How One Surrenders to the Emptiness

Buoyancy
by Rumi, version by Coleman Barks from The Essential Rumi

Love has taken away my practices
and filled me with poetry.

I tried to keep quietly repeating,
No strength but yours,
but I couldn’t.

I had to clap and sing.
I used to be respectable and chaste and stable,
but who can stand in this strong wind
and remember those things?

A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself.
That’s how I hold your voice.

I am scrap wood thrown in your fire,
and quickly reduced to smoke.

I saw you and became empty.
This emptiness, more beautiful than existence,
it obliterates existence, and yet when it comes,
existence thrives and creates more existence!

The sky is blue. The world is a blind man
squatting on the road.

But whoever sees your emptiness
sees beyond blue and beyond the blind man.

A great soul hides like Muhammad, or Jesus,
moving through a crowd in a city
where no one knows him.

To praise is to praise
how one surrenders
to the emptiness.

To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.
Praise, the ocean. What we say, a little ship.

So the sea-journey goes on, and who knows where!
Just to be held by the ocean is the best of luck
we could have. It’s a total waking up!

Why should we grieve that we’ve been sleeping?
It doesn’t matter how long we’ve been unconscious.

We’re groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness
around you, the buoyancy.

If We Didn't Try to Hold the Flux

Surviving DC, July 22, 2002

"It's a tension, I think, because what both science and at least some philosophical and even religious traditions tell us is that the world is impermanent. Nothing in it stays the same. We don't stay the same. Our bodies don't stay the same. The people that we love and the things that we love don't stay the same. That's just the truth of the matter, that there's this constant impermanence, this constant flux. And some philosophers have argued over the years that we should just embrace that. We would be freer if we didn't try to hold that flux for a moment. 

I have to say, my feeling about it is, part of what makes everything so precious to us is exactly the fact that we know it's going to disappear. We know it's impermanent. We know it won't last. But what we love is this thing now. For me, the most dramatic example of this is our relationship to our children. We know they're going to go. We know that in twenty years from now, if they treat us with affectionate contempt we'll be doing really well. But that doesn't change the fact that right now, it's this child and not any other child in the universe. Just this one.

I think there's something really deep and profound about our human lives that the fact that we can do both of those things--we recognize the impermanence, but that we feel the attachments--that seems to me to give our life its very special texture."  

~ Alison Gopnik, from "Object Lesson," Radiolab, Season 12: Episode 8

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See also: 

• Gopnik, A. (2009). The philosophical baby: What children's minds tell us about truth, love, and the meaning of life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (library)
• Instincts

Rare Moments of Emptiness

Parking Garage, Houston (2012) Lynn Saville

Excerpt from "Eloquent Empty Spaces," by Lynn Saville, The New York Times, November 2, 2013: 

WHEN I began photographing cities at twilight, I was attracted to outlying regions, places that seemed unloved and overlooked. More recently, I have been lured back to the central areas of cities, where economic turmoil has produced its own gaps in the urban facade...

Signs of previous occupation, failure and loss mingle with hints of renewal and re-creation.

Working in places such as New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Me., Boston, Cleveland, Columbus, Ohio, Detroit and Houston, I continue to photograph cities at dawn or dusk. These transitional times underscore the shifting nature of vacancy and offer glimpses of cityscapes in rare moments of emptiness. 

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See also:

• Saville, L., & Fried, P. (1997). Acquainted with the night. New York: Rizzoli. 
• Saville, L., & Danto, A. C. (2009). Night shift: Photographs. New York: Monacelli Press.

Made In Its Image

Ampersand, Wednesday Wolf

Genesis Revised
by Reed Whitmore, from Fifty Poems Fifty (1970) & The Past, the Future, the Present: Poems Selected and New (1990)

In my opinion this concept of the interval, detached as it is from the selection of any special body to occupy it, is the starting point of the whole concept of space.

~ Albert Einstein

Think of an "and" alone,
Nothing before, nothing after, 
Nothing and nothing. 
The "and" proposes a structure, and by the proposing
Is. And makes.
For nothing is nothing, but nothing and nothing
Are spatial, temporal; the structure does it,
A nothing there and here, a nothing then and now,
To and fro in the space-time.

But in grammar we cannot think of this. The
     "and" comes second.
We need something, then "and." 
Or if we are willing to grant, without understanding,
     a precedent "and,"
We still ask to know where it came from.
Grammar, logic, math work in the matrix
Of the space-time. "And" is the space-time. We
     in its matrix
Know what we do in it, where we are in it,
But not it.

This that we don't know we call soul, spirit.
More of it every day is found in the physics lab,
By omission.  
It is what we tend to describe by what it is not.
It is not logical, it is not metrical; it is not
     (as I now propose) grammatical.

Yet it is with us. Our minds seem made in its image,
Each a space-time kit for making a world up.
We cannot conceive of that spirit (the "and")
     a father,
Yet we cannot conceive of it otherwise. In
     Eddington's words,
The breach of causality keeps breaking the chain of
     inference. Sense leads to nonsense.

In the beginning, then, was nonsense? So every
     beginning. So far.
We cannot conceive of a nothing that makes something.
The "and" we say must be physical. Or electrical.
     Something.
Yet the something is nothing. Nonsense.
We have no grammar for nonsense; we cannot posit
A nothing-something moving between nothings.
Yet I repeat:
Think of an "and" alone,
Nothing before, nothing after,
Nothing and nothing, thereby making

The first day.  

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See also:

• Reed Whittemore's obituary (New York Times, April 2012)
• Appreciating Nothing
• There Is No God And He Is Always with You by Brad Warner

To Behold and Not To Think

Topiary Park, January 26, 2013

The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.