To paraphrase Shantideva, to love is to exchange "I" and "other." He calls love a "sacred mystery," because we don't know how it works - just that, when it is real, it always does.

I would venture some thoughts of my own, but I think I'd prefer to leave it up to those who have had more experience than I have. I think all of us, in a sense, must stand on the shoulders of giants.

There is no belief here. There is only knowledge, and I can speak from the knowledge which comes from trial and experience to say that I have found this to be true.

I am glad I read Eliot's "Prufrock" when I did, when I was 17. Reading it again now, only three years later, this passage does not seem so much forlorn as it does contemplative, if put in proper perspective:

I grow old - I grow old.
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?
Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think they will sing to me.


I had contemplated writing a treatise on the sadness of aging after reading that passage, and the simple solemn beauty of his quip that he does not think the mermaids will sing to him. And is there anything more representative of the subtlety of life, the sweetness and transience of youth, than a ripe peach?

But now I see that it can also be treated as an expression of aging, the subtle beauty of the impermanent. As Lord Buddha has said, in death the elements recombine - we become our children and the grains of sand and the waves that rush over them. We will be walked upon by people in white flannel trousers with the bottoms rolled, and swum through by mermaids as they sing to one another.

Isn't it beautiful when you think of it this way? Whenever I begin to fear growing old (yes, even 20-year-olds do), I think of this.

Glancing back and forth from computer screen to the dust-obscured busy street outside my window (it has been a long time since these windows have been cleaned), I think about words that describe my present state, and virtually anything fits. Contemplation. Solitude. Why nouns? Why not verbs? Running, jumping, moving, changing - or passive: being, knowing, recognizing. Remember the Borges story, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, of an encyclopaedia entry about a civilization without nouns - "the river under the moon in the night " translates as "the liquidly-running silent under the rising shining-out of the darkly enveloping." Can we really understand this? Imagine a civilization without the restive word-quality of nouns. How active we might be! How much progress a single day would yield! And there is my word - opportunity.

There is a summer of opportunity ahead of me. To read and to write, to establish contact with my deeper self through an intensification of the spiritual path, and to accomplish everything that I couldn't during the academic year. I have the opportunity to create the best possible experience for the incoming freshmen in the FOCI program at Georgetown, to impact all four of their years in Washington, DC, and yes, perhaps change the course of their lives. I have the opportunity to get it right this time; I have the opportunity to destroy completely, once and for all, my ego.

There is a deeper meaning of opportunity as well. There is the opportunity that I have and that others do not. Can I share this opportunity? Not concretely, perhaps, but with diligent effort I can increase and multiply the opportunity I have been given, almost like an investment. Save up the good will and the love given as a token at each available moment of our lives, and by the time death comes, we have amassed a fortune. What we do with this fortune is not our choice - it is distributed to the world, our heir apparent to the wealth of life.

The opportunities we are given are little more than inanimate objects or empty space for us to move through - it is our action that determines the fate of those material things. What did George Harrison say? "We were talking about the space between us all, and the people, who hide behind the wall of illusion, never glimpse the truth 'til it's far too late. If they only knew!" That's the space. And: "With our love, we can change the world" --That's the action. Within us, without us, we are what we make of our opportunities.

Life is a noun, to be viewed retrospectively, building the sepulchres of the fathers, as Emerson would say.

But living is a verb. Isn't that inspiring?

This morning, I read the following passage from the works of Eknath Easwaran:

"It is not enough to have faith in spiritual ideals, based on the testimony of the scriptures or spiritual teachers. We must realize these truths for ourselves, in our own life and consciousness. As the Buddha was fond of saying, the spiritual teacher only points the way; we must do our own traveling. The personal example of others may plant the seed in our hearts, but faith can develop fully only when we begin to experience these truths in our own lives."

