The Choice of Emptiness is a new book by Jim Ralston, published by Acheron Press (Bear Creek at the Kettle, Friendsville, Maryland, 21532, $6.75 paperback). I’d never heard of Ralston or Acheron Press before this book arrived. There are so many things we don’t hear about: a writer like Ralston courageously making his way to his own center, telling his story without frills but with great clarity and honesty; a small press like Acheron, which has a new magazine out called Nightsun, publishing quality work which probably won’t make much money but which deserves your support. Thanks to Acheron and Jim Ralston for permission to reprint this excerpt from the book. © Copyright Acheron Press, 1982.
— Ed.
(September 10 — Frostburg)
— What is anything for? I am standing in line at Fidelity Bank, and inside my universe has caved in. I feel like the guy who folds his laundry, then goes down to the cellar and shoots his head off.
— I walk down Main Street, looking in the shop windows, but not looking. Aching inside. Killing time, but waiting for nothing. I pass a sweater shop and see a salesclerk who reminds me of Denise. Soft curly hair, full breasts, slow thoughtful movements as she folds some sweaters and stacks them on a shelf. She looks up and smiles at me. Through her smile I notice my own reflection in the glass. I wince to see myself so morbid.
— Dusk deepens my melancholia. I look out my kitchen window and watch the sky darken into that thin white-blue. It scares me what inner darkness I have to face.
And yet, day-to-day life, it just keeps going on. Connie will be dropping off the kids tomorrow morning, and where will I find the strength to handle them. I have weeks’ worth of themes piling up on my desk to correct. My house is a wreck, dirty dishes overflowing the sink, plants drying up, clothes strewn over the floor in every room, along with last week’s newspapers, food wrappers, children’s broken toys, ash trays spilling over with cigarette butts, empty match books, crushed cigarette packages, half-eaten apples.
I shut myself in the bedroom and lie down for a short nap. As usual I just lie there, wide-eyed, thinking, thinking, staring into the ceiling, the same old thoughts circling around each other. I pull the pillow over my face and think how satisfied Denise looks in her new life. I wonder if I can wish her any happiness from all this jealousy. Why do I still think of her as mine after all this time? Why do I cling so to the past, with all of its obsessions and fears and false hopes? Why can’t I let the past die? Why is my so-called love for Denise so dependent on having Denise? Certainly I can see through it now, see the falseness, the immaturity. I am a grown man. I am thirty-five years old.
I think of Connie, my ex-wife, how she has made a new relationship for herself, a new home. Why has it been so easy for her? I think of Ty and Holley, and all their fear for what is happening to their Daddy. I see it in their eyes, “Daddy, come back, come back,” and I start to cry, bitter tears, also wondering what is happening to their Daddy, if he can come back now. For a few minutes I remember back to the cozy little world of several years ago. I had done my life so carefully — college and graduate school, marriage to my college sweetheart, two beautiful children (“a girl for her and a boy for me”), a college teaching job, our own starter home and mortgage payment book, a VW camper with a pop-up top, a cabin in Canada, home to our respective parents and grandparents for Easter and Christmas. . . . And now it is hard to remember why I was so frustrated that I would give it up. And for this! For pain.
Denise
I am jogging this afternoon, still depressed from a broken heart of months ago, and even more depressed that after all this time I still can’t shake myself free. My lost love has gone deep inside me, and wherever I go, whatever I do, I feel hollow, half dead, like the best part of me isn’t there anymore, and never will be again. I think the man says more than he knows when he calls his woman his better half.
When I jog, I like to let my mind fall away if it will, and just look around, and listen, and smell, and breathe, and run. It is a beautiful autumn afternoon if I can let myself out to enjoy it. The sky is low and gray. The autumn flowers are heavy on their stems, already touched with vague frost. The brown and yellow leaves are forming soft circles around the bases of the tree trunks, exposing more and more skeleton every passing hour. It’s the kind of autumn day you can reach out and touch, everything is so crisp and bare. You can feel inside and outside the landscape both at once . . . almost . . . a little bit if you try. But alas, this afternoon it is all effort and no results. I am remote from the healing power of nature. My body is stiff, my legs (and my heart) are heavy. And my mind is clogged up with memories of what I used to have, what I ache to have again, but what I have no more.
It’s strange when I’m depressed how my mind will start making these endless heavy circles around itself. It’s something like jogging laps on a track, where I run ten miles and end up exactly where I started, only tired. Mind-circling never seems to go anywhere either. It doesn’t loosen the depression, it doesn’t relieve the pain, nor does it lead to much understanding. Rather I think it’s my poor habit of using thought to solve emotional problems, using my mind to dominate my heart, standing over it (over-standing) by way of forever encircling.
Disgusted with circles, I leave the track and move out onto the streets and hills, wherever my legs decide to take me. This afternoon they run me up the hill to the top of town ad Frostburg Memorial Cemetery, though I think it’s my mood that points the way. I am gloom through and through, and getting lower every mile, and lo, I am starting to cry as I run. Who is this fool, I think, running around the graveyard in broad daylight, crying over nothing and everything. But my heart says, keep going, and I do. Up and down the long lines of graves I run and cry, over the dead bodies and cemetery grass, up one row of stones and down another, big stones of former somebodies, medium-size stones of former everybodies, little flat stones for former nobodies, now all dead bodies, I grieve them briefly as I pass, the rich and poor, the proud and the humble, the aged and the infant, all equal now, all dead, some who had lain there before I was yet born, some who were born with me in my very own year, some who had died the same . . . The Andersons “Together Forever,” Susan Markham “Too Soon Taken,” William Thompson “At Home with His Father,” Jonathan Peterman “Sadly Departed.” . . .
It may not sound profound, but a truth of life suddenly drops down inside me into a place I have never felt it before. I suddenly know that all things die. They really die. In spite of these “eternal” granite stones, these all-seasons plastic wreaths and flowers, these hopeful inscriptions, “Together Forever,” “In Heaven at Last,” etc.; in spite of our funeral customs to make death look like a Sunday after-church snooze; in spite of our Sunday school promises of Heaven or Hell and everlasting life; in spite of all the desperate energy we spend to make it untrue, the truth is — nothing, absolutely nothing, is to keep. Not even our own bodies, no matter what the undertakers and Sunday school teachers do and say to preserve them. These are dead bodies underneath my running feet. They were once as full of life as you and I, full of hopes and anguish and future plans, but now they are dead.
And carrying it but a few steps further, I know something else to be true, too. It’s the same in life as it is after. Nothing is to keep here either. Life is always dying in one way or another. No moment is to hold. No relationship is forever. Even if it happens to last until one of the partners dies (and rarely does it last so long), that will be the end of it, and no kidding.
