by Harvey Lillywhite
Growing up in Utah as a non-believer among a semi-Christian sect whose aspirations included world domination (they already had the whole state) and whose doctrine led it to trust that we are all now living in the latter days before the profound rupture (some would say rapture) that will finally divide the wheat from the chaff, spiritually speaking, you might say I was raised within the valley of the shadow of the Jeremiad. So it’s no wonder that I was rendered totally helpless in the face of the Japanese haiku. All of which brings me, obviously, to our subject for this wandering essay, the Garden of Eden.
in the scent of the orchid
the butterfly
perfuming its wings
—Matsuo Busho
At Bashō's Grave in Ōtsu
first autumn moon
before you get too big
stand there and smile for us awhile
—HL
Just last month I found myself near the top of a high building in a small room before a huge window overlooking Central Park, its green 341 hectares in the heart of Manhattan a reasonable enough facsimile of The Garden of Eden, and it seemed to me that, all around it, something had metastasized and might be dying and that I, a tiny pair of eyes, was enveloped in that affliction. It’s reported that Eve and Adam were evicted from Eden by God for eating the forbidden fruit. O apple. How tempting. The quintessential low-hanging fruit. And how charming the snake: sleek, stealthy, and, O, that darting tongue! And then there were the consequences: pain in childbirth, the shame of nudity, death, and knowledge, no doubt among others (disappointment and betrayal spring immediately to mind). Such excitement. But what God took away from us, technology restored. And here was Central Park, a fitting haiku right in the middle of this teaming, tragic, glorious city—a city capable of inspiring a grand Jeremiad if any city could. And the realization that came to me (from where? how does this intelligence thing work? thoughts popping up unbidden from the mysterious language factory that keeps minting my worries and flurries of judgments, the very stuff of my wandering mind, barely manageable if completely uncontrollable) was that my body had within it some park, or maybe was a park itself, some Central Park amidst the blight of consciousness and the sad transcendence of thinking, some Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve walked around together still naked, doing everything under the sun and eating anything (save the apple), a pleasure garden, an emotional state, a playground where part of me is always out at recess and nothing is withheld. . . .
It just makes so much sense, the Jeremiad part. Babies are nearly all park at first, all Garden of Eden. But they grow out of it, though not entirely. There’s always the tug between that lost place (lost because ignored) and where we find ourselves, busy thinking and figuring things out with all the accompanying anxiety and stress, where we might find ourselves—before a huge window at the top of a high building, say in NYC, having risen above our troubles down there in the grim streets, looking out at the integrated circuit board of the city—and notice, right there in the middle, a spot of green, a Central Park, and become ever more aware of something missing inside us that surely used to be there. What other logical conclusion could you reach? The world is coming to an end! And truly it is, for me, it’s coming to an end fairly soon. I am for a fact in the latter days of my lovely little life, nearing my own personal expiration date (stamped somewhere on my carton in tiny type where I can’t quite see it). And this realization generates fear, or an unsightly rash—a Jeremiad perhaps, which might percolate some personal reclamation project wherein the park is re-discovered and, in my dotage, I return there to live out my reclining years and cultivate my garden. There’s nothing like a good Jeremiad to get you thinking straight, to put you in the mood for a long hot-air-balloon ride over the troubled waters and turbulent bedrock of our miserable day-to-day existence.
It does amaze me what we can do when we put our minds to it. I just read where Dr. Klaus Zuberbühler of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and his group have discovered that Campbell’s monkeys, which live in the forests of the Tai National Park in Ivory Coast, have a primitive form of syntax. He figured out that these monkeys have words (read: sounds) that denote things (like leopards and food and “me horny”) and events and that these words are combined to make strings of sounds (read: sentences) that allow the monkeys to communicate pretty well together and to say lots of necessary things. They even have prefixes and suffixes. He speculates that whale sounds and other animal sounds are likewise a true form of language with syntax that allows many combinations of words (wow, whole whale paragraphs, short stories, and elephant haiku . . . imagine!). So Dr. Zuberbühler figured all this out. And just looking around at Manhattan, it takes your breath away experiencing what everybody has figured out. All this is a pretty happy consequence of expulsion from the Garden, but it’s not to say that death, which we’ve forestalled a bit, has been vanquished. Thus our post-Edenic Jeremiad-leaning sensibilities are still driving a lot (most?) of what’s going on with us from moment to moment and from day to day as we struggle to survive and to find that illusive happiness that we can’t do without but is always just a tad beyond our reach. And I have to admit, at least speaking for myself, that these are the latter days—though I am no saint and have dedicated myself to learning to live a hopeless life full of surprises at every turn.
