Wasteland 2

I’ve been there. Where the fool offers you a glass of water for your unslaked thirst. It’s called beauty. But a kind of sensual beauty, a maddening passion for the world as it is. Precisely as it is, not perfected, not bettered, but exactly as it is, with its stinks, horrors and uglinesses. This is to emerge from the Wasteland. When King Arthur finally emerged from the Wasteland, it is said he no longer knew anything, not even himself. And it was the Fool asked him, what is it you want? And the only thing he could think of was to say, I am thirsty. And the Fool chuckled, offered him water and said well then, drink.

It’s a deceptively stupid end to the Wasteland, but this is indeed what it is to emerge. A fantastic, raw, explosive awakening full of hideous sensual violent dolor. The great thing about the Wasteland is while you are in it, as you suffer the pressures of building your life, you are so close to losing your mind and slashing your nerves, you have little energy for the sensual dangers of life. The door to self-forgetting of the erotic, dionysian, intoxicating kinds remains harshly but protectively closed while you are in the Wasteland. You forget entirely what happiness feels like, you forget beauty, love, sensual pleasure, you become still and inert as a piece of dead wood in obeisance to the roaring thrash of the struggle that hurtles and drowns out everything else, everything you thought you were. In the Wasteland, you know only freedom. You know fatigue. You know the superlative bottomlessness of your own resistance. The cold proud burn of the solitary crags is what keeps you alive, its power and strength feed your flagging spirit. You become invincible but your spirit is as hard and impenetrable as a rock.

Then one day, you feel it. The tiniest click. The smallest subtlest shift. Nothing external has altered. You have no money, no sudden successes, no great and flaming hero here to rescue you. You have forgotten yourself, your old life, your name, your identity, your old loves, flames, pains and raptures. You are empty, like a dervish that has spun around once too many. Suddenly, you turn and you see only the Fool, an idiot who chuckles as he asks you a simple, idiotic question, that you are unable to answer. And you murmur the first thing that enters your dried out mind and you say Thirst. It is an anti-climactic response after all the wild dreams of paradise you have spun for yourself in the dark caverns of loss and doom. Thirst is mere crumbs and pebbles against the golden promises of endless light that have kept you alive all this time. But the Fool signals a return to the body. And so to the body you return, but not as before, not in fear, doubt and spiritual penury. You return to the body as the seat of your own power, the throne of your kingdom to rule over as you please, this is the body you took, that you love, that you reclaim as the source of all you know as pleasure, enjoyment, the grandeur of all that the universe has to offer as LIFE.

I had forgotten what it was, this feeling of being torn open. What the Sufis call ‘dard,’ the heart-rending pain of rapturous beauty. This is ecstasy as the mystics describe it. It is not part of the daylight world of prayer and hymn-singing that is a communal and poorer aspect of collective, handicapped religion, this is the height of spirit as it rules in the dark corners where pleasure is suffused with pain, rapture with torture, ugliness always with beauty. People think the awakening of the inner spirit brings you to some sort of heaven realm, where suffering ends, where death is non-existent, where there is only a sort of angelic beauty, devoid of the heaviness of gravity or the graceless pallor of early mornings, when the filth and disease of life and mortality sink in after night-times of eternity spent in the arms of self-forgetting. This is not so. The awakening of the spirit is magnificent, furious and full of blood. You begin to dig it all. You begin to see death not as an exception but as the core, you see that sadness, that all suffering are a tearing away of stillness, a stillness that is unbearable to the constantly moving, rushing, hurtling nature of raw spirit. In the Monotheist tradition, God is stillness, good and reason. The Hindu word for the non-dual, unnamable substrate of all things is Brahman, from the root Brh, to gurgle, to burst forth. It is as formless as it is benevolent, as munificent as it is full of childlike playful laughter. It is the premise of suffering that changes, the threat of death that is no longer a threat but a willed release, of the end of all sadness, not because you negate it, but because you begin to see that to feel purely, richly, dolorously IS the goal of being, not its off-putting side-effect. Thus it all becomes densely, exquisitely, eye-scorchingly beautiful. The nature of life is beauty, not an esthetic or perfect geometry, but the magnificence of a world transformed by love. When love is everything, it all becomes beautiful in a way that cannot be described. And this is what awaits you at the end of the Wasteland.

All that remains for you then, is to enjoy it!

what exists before being? being. after? being. always a fullness, never a drop lost… life must therefore be lived like every second counts, it is our sacred refuge, all else is time wasted.