Life is change, fight it though we will. A deeper truth shoots through me with the force of healing shock. Since all things die . . . since all things die, how can having forever, or “having” for any length of time, matter so much as it does? How can it matter at all? Rather what counts is the full experience of life and love in the moment we are living and loving. It’s the quality that’s eternal. It’s the quality that matters. Or nothing matters, because as for quantity, there will always be an end to that, and it will never be enough. We would all like the eternal summer, day without night, joy without sorrow, union without separation. But life will defeat our desires and efforts to make it something else from what it is.
What life is, is death. Entwined, inseparable cosmic lovers. To be wise means to live in the moment, and to let the old things pass out of our lives with the same ease and grace that we let new things be born in. If there is no door open at the dying end, the birthing end of our lives will be choked closed too. If there are no more graveyards, there is no more maternity either.
As I descend the cemetery hill, back onto the city streets, my soul still feels sad, like the autumn tones of color now darkening into evening; but my step has a new lightness to it, my breathing a new ease and depth, as if some heavy weight has been lifted from my back. The thought comes to me to run over to my old love’s house to share with her these new feelings and insights. But ah! Probably just another trick to breathe life into a corpse, whose time is not hello, but good-bye. Not birth, but death.
So I’ll say good-bye here, and let the grieving begin at last. And wish us both new experiences and relationships, as good as we once had together.
Good-bye Denise.
(December 20 — Frostburg)
— In my afternoon literature class. I teach Phillip Booth’s “First Lesson.” It is ironic that the poem should come up today. As I read it to the class, there is a lot of intensity. The students feel it too.
First Lesson
Lie back, daughter, let your head be tipped back in the cup of my hand. Gently, and I will hold you. Spread your arms wide, lie out on the stream and look high at the gulls. A dead- man’s float is face down. You will dive and swim soon enough where this tidewater ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe me, when you tire on the long thrash to your island, lie up, and survive. As you float now, where I held you and let go, remember when fear cramps your heart what I told you: lie gently back and wide to the light-year stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.
— After class I am exhausted, and I turn off my office light and prop my feet on my desk. Outside in the hallway I can hear the tapping of typewriters and the clicking of heels on the hard tile floor. There is a thin streak of light underneath my door, enough to make faint shadows on the wall, and to see the rising and falling of my chest underneath my chin.
I fall asleep, and when I wake up I am disoriented. My mind is in a discussion with itself; it feels as if I’m hearing voices. They are saying that though what I now do (teaching) gives me some satisfaction, I know well it is not much. And it cannot be the deepest satisfaction because I’m still hiding the scared parts of my life underneath whatever I do. If I want to be all that I am, these outward things, even my job, will have to be stripped away for a time, to let the fears inside arise into clearer shapes, so they can be faced and wrestled with. Then all these things will be added unto me, and in new measure, in new depth.
The Sea Will Hold You
Life seems to pull at us from two opposite directions. We want security on the one hand; we want sameness, routine, predictability. On the other hand we want adventure, freedom, variety, newness, the unknown.
If we don’t have enough moorings to what we know, to what we feel safe in, we run the risk of being dashed upon the rocks or blown away by the first strong wind. People can get lost in rapid change, even in their own growth if it comes too fast for our roots to handle. However, such overzealousness (or recklessness) is the rare exception, not the rule, although we fear it so much more than the other kind of lostness that comes with too much security, too little growth. Thus most of us have become heavily overweighted on the security side of the balance, always playing life safe, making our todays endless repetitions of yesterdays, choosing again and again the old and the tried, rejecting the new, fearing and avoiding the unknown, and closing an always tightening circle around our lives and spirits.
Perhaps a solution to the problem lies in a redefinition of what security is. If we could look at life, just for a moment, through eyes washed clean of fear and cultural conditioning, we would see that there is really nothing to hold onto anyway, and that the most insecure thing we can do is to try to grasp life, to make it stay put. We would see that we are hopelessly adrift, like it or not, and the most secure thing we can do is learn to float; to go where the winds of life carry us, and to come to know in a very deep place that the sea will hold us.
All that our fortresses accomplish — be they our careers, our degrees, our marriages, our homes, our possessions, our bank balances — is to “protect” us from the blowing winds of life, to steadily undermine our confidence that we belong to life as much as life belongs to us; that we are on the inside, not outsiders looking in; that we are friends, not strangers; that we are with life, not against; and that life is with us too, if we will but cooperate. But how can we cooperate, or participate in any positive way from inside our walls. Real security is breaking free, letting go, risking all.
. . . except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.
The undivided life, the life not protecting itself by walling the world out, sees that there is no such thing as security as man generally seeks it, in the human preoccupations, in culture. It is an illusion, and preferring truth, the wise man gives it up. And in giving it up, paradoxically he finds it. . . .
Rome And Carthage
I
Drown, or learn to breathe the new air. That’s what it means to live at the bottom of the ocean, Bert and I would tell ourselves and each other on those long winter walks. To live in the depths was like learning a new way to breathe. To live on the ocean floor of ourselves, not just occasionally touching bottom, but regularly, continuously in contact with our deepest selves — was it even possible? . . . against all the distractions and amusements and escapes with which life baited us? When the pain came, the emotional chaos, was it possible to live inside it and not run away?
The ocean bottom was our life theme that winter. We would be Jonahs (or Jobs) and get to know ourselves in this new air, in this strange underwater landscape, among these weird shapes and slimy deep-sea monsters, in the belly of our lives. We would make a new home among them, and maybe even learn that these monsters are not ugly and terrible after all, but only strange. They have been waiting for us down here all along, but we have chosen to live in the shallows, only skin-deep. And the dark and scary underside of life we fool ourselves to think is far away.
II
It’s too strange how life “just happens” sometimes. Bert appeared to me the very night that my Denise-world collapsed. I was giving her a surprise birthday party at my house, and there were a hundred people there at least, including her softball team, the bluegrass band from Mike’s Tavern, and all the regulars from the Democrat Club where she tended bar. A couple friends and I had spent the day decorating the house and baking cakes, and I had bought two kegs of beer and a case of liquor, and a table full of cheeses and crackers. It was a nice party, if I do say so, though perhaps my motive was not pure love. I knew that Denise and her “friend” had been seeing each other a bit, so I was also subtly trying to remind her what a good man she already had. Me. Look how nice and thoughtful I was.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t give Denise a little room, I told myself. She was ten years younger than I, and our worlds didn’t coincide in every way. For two small reasons, I had children, and she had nothing but freedom. We both talked about needing our own space, and all that open relationship jargon, but I had no intention of giving her so much space that I got lost in it. Neither did I know how lost I already was. Underneath my outward show of liberality and gentle paternalism, I was possessive as hell, and frightened, though I didn’t admit it at the time, even to myself. On the exterior, I showed a cocky faith that our feelings for each other would overcome all obstacles, no matter how handsome, or how young.
