Dharma - May 22 2021

 

Dharma

May 22 2021

His compact body,

scrambling up, and falling back

the smooth curve of the tub,

jet black

on glossy white enamel.

Hot water

wide-open tap,

a slowly rising flood.

A reverent Buddhist

could never kill a bug.

He scrutinizes the ground

before venturing a step,

lets flies

bite freely.

But I am not nearly so virtuous.

a non-believer

who eats meat and swats mosquitoes

ignores the peril of worms.

Yet I reached down,

and with cupped finger-tips

gently slid him up the slick vertical cliff

and over the edge.

So why could I not bear

to let him swirl down the drain?

Eight legs

paddling madly as he cooked,

his buoyant body

flushed airily away?

Perhaps because I despair

at all the suffering in the world

but feel powerless to change it.

Because I mostly feel unseen

and inefficacious.

All around us, all the time

the merciless churn

of life and death goes on.

And here, a small harmless spider,

as disposable as breathing out

and inconsequential.

Nevertheless,

from a faithless man

a simple effortless act.

As if the hand of God

had reached down from heaven,

and with the merest gesture

could revoke and dispense life.

A Dharmic act

to set the world right,

even if only

infinitesimally small.

I find that the older I get, the more exquisitely I feel the suffering of others – human or not.

(Also, unfortunately, the more misanthropic, pessimistic, and nihilistic. Which may make me an ideal subject for the study of outlook on mental and physical health. Although I suspect I already know the answer:  sunny and optimistic would probably fare much better!)

I read an article today that referred to a traditional Chinese dish that involved boiling crabs alive.(https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/17/the-gatekeepers-who-get-to-decide-what-food-is-disgusting ) Which may tempt us to judge another culture and feel disgust. But only if we forget that many of us give no second thought to eating lobster that have been similarly boiled alive. While reading this, I reflected back on how earlier today I had carefully redirected and slowed the stream of hot water in the laundry tub to spare a small spider who was on the verge of being washed away. I also refuse to eat lobster. Not that I'm even close to the virtuous person any of this might make me appear. But somehow, this small inconsequential gesture left me feeling better about the world, as well as my very modest place in it. Perhaps the path to virtue consists of many small steps.

I thought not only of dharma and the Buddhist reverence of all life, but of the Jewish concept of tikun olam, which has come to mean one's duty to “repair the world”. But I prefer the Buddhist worldview, because it does not privilege human life; it reveres all life as if we are all sentient and equally deserving. This may explain why I personified the spider: instead of “it”, I very intentionally used “he”, “him”, and “who”. (“She” and “her”would have worked just as well, but I guess I allowed myself to be lazily led by the weight of literary tradition, in which the male gender has customarily been the default.)

I really like the hand of God line. I think it's the irony:  a militant atheist, using religious references. But is also literally true, because this simple act is equivalent in its mercy and consequence as any notion of Godliness. Anyway, to have power over life and death and not exercise it seems horribly negligent and solipsistic.

I generally prefer to avoid “big” words for two reasons. First, they tend to evoke an intellectual rather than an emotional response because they take that much more processing. In my poetry (prose is different) I want language to enter the brain as close as possible to the way music does:   directly, with no processing or deconstruction. And second, most people are unfamiliar with “big” words, so their use can be counted on to interrupt the flow, perhaps even turn a reader away from the poem. No one likes a show-off! Nevertheless, I couldn't resist “efficacious”. The rhyme was too perfect, so when it struck me I couldn't drop it. Even though I probably should have for another reason, as well: it's redundant, since I already referred to powerlessness. . . .Perhaps, though, redundancy is sometimes OK:   if something is important to say, it can benefit from the emphasis.