Dreams

 

I omit references within the text as this is a familiar essay, far from a scholarly one.   My readers will have noticed that I am hardly a nice observer of the distinction, though, and I have decided to append a general list of a few sources unnamed in the body of the piece, many of which are well-known. 

 

     Sir Thomas Browne observes in his excellent essay on dreams “that some have never dreamed is as improbable as that some have never laughed.”  People all dream nightly, and thus may act as gods, creating worlds, or at least as artists, spinners of gossamer fictions with such delicacy that they fall to pieces and vanish after the eyes have opened.  This evidence of the fundamental human need for narrative is reconfirmed daily by everyone’s experience, but there is no more agreement about the best use for these products of the imagination than for their cousins emerging from the more conscious areas of the brain, the short stories in a literary quarterly.

     Perhaps the evanescent quality of dreams (in which way they contrast with the author’s hopes of eternal life on the page at least) has a fortunate aspect.  Though fascinating to the dreamer, laden with significant detail and accompanied by urgent emotion, dreams generally cannot survive retelling.  There is little so boring as someone else’s dream.  Even great writers like Anais Nin and Jack Kerouac cannot sustain reader’s interest in unprocessed records of nighttime fantasies.  Yet dreams have such beguiling appeal to the dreamer that they seem as though they surely must bear consequential information. 

     In Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” the rooster Chantecleer, deeply troubled by a dream, groans, fearing, correctly, as it turns out, that his dream of a predator presages an actual attack.  His lady Pertelote reproves him, saying “vanitee in sweven is.”  She offers a physiological explanation, suggesting that dreams arise from overeating, a notion she shares with Winsor McKay whose comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was wholly composed of nightmares occasioned by overindulgence.  A good medieval polemicist, the hen cites the authority of Cato who discounted the significance of dreams. 

     More people over the years have agreed with the rooster than with his consort.  It is certainly the more stimulating and productive position, though heavy dinners late at night may play their own role.   Very many around the world and all through time have like Chanticleer thought dreams contain clues to future events.  The Bible is full of dream interpreters of this sort.    

     In Genesis Joseph no sooner says that interpreting dreams “belongs to God,” then he offers to do the job himself.  He accurately decodes the dreams of his fellow prisoners, with nice symmetry predicting that one will be freed and the other executed.  Neither of the dreams, though, directly portrays the destined outcome; through what Browne had called “symbolicall adaptation” three branches must be read as three days and birds munching bread as birds picking flesh from a corpse.  Thus, while dreams are considered to reveal the future, they do so only indirectly, obliquely, symbolically, after the manner of art. 

     In a depiction of Israel’s utopian future once the nation is properly observant, God promises not only to defeat their military enemies (as well as a plague of locusts), but also that “your old men shall dream dreams,” a promise repeated for Christians in the account of Pentecost.  Yet, in spite of the potential of revelation, it is sometimes difficult to discern the difference between God’s voice and a lie.  Jeremiah warns that false prophets may mislead the people declaring, “I have dreamed.”  After all, as Zecharaiah tells, the priests of other deities also offer dream visions.  “For the idols have spoken vanity, and the diviners have seen a lie, and have told false dreams.”  Islam likewise distinguished between the divinely inspired true dream (al-ru’ya) and the false dream, which may come from the devil, though many dreams are considered meaningless and inconsequential (hulm).

     The need for acute discernment in the interpretation of dreams has led to professional training in the skill by shamans and priests.   In many cultures the very dreaming of significant dreams is a task undertaken by specialists.  Not only have psychedelics (called by some in this context entheogens) been useful for vision-seekers, many cultures use psychotropic drugs specifically for the purpose of achieving more lucid dreams.  For instance, the Chonal people of Oaxaca use Calea ternifolia, called in English dream grass and the Xhosa people use Silene undulata, or African dream root.

     Belief in the predictive value of dreams has withered in modern times, though it like astrology survives in vulgar forms such as the pulp publication 1000 Dreams and what they mean (1944), attributed to Yohanna ibn al Farmouzi, and the Gypsy's Witch Dream Book of Numbers (1972).  The latter, in a sign of the decadence of the genre it shares with some fortune cookies, reduces all dreams to numbers of interest only to gamblers.  

    In recent times the interpretation of dreams has turned from divination to psychology, or, to use the mythic imagery of Freud’s Vergilian epigraph for The Interpretation of Dreams, from the heavens to the underworld.  Most moderns would assent to Freud’s declaration that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, though the use of dreams in therapeutic practice has declined precipitously along with the rest of the psychoanalytic system, in spite of the quondam assent of Freud’s colleagues such as Jung who maintained, “who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.”  Today, of course, a psychiatrist, after having observed the patient’s general demeanor, is likely to be primarily a prescriber of pills, leaving the talk therapy not to psychologists, but to social workers.  The doctor may never hear a patient’s dream.

    The revelation that narrative action in  a literary text has occurred in a dream has been derided as too convenient a convention, yet it has honorably used by writers including Li Gongzuo in "A Lifetime in a Dream," Chaucer whose Book of the Duchess is built around two dreams, and Langland whose Piers Plowman has an even more elaborate dream architecture.  Everyone knows of the sudden appearance of the white rabbit in a waistcoat to Alice in her doze on the riverbank and of Dorothy’s being carried off to Munchkin Country and eventually Oz before each young heroine awakens again to everyday reality.  The device is used in a good many less-remembered works such as Fritz Lang’s 1944 The Woman in the Window in which as in Oz some characters from the waking world appear in dream roles.  I consider the episode of Marge’s Little Lulu outstanding in which Tubby is pleased when he rises from bed (in dream) to find himself with a moustache but before his second awakening into the security of his accustomed world, he finds himself pursued by an outraged mob crying “little boys can’t have moustaches!” 

