Poetry is better than self-help, Part 1….

 

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Poetry is better than self-help, Part 1….

(Blogger’s note: This will be a two-part essay, with part 2 being published on November 6.) 

In his seminal work, Phenomenology of Perception, French philosopher Maurice Merleu-Ponty elucidates, most thoroughly, his idea of the eidos of consciousness, which is a counter to Rene Descartes’ mind-body dualism. For Merleu-Ponty, consciousness is not something separate from the body, an assumption that most people seem to automatically, reflexively hold.

Religious folks, for example, believe the mind is really the “spirit” or the “soul,” and at death it separates from the body and flutters off into a metaphysical realm somewhere where it is rewarded or punished for its various deeds and misdeeds. But most non-religious folks also hold the view that the mind and body are ultimately two distinct things. Think about such phrases as “mind over matter” or “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Or think about how the vast majority of “mental” health care is spent sitting in a chair and talking to someone about your thoughts and emotions, instead of, say, engaging in some kind of physical exercise.

Many people spend a lot of time and energy trying to get their bodies to submit to their minds in various ways. Self-help weirdo David Goggins is one of the foremost examples of this general philosophy, as he spends a lot of time extolling the virtues of physical pain in the pursuit of mental mastery. For Goggins excellence begins and ends with getting the lazy, lackadaisical body to do gloriously painful, exhausting things at the behest of a manic, tyrannical mind.

Consciousness, for the Christian, the therapist and David Goggins is something different than the body. Consciousness may interact with the body, but the two are ultimately separate things.

For Merleu-Ponty, though, consciousness is something that can only exist when there is a mind, a body and an environment. Consciousness is something that arises only when the proper conditions are present and does not exist independent of those conditions. Mind and body are one for Merleu-Ponty, but only when they are also one with the environment in which they exist, and this consciousness, the consciousness that can only exist when a mind, body and environment are all interacting with each other, he terms the eidos.

This conclusion, of course, is one of the foundational insights of basically every mystical tradition, in all parts of the world. Buddhists, Taoists, Sufis and various indigenous traditions have have attempted to expound on this realization for thousands of years. However, the American and European needed someone from America or Europe to explain this to them in academic language, otherwise how were they to take it seriously?

Regardless, this understanding of the eidos, ultimately, is why self-help fails. Another unspoken, often unconscious understanding is that the “self” is the same as consciousness. That I know “I” exist because I experience my “self.” It is my self that suffers. It is my mind or consciousness that suffers, and that mind or consciousness is my “self.”

But true bliss and joy and love and freedom exist only when the spectre of the self is transcended to some degree. It exists only when the perceived separation of mind, body and environment dissolves into moments of pure experience.

Think about the most blissful, joyful, loving and free moments of your life. What were you doing? Were you engaged in some activity that made you forget yourself in some meaningful way? Were you making love to someone you were so helplessly in love with you couldn’t coherently explain that feeling in words? Were you dancing, or rock climbing, or painting, or having a drunken dinner with some of your best friends? Were you playing useless games with your young children? Were you tearing down street lamps during mob rule after your favorite football team won an important game?

Our best memories tend to be of moments when we forget our “self.” When we lose our selves in moments, just as Eminem insisted.

So when I say that poetry is better than self-help, I’m not being sentimental. I’m not performing that gooey, touchy-feely, wannabe writer pose that one so often sees on social media. I don’t romanticize literature, and poetry is far more often than not, either so full of itself that all meaning is lost and must be created ex-nihilo by the reader, or it’s so poorly done that the intended meaning is useless.

Most poetry sucks. And yet, it’s still better than self-help.

That rare drug of Good Poetry, though, that Good Shit will simultaneously braid your neurotransmitters and teach you how to live, because the best poetry helps us relearn to lose ourselves in moments. 

America has brewed its fair amount of Good Shit. The Good Shit includes Whitman, Dickenson, Richard Brautigan, Gwendolyn Brooks, and, yes, even Charles Bukowski.

But, as with most mind-altering substances, the Real Good Shit usually has to be imported from overseas. Brandy, red wine, saki, champagne, fentanyl — the quality intoxicants have to come from foreign lands.

In today’s essay, we’re going to get drunk on some of the old Asian poets, who, for my money, were among the wisest teachers on how to forget ourselves, even within the confines of the sham and drudgery of daily life.

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Take your dog for a late evening summer walk. Don’t think. Just feel. Feel the sounds. Your dog’s feet on the pavement. The sprinklers on the lawns. The other dogs barking in the distance. The sounds of the distant car engines falling away. The chirping of the crickets. The groan of the cicadas.

Feel each step. Feel the air on your skin. Breathe not through your nose, but through the pores of your skin. Feel the twilight of the sun. The glow of the televisions in the houses. The flow of the yellow mist of the street lamps. Turn off the naming going on at all times in mind. If you can experience mind, body and environment as one, without any imaginary division of the three, this is liberation. Then you are free to create, to play and to love from your most unified “self,” which is not a self at all. And suddenly your symbols don’t matter. Your bodily attributes, your job titles, your villainous acts. There is no you. No self. No territories. Just the eidos of consciousness, and the freedom it entails.

