Call me fishmeal, for I alone am left to tell thee in our universe. No Queequeg, Tashtego, or Dagoo. Where have they gone? What have you done with them? They were my friends, faithful and just to me. White whale swimming away into the vasty deep. Will he come when you do call him? Or will you wait? Perhaps tomorrow he will come. Food for fishes, merely fishes, jester wishes he were dead. Jack Point roasting on an open fire.
The title means many things at once. We who have been schooled outside of traditions that regularly use this concept sometimes tend to ‘think’ we know what ‘dharma’ means. We may even tend to think that we understand such concepts, if we think about them at all. We look them up on Wikipedia and that copy (well written and well intentioned) tells us that the term might have something to do with right behavior (in the Hindu tradition), or some sort of cosmic law and order in the Buddhist tradition. In simpler, more vaguely new age terms, dharma seems to have something to do with ‘truth’, perhaps in the sense of some kind of ultimate truth, which may harken back to that idea of cosmic law that seems to have spilled across the internet like coffee or whisky across a desktop.
All worth considering, but maybe not a case of “All is true”. Rather, a case of All is somewhat true, or true from a certain perspective, or true in certain contexts. Partly true. When does ‘all is true’ slide into ‘what you will’? ‘Tis the season, after all. The pint sized Falstaff lounging around in his pajamas. Alcohol and swordplay never mix well. Or perhaps they do if Falstaff says so–sherry the source of courage, melting within us and without us, invented as a merchandising tool, left to us to wonder at in season.
Life is not a simple God given right to bear arms. To assert that the Constitution of the United States might really be directly derived from the ten commandments remains pure nonsense. It’s only about getting along. Only if we all get along and behave a bit is merchandising truly successful. Although earthly law may, to some extent, reflect what we think might be divine or holy law, it is worth noting that earth is not exactly heaven. Oh, must we apologise to Sir Thomas Aquinas and to the founding Puritan tradition? Substrata of the collective consciousness of the U.S. mind? Laws divine melt like sherry at the holidays or fat before a fire, melt, thaw, and resolve themselves into a purely utilitarian dew. All the rest is cranberry sauce. Rhetoric. Your very own cheese pizza. Oh, fudge. (Mind you, I am not picking on the United States. Liberté, egalité, and fraternité may apply to a spiderman rescuing a child on a balcony, and the remaining core of the British Empire may still make a few great shoes in Northampton, but how do these ideas apply to the wider field, and at what cost?)
Yet, what is this blog yammering on about anyhow? Have I lost you already? No doubt so many were lost before they signed on, before they read these sayings from the voice in the fire. Since I alone am left to tell thee, thy friends, family, cattle, all lost. Only you that have abandoned hope, since I know you cannot leave this place, only to you can I speak my words. Only to you can I possibly tell the truth. Allfather Odin, put out your eye and hang yourself upon this tree. Everywhere are gods dying on a tree. Everywhen as well.
Yet, we are at sea. We need context. A centre. We need to hold acquaintance with the waves, seeking what the classical Chinese philosopher/commentator Wang Bi likened to the hub of a wheel–dharma, if you will.
Here is T.S. Eliot:
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl. (The Four Quartets, East Coker 2)
Desolation knocking at the door? No. Already inside. Deep within the house. Enjoying brandy by the fire. The holidays. Deep lanes alway shuttered with branches and the past closed off like that recipe of nana’s that we cannot find to save our souls. They were the best damned cookies, I tell you. The best damned. Houses always turning into fields. Into roads, caterpillars and birds becoming mud in winter’s memory of spring. The pale horse, the passing van passing while we all await the owl. “Go forward, Faustus, in that famous art,/ Wherein all Nature’s treasure is contained”. * Proust’s memory.
Always going forward. Hurtling. Spinning. Falling forward to the deep guffaws of time. Faustus asking Mephistophilis (or Mephistopheles in the earlier A text) how it is that he might be out of hell. The devil dressed as a monk replying “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.” Our own surroundings always overturning like catfish roiling in the mulm. Bottom of a muddy pond. Marley’s ghost accompanied by his own infernal atmosphere, his hair and vestments constantly stirred by some hot wind that Scrooge doesn’t feel. Cats, soldiers, and skeletons. Old stone houses falling into disrepair, estates locked up in courts for generations. Old adobe houses unclaimed, melting back into the earth, crows and antelope, oxblood kiva fireplaces where someone once kept hearth. Time in The Winter’s Tale turning 16 years into a monologue. Perspective only the greatest power on the earth, turning moonlight into sunflowers. Turning flours into the best damned cookies.
Sometimes our greatest block to understanding, that old Hamlet “[T]here is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” quips Hamlet. “There is nothing in the world greater than the tip of a bird’s feather, and Mount Tai is small.” says Chuang Tsu. In spite of the fact that Einstein tells us that not everything is relative, an even greater prophet of our times has observed, “It is a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, and would give anything to slow down time, it has a disobliging habit of speeding up.” (J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. )
Hamlet thinks too much. Such men are dangerous. Aye, to themselves. They end up on the roadside, all dressed up with no place to go. In the room the women come and go, sipping their vintage fine porto. My kingdom for a whisky that isn’t counterfeit.
Shhhh. Let it be. Only the holidays bring this out in him. He’ll recover. He’ll be fine. There’s nothing that time can’t ease or can’t erase. Even ourselves.
We are all houses, the beginning and end in each of us. The alpha and the omega. What the hell? What the hell indeed?
One by one the bulbs burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house made once of time, made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were. (Crowley, Little Big)
These are the ghosts of Christmas presents, or the deep winter holidays, paper littered across the floor, remnants of feast in the next room, in the next house. Lipstick on a glass. A kiss of port left as a burgundy smear at the bottom of the well. A half a truffle, chocolate wasted, on a plate set aside by some remark, or some activity. These fulsome days replete with rich sensation, becoming cloying memory even as we watch them. Islands in the stream. Perpetuities in a nutshell. That estate chained up behind those iron gates. No one visiting in living memory, but old ones still tell tales.
*The Evil Angel encourages Faustus to raise devils to aid him in his purpose. (Marlowe, Dr. Faustus)