Thursday, December 01, 2016
Monday, October 24, 2016
Notes and Quotes on the The Gaze
Who can fix a limit to the gaze? Who will
dare to define it scope, point out its center, or draw a circle around its
sphere? As far as I can see, everyone turns away. Where? To the gaze.
On the one hand, the gaze is limitless,
extending in all directions, further than the eye can see. “The self,” says Ibn
Arabi, “is an ocean without shore. Gazing upon it has no end in this world and
the next.”
On the other hand, the gaze is nothing,
nothing but itself, a zero through which only another I is looking. “All
creatures are absolutely nothing,” says Johannes Tauler, “That which has no
being is nothing. And creatures have no being, because they have their being in
God; if God turned away for a moment, they would cease to exist.”
Is my gaze my own? Yes and no. I look, yet
cannot see myself. I am seen, yet none sees me. Is that you, looking back at
yourself in the mirror? No and yes. The gaze is the mirror of the gaze, every
look a reflection of itself. Where would I be, what would become of you—everything—if
that which sees and is seen by seeing, vision’s own visibility, were blotted
out, blinded? If the gaze through which we gaze shut its eyes? “Do not separate
from me,” says Hafiz, “for you are the light of my vision. / You are the peace
of my soul and the intimate of my heart.”
I see that one is always turning toward and
turning away, turning away from what one turns toward, turning toward what one
turns away from. What an endless revolution, the restless conversion of the still,
ever-spinning eye. Zoom in on planet pupil, a little nothing meaning all,
suspended in its own universal reflection, projecting and filming everything
through the point, the navel of itself. Is your gaze born from you or you from
your gaze? “I believe,” says Dante in Paradiso,
“because of the sharpness of the living ray that I sustained, that I would have
been lost if my eyes had turned away from it.”
Admit it, the gaze is really too much. Who
can withstand it? No one shall see me and
live. That must be why Narcissus never stops spontaneously lying to himself
about his reflection, never ceases to fall in love with his own image, seeing neither
that it is an image nor his. If you are me then who am I? If I am me then who
are you? Perpetual predicament of the illusion that sustains reality. As Meher
Baba once rhymed, “Oh, you ignorant, all-knowing Soul / what a plight you are
in! / Oh, you weak, all-powerful Soul / what a plight you are in! / Oh, you
miserable, all-happy Soul / what a plight you are in! / What a plight! / What a
sight! / What a delight!”
How eternally precious those passing
moments, when the gaze opens itself a little more and sees, by some
unfathomable magic or trick of the abyss which if you gaze long into it gazes
back into you (N), that the image is no less in love with Narcissus. As Francis
Brabazon said, “And so one arrives at the painful conclusion that the Beloved
alone exists—which means that oneself doesn’t. And that’s a terrible
predicament to find oneself in—for one is still there! The only solution I found was to accept the position: ‘You
alone are and I am not, but we are both here.’”
Whose gaze is that? What eye calmly turns itself towards the gaze of the real,
penetrating the sight of life, which is death to the living? It would seem as
if the person who possesses this look also cannot sustain it. Are not saints,
or the truly beautiful, forever ashamed of their own eyes? Here is a passage
from Meher Baba to fall in love with: “A wali . . . has the power to open the
third eye and grant divine sight, if he is in the mood. He can do so by simply
looking into the eyes of the aspirant, even if the aspirant is at a distance.
When the third eye is opened, all is light . . . It is so powerful an experience
that the recipient either goes mad or drops the body . . . One type of wali is
called artad. They are very, very few, quite rare. They are very fiery, with
piercing eyes that break through anything, even mountains! Their gaze is
sufficient to cut an animal in two, hence they always keep their eyes on the
ground. That too is split apart.”
If the gaze splits, surely that is because it
is without number, because the manyness of our eyes only sees by reflecting one. Thus the individual neither sees
nor is seen by unity without being cut in two. Consider this as the principle
of honesty or natural self-discernment. I am only whole, authentic, truthful, when
I see how double, how dark to myself I am, when eye see myself seen by seeing itself. “Look not upon me, because I
am black, because the sun hath looked upon me” (Song of Songs 1:6).
