Something I'm working on. -- Ladybelle Fiske
God
made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through. -- Paul
Valery
I love this quotation, a good thing,
since it greets me from my desktop every day. I put it on this blog site a
while back and a “gadget” on my home page to take me to the blog. That seems to remember only this one
saying, like a Zen koan repeated again and again.
The quote reminds me of the talks Irving
would present each week at our storefront, the Gallery Gwen, at 74 East
4th Street in the East Village, or Lower East Side of New York. My father loved speaking to groups, and
he was good at it: vastly well read, vividly aware of the mood in the room, and
funny as hell.
He was not, as some have said he must
be, long-winded, though the talks could go on for a while including questions
and discussion, or boring. He was not a tedious old man-- he was about the same
age I am now, come to think of it, sixty-two. That did not seem old as he
embodied it.
He looked well at that age, if a bit
rotund; he was dignified, with wild white hair and a golden and silver
mustache-- he looked like, and sometimes people thought he was, Albert
Einstein. They were both Pisceans, a fact that pleased Irving, whose minor at
Cornell had been physics. He spoke about the connections between philosophy,
poetry, religion, physics, psychology, and cosmology, among other things.
Irving was good at bringing into the room a sense that each person present was
perfect and beautiful, and more-- that each was in touch with all
transcendent human experience, that of the Sufis, Buddhists, Hindus;
the core of Christianity, the central warmth and love of learning, of the word
and the Word, in Judaism. We read about-- and Irving, sometimes with my
assistance (I could remember quotations verbatim) spoke of philosophical
thought, of science and how it explains so much of the world. He liked to talk
about the relationship between physics, in particular, and the
religious/philosophical/spiritual experience that joins so many mystics and
visionaries of this earth. He liked to talk about the "religion of no-religion."
He would take the thought that all of us
are Buddhas who are perhaps not yet awakened, go around the universe with it,
and bring it back into the room full of people. They, or some of them at least,
would often be aware of their own value for the first time-- or the idea that
it was not just all right to have fun, it might very well be one of the reasons
they were here. It was a chance to see and to feel-- to “get” the non-conceptual
concept that each was born complete and in a state of “sweet delight,” --
capable of experiencing both the joyous nothingness of Dogen and Blake’s
sensual human fire.
As I recall, Irv spoke on Wednesday or
Thursday, and on Friday he would bring a carload of people to Vermont. They
came to visit our "country estate,” as Irving called it, and were
sometimes dismayed to discover it was an old hill farm without plumbing or
real running water. Those who were able to deal with using an outhouse for
three days, might, Irving would say, stay “forever.” Some stayed almost
forever… at least, a very long time, and at least one person we met through the
Gallery chose to come back to stay as he was dying.
“The
nothingness shows through.”
I’d have liked to be able to show that
quote to Irving. Since he died in 1990, this is a bit tricky, but one may hope he experienced something like
this, the nothingness on the other side of everything, as he passed away, as
people say so carefully of death. I feel that he had that universal awakening experience
many times. Whether it always lasted, I don’t know (it seems to me that it’s
possible to have mini-Satoris which last for a time and disappear-- though they
never disappear entirely). I know he would have comprehended what Valery was
trying to convey, though Irving wouldn’t have any need to allude to an external
God.
I am not uncomfortable with the word God, as many people are.
It seems to me to be the same thing whether Christian Traherne speaks of being
clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars, or Mahayanist Milarepa
sings one of his hundred thousand songs. At the very core and heart, one finds
… what one finds. I have had the sense of encountering light, radiance, and
joyful wisdom in all people and all existence. For someone else, there may be
something else. Yet, may not all the experiences be based in the same thing?
After all, “God appears and God is light to those poor souls who dwell
in Night/ But does a human form display/ to those who dwell in realms of Day,”
Blake says.
For his part, Valery appears to be speaking of
Sunyata, the Zen concept of "emptiness." No bleak or existential
emptiness-- an open, smooth emptiness, as in still water or open sky. Looking for a long time into running
water over stones or at a flower or a blade of grass like Whitman, one sees the
form-- and the form is perfect, as evolution made it. But looking longer, one
may see the “nothingness showing through.” The cells, the atoms, and beyond the
smallest form… that something else, that nothingness, emptiness, is there: sunyata in a wild flower.
Taking the time to pay attention, I am
deeply appreciative of the beauty of this autumn, the first real autumn of
Vermont's growing recovery from Hurricane Irene. (Things were still a bit torn
up last year.)
According to an article in the local
paper, various phenomena arising from the storm and its floods has affected the
sugar maples and the colors we are accustomed to seeing in Vermont. Climate
change apparently has reached a point at which the first truly intense frost
may no longer reliably arrive before the leaves fall. Those cold nights bring
out the color, since the trees then stop making chlorophyll.
I need to look up a source for
this, but have heard and read it several times: It is said that that in eighty
or a hundred years, we may have no more sugar maple trees in Vermont and New
Hampshire due to global warming.
All things are impermanent, as the Buddha said, and as
Buddhists everywhere strive to remember. It is not hard for us, in Vermont, to
realize the truth of this after the last year. Permanency has flown like the
wild geese, security vanished like the blown dandelion seeds of last spring, and
a sense of safety that we had here in the heart of these seemingly everlasting
hills may have gone forever. Yet Vermont is rising from its many difficulties
with determination and insistence on its own way of being. Calvin Coolidge perhaps had this quality
in mind when he said that “If ever the spirit of liberty should vanish from the
rest of the Union, it could be restored by the generous share held by the
people in this brave little State of Vermont.”
The hills are still here, the trees are
still beautiful, and if we look after the wonderful and special place in which
we are fortunate enough to live, perhaps our children and grandchildren will be
able to enjoy its glory too. If all the maples are gone, it won' t be the
same-- and so we all must try to insist on any possibility of their being
preserved, locally and globally. If they vanish, though, I am sure that another
tree of some kind will rise here because Vermont endures. In the emptiness, in
the transience, the beauty of created form flows on and on through the Green
Mountains, and through the moment we are in… this moment, this second, Valery’s
nothingness can be seen.
Yes, this is something people have said
before, but it’s different when one actually experiences it.
In whatever way one can, through
meditation or simply walking every day through nature, it is worth looking
for. The experience of nothingness
in everything, of form in the formless and formlessness in form, will never
leave you. As one Zen master, I think, said, it will be “one quarter turn of
the head” away, and always available. All we need to do, as Aldous Huxley said,
is wake up.
