? language, as were most cultural creations we inherited form the past, conformed to the intellectual and spiritual proclivities of those who controlled its use and its structure. words were created to convey cultural meanings, and as they evolved, these meanings became embedded within the consciousness of everyday speakers. a language is a narrative, and some cultures have created words to express as much of existence as they were able to discover. others, in contrast, chose to build a fence around them.
but here's a proposal: i was thinking of writing a poem and then i read gregory orr's question: "do words outlast the world they describe?" good to think of this because yes, they do, of course they do, and that's the melancholy of life. words are sometimes the only thing that remains, like the visible light from a star long dead. like with god for example. it's all passings and remainings. but it's not all necessarily in vain. think of it: could you live without the ten thousand things of the sky? alive or dead? sometimes it's not only from the dead that all it remains is words. and words are also a part of the god that is all that exists.
-------
three poems by fernando pessoa
today someone read me st. francis of assisi.
i listened and couldn’t believe my ears.
how could a man who was so fond of things
never have looked at them or understood what they were?
why call water my sister if water isn’t my sister?
to feel it better?
i feel it better by drinking it than by calling it something –
sister, or mother, or daughter.
water is beautiful because it’s water.
if I call it my sister,
i can see, even as I call it that, that it’s not my sister
and that it’s best to call it water, since that’s what it is,
or, better yet, not to call it anything
but to drink it, to feel it on my wrists, and to look at it,
without any names.
-------
the mystery of things – where is it?
why doesn't it come out
to show us at least that it's mystery?
what do the river and the tree know about it?
and what do I, who am no more than they, know about it?
whenever I look at things and think about what people think of them,
i laugh like a brook cleanly plashing against a rock.
for the only hidden meaning of things
is that they have no hidden meaning.
it's the strangest thing of all,
stranger than all poets' dreams
and all philosophers' thoughts,
that things are really what they seem to be
and there's nothing to understand.
yes, this is what my senses learned on their own:
things have no meaning: they exist.
things are the only hidden meaning of things.
-------
the washwoman beats the laundry
against the stone in the tank.
she sings because she sings and is sad
For she sings because she exists:
thus she is also happy.
if i could do in verses
what she does with laundry,
perhaps i would lose
my diversity of fates.
ah, the tremendous unity
of beating laundry in reality,
singing songs in whole or in part
without any thought or reason!
but who will wash my heart?
-------
meditations on pessoa and language.
god hides behind nothing at all and in front of everything, because when we say thou to the neighbor god is everything that exists. in the between of i and thou god is all things and is in all things and all things are in him and also behind them and in front of them. god is words too, so we ask: how can words possibly not be able to express the nature of god? the nature of god is "this" and that essential presence is found everywhere and always, including in words.
we talk about the i and thou and poetry. here's the difficulty with the proposition "words cannot express": is it the case that there just aren't any words, or that i myself, that is, my own inept creative self, have ran out of words and am unable to find any? some argue that there is a difference of essence between language and experience and therefore the meeting between these two realms of being can take place only at their peripheries, like in the words of a prayer, never any deeper. but if that is the case, isn't the poet's task to create new words to express that for which there might not have been any in existence? in zen they say "mu" and there you have it! a word that expresses "that". it does not need to be a new sound, it only needs to be what poetry does: to write a word as if this was the first time it has ever been uttered and it expresses that which heretofore was unutterable.
words therefore are not inherently unable to express, it all depends on the source from which they emanate. if true poetry is a language that emerges in the between of i and thou, what emerges from the i-it is the vocabulary of loneliness and alienation. therefore words emanating from the whole-of-being will express the full poetry-of-existence, and words that emanate from the periphery of being will only delineate limitations and partiality.
there are two existential possibilities: from the between of i and thou a whole-being language emerges, and that language may include words or exclude them. from the transactions of i and it no language can emerge, but only a mere vocabulary, and the words it includes are those that are unable to express the nature of being. therefore we should make a distinction between the poetry of the in-between and the vocabularies of loneliness. as an example: the word "god" describes the between of i and thou, and in that sense, it is a wonderful word.
if we follow wittgenstein, we know that our words are the limits of our universe. if there is no word for "that", then "that" does not exist. he actually used the term "language", which is a term broader than words, but he meant "words". so if the famous widely accepted notion that "words cannot express" is true, then we know we have reached the outer and inner limits of all that exists. clearly, there can be no words for something which is not part of all that exists.
we talk about the i and thou and poetry. here's the difficulty with the proposition "words cannot express": is it the case that there just aren't any words, or that i myself, that is, my own inept creative self, have ran out of words and am unable to find any? some argue that there is a difference of essence between language and experience and therefore the meeting between these two realms of being can take place only at their peripheries, like in the words of a prayer, never any deeper. but if that is the case, isn't the poet's task to create new words to express that for which there might not have been any in existence? in zen they say "mu" and there you have it! a word that expresses "that". it does not need to be a new sound, it only needs to be what poetry does: to write a word as if this was the first time it has ever been uttered and it expresses that which heretofore was unutterable.