But that dark autumn night, as the house bounced with “Dixie” and “The Orange Blossom Special,” and drunk-happy faces shined everywhere, I would notice them occasionally looking at each other from across the room, and was startled to see how deep they already saw into each other. What was going on? That was supposed to be my place to be, but I was not alone there. . . . Or was I even there at all? To retaliate, I started flirting with other women, but when I checked back to see how I was doing, she hadn’t bothered to notice. I redoubled my efforts, but the next time I looked she was gone. They were gone. I frantically searched every room, every closet, the attic, underneath the cellar steps. They were nowhere. And together! And outside, the dark woods behind the house whispered me cruel secrets about the beginning of something, and the end of something else.
“Oh my,” I remember myself muttering, locking myself in the bathroom, and looking at my stunned face in the mirror. “Look at here. . . . Look at this. . . .”
This was supposed to be something that happened to other people. I had been caught wide open, with a naked heart, exposed in my own treachery. (It was I who had stolen Denise from her last lover.) Who would have guessed this would come back around to me. We were the perfect couple. Everybody said so. Everybody loved us.
I remember drinking a tall glass of whiskey straight down, and, as the party soared on past me, sitting on the couch with my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands, and a half-eaten piece of birthday cake sitting on the floor between my legs, . . . and this man from the college, a political science instructor that I barely knew, that I don’t even remember inviting, coming over and sitting beside me and putting his arm around my back for a very long time.
He was Bert, of course, and that gesture and that night marked the beginning of a great adventure we would take together. Bert, too, was suffering the collapse of a relationship, and that night we made a silent pact between us to thrash it out this time, to somehow wedge our way to the bottom of all this crazy pain of love and loss. Because, indeed, hadn’t this been the main circle of our lives — to love, to lose, to despair, to do whatever we could to escape the terrible pain and loneliness until we could find love again, lose again, despair again, escape the pain until . . . The only solution society seemed to have for this vicious circle (besides the hermitage or the monastery) was marriage, and to us that seemed more like a truce than an answer. We had both already tried that once. This time we would try something new. With each other’s support, we would find the courage to live where we were, to take a hard and long look at this whirlpool of insecurity, fear, confusion, and loneliness, which is always so obvious at moments of exposure, but which we spend lifetimes trying to avoid or cover over. This time we would explore it. We would face it, eyeball to eyeball, shake hands with it, square off, wrestle with it, and master it. Or die trying. We would learn to live in our own depths, or drown.
After all, we reminded each other, as the autumn nights darkened into winter, what is man’s common response to fear and suffering and emptiness but to run away from them. To escape, at all costs. And don’t we already know, we asked (as the mountain winter winds began to gather force and howl), that running away from pain increases pain, that running away from fear increases fear, that resistance strengthens the thing resisted. What would happen if we just sat still one time. And waited. And watched. Not from a high, aloof place. Not from a fortified castle. But centered within the pain itself, in the dead of winter, at the midnight of the soul, on the bottom of the ocean.
What would happen if just this time we became the pain, without resistance. Became the fear. Became the loneliness, the emptiness, the confusion, the despair.
What would happen if just one time, when life forced us into our depths, we just went down.
III
Though we weren’t much alike, Bert and I, we were one in that we were both lost and hurt, and were able to recognize that feeling in the other. And, of course, we were both looking for a way out of our suffering, . . . or rather, this time a way through to the other side. But it was perhaps because of our differences and our respect for them, and admiration, that we complemented each other so well in our common quest. There was nobody in our neighborhood so intensely centered in our separate places; and if both of us were unbalanced in our different ways, we had all the more to share. We were powerful magnets, and opposite poles.
Bert’s end of the pole was the mind; mine was the heart (in poor shape though it was at the time). It isn’t that either one of us was dead in the other place; if we were, we would have had nowhere to meet. But these were our off-balanced centers, and from here other differences naturally followed. Bert’s approach to life was more outside-in, mine inside-out. As he used to say it, he was Roman, fighting his wars abroad; I was Carthaginian, fighting at home. His emphasis was on social and economic reformation to redeem the individual life; my emphasis was on individual transformation, the revolution of one. In very basic ways, Bert was a Marxist, I was a Christian — meaning a man in search of my own Christ-force, my inner child. . . . Yet here we were, meeting at the crossroads, shaking hands, intriguing each other, becoming friends. For all the differences, we dared to trust each other. Maybe it was easier than being alone.
Whereas my powers were mostly intuitive, Bert was a theoretician, an aesthete, and social critic. He was as intense as I was preoccupied, and in almost the opposite direction. He had a keen eye for the outer world, for nature and culture, for landscapes and cityscapes, for paintings of horizons and horizons firsthand, for hues and tones of colors and sounds, for poetry and art and music, for our rotten social structures, based on greed and power and manipulation instead of the common good of man and all life. In the direction that he looked, he was balanced and open and acute. He was a theoretician who loved the textures of things, the rough siding of an old barn, the bare branches of a winter tree, a good joke. He read his Emerson, Marx, and Nietzsche, and he did watercolor painting too. (He loved to contrast shades of light, the artificial light from a street lamp or the interior of a house against the soft natural backdrop of dawn or dusk.) He was an intellectual who hated abstractions, who sometimes saw with the eyes of an innocent child, who would rather damn a book than hide his life in it, who was beginning to see that to have the insights, the wisdom, of a Nietzsche or a Marx, perhaps one would have to suffer like Nietzsche and Marx suffered. Perhaps nothing could be borrowed, or really known secondhand.
You couldn’t be with Bert long without seeing more world. Or at least learning the value of looking around. He was a tireless searcher, and his eyes stimulated a part of my own that had grown lazy and dusty — the part that looks outside. I began to understand the importance of seeing the world-out-there in a more penetrating way, which was the only possible way I could make it my own. Bert stimulated me to find a picture of my own sadness in the heavy gray clouds rolling over the forest, or to hear the sound of my own death in Beethoven’s “Seventh Symphony.” He dragged me into the cities, the museums, the concert halls, the parks, the forests. We spent a foggy morning listening to the ships’s horns in the Baltimore harbor. We played with the sounds of our echoes underneath the freeway viaduct. We felt our way along mountain paths on moonless nights. We watched the town of Frostburg sleep from atop the highest mountain rocks. We talked. Sometimes we laughed. We sketched pictures of what we saw. We wrote composite poems. We imagined possible essays and books and symposiums to awaken the dead, both within us and all around. He challenged me to really look at this painting, to listen to that piece of music, to taste the frosted apple on our midnight walk — to find my own soul in these “outer” things, in everything I did and experienced. And all the time we concentrated on remaining at the center of our emotional crisis, always remembering our challenge of ocean bottom living, and focusing on our experiences, not as a way out, but as a way down into deeper water.
