Untitled (June 12th, 2024)
Today is Shavuot, the day when five thousand and some odd years ago (eight-hundred and seventy-something?) the Jews received the Torah from God on Mount Sinai. Jesse’s Chabad rabbi lamented the other day during his dvar how he’s at once disappointed and interested in the fact that he wasn’t literally jumping for joy at just the mere thought that Shavuot was approaching, I’d say in about a three-to-one mixture. (Now that it's actually Shavuot today, he probably is jumping around right about now, but let’s pretend he’s not for argument’s sake). On the commemoration of perhaps one of the holiest days in the history of the Jewish people, if not in fact, the holiest, how are we all not filled with uncontainable, unconditional joy?
I for one, am filled with anxieties, which, through no fault of their own (that is to say, their content has nothing to do with my encountering of them), continue to arise in my mind with rapid frequency, blowing it about helplessly like strong winds in a huge, white sail. I say that the sail is huge and white (sparkling almost, pearly and opal) because if the sail, endless and brilliant, is consciousness, then the strong gusts are my anxieties: they blow into it and immediately the sail—which in reality is an infinite white surface, expanding out in all directions—contorts itself to the shape of the gust
A crescent shadow slips into the endless sail: contour, direction.
and all of a sudden, we’re off! Of course I don’t recognize it, though—that we’ve lifted anchor, begun our sea-shanties, pulled all the pulleys, etc.—until we’ve struck shore and brine is gushing rapidly into the galley.
Alas! What are the gusts? Again, sweet-nothings trying to seduce me, really, all of it silly and unreal—the worry that my new apartment will be dirty when I move in (I visited again yesterday and while it looked much nicer than the first time, the appliances and shelves were filthy), and that somehow my broker is trying to scam me into taking an unfinished apartment; a worry that I’m going to spoil mom and dad’s vacation by driving out there tomorrow to get dad’s signature for the lease, which I somehow forgot to get before he left; a worry already about Monday, when I’m going to a concert with E and J and might see A, although I don’t even know why I’d be anxious about seeing her; even more silly worries about the apartment and moving in and taking out loans for all of this; the list continues…
I just walked to the bank and back to get a certified check for my lease signing Friday—another worry: that my broker won’t let me see the apartment again before I give him the second check and move in; I stupidly already gave him his broker’s check! It’s as if I think he were really trying his hardest to pull a fast one on me. Assuming the very worst in people…—and I saw Dad’s friend Larry walking back from shul, of course in full attire. I was wearing shorts and a wife-beater and basically had to duck behind a parked car so that he wouldn’t see me. Realization: there’s some proto-anxiety here that runs beneath all of this, like a giant, high-up hurricane throwing out all of these gusts: I’ve got this feeling of terrible incompetence for life right now—here I am, back from a year off ‘my path,’ having plunged back headfirst into Rabbi Joel’s ‘real world,’ as it were; immediately the infernal expectation of success and absolute independence has become crushing. A comment from dad the other night over dinner reinforced the boundaries of the weight itself: if only all of his sons had gone to trade school we’d all be working and raising families right now (all of his sons seem to already be working towards, save myself, of course). Immediately too, I set to work: get loans. Get apartment. Get girlfriend. Get religious. So far though I’ve failed in all of these. I don’t need to address the particulars here in all of these, though it suffices to say that as of this moment I’m painfully without any. Of course some are self-imposed, and others are for sure on their way, but today and for the past few, running around and messing up this apartment signing (brought the wrong kind of checks, didn’t print out the whole lease, the apartment may be dirty!), none of that seems to matter. All that is perceptible is my inability just to be independent already, to be self-sufficient, to be competent, just simply ‘to be,’ even. As if I hadn’t just gotten back from a year studying Torah in a warzone!
To jump back out a level to my dad’s friend Larry—at first I was going to write about (wind eastward! Land ho!) some discrepancy in our clothing, and how my not going to shul just added to the list of worries, but really, it’s all the same gust: I’m unable even to go to shul on Shavuot, and had to in my incompetence, go to the bank on yom-tov because I’d brought the wrong kind of check to the lease signing. Layers of insufficiency pile on top of each other here… Even probably in writing all of this down—on a yom-tov even—I’m not being insightful enough, not poetic enough, etc. etc. etc.
“The feeling of shame over the previous day when consciousness again emerges from the ocean of the night. How dreadful must the contrast have been between the daily life and the living waters to make the verdict one of high treason. It is not the repeated mistakes, the long succession of petty betrayals—though, God knows, they would give cause enough for anxiety and self-contempt—but the huge elementary mistake, the betrayal of that within me which is greater than I—is a complacent adjustment to alien demands.” D.H.
Hammarskjöld’s “series of petty mistakes,” luckily for me, is not the self/God betrayal of which he is so afraid. But it’s this pettiness—which he points out is well-enough reason for anxiety and self-pity—which has been plaguing me with its “alien demands” since the other day. The very smallness of the weight is precisely what makes it feel so heavy and burdensome. Obviously, had this sense of failure been as true and wise as the sail itself, I would have no way of feeling its tug—rather, it would quietly and insidiously compose the canvas of my experience itself. Hence, no tug. But instead, the petty worries play upon the sail and masquerade as it, pulling and stretching until I don't know the difference.