Take the following excerpt from a poem, “Drinking Wine,” by Tao Yuanming (sobriquet: Tao Chien). Tao Yuanming lived 1500 years ago in ancient China where he had managed to secure for himself a position as an official of some repute in a society that, at the time, both cohered highly to Confucian ideals and which was constantly at war with itself, as various emperors, warlords and court administrators jostled continually for power.

Confucian society was highly preoccupied with the concept of the Self. It was a self-help culture where the self-help teachings of Confucius were expected to be enacted in all aspects of daily life. Each person in the empire was expected to embody their Confucian Selves. A man might see his self as a “man,” “father,” “son,” “oldest brother,” “grandson,” “scholar,” “nephew” and so on, and he was expected to simulate each role as ritualistically as Confucius (and various disciples) had previously deemed fit. Even emotions found themselves lapped up in the despotic Confucian simulation. The expression of grief, for example, was regulated, and one was not allowed to truly grieve, but must simulate it by mourning in the Confucian-sanctioned manner. Any derivation from those role expectations led to various kinds of shame and social chastisement and, often, suicide, because the Confucian Self could not tolerate failure of any kind.

This kind of living proved untenable to Tao Yuanming, and he developed what today we might call “mental illness” in response to feeling forced to adhere to the strict bounds of the Confucian Self. Eventually he resigned his post, and retreated with his wife and children to a paltry, rustic farm at the rural edges of the empire, where he drank too much wine and generally found peace, tranquility and joy for the remainder of his years.

The poem excerpt reads (translation by Red Pine):

I built my hut beside a path
But hear no cart or horse
You ask how can this be
Where the mind goes I go too
Picking chrysanthemums by the eastern fence
In the distance I see South Mountain
The mountain air the sunset light
Birds flying home together
In this there is a truth
I’d explain if I could remember the words

American readers (or any reader whose formative reading years were spent suckling on traditional Euro-American types of poetry) have a difficult time with this kind of poetics. The language, even in translation, is crude and unadorned. The meaning seemingly too straightforward. Poetry is supposed to be “deep” and “profound” and contain multitudes of Delphic meaning. But what’s happening in this kind of poetry is a direct description of the eidos of consciousness. Tao Yuanming is explaining the freedom of the emptiness of Self. “Where the mind (heart) goes, I go” because they are one and the same. He can’t remember the words, because in his emptiness of Self and of its accompnaying symbolization, he has become full of wordless, selfless creativity, play and love. That is the truth he cannot speak.

Or take this poem from Li Po (translation by David Hinton):

Among blossoms, a single jar of wine.
No one else here, I ladle it out myself.
Raising my cup, I toast the bright moon,
and facing my shadow makes friends three,
though moon has never understood wine,
and shadow only trails along behind me.
Kindred a moment with moon and shadow,
I’ve found a joy that must infuse spring:
I sing, and moon rocks back and forth;
I dance, and shadow tumbles into pieces.
Sober, we’re together and happy. Drunk,
we scatter away into our own directions:
Intimates forever, we’ll wander carefree
and meet again in Star River distances.

No “April is the cruelest month, breeding// Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing// Memory and desire…,” no “Turning and turning the widening gyre//The falcon cannot hear the falconer…the centre cannot hold,” no “And savage Juno’s anger remembered him.” Nothing ostensibly epic or important. Nothing the gods would sing about. Just a lonely alcoholic finding solace in the moment, identifying ultimately with “Star River distances” (also known as “the Milky Way”). Li Po loses all self and becomes first the moon and his shadow, then, eventually, the Universe. Through his emptiness of Self, Li Po becomes something more: creation, play and love.

Ancient China had dozens of these kinds of poets: Wang Wei, Bai Juyi, Stonehouse, Tu Fu, Hsieh Ling-Yun, on and on.

Here is Han Shan (“Cold Mountain,” so named because he lived on a mountain called “Cold Mountain”), who was so wild and free and selfless — choosing to spend most of his days living alone in a literal cave, and writing his poems on rocks and trees — even the other Chan Buddhists and Daoists and hermits found him weird and eccentric and, if they had the
proper language to do so, likely “mentally ill.”:

Clambering up the Cold Mountain path,
The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The wide creek, the mist-blurred grass.
The moss is slippery, though there’s been no rain.
The pine sings, but there’s no wind.
Who can leap the world’s ties
And sit with me among the white clouds?

The question, “Who can leap the world’s ties…” is not a rhetorical one. Han Shan, like Zhuangzi looking for the person who can forget the words, wants to find the kind of person who can discard the Self, experience the eidos and sit with him in heaven.

This poetic shedding of the self, and its accompanying ecstatic embrace of the mere act of living, soon found its pinnacle in the haiku poets of medieval Japan, whom we will meet in part 2 of this essay.