     Dreams may convey an entire vision, a world-view.  The most celebrated dreamer of this sort is likely Zhuang Zhou who dreamed he was a butterfly and, upon awakening, pondered whether he might not as likely be a butterfly dreaming he was a man as a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly.  (Oddly, Socrates makes exactly the same point in a passage clear and casual if more abstract and less artful.)  Such epistemological questioning of reality seems to express skepticism like that of the Pyrrhonists, but there is no equivalence between the insect and human consciousness.  During the dream Zhang had been “flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased,” whereas upon rising he fell to uneasy self-conscious cogitation.  It is a smaller Fall from grace perhaps to lose the wings of a butterfly than to be exiled from Eden, but the trajectory is similar.  From the wholly involved but free participation in a natural spontaneous life such as we imagine animals to experience we have descended to the neurotic human psyche, prey to guilt, doubt, and self-questioning.

     Liezi describes a dream of the time the Yellow Emperor wore himself out with governing.  He devoted himself to his duties and at the same time indulged in sensual pleasures until, finding that his “ravaged flesh darkened and his dulled senses were stupefied, he concluded that attachment to himself and to the kingdom were both destructive.  He went into retirement, neglecting matters of state and living like an ascetic.  At this point he had a dream of the utopian land of Hua Hsü where people “have no cravings and lusts.” There “all men follow their natural course” and they have never heard of “profit and loss.”  They have thereby gained an extraordinary sensation of liberation, expressing by Liezi as “the ability to ride space as though walking the solid earth.” This same Yellow Emperor was said to appoint officials based on verbal clues in dreams and to him was ascribed a book of dream interpretation. 

     My own dreams seem rarely to rise to the economy and clarity, not to mention the significance, of these dreams, but of course examples from written sources are generally composed or literary dreams.  Even those reported by physicians such as Freud and Jung seem to many critics to be artificially pruned to reinforce the author’s general theories.  I experience neither divine openings nor the terror of nightmares.  Many times I have found myself in a semi-familiar area, a campus or a city neighborhood having extraordinary difficulty making my way to my destination.  I turn a corner and see an unexpected territory yet to be traversed or a make a short cut through a university building only to find it a maze of corridors.  I feel the mildest frustration.  What can be the purpose of such a fantasy?   Having been student or instructor most of my life, I have often found my dream persona unprepared sometimes for attending, sometimes for teaching a class, though again without much anxiety.  “Ah, well,” I would think, “I have three papers due tomorrow, but two can be submitted late and it will be easy to do the third tonight.”   Or I would improvise a lecture I could deliver without the students’ having read any specific text.  The mildness of my dreams is consistent.  I like many have also imagined myself without pants or without clothes in public places, but others seem not to notice.  The unconscious is often conceived as a roaring beast, but mine seems thoroughly domesticated.

     On several occasions, for months at a time, I have set out a notebook on the night table to record my dreams and I have definitely observed that putting this sort of conscious attention on dreams alters them considerably.  They become far easier to recall, more coherent, and more weighty with the meaning I sought.  Probably the Lakota in a sweat lodge will experience what he has been taught and what he has observed in the practice of others.  A Cameroonian educated in France told me that a snake would visit him in the night to advise him.  As a member of the snake clan it was no more than he expected.  Thus I am confident a Freudian or a Jungian would rapidly acquire the knack of dreams congenial to expectations.    

     It may be, in fact, that our deepest sleep represents at once an unerring prediction of the future and a philosophic cue.  Decades ago the Dalai Lama addressed the great American populace through People magazine saying, in what is his most achievable suggestion if not the most lofty, “Sleep is the best meditation.”  The Vedanta Hindu tradition identifies the waking state with the gross body and the sleeping state with the subtle body.  The deeper sleep in which consciousness is eliminated altogether, the non-REM sleep is identified with the absolute.  (In the familiar way of philosophic one-upmanship, some authors include a fourth state as the final one, at once transcending and underlying the other three.)   Thus samadhi, far from being a remote and mysterious state of consciousness, is experienced by everyone nightly.  While such emptiness may be the source and end of everything, and indeed nirvana means “blown out, extinguished” it is nonetheless far less engaging than the dreams that can dominate our attention at one moment and vanish in a moment.  Dreams seem, like much of what we experience, to mean what we wish for them to mean.

 

 

Sources

Browne, “On Dreams;” Genesis 40:8, Joel 2:28, Acts 2:17, Jeremiah 23:25, Zecharaiah 10:2; Gianluca Toro and Benjamin Thomas, foreword by Jonathan Ott, Drugs of the Dreaming: Oneirogens: Salvia divinorum and Other Dream-Enhancing Plants; Carl Jung, Letters; Plato, Theaetetus; Zhuang Zhou, The Book of Lieh-tzu; Huangfu Mi, Records of Emperors and Kings, Mandukya Upanishad.

Parmenides and the Perennial Philosophy

Numbers in parentheses refer to the standard listing of Parmenides’ fragments.  Those in brackets are endnotes.

    Parmenides was my favorite when as a student I first read the pre-Socratic philosophers.  I was, I imagine, attracted by his dramatically startling claims.  The paradoxes of his disciple Zeno delight everyone with a taste for tossing concepts about.  A generation or two later Socrates’ dialectics, Aristotle’s ratiocination, and the theatrical gestures of Diogenes would open up philosophy in other directions, but the fundamental challenge of Parmenides’ thought remained unchanged, as immovable as the plenum he imagined.

