Songs about Nothing

You must do nothing before you can do something. Silence surrounds and intersects sound. Darkness defines light.

Such is the power of nothing.

Joan Konner has compiled an anthology of quotations celebrating nothing. “You Don’t Have to be a Buddhist to Know Nothing” has a busy title, but the book is packed with trenchant notions about nothing.

Dip into it anywhere and discover the power of nothing.

Examples:

“Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely to nowhere.” Frank Herbert

“Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being — like a worm.” Jean-Paul Sartre.

“The deepest you is the nothing side, is the side which you don’t know.” Alan Watts.

“With chess, as in literature, you can’t fill all the spaces because there would then be no game to play, no story to tell.” Timothy Walsh


The book often presents familiar words about nothing that you are forced to understand in a radically different way.

Some of the most familiar are lyrics.

“Nothing from nothing is nothing.” Billy Preston

“Nothing’s going to change my world.” Lennon-McCartney

“I’ve got plenty of nothing and nothing’s got plenty for me.” George Gershwin

“He’s a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody.” Lennon-McCartney

“And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dare
Disturb the sound of silence.” Paul Simon

We are verbs disguised as nouns

The following grew out of a sharing session we had at our Quaker meeting last Sunday. Marge Abbott, who has written about how various Quaker groups differ (and agree) about faith, got us to talking about beliefs.

Marge asked us to choose one of several sentences posted separately on the walls of the room. Each statement briefly described a different way of relating to life’s purpose. We formed small groups around each statement. Later we would report to the larger group.

I joined five others to discuss:

“A life that makes present and visible the realm of the invisible spirit.”

Our group agreed we were drawn to the statement because, unlike several others, this one didn’t mention “God.” For some of us, the word “God” seemed to limit, well, “God.” We agreed that the word “Spirit” is broadening, even liberating. As one person put it, it is “free of a lot of ‘God’ baggage.” Stuff like fear and retribution.

Nevertheless, I had a couple misgivings about the statement. I believe the invisible needn’t be “made visible,” (leave it well enough alone) except in some metaphorical sense. “Realm” implied a monarchy and seemed vaguely Biblical (The Kingdom of God etc.) and out of keeping with the deeper meaning and liberating tone of the statement.

And then the word “spirit,” though far better than “God,” seemed static, frozen — unspirit-like.

As we shared our thoughts about the statement, I concluded that one of the strongest words in it was “makes,” the verb. Several people commented that they were drawn to lives of being, acting, doing — making.

At that point, I saw that the statement’s nouns needed to be considered as disguised verbs. I experimented with adding “ing” to them. One, “life” to “living,” was easy. But the new words intrigued me: “realm-ing” and “spirit-ing.” I even tried out on the adjectives: “present-ing” and “visibl-ing.”

Suddenly the words, indeed the whole sentence, sprang to life. Then it occurred to me that nouns (and adjectives) everywhere, could spring to life if we recognized them as verbs in disguise. Many of them ARE life.

Mulling this over yesterday, I toyed with what it means to be a “human being,” and I realized that the work of “verbing the noun” already had been done for me. What is a human if not being? Human being to be exact.

Alan Watts often made the same point in his lectures. I continue to listen to Watts’ recorded talks when I work out (Watts would find that strange, even perverse). At one point Watts’ described what would happen when he died. “I’ll stop being Alan Watts and start being something else,” he said. At the time of his talk, and throughout his life, he was, he said, "Alan Watts-ing."

We are all "being" the same with the person we have been given for this short time.

And in so "being" we are constantly changing. We are not fixed. You and I are not the same “beings” as we were 10 years, 10 days, 10 hours, 10 minutes,10 seconds, 10 nano-seconds ago — because we are verbs, not nouns.

Encouragement and a year-end report

It’s time for a year-end report, and then a holiday break.

According to the various devices that monitor activity on The Red Electric, this post is number 540 since I began writing regularly in September 2006. In that time I have had 13,614 visits. Recently the site has averaged 45 visitors a day.

Those are the numbers. Occasionally I learn how readers are affected by what I post here.

Yesterday, I received a Christmas greeting in the mail from Robert McGowin, a fellow typewriter collector. Robert is a teacher who lives in Montgomery, Alabama. I’ve never met him in person, but we have exchanged correspondence and, as you will see, he follows the meanderings of The Red Electric.

