ENSO
Ensō
Monday, February 22, 2021. Up at 6 then again at 7:30 & browsed bedside book, Ensō, by Audrey Yoshiko Seo’s (2007) and suddenly felt its connection to epiphany (Wikipedia): “In the traditional Zen arts, painting and calligraphy functioned as visual discourses, while poetry with its live words communicated the essential wordlessness of Zen. D.T. Suzuki, in speaking of these unique forms said: “The arts of Zen are not intended for utilitarian purposes, or for purely aesthetic enjoyment, but are meant to train the mind, indeed, to bring it into contact with ultimate reality.” (Quoted by John Daido in Seo 2007)[1]
Is ensō an implicit koan? We might believe that no answer is as valuable as the question’s provocation of alternate ways of thinking (Tricycle; Wikipedia) one of which may enlarge the possibilities of transcendence? We are explorers, spelunking in our own minds. The allure of an experience that so many have characterized as a peak experience—unforgettable, transformative, but ineffable—is irresistible (at least for a few minutes, hours, or days in my own life). I don’t feel a need to attain transformation as much as I’d like the experience of feeling its latent possibilities—another horizon. (Also, uncertainty makes me timid)
In my 20’s, the early 1960’s. I learned to appreciate the power of meditation and of repeated experiences, such as mantras, music, and the experiencing of calligraphing hundreds of the character that represents “tao.”[2] That exercise, undertaken under the eyes of mentors, Bob and Bobbie Cable, often leading to an aura of enlightenment—the aura of something about to happen, like the aura that presages an epileptic seizure or the sense that something is on the tip of my cognitive tongue, like Franz Wright’s pursuit of the word just out of reach. He wrote about “some radiantly obvious thing I need to say, though quite what that might be escapes me at the moment, as it always has, and always will” (2006).[3] Perhaps this is because it will always escape, and is thus, as Schiller would say, “Always becoming, never is” (quoted by Carlyle) [iii] . Or the aura—the precious moments—Dostoevsky spoke of as preceding the “eternal harmony” that he occasionally experienced: “There are moments,” he wrote, “and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony … a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself and the rapture with which it fills you. If this state were to last more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and would have to disappear. During these five seconds I live a whole human existence, and for that I would give my whole life and not think that I was paying too dearly (A&O notes) and many citations, e.g., Oliver Sacks in TMWMHWFH p162–a book you are highly encouraged to experience)
This resonates deeply with Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience” (1859)[4]
[this is perception in an unfamiliar sense. Because its object may be different [its target not a sensory cortex?] But no less central to our human experience, our self-hood—perhaps essentially more in its essence. Embodiment? We invoke epoché and then forget it. But does it speak to a different level of organization? Higher? Lower? (deeper)]
And why not!? Such moments, along with memory and imagination are all that humans can know. Experiences they can point to, but never attain. They are said to have connections to the ephemeral and the timeless. And finding the right combination of cognitive processes, their harmonious synchrony in the creation or the appreciation of art, seems uniquely suited to provide direction for this moment. Can we get a fresh perspective on the maelstrom we seem to inhabit? Art can do this. Saul Bellow [5] said, “Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm—an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.” [such stillness is a precious “momentary stay against confusion,” as Frost called it.][i] [ii] And there is time, past, present, future … and the stillpoint as in T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” (1936)[6] –it feels like the eye of a storm.
Here we should take a break and read Borges’ wonderful “Aleph”
“. . . the mechanism by which we come to know beauty and “feel” the aesthetic. What we “feel” at such moments is the analogy of part and whole, [foreground and background] object and other object, relation and relation. This is one reason that in moments of aesthetic transport we assert the universality of the beautiful: we are feeling something not inchoate but precise and seemingly beyond contradiction. This is also why we feel something similar when coming upon the beautiful in art (or music) and the beautiful in nature (or mathematics). As Schopenhauer asserted, “Aesthetic pleasure is essentially one and the same, no matter whether it is evoked by a work of art or immediately produced by the contemplation of nature and life.” Beauty is experienced as a form of knowledge because it is through the archetypal rational act ‑ that of analogy and metaphor ‑ that we come to know the beautiful.” (Edward Rothstein, 1995, from Emblems of Mind: The Inner Life of Music and Mathematics, Chapter 4, “Theme and Variations: The Pursuit of Beauty” pp. 163‑168)
The ineffability of the moment was understood by William James: “Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.” (Wm. James, The Principles of Psychology, Ch. 15, 1890).
My own undertaking has explored every variety of expression, but writing is what seems natural now, sharing Walt Whitman’s view that “The secret of it all is, to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment—to put things down without deliberation—without worrying about their style—without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote—wrote, wrote. No prepared picture, no elaborated poem, no after-narrative, could be what the thing itself is. You want to catch its first spirit—to tally its birth. By writing at the instant the very heart-beat of life is caught” (Walt Whitman)[7]
As any thing can be sacred because all things are connected to each other, any moment can the one! “Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete 4,000 years ago, a love that ended yesterday in Texas . . . each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. the minute winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time” (Thomas Wolfe from the first page of his first novel, “Look Homeward, Angel” 1929)[vii]
The payoff:
It was as though I had looked for a truth outside myself, and finding it had become for a moment a part of the truth I sought… (C.P. Snow in The Search, cited by Judson).
[1] Quote from John Daido Loori in his forward to Audrey Yoshiko Seo (2007) Enso: Zen Circles of Enlightenment. Weatherhill, Boston P.xv
[2] Like copying Sutra: https://zcla.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Sutra-Copying-Introduction.pdf downloaded, February 22, 2021
[3]. Quoted in Langdon Hammer’s review of Franz Wright’s “God’s Silence: Poems,” “In Pursuit of Revelation” [title at website, title in paper was “To Live is to Do Evil”] NYT Sunday Book Review, May 14, 2006, p38.