     Paradoxically, though Parmenides’ conclusions seem outlandish from the perspective of everyday reality, they are peculiarly reasonable to a skeptical modern sensibility.  To me he represents the most profound ancient Greek statement of a perennial philosophy in the classic modern form represented by Transcendentalism and, in the twentieth century, Neo-Vedanta.  Parmenides has in common with Huxley (and mystics in different parts of the globe throughout the centuries) the apprehension of an ultimate reality underlying sense experience which is, to use Parmenides’ language “unitary, unmoving and without end” (μουνογενές τε καὶ ἀτρεμὲς ἠδ᾽ ἀτέλεστον). (347)

     After millennia in which our species had used the poetic devices of analogy and metaphor in religion, magic, ritual, and mythological thought, Parmenides proposed using only the mind.  From the simple proposition that one can say nothing about the nonexistent or “what is not,” Parmenides developed provocative and astonishing conclusions.  The phenomenal world is in some sense “unreal;” motion and change are impossible as the cosmos is monistic, the only thing that exists. 

     He arrives at such a strikingly counterintuitive position by significant rhetorical and dialectical routes.  The title of his principal work Περὶ Φύσεως is sometimes translated On Nature but its concerns are so fundamental that it might have been called On What Exists.  A dramatic proem sets the angle of Parmenides’ approach.  The philosopher’s insight is attributed to his having been taken on a journey by the maiden daughters of the sun, arriving at a gate in the borderland between Night and Day at which point he encounters a goddess [1] who delivers to him the knowledge he conveys to the reader.  Though the location signifies the duality that constitutes the ordinary experience of reality, [2] she offers a route to a unified vision.  

     The divinity would seem to be Night herself: Parmenides goes to “the halls of Night,” and the goddess who greets him welcomes him to “our home” (1).  The goddess Night serves as counselor to Zeus in some of the major Orphic texts, including the Derveni cosmology. In the closely related Orphic Rhapsodies, Night instructs Zeus on how to preserve the unity produced by his absorption of all things into himself as he sets about initiating a new cosmogonic phase. It is thus appropriate that Night should be the source of Parmenides’ revelation, for Parmenidean metaphysics is very much concerned with the principle of unity in the cosmos.

     This deity’s specific identity, though, is less important than the fact that the mythological language implies that Parmenides’ ideas are not as attributable to rigorous ratiocination as to revelation or intuitive insight.  The goddess promises to reveal to him “well-rounded truth” (aληθείης εὐκυκλέος) [3] in contrast to the “opinions of people, in which there is nothing true at all” (βροτῶν δόξας͵ ταῖς οὐκ ἔνι πίστις ἀληθής). (fr. 342, stressed again in 346)

     In the voice of this goddess, Parmenides proceeds, arguing that, as no one can meaningfully conceive of what does not exist, human thoughts must concern only “what is.”  (2)  His language here outpaces his reasoning which has been criticized as specious by modern scholars who note his conflation of the existential and predicative uses of the verb “to be.” [4]  The criticism will carry little weight for readers who have accepted the introduction with its mystic quasi-shamanic flight, suggesting that the philosopher’s vision rests on experience and intuition, on meditation perhaps, rather than on logic. 

     He argues that most people conveniently ignore logic when they treat what is and what is not sometimes as the same and sometimes as differing.  They are “two-headed,” helpless in their ignorance. (6)  Yet this error is the basis for the conventional way of seeing the world, what Parmenides calls the “way of appearances” [5](or seeming or opinion).  (See 1 and 8)

     “What is” is a kind of universal substance that must be “unitary, unmoving and without end.”  There is no void or emptiness since a plenum fills all of existence.  Contrary to appearances, there is no growth, there is no change, there is no beginning or end.  Reality cannot be divided, for it is alike everywhere (οὐδέ τι τῇ μᾶλλον, τό κεν εἴργοι μιν συνέχεσθαι).  Like Einstein’s universe, it is finite, though without beginning or end.  It may best be imagined as a sphere. (8)

     I am not concerned with tracing sources, among which others have noted Xenophanes, Pythagoras, and others, nor do I wish to detail influences, through neo-Platonism, Epicureanism, Pyrrhonisn Skepticism, pseudo-Dionysius, certain medieval mystics and Spinoza.  My point is quite simply the fundamental similarity of Parmenides’ monism and the tradition some have called the perennial philosophy.  Perhaps the most significant and concise statement of this view is the Advaita Vedanta teaching grounded in the Chāndogya Upanişad.  In the seminal sixth book Uddalaka explains to his son Śvetaketu that a single substance underlies all phenomena including themselves.  “Tat tvam asi.” (“That art thou!”) he declares.  There is no other -- the fabric of reality is continuous.  According to Advaita Vedanta, the individual and the deity or cosmos are identical: atman = Atman. 

     Parmenides goes on to relate what he calls the “way of opinion” providing an elaborate cosmology that once occupied the greater part of his book, but which is largely lost.  Though this portion of his work more closely parallels the speculation of earlier philosophers, it was less distinctive as well as being undercut by the author’s repeated assurances that his assertions in this section refer to appearances only, the way things seem, and not their real nature, rather like the Hindu concept of maya.  

     Parmenides is associated by Strabo with the cult of Apollo Oulios, an epithet usually rendered as the Healer, though the primary meaning of the word in Liddell and Scott is “pestilential” suggesting the hand of the Far-darter in plague and disease. [6]  Apollo is then defined, in sum at least, as indifferent to human desire just as the Hindu deities often have beneficent and malign manifestations.  Apollo and the cosmos as a whole are not so much ambivalent or unpredictable as utterly beyond good and evil.  For Parmenides would deny the final validity of disease and health, pain and joy, indeed of all dualities.  For him such contraries are the illusion from which arises the “way of appearances” as opposed to the “way of truth.” 

