mute cicada--
he, too, perfectly
at peace
Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue
"Dinner with Henry Miller"
Click on picture to watch video
"Holy Secrets: the Poetry and ArtHere are two great videos for your viewing pleasure while I put my feet up and relax a bit. The first comes by way of recommendation of the ever vigilant poet/artist, Ed Baker, who set me on my path of recently pursuing The Hamlet Letters by Henry Miller. The second is a short film by Matthew Listiak which I've passed on to folks before, but its been long enough to, one, recommend it again for folks new to these parts and, two, watch again for those of us who've seen it before.
It is a revelation, which is about the best one word summary of Albert Huffstickler I can think of.
Miller wrote a book entitled The Books in My Life. From that book is an interesting section on Krishnamurti, interesting as much for what it says about Miller as it does for the great spiritual leader:
After a long discussion with a man in Bombay, the latter
says to Krishnamurti: What you speak of could lead to
the creation of supermen, men capable of governing
themselves, men who would be their own masters, absolute.
But what about the man at the bottom of the ladder, who
depends on external authority, who makes use of all kinds
of crutches, who is obliged to submit to a moral code which
may, in reality, not suit him?
Krishnamurti answers: See what happens in the world.
The strong, the violent, the powerful ones, the men who
usurp and wield power over others, are at the top; at the
bottom are the weak and gentle ones, who struggle and
flounder. By contrast think of the tree, whose strength
and glory derives from its deep and hidden roots; in the
case of the tree the top is crowned by delicate leaves,
tender shoots, and the most fragile branches. In human
society, at least as its constituted today, the strong and
the powerful are supported by the weak. In Nature, on
the other hand, it is the strong and powerful that
support the weak. As long as you persist in viewing each
problem with a perverted, twisted mind you will accept
the actual state of affairs. I look at the problem from
another point of view ... Because your convictions are
not the result of your own understanding you repeat
what is given by authorities; you amass citations, you
pit one authority against another, the ancient against
the new. To that I have nothing to say. But if you
envisage life from a standpoint which is not deformed or
mutilated by authority, not bolstered by others'
knowledge, but from one which springs from your own
suffering, from your thought, your culture, your
understanding, your love, then you will understand that
what I say - "car la méditation du coeur est l'entendement"
... Personally, and I hope you understand what I say now,
I have no belief and I belong to no tradition. I have always
had this attitude towards life. It being a fact that life varies
from day to day, not only are beliefs and traditions useless
to me, but if I were to let myself be enchanted by them,
they would prevent me from understanding life .... You
may attain liberation, no matter where you are or what
the circumstances surrounding you, but this means that
you must have the strength of genius. For genius is, after
all, the ability to deliver oneself from the circumstances
in which one is enmeshed, the ability to free oneself from
the vicious circle ... You may say to me - I have not that
kind of strength. That is my point of view exactly. In order
to discover your own strength, the power which is in you,
you must be ready and willing to come to grips with every
kind of experience. And that is just what you refuse to do!
This sort of language is naked, revelatory and inspiring. It
pierces the clouds of philosophy which confound our
thought and restores the springs of action. It levels the
tottering superstructures of the verbal gymnasts and
clears the ground of rubbish. Instead of an obstacle race
or a rat trap, it makes daily life a joyous pursuit.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Respect My Authoritah | ||||
| ||||
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Ore on Terror | ||||
| ||||
NostrumSome days I just let
..................everything go
and sink into the neighborhood,
sit on a bench
..................in front of the bakery,
talk to anyone that passes
and don't think about
..................anything at all.
I think they call that
..................healing.Albert Huffstickler
Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue
Similarly, it seems to me, the dreams of the idiots today and for the last hundred years or so, will also be realized in the centuries to come. That dream is of economic independence, and I have no doubt it will be achieved, though perhaps in a way and through a form of life wholly unexpected. I believe that the Machine will be incarnated and will dominate man's life in dual fashion, as he has allowed himself to be dominated in the past by other ideas. I believe it will take centuries yet for man to pierce the fallacy of the machine way of life. I believe there will even be a certain amount of good resulting from his life with the machine, but ultimately it will be discarded–because it has no reality. The subservience to the machine seems to me almost like the last lesson for the narrow restricted personal view of life which man has. The world will really become the Hell which the machine, as a surrogate form of life, symbolizes. Man will come face to face with himself and see himself as a substitute for the real thing. He will have to surrender his narrow conception of life, his unreal desire for security and peace, for a protection from without, a protection wholly artificial and created out of fear. He will have to learn to live, not only with others, but with himself. He will discover that his comfortable world of economic bliss and security is in reality a straitjacket. He will see that he is surrounded by useless appendages to himself, the concrete manifestations and crystallizations of his own fears. The machine will become a myth as the Avenging Furies of the Greeks have become myth for us. Nothing can prevent this long and tedious experiment, for this is the real desire which is at the root of our present-day conflicts. It doesn't matter what ideal or ideology is proclaimed, in what name men fight and die: what is real and what will be made manifest is this desire for economic security. They will have it, the men to come, and they will wrestle with the evil which is bound up in this specious blessing. There will be men a thousand or two thousand years hence who, in their frantic desire to preserve the status quo, the era of economic bliss, will point to us of today as an example of the horrible condition from which they escaped and into which they are in danger of relapsing. But they will not relapse back into our condition of things. They will relapse forward; they will fall back blindly on the invisible wave which carries the human race on from round to round of ever-increasing reality. They will be carried forward as dead matter, as the debris and detritus of a vanished order. The Hamlet dilemma, which today we call neurosis, seems to me to be a symbolic expression or manifestation of man's plight when caught between the turn of the tides. There comes a moment when action and inaction seem alike futile, when the heart is black and empty and to consult it yields nothing. At such moments those who have lived by illusion find themselves high and dry, thrown up on the shore like the wrack of the sea, there to disintegrate and be swallowed up by the elemental forces. Whole worlds can go to bits like that, living out what you would call a "biological death," a death which Gutkind calls the Mamser world of unreality and confusion, the ghostly world of Hamlet, the Avitchi of the Buddhists, which is none other than a world of "effects." Here the unreal world of ideas, dogmas, superstitions, hopes, illusions flounders in one continuous nightmare–a reality more vivid than anything known in life because life had been nothing but a long evasion, a sleep.
the human goblins
bow their heads...
dew dripping downIssa
translated by David G. Lanoue
Henry Miller, The Hamlet Letters, page 171.
the day is short
as is the life
of the dragonflyIssa
translated by David G. Lanoue
best,
Don
PS Thanks again, Ed.
"Anyone who is interested in the secret of a thing is obsessed by that thing and thereby puts it beyond his grasp. The man who is in life and alive is not interested in the secret of life. A man who is interested in the secret of life is already dead. Of course it is easier for us to believe we are immortal; men have had this belief for thousands of years. They will continue to have this belief for thousands of years to come. There is nothing strange about it, nor is there anything strange about their holding the notion of mortality at the same time. The duality of man's nature is an ineluctable quality of man's consciousness; it is only the thinker that is absurd enough to try and argue it away."Henry Miller, from The Hamlet Letters, #18, September 7, 1937
Personal Styles In NeurosisWhen you observe it,
look well within yourself.
Take notice, that all living
things have their fulfillment.
In the light, if you appear colder
than death, remember: you're a rock;
and I've been kind enough
to grant you an audience.Richard Houff
Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue
Posts
All Comments
lilliputreview at gmail dot com
.jpg)
