The Resonance of Paterson

I saw a movie trailer months ago and knew I had to see the movie when I could. Today I could and did. And I know it will linger in my heart and mind for a long time.

It's a Jim Jarmusch film called "Paterson." It's a quiet, contemplative film about a young guy named Paterson who lives and drives a bus in Paterson, New Jersey. He wakes up every workday to the clock alarm in his head, kisses his wife, eats his Cheerios while composing poetry in his mind or notebook, and dutifully walks to work. He sits in his bus before his shift writing poetry until his beleagured boss comes along and reminds him it's time to go to work. As he drives, he listens attentively to the conversations of disparate people around him. When he gets off work, he walks to a secluded place and sits on a bench by a waterfall writing more poetry. Then he walks home, greets his endearingly ditzy wife, eats dinner, and takes his bulldog for a walk, and leaves him parked outside a cozy neighborhood bar while he ambles in for a leisurely drink and quiet conversation with the bartender-owner and an assortment of fellow patrons. The next day, it all begins, progresses, and ends almost exactly the same way.

Never before have I seen a film that resonates so powerfully with my sense of the trivial repetitiveness of life. Life's pointlessness has been acutely on my mind over the past year or so, and "Paterson" drives it home. Not in a depressing way. I'm not depressed, at least not most of the time, by seeing life as "a tale told by an idiot," even when its "sound and fury" gives way for me as it does for the film's protagonist to quiet, purposeless reiteration.

And never before, perhaps, have I identified so much with a film's character. Paterson is the guy I would likely be if I were even as bold and capable as his very unassuming and mediocre personage. For one thing, I now understand the lure of a neighborhood bar the way I could never fathom before. And if I were a little more outgoing than I actually am, I'd probably end my numbingly repetitive workdays with a trip there to sip a mug of beer and talk pensively with others while cool jazz played warmly and unobtrusively on the jukebox in the background.

And, like Paterson, I would write before and after work. Not poetry but nonfictional prose. And, because of my similar lack of ambition and/or confidence, I would do no more than Paterson to get my work published for pay or recognition.

The film also conveyed to me an acute sense of how alone we ultimately are, even if we're married to someone who truly loves us and we're surrounded by chattering people all day long. My philosophy may tell me we're all interconnected with each other and with the whole shebang of kosmic existence, but my heart feels existentially separate from every one and every thing. Yet I don't find this feeling depressing so much as simply and resignedly factual.

But it's also a fact that once in a blessed while a special film comes along that makes the idiotic tale of life and aloneness glow with rare and poignant beauty that leaves me happy to be alive, in part so I can experience such affecting works of cinematic art and bask in their affirming afterglow. "Paterson" is one such film for me.

Effing the Ineffable

Many people believe that mystical experience--the wordless experience of "Ultimate Reality"--cannot be translated into words. That is, it is "ineffable." But Ken Wilber disagrees. Actually, he doesn't disagree completely. All experiences are ineffable. We can't perfectly describe our common experience of a sunset or an orgasm any more than we can describe mystical experience. But we CAN use words--i.e, "signifiers"--to represent sunsets and orgasms pretty well if we really try, and so we can also use them to represent mystical experience. Zen masters, says Wilber, talk about satori all the time among themselves, and they understand quite well what they're talking about. For instance, they know what the word Mu signifies from firsthand experience.

But so many people interested in religion and spirituality have bought the old bromide that mystical experience is ineffable that not enough effort has been made to translate this experience into clear and compelling language, and calling mystical experience ineffable has led many scientists, philosophers, and others to reject it as meaningless on the grounds that if you can't describe or explain it, it doesn't exist or mean anything significant.

Wilber proceeds to argue that signifiers don't mean a whole helluva lot to those who don't have the "altitude"--level of cognitive, spiritual, or other kind of development--to know firsthand what they mean. He says that it can be terribly frustrating to describe--use signifiers for--mystical experience or other spiritual realities to people who haven't developed enough spiritually to be intimately familiar with them, and it's even more frustrating to try to persuade someone to accept an opinion grounded on intimate knowledge of these realities. With those people, one may have to settle for nonverbal "transmissions" of these insights. But those who have the developmental altitude can work harder to create a rich language capable of signifying these spiritual realities as well as possible--just as mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers have created their own specialized languages--so that they can communicate more effectively with each other.

And I wonder if it might be possible to develop this spiritual language so well that it can help lift those of lower developmental altitudes to higher ones. For just as it might be possible to so vividly describe the ocean to someone who has never experienced it that she gains some inkling of what it's like, it seems to me that it might also be possible to describe mystical experience in ways that give those who have never experienced it some understanding of what IT'S like. And this, in turn, might help them develop to where they understand the experience better and better until, perhaps, they someday understand it vividly through direct experience. That is, instead of only being able to read about it and imagine it on the basis of what they've read, they finally make it to the ocean and see and hear the crashing waves with their own eyes and ears and feel their misty emanations on their own skin.

