Meditation: On Meaning And On None

I recently finished a sequence of prose poem meditations based on sentences by Simone Weil. One of them was about a former Tinfish Press intern, Ithi S, who killed himself earlier this year. Here is the piece:
27.

We have to try to cure our faults by attention, and not by will. I looked down at the First Folio's open page and read, “to fleep perchance to dream.” When a dyslexic businessman looks at street signs, he sees letters but not where they belong. His only order, memorized. My student's sentences flit from hurt to hurt like hummingbirds. I ask him to look at what he's leaving, but that's for a later age, after the slowing down of synapses (and their attendant asps). The dream included snakes, but they were shedding skin rather than flashing it. Earth is covered with our molting: shell casings, bird shit, flat tires, a pile of wood where a single-wall house fell in on itself. To attend to this is not to reverse animation, turn tragedy into farce. It's to rest in the particular moment of our dying. The envelope arrived from Thailand with hardly any address on it: my name and place of work. Ithi's memory book; flip it either way and he smiles. Dead “by his own hand” at 33 on this Good Friday. I fucking hate symbolism.

--i.m Ithi S.

My friend Jon posed the following question: "More about that: 27, "'I fucking hate symbolism'": is this a quote? Spoken by someone who may be troubled because in his undergraduate way with his undergraduate syntax he hasn't thought his way up to the truism that to speak in words, any words, is necessarily to speak in symbols?" 

To which I responded that the outburst was all mine. That final sentence recoils at the way Ithi's suicide, Good Friday, and his age (33), collide, as if to mean something, as if to participate in a symbol that is greater than the circumstances of his death. As if to make something of that death, beyond emptiness.

The OED defines meaning this way: 

 1. The significance, purpose, underlying truth, etc., of something.

 a. That which is indicated or expressed by a (supposed) symbol or symbolic action; spec. a message, warning, idea, etc., supposed to be symbolized by a dream, vision, omen, etc. †in meaning that: as a sign or token that (obs.).

Why the recoil? It's the "underlying truth" part, I think. I do think. As a child I was prone to depression; my mother's response to my anguish was, typically: "you think too much." I did, and I do, but thinking has been one of the great (and at times only) joys of my existence. To think meant to sift through confusion to arrive at wisdom, even when (it always does) wisdom sifted away again. For most of those early years, it wasn't clarity I arrived at, but something that just might get me closer. Jan Zwicky quotes Dennis Lee:

"There is a moment in which I experience other people, or things, or situations, as standing forth with a clarity and a preciousness which makes me want to cry and to celebrate physically at the same time. I imagine many people have felt it." (101/189)

My notion of "emptiness," then, pointed to a lack of meaning, but Lee describes what I've since come to think "emptiness" means: "Each stands forth as what it is most fully, and most preciously, because the emptiness in which it rests declares itself so overpoweringly. We realize that this thing or person, this phrase, this event, need not be. And at that moment, as if for the first time, it reveals its vivacious being as though it had just begun to be for the first time." It's rebirth through recognition, the moment of seeing a flower at its most intense color after a session of meditation. It doesn't last, but that's not the point.

When life did not seem worth living, there was this. I associated my love/need for meaning with my depression, not yet realizing there was a word for that, too, namely "rumination." 

 c. Psychiatry. Obsessive repetition of the same thoughts to a degree which interferes with normal psychological functioning. Also: an instance of this.

When I look up "depression and rumination" now, I find that researchers seem to agree with my mother; rumination is bad for your health. But if rumination is a given, rather than an acquired activity, what then? Make use of it.

The promise of meaning has always been equated in my mind with a validation of life. It didn't take me out of time, but thrust me back into it. I found the primary locus of meaning in memory, as depression triggered it, too: memory meant loss most powerfully, but also spilled out in sequences of related images and thoughts and stories. It worked with the speed and precision of metaphor-making, leaping from remembered object to remembered object. What to do with these gymnastics, the kinetic churn of memories that didn't end anywhere, but simply ushered up new chains? 

Meaning is what slows the mind. Or so I thought then. Now I think it's sitting still and letting memories float past without attaching to them. But then I think I was hoping to slow down the constant flow, to find the place where meaning would gather flux together and to give it a stopping point. To stop is to feel some comfort, if only because there's breathing room. Meaning has a lot to do with the breath, my Buddhist teachers tell me.