So the kicker of the Jeremiad is an act of repenting—an apology, an atonement (AT-ONE-ment), self-reproach, regret, rue, bewailing, and possible penitence, and penance, punishment, a sacrament. Sounds fun, right? By the way, it’s exceedingly lucky that we’ve put our minds to this problem of being kicked out of the Garden of Eden by our own Maker because we’ve got lots of programs now to deal with this, not to mention medication and websites. And on top of that, statistics claim that every three seconds in Manhattan, among the eight million or so souls, five people are having orgasms. Imagine that crying ensemble, that part of the symphony. And with that juxtapose those x-number every three seconds in Manhattan who are at the point of dying. Then add the sirens and garbage trucks, the taxis, a whole hell of a lot of arguments, all the people screaming down in the pit at Wall Street, the squeaky little sounds all the rats are making, and maybe, for good measure, all the people out of eight million who at any one time are laughing hysterically. Now that’s music. I guess it’s something similar to what John Cage heard. And he’s right. You just can’t ignore all the sounds as you go through life on any given Monday. We’re so visual, deafened really by our desire to see. So take a second and listen to something. Maybe start with your own breathing. In and out. In and out. That’s it. Keep going. . . .
Listening, that grand penance. Keep breathing. In and out. Nice! (Maybe listen to someone else’s breathing as well.) So maybe you find yourself sitting and listening, or, if you’re lucky, lying next to someone listening. Don’t, however fervent your penance, assume that your troubles are over. Believe me, they’re just beginning. But that’s who we are, all our troubles, and that’s brilliant. It’s like having freckles or an unsightly boil on your butt. It’s just the way it is. Even there, you might find the park, a spark of The Garden of Eden that’s survived all these years and all these collective thoughts later, after the first mover told great grandfather Adam (a guy made out of the very earth!) and his wife, great grandmother Eve, (made out of a rib?) to bounce, dislodged them from the easy life, got them thinking a little, kicked their asses and locked the gates. (Nowadays, Eve and Adam would show no remorse—between the snake and the apple they’ve had to divorce; so their kids are struggling, but consider the source.)
Seriously though, the Zen tradition, which we were just entertaining, is a history of admonishment, a sentiment that’s maybe first cousin to the Jeremiad. Isn’t hitting a part of being a Zen teacher and being hit a part of being a Zen student? WAKE UP! WAKE UP! (The end of days is here . . . every day now so precious, even, as Roethke said, love’s worst ugly day.) Somewhere inside there, in your Garden of Eden, your own Central Park, is your true nature (and it may not be so pretty). You take the good with the bad, as they say. And further you realize that YOU is a short-term phenomenon, a little momentary energy center amongst the 6,967,393,681 (July 2009 est. from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency “World Factbook”) other similar energy centers, who, in turn, are amongst the countless other kinds of energy centers, the butterflies, the big cities, the fruit flies that seem to come out of nowhere wherever there’s a ripening banana, in this incredibly energized multi-verse. And all this reminds me of why I crave haiku, maybe as an antidote and maybe as a logical result of the terrifying Jeremiad—where the monsters and dragons live in our dreams for real.
dead my old fine hopes
my dreaming dry
but still, iris, blue each spring
—SHUSHIRI
dew evaporates
and all our world is dew
so dear, so fresh, so fleeting
—ISSA
arise from sleep old cat
and with great yawns and stretchings
amble out for love
—ISSA
dim the grey cow comes
mooing mooing and mooing
out of the morning mist
—ISSA
a saddening world
flowers whose sweet blooms must fall
as we too, alas
—ISSA
now in sad autumn
as I take my darkening path
a solitary bird
—BASHO
and 3 by HL . . .
we lie together
empty-handed and alone
our bed an island
day of mist and fog
delicious hot December
nothing to transcend
dark self wandering
the great hopelessness of light
everything is here
Listen, The Garden of Eden is doing fine, as the song says, within us and without us. In closing, we should know that an American Indian myth about Sky Woman tells of a beautiful young woman who lives in the sky. She has a great life. But she’s warned that she can do anything but pull up the huge sacred turnip in the garden. She resists, for a time. Then she digs it up, leaving a big hole, which she falls through, plummeting to earth, where she starts our world. THANKS SKYWOMAN! I think it’s called felix culpa, a Latin phrase meaning "blessed fault" or "fortunate fall." It refers to Adam and Eve's fall and the loss of the Garden of Eden, known theologically as the source of original sin. (Every year the phrase is sung in the Exsultet of the Easter Vigil: "O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem,") As for me and my merit and redemption, I chant aloud and clap each year around this time (with as much chastity, moderation, charity, zeal, meekness, generosity, and humility as I can muster) the seven deadly sins, which so well define me, because, I believe, they are decidedly the best map of our true nature. And any good Jeremiad is, at the end of the day (or all days), a matter of paying homage where homage is due. O Lust. O Gluttony and Greed. O Sloth. O Wrath. O Envy and Pride. (Do we chastise the lion for bringing down the oryx?) O Spring and Fall. O Morning and Twilight. After all, enlightenment is a small, humble thing, the opposite of transcendence, a word, an idea, which, if you’re diligent, will disappear like the steam that rises from a golden glass of green tea.