Imagine a map of all vision, a long tracing
of its every line, individual and collective, from the beginningless beginning
to the endless end, from the earliest emergence of anything to its final
absolute evaporation. A one-to-one map scaled to the continuum of seeing
itself, all of its sleeps and wakings, every stop and start across the seas of
every kingdom of being, in short, from stone to human. What does it look like? In
his Dialogue on the Two Principle Systems
of the World, Galileo, in order to explain how “this motion in common [i.e.
the motion of the earth] . . . remains as if nonexistent to everything that
participates in it,” conceives the figure of an artist who draws, without
separating pen and paper, everything he sees while sailing from Italy to
Turkey: “if an artist had begun drawing with that pen on a sheet of paper when
he left the port and had continued doing so all the way to Alexandretta [Iskenderun], he would have been able to
derive from the pen's motion a whole narrative of many figures, completely
traced and sketched in thousands of directions, with landscapes, buildings,
animals, and other things. Yet the actual real essential movement marked by the
pen point would have been only a line; long, indeed, but very simple. But as to
the artist's own actions, these would have been conducted exactly the same as
if the ship had been standing still” (Galileo Galilei). Is not the real hero of
the story the hyper-saccadic story of the eye? Now raise that to the power of
itself ad infinitum. What a line!
More locally, the gaze concerns the
duration and depth of seeing, the extensity and intensity of its time and
space. Gazing not only looks but looks beyond looking, exploring the very
surface of vision as a dimension otherwise than surface. The gaze sees by
seeing into seeing itself, in both senses at once. No need for a map, the gaze
directs itself. As Merleau-Ponty explains, the focus of the gaze, through which
we establish the qualities of objects by interrupting them from “the total life
of the spectacle,” operates through an essential reflexivity: “The sensible
quality, far from being coextensive with perception, is the peculiar product of
an attitude of curiosity or observation. It appears when, instead of yielding
up the whole of my gaze to the world, I turn toward this gaze itself, and when
I ask myself what precisely it is that I
see; it does not occur in the natural transactions between my sight and the
world, it is the reply to a certain kind of questioning on the part of my gaze,
the outcome of a second order or critical kind of vision which tries to know
itself in its own particularity.”
So we are led back, willy nilly, to the
essential gravity of the gaze as an exponent of will, to looking as the weight
of the love of a being who is its own self-consuming question. But what of the
one whose will is annihilated? “To those in whom the will has turned and denied
itself,” says Schopenhauer, “this very real world of ours, with all its suns
and galaxies, is—nothing.”
What does the gaze that sees nothing see?
“And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw nothing”
(Acts 9:8).
I trust that both Dante and Hafiz agree
that this gaze sees not only nothing, but everything. As their contemporary
Meister Eckhart says, “A man who is established thus in God's will wants
nothing but what is God's will and what is God . . . Even though it meant the
pains of hell it would be joy and happiness to him. He is free and has left
self behind, and must be free of whatever is to come in to him: if my eye is to
perceive color, it must be free of all color. If I see a blue or white color,
the sight of my eye which sees the color, the very thing that sees, is the same
as that which is seen by the eye. The eye with which I see God is the same eye
with which God sees me: my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one
knowing and one love.”
This makes me want to see what these two
poets might see looking into each other. For both are so well versed in the mystery
of the unitive doubleness of vision experienced in the gaze, wherein the
two-ness of the eyes becomes one. As Hadewych explains, “The power of sight
that is created as natural to the soul is charity. This power of sight has two
eyes, love and reason. Reason cannot see God except in what he is not; love
rests not except in what he is. Reason has its secure paths, by which it
proceeds. Love experiences failure, but failure advances it more than reason.
Reason advances toward what God is, by means of what God is not. Love sets
aside what God is not and rejoices that it fails in what God is. Reason has
more satisfaction than love, but love has more sweetness of bliss than reason.
These two, however, are of great mutual help one to the other; for reason
instructs love, and love enlightens reason. When reason abandons itself to
love's wish, and love consents to be forced and held within the bounds of
reason, they can accomplish a very great work. This no one can learn except by
experience.”
And I am looking forward to this encounter all
the more, not only because, as Vernon Howard says, “Anything you look forward
to will destroy you, as it already has,” but because what is seen between the
gazes of these two poets will no doubt be something neither could see—the beauty
of a spark leaping between the eyes of two no-ones.
As Hafiz says, “اهل نظر دو عالم در یک نظر ببازند” [Men of sight can lose both worlds in one
glance]. Or as Love tells Dante in the Vita
Nuova, “Ego tanquam centrum circuli . . . tu autem non sic” [I am as the
centre of a circle . . . you however are not so].
Thursday, September 29, 2016
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Sunday, May 08, 2016
The Miracle of the Sigh
If I sigh for the miraculous, for the beauty
that takes breath away in wonder, maybe it is because the sigh itself is a
miracle. And if it is not, if as the song says, a sigh is just a sigh, perhaps
that is the miracle, that a sigh, to
be miraculous, need not be anything other than itself.