It's hard to think about meaning now. Each day brings new trauma; if we are not black men or their families, it mostly brings trauma through the act of witness that television and social media provide. Trauma targets meaning as much as it targets persons. You cannot think "straight" if you are traumatized. Neither can you escape your memories. That's what PTSD is. And your memories are not yours alone; they belong to a culture's history, one that spools constantly in place at times like this one.

Where history, memory, and trauma come together, you find a shitload of symbolism. The tweeters unhappy that the murderer of Dallas cops, Micah Xavier Johnson, is being called Micah X Johnson by media, claim that media equates MXJ with Malcolm X, with Black nationalism, with what scares white folks. That's a symbolic claim, as is so much racism and anti-semitism (H. Clinton on a bed of cash with a five-pointed star beside her is nothing if not symbolic). The claim to literalism is also Trumpism; it's his only escape. 

So where does meaning lead me on a morning like this, several days into a week that is nothing more or less than a bloodbath, in a year of bloodbaths? I don't know. I fucking hate it. But when I look back at the OED, I remember that the first definition of "meaning," before the one I cited above, is this. It's obsolete, the dictionary claims:

  The action of mean v.2; moaning, lamentation.

As someone wrote in the copy of Jan Zwicky's Lyric Philosophy I have from the library, "That's the one." And the jpg is 0101. No, I'm wrong, it's 0100; 0101 was sideways. Meaning isn't as, but is, moaning and lamentation. As I would have it, moaning precedes meaning, but as the word and this week both know, they come at once, as memory and as present tense.

I also find that the word "rumination" lives outside its psychiatric corral, means:

 a. The action of revolving something in one's mind; meditation, contemplation.

May truth indeed be a form of honesty, and may there be clarity in our thoughts.

mem card: "geometry of cure": 18 july

Clearly, nothing is sacred. Words are iron, unfiled. Not the death of irony, but of calm, of kind. Make a fist of your arthritic hand. Words flame like joints, (un)like the bombing in Gaza. Four boys captured in a photo running: photo of four bodies on a beach. A rebel fighter tells his Russian master he shot down the wrong plane. The loops in my daughter's hair cannot be unwound. Egrets pace a circuit behind the lawn mower, necks bobbing. The sharpest mantel is of hurt. Air hammers could break it, but with such a degraded sound. Look for the geometry of cure, a flour sifter's stuttering. Draw it on a board; leave it for the next class to memorize.

                                                                --18 July 2014

Note:

"Clearly": Dogen

mem card: "pain's roulette": 16 july

All my life false and real. The letter she sent was based on fiction, but it bore consequences. I'm bored, my kids tell me. To bear is to bore as to flow is to flown, conjugation as shotgun wedding. There was hardly any ground on which to make their film; there's surfeit of meaning in Israel/Palestine. How do we lend quiet to their stones, their walls, their pain's roulette? A factory near here makes samsara souvenirs. They're usually on sale: five for the price of four. Put them on your shelf at home and listen to John Zorn saxophone or the blare of air raid sirens. Each kit comes without shelter, without cork to keep the memories out. What it offers is lines and line extensions. Get on your hands and knees and set them down, inch by hard inch. Lines forget circles forget the dull refrains.

                                                          --16 July 2014

Note:
"All my life": Dogen
John Zorn: thinking of this.

mem card: "lines": 15 july

Doubts do not grow / branches and leaves. Why is that a Buddhist poem, Chris asks, the one that wanders through thought's foliage, not pausing to remark on the impossibility of narrative, the folly of grasping. My colleague asks me to look at the lines, not to honor them. These lines lose their branches and leaves like an odd island autumn, before the leaf-blowers & egrets come to fashion an end to story. I'm interested in what happens to context when it's shed, lodged beside other memory-sentences, when it asks you to re-imagine its slot in the machine. “How do you get down off an elephant?” Bryant's joke goes. “You don't, you get down off a duck.” The monk is a beggar away from his monastery. The man holding a cardboard sign, “Homeless Vet: God Bless,” turned his large eyes away when I reached the corner of Pali & Kamehameha highways. Sometimes, Pam writes, you cross the line.

