Think Without Thinking

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton IL, Feb. 8, 2009

beginning with a poem by Grace Paley:

you can’t think without thinking about something

my friends who are Buddhists are sometimes thinking

weeks on end about how to think about nothing

they are often successful

sometimes looking

at that famous sculpture (or a picture of it)

I think    oh he is surely not thinking about any-

thing    he only wants to give the appearance to

passersby for some reason    or he needs to hold

his heavy head in his hands which will allow

thoughts or ideas into his stoniness

just as I    putting

my pen to paper am pretty sure that something

which has pressed upon my breath beyond bearing

will appear in words    take shape and singing

let me go on with my life

 

In the sixth line of Grace Paley’s poem, “you can’t think without thinking of something,” she mentions “that famous sculpture.”  Of course, the one that leapt to mind immediately for me was Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker.”  In a poem that, in the beginning at least, is about thinking, this seems like a no-brainer.  But then once I’d thought of it, I wondered how that happened:  how would a person I’d never met, from a place I don’t know, in a poem without the usual niceties of punctuation or capitals, lead me with three little words to conjure, out of the countless pictures I carry in my head, that one iconic image of the dark fellow with his chin in his hand?  But when I read her words, I could do nothing else:  it wasn’t conscious, it just seemed like I thought about it without thinking…

I’ve never been to the Auguste Rodin Museum, but they tell me it’s great.  When I do get to go, here is what I think I’ll learn:  that the piece we’ve come to know as “The Thinker” is a small part of a never-used larger work depicting Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell.  The museum that planned to use the work over its doorway was never built, but the little centerpiece of the naked, muscular, seated man contemplating something became a work of its own.  It wasn’t well regarded in its day because, as it turns out, it was too forward thinking:  it used the old classical forms in a newly naturalistic, almost modern fashion, and would only later be seen for what it was – a bridge between one period of artistic expression and another.  You wouldn’t have known it at the time:  Rodin made a decent enough living during his lifetime but he never achieved any level of fame that would indicate that any of his work would become the cultural signpost that it is for us today. 

Why would Grace Paley choose such an image for her poem?  She seems a little cynical, doesn’t she?  She says she sometimes thinks he’s not thinking anything at all – he only wants people to think he’s thinking.  Whether this is simple projection on Paley’s part, or a clue to a larger cultural morass is hard to say. 

Paley may have felt undervalued as a thinker though she was well-known as a pacifist, peace activist, and women’s rights advocate.  She taught at Sarah Lawrence College, published poetry and short stories, was the first officially appointed New York State Writer, and was poet laureate of Vermont in her last years.  If she needed more evidence of her ability to think than that, God help her.  I suppose many of us do not see ourselves clearly enough.

Perhaps, though, she’s pointing here to something larger:  maybe she knows of something nearly universal in the human psyche.  Perhaps she knows that most of us harbor a suspicion that our thinking is not up to par, that if others only knew how poorly or how little we were thinking or what we were thinking about, we would surely be the butt of jokes or driven out of society or burned at the stake or worse.

But maybe, she says, maybe it’s not as bad as all that for this motionless guy.  Maybe this Thinker just needs to hold his heavy head in his hand so that something will come into that thick, rock-hard noggin of his.  As we look, we can see that, whether it’s full of thoughts or not, his head is heavy, so heavy he’s staring downward – not upwards as if in conversation with God nor straight out level as if looking for answers from his fellowman.  No, he’s looking down, at the earth.   In fact, he appears to be, if not exactly flattened and prostrate, then at least heavily earthbound, seemingly held captive and immovable on the little piece of ground on which he sits.  But then, by contrast, notice his feet, at an angle to the horizontal, toes gripping the turf in league with the taut muscles of his legs, his lower body ready to explode, ready to spring the man free and lift the whole of his being upward into the atmosphere – not by using his thoughts which, rather than being the vehicle of his release, seem to actually be the weight that holds him pinned to the ground.  It is not his head but the rest of his body that he’s on the verge of using as a springboard that will become the real means of his freedom.

Paley’s Buddhist friends are looking for freedom, too.  She says they want to think about nothing, and are often successful - which I had to stop and think about whether she meant that as a compliment, that they had indeed done what they set out to do, or whether she meant it as something of a demeaning little joke:  her Buddhist friends are people who don’t think, can’t think, aren’t as smart as her, aren’t as valuable.  Again, she points at the cultural here, I think:  maybe I’m projecting, but I think most of us spend some time each day judging those around us, deciding whether we’re more valuable than they are because of some personal trait or some resource we have more of than they do.  “They don’t think like I do, so they’re not as smart as I am, or they don’t have as much as I do, therefore they’re not as valuable as I am, therefore I will look down on them.  Or worse.

But maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe instead of demeaning her Buddhist friends, Paley is actually holding their spiritual practices up to a higher light.  Maybe she knows of the Four Noble Truths:  the nature of suffering, the origin of suffering, the end of suffering, and the pathway leading to the end of suffering.  If you haven’t been to a gathering of our own Green Sky Sangha group, it might be worthwhile to look into these Truths in a little more detail:

The first Noble Truth, the nature of suffering, is that birth, illness, aging, and death are suffering;  being separated from what you love is suffering;   union with what you don’t love is suffering;  clinging to anything is suffering:  Noble Truth #1.

