I saw Spike Jonze's masterpiece, "Her," on Sunday and consider it the greatest cinematic feat of imagination since "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." In the movie Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with the first operating system endowed with consciousness. The arc and fate of their love mirrors the arc and fate of most human relationships. Only the OS, moving at the speed of light, does what unfettered consciousness must do: merge with the Infinite. OS's last message to the hero is an invitation to cosmic consciousness that we have honored when uttered by Buddha, Jesus, Rinzai, Rumi, Kabir, Ramakrishna and so many others. Now a DEUS EN MACHINA, a/k/a OS, utters it. It is so nice to have a man-meets-machine movie that does not follow "The Matrix" template and put humans at the insidious beckoning of body snatchers. The movie seems to say that the ultimate subversion of technology could be as spiritual and beneficial as the subversion of every great, ancient iconoclasm.
"Her" also reminded me that my life-work has been to achieve the grace of non-duality. Here is my take on this subject inspired by "Her." While this pretends to be a poem, it is, in reality, an abstract. It is meant to give you a sense of what I feel about things and how I approach expression of 'ultimate reality.' See it as an aid in construction of a modern-day mythos of awakening. I think the religions have so thoroughly done in their own syntax that it is useless to build bridges to them or try to salvage their ways and means. We must find a new platform, a new ground of being in which discovery is suited to this time of profound bereftness and chronic deconstruction. It will not be easy. But there is no alternative to the Now and New.
Besides, the icons and archetypes have been drained of all vibrancy. A case in point: Years ago, I read that Walden Pond has the highest urine content of any such body of its kind in America. So much for pilgrimage divorced from irony or cynicism. And there is no reason or need to bathe in or drink Ganges water. We're on our own. Leave Mecca to the Muslims. Leave the Ganges to the Hindus or, better yet, the EPA. Let's launch an unsoiled expedition here on new soil and on new terms--even though a million tipping points toward destruction may have been reached.
WHAT MY OS TELLS ME
for the Breakfast Clubbers & Luncheoneers
1
There is nothing new.
There is nothing old.
Like a kite kept aloft
by deft maneuvering
on a calm, windless day,
things hang in a harness of air
with no visible means of support.
Like the perfumed air of evening
things hold us in a sway of subtlety,
fresh and fragrant
as sent
to us
in fully factoring sentience.
2
"Pay attention" is the first and only commandment
when and where perception is the coin of the realm.
To worship is to pay the particular, the particle, its full due
like a dew that covers the field
in a shimmering shield of invitation.
Even if mist hovers and enshrouds
it bulges with mystery
and full disclosure.
"The Image-nation," poet Robin Blaser called it.
3
We have been stripped bare
to a mechanics and musculature
of discovery. No heroes die
for things to be seen as they are.
The grail comes in six packs,
always enough to go around.
This mythos involves
a red wheelbarrow
and the dirt-road camino real
of its latest sighting.
4
The discretes, the isolates
are gloomy and incomplete
if they participate
in a context or landscape
of ownership or possession.
Completeness, completion comes
once things seen and known contribute
to a supremely communist coherence
of mass and morphology
that guards and guides us
to reverence and sustenance.
The Zen Masters told us over and over
that the mountains walk among men.
5
There is no name for god
other than the names of the Creation
to which god is surrendered--
his only remaining authority
a kind of painterly authorship.
If you must believe in a God
outside of time and space
see this world as his unsigned cave painting.
For me, God is snake skin shed,
slough of birth discarded
for the all-consuming tasks at hand:
vigilance and adventure.
The world is graced with an ability
to give cues and rejoinders. When the names are spoken
as if part of a procession of prayer or praise
they betoken a nameless unity.
There each thing that is part of it
acts as embodiment and portal.
6
The veils dis
appear only in revelation.
There is no coverup.
What you see on a clear day
is all there is to see.
7
The mystery is that we don't see
the obvious point of the mystery
its latest point of departure.
Each member of the flora and fauna
is cave entrance found
to depths of remembrance.
To the ancients
the "Om" was the thunder of hooves
on plains above the cathedral depths
of dream and recall.
Its seal was the blurred bison hieroglyphic
cave dwellers left on walls to honor
the power and the glory.
8
To what does the sun or moon
subpoena us? To merely look at things
in a way that does not add
to a burdensome sense of enclosure.
To look is to leave the body
with the full faith
that the secret to be revealed
is the thing itself
as cradled in beholding.
Be held by things. Be beholden to them.
Offer sight and hearing as obeisance
as if you were bowing to an emperor,
as if you were summoned
to the same hearing as the gods.
The meadow of gold or green grass
or cover of thick snow
is a summons.
See how in both sun and moon shine
the Iand is kept brightly sequined
in a sequence called totality.
9
No man walks on the moon
with as deep a tread
as the gaze of a man
staring into the sky at midnight.
Cosmonaut sees nothing
you don't already know.
Cosmos naught
unless the moon which orbits the earth
receives the retinal gleam
that is first light
of morning.
10
Just as the sun is summoned by bird song,
the prayer is lamp
that has no existence
apart from the summoning light
it lives to give.
Gnosis is continuing outburst of invention
called Creation.
11
No matter what happens,
the distance we stare at
comes close enough to tell us
all is well
all is welcome.
I was born to listen.
Yours truly,
David Federman, 1/24/14
No comments:
Post a Comment