                                                                 --15 July 2014

Note:

"Doubts": Dogen 

Photo by Radhika Webster Schultz

mem card: "salvage or suicide": 14 july

Mind is walls, tiles, pebbles. After death, a tile-cleaning, pebbles in the mouth. He saves his dead son's junk mail, as if he could still buy what he didn't need. My friend's father was stabbed by a Palestinian on a street in Jerusalem. What they do is not in my name but in my economy. RIMPAC actors destroyed a ship yesterday with a new Norwegian missile. Karl Ove's third book arrived in the afternoon, along with a cat comb. There are days when detail is either salvage or suicide. My “friend,” he writes, asks to be de-friended if you side with Israel. Outsource your disdain onto its actor. They're all bad, Kevin Spacey said. From his father's ceiling a dozen knives hung down like hams from their hooks.

                                                                 --14 July 2014

Note:
"Mind is walls": Dogen

mem card: "compassionate disruption": 10 july

This is everyday mind. A woman in North Carolina called the cops on sculpted Jesus. He'd not be a vagrant, she said, or need our care. His form is scary after dark, he looks so real. There are holes in his bronze feet. Compassion means to suffer with, or suffer as. Disruption is to rend apart with violence. Paradox can't cover them like a tarp, or a blanket. Paradox is a box too small for them to fit, especially their feet. I told my co-worker in London, 1980, that I watched the bums at lunch and she laughed. I had to say tramps: those men in dark coats in a park full of tulips and older lovers on the Thames. I was the nomad & they a counter-citizenry of the poor. We have privatized blame: give us your blankets, your medications, your shopping carts. We offer you the right to disappear, or to pay a fine for being seen. Can you define table and chair for us, asked a man who needed them for his busking. They'll just sit in wheelchairs and pretend, he added.

                                                                  --10 July 2014

Notes:

--"everyday mind": Dogen

--"compassionate disruption": Mayor Kirk Caldwell, on sweeps of the homeless

--some language from public testimony before the Honolulu City Council, 7/9/14 

--thank you to Catherine Kong for bringing Jesus to my attention.

mem card: "fake monks": 8 july

Each grass and each form itself is the entire earth. Each memory casts its form, like a pole whose fisherman dozes in his truck. From my bike I see which cars contain tourists, and which are lived in. The pulled-over van with a dog tied to a tree alongside it is one. If we consider the homeless to be tourists, perhaps we'd offer them hotels, fresh towels, maid service. Island of nomads, convertible Mustangs, rice rockets, Sunday's Harley drivers in their leather jackets. According to the New York Times, one monk entered a restroom and came out in street clothes, took the subway out of the city. They're fake, you know. Karl Ove's a novelist who hates fiction, so he writes his everyday; the critics call it “banal,” but women love it. We like our men in street clothes, buying their six-packs with panhandled dough. Real monks don't beg for money.

                                                                 --8 July 2014

Notes:

"Each grass": Dogen

Karl Ove: Knausgaard

The photo is from the Facebook page "Fake Monks in New York." 

So is the quotation at the end.

mem card: "not a shell": 5 july

Vigorously abiding in each moment is the time-being. A dead eel in the shore break isn't banal; nor is the styrofoam cup shard, the panty liner half-buried in sand. In one's 50s, abstraction trades places with the particular. Not a shell of, but a shell my daughter holds up, three black dashes on white. A white fish with one black dot on its mid-section swims beside a coral head. Some boys scramble over rocks, find another dead eel; its spine & teeth show yellow on black rock. Three boys & then another killed in Israel/Palestine, horror to counter-horror. Trauma's memory without screen, unlatched door in a wind storm, flapping without brake, or interval. Each moment in its time until there's only protea stuck in a stump at Punalu`u. The image of these flowers can abide, refresh, return. Involuntary key stroke, happy typo on a sea wall.

                                                               --5 July 2014

Notes:

"Vigorously": Dogen

mem card: "bike ride": 5 july

The “eyebrows” and “eyes” are mountains and oceans, because mountains and oceans are eyebrows and eyes. The mountain is net; ocean lacks stoppage time. Ahuimanu: clutch of birds. Small brown ones skitter as I ride my bike up Kahekili's shoulder. Landmarks for the dead: a football jersey & photo; cross & lower plaque (Courtney & Micah); some dim flowers in a pot, an upside down bucket. Stalks lean over a square of cement across from the sewage plant. Convertible mustangs whizz by, a truck with two sleeping women in the bed. Yes, she saw my phone up the road where I thought I'd hit a rock. Keep the Country Country. New City / What a Pity. There's a new lo`i beside the plantation houses. A Smoke Meat sign sits beside two lawn mowers. Inside the van, man hugs dog. To notice is not to know anything. Say mantras for dead chickens, doves; repetition might not heal, but it takes time.