Bert was like a pointer to me. Although he accepted, even appreciated, my preoccupation with my inner searching, he would also urge me outwards, tease my eye to focus on the world out there, if for no other reason, to give myself another picture, another view of my world inside. We developed metaphors for our adventures. We were the Dutch reclaiming land from the sea. When the pain and confusion were overwhelming, these were the floods coming again. But each time we pushed the water back a little farther. Inch by inch the sea receded, and we became a country. . . . Or we were Stanley searching for Livingstone searching for the source of the Nile. Or we were Cortez, landing in Mexico, and now burning his ships to conquer or die, burning his bridge back to the old world and old things. Or we were little trees, almost all underground now, but silently spreading and deepening our roots, and getting ready to burst into rapid growth. . . .
“We must begin to write,” Bert would urge me. He wanted us to write together, to form a writer’s commune of two, right where we were in Frostburg. At first I resisted. I had tried writing once, eight years of it, and was satisfied I was no writer. He said that was my apprenticeship; I was just getting comfortable with words.
“Words for me are dead,” I argued. He said maybe that was true then, but now it would be different. Now I was working on my life. I was at the center, and now the words would bleed.
“I can barely teach my classes and take care of my kids. How can I write a book?”
“It doesn’t have to be a book, not to start with. But you must create. We must create. That’s part of living at the bottom of the ocean — not just to feel our pain, but also to create. . . . You are a writer. I am a writer. Now we must write. We must increase ourselves. We must build our country. . . . You have shown me the way down; now I will show you the way out.”
What Bert meant by that last comment had to do with my gift to him, a knowledge of inner geography that I had already begun to chart in some detail (with Roberta’s help, and primal therapy). It was the inner, emotional life that was my more familiar landscape. I knew the fears by name, and I knew many of their disguises and hiding places. Though I had not squared off with them for the final battle unto death, I knew something of their shapes and of their slipperiness. I had “studied” them for a long time, and was becoming more and more clear about how they controlled my life and made me miserable, always manipulating me and bumping me against the same old walls of frustration. Fear of failure, fear of abandonment, fear of aloneness, death. Fear of my own energy. Fear of love, pleasure, sex, life, . . . They go on and on, overlapping each other, creating a powerful chain of resistance to our impulses to grow and break free. In the end they are perhaps one fear, or FEAR itself, fear of being alive and alone and ourselves in this eternal moment. Fear of being our own souls, and accountable. Fear of breathing the new air at the bottom of the ocean.
My search had begun in earnest with my involvement in primal therapy, which showed me the way to the source of my inner Nile was through the body and the feelings, not the mind. The complexes of pain and fear stored inside my body must be opened up and experienced before my mind could ever understand them. (The conscious mind can never understand that which is repressed, because it is one of the agents of repression: i.e. overstanding.) For example, what did it mean to know I was sad if I couldn’t cry, to know I was angry if I was incapable of pounding my fists against the mattress and raging. That is empty, unconnected knowledge. The real insight into my sadness, my fear, my anger, was inseparable from the expression of them, a kind of secular exorcism. Before they could be understood, I must first bring them up out of the darkness, and they lay so much deeper in me than I first suspected, and had been with me so much longer than I could first believe.
Primal therapy showed me how my basic insecurities were rooted inside myself, and thus unfinished aspects of my past, and that it was fruitless to layer my life on top of these. It showed me that instead of growing through certain critical stages of my early life (adolescence, childhood, babyhood, even birth), I, like most of us, found my real feelings too painful and frightening (and socially unacceptable), and buried them alive, covering them over with acceptable behaviors and pretense. So instead of growing up through myself, each new stage building on the foundation of the last, and thus opening up from the inside-out, something like a flower bursting through its bud (which has grown out of its stem, which has grown out of its roots, which have grown out of its seed), I grew away from myself. I split, and then spent the rest of my life trying to build my houses without foundations.
Examples of the ways children and infants are split off from their intrinsic feelings, their real inner lives, are obvious and numerous. “Big boys don’t cry!” parents tell their little boys, threatening them with subtle body cues and language tones that they’ll withdraw love and support if they don’t fake it out and act like big boys, or little men. “Nice girls don’t fight!” parents shame their little daughters, with always the same implicit threat of withdrawal of love. When kids are scared or angry or jealous or messy, or even energetic, they are punished, subtly or openly. And the message is always the same, in whatever form it comes: no love unless you die to your inner self. In a repressed and listless culture, open expressions of real feelings will always be uncomfortable. The life force will have to be denied (or transmuted into certain forms of sanctioned aggression, like football or war), lest we have to look at our own living death.
Schools, and society in general, pick up where the parents leave off, and then when the children become the next generation, what they have had to deny in themselves, they in turn will deny in their own children. On and on down the line, to no end, the vicious circle is maintained, and we never have any real adults, but only repressed, teeth-gritting children everywhere, pretending to be grownups, but not grown up at all. Only grown away from their original nature. Covered over, hurt little kids, and so easily exposed in an unguarded moment, if they ever get their surfaces scratched. If they ever fall in love, or get fired from their jobs, or go broke, or get socially rebuffed, or bump their cars, or slip and fall on the ice, or get sick, etc.
The primal process is a simple one, though strenuous to practice. In the witness of other pilgrims on this inward journey, we are encouraged to go underneath our disguises, underneath our idealizations of ourselves, and to risk showing the persons that we really are. (The macho man, for instance, deflating his chest and showing the frightened little boy inside.) It’s as simple as learning to express ourselves again, for whoever we are or whatever we are feeling at any moment, be it joy or sorrow, courage or fear, pride or shame, pain or ecstasy, etc., . . . to express ourselves from as honest and deep a place as we can find inside. And once we begin to trust our feeling nature again; once we can let ourselves be angry again and express it through our bodies, the way a one-year-old or infant expresses his anger (is his anger); once we can let ourselves feel scared again, and tremble with the fear, then an irreversible process has been set in motion, and there is no stopping until all those buried feelings (all that buried life that we have been carrying around inside) have also been exhumed and set free, . . . until we reach the bottom of our lives, and now have a depth basis for self-understanding, self-healing of our divided natures, and the beginnings of abundant life.
(January 11 — Florida)
— I spend the afternoon sitting in the community citrus grove overlooking the lake, quietly meditating, feeling the sun and breeze against my body, watching the fish jump, watching thoughts run through my mind, playing with one another, asking questions, then disappearing in the background for a moment of silence, or giving way to a bigger thought, a more urgent question.
