Address: “What Have You Done with your Eyes?”©
The Rev. Sarah Lammert, USR Jan. 21, 2007
It is said that shortly after his enlightenment,
the Buddha was seen walking down a road.
He passed a man who was so struck by his
extraordinary radiance and peacefulness that he stopped and asked the Buddha:
“My friend, what are you? Are you a
celestial being or a god?”
“No,” said the Buddha.
“Well then, are you some kind of magician or
wizard?”
Again the Buddha answered, “No.”
“Are you a prince or a king?”
“No.”
“Well, my friend, what then are you?”
The Buddha replied, “I am awake.”
What does it mean to be awake? When we rise from our beds in the morning,
leaving the world of dreams behind in a rumpled pile of sheets and blankets and
pillows, do we enter the waking world?
Or is the dream world the access to a deeper reality; our daytime dulled
by the events that consume us, and the stories we tell ourselves about our
lives? If I am not the Buddha, sitting
for forty days under my Bodhi tree and achieving full enlightenment, do I ever
truly wake up? When do we skim the
surface of life, and when do we pierce the veil of illusion, diving into the
marrow of life, and somehow becoming real, and true?
The poet Antonio Machado pondered
such questions throughout his lifetime, weaving in themes of sleeping and
waking, dreaming and consciousness, limitation and limitlessness in his
poetry. “Beyond living and dreaming
there is something more important: waking up,” he wrote in a collection
dedicated to his contemporary Ortega y Gasset.
And of his own religious faith, he wrote, addressing his words to Jesus:
“All your words were one word: Wake up.”[1]
Wake up! It sounds like simple, sage advice, but it is
a message worthy of a lifetime of inquiry.
Machado himself began to ponder this as a child, when his mother asked
him a strange question: “What have you done with your eyes?” This question became a sort of leitmotiv for Machado – an extended muse
on the ways we filter reality through the senses as well as through our ways of
thinking and speaking. For Machado, who
lived in Spain during a time of creative and intellectual ferment, as well as
the violence and turmoil of the Spanish Civil War, the point of living is to
unlock our vision, freeing ourselves from the prison of our own
narcissism. “There is another life,”
writes poetry critic Roger Housden of Machado’s work, “There is another life,
[Machado] says, our true one; and it is here, just below our skin and our
eyelids. Sometimes we can come awake to
it in our night dreams.”[2]
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvelous error! –
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?
There are moments like these in
life, whether arising from a dream, “Ah,
marvelous error!” or welling up in us as we listen to music, encounter
nature’s beauty, read a particularly insightful passage in a book, or even just
during the daily round, when we do feel our hearts leap and pour out with
newfound inspiration. Whence this water of anew life arises we don’t
always know, but like the first blush of a new love, these are moments to be
cherished in life. We feel energized,
our fear is diminished, and all seems possible.
Perhaps this is what it means to awaken – it is to feel the stream of
life running through our veins, the waters of a new life pouring through our
heart. To awaken is to allow wonder a
place beside our knowing.
There may be an element of grace in
the experience of awakening, but lest we think that these waters of life come
from without, Machado continues:
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvelous error! –
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
Everything in our lives is useful,
is necessary, is part and parcel of who we are.
Even the failures, even the disappointments, even the despair. A heart that can be broken is a heart that
can break open to the world in new ways, opening one’s capacity to connect with
others, to feel compassion, to see new possibilities. Our sorrow, our failures can be the source of
our own transformation, and that of our world, the dusty pollen that is
transformed into honey.
Machado himself was not unfamiliar
with heartache, having lost his young wife to tuberculosis after only three
years of very happy marriage. He
understood how one’s world can fall apart in an instant. His father died while Antonio was in the
middle of his university years, forcing him to leave his literary studies and
seek work due to economic necessity, which was as terrible disappointment to
him at the time. He first found a job in
the theater and later as a French translator, and it was while he was working
for a French publisher in Paris that he came across the great Symbolist French
poets as well as the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario, who encouraged Machado to
write poetry of his own.
What had been a disappointment, even
a failure in terms of his education, in the end set the stage for his life as a
successful poet and a playwright. His
sorrows, his losses, the unexpected turns in his life became the sweet honey
that allowed his poems to speak so vividly of the human condition. Today, he is considered to be one of Spain’s
finest and most beloved poets.
