appearances

Posted on January 22, 2014 by tiramit

POSTCARD#43: Chiang Mai: It’s been a long extended morning, awake before dawn. My day began at 3 am – not a day, a night… correction, not ‘a’ night, just ‘night’, no defining characteristics. Night, as in: ‘the state of night.’ Night as an abstract noun, the darkness that envelops all beings in sleep, including a few birds, head-under-wing, perched on small branches in the treetops, level with my apartment on the third floor. All the lights are on here, dishes make noise, kettle boiling; cups rattle but there’s no coffee, and I can’t go out to get some because everything is closed… a long time to wait before the little supermarket round the corner is open. I sit near the window and look at the birds breathing, their small chest movements sometimes visible.

A couple of hours reading friends’ blogs in the UK and the East coast of the US. And by the time it’s daylight, and Chiang Mai is awake, I feel like going back to bed. But instead, I’m walking along the road blinking in the sunshine. The air is warm like a soft blanket; no heaviness of winter clothing or hard shoes. T-shirt, shorts and rubber slippers, everything light and easy. Noise and clatter, traffic, smells of food cooking. Everywhere you look it’s like a children’s picture book, blue sky and golden people who smile all the time. The world has been photo shopped, vivid, maximum-pixels. Everything appears as if lit from within, bananas are almost luminous; papaya fruit is a magic-marker orange. Too bright for me, I feel like an owl in the daylight, a nocturnal shadow… let me hide in the shade of my sunglasses; deep, cool, blue-green, cloaked in my dark, quiet space.

After the eye operation I’ve been disturbed by bright light. The doctor says the surface of the cornea is exposed, I have “the eyes of a twenty-year-old’ (wow). It’ll take a couple of years to adjust to the world. The sunlight in Thailand is bright like a television studio and I might have felt less sensitive about light, maybe, if I’d been living in the North of Scotland, where I’m from, and been the pale, indistinct, colourless being that I really am, with the pigmentation of a plant growing in the darkness – long and extended tendrils seeking out tiny sources of sunshine and taking on the glow of colour only when the growing tip finds its way through a crack and into a glimmer of light.

So I’m making my way along the small pavement, looking out for traffic hazards in this busy place and staying alert because of the rough paving underfoot I could stumble on – all kinds of obstructions and sometimes no pavement at all. A small temporary restaurant has arrived that wasn’t here yesterday, the owner just drives up in a pickup truck, sets up his stuff on the pavement, tiny tables unfolded and stools to sit on. It blocks the way, pedestrians cannot get past, have to step down on the road and walk out in the traffic, then back up on the pavement again. Can’t help feeling they ‘shouldn’t’ be allowed to do that… I notice though, that nobody here seems unduly affected by the inconvenience. Thais don’t impose their ‘preferences’ on a world that is for the most part neutral. It’s a Western thing to try to customize it according to what it ‘should’ be like, and engage with all the feelings conjured up by a ‘self’ that makes ‘my’ world into something good, bad or whatever.

Suffering a bit and thinking about this turmoil of having to adjust my expectations of the world according to how things appear to be and why bother with all that because things never turn out exactly as I want them to be – but the best is yet to come, really, because when I get to the little supermarket, the whole place has been demolished! It is totally not there. Doors taken out and nothing remains of the place that I recognize, just this very large, dark, dusty hole in the building. Some kind of major renovation. Hmmm looks like I’ll not get the coffee I came here for… but on the way back I see the temporary shop erected on the pavement is selling coffee. So I sit down and have one there.

‘For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world. Our life is endless, in just the same way that our field of vision has no boundaries.’ [Wittgenstein]

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Listening 1

Posted on July 15, 2012 by tiramit

South India: Birdsong. A small wave of tiny notes. Sitting on the cushion under a thatched structure built on the roof. Focus on breathing, soft warm air, it’s the end of the night. Dawn light coming up. The birds near to me are surprisingly loud, so much energy from such a small body, such a tiny breathing system. There are these silent intervals, to take a bird-size breath of air, I think, then a long musical ‘verse’, and another silent interval for breath; the ‘song’ moves on to the next verse and so on. The regular pace of these silent intervals contributes to the pattern of the verses. Birdsong is a ballad, a story about something that goes on and on; more than enough; an abundance. It blows away the scarcity of my small mindedness. I can see why they call it ‘The Dawn Chorus.’ Sky is full of sound, a huge chord played on an instrument with a great number of strings

Listening consciousness and sound object are one and the same thing, there’s an affinity with birdsong. Maybe it’s about acoustic resonances of the bird cranium being all of a oneness as far as we other living creatures in the world are able to perceive it. And, part of it too, are the echoes in the spaces between things: reflective surfaces, tree trunks, branches, walls, the air, clouds. Sympathetic resonances create multiple frequencies like the echo it makes on the underside of my thatched roof. And now it’s gradually diminishing; no grande finale, just a musical occurrence that takes place every day and gets forgotten about as soon as the sun rises in the dramatic way it does, expanding into our lives and everything becomes secondary to that main event.

