Words&Dirt

“The more clearly I attend to things, the more clearly they vanish into me. The Cosmos is all dragon, all generative transformation driven by a restless hunger, and perception shares this dragon-nature, as does any other dimension of this being I am: thoughts, feelings, memories, desires, they all keep relentlessly appearing and evolving and disappearing into the forgetfulness that is the texture of our day-to-day lives.

Consciousness is made of the same tissue as the Cosmos. Things vanish into us just as they vanish into the Cosmos, and we call it forgetfulness. Once thoughts vanish into forgetfulness, they are replaced by new perceptions. We assume self is a vessel of Presence and remembrance in which experience subsists over time, somehow defining who we are. That vessel inscribes the boundary between inside and outside, the rupture between us and landscape. But we are more forgetfulness, more Absence than anything else. All of the events and landscapes, books and people and experiences that have made me who I am, all of the ideas and what I’ve built from them––that whole life is completely forgotten here, this mountain walk filling my mind with blue sky and all the colors of these autumn leaves shimmering with last night’s rain. I don’t remember any of it––not what I read yesterday, or even what I thought or saw at the beginning of this walk. If I cast my attention back and tried, I could remember one thing or another. But in that remembering, I would have lost whatever is happening right now, and that constant vanishing of my self would not be slowed or altered in the least. Self-identity, which evolved for the huge selective advantages it offered, is a complex pattern of recurrence in the vast tissue of transformation. But mostly there is that tissue, all this vanishing and vanishing that I am. It’s beautiful, and a blessing––for with all that is lost to forgetfulness, there will only be a last little bit for death to claim when it comes.

We tend to ignore the disappearing, the forgetfulness, but all day long, day in and day out, forgetfulness keeps us woven into dragon’s traceless transformations. Self, that center of identity, is a denial of dragon and the empirical reality it represents: the generative female structure of consciousness and Cosmos. It is a denial of forgetfulness and of our actual moment-to-moment experience. That denial is part of dragon, of course, but it is dragon’s blindness to itself. And as the defining structure of the center, language is the medium of that blindness. It too is a denial of forgetfulness and Absence and the generative nature of things.

Linguistic thought is a system of Presence, and it’s easy to assume Presence is essence. It’s easy to assume that in language we can grasp the essence of things. This is a bedrock assumption in the mainstream Western philosophical tradition; but everything we know about this Cosmos, about its vast and intricate natural history, and equations describing its day-to-day web of energy transfers, and all our stories and myths and legends––all of that imagination and knowledge is part of the center, this body of understanding and memory and thought that I am. Even after the most exhaustive scientific description, the most accurate philosophical account, or the most concise and imagistic poem, the ten thousand things remain, in and of themselves, a mystery beyond me. Once I try to explain, the center replaces the mystery, even if I speak the wondrous legends describing the mystery itself.”

––Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape, by David Hinton, pg. 76-8

“History, by definition, cannot be experienced directly. As it is happening, it is the present, and that is philosophy’s realm.”

––The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson, loc. 10371