McDonalds Memo - 3

[tariki]

Trying to head for simplicity. I don't often try to chart a course, but there are always exceptions.

Simplicity. I no longer listen to the news or visit News Websites. Fortunately Mrs Tariki is with me on this. Once the headlines have been spouted then its switch over to any Quiz Show on offer. Hopefully we can hit one that we have seen before and therefore get a few correct answers.

And giving up on soccer after a lifetime of following certain clubs, going to away games, stewing over results. I think VAR helped finish it off. Enough said.

And reading. Often I have had about 10 or so books going at once. E-books and "real" books - I love the heft of them, and actually prefer a well read one, the pages ruffled, well loved. 

Now just two. One in Kindle, another to touch and feel. My current e-book is "The Letters of John Keats", a Penguin edition with various notes and commentary. I don't actually like much of Keat's poetry - I find it a bit turgid, which probably says more about me than the poetry - but there you go. But I find his life, in biographies, ever fascinating. His friendships, his commitment to "beauty" and "truth". So ardent. And his letters are fine. 

It was in his letters that he spoke of negative capability, which he saw as a contrast to any striving towards "certainties", or as you can find in Wiki....

......to pursue a vision of artistic beauty even when it leads them into intellectual confusion and uncertainty, as opposed to a preference for philosophical certainty over artistic beauty. The term has been used by poets and philosophers to describe the ability to perceive and recognise truths beyond the reach of consecutive reasoning.

Keats said that no worthwhile truth could be found by consecutive reasoning, and thus he would have appreciated the central philosophy of Buddhism, the Madhyamika, which speaks of the eternal conflict in reason, and therefore the need to rise (or is it "dip") to another standpoint - this not a position as such, but a no-position that supercedes all positions. The Middle Way. 

Well, enough of that. My "real" book is a rather weighty tome, Thomas Mann's "The Brothers of Joseph", which is a re-telling of the well known Biblical story. Weighty? Yes, about 1500 pages, Mann's magnum opus.

I was actually trying to read (the second attempt) Mann's "The Magic Mountain" but alas found it above my head. I was getting nothing from it, its themes and allusions lost on me. But the "Brothers" is a story, although the text is pretty dense and convoluted. But this suits me. I can read just a small section at a time, yet just one paragraph often offers much to reflect upon. And humorous at times. Joseph is presented as fairly "pagan" in outlook. Much to ponder. 

SPOILER ALERT:- Joseph ends up as top man in Egypt and they all live happily ever after.

One exception, is that I continue to dip into - on and off, mainly off - Thomas Cleary's translation of "The Blue Cliff Record", a collection of 100 Zen Koans. Cleary's book is called "Secrets of the Blue Cliff Record" and contains commentary by two old zen masters. Most - if not all - of its secrets remain such to me. Looking up my records, I see that I downloaded this book on 22nd March 2014. So far I have reached "Case 69" , called "Nansen's Circle". As I have indicated, I make little of what is on offer, but have persevered. Just once or twice something "clicks" (consecutively or not) and I feel as though the hefty purchase price was not entirely wasted. 

Here is "Jansen's Circle" (why should I be the only one to suffer?)

With no place to sink in your teeth, the mind seal of Zen masters is like the works of an iron ox. Having passed through a forest of thorns, a Zen practitioner is like a snowflake on a red-hot furnace. Leaving aside piercing and penetrating on level ground for now, when you do not fall into conditions, then what?

I do think that this has to do with "radical freedom" and the possiblities of its existence, of breaking free of our conditioning in the only way a finite being can. But I may be wrong. The commentary by the two "masters" simply adds confusion, at least to my mind. Hakuin, for instance, who says 'when consciousness in the skull is exhausted, how can joy stand,' which is hard to get a bite on".  Well, it certainly is. 

Anyway, enough for now. I feel better for tapping this waffle out, even if no one else does from reading it.

Edited January 7, 2023 by tariki