Other sounds become heard; ordinary household noises, miscellaneous gentle ‘clatter’ from houses through open windows. Dishes clink, aluminium pots make that dull ‘ding’ sound. A shout, partial sound of a goat. child cries, cock crows, dog barks, a bicycle bell, street trader’s call, a car horn honks. Something clinks, and it goes on, individual recognisable sounds all appear in consciousness exactly as they occur, no end to it. Each has its own space, situated in its place in a clear sequence, one after the other.

I’m thinking there’s something about it that suggests a composer could create an orchestral symphony out of this? But it doesn’t work that way, I realise. It’s not the ‘actual’ sound I’m listening to, it’s the ear consciousness function that is set to rationalise the flow into an orderly pattern of ‘virtual’ sound. Each unit of sound has a place, according to how the consciousness function selected it, unknown partial sounds are replaced by known sounds, ear consciousness triggers a process so the object is placed according to the ‘closest match’ that can be found in the filing system.

The actual sound space I’m surrounded by may well be a tremendous complexity of pieces of things; an ocean of permutations. There’s some insight into what this amounts to but I know I’m not even taking on anything resembling the scale of it. I seek stability from this chaos: the ‘self’ shapes the randomness of the universe into a manageable chunk and I can settle with that thought.

‘In the normal way, attention shifts from one thing to another. Surprising events grab the attention: other chains of thought wait to be finished as soon as there is a gap. So there is never any peace. This is efficient in using all available processing capacity, but what does it feel like to be … in such a system? I suppose it feels like most of us do feel – pretty confusing. The only thing that gives it any stability is the constant presence of a stable self model. No wonder we cling to it.’ Dr. Susan Blackmore [link to: Science tackles the self ]

[Link to: Listening 2]

rope seen as snake

Posted on July 12, 2012 by tiramit

OLD NOTEBOOKS: Nontaburi, Thailand: Alone in a house surrounded by trees. Leaves filter a lovely green light all around; birds, lizards, squirrels, I see something move out on the patio… is it a bird, dropped down from a branch to peck at something? There, it moves again – just a hop and it’s a few feet further on. I sit very still, don’t want to frighten it away. I see it now, in the same position, not moving. After a long time waiting for it to change position, I decide to slowly get up and see what happens when I do that. It’s still not moving – maybe it’s injured. I go out on the patio and walk up to it. Ahhh… the bird is not a bird, it’s a large brown leaf, blown by the wind across the patio surface.

Go back inside and look at it again. It looks exactly like a bird, and just then a gust of wind blows the leaf. The animation of it is absolutely convincing, but I see it now as a leaf, not a bird. How strange, believing that something is there, then having to accept that it’s not. The teaching about the rope and the snake; a piece of rope lying on the ground is thought to be a snake. It’s an analogy of ‘self’ seen in consciousness + name-and-form: I recognize that the rope is a rope, not a snake, and can see how the illusion occurs. Or I may not see it and be convinced it’s a snake… maybe for a long time – a whole lifetime preoccupied with a ‘self’ that isn’t there.

This small epiphany occurs after another curiously similar event took place in this quiet house. I’m alone here except for D who is a grad student, working part-time, and he also takes care of the place. I don’t see D much, he works night shift sometimes, sleeping in the middle of the day. The house is large and I’m never absolutely sure if he’s here or not. Usually he stays in his room so I’m used to not seeing him around. I just quietly go about the house, day after day, not making too much noise in case he’s sleeping and quite often forget about him completely.

Then, just the other day, I start to wonder what happened to him. I look in the car park and his car is not there. When did I last see his car? Two days ago, or longer than that? I go to look at his laundry – could be the same laundry that’s been there for a while… clothes without a person inside them – remembering the movie: The Time Traveller’s Wife. I have to stop for a moment and think, when did I see him last? Go up to his room, door is open, nobody there. Hard to believe, I assumed D was in the house but I’ve been alone the whole time. The leaf-seen-as-bird metaphor. Something I thought was there, wasn’t… thinking it’s one thing, then it’s not. The usual sense of ‘me’ suddenly gone… then it returns again. Everything feels light and transparent.

‘It was as if lightning coursed within my chest. The impact lasted for a while, and for the next few weeks whenever I saw people, they seemed like a magician’s illusions in that they appeared to inherently exist but I knew that they actually did not.’ [‘How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life’. The Dalai Lama, in the sixties reflecting on the Rope Seen As Snake metaphor, phenomena being dependent on conceptuality and his discovery that the “I” exists conceptually, dependent on mind and body; not an entity in itself] Source: Emptiness and Existence:

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