Wilber says that poets such as Rumi do this pretty well. But is it also possible to do it better and better with prose? Perhaps it has already been done better than most people realize. For instance, here is an excerpt from Alan Watts' masterfully evocative rendering of an LSD-induced mystical experience as reported in his wonderful book The Joyous Cosmology:

T0 BEGIN WITH, this world has a different kind of time. It is the time of biological rhythm, not of the clock and all that goes with the clock. There is no hurry. Our sense of time is notoriously subjective and thus dependent upon the quality of our attention, whether of interest or boredom, and upon the alignment of our behavior in terms of routines, goals, and deadlines. Here the present is self-sufficient, but it is not a static present. It is a dancing present—the unfolding of a pattern which has no specific destination in the future but is simply its own point. It leaves and arrives simultaneously, and the seed is as much the goal as the flower. There is therefore time to perceive every detail of the movement with infinitely greater richness of articulation. Normally we do not so much look at things as overlook them. The eye sees types and classes—flower, leaf, rock, bird, fire—mental pictures of things rather than things, rough outlines filled with flat color, always a little dusty and dim.

But here the depth of light and structure in a bursting bud go on forever. There is time to see them, time for the whole intricacy of veins and capillaries to develop in consciousness, time to see down and down into the shape of greenness, which is not green at all, but a whole spectrum generalizing itself as green—purple, gold, the sunlit turquoise of the ocean, the intense luminescence of the emerald. I cannot decide where shape ends and color begins. The bud has opened and the fresh leaves fan out and curve back with a gesture which is unmistakably communicative but does not say anything except, "Thus!" And somehow that is quite satisfactory, even startlingly clear. The meaning is transparent in the same way that the color and the texture are transparent, with light which does not seem to fall upon surfaces from above but to be right inside the structure and color. Which is of course where it is, for light is an inseparable trinity of sun, object, and eye, and the chemistry of the leaf is its color, its light.

But at the same time color and light are the gift of the eye to the leaf and the sun. Transparency is the property of the eyeball, projected outward as luminous space, interpreting quanta of energy in terms of the gelatinous fibers in the head. I begin to feel that the world is at once inside my head and outside it, and the two, inside and outside, begin to include or "cap" one another like an infinite series of concentric spheres. I am unusually aware that everything I am sensing is also my body—that light, color, shape, sound, and texture are terms and properties of the brain conferred upon the outside world. I am not looking at the world, not confronting it; I am knowing it by a continuous process of transforming it into myself, so that everything around me, the whole globe of space, no longer feels away from me but in the middle...

Poetry and Scripture

Gagdad Bob was inspired by my recent posts on the Bible and poem deafness to write about "scripture and revelation." I'd like to address some of what he said today.

I am not going to provide a link, because I don't want to needlessly embarrass the person or make them feel self-conscious.

I wouldn't have written about it in the first place if I felt unduly embarrassed or self-conscious about it. Besides, my humble blog could have used the publicity. :-) On the other hand, I don't need a bunch of true-believing proselytizers either.

Basically, the dilemma has to do with an integral-type person who says he does not comprehend Christian scripture, so he must reject it.

I don't "reject" it in the sense of resolutely concluding that it reveals no important truths. But I DO wonder what truths it may reveal and how we can know what they are.

He is particularly appalled by Old Testament stories of God expressing his frustration and disappointment with mankind by effacing them from the planet and starting over. Viewing the situation in wholly humanistic, rationalistic, and literal terms, this person can find no possible justification for God's act of mass-killing. And if we interpret this story in an allegorical way, who's to say that we can't interpret everything else in the Bible in such a way, including, say, the resurrection of Jesus? So this person has jettisoned Christianity entirely, in favor of a more abstract and impersonal Buddhistic notion of God.

What justification IS there when the story's taken literally? What compelling allegorical meaning does it have about any true God? Why should we interpret Jesus' resurrection literally? Do we need to interpret it literally to be "saved"?

Now interestingly, in a subsequent post, this person may have provided a hint of insight into his own spiritual infirmity -- indeed, if that is what it is -- by pointing out that he has never in his life been able to comprehend poetry. He doesn't believe this equates to stupidity, since he certainly understands plain English and has no trouble expressing himself. But when it comes to poetry, he either derives no coherent message or a flat and literal one. He cannot intuit the specifically poetic sense of the poem, which obviously rises above the literal.