     Such insights have rarely attracted many disciples.  Whatever heights Hindu philosophers achieved, the average Indian is satisfied with customary sacrifices and other forms of formulaic worship.  In ancient Greece Pythagoreans and other mystery religions (including eventually Christianity) gained many followers with the promise that the individual soul was immortal and only the cult could provide supposed means to improve well-being after death.  Conventional religion has often displayed little patience with the monistic assertions: Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, and Spinoza were all indicted by their communities for expressing European versions of the Upanishad’s “tat tvam asi.”

     Specifically because their conclusions are experiential, attempts to rationalize the revelations of mystical flights like that Parmenides relates at the outset of his work, such thinkers are as immune to logical refutation as to proof.  They can only record their own insights (or seeming insights) and point a way for others seeking the “way of truth.”  Side-stepping the slipperiness of language and the dubious claims of syllogisms, they present a spirituality independent of supernaturalism, authority, and tradition.

    

 

1.      1.  Identified variously as night, Nature, Wisdom, Necessity or Themis.

 

2.      2.  Thus the account in Genesis describes creation of material reality through a series of oppositions: light and dark, earth and sky, water and land.

 

3.      3.  Compare this usage to the description of the cosmos as spherical in Plato, Timaeus 32c-34b.

 

4.      4.  See, for instance, G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, p. 269-70.

 

5.      5.  Parmenides’ word δόξα might also be translated as “seeming” or “opinion.”

 

6.      6.  The pattern is the same with φάρμακον, meaning both medicine and poison, a circumstance of which Derrida made a great deal in “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination.

Tristan Tzara, Poet of Manifestos

Numbers in parentheses refer to Tzara’s manifestos listed just following the essay. I used Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries translated by Barbara Wright from Riverrun Press, New York to avoid quoting in French and including translations. The originals are readily available.
Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes.


Tristan Tzara pioneered the development of the manifesto as a literary form, [1] a movement across movements that persisted throughout the twentieth century and, in a quieter form, into the present. To me his poetry and drama generally work best in performance. While on the printed page the appeal of much of his work is less apparent, his manifestos retain their lively and likable energy.

The invention of this new genre, as well as the reinvention of performance poetry, was, perhaps, natural given Dada’s profound and polemical skepticism. For Tzara, Arp, and others a fiercely radical questioning approaches nihilism like an asymptote, yet their political, aesthetic, and spiritual idealism remains always a flicker, peyrceptible to the discerning reader. In the realms of conceptual art, chance, and the privileged valuation of the ephemeral, Tzara’s early twentieth century pronouncements are groundbreaking.

To be sure, Tzara could not have been clearer about his manifestos being anti-manifestos. In his seminal “Dada Manifesto” he notes the paradox and readily admits his self-contradiction: “I am writing a manifesto and there is nothing I want, and yet I’m saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles.” He later writes under the guise of Monsieur AA, the Antiphilosopher. Dada, he says, “doubts everything.” “Everything we look at,” he insists, “is false.” “We don’t accept any theories.” Dada is “a word that throws up ideas so they can be shot down.” (2)

Playing up the destructive potential of his position in dramatic form, he proclaims ”there is great negative, destructive work to be done.” Dada is “like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers, we are preparing for the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration, and decomposition.” (2) Anticipating Jimi Hendrix, he calls for musicians to smash their instruments on stage. (3)[2] “Every act,” according to him, “is a cerebral revolver shot.” (6)

If nothing whatever can be known, making everyone an "idiot,” as Tzara calls himself and his readers alike (5), what then? If the poet is a mere “fart in a steam engine,” (7) what more can be said? Avoiding as Gorgias had done millennia before, the desolate and boring aporia that might result from a conviction that Truth is altogether inaccessible, Tzara turns to his own subjectivity. This is essential because, “a work of art is never beautiful, by decree, objectively, for everyone.” (3) Since every consciousness is unique, the individual must shed “the pursuit of I worship you.” (4) Authority, including Tzara’s authority, is illusory. Thus the manifesto reader must not be “led astray by Aaism,” (4) that is to say, by the very document he is reading. Tzara rejects the very possibility of discursive thought. Some explain, he says, while others learn, but both deceive themselves. Abolish both the teacher and the learner and you have dada. (7) He calls, in fact, for “NO MORE WORDS,” though he cannot avoid using words as he does so. (5)

Only by entering into his own mind can the poet make progress: “With the words I put down on paper I enter, solemnly, into myself” (6) Tzara refers to this inward turning as “selfkleptomania.” (7) To him he is simply making explicit what is inevitable in any case. As he says, one may try to write a manifesto, but “it’s your autobiography that you’re hatching under the belly of the flowering cerebellum.” (7)

The dominant result of this introspection is an extraordinary ebullience, irrational exuberance and high spirits arising from some unquestioned, unquestionable base in a pyrotechnic display of excited language. Delightful little verbal displays pop off here and there. He maintains, for example that art is to be identified not only with Dada, but equally with plesiosaurus or handkerchief. (3) He renews the reader’s subscription to “the celluloid love that creaks/ like metal gates” (4) The phrase “for the saxophone wears like a rose the assassination of the visceral car driver” occurs in the middle of a passage as scintillating and fast-moving as the world of subatomic particles. That passage ends “thus drummed the maize, the alarm and pellagra where the matches grow.” (6) At times, Tzara’s manifestos are so rich in this pure poetry that one feels as though one is eating bonbons. “Dada is a dog – a compass –the lining of the stomach – neither new nor a nude Japanese girl – a gasometer of jangled feelings.” (7) And so it goes, infused with wild unpredictable imagination and passionate enthusiasm.

In the end, “Dada is our intensity.” Spectacle rules: “We are circus ringmasters.” “It’s still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors” (6) the cosmos then becomes a marvel, “the spermatozoon ballet” (4), at which one can only look on in wonder.

