Breath

It was cool and sunny this morn, so I got up early and zipped down to Bloor St. for breakfast. I stumbled across lots of lovely stuff in the Globe And Mail, and wished you'd been there to hand the paper to (as a distraction while I stole and ate your toast). I suppose this is the next best thing (after a yawning gulf).

The Globe article was about Tony Hendra, a satirical writer whose work I grew up with; he has written a book dedicated to a monk.

Here's the part that struck me:

The book takes you by the hand and shows you, gently and clearly, what it means to love. Which is just what Father Joe did for Hendra. "Father Joe never taught me; that's too easy," says Hendra. "Rather, he always led me to an understanding of the core sin, the only sin, the sin before all the things we call sin, and that is selfishness, the self-centredness that keeps you being so deeply with yourself that you hate people: You want revenge. You want pleasure. You want to commit adultery. You have road rage, greed, whatever. It all comes from being trapped in this prison of self. It's not a difficult message to hear, but to understand it, to act it, that's really difficult. But he did." Adds Hendra, "To him, loving, which was the only way out of this prison, was not some mushy, hippy, lank-haired kind of feeling. It's a conscious effort to reach over those walls, to listen to people, to reach into other persons' selfishness. That's when good starts to happen."

I've been thinking a lot lately about Hendra's "core sin". Not that it isn't always at the back of my mind. I feel it moving in me constantly. I suppose that's why, every couple of years, I go through some kind of renewed interest in Buddhism. And why I still wander into churches despite my staus as a confirmed agnostic. How to cope with the distortions of ego: the eternal question, I suppose.

But why am I thinking about it more than usual? Hard to say. Part of it has to do with the documentary ideas I've been bandying about. I'm interested in Magic Hour - because of the incredible effect that time of day has on our perception, and on our inner life. And in trying to understand why certain qualities of light offer the promise of such grace, I started to enumerate all the things that had that effect on me. One, obviously, was light. But there were others...

Wait, you know, I'm wrong. I just checked. Yes, I'm wrong. (I hope you don't mind an emergent thought process)

As with many other things, this obsession with the 'sin of egotism' began, at least in its most recent form, with you.

You see, up above, before I broke off the sentence, I was about to list all the other things that moved me beyond ego, washed it away, and left me feeling vulnerable, open, honest, and awestruck - the antidote to selfishness. I was about to type "art", "wind", and "sex". Then I realized that I'd typed this exact same sentiment once before. So I went hunting, and there in my Sent Messages, was the following...in my answer to your DC email:

Nothing is about the visible, and the present. It's all about the past and the future. I've never had a single conversation with you that wasn't fraught with those complications (at least for me). I think that's why sex, and the post-coital state are so important (and maybe communing with nature {and maybe great art})...the few moments that are, through their sheer power, unencumbered by subtext. They are all text, in such big type, that's there's no room for 'sub'.

Not as eloquent as I might have liked - and I left out 'wind', 'large bodies of water', 'pets' (although they might fall under the 'communing with nature') and, of course, the hard fact of death - but I think the sentiment is on the mark. The point, and not an original one by any means (even to me) is that the distortions of ego are so powerful and omnipresent that they prevent us from seeing the world, our companions and - most egregiously - ourselves, except through the lens of our own selfishness. And then, every so often, in a flash, something corrects our vision, and we get a sudden glimpse of our place in the world, and the unspeakable grace of the things that surround us, of the people we only think we've known and understood.

The experiences that do this sometimes make us feel small (the startling scale of Newfoundland's geography, the sweep of a strong wind, the relentlessness of pounding surf, the uneasy horizon of the open sea, the fecund smell of emergent Spring, the tremulous fragility of late Autumn). Often, they remind us of our own mortality (the faces of the dead, especially the ones we've loved). Occasionally, they involve physical exhaustion (good sex and runner's high) and move us outside of time (sex and running again, and good art too). But, taken together, they have something else in common.

All of them, in their fullest expression and experience, require a complete loss of sovereignty. They demand an acknowledgment that the most precious things in life are, irrefutably, beyond our control - that our ego, for all its frenetic activity, can't secure, manipulate, control, or contain the things we most desire. These things are bigger than our imagination. And that's the source of both their beauty and their power.

So, if you hadn't figured it out already, that's where you come in. Not as an email interlocutor, but as an object of desire, a force of nature, an implacable corrective to my ego. Don't get me wrong. It's not that I relish your dismissiveness, welcome your erratic behaviour, or am masochistically attracted to your unattainablility (after all, these all might be 'sins of the ego' in their own right). On the contrary, I am have always been most moved by your generosity, your secret stillness, and your gentleness. You've disarmed me, utterly, with your fierce intelligence, irrepressible sparkle, breathtaking beauty, and surprising grace.

That's why I first called you 'Beauty' all those years ago. Because of that line from the Spirit of the West song. (By the way, did I ever tell you that I tracked down the statue they refer to?)

We made love upon a bed
That sagged down to the floor
In a room that had a postcard on the door
Of Marini's Little Man
With an erection on a horse
It always leaves me laughing
Leaves me feeling that of course if
Venice is sinking
I'm going under
'Cause beauty's religion
And it's Christened me with wonder.

I always loved those lines. I loved them before I met you. They summed up everything I believed in.

Then we met. And after that, each time I heard the song, you were beauty.

You have, always, Christened me with wonder.

When you gave me the song - when you remembered to give me the song - it shook me. Since then, I have struggled to find a place for you in my heart, to contain the idea of you, to hold you at arm's length, or to draw you close. But, of course, if Venice is sinking, I'm going under...

So, in a messy, confusing way, you are part of my larger exploration of the 'core sin' of selfishness. You've also led me to see, in Magic Hour, a universal expression of grace. Or to believe that a filmic meditation on the exact moment when stories move us to tears might, somehow, reveal our secret soul, stripped of ego. You were there, at that moment of inspiration, weren't you? And it was you who noticed what was written on the walls.

My father, deathly sick in the hospital, helpless and intubated, had an 'Inspiration Therapist'. Her job was to slide the tube down his damaged throat, remove it, clean it, adjust it, and then guide it down again. She kept him breathing. She was responsible for his 'inspiration'. She kept him alive.

Inspiration - c.1303, "immediate influence of God or a god," especially that under which the holy books were written, from O.Fr. inspiration, from L.L. inspirationem (nom. inspiratio), from L. inspiratus, pp. of inspirare "inspire, inflame, blow into," from in-"in" + spirare "breathe." Inspire in this sense is c.1340, from O.Fr. enspirer, from L. inspirare, a loan-transl. of Gk. pnein in the Bible. General sense of "influence or animate with an idea or purpose" is from 1390. Inspirational is 1839 as "influenced by inspiration;" 1884 as "tending to inspire."

Inspiration. Beauty. Muse. Your lovely breath.

Somehow, you've have taught me that the sin of selfishness hasn't just caused me to treat people badly, or to betray the principles around which I'd hoped to organize my life. More than that, you've helped me discover that my selfishness - what Hendra calls "the self-centredness that keeps you being so deeply with yourself" - has held me back from any genuine expression of myself, both artistically and personally.

If I've achieved less than I've wanted in life, it's because of an arrogant assumption that, for me, this could be possible without loss of control, without risk, without humility, and without fear. I'd come to believe that I'd already risked - and lost - enough.

For a long time, I've congratulated myself on my openness and honesty. But, really, I've just made a fetish of that pose. And if you didn't see this yourself (and I believe you did), at least you made me see it - and in such excruciating detail and clarity. I've often felt foolish in your presence, but not for any of the seemingly predictable reasons. Only because you've made me so keenly aware of my dishonesty, my reserve, my dissembling, my avoidance, my pride, my desire, and my fear.

"Father Joe never taught me; that's too easy," says Hendra. "Rather, he always led me to an understanding of the core sin, the only sin, the sin before all the things we call sin, and that is selfishness, the self-centredness that keeps you being so deeply with yourself that you hate people: You want revenge. You want pleasure. You want to commit adultery. You have road rage, greed, whatever. It all comes from being trapped in this prison of self. It's not a difficult message to hear, but to understand it, to act it, that's really difficult."

And you never 'taught' me, either, in any overt, or condescending way - the way I have, too often, tried to teach you. Instead, you've 'led' me, inadvertently or not, to a deeper realization. As Hendra says, "It's not a difficult message to hear, but to understand it, to act it, that's really difficult."

He's right about that. It is difficult. And I'll probably need help.

I'd love to have yours.