    Beliefs should ideally come from a deep desire to know. A belief is fine to have, but it should have an accompanying rationale for its being so firmly embedded within one's consciousness. What this means is that a belief is not an end, but rather a waystation on one's path to ultimate knowledge, such that, "I believe that if I follow Buddha's noble Eightfold Path and his other stated doctrines, I will ultimately reach a state of Nirvana." This belief must be put into active practice if it is to be worth anything at all - otherwise these are just cheap and hollow words. We can manipulate our minds to do all kinds of things - believing, among them - so we should not take belief without experiential confirmation as truth. If it is truly a belief, it arises from a curiosity to know and a desire to do; to make a distinction, if it is a true belief, then it must also be confirmed by valid experience.

    This is among the reasons why I don't prefer the term "faith" as an interchangeable substitute for "religion" or for that matter a set of nonspecific spiritual values: because faith cannot be treated as the end-all-be-all of our existence on earth, just as inevitably flawed sense-based outlooks cannot suffice for an accurate knowledge of the metaphysical. One can believe in God to the end of time, but without experiential confirmation (such as intense prayer, or deep meditation) that leads the spiritual aspirant into a state of knowing - even beginning to know - such faith or belief will remain a premature expression of one's divine inner nature.

A vision.

Myself, my friends, my family, people I have never met,

All on some kind of moving vehicle barreling past a flash of light and intermittent darkness.

A liberating feeling, as though we are all going to a peaceful, happy place,

Perhaps to death.

Someone begins to pray – I hear OM Ma Ni Pad Me Hum,

One syllable at a time, then a Christian prayer, then Hindu, then Jewish,

And then I find myself taking up the muezzin’s call.

Others join me in Allah, Allah and all of a sudden I find myself swirling,

And I awaken in a desert land of vaulted arches and silk and spice.

A bit like Agra. A bit like Akbar’s tomb, and Shah Jahan’s prison. A bit like Aurangzeb’s fort. Life and death and safety and uncertainty all as one.

And I am in a caravan of someone of great importance, riding at the head of an endless stream of haremlike single-horseback coach-tents,

Following and revolving behind me in a line.

Their clip-clop is audible and soothing and perfectly rhythmic, as if all are as one.

Then we begin to descend a hill, up a sort of entryway to what I know is a fortress or palace of some kind.

And as I reach the top I try to think of something else and I almost can,

(Almost see the lotus blooming on the lake surface!) but not quite,

And I see in front of the me the front of the caravan turning back around and coming back towards me,

Passing me on my right and my left, then on my right, and I make a joke about being in America not England. And it seems funny for a moment because I know that there is no distinction.

And I feel myself begin to turn around to come back the way I’ve come,

Back down the sandy dusty hill with my train of mobile harems in tow,

And I feel pure joy,

Because I know that I will come back to this place of orange sand and blue skies.

And I awaken.

Allah Allah… Allah Allah… Ringing about me still, as I open my eyes--

    In my beginning is my end, and in my end is my beginning.

3 August 2006 10.25 pm

Home now for two days and some change. This is my final diary entry and as such I feel it necessary to commemorate the occasion by typing it rather than writing in my usual cryptic longhand. Three days since I’ve been in India and I still don’t know what to think or even how to go about beginning to think about thinking.

- Something whining near my ear: a mosquito. Back at Shantivanam again – it buzzed – and I died—

So much that happened. It would be impossible to recount all of it, really. This is the eternal predicament of all writers. There is a perfection which exists all around, call it reality, call it consciousness or being; we see it in everything we do. We hear it in the sound of the rain against the window. The sun on our face. The itchtingleprick of a miniscule needle drawing blood out of us and into an insect, gone before it is felt. I hear it in Katrina’s voice – the sadness, overwhelming: the contours of Raymond’s long face, like a Greek comic mask: the pregnant question of Brother Amaldas – can you feel the Shanti? How can we capture all? How can we even begin to go about capturing even some?

