GRAILS

GRAILS

Sometimes I wonder if what every person needs is a grail. I’m not talking about religion and mythology, but a chemical reaction working at the cellular level actually working to turn waste into sustenance, confusion into clarity, randomness into compass bearings, lead into gold. For most of us it seems like the “small things” in our daily existence are what offer exactly this. Without them we’re lost. We’re caste out onto that big black water without a map or a rudder.

Call it another dimension to grassroots, but everything seems to begin at “the root” – beneath the feet of the individual. And that means the fate of everything comes down to one’s access to his own personal grail. Make no mistake, clarity does not erase the mystery of things, the kinds of confusion meant to inspire and intrigue. A grail is there to express what is deepest, most mysterious and inexpressible about ourselves. It’s there to give form to the formless, even when that form makes no sense on the outside and to other forms content on invalidating yours.

If allowed to grow and develop, your grail eventually links up with other small grails like roots twining themselves between trees. The trees remain separate above but find their real nutriment in the subterranean linkages below.

Funny, but the word “radical” derives from the Latin for “root.” That means if you ever want to get to the root of something you must go radical. Hence religion and politics resisting efforts to go to the real root of things. It would upset everything. It would bring about the closest scrutiny of motives. Hence also the censure of a radical’s closest cousin, ally, and ultimate purpose – “the free man” (L. liberalis).

A grail’s purpose is bringing all these elements together into a readable text. The text itself is careful not to become doctrinaire or orthodoxed. It stays fluid and open to interpretation (not unlike the Constitution – America’s Holy Grail). The very definition of a grail is “the object of a difficult quest.” Through flexibility comes the magic of returning us to basic fundamental meanings through many interpretations. The “quest” is finding flexibility, the “object” is in the meaning, and the meaning is found in the basics. The “basics,” the “fundamentals,” never change – just the details.

Lately in our history the individual has been robbed of his grail, and society no less. So we grasp at anything we can to anchor us, to find safe harbor and moorings to soften our confusion. It’s gotten so bad that we confuse the currents below with rudders and compasses. In other words, tails wag the dog. We’ve also forgotten that those “undertows” are anything but random. They’re the forces manufactured by others to a) kill spiritual meaning, b) keep confusion and desperation strong, and c) to offer faux sanctuaries from the storm. Once safely docked in port, the ropes of confinement tighten. No more liberalis, no more linkage to roots.

The Holy Grail for me is books, literature, and the scribes writing them. They’re the captain of my ship, navigator in charge of rudder-operations. But again, they remind me of a deeper fundamental – as vector to the mysteries of myself, to my personal “constitution.” Like a dream, they become actors in a psychic play, on a stage made of decking and ropes and sails and wind. They’re the voices of my soul speaking back to me. And they warn me of dangerous crags and “shallows” which will most certainly leave me aground and lost.

The water metaphor is fitting – the quintessential symbol of ancient alchemy. One’s personal balancing of water and fire, solutio and calcinatio, is the most personal of quests. And once balanced it never remains stable on its own. It requires a constant vigil, shouts from the crow’s nest, constantly redirecting the handlers of ropes and sails on where to navigate. The waters are never still except in knowing them well.

Should it be at all surprising that water surfaces most violently in the presence of dry-docked politicians and pirates hawking stolen goods. They fear the waters, eluding them and inventing myths about Odyssean water demons and monsters (huddled between Scylla and Charybdis, which means “between two evils,” a “rock and a hard place”). The dry and arid mind is one that calcifies, land-locks, and freezes one to fixed reefs. There’s no movement and no breathing. It worships the hard rocks which gave rise to maritime graveyards. It also tries to constantly resuscitate the dead and gone – the past. It fears movement and change, the freedom of fluidity. It seeks to “drain the swamp” of undefined, uncontrolled, unmanaged movement unseen from the shoreline, and then fill it in with sand.