Yet, Tzara sounds a word of warning. Significance is lurking in the shadows. “While we put on a show of being facile, we are actually seeking for the secret essence of things.” (1) Tzara’s pseudonym on top of a pseudonym for several of his manifestos is M. Antipyrine, a name suggesting a healing nostrum. The psycho-aesthetic-spiritual solution suggested by Tzara (and other Dada artists) has much in common with Zen Buddhism. [3]

Tzara’s pseudonym with its associations with the French word triste draws attention to the universal suffering that motivates the Buddhist search for enlightenment. [4] He repeats the line “You’re all going to die,” (7) as if this fact poses the essential problem of life. The solution to this problem is in both cases experiential rather than logical. Tzara insists that “logic is always false,” (2) a contention that, were it not so baldly stated, could be a portion of a Zen sutra. He speaks nearly explicitly about enlightenment: “We really know what we are talking about, because we have experienced the trembling and the awakening.” (7) Dada arises not from intellection but from living: Dada, Tzara says, is “the roar of contorted pains, the interweaving of contraries and of all contradictions, freaks, and irrelevancies: LIFE.”(3) The twentieth century artist recalls Nagarjuna and Advaitist Vedanta when he proclaims that dualities are a fraud, specifying “order=disorder; ego=non-ego; affirmation=negation.” (2) [5]

Finally, and most dramatically, Tzara agrees with the sages that we are really liberated all along, though unconscious of the fact. Nothing really changes with sublime knowledge. One returns at last to the point one had occupied all along. The “three laws” of God are “eating, making love, and shitting.” (6) The story is told of Baizhang Huaihai among others that, when asked how he pursued enlightenment, replied “When hungry, I eat; when tired, sleep.” Yet somehow, in both cases, everything is transfigured.


1. Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto 1916
2. Dada Manifesto 1918
3. Unpretentious Proclamation 1919
4. Manifesto of Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher
5. Tristan Tzara
6. Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher Sends Us this Manifesto
7. Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love


Endnotes

1. The word manifesto had earlier been used for many political declarations such as Bolivar’s “Cartagena Manifesto,” Peel’s “Tamworth Manifesto,” and, most notably, Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century several anarchist manifestos appeared. Very likely the move from the social realm to the aesthetic was facilitated by the military analogy suggested by the term avant-garde.

2. Hendrix did this at Monterey in 1967, but he had been preceded by Jerry Lee Lewis destroying pianos in the 1950s as wel l as by Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck and others. In the realm of avant-garde art, Nam June Paik smashed a violin in 1962 as part of his "One for Violin Solo" and the gesture had become enough of a convention that a Destruction in Art Symposium was held in London in 1966 which involved a number of “destruction events.” Two years later a similar event was held in New York City. Oddly, Townshend had studied with Gustav Metzger who was the central figure in the London symposium.

3. I am hardly the first to note the similarities. See, for instance, Won Ko’s Buddhist Elements in Dada: A Comparison of Tristan Tzara, Takahashi Shinkichi and Their Fellow Poets.

4. In fact the name Tristan is Celtic meaning noise, and is not derived from the Latin tristis, though the association is prominent in Tristan and Iseult as well as with Tzara, who, according to Paul Cernat’s Avangarda românească și complexul periferiei: primul val, said that it was meant to recall the French phrase “triste âne tzara” ("sad donkey Tzara"). According to Serge Fauchereau's report (also recorded in Cernat), Colomba Voronca recalled Tzara’s explaining it as a play on the Romanian phrase trist în țară, meaning "sad in the country." In 1925 he legally changed his name from Samy Rosenstock to Tristan Tzara.