The struggle it seems is futile. To try to shape words on a page or colors on a canvas in order to allow another to experience fully that which spurred the artist to create his paltry imitation – try we must but a full realization of individual experience on a mass scale can never be achieved under any circumstance but the Divine. But this is the true beauty of the struggle for creation in art: that which the artist has tried to render, beginning with the model of reality as he sees it, darkly and through the distorting glass of I and mine, leaves his poor artistry’s control the moment that the first letter has been laid on the page or the first daub of paint is smeared on a canvas, for whether he is recreating his perception or the dark glass which alters it, the fundamental truth is that every person will perceive uniquely, beautifully. This is the Divine: that that which seems as though it is separate and unique and a part of our own experience and memory exists only truly within the realm of the universal, that is, as something that, when the shroud of the individual mirage of perception is removed, exists within all things and without them, because beyond the world of perception there is only the one timeless and ubiquitous truth of knowledge and experience and makingness (there is a German word for this which I am forgetting) abiding in a plane all its own, which is the true Kingdom of Heaven. Within you without you – in the space between us.

Plato was wrong. This is what can be called the beauty of art – the imperfection and the futility, perhaps noble, of the struggle to create and endure where there cannot be any truly new or unique creation and endurance is inherent within everything at its core. A delight in disorder, Herrick called it: this does more bewitch me than art precise in every part. The truly great works are those in which the original vision of the artist imagining perfection in his vision of his completed creation shines through into his disorderly and tragically incomplete imitation of his own glimpse of the Divine in all things – and this not without some remorse for things that might have been. The irony: things that might have been but which are and cannot be seen. They are that which is.

This is my poor attempt: to jot down creaking skeletons of ineffectual words imbued with not a fraction of the passion of being that they are meant to convey. Attempted kidnapping, to whisk my readers away to a faroff land that does not exist, at least not exactly like I’ve told it, and even if it did, it certainly doesn’t any longer. Read, and make of it what you will. The truth is not in the words. It is in the thing itself. It is in you.

What have I left out? Telling it now, adding it at the end, emendations made to a childish portrait meant to be a masterpiece, trying to cover errors and fill in holes, but of course this is like reciting verse out of its original context: they are made into what we would like to make of them:

NAVEEN DIDN’T MEET US

Raymond and I wanted our money back, for the train tickets purchased anew because of Naveen’s mistake. Oops. Ninety dollars like Kaiser Sozé – fft! Raymond exchanged stern words on the phone from our hotel room in Delhi. Naveen spent the rest of our stay avoiding us: couldn’t call because he was out of station. Couldn’t arrange a meeting because he was already in one. Didn’t drive us to the airport because of business. Busy-ness.

THE BLACK TAJ MAHAL – BUILDING AND DRINK ALIKE

A legend: that Shah Jahan planned to build a second Taj, across the river from the first, in black marble, for his own tomb. To shadow the brilliance of his Most Excellent Lady. How amazing it would have been – astonishing. Tragic to picture what, once again, might have been. Is it there?

Aurangzeb had his father placed on house arrest and imprisoned in Red Fort, in a cell of white marble carved and inlaid with precious stones, where he lived out his final eight years gazing across the river at his most Excellent Crown of all Palaces. Tajii Mumtaaz Mahal. Smitten. And then after he died his son violated all beauty and perfection and placed his father’s sepulchre beside that of his most beloved wife. Slightly behind and to the left. Who can know perfection if it is so easily tainted? Is it perfection at all?

A pepsi float with vanilla ice cream, served in a frosty tumbler, tall, with a straw. An edible masterpiece to mock the legend that might have been realized: how cruel that no matter how pleasing it is to the palate, in the end the Black Taj leaves the body through the same orifice that all other solids leaving the body depart through. Unto shit thou shalt return; and from shit shall a new being be made.

LOOK ON MY WORKS, YE MORTALS, AND DESPAIR

Through an anteroom door of goldleaf calligraphy intricate and pristine, down a long echoing hallway barren and sloping the grand chamber of the tomb of Akbar, the Great Greater Greatest, superlative among his dynasty and in history. Walls rising to fifty feet above the cold granite floor polished smooth by the wear of four hundred years of millions of bare feet firmly grounded. Whistling, like Lawrence:

You can hear the girls declare,

He must be a millionaire.

The sound takes on a new life, reverberverberating, berverberver, berating, revere, berating: So humble a tomb. We are all the same in death: all things go, all things go. To the creator. I am Akbar the Ozymandian. Look on my works, ye mortals, and despair.