“What kind of apocalypse does Wright imagine in his new poems? He is not waiting for the Rapture, but he is a Roman Catholic devotional poet of mystical hope. He is impatient with the real and visible (>concrete things stand for / invisible things=), and he pushes past them toward >real reality,= >a higher unseeable / life, inconceivable / light / of which light is mere shadow.= This impatience extends to people “a human face” is “the mask” / of some being no one can see—as well as to language. Wright describes a moment of past vision in which “The mask was gone,” “There was no / I,” and
there was no text, only what the words stood for;and then what all things stand for.
Wright’s poems pursue this state of revelation, as if there were a word just out of reach, beyond the words on the page. He calls that goal of “ … some radiantly obvious thing I need to say, though quite what that might be escapes me at the moment, as it always has, and always will.”
[iii]. “Are we not in a world seen to be Infinite; the relations lying closest together modified by those latest discovered and lying farthest asunder? Could you ever spell-bind man into a Scholar merely, so that he had nothing to discover, to correct; could you ever establish a Theory of the Universe that were entire, unimprovable, and which needed only to be got by heart; man then were spiritually defunct, the Species we now name Man had ceased to exist. But the gods, kinder to us than we are to ourselves, have forbidden such suicidal acts. As Phlogiston is displaced by Oxygen, and the Epicycles of Ptolemy by the Ellipses of Kepler; so does Paganism give place to Catholicism, Tyranny to Monarchy, and Feudalism to Representative Government,—where also the process does not stop. Perfection of Practice, like completeness of Opinion, is always approaching, never arrived; Truth, in the words of Schiller, immer wird, nie ist; never is, always is a-being.” (from Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Characteristics. The Harvard Classics. 190914; Paras. 40-58 http://www.bartleby.com/25/3/3.html
Texts of Carlyle’s NOTE BOOKS (http://www.archive.org/stream/twonotebooksofth00carlrich/twonotebooksofth00carlrich_djvu.txt )…
[4] Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr: “A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience”(The Professor at the Breakfast Table, 1859 ch 10)
[5] Saul Bellow In George Plimpton Writers at Work (1967) 3rd series, p. 190) Also, In Brain Pickings, In a 1966 interview, Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915–April 5, 2005) articulated the seed of what would blossom into a central concern of his life, and of our culture: “Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, in the eye of the storm… Art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.” A quarter century later — already an elder with a Pulitzer Prize, a National Medal of Arts, and a Nobel Prize under his belt — Bellow would come to explore this duality more deliberately in his stirring essay on how artists and writers save us from the “moronic inferno” of distraction. Also, Conversations with Saul Bellow (Literary Conversations Series) Paperback – January 1, 1995 by Gloria Cronin (Editor), Ben Siegel (Series Editor)
[i]. “Robert Frost, in the preface to his Complete Poems ( 1949 ), defined a poem as “a momentary stay against confusion” and defined poetry as an artistic medium which reflects stability and permanence encompassed by the moment of the poem. In his own work, he wanted to preserve his most common poetic subjectsthe fading New England country life and dialect, and rural landscapes and historyby fixing them indelibly in an immortal poetry, for Frost always retained something of the notions his mother taught him as a child: that a creative act is one inspired by God, that the impulse to write is divine, and that poetry could express dimensions of immortality. When he matured as a poet, Frost relied on Emerson’s thoughts regarding the “godly artist” to corroborate his mother’s teaching; later still, when asked to introduce the anthology New Poets of England and America (1957), America’s foremost poet alluded to his early belief that poets enter a meditative “state of grace” while composing.” From “The Enduring Robert Frost,” By Samuel Maio (first published in The Formalist, 1990).
[ii]. From Seldes’s The Great Thoughts p 223
[6] T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton.” (The first of the Four Quartets 1936) https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/11/18/t-s-eliot-reads-burnt-norton/
[7] Walt Whitman Quoted by Brenda Wineapple (2019)[iv] From Walt Whitman Speaks: His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America, transcribed by his friend Horace Traubel during the last years of his life.) Brenda Wineapple (2019) ‘I Have Let Whitman Alone’ NYRB APRIL 18, 2019 ISSUE pp. 18-20. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/04/18/walt-whitman-alone/
[vii]. “In June 1926, Wolfe once again sailed for Europe and began writing notes and phrases for the novel about his life that became Look Homeward, Angel. For the next two years he divided his time between Europe and New York working feverously to complete his massive manuscript he initially called O Lost. Completing the novel in Spring 1928, the manuscript began making the rounds of publishers while Wolfe continued his travels in Europe. // In the fall of 1928, while in Vienna, Wolfe received a letter from Maxwell E. Perkins, the legendary editor at Charles Scribners Sons, asking him to meet with him in New York to discuss O Lost. // Wolfe returned to New York and on January 9, 1919, the manuscript was formally accepted for publication by Scribner’s. That spring Wolfe gave the novel a more evocative title—Look Homeward, Angel(the manuscript had been trimmed down by Wolfe and Perkins to a more commercially viable length of 240,000 words). // Look Homeward, Angel was published on October 18, 1929 and created an uproar in Asheville. The novel was condemned from street corner to pulpit and banned from the public library. There are more than 200 characters in the novel, all easily identifiable citizens of Asheville. Wolfe received death threats, and it was not until 1937 that he felt safe to return to his hometown. // Look Homeward, Angel proved both a critical and commercial success, and Maxwell Perkins was eager for Wolfe to produce a new novel as soon as possible.” (From htp://thomaswolfe.org/details/bio.html (December 6, 2003)