The miracle of this
gathering is that we get to hear and speak the sighs of Dante and Hafiz
together, to have them, side by side, in the same room.
Dante died in 1321.
Hafiz was born in 1325. So this is something that could never have happened.
Or, in light of the mystery of reincarnation, properly identified by one
anonymous author as “in no way a theory which one has to believe or not believe
. . . a fact which is [to be] either known through experience or ignored” (Meditations on the Tarot), this may be something
that could never have not happened. Thus who knows, this gathering might be
both and something better than either, the miracle of a third thing, the event
of the presence of one in whose name two or three gather.
The impossible is
inevitable. And in this case, there is also lightning, a striking resemblance.
Above all, the greatness of these two poets, the height and depth of their sighs,
belongs to the sphere of intense experience, ecstatic and torturous, of the
intersection of human and divine love, more specifically, the noble love of a woman
and the love of God. For Dante, it was the death of Beatrice which marked the
center of his poetry’s turning toward the divine. Only from the abyss of sorrow
and the poet’s death to himself within it does there spring the miraculous
vision of the Commedia, the
potentiality of a truly new poetry, of a word that authentically writes itself
now, in light of the eternal present. As Dante states near the end of the Vita Nuova, “And to arrive at that, I
apply myself as much as I can, as she truly knows. So that, if it be pleasing
to Him for whom all things live that my life may last for some years, I hope to
say of her what was never said of any other woman.” For Hafiz, the death of his
beloved instead takes place virtually, in experience, upon the imminence of the
long-sought moment when he could finally realize his desire. Where the death of
Dante’s beloved is the ground of seeking her in God, Hafiz’s earthly love is
eclipsed by desire for the divinity that grants him the opportunity to fulfil that
love. With uncanny complementarity, the two poets’ experiences appear as
different as they are similar. Hafiz’s story is recounted by Meher Baba as
follows:
Once
in his youth, Hafiz encountered a very beautiful girl of a wealthy family. That
very instant he fell in love with her; it was not in the carnal way, but he
loved her beauty. At the same time, he was in contact with his Spiritual
Master, Attar, who himself was a great Persian poet. Hafiz, being Attar's
disciple, used to visit him daily for years. He used to compose a ghazal a day
and sing it to Attar. . . Twenty years passed and all this time Hafiz was full
of the fire of love for the beautiful woman, and he loved his Master, too.
Once, Attar asked him: “Tell me what you want.” Hafiz expressed how he longed
for the woman. Attar replied: “Wait, you will have her.” Ten more years passed
by, thirty in all, and Hafiz became desperate and disheartened. . . . Hafiz
blazed out: “What have I gained by being with you? Thirty years have gone by!”
Attar answered: “Wait, you will know one day.” . . . Hafiz performed chilla-nashini, that
is, he sat still within the radius of a drawn circle for 40 days to secure
fulfillment of his desire. It is virtually impossible for one to sit still for
40 days within the limits of a circle. But Hafiz’s love was so great that it
did not matter to him. On the fortieth day, an angel appeared before him and
looking at the angel’s beauty, Hafiz thought: “What is that woman’s beauty in
comparison with this heavenly splendor!” The angel asked what he desired. Hafiz
replied that he be able to wait on the pleasure of his Master’s wish. At four o’clock
on the morning of the last day, Hafiz . . . went to his Master who embraced
him. In that embrace, Hafiz became God-conscious. (Lord Meher)
Following love’s infinity in the face of
the finite, through the domain of death, the poetry of Dante and Hafiz fills
the space traversed by longing, the degree
or mode of love which moves between desire and surrender, the form of eros that
at once insists on satisfaction and grasps the futility of that insistence. As
the word of the word of love, the tongueless articulation of the heart before
and after speech, a murmuring of the heart as mouth around the spiritual limits
of language, the sigh is the proper expression of longing, of desire across
distance and the hopelessness of separation. Thus the sphere-piercing
spatiality of the sigh, its mapping of the paradoxical parameters of the heart as
something both excluded from and already established within its own home. Like
a breath at the edge of the universe which is no less one’s own, the sigh
traces the heart as no less exterior than interior, as both trapped within and
containing what holds it. Augustine defines the heart as “where I am whoever or
whatever I am [ubi ego sum quicumque sum]”
and love as “my weight [which] bears me wheresoever I am borne [pondus meum, amor meus; eo feror, quocumque
feror]” (Augustine, Confessions).