A GOOD WALK SPOILT

Walking in Agra to outrun the five hours remaining between the end of our sightseeing tour and departure by train. Being followed by two men pedaling, peddling bicycle rickshaws competing for our patronage. No, thank you, we don’t want it, just walking, thanks. American? No, Australian. Feigning Australianism badly, but to them all white people must look the same and sound the same at that. Walking by six men clad in soiled undershirts and dhotis, one approached me and asked to buy my necklace. Stink of rum about his dirty stubble. No, I said. Why not. My mother made it for me, and I like it, and I intend to keep it. Then how about my shirt, he asked. Name a price. A hundred dollars US, I said. Don’t want it so much anymore, eh? Angry, no, belligerent: you think only you stupid Europeans have money? You think you’re the only rich people in the world? Come and play cards and find out who’s really rich, or take off your shirt now, I will buy it from you. I am not a European, I said. Fuck you, I thought, because he was right. Money is a husk – not the jewel in the lotus within the heart. A diamond in the rough stubble rumsmelling grime, it was there somewhere, but I couldn’t see it. They see dollar signs but we see empty hands. Do I look like that which my judgment sees?

RAYMOND’S COMMENT THAT WE WILL EVENTUALLY FORM A DIFFERENT PERCEPTION OF THE OVERALL TONE OF OUR VISIT RETROACTIVELY DUE TO OUR OMISSION OF THE MORE UNPLEASANT DETAILS SIMPLY FOR LACK OF ENERGY IN THE ACT OF RETELLING

And we will tell it like we wanted it to be so much that in the end we begin really to believe that it is as we say and not as we saw.

SET A COURSE SOU’-SOU’WEST, MISTER RAYMOND IF-YOU-PLEASE

Stepping off the metro at the Karol Bagh stop and the realization that we do not know how to get back to our hotel. Raymond, with his hand on our rickshaw driver’s shoulder, began giving directions in pantomime completely by vague sensory recollection. Let the Jew be my guide. Left here, yes, left. And straight, no, no turn, straight, yes. Now right. Now right again, round the roundabout, keep going. There’s the beggars from this morning. There’s the chemist’s shop we passed last night. Here somewhere, he said. Yes, I know, I said, but this is up to you since my sense of direction has been turned completely on its head. I have been turned on my head. There! he exclaimed. The White House hotel, remember? No. Yeah, the White House. Further up this street, more, he said, longer down, yes.

A wave of relief as the unremarkable façade of the Sunstar Residency came into view. Stepping out, I paid the driver, hunched nervously at the wheel, one hundred rupees above the fare he requested. Now I patted him on the shoulder. Tough driving. Hard, I said motioning. You did a good job. Thank you, I said, and he smiled.

I should have paid Raymond.

AWKWARD IN THE ORIGINAL SENSE OF THE BIRD WITHOUT CAPACITY FOR FLIGHT

On the sleeper car pulling into Delhi, our attendant drew back the curtains to the compartment as we were finishing breakfast. Held out a tray with mints and a few bills: a tip, sir, he said. I looked at Raymond and he gave me the Look back and I reached into my pocket and took out eighty rupees in bills and deposited all onto the tray. Still he held it in front of me. Knowing the answer before I asked, I asked anyway, Good? That bloody indecipherable headbob. A smile, nervous, laughter, false with anger lacing tightly a net beneath. No, huh? Raymond, his voice low, fast, in our coded English: ay-doublyew-kay-word. Yeah, yeah I know. Another hundred fell out of my hands and he nodded, or bobbed, head floating high above my capacity to understand what he meant. O good. Acceptable at last.

Then moving the tray from me to Raymond. Anger rising, no, we won’t be panhandled, we are not whiteskinned moneybags. All you did was bring us sheets so dusty that I spent the whole night sneezing. God damn it, I said to Raymond, tell him no. That’s enough for the both of us.

No money, Raymond said. No money. It was the truth, almost – only 300 rupees between us.

ALL YOU PEOPLE LOOK THE SAME TO ME

Outside the state emporiums in Delhi, buying water. Rs. 20/litre, cold. 15 room temperature. Still sneezing from the train blanket’s residue. Our salesman: are you Chinese? Raymond and I exchange furtive smiles. Yes, he said, we are. How can you tell?