5. Tzara reinforces the point while incidentally anticipating Derridean deconstruction in section IV of 7.

Agnostic Credo and Vita

I
     I just returned from three hours of rocking, propulsive gospel music by members of the congregation of the House of Refuge in Newburgh. These musicians live in the largely depressed East End of the city with the highest rate of violent crime in New York State. They face racism and poverty; we noticed members of the congregation with track marks and missing teeth, yet the mood was overwhelmingly joyous. Every performance insisted on thanking a benevolent deity for blessings and insisting on the certainty that the worshipper is heaven-bound. Hellfire, even morality itself, scarcely played a part. Every participant was wholly involved, possessed one might even say by the occasion, dancing and calling out and singing in ecstasy.
     I was moved. One might think it scarcely plausible that a thorough skeptic like myself could appreciate the choir. Yet I think the House of Refuge embodies something of the essence of the religious impulse. Their elated acceptance is the opposite of a glum submission to the circumstances of life or indeed to the dictates of organized religion. Untroubled with doubt and little concerned with doctrine, they feel connected to a divine they embrace with the highest of rapturous spirits. Though I rejected my family’s less expressive Protestant church at an early age, I was touched and responded with admiration and envy to the singers from the House of Refuge.
     Lacking any faith, I am an unlikely formulator of a credo. Does the position of a skeptic, believing nothing, lead nowhere as well? One might, like some ancients, argue that it is arrogant and unseemly to deny the common opinion of humankind and proceed then with a spirituality of the majority. One might act on Pascal’s wager and practice religion to be on the winning side just in case. Like many less sophisticated church-goers, those who take these paths seem to be able to believe what they wish to believe. My own beliefs have developed quite differently, out of a lifelong exploration of religion and in particular of mysticism that seems to me wholly consistent with a materialist world-view. Several observable facts lie at the foundation of the initial conviction that such a search is likely to be rewarding.
     First of all, spiritual inquiry might begin with the established fact that all human cultures have religion. This is true around the world and all through history and as far back before as evidence exists. It appears as though belief in the unseen arose contemporaneously with language and art. [1] Such a universal cultural practice cannot be arbitrary but must be radically meaningful in some sense. Much of what passes for religion in both archaic and contemporary times is admittedly self-interested and shallow. People have always performed do ut des sacrifices and conjured what is simply magic, attempting to persuade themselves they have some control over a frightening environment. Yet surely it is absurd to imagine that the Ultimate Reality is in any way concerned with granting a defense against malice, a recovery from illness, a successful hunt, or a fulfilling and exceedingly long-lasting retirement in paradise.
     Yet the universality of the spiritual quest implies an object. It is as unthinkable that everyone desires to reach an altogether nonexistent Ultimate as that human should suffer physical hunger in a world without food. We have as well a rich record, likewise common to all humankind, of the experiences of those convinced they have felt the presence of the holy or have even achieved union with god. In individual cases one might write off the saints of various belief systems as neurotic, psychotic, power-hungry, or sexually frustrated, but the persistence and the similarity of mystical experience around the world implies a deeper explanation.
     As a lifelong littérateur I am familiar with the capacity for the symbolic forms in images and narratives to express the subtlest and most profound ideas and affects. Indeed, I have always regarded art as the most effective instrument for interrogating the cosmos and expressing the human consciousness. Religion, with its myths and rituals, is in one sense a subcategory of art. Our species’ greatest skill is symbolic manipulation, and religion records thousands of years of attempts to concretize the ineffable in forms understandable to our fellow humans.
     The validity of religion as a nexus out of which aesthetic objects are created cannot be doubted, yet its dogmas can. There are some particular doctrinal elements that I find particularly implausible, yet which have appealed to many. The initial governing principle in many statements of religious belief is the necessity of faith, meaning the acceptance of a proposition as true without evidence. To have faith is considered a great virtue, though the difficulty is in deciding which of the countless varieties of “faith” one should adopt. Bobby Henderson’s Pastafarians with their deity of spaghetti and meatballs (including His Noodly Appendage) are consciously outlandish, but logically correct when they say their “deeply held beliefs” have equal truth value to those of any other supernatural religion. [1] Surely it sounds very like flimflam when someone praises the adoption of a whole philosophical and spiritual position on the questions of the very importance without any reason whatever. Suspicions rise higher yet when the proponent insists on the exclusive value of a single brand of belief while condemning all others, yet this is the habit of virtually all institutionalized religions. They advertise while seeking, like corporations, to out-claim their competitors.
     The anthropomorphic personal god described as feeling love, anger, mercy, jealousy, even regret is, if assigned such characteristics, no longer an absolute. When I read that Noah burns a sacrifice and “the Lord smelled a sweet savor” (Genesis 8:21), I cannot avoid imagining the Old Gentleman leaning over the edge of a cloud to take a whiff. This is the stuff of myth – it is what we expect in a two thousand five hundred year old tale, but it is thinnest and least rewarding when taken literally.
     Religions tended to be intensely local and tribal in antiquity. Priests in ancient India, Greece, and Israel attributed their army’s victories to divine blessing and defeats to holy chastisement. To this day groups like the Amish, the Hindus, and the Jews do not proselytize. In effect theirs is a family god, passed down the generations but generally unavailable to those outside their community, surely a concept implausible in deity.
     It is not only inconceivable to me that god should recognize ethnic distinctions; it is likewise impossible that revelation and theophany could manifest at only particular times and places. For instance, Christianity, insisting on the belief in Christ for salvation, writes off all those born in non-Christian parts of the world, many of whom in the past may never have heard Jesus’ name. Christianity invented a way to imagine that the old patriarchs who lived prior to Christ might have been saved, but the whole notion is ill-patched together. Clearly, whatever humans know of Ultimate Reality must be equally accessible at all times and places.
     Morality is a preoccupation of most religions, yet ethics relates only to human society. Good and evil are defined by an act’s effect on oneself and others. In the natural world, and even more emphatically on its cosmic scale, morality cannot exist. Religious tradition prescribes two sorts of rules governing its followers’ actions. Some arise from the thoughtful and considerate practice of social life: prohibitions on killing, stealing, and unrestrained sexuality. These require no divine sanction; purely human considerations are quite sufficient. Other rules are purely ritual. Male Sikhs never cut their hair or beard as a show of piety; Buddhist monks shave hair, beard, and eyebrows for the same reason. The point of taboos is to create community. Hindus do not eat beef; Jews and Muslims avoid pork, the old Pythagoreans proscribed beans. Many groups insist on modest dress covering the body; sky-clad Jains go naked. Some uncover the head to show respect; some cover it. Whether arbitrary or morality-based, human behavior simply cannot be meaningful to the absolute.
     Yet, in seeking to control people’s actions, religions have often sought to make their devotees believe that good character will be rewarded and evil punished, either through heaven and hell or karmic rebirth. There is a symbolic propriety to this reduction of ethics to self-interest, because after all, the primary reason we agree not to assault our neighbors, apart from the fact that many of us may not be so inclined, is to avoid being assaulted oneself. Yet is seems demeaning and childish to promise pie in the sky to hoodwink someone into cooperating.
     I find myself defending the dignity of deity against those who would portray a grandly awesome, quasi-human as god. Very nearly all my objections arise of my unwillingness to put limitations on the godhead. I realize the value of these lesser visions of deity. People have different natures and different routes to spirituality. Some have a sensibility primarily responsive to devotion which might be symbolized by Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa in Rome’s Santa Maria della Vittoria. Devotional worshippers such as those in the Hindu bhakti tradition may require an anthropomorphic god as the object of their meditation. Others may practice good works, recalling the words of the apostle James the Just "Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only" (James 2:24). Such a path is called karma yoga in Hinduism. Theologians may be regarded as pursuing enlightenment through knowledge, the route of jnana yoga, through ideas and reasoning after the manner of Aquinas or Nagarjuna. For me, the divine cannot have attributes, though to some this would amount to emptying the meaning of the grandest of ideas. Yet even in these lesser conceptions patterns are clear and well-established through the world and through history. Partial and flawed though the congruence may be, it is clear that there is considerable common ground on the highest reaches of spiritual theory and practice.
     Not all traditions insist as singlemindedly as Jews, Christians, and Muslim on a personal god. The fact is that a number of belief systems ordinarily considered religious are essentially atheist. At least some varieties of Daoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism (as well as certain of the Skeptics, Epicureans, and Stoics of antiquity) construct religions or quasi-religious philosophical systems that do not depend on a supernatural god. [2] Each of these goes beyond mechanical materialism to promise some divine afflatus, some profound joy at the feeling of cosmic connection, a delight in the phantasmagoria of the phenomenal world while recognizing its dependent and ephemeral nature. I might compile a long series of texts, a sort of unbeliever’s, Bible promulgating a featureless deity, a skeptic’s god.
     The first sentence of the Dao De Jing insists that no verbal statement can define the Dao.
     In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad the universe is identified with Brahman and with the soul, and Brahman is described as "neti-neti" or "neither this, nor that." Adi-Shankara and others in the Advaita school of Hinduism write of the Nirguna Brahman, which specifically means the god without attributes. The Katha Upanishad describes even the gods as skeptics entertaining doubt. [3]
     Buddhists both Theraveda and Mahayana, acknowledge the fruitlessness of inquiry into the “fourteen unanswerable questions” including issues of epistemology and the afterlife. One could scarcely conceive a skepticism more radical that that expressed in Nagarjuna’s Catuṣkoṭi or Tetralemma : “Any object or proposition cannot be said to exist. It cannot be said not to exist. It cannot be said to both exist and not exist. It cannot be said to neither exist or not exist." His view was the basis for the Madhyamaka school.
     Even in the insistently literal-minded Abrahamic religions, the same worldview breaks through. In Christianity the author of the Divine Names, the so-called pseudo-Dionysius, using ideas already elaborated by Proclus and Plotinus, set forth an entirely apophatic vision of deity. For his translator John Scotus Erigena as well God is “nothing,” but rather “the negation of all things.” [4] Contrary to much of his tradition, Moses Maimonides declares god to be wholly without attributes. [5] I know little of Mu`tazila Islam but I understand it approaches a similar sort of negative theology.
     Furthermore, each of the theistic traditions has produced mystics whose transports are described in such a variety of mythic languages that they may well be considered to share their essence while differing in rhetoric. To those inclined to accept the notion of a perennial philosophy [6] the insights of the mystics are relatively free of cultural specifics and lack the exclusivity that informs most orthodox ritual and theology. The fourteenth century English Cloud of Unknowing suggests that the worshipper who feels even the “kindness” and “worth” of god must abandon those thoughts and plunge into the “thick cloud of unknowing.” [7] Yet rather than striking the author as a descent into a frightening abyss this realization generates an in him an extraordinary state. The mystic may feel the divine as heat, light, sweetness, music, or as an exalted form of love, transforming the ordinary self into an effortlessly virtuous serenity, marked as well by the sort of joy that is visible today bubbling up from the belly of the Dalai Lama in public events.
     The enlightenment of the great tulku for all his esoteric lore seems to me essentially similar to that of the gospel singers from the House of Refuge. Millennia of evidence support the conviction that these people and countless others from all corners of the globe possess something precious, something worth pursuing, something that opens one’s eyes, not only making life livable, but rendering it a delight. For the Pentecostals and the Yellow Hat line of Tibetan Buddhists it may be a simple matter of acquiescence in an inherited tradition, while for others a dense undergrowth of imagery and story must be decoded or bypassed. A total skeptic, I find myself still rooting around in the mudpool of the world to seek the kernel of enlightenment. Neither swine nor divine we pursue the mystery of divinity (and such subsidiary enigmas as death, love, and epistemology) animated somehow from with an impulse virtually universal in our species. [8] One need take nothing on faith; we have records in every generation of those who realized their own relation to the cosmos and thus their own true nature.
     We can hardly know the truth about the universe, astonishing as we find the glimpses given us by astronomers, since we can know nothing that is not mediated by our own sensory apparatus and consciousness. Yet there are many examples of those who turned this limitation into an opening by focusing on altering the subjective mind itself, seeking enlightenment and liberation within rather than information or a helping hand from gods without. While no one can alter the galaxies or create gods by wish-fulfillment, people can to some extent direct their own thoughts, sometimes with dramatically satisfying results. If religion and philosophy are conceived as the search for the best way to live a human life, the mystics, for all their apparent focus on the beyond, seem to have devised a highly effective technology of the mind for living in the mundane.