                                                               --5 July 2014

mem card: "No Shit" : 4 july

The moon is neither new nor old, because moon inherits moon. I'm usually a happy, satisfied person, but not today. I can sometimes spend time alone, but usually I hit the button that shocks me instead. I'm a sad American, caught in black & white. The wall behind me reads No Shit. History's bunk, so I have none that cannot fit beneath my bed. I sort my memories as a teenage girl does beads, dividing blues from yellows, greens. They fight me back, like balls in a lottery machine, dancing. After practice, she sings in the car, stabs the air with her index. Been around the world, don't speak the language / But your booty don't need explainin'.

                                                                     --4 July 2014

Notes:

Photograph by Jim Goldberg

"The moon": Dogen

"booty": Jason Derulo, "Talk Dirty"

 

mem card: "de-friend": 3 july

Spit out yourself and spit out others. She tried to disown me but I refused. She was at the airport saying never come back & I was orphaned & going away. Do you think you can talk to her? Phyllis said. He says he won't pay for the casual sex of others, for their mistakes, their lack of will, their elective surgeries. They are gendered female. Women want daddies, safety nets, claim their victimhood as privilege. I had an allergic reaction in Chinatown; on the way to my car I ducked in an alleyway to vomit. “I belong here now.” I'm the moralist, he opines. Click de-friend.

                                                                             --3 July 2013

Note:
"Spit out yourself": Dogen

mem card: "work benefits": 2 july

 

Everyday activity at this moment is hundreds of grasses brilliant in the moon. The moon an indifferent grade last night; gone behind gray cloud this morning. Birds, my black fan, the deaf cat calling, soon the RIMPAC planes. Yesterday, egrets patrolled the fresh mown lawn. They wear brown stripes down the backs of their necks, like ties. At Goodyear, one guy ignored me by staring at his screen; another jabbered on the phone. “It's a personal call,” a second colleague said. “He annoys everyone.” He was talking about work benefits, staring at his phone while his colleague and I talked about him. A woman and a man waited behind me. The supervisor's name is Scott. I walked to elementary school in the third person, composing the narrative of my life. Now the sun sharpens the green & the gray immensity of cloud as a man walks across my louvered window to the workers' shed. This was not the narrative I had in mind; it's no narrative at all. The end.

                                                             --2 July 2014

Note:

"Everyday activity": Dogen 

RIMPAC: military exercises in the Pacific

mem card: "team of orphans": 30 june

 

“The green mountains are always walking; a stone woman gives birth to a child at night.” Not a birthing stone, but a woman. Beneath a blue tarp, above a blanket, lies a round stone with face etched in. Above the blue tarp, red lava consumes condo towers. We circulate through the gallery, watched by a docent in a wheelchair. When she smiles, one bottom tooth shows. She asks about the volume of the music. The woman is not stone, but sidewalks are as hard. The cold corridors of Bal Mandir: her crib stood by the door. Two men arrested for forcing girls to wear bridal gowns, have sex, molest little boys. “The only team I'd coach is a team of orphans,” Mike Matheny wrote.

                                                      --30 June 2014

Notes:

 "The green mountains": Dogen

Art by Imai Kalahele, from the Iolani Gallery, WCC, fb page. 
Images of Bal Mandir, Kathmandu, Nepal.

mem card: "a particular pronoun": 27 june

You should study this in detail. He testified that the homeless sleep perpendicular to the street, rather than parallel. The homeless are a particular pronoun. Leaving a restaurant I saw a fresh line of tents on the sidewalk; a couple my age walked toward me from theirs. I have my grandfather's Hamlet, who was taken off a Pittsburgh street by nuns. He was a great salesman, my mother said. A poet's son was killed at Leavenworth. To leaven is to make rise. The homeless must get off our sidewalks, leave our parks, keep their shit to themselves. In an interview, the poet said, I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.

