A Message to the Universe
by Kazuo Ohno, 1998

“On the verge of death one revisits the joyful moments of a lifetime.

One’s eyes are opened wide-gazing into the palm, seeing death, life, joy and sorrow with a sense of tranquillity.

This daily studying of the soul, is this the beginning of the journey ?

I sit bewildered in the playground of the dead. Here I wish to dance and dance and dance and dance, the life of the wild grass.

I see the wild grass, I am the wild grass, I become one with the universe. That metamorphosis is the cosmology and studying of the soul.

In the abundance of nature I see the foundation of dance. Is this because my soul wants to physically touch the truth ?

When my mother was dying I caressed her hair all night long without being able to speak one word of comfort. Afterwards, I realized that I was not taking care of her, but that she was taking care of me.

The palms of my mother’s hands are precious wild grass to me.

I wish to dance the dance of wild grass to the utmost of my heart.”
   

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I think about what Ohno meant. The wild grass dance: can this be where we converge, if we are able, with mother of womb and mother of soil; with both at once? Where we creatively express (in dance, art, smile, love, song) so joyously in life — “joy” not as a function of happiness but simply of pure coursing blood & exhalation — that we merge with the core within us [our past, our genes, our biology] and outside us [our partners in soil, in air, on land, in the tiniest cells of the smallest motes; all of which are also us, comprised of the same stuff as us]?

Creativity and expression as acts of radical reconciliation between ourselves and ourselves.

Ohno talks of stroking his dying mother’s hair. Is it so with our planet? We tend as best we can in her Autumn, already having grieved her to collapse after the Spring and Summer of our human life with her, stroking her in a comfortless set of gestures. In reality, she is the one caring for us, still allowing us to live and breathe, and eat, and enjoy & survive by the still-interwoven but slowly-fraying web of vitality connecting bees to flowers to birds to wind to soil to sun to leaf to oxygen to us, to us.

There is nothing to do but feel this to root.

Be wild grass even as it dies back, falls back to cracks in pavement, roots slow-buckling slabs of it up in joyous revolt.

(More about Kazuo Ohno here)

Essay by C. Way - Copyright © 2008 SnailCrow.com
   

   

(10 more like him here)
   

19th century thinkers like William Paley argued for the existence of God based on brilliant, beautiful, complex designs in nature — flowers, trees, bird plumage.

You might as well argue for the existence of God based on the ten astonishingly repulsive submarine lives in the link above: Alien forms so ugly they resist all aesthetic valuation. With walleyed gill-flutter they shatter the mirror and slither into the soft void beyond, where symmetry, harmony, color, line & beauty all become meaningless. They’re defiantly themselves, in silent, weird, ultra-pressurized pitch — Holy fuck, look at these critters.

My throat catches when I scan them all. The glutinous blobfish. The estuarine rockfish, severe & implacable as an Olmec head. The wheezing porcine lumpfish.

Why do I start to feel this way? Is it because I catch myself finding them wretched and laughable, ridiculously abhorrent, and then become ashamed with myself, knowing they can’t help how they were made?

Is it because I feel humbled in their presence, their ancient miles-removed presence, so coldly distant from mine that they might as well be martians wriggling among asteroids?

Is it because I feel smaller and uglier & more pathetic compared to their spiny, encrusted, cartilaginoid, mucoused, jellied but unselfconscious & heedless & glaring faces? More purely themselves in all their horrorshow gristle than all of us with our dissembling and meta-shit and second-guessing?

There they are, these deeptrench lives, captured in shock at the foot of ours, drinking all our drainage, our oldest and strangest cohabiters, blinking and mouthing in black while we feed them more plastic.

“Habitual Costiveness,
Depraved appetite,
Calculous and nephritic complaints,
Cutaneous eruptions,
Some species or states of gout,
Some species of dropsy,
Scrofula,
Amenorrhea,
Dysmenorrhea.”

That’s from Saratoga Springs’ 1821 advertising literature. It’s a list of maladies supposedly cured or alleviated by the the famous spring waters of that NY state resort. I read about this in the Atlantic Monthly a few issues ago.

So my first reaction, of course, was: “Bubbly mineral water, that’s all. Snake-Oil.”

Then I got to thinking about it. If enough people believe it, does that make it true? I’m used to hearing, and saying, ‘Hell no.’ What if the answer was ‘Yes’? In matters of faith, I believe it is.

I think a kind of psychic energy accrues around the hoped-for phenomenon, the faith-healer or faith-healing object, whether it’s a spa, a river, a shroud, whatever sacred or magical site or relic or person is supposed to confer health or powers or miracles, and that the more hope and yearning is focused on it, the more potent becomes its very real psychosomatic effects. Buzz swells around the faith-healing object in proportion to the people who swear by it, and the likelihood of people having real, empirically-knowable results from an encounter with the faith-object increases.

Put another way, I have no problem believing that some people visiting Saratoga Springs in 1937 really did have their indigestion alleviated, their skin conditions helped. I’ve known people that were so agitated and nervous as to send themselves to the hospital. You have too. There is no limit to the havoc the mind can wreak on the body. And conversely, no limit to how it can help.

It’s all too easy to lambast these kinds of things as pure evil-hearted humbuggery. And there’s a lot of it around, I’m not saying there isn’t. But a lot of it, if only psychosomatically, has worked. What the Saratoga founders did — and what most well-meaning and inspired faith-healers do — was to strike a wellspring — not of magic water, but of Need. They found a nexus of yearning on earth, tended it, cultivated it, marketed it, marshaled the psychosomatic evidence to its efficiency, and created a phenomenon. I don’t know how many people really came away from Saratoga springs over the last 200 years bettered and more healthful. But I’m not willing to say it was all a gigantic sham. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people returned in a better frame of mind and body. It might’ve been expensive. But what kind of price do you put on health? Especially a diminished “Depraved Appetite”?

But when does it get ugly? When does it turn devious? I believe the answer is — following William James in his “Varieties of Religious Experience” — when the “fruits” of religion are no longer there to consider, i.e., when the empirically-knowable benefits disappear. Only then can we start to call out the faith in question — like the faith in the healing powers of spring water — to be false.

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