August 19th
"Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By "they" I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no place has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something "actual" is to place it on the market. the time will come when they will sell you you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.”
I'm sitting here, having just read Thomas Merton's essay, "Rain and the Rhinoceros", written in 1965 while the author lived in a cabin at the Abbey of Gethsemani, near Kentucky cornfields where SAC bombers crossed the sky at night and thoughts about the dilemma of modern humanity were crossing his mind. The essay is first in a collection of prose called "Raids On the Unspeakable" in which Merton addresses the nature of actin and contemplation, our need for solitary revelation and our identity in terms of the collective. My friend Carmen left me the book as she went off on her own spiritual quest up through Colorado and Utah, seeking connection to her roots and answering an irresistible call toward freedom.
The "Rhinoceros" of the title refers to the play by Eugene Ionesco in which a man watches his friends and family and all those around him transforming into a herd of rhinoceros, until the man is the only human being that remains. Standing out from the crowd he looks in the mirror and realizes that in relation to everyone else he is now a kind of monster. HIs choice is either to become a rhinoceros himself or to go out and challenge the crowd, proclaiming in a sort of futile gesture the fact that he is still a man.
The play's theme is our individual responsibility to pull ourselves up and out of the void of ignorance and obsession without the aid of the crowd, to resist the pull of the collective that wants us to feel that we are 'okay' because we fit in, because we do what people do and want what people want. Merton refers to the 'fabricated dream' of the city in which a mystification sets in between ourselves and the world, in which we substitute the fabric of myth for that of reality. This, written in 1965, when the electronic age was still in infancy and the machineries of consumption were just getting geared up on the wings of eternal progress.
The author points a way toward awareness, through solitary contemplation and the acceptance of the truth of our own identity. Only when we see beyond the impermanence of the social self do we embrace the invulnerable and undefinable reality that exists beneath, and only then are we truly awake to the constant and ever altering river of life.
The collective offers an illusory escape from the demands of awareness. By promising to us the gratification of all of our ‘needs’ while constantly constructing new ones, society promises a sense of permanence and security that requires only our full identification and cooperation. Tragically, the promised satisfaction remains continually just out of reach, though we dedicate whole lifetimes to its pursuit. Our quest for ultimate satisfaction always reveals a measure of doubt with the sense that something vital is missing. This leads to more costly pursuits of other imagined needs in a cycle that can only end in despair unless we surrender along the way to something greater than either our fantasies or our desire to belong.
The alternative to ultimate despair is to find freedom. "We must begin in the social womb. There is a time for warmth in the collective myth. But there is also a time to be born. He who is spiritually "born" as a mature identity is liberated from the enclosing womb of myth and prejudice." The prejudice Merton refers to is that of the collective, toward any person or way of being that does not share the common set of assumptions about what are appropriate needs and appropriate behaviors. Ultimately the myth of the collective is one of control. So we are talking here of emancipation.
In Merton's view emancipation takes either the form of unselfish action in service to others or in the contemplative life where one confronts the void in order to be free from the fear of losing the self. In solitude the human being accepts the universal condition of humanity, becoming everyman and resisting the illusions of security, reputation and power (the three temptations that Christ faced in the wilderness). Merton points out that hatred and violence are inevitably collective in nature. We tend to hate in groups as the collective reinforces its own identity in opposition to that of outsiders. To be alone, to realize ones essence in solitude, is to have no need for violence against others.
So, here I am just trying to make sense of this whole story, I mean the story of 'me' that I've been dragging around with all these years. Who is this person that looks at himself in the mirror, these days amazed at the fact that he actually is beginning to look his age, knowing at sixty that this fine and handsome body will soon begin to come apart like an old rubber band overly stretched?
Born in Cleveland in 1950 when the air over Lake Erie was still full of blimps and World War cargo planes. When horse pulled wagons trolled the brick streets for junk paper and rags. When the knife sharpener with his cart made biweekly stops at the corner by the bar and mothers and fathers would bring him their tools. I remember the coal coming down chutes to our basement before the winters came. I sometimes feel like Ridley Scott's android in the movie, Blade Runner: "All these memories vanish, like tears in the rain." He smiles briefly, proud of his conquest of human metaphor, and dies.
I've arrived at sixty, having few possessions besides the artifacts of memory, no assets to speak of, no retirement plan, no property besides what I have to tool around in. I work in a grocery store, as if this is my destiny to accept or deny. Whenever my thoughts make me anticipate the future or regret the past I get myself in trouble. My proudest achievement may be the slightly perverse fact that I've never really been able to define myself by what I 'do'.