What does constitute the ultimate high treason for Hammarskjöld, though, is the final “adjustment” to this masquerade. As soon as we forget the difference between the sail and the wind and drift off anxiously in the night—death—we’ve lost. I have the tools though (astrolabe, burning horizon, weathervane) to navigate, and recognize the narrowness for what it actually is and isn’t. Not only on the level of the wind either, i.e. recognizing that my anxieties are petty and silly, but on the level of the infinite sail: its whiteness and smoothness become apparent only if I let them. The fact that I am, not what I am, is blindingly the truth, the solute to any anxiety.
My bike ride on Monday, the day before last, comprises exactly this solution (in both meanings of the word). I set out to bike on my normal route, probably Whitestone or King’s Point (though I never really decide until I’m halfway down Hillpark), but decided somehow on Sagamore Hill, which is around double or triple the length of the other two, respectively. Around halfway there I had the thought to turn back: this is much too far, how are you going to make it back? You’ll be exhausted, etc. And I almost did, too, ready to chalk it up to the pain already prickling at the tops of my knees, when I realized that my problem was thus: I was simply sailing opposite the wind, and it was unbearable. If though, I decided to use the stars for directions instead of the wind, I would continue to sail straight and true. True north, self-aligned, Godly.
To say the least, I did, and ended up an hour later exhausted and satisfied, at Sagamore Hill. Though it wasn’t actually Sagamore Hill, instead a place just about two miles short of it: Young’s Memorial Cemetery, a spot I’d always passed and remarked at but had never been, and where Teddy Roosevelt himself is buried with his second wife Edith. There I climbed the twenty-six steps to his grave (corresponding to the number president he was) and sat, ‘victorious’ at my bike ride’s success. Though in reveling in my own triumph, I had immediately been conquered—myself now by the bike ride—by my victory. It was all I could think about; it was all there was. Still too, I had my worries about the bike ride back. The vivid thought arose of being picked up and driven back, and as silly as it seems now, all of this obscured—in the way that brightly-colored thoughts mysteriously overlay themselves on top of one’s actual field of vision—all of the beauty that surrounded me.
I meditated on the bench beside T.R.’s grave, which was a humble gray slab bordered by ivy, smooth rocks, and little flags, and recognized again my problem, that being the series of petty demands I had/am making upon myself, well including the demand for some kind of immediate return to self-sufficiency, if I ever had it, and my inability to achieve it once again in the now. And perhaps thank God for that, lest I adjust too quickly back into my old ways, which honestly, I’ve realized, have been mostly the ways of others. True independence, comes not through a perpetual series of ‘getting-ofs’ as I seem to believe, but rather through the simple recognition of their encumbrance of the soul. Otherwise with what we believe to be independent ‘on’ quickly becomes its own dependency. Already the obviousness of my double bind becomes clear here: dependency on everything going ‘as it needs to go’ in order to facilitate some final state of ‘self’-sufficiency. True, maybe, things haven’t been going exactly my way so far since being back, but then again, when have they ever? And then again, again, what exactly would 'getting my way' even look like?
The wide-open bay stretched out in front of Teddy and me and chipmunks scattered around in the low ivy. The view and the chirping couldn’t possibly have grown old for him; it wasn’t the case that here I was, and there he was, but rather, here I was, and there he was. I knew both of us were experiencing the whole thing for the first time. Yes, the sail had been unfurled straight and plain once again. Way past the inscription on his gravestone, or even the stone itself, it is the only memorial that would or could ever stand the ultimate test of time: that within us which is greater than us, as Hammarskjöld puts it. In full recognition of this, I could finally see the smallness of my anxieties and only then properly un-see them.
I jotted some words down, saluted and thanked Teddy, put my hat back on, and started home. About halfway back my patellar tendons started to bother me, and on some of the final, steep hills of my ride, they became unbearably painful. In a further experiment in mindfulness, I considered the pain as just more wind caught in my sails. The result? I made it home without a single dismount, although the pain still present in my knees tells me that sometimes we do need to pay proper heed to the storm.
On a plaque beside his gravestone, a line of Teddy’s (I’d like to think he prefers the nickname over President Roosevelt) framed Hammarskjöld’s just a little differently.
“In the long fight for Righteousness the watchword for all of us is spend and be spent.”
Perhaps this is the answer to Jesse’s rabbi’s conundrum: clearly I am not jumping for joy right now, and perhaps cannot. How could I? I may even be headed in entirely the wrong direction! But here enters the second and more important ingredient in the rabbi’s mixture—interest. Interest, not disappointment, in the passage of time, in the reasons why we can’t by happy, in simply being: this is the key. That we place our attention, not what we place it on, is what both Teddy and Hammarskjöld were getting at. Spend attention only, and you’ve fallen to the lesser crime—the pettiness of anxiety and self-contempt. Be spent, only, and before you know it, you’ve succumbed to the “alien demands” of the other—you’ve forgotten that the sail isn’t really gust-shaped at all. T.R.—and his memory right now for me is a simple, cleanly-burning blessing—points out to us the razor’s edge towards Righteousness: manage to spend and be spent simultaneously, and you might just be able to see both wind and sail, waves and sea, stars and radiant horizon.