A TACTICAL INCISION

Raymond to Fr. Joe on our last meeting with him at the Kripa Foundation. In America we have a saying that if you talk the talk, you’d better be able to walk the walk. Truly, Fr. Joe, you seem to embody this: you do everything you say you do, and then you go on to do more. I’m honored to have met you, and it’s been truly refreshing to have seen all of the great things that an honest and committed person is capable of doing. Father Joe smiling with wet eyes, and Raymond glancing quickly, ever so slightly smiling, in my direction. I knew. I felt like laughing out loud – his words were true. Undeniably so, and I knew it. We all knew it, and although I could not bear to look him in the face for fear of giving myself away I felt the Priest, the talker of talks, burning with the shame of the truth about him that we had all discovered in those three weeks together. The ersatz model against the real thing.

Afterward I must admit that I felt genuinely and inexplicably sorry for him. Even his fingers, curled slightly at the first knuckle, looked sad.

EVERYONE LAUGHS AT ADAM’S SUDDEN APPREHENSION

The first time I heard Adam ask Naveen I laughed, and so did he. Do you know any enlightened masters? We all laughed, a good polite chuckle. No, I don’t think there are very many Buddhas walking around outside the hotel, Naveen said.

And then I came to see that Adam was serious, the trip wearing on as he asked more people and they gave the same goodnatured chuckle. No, we don’t know any. The konchoks. The boat driver on the Ganges. Sister Marie-Louise. Brother Amaldas. Laughing, no, no, or they didn’t understand. Perhaps both. Adam’s question began to wear on him, and to wear itself out. By the time we reached Shantivanam he had changed the phrasing to something closer in nature to a plea: where can I find an enlightened master?

Adam, reading through books by mystics, the Saad-Vidya, the Upanisads, Easwaran’s Mantram Handbook. The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind…

More painful than I think anything else on this trip, more than seeing the man whom I thought I loved and respected self-destruct or witnessing the group dynamic fracture into camps, all against one, was watching Adam lose his confidence in the beauty of the workings of the world, and of the capacity for knowledge of himself. No more faith: he lost it. Perdido. I do not know if lost faith is ever returned. He walks in light but all he sees is darkness. Let us hope.

A SURVEY of the LANDS ADJACENT to the TOMB OF AKBAR, set to the tune of Schubert’s Piano Trio in E-Flat Minor, Op. 100 (Second Movement)

It was a time and a mile-long time, it was
Taken down turned around down dusty roads
Slicing scars through virgin hills and creeping
Lurching slowly with an eye towards the petrol gauge
Ticking back – back – back – winding the wheel back
To its origin, lurching in time, methodically mad
While the world’s wax curtains draw back waning, to reveal:
A stop.

 

(Glottal:) ألشِّتاءُ

 

Stopmotionstopstop, stuttering, animated, creaking desolate.
Ozymandias: Look On My Works, Despairing.
Forgive them Lord for they know not what they are getting themselves into.
Iron Nails Ran In, perfectly autarkeiaic.
Get up down over yonder, going home
To be a stranger again
Been there yes but honey have we done that
I dont think but perhaps have we O perhaps –
The beast with two backs backtoback
Like butterflies copulating on a twig (a day in the life,
the life in a day)
Where are we going do you know
All things go, surely, to the destroyer
Om namaha Shivaya
Om bhavaya ishaya namaha.

 

Introibo ad altare dei and come out
clean as a whistle on the other side.

    For the last eight days of September and the first 29 days of October I smoked like a fiend. A chimney if you will. Probably went through three packs a week, perhaps more if I became frustrated with myself and threw my cigarettes away only to discover eighteen hours later that I was desperately in need – not of want, but feeling a deep necessity as though my most inaccessible character was bound to this dry rolled up leaf laced with toxins and producing rich and foul-smelling smoke whose calm effluvience so artfully destroyed, masterfully really, the lungs of al-dachna, the one who smokes – of a cigarette. I would not stoop to bumming. Not condescend to bumming – to asking politely, would you kind sir or madame so kindly give to me, kindly, a kind roll of kind kindling for my aching lungs, so that I may gracefully and poetically kill myself slowly and meteredly as a master painter with his life’s work? No – not I. I would furnish my own ends, thank you.

