David James Duncan
Strategic Withdrawal
any movement inward
--
as into a chair by a window the light of which you use only to stare into a cup
of tea
--
or as into a habit of tea-drinking, as opposed to coffee, because the former
behaves so much more quietly within the body, so softly helps open the eyes and
the mind
--
or as in letting the eyes come to a standstill, in some space on the page of a
book you’ve been reading, in order to stare at nothing, or at something inside,
or at something neither inside nor out – an association-sprung scene, an entire
small world, maybe; a place so pungent you leave your body to stand in it for a
time
--
or as turning over a handwritten letter, before or after you’ve read it, to run
your hand across a blank side, the written words invisible now, yet palpable in
the impressions the pen left in the paper, the strange backward slant you never
think of as being there, the earnest weight of the writer’s departed hand,
physical track of her thought still traceable, the “handicraft” evident in the
paucity of words, the whole page, though we think of paper as “smooth,” as
idiosyncratically and subtly bumpy as the skin of your love’s body, in which
also dwells a reverse side, unseen side, of breath, blood, inchoate words,
nonverbal language
strategic
withdrawal: any movement backward, away from the battle lines of one’s
incarnation (as in the phrase “spiritual retreat” but without the
once-in-a-blue-moon connotations of those two words, because the backward
movement needed, the spiritual retreat required, is moment to moment, day to
day)
strategic
withdrawal: any refusal to man our habitual political or psychological trenches
or to defend our turf, for though the turf may be holy, our defenses, when they
grow automatonic, are not
any
refusal to engage with that testy or irritating or ideologically loud or
theologically bloated person in your life – you know the one: the agitatedly
racist or religionist, politically powerful or compulsively processing pedant,
coworker, parent, friend, or (God help you) spouse whose opinions are too
poorly formed, too loudly held, or just too incessantly divulged to allow you
to achieve peace in the presence of so much clanging banging editorializing
mental machinery
any
retreat (however ignominious it may seem to the will or the mind or the ego)
not just from all such exchanges but from the underlying tensions and history
that launch the exchanges (your side
of the tensions and history, anyway: the side you’ve an inalienable right to
retreat from)
any
movement away from one’s “urgencies,” one’s “this-is-who-I-am” nesses, one’s
responsibilities, agitations, racial guilt, sworn causes, shames, strengths,
weaknesses, memories, workaday, identity, public or secret battlefields
any
movement toward formlessness
silence
emptiness
primordiality
any
movement toward a beginning, as in Genesis 1, John 1, Quran Tao Te Ching
Diamond Sutra Mahabharata Kalevala Mumonkan Ramayana Torah Gita 1
and
toward one’s own “in the beginning”
toward
one’s origin (root of originality); toward
one’s ignorance (that underrated state the embracing of which precedes every
influx of fresh knowledge); toward one’s amorphousness (state of all clay
before the potter conceives a form, wedges the clay, centers it, and begins
throwing the cup or bowl); toward one’s interior blankness (the state of the
paper preceding every new idea, drawing, poem); toward one’s wilderness (wild:
the condition of all worlds, inner and outer, before the creation of the
man-made bewilderments from which we are endeavoring to withdrawal0
strategic
withdrawal:
any
attempt to step from a why, however worthy, into whylessness
as
in an extemporaneous walk to a destination unknown; a walk during which
everything but your movement through God-knows-where becomes the God-knows-what
you’re doing
or
as in going fishing without the desire for fish so that desirelessness becomes
the prey you’re catching
or
as in a stroll to a neighborhood café or tavern one or more neighborhoods
removed from any in which you’re known, which establishment you then enter not
to socialize, read the paper, or eat the (probably bad) food, but just to nurse
a single slow drink as you soak, without judgment, in the presence and riverine
babble of your city and native tongue
strategic
withdrawal: any act you can devise, any psycho-spiritual act at all, that
embodies a willingness to wait for the world to disclose itself to you, rather
than to disclose yourself, your altruism, your creativity, skills, energy,
ideas, and (let’s face it) agenda, myopia, preconceptions, delusions,
addictions, and inappropriate trajectories to this world
willingness
to drop trajectories; willingness to boot up with all extensions OFF;
willingness not to save the world but
simply to wait for it to disclose itself to you, whether anything seems, even
after long long waiting, to be disclosing itself or not
an
act of faith then, really; faith that the world is always disclosing itself; faith that lack of disclosure is
impossible; faith that what blocks Creation’s ceaseless flow of disclosure is,
invariably, our calluses and callousness, our old injuries and injuriousness,
our plans, cross-purposes, neuroses, absurd speed of passage, divided minds,
ruling manias, lack of trust, lack of faith – overabundance of faith, cf.
Thomas Merton: ‘Prayer is possible only when prayer is impossible”
strategic
withdrawal: to step back, now and then, from the possible to take rest in the
impossible: to stand without trajectory in the God-given weather till the
soul’s identity begins to come with the weathering: to get off my own
laboriously cleared and maintained trails and back onto the pristine hence
unmarked path by moving, any old how, toward interior nakedness; toward
silence; toward what Buddhists call “emptiness,” Christians “poverty of spirit,”
Snyder “wild,” and Eckhart “desirelessness: the virgin that eternally gives
birth to the Son”
strategic
withdrawal: this prayer: When I am lost, God help me to get more lost. Help me lose so completely that nothing
remains but the primordial peace and originality that keeps creating and
sustaining this blood-, tear-, and love-worthy world that’s never lost for an instant
save by an insufficiently lost me
“We’re
all in the gutter,” said Oscar Wilde in the throes of just such a withdrawal, “but
some of us are looking at the stars”
strategic
withdrawal:
look
at the stars
Shepardstown, West
Virginia; cross country
Delta jet; and Lolo,
Montana: summer 1999
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