II
     My path to the positions outlined here was hardly unique. Many others in my age cohort, the first year of post-war babies, read the same books and responded to the same social influences. I suspect a brief sketch of some details of my own development might reveal significant likenesses (as well as equally important differences) with the experience of others.
     A normal middle-class child growing up in the Midwest of the 1950s, I attended church, Sunday school, and vacation Bible school like all my friends. I was encouraged to pray before going to sleep, and I believe that for a few years I did. All the same, I withdrew from this Methodist upbringing in preadolescence. I had come to dread the interminable hymns, slowly winding through six solemn verses of Charles Wesley’s poetry. During the sermons, which tended toward such topics as “Women of the Bible, Part 7,” I invented a system to pass the time by counting the organ pipes and calculating how many seconds longer I would be contained in the purgatory of a pew. I recall during my church’s confirmation classes asking the unimaginative minister incredulously if he thought a pious and humane Hindu man who practiced kindness to his neighbors and followed the rituals of his culture would be condemned to hellfire. The reverend gentleman’s confident response (“Only through Jesus!”) convinced me that, though he had an honorary Doctor of Divinity (and was fond of the title), he could know very little about the divine. Part of the run-up to church membership was to submit a spiritual diary covering the weeks of the course, but I never wrote a word. Until the day I was received into the church I feared that he might fail to include my name from the roll as a result of this omission.
     A few years before I had read Joseph Gaer’s 1929 book How the Great Religions of the World Began, [9] a survey that, for all its chatty anecdotal reductiveness, gave me a good deal of information and more than enough reason to doubt my pastor. I think I was in sixth grade when my parents purchased Life’s book of The World’s Great Religions, and I read and reread and studied the photographs. When my sixth-grade teacher assigned the construction of a shoe box diorama depicting a scene in history, I illustrated the legendary meeting of Confucius and Laozi.
     The next year I discovered Evelyn Underhill’s Christian-oriented books on mysticism, a rich source of quotations from the European mystics, as well as the Dover reprints of the Sacred Books of the East series. I had a look at R. B. Blakney’s Mentor Dao De Jing (titled The Way of Life) and felt at once at home and entranced with the very first verse. I began to consider myself a Daoist Buddhist. Though I found no point of contact between the spirituality I was earning about and my Methodist church by middle school I had decided the highest possible ambition was to be an ecstatic mystic. [10]
     In high school I pursued these interests and began reading D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and Joseph Campbell and paying special attention to Buddhist references in the Beat writers. I discovered that the Theosophical Society’s American headquarters were next door to my home town in Col. Olcott’s grand old mansion with its fascinating Victorian library filled with Asian philosophers. [11] Exposed to Vedanta, I read Upanishads and then Huxley and Isherwood upon which I could only conclude that I was a Daoist Buddhist Hindu.
     At university I followed Huxley and Watts in the use of psychedelics and found the alteration of consciousness with LSD roughly comparable to other methods such as fasting, chanting, meditating, and the practice of austerities. In the middle sixties we took the drug very seriously indeed, carefully designing the trip and discussing its implications for weeks afterwards. I was learning Greek and trying to digest the immense interconnected fabric of ancient myth. I wrote my senior thesis on Christopher Smart’s visionary madhouse poem Jubilate Agno under the direction of an eighteenth century scholar who could only scratch his head over my excitement about this wild work he viewed only as a curiosity. Later in graduate school I made a particular study of medieval mystic poets and translated Mechthild von Magdeburg while spinning theories connecting mystical texts with literary theory.
     Toward the end of my undergraduate years I began attending a Friends meeting, in part to bolster my dossier as a conscientious objector in case push came to shove with my draft board, but also because of a real sympathy for a brand of Christianity without a leader, practicing group meditation without insisting on Christian belief. [12] That they had such a magnificent radical social tradition, not only on war, but on race and virtually all others issues only heightened their appeal. I joined in 1968 and attended meeting for about ten years. During unprogrammed meeting for worship people simply sit silently. Should any one feel moved, that person may speak. After years of sitting quietly in meeting, I was not once moved to speak.
     I not only made a poor Quaker, I feel itchy and impatient while sitting zazen (though I once could pull myself into an uncomfortable full lotus) and I have miserably failed as a yogi quite a number of times even after persisting in what I considered good faith efforts for months. Yet, I think I have caught sight of the footprints of the Ox of Ultimate Reality; I may even have seen his tail disappearing into the thickets once or twice, [13] and I can hardly give up the pursuit now whether or not I ever progress, indeed, whether or not there is an ox at all.