This is an excellent summary of my difficulty, except that I said it appears to be true of "most" rather than all poetry I've encountered. I guess the same goes for the Bible. I don't seem to grasp the inner truth of many of its verses, but I think I may understand and even resonate with some of them.

For the whole point about scripture, as far as I am concerned, is that it is not so much the "word of God" per se. Rather, I see it as a message from man to man -- a divinely inspired message from man's higher self to his lower self, expressed in a language that the lower self can comprehend.

If scripture is inspired by God and is "man's higher self" speaking intelligibly to his "lower self," what relation does "man's higher self" have to his "lower self" and to God?

if scripture were purely in the language of the celestial realm from which it arises, man, as he is presently constituted (and certainly ancient man) would not be able to comprehend it.

If man's "higher self" wrote it, didn't it translate this writing from the "language of the celestial realm"? That is, didn't it already understand the "celestial language" before it could express it in scriptural language? If so, why does it need to translate the "celestial" language into something simpler? Why does the "lower self" need to understand it, and can it understand the "celestial language" in any meaningful way from reading the simplified translation?

How do we respond to the person who rejects the entirety of scripture based upon this or that seeming absurdity?

Speaking for myself (and I suspect for many others), I don't "reject the entirety of scripture" based on "this or that" dubious literal passage. I acknowledge that if one looks hard enough, one can probably find "meaning" in virtually every biblical passage, much the way one can "find" objects or even an entire story in every Rorshach ink blot. So, I don't necessarily "reject" any scripture. What I do is question whether parts of scripture that seem incredible on a literal level should be taken that way, even if they're officially supposed to be, and, if some fundamental parts that are supposed to be taken literally are exceedingly dubious when taken that way rather than as allegories, what this means for the entire faith. For instance, if one can legitimately doubt, even if one can't outright dismiss, the unique divinity and resurrection of Jesus, how should this affect our interpretation of scripture as a whole and our allegiance to any Christian church's teachings?

When Scripture is envisaged in its totality it imparts global value and its supernatural character to whomever is not blinded by any prejudice and who has been able to preserve intact the normally human sensibility for the majestic and the sacred."

I may be somewhat "prejudiced" against taking ancient stories of miraculous people and events as actual history, but I don't know that my degree of prejudice in this regard constitutes pathological "blindness." Rather, it seems quite prudent. But what I'd really like to know is what "global value" and "supernatural character" is "imparted" to someone capable of "envisaging" scripture "in its totality." What does this graced person understand about God and Jesus, and how does he feel and live?

Thus, we might say that the "poetic sense" is analogous to the "musical sense" of the sophisticated listener who is able to pull together all of the diverse musical connections as they are deployed in time (i.e., melodically) and space (i.e., harmonically)...While I am unable to appreciate either opera in general or Wagner in particular, that doesn't detract from the deeper point that I am trying to make about scripture and the poetic sense.

If the "poetic sense" is, indeed, "analogous to the musical sense of the sophisticated listener," and most readers of the scripture are no more sophisticated in their poetic sense than most musical listeners are sophisticated in their musical sense, just how well does scripture speak to the "lower self" of most of us, and, if it's truly "divinely inspired," why doesn't it do a better job of speaking to most of our "lower selves" than it seems to?

Poem Deaf

I have never been able to make heads nor tails of most poetry. I don't know why. I could chalk it up to plain stupidity, but I think I'm reasonably knowledgeable and have a decent command of the English language. However, when I read most poetry, it's just words that don't convey any coherent message to me. Or the only message I get from it is so insipidly literal and mundane that it's surely not what or all the author intended. I may understand some of the symbolism or allusions, but, like I said, when I try to weave everything together into a unified story, scene, or message that makes sense, I can't.

For this reason, I've stayed away from most poetry and even song lyrics and stuck largely with prose and instrumental music respectively. Simon and Garfunkle songs are one of the only notable exceptions I can think of to this. I always seemed to "get" many of their songs (although I never had a clue about Baby Driver ). But I'm not sure what that says about the quality of Paul Simon's lyrics or my capacity for comprehension.

I bought a book recently that I hope will help me understand poetry better and appreciate it more. I'll have more to say about it later, after I've worked my way through it or at least started to do so.

In the meantime, I'd like so share with you one of my feeble attempts at writing poetry. I wrote it when I was a lot younger and even more foolish than I am now. It was my attempt to capsulize my philosophy of divine Oneness and apply it to the alienation and loneliness I felt at the time:

Whichever Way You Go

Dear and troubled friend.
Can you see without without within, or within without without?
Look to yourself and see Tao .
Look to Tao and see yourself.
Either Way or no Way, it doesn't matter how.
Tao takes care of itself.

Whichever way you go, Tao is sure to flow.
So, what's the problem?

Now do you see why I and poetry don't mix very well? :-)