I recently experienced death again. No, not mine, fear not, but that of someone near me, at close quarters again. My life changed originally with the passing of my father, a wonderful sensuous large-hearted softness of a man, and a tremendously important presence in my life. I lost him almost two decades ago, and experienced the various stages of the detachment of his presence in the form of a series of dreams. His passing was of determining value for me, it formed me as I am today, fierce, independent and yet, fundamentally a creature of the blood and heart, essentially other-worldly and uncaring for the dust of materialism.

This time, it’s my uncle, my spiritual and artistic Guru in fundamental ways. He was a grand, lion-spirited musician, Dinkar Kaikini was his name, he lived in Mumbai, India, and no, he wasn’t as famous as he should have, might have been. It’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about since he left us last weekend. And he continues to impact me with the meanings of his life. In ways I didn’t realize although I was aware of what he meant to me even when he was alive.

Life limits you ironically, it binds you to the body and its errors. My fears or worries at not performing music as he taught it to me, the idea that art is a physical life-bound achievement, that fame must come to the artist, this is what has been released with his passing. It is as if I am seeing at last, what I have always sensed. That we are spirits first and foremost. That everything we do, feel and become is a long, joyful continuum of consciousness winding through life and what we call death. Death in this vision is not death at all, but in fact a form of spirit-being, unmediated and clear, without the limiting forces of the body. It is profoundest joy but without the delicious sensations of the throbbing, bleeding body. Art needs the body. Creation demands it. Being though, is constant.

So what is the use of the body? None. The body has no use. It is an act of joy, an undertaking of sensual pleasure. To believe it has ‘utility’ is to be as wrong as saying food exists so that toilets can exist. Art has no utility either in this vision. In fact, ironically, the only thing that does have utility is suffering. Sorrow has no real presence in the continuum of being, save as a technique of transcendence, of liberation. And by liberation I don’t mean ‘Nirvana’ which is abstract and inaccessible, I mean the sensation of profound freedom such as we all feel on a Friday evening, and that comes brutally to an end on Monday morning.

I have seen it before but now I see it clearly. Life is a continuity of the spirit-being in what we call death. One plays off the other, a bit like our moments of escape play into our moments of involvement. Friday evening feels fantastic because Monday morning is oppressive. And the Monday morning exists so we may begin to wonder what the hell is the point of all this oppression, am I really doing what feeds my soul? Or is this misery just an act of fearful, imprisoned habit? Can my entire life be a Friday evening?

I say it can. Mine is. No reason yours can’t be.

To believe art can change the world, that it can make you famous, that it can do anything at all, is to see the world as a place of idiotic outcomes and material equations. It is to do away with the sheer thrill of being, of the joy of freedom we all know we feel on that fleeting Friday evening. And until you seek out this freedom, oppression in some form or fashion will be your lot.

Politically too, the world is suffering profound and horrible oppressions. Right now, the US is ‘occupying’ Haiti under the guise of ‘bringing it aid.’ If only the US had left Haiti alone and free over the last 200 years, nobody there would need American help. We know what’s good for you: which is the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the Bourgeois, the West, the Church and the Paternalist Employer, is nothing but oppression. Pure, stinking simple. And the only way for us to rid the world of this oppressive state of affairs politically, is to rid ourselves of capitalist lies about utility personally. It is to fight individually and endlessly for our own freedom. There are no public solutions. The political is the spiritual. The freedom of each spirit is the freedom of all.

So how can you save the world? Can you be a hero? Sure. Simply demand that Friday evening be the prop and stuff of your every living moment. That simple. And that profound.

My uncle escaped into the freedom of his spirit. He understood that fame, recognition, none of it meant as much as freedom. As the engorged plenitude of the sensual living free moment. This was his first and final choice as an artist. To create for pleasure is the artist’s sole activity, to escape oppression his relentless need. There are no other goals beyond this freedom and this pleasure. Life has no use beyond this freedom and this pleasure. If you haven’t got that, start over. I have. Several times. Nothing to it.

The spirit IS being. And being is no philosophical dryness, it is the sheer thrill of a drink, a first love, the first few lines of your new book, it is the thrill of life itself. But only in freedom. You will never experience this thrill (except as a desperate unlived need) on your way to work. Or at the bank. Live only for your freedom, your joy, your own divine and unique self. Everything else is oppression.

The thrill of this, since my uncle died, has engulfed me. So much so, that I have trouble breathing.

See you soon.