I watch Doug hoeing in the gardens nearby, his shirt wrapped around his waist, his body lean and muscular like a yogi’s. Even from fifty yards, I can see the scar in his side where they tried to dig the cancer out. It is a circle about six inches in diameter, just under his rib cage. That’s where they shot the cannonball through him, he jokes. He calls it his badge of cowardice for ever letting the doctors get hold of him when he already knew how ignorant they were about health. After that surgery, he refused all further medical treatment and began his long pilgrimage to discover a real healing that went to the roots of the disease (and his life) and didn’t get mesmerized by the symptoms.
In his own case, he has already proved himself wise for his choice. Without further medical “help,” he was supposed to be dead years ago, but be is very much alive. A couple years ago, a new primary melanoma appeared on his shoulder. For curiosity sake, he had it biopsied. Yes, cancer again, it would have to come off. Another surgery. . . . Over his dead body, he told them. He fasted three weeks on carrot juice instead, and watched it disappear before his eyes. The doctor called it a spontaneous remission, which was a medical word for miracle. But Doug knew what he was doing.
Whatever his future, he has already beat the system, I think, noticing his energy as he vigorously hoes the peas and carrots. I mean the brutal system of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, which has left my mother almost without a spare part of her body, including her breasts, hair and other things feminine. After her operation last summer (this time to take out her spleen), she told me that they would never touch her again, that if she had only known, they would have never touched her the first time. And she is one of the lucky ones who has gone into the cancer statistics as “cured.” I wonder how many millions of others would say the same thing if they had only known.
Doug says we don’t want to see cancer as a teaching in our lives. We’d rather think that cancer is something that happens to us from the outside, as a kind of bad luck; and the cancer doctors and the whole medical profession support this delusion with their treatment of cutting or burning or drugging it out of our bodies. What cancer really is, he says, is an early but critical warning that our lives are breaking down from the inside out, and that if we don’t change them, and radically change them, including our diet, patterns of exercise and rest, environment, thoughts, . . . then our time has come to be reabsorbed.
And he assures one and all that that is not his time yet, and that he will die of old age and outlive us all, if we don’t watch out. And I would be the last to doubt it.
— I knew it before, somewhere, but today I know it better, deeper. The ego is not the self. At most it is a small aspect of the self sharply attuned to the survival instinct. But at worst, it is more like a parody of a deeper identity. It is the self adjusted to culture and alienated from nature. It is the smallest circle within an infinity of circles, which are also me.
And as the ego is a parody of the self, so are the creations of ego parodies: the schools are parodies of learning, the churches are parodies of religion, marriage is a parody of love (or partnership), sex is a parody of sensuous surrender, etc.
— Bert’s Marxism, Doug’s libertarianism, God’s World’s vegetarianism, Denise’s woman’s liberation, . . . each of these outlooks is quite right, but for its possessor quite wrong in the sense that it provides a covering for a deeper truth of who he is. It becomes a sophisticated form of hiding, curling up inside of ego.
— I think about my own clothing, my layers of protection against being naked. One thing surely is my niceness. I’m not so nice, so patient and forebearing, as I act. My smile is not always intrinsic, but many times another posture (or perhaps just a habit) to get approval and acceptance, to feel that I belong to life, which I also mistake for culture most of the time.
My intellectualism is also a kind of clothing, mostly — a child of ego, and not at all the same thing as awareness (thinking and seeing). Fortunately both the intellectuality and the niceness are falling away, though I sometimes feel confused and alone (naked) without them.
— Apart from a few of the founding fathers who created the myth, America wasn’t really ripe for democracy. Our hearts and minds were, and are still, monarchical, vertical. We an deeply conditioned to think of all of our relationships as hierarchies (who’s above and who’s below), and to live out our lives located somewhere inside a pecking order. (God is on high, man down below; the father is the head of the family; the boss may not be right, but he’s the boss, . . .) These power structures keep us from having to engage our own freedom. There is kind of dead comfort in knowing our place. We just have to find our niche and get cozy there. In myth only is America the “New World.” In reality we are as terrified of freedom as ever. And we fear and tremble when we feel somebody rocking the boat.
Boyhood Farming
Spring in Michigan is a delicious time. One can feel the winter oozing out of the soil and the earth awakening. One feels it inside himself too, a melting, an energy, a return to life.
I am camping in a little birch grove in the back corner of my boyhood farm. It is late morning and the sun is halfway up the sky and bright against my face. The air is cool and warm at the same time. It takes Michigan air awhile to catch up to the season. Even though the birch trees are budding and the meadows are bright green, there are patches of snow in the shadows and little remnants of drifts piled up against the fences. And early this morning, there was a thin glaze of ice in the middle of Baker’s watering pond.
At my feet I see some small violet buds just beginning to purple. Violet was my mother’s name. I remember my sisters and I walking into this same grove thirty years ago, looking for violets as a first sign of spring. It was like seeing the first robin, or hearing the ice crack on the lakes and ponds. In Michigan you strain your eyes and ears for spring. It never surprises you. You are ready for it.
Across the open fields, I can see the shells of the old house and barn. . . . How quickly it all falls apart, I think. From this distance though, one could almost imagine they are habitable again. If I look quickly, a side glance, I can see underneath their decay and remember them as they were — alert, trim, alive. But it has to be a fast look, maybe the way a small boy might look up from his back pasture adventures of cowboys and pirates to be sure he hadn’t wandered out of sight of home and hearth.
Meanwhile, as I warm myself in the morning sunshine, a doe and her fawn come out of Baker’s woods to drink at the pond. The fawn is new. Its legs still wobble. A green mallard duck and his brown mate float among the reeds, watching the deer, but unconcerned. I sit very still, absorbed, for a moment unaware of myself, as if I am another birch tree soaking sunshine and preparing to burst into leaf. I remember being here before. A body memory. I remember the smell of springtime, the shape of the hills, the texture of the cool morning air, with the sun a bright warm spot shining through. I remember. . .
The deer are spooked by a sound too delicate for my ears to hear. They bounce back into the woods, and in turn upset the ducks, who fly away with great commotion of wings and squawking. I also feel vaguely upset and want to run home too, . . . but I know this is the right distance for me today. This is as close as one can ever get to his past, perhaps. Anything closer is further away. One then sees the broken windows, the caved-in roof, the rotted beams, the death and decay. And that is all as it should be, and needs to be looked at. But today, this is as close as I come.