So the sigh, echoing simultaneously one’s first and last breath, both the
spirit which animates you in the first place and the expiration which becomes no
longer yours, pertains to an essential openness and mobility, the unbounded wherever
and wheresoever of things.
This for me is the
sigh’s miracle—not anything supernatural, but that it marks the miracle of
reality itself as infinitely open, as spontaneously expanding without limit or
horizon into more and more of itself. Hear how, on the one hand, a sigh
resonates with the sense of the weight of facticity and necessity, the crushing
gravity of that (that things are as
they are, that anything is, that something is not) and hear, on the other hand,
how a sigh floats in the space between
the actual and the ideal, in the sky of its own indetermination and freedom.
The suspension of the sigh, its hovering, pertains to the paradox of freedom as
realizable yet unpossessable, the necessity of freeing oneself from oneself,
from one’s own freedom, in order to be free. As Meister Eckart says, “The just
man serves neither God nor creatures, for he is free, . . . and the closer he is to freedom . . .
the more he is freedom itself.” The sigh is the dialetheia of freedom and
necessity, the joy (and sorrow) of knowing that nothing is fixed and the sorrow
(and joy) of seeing that it everything is—that thank God there is absolutely
nothing and everything you can do
about it. As Vernon Howard said, referring to yourself, “you want to take that to Heaven?”
The admixture of
joy and sorrow found in the sigh reflects the miraculous fact, the light weight
and grave lightness, of reality’s paradoxical openness. As Agamben says in The Coming Community, “The root of all
pure joy and sadness is that the world is as it is.” The intimacy with
separation spoken in the sigh likewise manifests separation as a special order
of intimacy. As Mechthild of Magdeburg, a Beguine of the 13th
century says, “O blissful distance from God, how lovingly am I connected with
you!” Or as Meher Baba once spontaneously rhymed, “Oh, you ignorant, all-knowing
Soul / what a plight you are in! / Oh, you weak, all-powerful Soul / what a
plight you are in! / Oh, you miserable, all-happy Soul / what a plight you are
in! / What a plight! / What a sight! / What a delight!” (Lord Meher).
We are indeed in a fiX,
in a spot marked by a great, unfathomable X. Such is the order of the truth of
the sigh. That the mystery of the world is more than metaphysical. That not
only is there something rather than nothing, but that one is. That there is not
only eternity but time, not only good but evil, not only truth but illusion,
not only oneness but separation, not only the universe but the individual, not
only you but me. These are astonishing things, stupendous facts pointing to a
reality more stupendous still. All is somehow more infinite for being finite. In
other words, there is something about the sigh that turns everything inside
out. I hear Levinas sighing as he writes, “Time is not the limitation of being
but its relationship with infinity. Death is not annihilation but the question
that is necessary for this relationship with infinity, or time, to be produced.”
The opening of the
world, in both senses, is poetry, the miracle of the word which takes you aside
and makes one hear its silence and speak what one cannot say. Thus the singular
story in the Gospel of Mark of Jesus’s sigh: “And they brought to him a man who
was deaf and had an impediment in his speech; and they besought him to lay his
hand upon him. And taking him aside from the multitude private, he put his
fingers into his ears, and spat and touched his tongue; and looking up to
heaven, he sighed, and said to him, ‘Ephphatha,’ that is, ‘Be opened.’ And his
ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly” (Mark 7:31-4).
Therefore,
to close my opening of this gathering, to thank the sigh for making possible
our being side by side with these two poets, I will read a poem by a third poet,
one Pseudo-Leopardi, on the same theme:
Unable to swim
the ocean of each other’s eyes
We must sit side
by side, gazing at a blind world
Whose dumb mouth
has lost all taste for silence.
Heads dizzy as
ours naturally lean together,
Kept from falling
off only by the golden sighs
Suspending these
bodies like puppet strings.
The soft tautness
of the secret lines is thinning us,
Sweetly drawing
all life-feeling inward and up
Into something
pulling strongly from far above.
There is no doubt
that the sigh-threads will one day
Draw our hearts
right through the tops of our heads,
Eventually
turning everything totally inside out.
Already my body
is something much less my own,
As if the thought
of your form is my new skeleton
And your memory
of my flesh your new strength.
If I embrace you
my own power would crush me
And if you cling
to me I would surely evaporate.
Dying lovers do
not touch without touching suicide.
Side by side we
float and stand. It is our way of lying
Bound together
across space on this lost world
Whose eyes will
not survive seeing us face to face.
Thursday, March 17, 2016
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
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