And so it can be for all of us. Life takes an unexpected turn: a death, a job
loss, a failure to achieve something we had worked for, the end of a marriage or
a relationship. And yet; if we can work
through the accompanying despair and disappointment, whole new worlds are
available on the other side. We may even
discover our own poetry in the process.
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvelous error!
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.
This is what happens when we emerge
on the other side of the river of loss and regret. We awaken filled with the warmth of love and
the light of truth, to the chalice of our own being. Something elemental shifts inside and we
realize that the center of our universe is not the sun out there, but the fiery
sun at the core of our own being. As the
Buddha said, “Be ye lamps unto yourself.”
As Jesus echoed, “You are the light of the world.” You are, quite literally, the final arbiter
for yourself of what is true for you, and to feel this fire is to feel the deep
release of at-homeness within yourself.
As the sun glows, bestowing the gift of life to earth, so too the human
heart which is awake bestows wonder, joy and peace not only to the self, but to
the asking world.
So we approach the end of the poem:
Last night as I slept,
I dreamt – marvelous error!
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.
How to interpret this? On the face of it, Machado is saying
something quite radical for an early 20th Century Spanish Catholic –
God is not a separate being ruling from His heavenly throne, but is inseparable
from the center of one’s being. The new
waters of life, the transformative beehive, the fiery sun – these are all
perhaps metaphors for God, for the higher being, or perhaps the true being of
self.
And yet, as with every section of the
poem, there is the complicating line “I dreamt – marvelous error!” (in the
Spanish it reads “bendita illusion). Is
Machado equivocating, warning us that all attempts to define the truth are
illusory at best? Or is he pointing
towards something like the Hindu idea of maya
– that the phenomenal world represents a sort of fleeting reality, one that
shifts and changes through the lenses of time and perspective? It would seem that Machado is, in fact, a
mystic. For him there is no separation
between consciousness and physical matter, or mind, body and spirit. Wake up!
He seems to say. The waters of
new life, new sweetness, new light, are all locked within the human
spirit. Open your heart and mind and
look anew.
Just a few days ago, I was driving
in my car rushing over to Lila’s school because I was flirting with being late
for her publications party, and she had warned me that she would be the first
one up. I flipped on NPR as I was
nervously waiting for the light to change at Linwood and Van Dien, and on came
this story over the BBC about how the Doomsday Clock had just been changed for
the first time in four years, and not in a good direction. Two full minutes had apparently been added
due to recent concerns with the two greatest dangers facing our planet: the
spread of nuclear weapons and global warming.
I arrived at the school and faced a
dilemma. Should I listen to the rest of
the story, and find out what time we were now at on the Doomsday Clock, which
is after all something pretty important to know about, or should I be on time
for my eight year-old’s literary performance?
The mother instincts won out and I dashed for her classroom, slipping
inside in time to find a seat before the teacher made her introductions. Lila’s face which had been peering intensely
towards the door, relaxed considerably when she saw I had come through on time.
Thank goodness for the
internet. I was able to listen to a
streaming version of Daniel Shore’s take on the Doomsday Clock story, and I now
know that we are currently poised at just 5 minutes before midnight, midnight
being global catastrophe. The clock, he
explained, is an elaborate system set up by nuclear scientists who were
horrified at what they had unleashed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World
War Two, and wanted to warn the world about the dangers of the nuclear
age. “The scientists may enjoy this game
of nuclear catastrophe,” he concluded, “after all they started it.”
Why bring all of this talk of the
Doomsday Clock in on the heels of Machado’s poem? Having died after crossing the Pyrenees into
France on foot to escape imprisonment at the hands of Franco, Machado didn’t
live long enough to even see the dawning of the nuclear age. And yet, he might ask us, even given this new
challenge to the very life of life, to the future of new birth: “What have you
done with your eyes?” What have you
done, knowing what you know, seeing what you see?
Are
you fully awake, fully alive, fully open to the world? Knowing that there is none to turn to, no expert,
no God, outside of our own hearts, what might we create in our world? How might we transform our failures into
sweet honey, our mistakes into new possibilities, our despair into the
quenching waters of hope?
“Travelers,
there is no path, paths are made by walking.” wrote Machado. If we are to turn those hands of time back on
the Doomsday clock, and come through for our children, their faces turned to us
in expectation, we are going to have to Wake Up! and create a new path; in
compassion, in unity, in peace, in love.
May
it be so.