When I was a boy, I was this farm. It was an external metabolism. It was alive, inside and out, and a complete world unto itself. At one time or another, we had all the farm animals — pigs, sheep, goats, horses, chickens, ducks, rabbits, dogs, cats, and five Guernsey cows that Dad milked by hand, morning and night. I still remember some of their names (Molly, Dolly, Star, . . .) and which stanchions they stood at. I can almost hear the rhythmic splash of the milk in the buckets, and see my Dad there, with his old farmer’s hat on, sitting on the three legged milk stool, his hands squeezing and pumping, his head resting in the cow’s flank.
Even as a little boy, long before I was old enough to help, I would go with Dad to the barn to do chores. I remember standing there across the gutter, watching him milk, having no idea in the world how new to life I was. Every now and then, when I wasn’t paying attention, he would squirt a stream of milk at me, and I would squawk at him, half protesting, half delighted, while I wiped the milk off my coat, or off my face if his aim had been good. I remember how warm the milk felt on my cheek, how good it tasted to lick it into my mouth.
On the farm, the path to the barn is the boy’s rite of passage. Sometimes very early in the morning, even before the rooster was crowing, Dad and I would have started our day, throwing down hay from the mows, filling up the buckets with water, the grain pails with oats, cleaning the gutters, calling in the cows, c’bos, c’bos, for the morning milking. It was something we did together, father and son. Then at daybreak we would come back inside and have breakfast in a cozy-warm kitchen smelling of eggs and sausage and toast, and full of mother touches and mother comfort. It was good, both the going out and the coming back. Both worlds. The gap between them frightened me sometimes, that tension between man and woman and their worlds. But I needed them both, each in their turn. It was a good time for me. That was before Mom got so sick and upset the balance.
Every spring we planted a half-acre vegetable garden off the north side of the house. When the ground was dry enough to plow, I would watch Dad turn the earth into those deep brown furrows, full of angleworms, some struggling to bury themselves again, others cut in half by the sharp blade of the plow. Plowing was precision work, so Dad would have to do it. But after the earth was turned, we would attach the drag to the tractor, and then it was my turn to work. I don’t know when I was happier. Driving that tractor was like a real taste of being a grown man, with a man’s work to do. I would dream about it at night — pushing down the clutch, shifting the gears, letting out the throttle, feeling the power vibrating underneath me.
I was the farm. The farm was me. On the hot summer nights, sitting on my bed in my upstairs room, I could hear the corn growing. And that was me, too. Or on a hot July noon, the sun straight up, I harvested my lunch straight from the garden — carrots, radishes, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers — cleaning them with my jackknife under the outdoor pump. What empty freedom there was in these small actions. In the fall, I loved to climb the apple trees to find the choicest, roundest, reddest apple alive, and eat it as I sat hidden in the boughs and surveyed the summer landscape of my youth fading into autumn. I ripened with those autumn apples. Sometimes the dividing lines were very fine. There was all that space of a farm boy taking care of himself, doing what needed to be done and what wanted to be done, spontaneously, without asking questions or permission.
It wasn’t that I was overlooked, or neglected. I was cared for, perhaps too much. But I didn’t have to ask my mother if I could have an apple out of the refrigerator. Nor did we ever hassle about how many hours of TV watching was too much (there was no TV to hassle over), or how much sugar was too much, or how much homework was not enough, or whether my sisters and I were old enough to have girlfriends or boyfriends, or which friends were good influences, which were bad. The space of the farm seemed to absorb the trivial questions. There was a bedtime, but it was loose. We slept when we got sleepy, and we ate when we got hungry — then we ate dinner too. We took a bath every Saturday night whether we needed it or not, but mostly the clock and calendar didn’t obsess us. We went more by seasons than by weeks and months, by intuitions more than schedules. There was still some trust in internal regulations. It wasn’t perfect, but there were some balances struck. We still had all the inside stuff to work out, the growing pains, the fears, the emotional bondages, darkness and death. We still had to struggle with the existential problems of life the way perhaps only children can; we made attachments, got hurt feelings, cried ourselves to sleep some nights, struggled for identity and importance, and all the rest. But the thing about the farm was that it never closed in on you. Not as a kid, anyway. It gave you all the room and time you needed to learn, to understand. It could leave you alone in a back pasture all afternoon without asking one question. There was a kind of love there, contained in those forty acres. There was a spirit as close as the earth on bare feet, or the wind blowing through the birch trees. It was more than a vague atmosphere. It was an identity. But it takes the very young to feel it.
As a boy growing up in the late forties, early fifties, I think I got the last taste of the mythic America, the rural America, before it sold out to color television, wall-to-wall carpeting, old people’s homes, the corporate Friday paycheck, all those things that have been called the good life. My loss of innocence was the whole nation’s. We fell together, Thomas Jefferson and me. I was at the crossroads where the whole experiment came undone forever. I was raised when Jefferson’s forty-acre farm was still a serious enterprise and not a factory worker’s hobby or a country retreat for bored and restless suburbanites. Our neighbors to the south, the Bakers, still worked their fields with Clydesdale horses. The milk truck still bothered to stop for one or two cans of milk; you were a dairy farm with three cows, or even two. People still had their rough edges, their own accents; tastes and styles weren’t yet dictated by Madison Avenue through the TV; agribusiness was not yet a word; schools weren’t yet consolidated into factories of efficiency; homes weren’t prefabricated; hot dogs were still made out of unpoisoned meat; the supermarket hadn’t canceled out the general store. . . . At one point our family car was a Model A Ford that Dad started with a crank, and fourteen cents was the price of admission to the double feature movie on Saturday night, but ten cents would get you in if that’s all you had.
Maybe we didn’t know so much about the world, about the faraway things. But there was another kind of knowing on the farm, a knowledge that went deeper than facts or information, a blood and bones knowing that was your roots and your foundation. Even if you left the farm behind for other places and new adventures, it never left you. It was always there inside you. In my youth, I watched my Dad butcher my yearling calf (which we had raised from birth), first stunning it with a sledge hammer blow between the eyes, then slitting its throat to bleed it to death, then disemboweling, ripping off the hide, etc. I know something about hamburger that you can’t learn on TV. I’ve eaten hamburger that’s mooed at me and licked salt off my hand, and that makes a difference in the taste. I helped my Dad catch the chickens to hatchet off their heads and hang their bodies upside down from a tree branch. I have seen the “chicken run around with its head chopped off” (I have seen the head itself lying in the grass, blinking), and I know something about Sunday chicken dinners with all the trimmings. I was witness to the fall freshening of the heifers, and though I wouldn’t exactly call it sex education, there was a kind of knowledge there too, something that vibrated inside me deeper than words go. I discovered my watermelons frozen on the vines fall after fall, before they had a chance to ripen in the short Michigan summers, and I learned that sometimes persistence doesn’t pay off — sometimes nature’s persistence is bigger than man’s, and there is good sense in giving up. I became an expert apple tree climber, and there was no apple too remote, no risk too great to reach it, and I learned something about balance and broken arms. I found my two pet lambs frozen to death in their pen one winter morning (after I hadn’t shut the barn door tight), and I learned something about drafts and responsibility. I developed eyes to see maple sugar icicles in late winter, how to treat myself to nature’s candy when there was no nickel anywhere, even in the seams of the couches. I learned to ride my Palomino horse, Pal, without a saddle. I learned what it felt like to become one with a horse’s back, and what it felt like to fall off, too.