The cover of his card was a photo he had taken of a 1930s Underwood Universal portable typewriter (Jack Kerouac used this model). A desk lamp bathes the old typewriter in amber light. I’ve shown the card here, displayed on a similar machine from my own collection.

Robert typed his message to me — flawlessly, as usual.

“I’ve been keeping up with you through your various blogs online. I especially enjoyed your entry containing the Alan Watts quote (“We have run into a cultural situation…”) regarding the dangers of mass mediation.

“I liked that sentiment so much that I put it on my blackboard, letting it remain there for several weeks. Students asked what it meant, and some even copied it on the outside of their notebooks — the ultimate tribute.”

Robert’s thoughtful note, other encouraging responses and my own irrepressible muse will motivate me in the new year.

I’ll resume January 5.

Encountering reality

A few days ago, I shared a quote from the late Alan Watts that continues to challenge me.

Part of it was this: “We’ve run into a cultural situation where we have confused the symbol with the physical reality, the money with the wealth and the menu with the dinner.”

The symbols, he notes, are self-imposed controls that we feel are needed because we believe, as human beings, we can’t be trusted.

But, of course, the controls can’t be trusted either because, as he points out, we made them.

Ultimately we must be thrown back on ourselves and on “physical reality.”

If only we knew how to be in touch with ourselves and nature around us. So much of our understanding of both is mediated through symbols. We are told (and shown) what we should fear, what we need, what it means to be “a success.” We are given — and give — misleading and false measures of our being.

As a result, we lose our very sense of who we are and what is important. Tragically, we also lose the knowledge of how to regain what we have lost.

As for “physical reality,” we spend less and less time with it. Instead we inhabit a fantasy world that has little to do with the real one, except that our addiction to fantasy will contribute to the neglect and ultimately destruction of our neglected reality and of ourselves.

Watts died in 1973. Ubiquitous computers, high-definition televisions, video games, cell phones, and iPods — mass disseminators of alluring symbols — were not part of his world. And yet even then, he warned of a confusing of symbols with reality.

If he only knew what the next third of a century would bring. The confusion has spread unabated. Out of it has emerged a symbol-manipulating, reality-averse, fear-mongering government more controlling than any this nation has seen.

The hope, if there still is hope, resides in our direct encounters with each other — in families, in communities, in civic and service organizations. Being together, working together, knowing and addressing each other’s needs, trusting, we have no need for external controls, no need for media-generated symbols.

We desperately need to experience and respond to the fullness of our shared, immediate reality.

Starving on eating menus

I’ve taken to downloading lectures into my iPod so that I can feed my brain while I exercise my body at the Southwest Community Center.

Among recent downloads have been talks by the late Alan Watts. Watts, who died in 1973, was a great popularizer of Zen Buddhism in America.

You can listen to many of his lectures here.

A week ago, as I was running on the treadmill, I heard Watts say the following. The fact that I was on a treadmill at the time of hearing this was purely co-incidental and, frankly, weird. As you will see, Watts speaks of the Westerner’s need for control systems. What greater control system is there than the treadmill?

Anyway, here’s what he said:

The assumption of Judeo-Christian culture is that man in his nature is sinful, and therefore can’t be trusted. The assumption of ancient Chinese culture is that man in his essential nature is good and therefore has to be trusted. They say to us, if you can’t trust your own basic nature, you can’t really rely on the idea that you are untrustworthy. And therefore you are hopelessly fouled up.

This different assumption has amazing political and other consequences. If we say, no, we human beings are fallible and basically selfish and really, really fundamentally evil, we need law and order. We need a control system to put us in order. And then we project these control systems into the church or into the police or into somebody, who are really ourselves, disguised.

It’s like daylight savings time. Everybody could simply get up and hour earlier, but instead of doing that, we alter the clock because the clock is a kind of authority. We say, well, the clock says it’s time for us to get up. The Ameri-Indians laugh at the pale faces because the pale face doesn’t know he is hungry until he looks at his watch.

And so in this way we become clock-dominated. And the abstract system takes over from the physical organic situation.

And this is my big pitch, if I’m going to make a big pitch: We’ve run into a cultural situation where we have confused the symbol with the physical reality, the money with the wealth and the menu with the dinner.

And we are starving on eating menus....