words therefore are not inherently unable to express, it all depends on the source from which they emanate. if true poetry is a language that emerges in the between of i and thou, what emerges from the i-it is the vocabulary of loneliness and alienation. therefore words emanating from the whole-of-being will express the full poetry-of-existence, and words that emanate from the periphery of being will only delineate limitations and partiality.
there are two existential possibilities: from the between of i and thou a whole-being language emerges, and that language may include words or exclude them. from the transactions of i and it no language can emerge, but only a mere vocabulary, and the words it includes are those that are unable to express the nature of being. therefore we should make a distinction between the poetry of the in-between and the vocabularies of loneliness. as an example: the word "god" describes the between of i and thou, and in that sense, it is a wonderful word.
if we follow wittgenstein, we know that our words are the limits of our universe. if there is no word for "that", then "that" does not exist. he actually used the term "language", which is a term broader than words, but he meant "words". so if the famous widely accepted notion that "words cannot express" is true, then we know we have reached the outer and inner limits of all that exists. clearly, there can be no words for something which is not part of all that exists.
what is the difference between the terms universe and existence? we know, from kant, that existence is not a predicate. therefore universe is all there is. i, for once, know absolutely not a thing about anything at-all that is transcendent to the universe that exists. wills and minds are things of our own realm, and therefore i can only hope to gain some understanding as to what those words seek to describe. and i will do that by employing both words and direct intuitive experience. and for that, all i can do is look at my here and my now and ask my mind to tell me what the will of my being is at both this present moment, and on these, my four spans of land. and that's not a very easy thing to do.
i say this, owing a great deal to the poet g. k. chesterton, that simply because i've had an experience of something, it does not follow that i necessarily believe in it. nor can i necessarily describe it so that someone else might get a glimpse as to what for me was immediate and direct. i must rely on the fact that what i experience as being my love for you, is the same experience you describe as being your love for me. that is to say: despite the fact that even if words are unable to convey the full nature of the presence, both of us know it to be the same whole-being experience.
but "mu" is a word! so it helps. and we have given it a meaning, even if we don't agree with it. and for that our conversation might be less utilitarian than it might have otherwise been. but utility is not the point of every conversation. so the question to go back to is if this is a problem with a universe which is just too-wide to be contained within a narrow language, or is it that we keep language intentionally narrow so as to make room for the concept of ineffability? it can always be the case that our minds are not creative enough to burst the artificial limits of a limited vocabulary. i suspect we need the ineffable, and we intuit that words get in the way. even mu.
i think we can do "better" with language. take the case of the word "god". we invented a word to express the ineffably infinite and eternal. why stop at that? language, as were most cultural creations we inherited form the past, conformed to the intellectual and spiritual proclivities of those who controlled its use and its structure. words were created to convey cultural meanings, and as they evolved, these meanings became embedded within the consciousness of everyday speakers. a language is a narrative, and some cultures have created words to express as much of existence as they were able to discover. others, in contrast, chose to build a fence around them.
but here's a proposal: i was thinking of writing a poem and then i read gregory orr's question: "do words outlast the world they describe?" good to think of this because yes, they do, of course they do, and that's the melancholy of life. words are sometimes the only thing that remains, like the visible light from a star long dead. like with god for example. it's all passings and remainings. but it's not all necessarily in vain. think of it: could you live without the ten thousand things of the sky? alive or dead? sometimes it's not only from the dead that all it remains is words. and words are also a part of the god that is all that exists.
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to pessoa. a poem
all year long i was under the impression
that there were such things as afternoons.
but here is the funny part:
there are no such things!
every time i look
it is always now.
and i'm disappointed.
i loved afternoon teas.
even though i never drink tea.
i loved afternoon walks.
especially to show off my new sandals.
i loved afternoon love making.
even if it was at night.
nights are beautiful too.
without afternoons
it would be interminable mornings.
imagine that!
but this year i realized
there are no such things as afternoons.
i think i will miss them.
and the interminable mornings.
but now i drink alone.
as my ancestors did.
with a thoughtful tango poem
and a very silly kleizmer tune.
i love this snowy winter afternoon.
yes.
afternoons are beautiful.
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the best spring i've ever had
was in the middle of winter.
i remember every little detail.
especially of things which never happened.
i decided to be in love.
in the middle of winter.
i mixed seltzer in my dad's wine to fake it last longer.
dad was really pleased.
pan con manteca three meals a day.
how sweet it felt!
and how many dreams spread over that bread!
kind of sad when the seltzer ran out.
i remember the names of every girl.
i hope they remember mine.
my mom was always right.
oh god, how right she always was.
speaking of god
he came early into my life.
i asked for more seltzer for dad's wine.
but i guess somethings he just can't do.
but i did love my winters and springs.
how can i not be sad for what i lost forever?
but the word god still hovers around me.
i think that's a good thing.
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