Milarepa,
the twelfth-century Tibetan
yogi who sang wonderful songs about
the proper way to meditate, said that the mind
has more projections than there are dust motes in a
sunbeam and that even hundreds of spears couldn’t put
an end to that. As meditators we might as well stop struggling
against our thoughts and realize that honesty and humor
are far more inspiring and helpful than any
kind of solemn religious striving
for or against
anything.
Humans born into
this floating world quickly become
like the roadside dust: at dawn small children,
by sunset already grown white-haired, without inner
understanding, they struggle without cease.
I ask the children of the universe:
for what reason do you
pass this way?
Our task
as humans is to find
the few principles that will calm the
infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend
what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable
again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness
a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by
the misery of the century. Naturally, it is
a superhuman task. But superhuman
is the term for tasks we take
a long time to accomplish,
that’s all.
Let us
know our aims then,
holding fast to the mind, even if
force puts on a thoughtful or a comfortable
face in order to seduce us. The first thing is not to
despair. Let us not listen too much to those who proclaim
that the world is at an end. Civilizations do not die so easily,
and even if our world were to collapse, it would not have
been the first. It is indeed true that we live in tragic
times. But too many people confuse tragedy with
despair. “Tragedy,” D.H. Lawrence said,
“ought to be a great kick at misery.”
This is a healthy and immediately
applicable thought. There are
many things today
deserving such
a kick.
If we are
to save the mind we must
ignore its gloomy virtues and celebrate
its strength and wonder. Our world is poisoned
by its misery, and seems to wallow in it. It has utterly
surrendered to that evil which Nietzsche called
the spirit of heaviness. Let us not add to this.
It is futile to weep over the mind,
it is enough to labor
for it.
But where
are the conquering virtues
of the mind? The same Nietzsche listed
them as mortal enemies to heaviness of the spirit.
For him, they are strength of character, taste, the “world,”
classical happiness, severe pride, the cold frugality of
the wise. More than ever, these virtues are
necessary today, and each of us can
choose the one that suits
him best.
Before the
vastness of the undertaking,
let no one forget strength of character.
I don’t mean the theatrical kind on political
platforms, complete with frowns and threatening
gestures. But the kind that through the virtue of its purity
and its sap, stands up to all the winds that blow in
from the sea. Such is the strength of character
that in the winter of the world
will prepare the
fruit.
8 December 1966 – 26 July 2023
Someone went to a Sufi
with a question. He said, ‘I have been
puzzling for many, many years and reading books,
and I have not been able to find a definite answer.
Tell me what happens after death?’ The Sufi
replied, ‘Please ask this question of
someone who will die. I am
going to live.’
I came home from running errands two afternoons ago and picked my iPhone up off the counter where I’d left it, face down. As it was turning toward me, I saw among the notifications on the lock screen one from the New York Times that began with the words, “Sinead O’Connor…”. I put the phone straight back because I knew I needed to go talk to the contractor working on my lanai, and I knew that would be hard — and strange — to do through a river of tears. Notifications that begin like that are usually just one kind.
Since her death was announced, I have read tens or hundreds of thousands of words written about this lion of a woman, and mostly I’m struck by the river of quiet condescension which runs through them. “Struggled with her mental health for years”, they all say, often in the headline. They talk about how her career was never the same after she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. They jabber a bit about her dance with suicidal ideation and she is dismissed, by nearly every critic’s tone, to some pantheon in their minds of lesser, failed artists.
Sinead O’Connor was abused, sexually and physically and otherwise, in her early childhood by her mom. Not a little, a lot. People who’ve gone through something like that suffer things you and I don’t: borderline personality disorder, dissociative identity disorder, so on. They are colossal fragmentations of the mind and self which arise as a natural response to being savaged by a person of trust in a time of indescribable vulnerability. These have next to nothing to do with our fiercest moods, yours or mine, however full of darkness, struggle, and desperate grasping our troubles may be, however long they might go on.
Many people who’ve endured such things are permanently or regularly crippled by them at a level and in ways we cannot imagine or understand. Sinead O’Connor recorded ten albums, many of them outstanding, endured epic fame, which is no treat, collected Grammys and other awards by the wheelbarrow full, birthed and raised four children with tremendous love, fought off the hands and minds of record executives who imagined her a sexy bunny of a pop star when she understood herself to be a revolutionary and a protest singer, and carried on a lively, funny, occasionally heartbreaking, always substantive and intelligent and meaningful conversation with the world for nearly six decades. It included a very fine memoir, Rememberings (in which she refers to Prince as “Ol’ Fluffy Cuffs”, which gives you some measure of her wit). Her conversation with her creator, every bit as public as the rest of her life, was one of the most profound and wide-ranging I have ever witnessed.
Talking about how John Steinbeck was disrespected by critics after his death, the poet and novelist Jim Harrison said, “The Grapes of Wrath is a monstrously underrated novel, and Steinbeck has been neglected. But that’s okay, because he’s Steinbeck and they’re not. Where’s their Grapes of Wrath? They didn’t even write The Grapes of Goofy.”
Sinead O’Connor was as large as they come. She fenced and cleared the wilderness of her soul and her furiously difficult life, she toiled there with the dedication of an artist of the very first water, and she brought forth sweet grapes like few ever have or will. I trust that she is bringing them forth still, and I bow to this magnificent being for all eternity.