West Point

 

October 16. 

I'm a single month away from my 40th anniversary as a sober person.

The photograph was taken at West Point this past Wednesday. We were up there for my friend Rip’s mother’s interment; and although from one point of view it was a joyful reunion of many old friends and family, from another one it was a sobering reminder of how we will all eventually die. 

Rip’s mother was buried next to her husband, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the general who led the United States through the bitter, fractious, and deadly Vietnam War, which formed so much of the history of my own generation and marked the moment of divisiveness which has colored so much of the nation’s history since. 

Like those buried around him, the general did what he did because it was his duty. The graveyard at West Point is filled with those who did their duty as best they understood it, even though in many cases it led to their deaths. This is a level of commitment rare in today’s America. To stand amongst these graves was a deeply emotional experience.

I don’t have occasion to wear a jacket and tie very often anymore; in the circles I travel in and the life I lead, such uniforms have fallen well and far out of fashion. Yet to dress up in this way is a reminder that there are certain things in life that ought to be approached formally, with a respect that we too easily forget. When Robert Fripp dresses the members of King Crimson in formal attire for concerts, it helps us, because he reminds us that like life, this concert is a serious thing to be approached with respect and understood as a kind of work. We think everything should be fun; but life isn’t fun. It’s a serious business, and although joy and enjoyment have their place in it, we should not forget that it ends in death and that we need to have a sense of this around us in order to bring the appropriate gravity to our attention and our relationships.

Rip and many of his friends are musicians and they performed a spirited and enthusiastically improvised version of “When The Saints Go Marching In” at the graveside. It was by turns both perfect and appalling. I feel his mother would have loved it and his father would have hated it. It is, in any event, what took place, and like everything else on the surface of this planet in complete conformity law, no matter how bewildering its manifestation.

As it happens, Rip was the person who was there at ground zero when I got sober, and he steadfastly supported every moment of that effort. He also introduced me to the Gurdjieff work; and so I owe him my life on at least two counts.

It is been an unusually warm October; and although we continue to get somewhat more rain than usual — we’re often in the midst of drought in the fall here, or at least used to be —the month has produced some extraordinarily pleasant days. We have yet to come close to first frost, and the leaves are moving into their fall colors very gradually.

I find my soul pinned to the board of this life. The more subject one becomes to astral influences, the more stubbornly one is planted not in some extraterrestrial, heavenly transcendence, but in the simple and inescapable fact of this life and what it is. Heaven and hell meet here and they are both here with me inside myself; sometimes I channel one, sometimes the other, and sometimes– more often — they channel me, but I can’t escape the truth of where I am, in the chemical, molecular, emotional, intellectual, and physical sense of myself.

Although it is right here with me, in some senses the soul is a distant thing, because it lies so deep within being as the root of my arising. The stillness it emanates penetrates all the way through, it’s true, to the surface these days; yet these two parts are still getting to know one another and there's always an uneasiness. Stillness is cautiously distrustful of the agitation that life brings; and the agitation of life believes in itself so much that it holds stillness in perpetual contempt. 

A truce is formed somewhere in the midst of this mutual suspicion. In that truce, the stillness always holds the high ground simply by being planted in the lowest ground of the body.

This lowest ground of the body is not a subscriber to the agitation. To be sure, the body has its own forms of agitation; but they can be met in objective silence and tolerated. The energy that makes the stillness possible is stronger than anything else in Being.

In the midst of this inescapable existence (for as long as I am alive) on the surface of this planet, I see how I don’t know anything and what a fool I've been for most of my life. I have, however, no choice but to be clueless and no ability to be anything more than a fool. 

I embrace these two hopeless conditions filled with the hope of sensation and the faith of the soul, because they do know something and they are not fools. 

If I trust them, perhaps they can lead me forward through this mess to a more intelligent love and compassion — which, with every passing day, feeling instructs me as the greatest possible aim.

with warm regards,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.