The thing about the farm is that life was close there. Birth, death, sex, work, love, loss were everyday — they were inescapable, sometimes scary, sometimes painful, but never alienated, never secondhand. In its everyday way, life was full. You didn’t think about it at the time because you were too busy living it, and what was there to compare. But later you knew. It was still there inside years later. Your body remembered — the soft feel of Pal’s mane to pet, the smell of a field of new mowed hay, the taste of a pod of peas straight from the garden into your mouth, the sound of the crickets chirping you to sleep at night when the rest of the world had grown totally still.
Sometimes, yes, I want to say to myself, whoa, STOP! Stop right here a minute, and think. Somewhere back there I fell asleep on the path and made a wrong turn, or missed a right one. Let me backtrack a little and find the spot, and try a new direction to go. But then I see that it’s not just me, it’s all of us. We’ve all come this way together; somehow this is the direction that life travels, like it or not, willy-nilly. The curse of man is that he loses his innocence. It doesn’t matter when he’s born. People raised in the teens and twenties felt the same way about the forties and fifties as I feel about now. The age of childhood is always the age of innocence, no matter what decade we’re born in. And the next age is the fall. It seems likely that we could never find our way back far enough to recapture the wholeness. There would always be some further distance to go, some deeper innocence to rediscover. From a cultural vantage point, the American Indian would certainly want to push further back than my father or grandfather to find the crossroads, where culture and nature were identical, their interests harmonious, where the insides connected to the outside without the gap in between. For me, perhaps for most White Americans, it feels like the farm and the simple village are the lost harmony we left behind in our greed for a better and faster life. But for the Blacks and Indians, it is perhaps even a deeper innocence they long for, the wilderness herself.
But that’s not the way it works. We can’t go home again, personally, culturally, no way. Life cannot stay still, neither can it turn back on itself; it is not kind to those who try. Perhaps the best we can do is look back, briefly, to collect ourselves and understand. Maybe at the most we can make a short visit, a pilgrimage, peek in from the back door of our thoughts and remembrances. Then we must push on through the darkness, because that’s the only way we have to go. It is our curse, and our task, and our adventure.
I remember my mother, her last summer before she died, talking about maybe buying the old farm again, and fixing it all up like it used to be. It was a pleasant fantasy, and for an hour I joined her in it. But when I got excited enough to suggest that we drive out to the old place and look around, she sighed and said no, she was too tired today, but maybe tomorrow. . . . How can the river flow back into itself. In a way, it does, but in a larger circle than our imaginations can readily conceive. First comes the ocean. First the river must disappear altogether.
I am awakened from my reverie by the spring peepers singing their evening song. I wonder where the time went. My little boy ears hear them too, and remember. I wonder where that time went. Underneath change there is always the same thing. If we move ourselves into the larger circles, there is no death. Part of us is already there. It’s a matter of getting in touch.
It doesn’t mean that we have to surrender our individual lives, the life of the ego with all of its fears and joys and sorrows and melodrama, with its past and present and future, with its preoccupation with time and progress, life and death; but rather to see this ego-center, this individuality, as a circle within a larger circle, and to know that the larger circle is us too. Then we can relax and let it all be. The planets spin around the sun, the same as the moon spins around the earth. But the sun is also spinning around the center of the galaxy, and the galaxies are spinning around another yet invisible center. And finally who’s to say which is more, which is less. The point is not to get lost in any particular circle. There is part of us that can reach the stars, that is already in the stars, and always has been, as surely as we are the atoms of our bodies, which are little universes in their own right. The big and small of it don’t matter so much as we think. There is infinity both ways you look, and perhaps they circle back and touch each other too, in a way we don’t yet comprehend. The thing is to get in touch.
It’s funny. The pull back to the old farm is like the gravity intensification of an exploding star, in its last burst of energy, but about to disperse into space and death. I will let it pull me all it wants now. I know I won’t come back here again, if for no other reason than by next time through, here won’t be here anymore, but in the “cracks and runnels” of my own mind.
Over the fence, in Baker’s woods, I hear the faint note of an owl whooing. Or is it a mourning dove mourning? The sun is getting lower in the West, and is beginning to draw its warmth back into itself. I feel a shiver. It looks to be setting directly over the old homestead. I almost expect to see it shine through its ancient ribs. I think — my nostalgia now floating away into twilight — I’m almost done with the past now. It’s just pleasant here this afternoon, this evening, the moment now passing in between. It’s a quiet place to camp, to think, to meditate. The ducks are back on the watering pond. The deer I suspect will soon return for their evening drink of water. Across the fields, I can faintly hear young Peter Bontekoe calling his cows in for evening milking, using the same old call, c’bos, c’bos, that his dad used and my dad used. The modern dairy businessman still has to call his cows in, it seems.
Even so, the illusion is broken. I can see too clearly now the old farm is a ghost. The house and barn are empty shells. Life left them long ago, and they slowly return to earth, having fulfilled themselves and the stages of life that they were. They are no more than empty cocoons hanging from the trees, from which the butterflies have flown. So do we leave our own pasts behind. Someday our own bodies. Life is a constant metamorphosis from one stage to another. But why do we live so hard against this fact? Why are we afraid? In truth, we never leave anything behind, but carry it inside. Nothing is ever lost, only when we try to hold on. then all is lost. Our whole soul. But if we let go, then we can take everything with us, because we become strong unto our own invisible centers, and the world becomes light.
. . . except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.
I was thirteen years old when we sold the farm. That was twenty-three years ago, yet time doesn’t measure distance from that which lives inside you. For a part of me, it was only yesterday, and will always be only yesterday.
I was sad, but I wasn’t frightened. I was still too young and the flexible to be frightened of change, and I saw the city waiting for me as a new life and challenge. Even then, at thirteen, though I didn’t think about it in words at the time, I didn’t doubt that the farm was as much inside me as I was inside myself, and though I was now to go on to a new and strange city world, the farm part of me could never be lost.
It was a great gift, and as I could leave it there, I could also take it with me. . . . Tonight, after dark, I would like to wander up close to the old place, and sleep inside my old bedroom one last time, before it turns to dust and ashes. Because I know I won’t come back here again.