Would I could afford to
buy myself some cancer right now –
I’d smoke it all day, and
all night too: betcha by golly wow!

Yes, juvenility. But it is reality. I think the reason that I began those few weeks ago was not for the feeling of the smoke entering my lungs – for, really, who ever finds such a thought attractive? – or for the acrid taste of burnt tobacco filling my mouth, but for the image of myself destroying myself: consciously, systematically, fashionably. Like tuberculosis - such a romantic disease, a disease of the Romantic period, by romantics, for romantics; maybe it was the romantic in me, darling.... Like Chekhov, destroyed by circumstance before I would have a chance to do anything that tarnished my career. Before I had a career.

There is something powerful about breathing in the remnants of a flame and spewing it back out again from an orifice which talks and breathes and eats and makes love and all other sorts of things, vomiting, I don’t know – sort of like signing my own death warrant but knowing for a long time that Hades’ messenger won’t come to collect any time soon. It was like gambling – ultimately the addict does it for the thrill, not for the winnings, and when it came down to it I enjoyed the rush and didn’t care to compound the facts in my head that would have inevitably revealed to me that there was no way I could possibly win against the house with the odds stacked the way they were. But that was my rationale – my personality, even. Some people are politicians; others are jocks; geeks; jokers; I found myself, more and more, becoming a smoker. Name: Haddad. DOB: Sixtwentytwoeightyseven. Occupation: Smoker. Like José Jimenez – My name: smoker…. My job: smoker…
But then, last Sunday, I pulled myself out of bed at eight in the morning and donned my winter jacket (even though it was only late fall) and a hat and walked down 35th street to M to cheer on Danny Gude in the Marine Corps Marathon. We (myself, Nick, Piya, the crowd, in anticipation and joy, pervasive) waited. The front runners came: smiling and breathing heavily and the muscles in their exposed legs groaning and shaking with the strain of exertion and determination, pulsating wildly with some animal power which only true athletes can muster. Then more people, all happy, all keeping pace with one another – then Danny, running by in a blur of black Underarmour, sunglasses firmly affixed to his face, running and smiling for my camera which caught his happy face amidst a blurred cloud of energy and action and life: and seeing him, and seeing all these happy, fit, fullbreathing heartpounding joie-de-vivresque people, people, people¸ running by in a happy line tens of thousands deep and seven happy miles long, all joyous and embracing the life that was theirs, I felt myself suddenly full with a deep longing to be myself again, to have my own personality, to be happy and fit and all of these things that the act brooding away the remainder of my truncated life in a nimbus of smoke prevented me from becoming or fully understanding. I wanted to do it. I wanted to be something different. I want to live:

To see the earth turn one more time –
I want to live
To feel a hand that isn’t mine…

It has been five days since I have smoked; since Sunday morning I have not even craved a cigarette once – something about knowing that I have life and there is a certain way in which I can enjoy it and others in which I can squander it prevents me from taking up the active forfeiture of true happiness that smokers, consciously or not, but probably to at least some degree the former, pledge with such passive sadness and abandon. Since Sunday I have run a total of twentyfive miles – almost a whole marathon. The Dublin Marathon will be held on October 26th next year. I will be there, among the miles-long lines of thousands or happy runners breathing heavy with faces reddening and hearts pounding with the essence of mortal existence. Three hundred fiftyseven days and counting: I have made a pact with myself not to smoke any longer, never to light up a cigarette again. Will I honor it? I would like to think yes.
I hope I have not become preachy. I hope I will not unabashedly foist my feelings and opinions upon others unwarrantedly. But as Paul Simon says I know what I know:

The Four Noble Truths, as reïnterpreted by A. Haddad:

1. There is suffering which suffuses the world.
2. I suffer.
3. This suffering is not me – I am myself, not my suffering.
4. My true self is based in unlimited tranquility and joy.