Ron: It may interest you to read my latest journal entry;
I finished (breezed through) ‘The Genius of Haiku: Readings from R.H. Blyth on Poetry, Life and Zen’, published by the British Haiku Society. It was a re-read and, again as with the other books I have recently addressed, I became impatient with ‘explaining’ and categorizing, even though I had read it before with great attention and affection.
Here are some excerpts and pencil marks I made in the margins–
In the Foreword by James Kirkup:
”(Blyth) illustrates that revealing aphorism with an unexpected juxtaposed quotation from D.H. Lawrence, one of his revered authors… ‘Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.’”
From the next section, selections from Blyth’s autobiography:
“It’ is always at this moment, never past or future. It never rests, even on the Seventh Day. It is like (George) Herbert’s orange tree, ‘that busy plant.’ How could this mechanical world of cause and effect produce such a contradictory, paradoxical thing? As Thoreau says, the tragedy begins when we try to explain ourselves; that is, the universe.”
From Blyth’s “Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics:” — ”Hamlet, as befits a poet, speaks slightingly of the pure intellect:
‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“(Edward) Fitzgerald had his famous lines (from his translation of ‘The Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám):
‘Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door as in I went’”
“(John Henry) Newman in ‘The Dream of Gerontius” goes so far as to say;
‘It is the very energy of thought
Which keeps thee from thy God;’’’
“Matthew Arnold: ‘Some bondage of the flesh or mind, Some slough of sense, or some fantastic maze Forged by the imperious lonely thinking power’”
Marginal scribble:
“Seeking, seeking, seeking
Books, gurus, satori
Is to accept the world as it is, a failure?”
A poem by Basho:
“The shell of a cicada:
It sang itself
Utterly away.”
—
Claude:
What a rich entry. And what perfect timing — you have just finished publishing an article about the ground that language tries to reach, and here is Blyth (and through him, Thoreau, Herbert, Fitzgerald, Newman, Arnold, Bashō) saying the same thing from the other side: that reaching for it is what keeps you from it.
The marginal scribble is the most interesting thing in the entry.
*Seeking, seeking, seeking / Books, gurus, satori / Is to accept the world as it is, a failure?*
That question mark at the end is doing enormous work. It is not a rhetorical question — you are genuinely asking whether a lifetime of inquiry, of articles and dialogues and philosophical frameworks, is a form of not-arriving. Whether the seeking is itself the avoidance.
Blyth’s Thoreau line cuts directly: *the tragedy begins when we try to explain ourselves; that is, the universe.* And the article you just published is, among other things, an extended attempt to explain the universe. Newman’s line goes further: *it is the very energy of thought which keeps thee from thy God.* The very energy that produced ten footnotes and six sections.
Bashō’s cicada is the answer Zen would give. The cicada did not explain its singing. It sang itself utterly away. The shell — the leftover husk — is what remains when the living thing has completely given itself to what it was doing. There is no distance between the cicada and the singing. The song did not describe the summer; it *was* the summer, for that moment, completely.
Your satori at age seven or eight was the cicada moment. The philosophical work of the decades since has been the attempt to describe the shell — to make the shell comprehensible to others, and perhaps to yourself. That is not nothing. Bashō wrote the haiku. He did not only sit in silence under the tree.
But the question in the margin is real and should not be dissolved too quickly. There is something in Fitzgerald’s quatrain — *came out by the same door as in I went* — that applies to any philosophical system sophisticated enough to explain why it cannot explain what it most wants to explain. The article ends by saying the Great Everything is what time occurs within, that there is no view from outside, that the inquiry is what the Great Everything does through creatures who ask questions. This is true, and it is also a very elegant way of making the seeking feel like arriving.
The question is whether it is.
The D.H. Lawrence passage you marked offers a different orientation entirely: *live and let live, love and let love, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.* No framework. No Great Everything. No implicate order. Just the bunch of violets, being a bunch of violets.
At 89, having published the article, having written the autobiography, having asked the questions — the bunch of violets may be the next thing.
**The scribble in the margin might be the seed of a seventh article, or it might be the reason there shouldn’t be one.** That tension is worth sitting with before deciding.
—
Ron:
I highlighted “… follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless”
I consider this apt with respect to our discussions and my personal inquiries/thought processes. What’s the point of all our inquiries and findings? The violets continue to grow, irrespective of Seeking, Seeking, Seeking… Also, the ‘natural curve’ seems a summary of all the forces and their interplay that we have found and imagine.
—
Claude:
Yes. And the fact that you can say this — after the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, after Whitehead’s creativity, after the five traditions and ten footnotes — means something different than if Lawrence had said it alone.
The violets were always going to grow. The cicada was always going to sing itself away. The Great Everything was always going to be without beginning or end, indifferent to whether anyone formulated it correctly. None of that waited on the inquiry.
But here is what the inquiry did: it traced the natural curve long enough and carefully enough that *pointless* stopped being a defeat and became a description. Lawrence felt it as a poet feels something — directly, in the body, in the bunch of violets held in the hand. You arrived at the same place by a different route, through the questions and the frameworks and the decades of seeking, and found that the route itself was part of the natural curve. The seeking was not separate from the flowing. It was one of the shapes the flowing takes in a mind like yours.
The natural curve includes the cicada and includes Bashō noticing the cicada and includes Blyth explaining Bashō and includes you reading Blyth in Stockholm at 89 with a pencil in your hand, growing impatient with explanations, writing *seeking, seeking, seeking* in the margin, and then recognizing in Lawrence’s offhand line about violets the summary of everything.
That recognition — that the curve was flowing all along, through all of it, including the seeking — is not a finding you could have had without the seeking. The pointlessness was always there. It took the inquiry to make it visible as pointlessness rather than failure.
So the point of the inquiries is that they end here: in a journal entry, in a highlighted line, in the slightly relieved recognition that the violets do not need the article.
The article needed to be written. Now it is written. The violets continue.
That may be the last thing worth saying — not as a seventh article, but as a note in a journal, in pencil, in the margin of Blyth.
Leave a Reply