1. Lord Bertrand Russell made precisely the same point in a more decorous manner in his 1952 essay “Is There a God?” when he declared that, were he to claim there is a teapot orbiting the sun between earth and Mars, he could hardly expect others to believe him simply because they cannot prove that there is not. For another materialist’s evidence on the origin of the supernatural see J. David Lewis-Williams’ excellent The Mind in the Cave.

2. Or agnostic or “transtheist, “a term used by Paul Tillich and Heinrich Zimmer to describe those who may accept the existence of deities, but for whom these superhuman entities are not the Ultimate Reality. Of course the Jain tirthankaras are venerated as people worship gods and a Daoist or Buddhist temple will include no end of deities, flamboyant and restrained.

3. Katha-Upanishad I.3.15.

4. Periphyseon, “nihilum” I, 447c, “negatio omnium” III.686d.

5. Guide for the Perplexed, I: 57.

6. The concept of a philosophia perennis was first proposed by Agostino Steuco drawing on neo-Platonic ideas of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The idea was accepted by the neo-Vedantists. See Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy.

7. The Cloud of Unknowing, tr. Clifton Wolters (Penguin), Ch. 6.

8. Freud in The Future of an Illusion claims never to have felt the “oceanic” sensation about which Romain Rolland had written him, but perhaps his superego was suppressing more archaic sensations arising from beneath.

9. Gaer had taught at Berkeley and was involved in New Deal programs such as the Federal Writers Project, the Farm Security Administration and the Treasury Department and then served as publicity director of the Political Action Committee for the CIO.

10. It is only in part self-satire when I recall that at this time I considered careers as a mystic, revolutionary, and poet, before selecting the last as the most practical choice.

11. Olcott was an American military officer and attorney who became interested in spiritualism when writing an article for the New York Sun about séances. He was a founder with Mme. Blavatsky and others of the Theosophical Society and, like her, an early American Buddhist. He is well-known in Sri Lanka for his work there with Buddhist and educational groups.

12. Since the early nineteenth century many Friends have regarded Christ as divine only in the same sense that all humans are if they act on their inner light.

13. See the Ten Ox-Herding pictures which occur in many Chinese and Japanese versions and are popular in translation. The best-known version is that by Kuòān Shīyuǎn from the 12th century.