                                                                  --27 June 2014

Notes:

"You should study": Dogen

"I like all": Howard Nemerov

Photograph of Jeremy Nemerov (1968-2014), from an article by Bill McLellan 

mem card: "swallowed" : 25 june

The whole sky and whole earth are swallowed. I don't want to be swallowed, but I want my absence known. When he came to shake hands, we pulled back, put lines between us and his eyes. I'd feel swallowed; what stoppered me but a cork. Her family'd come from Cork. Looked in the phone book, saw her name multiply; every woman on the street wore her narrow face. Photos of mixed families do not include ours. Oh, she's the one with the haole parents, someone says. He's only afraid of white people, one girl tells another about her baby brother. I'm so glad I'm not, she adds, her audience the white girl who asked. She hesitated, but kissed my cheek. The crime is in the mouth, its particular wound to skin. I hear both of you in her.

                                                                      --25 June 2014

Note:
"The whole sky": Dogen

mem card: "ecstasy": 24 june

There is a world of sentient beings in fire. He approaches from the basketball courts, across the parking lot, calls out to us. What are your names, he asks, his right hand stuck out. Just the first, I won't remember the last. His shirt as open as his eyes. We shake his hand, offer up our names. I turn to see him kneeling in the parking lot behind me, forehead to the asphalt, singing about Jesus. Ecstasy, Glenn suggests, or meth. Bipolar, says Bryant. Assign them a name, his wide-open eyes. We see every day what we fail to notice: cloud, sky, red gas can. Title the poem so it can be hand-held, like a dog's rubber toy or a video cam. The dog eats dirt, pees on the deck. We forgive him because he's old.

                                                               --24 June 2014

Note:
"There is a world": Dogen

mem card: "particular of water": 22 june

When water solidifies, it is harder than a diamond. The particular of water is less water. Particulate anecdote. There's a blue guitar on top of the homeless man's burrow. I saw it slung over his shoulder, thought it a fishing spear. Those who don't know they're being watched, or those who watch themselves as if removed from others' eyes. She puked in a Colorado Rockies' cap at the top of Mount Evans. My mother said the novel smelled bad. Served him water in a jelly glass, the kind I always hated. The rim denoted lid: eye in the tunnel half-open, hyphenated.

                                                                           --22 June 2014

mem card: "thusness": 20 june

Water is only the true thusness of water. It's more than flowing, but flowing is more than itself. Why are all abstract paintings alike, he asks. My daughter needed to take the portrait of a stranger. When I download her photos, I see a college student seated at a bench, eyes at her level. Do not take pictures of the homeless. Better to witness their tents, their blankets, their coffee cups, their dogs. The Stranger is newly translated. How do you navigate “maman”? The same sun in French is not a son. The same sound is not sound, but the thusness of sound. Read this sonnet like a lawyer in love; the speaker makes an argument, after all. They used to rhyme, love and prove. Now we prove our love without sound's symmetries. Under that tree, or that one, I thee wed. You in your loaner ring, and I in mine.

 

                                                                     --20 June 2014

Note:

"Water is only": Dogen

mem card: "zombie apocalypse": 20 june

The original face has no birth and death. My son refuses to enter the pool, turns his back on two young parents and a child splashing. That's not it, he says when I suggest. That's not it, not it. I will not guess, assume. He's my multiple choice generator, lacking empty circles. My mother stared at another woman in a restaurant. It was a moment of intimacy I wish I hadn't witnessed, he writes. To perceive is not to know. It's some kind of zombie apocalypse, this wanting to read minds, or at least faces, to lever into synapses, catch impulses before they stick. When asked what he'd do in case, my husband responded that he'd cook them. Our daughter's only possession when we met her was a thick brown pencil. She clutched it in her fist. We don't remember her early sounds; she started on us with words.

                                                                    --20 June 2014

Note:

 "The original face": Dogen: "My late master, old buddha, said:"

mem card: "at Civics": 18 june

When water melts, it is gentler than milk. Beneath a pink kid's bike by the road, I see the man's back. Shirt pulled over head to shade his neck, he faces the woods. Two hundred yards back, a black plastic door fronts his burrow. Brown ti leaves wrap around the rail above. Categories require instances. Instances require equipment: bike, tarp, pole. At Civics, girls practice footwork, each to her own ball; behind the restrooms a couple has set up camp. It's probably safe, I tell my son, close to the police station. We cannot let the homeless take over our city, the mayor says. It's a problem that requires a war, or a cure. The man at the park stares through chain link at the parking lot. His partner lies beneath her yellow blanket. I see her two feet, standing.

                                                                                  --18 June 2014

Notes:

"When water": Dogen

Photograph: Civil Beat, 2 June