(June 15 — Canada)
— When I fast. I see more clearly the meaning of food. For me it is so much more than nourishment for the body. It is also a symbol, and a powerful one. Eating (stuffing) is not so much my need to be fed, but my need to be full. It is a thrice-daily appeasement of my fear of emptiness.
Yet I am more and more convinced that only emptiness is creative. On all levels this is true. To be full of tradition is to have no room for the new. To be full of responsibility is to have no room for play. To be full of activity is to have no room for reflection. To be full of self is to have no room to receive another. . . . Whatever is obsessive, or even excessive, has to do with my preoccupation to be full. It doesn’t matter much whether it is obsessive eating, obsessive working, obsessive sex-ing, obsessive thinking, or even obsessive denying — they all indicate no faith in life, no trust, no real openness to experience, and thus no creativity. They also indicate distortion, misplaced values, and substitution behavior, for example, the substitution of a full belly for a full heart, or words and thoughts for feelings and awareness, or orgasm release for sensuality, or power and control for love.
It’s not easy to be reborn. It means I have to die to my deadness, and to all that I do to stay dead. The trouble is that I’ve become vaguely comfortable going through the motions of life, living at a distance from myself, investing in the surfaces of things, and just plain coping.
It takes depth of self to be comfortable alone, doing nothing, and culture has provided us many outlets to relieve our tensions begat of shallowness. It has done such a “good” job that we have been mesmerized to think our innumerable distractions aren’t distractions at all, but everyday life. We no longer notice how nervous we are. For example, it might not strike us as out of the ordinary to see a man smoking his morning cigarette and absently chatting with his wife over their breakfast of coffee and sweet rolls, meanwhile thumbing through the newspaper, and half watching an interview in the TV morning show, half listening to the weather report on the radio, while waiting for his nerve tranquilizer to take so he can stand the hassle of rush hour traffic, so he can get to work on time at a job he doesn’t enjoy but which pays good money to allow him to keep up in this great race of life.
Of course this picture is exaggerated, but how much? In varying smaller doses, this clutter is what our days amount to. The circles of our lives spin so rapidly that there is rarely any opening for a new perception or sensation to either get in or get out. We become busybodies, consuming robots, but we digest nothing, always restlessly pushing on to the next task or the next pleasure. And if our busybodyness should ever fail us, we always have our busy minds (mind clutter) to rescue the moment — idle fantasies, daydreams, disconnected sentences that run through our brains as if they had a life and will of their own. As it turns out, neither our actions or our thoughts contain their own meaning, but rather serve as shields against the terror of our own meaninglessness. And the faster our wheels spin, the faster we need to run to avoid the truth. Escaping ourselves is an addiction like all addictions: the more we do it, the more we need to do it, until every avenue to our inner lives is effectively closed off; until we have succeeded in becoming totally false.
What is it that we are so frightened of that keeps us locked inside these shallow circles, safely distanced from the gravitational pull of our lives’ centers? In earlier essays, I explored the kinds of personal damage we experience in childhood that destroy our trust in life, and which also lock us out of our own depths and thus inhibit our impulses to grow. But now I am thinking of that which lies underneath our individual childhood complexes and personality damage, that which lies at the very base of our existence, but which is no base at all, but rather nothingness, emptiness, death. Is this perhaps the first avoidance of all (the avoidance of the void) that is the beginning of our hiding and our falseness? Is the primary base of human culture more than anything a collective ego-hiding from the reality of death, a huddling together against the darkness? Is this fear the foundation of all other fear, the source of the split man has experienced from life and within himself? . . . I think so. But why? Why is the dust at the core of life so difficult for mankind? Why is it so terrifying that we go to such lengths to look the other way, to deny it, to build our whole culture, our whole lives, around a pretense and a hiding.
It goes beyond merely refusing to face death. We won’t even acknowledge that we are afraid, or worse, we insist that we aren’t afraid. However, for all our escapism, whether it takes the form of looking the other way or “brave” talk about not being afraid to die, the evidence of secret, subconscious terror is everywhere: in our grotesque funeral customs, which paint up dead people to be sleeping; in our belief that we’ll be raised again into life in these selfsame pickled (but secretly rotting) corpses; in our everyday attitudes that death is something that happens to the other guy, to the other family, but something we can forever buy more time against in our own lives. (We are always shocked when death strikes home — it seems impossible! So are we secretly relieved when it strikes only near to home, in spite of our condolences and sympathy.)
And the more we avoid our fear, the bigger it grows, so big that once we are faced with our own death in a clear way, the adjustment to reality is an enormous mountain to move. It represents such a leap that if we do make it, we land in a different universe from our contemporaries, who remain behind still in hiding. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who has spent much of her life counseling and companioning and learning from dying people, shows us that given the opportunity to face their impending deaths, people can transcend their fears and make the leap out of illusion and into reality. Indeed, she testifies that some dying people “enjoy” the greatest growth period of their lives, and grow to see death, not as a morbid defeat, but as a joyous victory, a coming into oneness with themselves, and thus becoming whole in a way disease and age cannot touch.
As with facing death, the same is true of inner nothingness, which is a living version of the same thing. According to the men and women who have had the courage to look, to go inside it, to become it (Jesus was one, the forty days in the wilderness being the symbol of this inner adventure), it is really no monster at all, but the very wellspring of life. The language of paradox that Jesus used in his teaching is based on the embrace of emptiness: the last shall be first, the lowest shall be the highest, the least the greatest, the poorest the richest, the meek the inheritors of the earth, the abundantly alive those willing to lose their lives.
I know I have had brief moments where I touch upon this emptiness, this inner death, myself; and these glimpses are evidence to me that contact with the inner self, all the way through to the nothingness, the dust, is the only path that leads out of the confusion and fear that otherwise will dominate our lives. Whenever I have experienced my life through my emptiness (empty of me, empty of ego fear), I have been transformed in a twinkling, without thought or effort.
As of now, this happens most clearly when I fast, which is an old trick that has always had religious connotations, false and true. In the worst sense, fasting is performed as a show of righteousness, sacrifice (which are their own rewards); but in a deeper spirit, it is done privately and quietly to create a connective current from the surfaces of life into the depths, at the bottom of which lies the emptiness of which mankind is so frightened. Even the act of not taking food into the body can be an affirmation of this emptiness, a statement of desire to be with it, to go into it. In this sense fasting is a spiritual search. For me it represents a choice of emptiness. And always, every fast, I get more clues of what is on the other side. It might seem something very small at first, and difficult to put into words. But, the affirmation of life is there, right in the center of nothingness; and once contacted, it begins to grow in meaning and importance.
For more excerpts from The Choice of Emptiness click here.