The grail of conservatism is found in the lesson of wagging dogs – that is, the bulldozing of land to build more safety around itself. The more it digs the more it uncovers water below its own feet. It runs into the aquifers of its own unconscious. The faster it digs, the deeper its hole. Today, our politicians are so lost in this conundrum that their only recourse is to nervously build higher and higher landings away from sea level. They live in towers and refuse to look below to what surrounds them. But once they settle in they’re quickly reminded of the unstable ground on which their towers rest. And they quake along with the unsettling of their creations, the creaking and moaning of a ship of fools.

I think of Hieronymus Bosch’s Ship of Fools – trying to carry off the “bestiary,” the lepers and insane – the vessel being the Church, what Bosch called the “seat of all vices”.It sailed at a time when alchemy was science, superstition was gospel, and heretics were burned. It swabbed its decks compulsively – needing to erase guilt. It kept “the unclean” in the lower gallows not knowing that the vessel itself courted disease by condemning it. The righteous climbed the spars and held up in the crow’s nest looking down on the unsaved.

Then there is the rest of us today. Those floating on the waters of our own uncertainty. The (grass)roots we seek are in the smallest places imaginable. They must stay small too, lest those policing our waters confiscate and monitor what we do. What they fear most is “freedom.” Too much fosters strength, and strength fosters demand – and finally democracy. So, we stay “under radars” while allowing our roots to entwine like that of trees holding hands below and out of sight. This is our grail-bond. It is the unum in our pluribus, the circulus quadratus (squaring of the circle), the One inside the many. But we won’t find it until we first trust in our private grails which must first be ours separately. Reach within before trying to reach to another root.

There are glyphs on every person’s grail wall, instructions on how to proceed. The first thing you must do is forget everything you’ve been told regarding what you need. This is the outside loudly, desperately, telling you who you are. In your mind you must be the first human being, the first Adam, to have walked in nature, with your pores open to every sensation. Everything is real and possible. Then it becomes a kind of undoing, unscripting. That is, it’s about losing yourself, annulling yourself, by silencing the self – hence, said Walter Benjamin, “not finding the road you are looking for.” And by not finding it, you find it. You are going nowhere, hence where you need to go. No appointments avails us to the very appointment waiting to guide us.

Our past frustrations become a compass. They propel us into a kind of perpetual motion if only to elude those frustrations. But that motion takes us into new spaces, and the grail wall instructs us to “stay open.” The next instruction is not to look for a sign, message, or anything profound along the way. This again is the outside obstructing the process. Again, you must lose the outside by losing yourself.

There is nothing to grab because no one is there to grab it. I think of D.E. Harding’s experience of “headlessness” in his book On Having No Head: Zen and the Re-Discovery of the Obvious. That is, “all mental chatter died down… I forgot my name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or mine…. Lighter than air, cleaner than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.” Insight is “an adventure down a unique Path….” The path is the quest which is “perfect emptiness.”

In a sense, this is art taking over. It is life imitating (becoming) art. It’s bigger than we are and becomes a kind of love of life. And as “love,” quoting Gibran, it “gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. [It] possesses not nor would it be possessed….. And think not that you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course. Love has no other desire but to fulfil [sic] itself.”

I simply cannot live without my grail. It is, to quote Whitman, the “song of myself” – guiding, instructing, scolding, humbling, inspiring, and parenting me. I die into it as one drowns in a cosmic sea with its currents and undertows, its wildlife and marine forests. It creates a kind of insanity as well, a difficulty navigating on “dry land.” But it’s the sacrifice one makes for his muse. It’s the power of an amulet inside of which the muse swims in cobalt blue, staying with us as we walk forward. We can slip inside the crystal at any moment when the world stops us.

The perfect cosmic storm: my grail quest visualized as an ice cave inside a crystal. I climb through its rocky crags while edgy “headless” slivers reach out from below and above like nature’s arms. Each has a message and a lesson locked in frozen stasis. This is “the truth” fighting off the ghostly toxins of dry-docked rules and limitations. My grail flows and becomes its own waters as I manage to melt the mysteries to myself. Then they become me. I die, and what surfaces from that remains unknown – a humbling metamorphosis.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt