A consequence of our feelings for warriorship and destiny is a practical faith in the truth of what is unfolding before you. Yielding means going forwards into the world, entering it as it enters you, consuming it as it consumes you, being as active and as alive as reality itself: standing up to it like a man. This is a difficult proposition and to make a reasonable stab at it we must believe wholeheartedly and unflinchingly that what is happening to us now is what is meant to be happening, and is what needs to happen for us to proceed along the path of destiny. In the world of spirit there is nothing accidental or arbitrary, everything is pregnant with meaning and consequence, and everything conspires to drive us forwards. Once we start dipping into that world it will teach us by presenting us with challenges designed to hone and work weaknesses in our spirit. Everything that comes our way, almost by definition, we have the energy for, just. Challenges are not there to be shirked. We have to believe this or the world has no real meaning.
I recently saw the movie The 13th Warrior with a smouldering one-dimensional Antonio Banderas. It's worth catching for the depiction of the Viking way of life. They really were great warriors with a feeling for fate and a love of life (which includes death) that made them immense in their presence and bravery (one of them is called Herger the Joyous). Their enemies (in the film) were bizarre: primitive neanderthal types who all carried around Venus of Willendorf amulets and possessed the strength to rip a Viking head bare handedly from its shoulders (why does Hollywood spoil everything it puts its greedy hands on?). The characters were all captivating and utterly admirable mainly because, I suspect, they lived in the world rather than beside it. The trouble with our civilised middle-class existence is that it has been designed to shield us from spirit because the last thing the powers that be want is a populace of short-fused warriors making trouble. A good modern upbringing will try to instill the socially acceptable warrior qualities in its young by encouraging competitive sports. These develop many wonderful attributes but generally not the most important one - the ability to connect heart-to-heart and let your energy out instantly with no thought or qualification. Even (especially) competitive martial artists know nothing of this and the reason is because they are afraid of failure - they don't believe, in themselves, in spirit, or generally - they are not great lovers.
I recently saw the movie The 13th Warrior with a smouldering one-dimensional Antonio Banderas. It's worth catching for the depiction of the Viking way of life. They really were great warriors with a feeling for fate and a love of life (which includes death) that made them immense in their presence and bravery (one of them is called Herger the Joyous). Their enemies (in the film) were bizarre: primitive neanderthal types who all carried around Venus of Willendorf amulets and possessed the strength to rip a Viking head bare handedly from its shoulders (why does Hollywood spoil everything it puts its greedy hands on?). The characters were all captivating and utterly admirable mainly because, I suspect, they lived in the world rather than beside it. The trouble with our civilised middle-class existence is that it has been designed to shield us from spirit because the last thing the powers that be want is a populace of short-fused warriors making trouble. A good modern upbringing will try to instill the socially acceptable warrior qualities in its young by encouraging competitive sports. These develop many wonderful attributes but generally not the most important one - the ability to connect heart-to-heart and let your energy out instantly with no thought or qualification. Even (especially) competitive martial artists know nothing of this and the reason is because they are afraid of failure - they don't believe, in themselves, in spirit, or generally - they are not great lovers.
I believe in GodBuckminster Fuller famously said "99% of who you are is invisible & untouchable". When you start working in the world of spirit the truth of this statement becomes apparent. Real useful natural intelligence is not the ability of your mind to solve complex problems, but allowing this 99% to come alive and operate for you. It is your better part because it is naturally connected - it is your divine aspect. When John's cat died last August (the most saintly creature I have ever known), John & I were thrown into this world of spirit & connectedness by the magnificence & perfection of his passing. For weeks afterwards our other bodies (our other 99%) were operating almost exclusively, especially when we worked together. We were throwing each other around simply by being & accepting. There was no need to join because we already were, through this third presence which was the spirit of the cat. This is another secret - that real connectedness always takes place through an intermediary - the third heart.
as fully physical
thus the Outer Predmost
of the World on which we 'hang'
as though it were wood and our own bodies are
hanging on it
Charles Olson: see comments page
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Olson's need was to so think the given world that it might again be initial, a fact of its physical event, of lives thus admitted and recognized. The "universe of discourse" was his term for the abstracting, generalizing system of reference, which put the immediate always at a theoretic "distance," so that reflection and representation might then be the primary human acts rather than the very 'actions' themselves. "I have this sense," he writes, "that I am one with my skin..."
So he is able to read his own life as text rather than reference. One time at Black Mountain he said to me, "I need a college to think with," meaning, I understood, that he wanted the multiplicity of instance, all particular and active, not the discrete or isolating possibilities of a chosen few. "Come into the world," he said, "Take a big bite." It was poetry that could move with the necessary syntax and speed, to 'be here' coincident with recognition, a locating act. Just as Pound's Cantos proved a first time record of human thought so sustained for almost half a century, Olson then moved the art to an exceptional capacity for thinking itself. Given Olson's 'methodology,' a favorite term, poetry had no longer a simply literary or cultural practice. It became, rather, a primary activity and resource for what can be called "historical geography," as Duncan McNaughton notes, adding then with significant emphasis taken from Olson's characteristic friend, the geographer, Carl Sauer, that "nothing whatever is outside the consideration of historical geography."
Robert Creeley
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