Am I an artist? I write these words, but with few expectations about their destination or intended audience. Whoever reads them is welcome to them. Long ago I realized that the effort to go back and reframe these words for publication or profit was most of the time more than I'm up for. Well, maybe this time. I pick up one of those 'How To Get Published' writers magazines every couple of years and rarely get around to glancing at the contents. Maybe I'm just not serious.
But I am serious. These words come out of me because they have to come out. I put them down on the page and the pages accumulate and once in a while I stick them together with staples or glue and give them to the people I know. Or better, now that there's the Internet I send the words into that etheric plain of collective consciousness in which all of our keystrokes are measured and, somewhere, recorded. My readers are part of the great Akashic fan club of the noosphere.
Thank god for the personal computer. I never could relate to the typewriter. In that regard I was technologically impaired. From elementary school through college I filled hundreds of notebooks with hand scrawled copy, mostly using the BIC Accountant fine point pens I would buy by the dozen (I liked the metal clip and it felt like a pencil). To convert all of that, or any of it to mechanical script using that beastly machine was just...labor. And when it was converted all of the grammatical errors and structural sloppiness would be more evident, and so the whole thing would have to be done again. More labor. My belief in what I was doing was never strong enough to see me past the first couple of drafts. So, was it laziness? Or maybe I thought that what I had to say was so precious that either people would want to read, damn the grammar and structure, or it was too unimportant to bother with.
At the end of my first year in college I wrote papers in almost every class that in some way mocked the whole process. I wrote my sociology teacher to tell her that sociology was a fake discipline lost somewhere between psychology and anthropology. I wrote my English paper in one night while tripping on LSD. For finals I wouldn't really study but would go on for dozens of pages based on my memory of lectures or on theories I formulated from glossing over the texts. I thought I was brilliant, and all of this structure was unnecessary. I was exploring realms that took me to the outer edges of everything and then coming back. I thought I understood time and space and consciousness in ways that my teachers never would. I was the insufferable egotist with the sweet salesman face that barely got by playing the system for time.
After I lost the lottery that sent young men to war I dropped out of college and decided to discover 'real' life, so I hit the road and never turned around.
Alright, stop, here I go again. It's all about 'me'. I seem incapable of writing about anything else. This is what I've done, this is what I think. I started my first novel when I was eight and have started dozens of times since, but my interest in fictional characters is short lived. Unless I'm willing to pursue elaborate metaphors always one step removed from experience I can't seem to get up enough steam to tell the story to the end. This story, after all, is still without an ending.
And what does all of this have to do with Thomas Merton? Perhaps this is my way of confronting the void. This is the recapitulation that Castaneda's Don Juan talks about, the necessary predecessor to realization. I just signed up for my first full length formal Zen sitting - seshin - and feel compelled to unload all of this stuff on the page so that I can go on with simple living. Maybe this is all just unnecessary and useless and maybe it's art. It's not really confessional because I have nothing to confess. I just want to tell you a story.
I was discussing technology. Writing requires only a surface and an implement for making impressions. Publishing, on the other hand, has everything to do with technology, whether typewriter, printing press or computer. In the Age that’s passing by, to publish is to gain all sorts of validation both personal and social. When you write something half decent the first thing your friends ask is "Why don't you get it published?" Pretty soon this is the voice that you hear constantly in your own head. So pretty soon you are writing only for the purpose of publishing, or what else is the point?
Or maybe you decide that too much of what is said has been said too many times already, or that there are enough words out there in the world and who wants to hear yours. You ask yourself, why would I want to pursue this rather difficult and demanding activity when I could be reading a book or watching television? So you give it up and carry on with your life and no one is the poorer for it.
Or you don't. You keep on writing, and once in a while you put it out there in some form or other. You conclude perhaps that it's just another exercise of ego or self-importance and yet you go on. Maybe this time you won't stop yourself with your own doubts or just give up due to laziness and you’ll be able to bring things to a satisfactory conclusion or at least a shape that's pleasing to you. It's like gardening.
So that, when Merton quotes Ionesco, "In all the cities of the world, it is the same. The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that 'a thing might perhaps be without usefulness; nor does he understand, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and back-breaking burden. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots.” ('Notes et Contre Notes, p. 129), you are no longer in the dark.
* * * * * * * * * *
Do not squander your life.
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