The second Noble Truth, the origin of suffering, is craving, whether for delight, for sensual pleasures, or for existence;  any attachment to one’s craving causes suffering. Noble Truth #2.

The third Noble Truth, the end of suffering, is the letting go of craving, achieving freedom from attachments, and a release of your reliance on them.  That’s Noble Truth #3.

The fourth Noble Truth, the pathway to the end of suffering, is called the Noble Eightfold Path and involves right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.  The Noble 8-fold Path is Noble Truth #4.

This is certainly one way to handle suffering:  you parse it out and number it and order it and give it structure so that it fits in the human brain, so that it can be thought about rather than simply felt.  Feeling it is not much fun, but in order to think about suffering, we often have to impose order where there is none – chaos is just too overwhelming and difficult to get a grip on because our brains don’t work that way.

It’s kinda like the 12 Steps of AA.  We – not only alcoholics but all of us to some extent – we need order to keep us from the abyss of chaos.  Ordering and numbering the steps of recovery is essential for those who suffer from the chaos of addiction where there is no order except for the acquisition of the next fix.  I’ve seen 12-Step newbies come into the program and begin to work through the Steps.  Especially in the beginning, they need to know exactly where they are on the ladder:  “I’m on my fourth step, and I have been for a month, but I’m gonna get it soon.”  Only later, after they’ve worked through each step in its turn, no matter how long it takes – only later will it dawn on them that they can be, at any given moment, on any of the steps;  they will likely need, in fact, as time goes on, to move back and forth through many of the steps everyday.  But in the beginning that much chaos is too daunting.  There is a need to be as orderly as possible just to maintain some stability and some balance so you can begin to end the suffering.

So the Buddhists apply the order of the Four Noble Truths onto the problem of suffering.  Dante applied the order of Nine Circles of Hell onto the problem of suffering.  Grace Paley applies the order of poetry onto the problem of suffering.  It is not just therapy;  it is the vehicle of her release, the real means of her freedom.

She says in this poem that “something… has pressed upon (her) breath beyond bearing…”  O, my goodness.  Can you feel that weight?  I can.  For me, it comes from the memory of things I’ve said or done – or haven’t said or done - that have been hurtful to others.  It comes from my awareness of the gross injustices in the world.  It comes from the overwhelming sense of loss and grief of my own and of others who have touched my life.  There seems no end to these things that are so momentous and so intractable and so dreadful.  So often, I can’t even put the feeling into words.

Whenever Paley feels this burden of something that holds her down so much that it makes it hard for her to breathe, her solution is to put pen to paper and allow that stuff, whatever it is that’s bearing down upon her, to appear in words – which it hadn’t before, it was just unspeakable and inarticulate chaos and suffering.  She allows it - somehow – without any conscious effort on her part – to move out of her head and heart and gut, out of the core of her being, and to flow out of the end of her arm through her hand and fingers and pen, and to be formed and ordered and structured by the rules of language and committed to paper - written out, becoming a concrete thing apart from her rather than an amorphous something holding her down and keeping her from breathing and stopping her from going on with her life.  The suffering is then no longer integral to her life – it can now be separate and apart.  It’s still there, but she is no longer “at one with it.”  But as long as she’s thinking, as long as she’s attached to her cravings, she suffers, she’s in Hell.  And the way out that she’s found is through putting pen to paper.  Then she can go on with her life.  Then she can lift her heavy head from her hand, stand all the way up, look out ahead of her, and walk on for awhile longer.

Far be it from me to perpetuate that old hierarchy, that old view of the cosmos that Dante was working with that posited a Heaven up above and a Hell down below.  Not many of us can or will say we believe in either heaven or hell, at least in any physical sense or as places where one spends one’s afterlife, such as it is or may be.  But the directions of up and down are still symbolically imbedded.  “He’s got his head in the clouds,” you might say of someone whose ideas don’t seem to be in touch with reality.  “She’s down in the dumps,” we say of someone who’s having a bad day.  We live between above and below, generally, and if we get stuck in either orientation, we’re in trouble.  To be pinned to the ground like the Thinker is or immobilized by “something that presses upon our breath beyond bearing” like Paley writes about is to be kept from traversing the middle way, kept from walking this earth, kept from experiencing the joy of the here-and-now.  As much as I don’t want to be pinned down, and as wary as I am of floating off into the ether, as much as I want to walk this earth and experience this plane of existence, I also want to touch that other direction.  I want to lift my head and open myself up from time to time to the infinite sky, to feel some connection to all that that is beyond me.  I would have gotten none of that from this poem of Paley’s except for one word, one tiny little pointer that offers redemption for all that came before.  It’s “singing”:

just as I   putting

my pen to paper am pretty sure that something

which has pressed upon my breath beyond bearing

will appear in words   take shape and singing

let me go on with my life

Is it the words that have taken shape that are singing, or is it Paley that is singing as she goes on with her life?  Actually, I think it’s us.  With all the weight of this poem, with all the thought about thinking or not thinking, with all the contemplation of the many depths of Hell, with all the unbearable somethings pressing upon our breath, in the end we will lift our voices and sing.  We will not be mired in suffering.  We will not hold our heads in our hands.  We will gather together.  And we will sing.

Because we can…