Reminiscence

For my Ithaca friends. A detective story fragment.

He leaves by the side entrance turning north toward the center of town. The forsythia blooms, and he thinks of the warm rains that have soothed him this Spring. Turning east on Clinton, he heads for the small benches lined against the railing overlooking the swollen creek, and sits one facing the shadowed facade of the police station.

There is very little he can do at the moment besides think somewhat obsessively about one or two things his client had said to him, as when she intoned puzzlement that the kind man she saw had perhaps not moved his mouth while speaking. 'Live' things appearing and disappearing at her door.

The afternoon sun, its beams falling through the slatted transit station across the walkway, gradually calm him. He notices the bee bedazzled hyacinths and wonders if they're enhanced. He considers the silver drop he'd seen at her forehead--no doubt hallucinated--and how it had captivated him even before he'd noticed her.

It would not be the first time a certain kind of feeling had led him to a dead end. And yet her way of telling the story--believing herself honest and truthful while subverting the storyline to some hidden purpose--is precisely what triggered his wanting to help her.

He falls asleep without the least bit of fuss, propped against the railing bars. A dream comes to him, one that he would likely remember only as a sense of inner softening: his father standing in a doorway, inviting him in; back-lit by the last golden rays of the day.

He wakes in the cooler air after sunset, thinking about holos he'd seen of the antique Bessemer furnaces pouring pure molten steel into twelve ton iron buckets. About his brother's sense of industry; his nieces, whom he loves but rarely sees. He thinks of oak trees bearing acorns, some at high frigid elevations, some in hot drylands. Giving pleasure and shelter and  sustenance and support. And the deep desire in human beings for making: making the world toward a perfect replica of paradise.

Only to realize that his mind had circled him back to the client. Were he to clarify his thinking now, the pleasant daze he felt might disappear. His right hand lies flat on the bench seat beside him, so he uses it to push himself up.

BODY

He carries a silence within him, and is moved to offer it to a higher power, which he can not grasp and can not name, perceiving it only as Absence, vast beyond imagining.

He recognizes the patterning of his mind: incessant thought, feeling, image, so much of it trivial and repetitive. But too, there is a more deeply felt sense of his body, a solid, silent realm of living possibilities, empty and waiting. And welling up from this, in a cycle of appearance independent of time's passage, hints, images, directives; a flow of intelligence entering his awareness from a dimension folded into the everyday, akin to dreams.

He wonders what he would experience if that intelligence would flow without the resistance of the habitual mind, and drops quietly into contemplation.

His focus on this internal body space, he tracks in his loins a downward flowing opening into dynamic emptiness, as if one would synchronize with that and be taken anywhere, do anything, like the sounding of a deep bass drum pulsing, expanding beyond measure.

He perceives shimmering in an empty space in the region of his throat and jaws, its core in the notch above his breast bone, expanding and pulsing with that same dynamism, a sense of outward movement permeating space with its essential vibration.

In his belly, the booming of the drum comes from above. He feels invited to open a door, and enters a heaving cataclysm, ten thousand voices in the language of dreams, a repository of all that he has ever known or could know, a sense of belonging to all that is or ever could be.

An expanding light field opens in his mind, the light taking all experience into itself, into its infinite possibilities, reclaiming and recycling and renewing and recombining it, infusing it with its own star-like essence; all of this in silence; all with a feeling of surrender into love, acceptance of everything, profound empathy in the heart.

When he had mused like this for perhaps half an hour, the sound of a thrasher calling from his yard intervened. He marvels at this down-to-earth intrusion, and at the other-worldly dream time imagery that seems to have included it.
He thinks of the bird, and of the millions of years during which his kind has heard them, delighting in them, coveting them, waking to their pre-dawn chatter, all represented to him in this moment as an intimate messenger from his own being.

Curve billed thrasher, Toxostoma curvirostre

FEAR

Wisdom runs beneath the surface of events in everyday experience, and is linked to them. When the mind is relaxed in its flow, its deeper layers merge into the stream. Then the world reveals its precious secrets in symbols and stories.

One may observe the stream of thoughts and impressions flowing through the mind dispassionately. Personal boundaries begin to dissolve, and consciousness itself becomes the focal point, a point of combustion through which undifferentiated life becomes experience.

The following is an attempt, with a little literary license, to portray what the process may feel like.

Like a spooked deer bounding up a wooded hillside and out of sight, thought careens away from the density of feeling, the fear left congealing in the pit of his stomach. By old habit, he returns to it, allowing himself the experience of its filaments spreading to his chest and throat and jaws. Shrieking voices converge inside his skull. Resisting the temptations to distraction, he settles in the awful vortex until a silent space emerges, and he finds himself in the quiet breath of his body.

Peace to all who read these words.

Communion

When we meet and greet one of our fellow travelers--and here I mean not only other people but animals, plants, rocks, mountains, the sea--such as the gloriously beautiful red and gold rose blooming in a neighborhood yard I happened upon while walking earlier today--I want to ask, what is meeting what?

A few days ago I had someone come to my office, a sensitive and intelligent woman dealing with a serious challenge to her health, and sometime during our interview I noticed in myself a stealthy withdrawal of attention from our pleasant conversation, through successive layers of thought and feeling and detail, ending up at rest in that--and here words mostly fail--silent, empty space of deep listening.

This "destination" felt profoundly alert to every nuance within the layers of the conversation without being altered in its fundamental stillness in any way; not only that, but I felt an intimate communion with her, a vivid stillness that lay beneath our offerings and responses, emptiness merging with emptiness, so to speak.

