What Uncle Bawa and Uncle Jack (Spicer) Were Trying To Tell Me

A week after I had the dream, it is still fresh in my mind, preceded by what triggers its most recent remembrance. In this case, the instigation was thinking, as I often do, of the Dylan Thomas line, "After the first death, there is no other." For the first time, I realized how shallow my understanding of it had always been. The line suddenly reminded me of my friend Ed Weiss and what he is always saying about God becoming His Creation. I thought, "The first death was God's when he became the Universe and it is the last and only one. There is nothing else but the Creation--and whatever form we take within it. We ARE wanted dead or alive." Since I had never thought anything like this before, I scrambled for coordinates, and instantly remembered my latest, almost-week-old dream about my guru, Bawa Muhiayaddeen. Bawa, I have realized, thanks to my friend Peggy Jo Donahue, is like an uncle or an aunt who raises a child with the kindness it never received from its biological parents. That 'angel' always returns when needed. Uncle Bawa is what Uncle Charley was to my father--an incarnate recurrence of the mercy these angels bring--even when, as sometimes happens, the angels rough us up. As I have grown older, mercy is more and more a modicum of wisdom and advice.

In Uncle Bawa's last dream/incarnation, he was taking questions during an evening discourse. I raised my hand and he recognized me, saying, "Don't tell me your question. Write it down on a piece of paper and I will guess it." So I wrote down my question on a piece of paper. As, or maybe just after, I did so, Bawa also wrote on a piece of paper, his scrawl instantly becoming visible on a big projection screen in the front of the room. His writing bore a perfect semblance to mine and the words were identical to those I had written: "What do I do now that I have dispensed with God?" Bawa then passed a piece of folded paper to me where was standing, in the back of the room. When I opened it, my question was written again, only this time in the Arial font I like to use when I am working on my computer. "This is amazing," I exclaimed. "It is the only way I can get you to accept me," he said with piqued weariness. "Now will you believe me?" I nodded an eager yes, and he said, "With you David, it is always the same thing--'What's next?' When will you ask, 'What's now'?" 

It was then that I realized that how I identify myself--whether as believer or non-believer--mattered NOT (KNOT) at all. God was just a cumbersome and ill-advised code word for what Bawa called "the all of everything." It invited the very separation that is inimical to the intended holistic meaning of the word 'God'. Spinoza's God was inseparable from this world in which we feel stranded--a nickname of sorts, a tired synonym for unity broken by the every thought of a standoff or stand-alone creator-namesake. A creature of habit, I then thought of a Jack Spicer poem that always comes to mind when the day at hand becomes more important than any sense of it as container of time or a space intersected by the long distant-convergant railroad tracks of today's news and other events. "Your breath is meant to join this day. So join it," I heard Uncle Jack say. This is Uncle Jack's poem, first sent in 1964 when I was a student at the University of Pittsburgh:

The Grail is as common as rats or seaweed

Not lost but misplaced.

Someone searching for a letter that he knows is around the house

And finding it, no better for the letter.

The grain-country damp now from a heavy rain

And growing pumpkins or artichokes or cabbage or whatever

                   they used to grow before they started worrying about the weather. Man

Has finally no place to go but upward:  Galahad's

Testament.

--(Uncle) Jack Spicer, "The Holy Grail," The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles, 1975, page 209.

Watching Jim Jarmusch's "The Limits of Control": Zen and the Art of Assassination

Mo and moi watched Jim Jarmusch's 2009 enigmatic masterpiece, "The Limits of Control," which depicts a ninja master-assassain's assignment as a kind of pilgrimage. As happens to inveterate movie watchers, my absorbent mind responded with a dream in which I attended a press conference given by a Mafia hit man. The last question he was asked is the following: "What advice do you have for all aspiring artists?" His answer: "Never let anyone make a bigger fool of you than yourself." 

The line was too good to be original but I have no recollection of ever having heard it before. In any case, it certainly explained Jarmusch's movie, which is a semi-sequel to his earlier "Ghost Dog." 

Jarmusch, like a lot of existentialists, confuses Zen masters with gunslingers and deifies focused instinct and rarefied cunning in the service of strange (as in estrangement) ends such as murder. Jarmusch's hit man is so pure with principle and practice that he tunes out anything that interferes with his assignment. This concentration makes him hyper-sensitive to the landscape (the movie was filmed in Spain), every nuance of night and day (captured beautifully by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who worked for years with Wong Kar-Wai). Because what Jarmusch calls "the optics of the movie" (i.e., characterization) are the interface between the assassin and the world, the viewer sees and learns only what the protagonist needs to perceive and know to carry out his assignment. Nothing else enters his mind; nothing else matters. All is the mechanics of the job. Thus the movie seems thin in plot. But actually it is very rich in it. 

Quite frankly, I have never seen anything like this film. The closest I know of anyone like Jarmusch is Jean-Pierre Melville, Jarmusch's French 'noir' predecessor who made movie after movie about ninja gangsters who are always undone by human failings such as loyalty. Jarmusch's hit man is a loner who is beyond any self-endangerment of failure, malpractice or even guilt. 

Personally, I think it is time to make movies about real-deal Zen masters not gunslingers. Start with "Zen and the Art of Archery" or the journals of haiku-master Basho who is on assignment--but only to perfect the poetry that records the perceptual prowess of the liberated man. Nothing dies except ignorance. Everyone watching or listening or read is saved. Am I asking for a moral cinema? Yes. But until it comes along, Jarmusch is helping clarify major moral issues.

Chasing Rainbows

There are times when music has been the only thing between me and chronic bleakness. This morning, when being 72 seemed older and farther along than I allow it to be, I needed to hear a song of hope. I needed it to fetch me from my thoughts and bring the rush of happiness that music brings. At a vintage music blog, the writer talked about some black string band records from the late 1920s that he found the best of their genre. One of these groups was the Dallas String Band and one of the recordings the blogger posted was "Chasin' Rainbows." The song was both a rescue and a revelation because it helped me understand a dream I had last night about my guru, Bawa Muhiayaddeen. 

In my dream, Bawa asked me to write 10 questions of pressing, personal importance on a sheet of paper and keep them to myself. When I was done writing them in my undecipherable scrawl, I told him I was finished. He then held up a sheet of paper with 10 question written on it that were identical in content and handwriting to my own. Not only that but he had a printed version passed to me to verify the questions. Of course, I was amazed. I asked him, "How did you do that?" He looked at me with disgust. "Isn't this what you wanted as proof of my power?" he asked. I was stymied. I wanted to say no but he was right. Mind-reading was, to me, a legitimate verification of his powers.

"Okay," Bawa continued, "now that I have established my authority with you, pick the one question that you need answered more than any other." I blurted it out just as written on the page: "What do I do after I dispense with God?" Bawa looked at me as sternly as he ever has. "Do you expect me to answer that question?" "Yes," I said, "or give me a clue." "David, stop asking, 'What's next?' and start asking, 'What now?' If God isn't the next thing or the thing that you need, what is? That's the question." When I awoke, with firefly-like flashes of light in the room, I added, "And that's the answer." 

Now you would think after a dream like that I would dance for joy. But atheism is not a joyful practice yet because it demands what Monique calls "acceptance of Nothing and the freedom it brings."  Mo and I watched an interview with director Ingmar Bergman last night during which he said, "I'm done with God. I know there is nothing outside me." Mo nodded yes, but looked as if Bergman was far from making peace with that answer. I knew what she meant. Bergman only wishes it were true, I thought, because such a truth is as final as it is absolute. Or as Mo put it yesterday, "Believing in Nothing takes courage." Until then, keep following the rainbow.