The Fruit of our Labors

"...a small heap of glittering fragments, whence the mystery of beauty had fled forever.  And as for Owen Warland, he looked placidly at what seemed the ruin of his life's labor, and which was not yet ruin.  He had caught a far other butterfly than this.  When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to moral senses became of little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality."

Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Artist of the Beautiful
The Portable Hawthorne

Bright Conceptions and Toil

"Sweet, doubtless, were those days, and congenial to the artist's soul.  They were full of bright conceptions, which gleamed through his intellectual world as the butterflies gleamed through the outward atmosphere, and were real to him, for the instant, without the toil, and perplexity, and many disappointments of attempting to make them visible to the sensual eye."

Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Artist of the Beautiful
The Portable Hawthorne

Ah, that gap between what we conceive and what we achieve.  I've always been moved by a song from the Country Western band Blackhawk, Just About Right:

My old friend,
Lives up in the mountains
He flew up there to paint the world
He says, "Even though interpretation's what I count on, this little picture to me seems blurred"
"Hard lines and the shadows come easy
I see them all just as clear as a bell
I just can't seem to set my easel to please me;
I paint my Heaven, but it looks like Hell"

 

Your blue might be gray, your less might be more
Your window to the world might be your own front door
Your shiniest day might come in the middle of the night
That's just about right

 

He says, "Man, I ain't comin' down 'til my picture is perfect
And all the wonder has gone from my eyes"
Down through my hands and onto the canvas,
Still like my vision but still a surprise"
"Real life",…

He says, "Man, I ain't comin' down 'til my picture is perfect
And all the wonder has gone from my eyes"
Down through my hands and onto the canvas,
Still like my vision but still a surprise"
"Real life", he says, "is the hardest impression
It's always movin' so I let it come through"
"And that", I say, "is the glory of true independence" "Just do what you do what you just gotta do"

 

Your blue might be gray, your less might be more
Your window to the world might be your own front door
Your shiniest day might come in the middle of the night
That's just about right

What was I born to do?

     "You are my evil spirit," answered Owen, much excited--"you and the hard, coarse world!  The leaden thoughts and the despondency that you fling upon me are my clogs, else I should long ago have achieved the task I was created for."
     Peter Hovenden shook his head, with the mixture of contempt and indignation which mankind, of whom he was partly a representative, deem themselves entitled to feel towards all simpletons who seek other prizes than the dusty one along the highway.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Artist of the Beautiful
The Portable Hawthorne

Logic and Spiritual Experience

"To say that the five skandhas are by nature empty and their combination an illusion is not  enough for those who have not actually experienced this fact.  They want to see the problem solved according to...logic....The teaching of anatman is the expression of an experience, and not at all a logical conclusion.  However much they try to reach it by their logical subtleties they fail, or their reasoning lacks the force of a final conviction.
     Since the Buddha, many are the masters of the Abhidharma who have exhausted their power of ratiocination to establish logically the theory of anatman, but how many Buddhists or outsiders are there who are really intellectually convinced of the theory?  If they have a conviction about this teaching it comes from their experience and not from theorizing.  With the Buddha, an actual personal conviction came first; then came a logical construction to back up the conviction.  It did not matter very much indeed whether or not this construction was satisfactorily completed, for the conviction, that is the experience itself, was a fait accompli."

D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism

Havel - the experience of meaning as a mystical relationship

Havel was no simple theist.  His spiritual experiences have a strong personal tinge to them though -

"man, whose quest is always - whether he admits it or not - an aspiration toward the 'absolute meaning of Being,' is suddenly confronted with a set of phenomena that reveal themselves as expressions of an integral Being and with Being that reveals itself to have meaning.  And thus, in fact, an encounter takes place: the existential longing for meaning encounters a powerful 'metaphysical-physical' signal of meaning and its 'obvious' manifestation.  And just as a human being who longs for meaning is open to the world, ready to hear its promptings, decode its signals, draw from it its deepest connections and its references to the order of Being - and thus infuse it with meaning - suddenly, the world too is, as it were, ready to infuse that existence with meaning: it intensifies its signals, it behaves in an 'obvious' manner.  We are then overcome by a feeling of joyous meaningfulness because we suddenly feel that the thing we have been constantly reaching out for is almost physically within our grasp, because it is not just we who are greedily open to it; our counterpart, too, has opened itself to us.  It is not just we who long for contact with the meaning of Being, but the meaning of Being itself, if it can be put that way, reaches out to us.  I feel like saying that a kind of mystic cooperation occurs; our need to discover our own meaning by touching 'absolute meaning' entices this meaning out of what surrounds us, and what surrounds us, on the contrary, entices from the deepest regions of our being our own veiled certitude that meaning exists, which is, the certitude of life itself."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

One danger of aging

"Many People give advice, but those who receive it gratefully are few.  Still rarer are those who follow such advice.  Once a man passes the age of thirty, there is no one to advise him.  When advice ceases to reach him, he becomes willful and selfish.  For the rest of his life he adds impropriety to foolishness until he is beyond redemption."

JochoYamamoto
Hagakure

quoted in
Yukio Mishima
The Way of the Samurai

Unto the least...

Perhaps you think Me stooping
I'm not ashamed of that
Christ - stooped until he touched the Grave -
Do those at Sacrament

Commemorate Dishonor
Or love annealed of love
Until it bend as low as Death
Redignified, above?

Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin), 273



Wikipedia:
"Annealing, in metallurgy and materials science, is a heat treatment that alters the physical and sometimes chemical properties of a material to increase its ductility and reduce its hardness, making it more workable."

Like the peal of a great bell, the theological echoes of this poem reverberate for a long time.

Procrastination

I held a Jewel in my fingers -
And went to sleep -
The day was warm, and winds were prosy -
I said "Twill keep" -

I woke - and chid my honest fingers,
The Gem was gone -
And now, an Amethyst remembrance
Is all I own.

Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin), 261



I too have learned to my sorrow that creatively it is best to strike while the iron is hot.

Zanshin

Bennett's examination of Bushido is very pragmatic.  His Philosophical explanations center on real life experiences in martial arts dojo's in Japan.  The first section of the book focuses on the concept of Zanshin, a term that connotes awareness and focus, with a dash of never letting your guard down and more than hint of compassion, respect and empathy, even for, perhaps, especially for, your opponent.

In an interesting section called "Zanshin Outside the Dojo," Bennett examines taking the attitude out of combat (or ritual combat).  Taking care of one's health, avoiding careless mistakes, treating others with courtesy and respect, carefully getting all of one's belongings out of a taxi and carefully saving the receipt are examples of Zanshin in action.  Losing keys or a wallet, forgetting to flush a toilet, and getting irresponsibly drunk (drunk enough to lose self control) are examples of lack of Zanshin.

"No Zanshin in the context of daily life is born of a failure to create a little buffer of space, stepping back and taking a minute to refocus, pay attention and get back in the moment."

Theologically, the constant Book of Mormon exhortation to "remember" serves as a kind of spiritual Zanshin in daily life.

I for one could use a lot more of both types of Zanshin.

reinhabitation

The Robin's my Criterion for Tune -
Because I grew - where Robins do -
But, were I cuckoo born -
I'd swear by him -
The ode familiar - rules the Noon -
The Buttercup's, my whim for Bloom -
Because, we're Orchard sprung -
But, were I Britain born,
I'd Daises spurn -

None but the Nut - October fit -
Because - through dropping it,
The seasons flit - I'm taught -
Without the Snow's Tableau
Winter were lie - to me -
Because I see - New Englandly -
The Queen, discerns like me -
Provincially -


The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin), 256

Public Relations

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell one's name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!


The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin). 260