I was aware of distinctions in the experience--we were each in our separate chairs in the room conversing with each other; people moved about in the hallway outside the room--yet in another, deeply felt sense, I experienced oneness with everything that was happening. Resting in this silence, the details of our communication, the worries, and problems, the questions and the scrabbling for answers, the attempt to figure out what is to be done; the emotions trailing along with these thoughts--all of this felt as movements or energies propagating from a still center to the horizon and beyond. Perhaps an image would be that of a circle whose circumference recedes to infinity, whose center is empty, yet through which arises the entirety of experience; a unity that includes the multiplicity of distinctions, the "ten thousand things".

Stages of an Introspection

There are times when storms rage, squalls roaring and blowing as if to drown the cities and plains, swamp the world of the living under relentless waters.

Such is the sense he has today, the storms of his mood raging despite the mildness of the late winter afternoon in the desert.

He retreats from this to contemplate quieter regions. The tempest simmering in the background of his mind, he unrolls an ancient scroll and reads there the words of an unfamiliar prayer, and as he reads, the forces that have been marshaling themselves at the periphery of his awareness pour into the chanted syllables, rotating about an axis of silence.

OM. MANI. PADME. HUM.

He feels disconnected from his thoughts, curled on the ground with his knees up in his belly, covering his head with his arms against the pounding energies that would obliterate him. His breath comes in ragged gasps. He feels his heart booming in his chest, gradually disappearing into its thunder, and there he finds the warding.

A hawk announces his presence with a strangled cry; he spies him in the paloverde beyond the garden wall. Welcome, he says. I know you do not serve me, and whom you serve, I am.

He walks the dark hallway toward the door at its end, drawn by soft light streaming from underneath. Pausing at the threshold, he waits a moment before carefully opening it into a dimly lit room. An old woman sits in a high-backed chair, her silver-gray hair falling to her shoulders, her bright green eyes looking out at him, her face unreadable. Behind her, a tall window transmits muted light through a gauzy curtain. After several minutes of silence, she turns her head slightly so that he sees one of her red coral earrings sway slightly against her neck.

She beckons him closer, to which he responds, aware of his own soft footfall. Standing without apparent effort, she takes his hand in hers and leads him toward the window, now shimmering with pearly light, dappling their faces and producing an odd effect on him, at once hypnotic and vivifying. Her hand is softer and warmer than he would have attributed to one so elderly; in fact, he is somewhat taken aback to find himself so nearly overcome by her loveliness.

Pulling aside the curtain, she points to the far mountains jumbled against the horizon, the rising full moon, fat and luminous, riding above them.

He watches a lighted candle as if in a dark room. No current of air, no rustling sound, no scent or sense of presence other than his own. Only the soft flame, silently dancing.

Grandfather

While walking in the desert I remembered my grandfather. He had come to the US a recent engineering graduate from Kiev, met my grandmother, a grocer's daughter, who later would give birth to my mother; worked as a metallurgist in the steel industry in Pittsburgh and Columbus, and was ill with diabetes and marrow cancer for the time I knew him, dying when I was twelve.

When I was about seven, my little brother and young parents took rail to Columbus from Pittsburgh, a great thrill. 

He spoke to me always with respect, answering my questions about lightning, the workings of television, government and geography, dinosaurs and much more that I don't recall. On Sundays in Columbus we'd sometimes watch the Yankee games on his 1950's seven inch cabinet TV.

Once he gave me a lesson in chemistry titration by taking me to the bathroom and having me hold a test tube, partly filled with the urine I had watched him void into it, adding reagent drop by drop until the color change told him how high his sugar level was. I remember how warm the test tube felt in my hands, and my queasiness, not quite dispelled by his gentle manner. I watched him, propped up in a hospital bed, inject his belly and thighs with insulin; I can still recall his ashen face, the smell of the alcohol swabs in his bedroom, the metallic gleam off the autoclavable syringes.

He was a short, compact man, made more sturdy looking by the steel and leather brace he wore against the ongoing deterioration of his spine. His complexion made sallow by illness. Bald, with soft gray almond eyes. A very neat grey mustache, a few coarse black hairs marking it. I never heard him raise his voice; in fact, he spoke in quiet tones that nonetheless commanded my attention. Something also that made an impression that wouldn't have been obvious to me as a child, only remembered all these years later: a calm resignation, and the strength of that.

I stopped for a moment to look out across the desert toward the western hills. The sky above them purpling and golden this late in the afternoon. Venus could be seen sailing above the horizon, a brightening light in the deep blue. I heard myself say, grandfather, how do you like the desert we live in now? He smiled with my face, looked toward the mountains through my eyes. Suffused by gratitude, I felt the stillness of the day, the gift of contact.

DESIRE

Lately, I've been noticing a vague, undifferentiated desire. Not hunger, but something like it; if I go for something, say a bit of chocolate or some tea, it isn't satisfied. I know what real hunger is like, and real satiation, a quiet hum in the body after some good food. This isn't like that.

Sometimes, I linger with it, and the first thing that peels away is any need to satisfy its demand, which has been amorphous anyway. Stripped of that, it hovers in consciousness, resolving itself into my breathing, or a fullness in my throat, or some other bodily sense; or a thought, or something someone is saying to me; some experience, the desire disappearing in the process. A ghost or a vapor barely perceptible, resolving into the next thing.

It's always disappearing, always not quite there, hinting at some quiet emptiness that is somehow alive. Something like being at an event horizon, feeling the pull toward . . . nothing. The pull itself is the the only movement; the destination is the next thing I'm involved in. Try to focus on it and it disappears into the looking; try to move it around or change it or identify it and it disappears into the effort.

I could say that I disappear and reappear, going in and out of the everyday world of thoughts and things in an endlessly repeating cycle, but how strange to contemplate the in-between, when I am not there, you are not there, but life is!