LIVING WISDOM

I've learned a lot of things from stones, both from building with them and from butting my head against their walls, the latter when I was mostly younger and stone walls were largely metaphorical. The main thing I've learned is that the process of building with stone is the process of the Socratic dialog, with me as student and the stones as Socrates. Stones do Socratics like they do granite; they have infinite patience, impeccable honesty, are untroubled by pride, and they know their stuff right down to the ground. You can trust a stone completely; a stone will never lie to you. So if you listen right, and don't mind a few of the pinched fingers and bruised toes that are the price of stone knowledge, the stones will show you in true Socratic fashion that you already know how to build a stone wall.

You seek to build it one way, and in learning you can't do it that way (the rocks will not stand for it, they have their scruples, after all; rocks aren't constrained by logic; they understand a much greater fundamental than we humans do), you learn some small thing that only rocks can teach: a kind of stony grammar, a petrosyntax. You focus on that and build... no, that won't do either; that's not the whole of the thing, only a portion. Rocks know it can't all be learned at once, and wisely don't crowd you with knowledge. But with that part you go on, and try again, and fail again. But when after a week away you come back to the task, you find you've learned another little bit, it too is now part of you, part of what you know about stones and stone walls, part of what the stones in their limitless patience embody. With that you go on again, begin to build, and fail, and learn another thing, and so it goes on, as bit-by-bit what you learn rises up like a stone wall. And when that learning wall is at last all learned, it will be but a slight step to build the wall itself.

If you want a wall that is a stone poem in stone syntax, you have to learn the bit-by-bit stones teach until at last you have a stone wall, not a book wall, not a you wall. The finest mortar for a stone wall, therefore, is patience in the builder, blended with integrity. No integrity in the builder, no integrity in the wall.

But the bigger lesson comes later, when the wall is standing at last and you go out into the world alight with the knowledge that this dialectic pertains to EVERYTHING you do: that any worthy activity is a dialog, that wisdom is a living thing, not frozen in time, not a doctrine or a dogma, not a monument, not a library, not a printed book, and that you are filled with wisdom, ready and waiting to be known to you.

What does living wisdom tell us? Among other things, that the solution is where the problem is: in ourselves. Loss of beauty, living beauty, within and without our lives, is the sign, the lesson, the marker, the measure, of our deviation from living wisdom. Lack of affinity with living wisdom lies at the heart of our problems, and if we continue this way we are ended: the real thing won't stand for it. Existence must be a dialog with the moment, as the living, thinking person is taught by any art, any worthy endeavor. You are instructed and guided by the very task, by the very ongoing. You are taught the true way most truly only by traveling it, not just by standing still and listening to others tell you about it, or by merely looking at an old map others have made. The way is vast, greater far than we, and it will prevail, no matter how we treat it or perceive it. We either go as it goes or the walls we have built will collapse upon us.

And as there is living wisdom, so there is dead wisdom. Dead wisdom obviates dialog by saying: "Do it this way because we have always done it this way." Dead wisdom says: "We know best." Dead wisdom souls a dead society, whose walls will not stand. Living wisdom, in contrast, like all ongoing, is endlessly learned, always and ever new. Living wisdom is green: the green of the grass, the green of the leaf, the green of that living layer beneath the bark of a tree. It is the green of youth and hope, of knowledge about to be known.

The legend of Narcissus is generally believed to refer merely to an individual's obsession with his own physical beauty-- a very convenient interpretation, given humanity's subsequent and ongoing history-- but as always, the ancient Greeks were looking much further than that. They weren't talking about mere good looks, which are after all very temporary, very local and clearly worthy in themselves. Rather, the Greeks were metaphoring the true and early recognized danger: humankind's tendency to become obsessed with itself and its reflection: its achievements, its power, progress, wealth, wisdom, nation, army, its many 'true' religions, its governments, mass production, art, technology, science; all in danger of divorce from balanced dialog with the world at large, an attitude aboriginal humans would classify as irresponsible, insane even, given its relation to reality. "What hubris!" Socrates would say; what narcissism!!


[My Ramble from the previous (Just Deeds) double issue of the Kyoto Journal]