a trembling question, an answer and a path towards…
cheerful serenity
In this somewhat regular letter, sprinkles of my wanderings through philosophy, culture, art and, well, life. An attempt to ease some ruffled spirits, perhaps. Mine, at least. This is me on the internet, this is my website.
Hello everyone,
In this letter, a path into the past, pointing towards the future. If this doesn’t make sense, read the letter!
For more regular updates on my writings (mostly on my website), it’s probably easiest to follow me on instagram.
I’ll be gone for the coming month, first for some silence and meditation and then, vacation. A new letter will probably, hopefully, arrive at the end of August.
Below, first, are my upcoming projects, pleas join if interested!
Have a great (remainder of the) summer,
Louis
English projects:
Meditation channel:
I’ve started a meditation channel, open for everyone - join the livestream on Telegram for a weekly half hour of guided meditation. Join the whatsapp group for notifications. It’s completely free, with voluntary donation.
Follow me on Instagram for more regular updates on writings and projects.
Nederlandse projecten:
Groep: leven en werken in het ritme van de seizoenen
Sinds een aantal jaar bestudeer ik aan de hand van dit boek van Jaap Voigt de seizoenen en hoe we hiervan kunnen leren in een meer natuurlijk ritme te leven. De afgelopen jaren heb ik in verschillende verbanden deze filosofie gedeeld. Op dit moment wordt er een nieuwe groep gevormd, er is nog een aantal plekken. Voor meer informatie of als je aan wilt sluiten klik hier of mail me: post@louisbijldevroe.com
Meditatiekanaal:
Gemiddeld een à twee keer per week begeleid ik een online meditatie van een half uur. Als je mee wilt doen kan je via deze link deelnemen aan het whatsapp kanaal, daar houd ik je op de hoogte wanneer de meditaties plaatsvinden. Je hoeft nooit aan te geven of je er wel of niet bij bent en alleen ik kan berichten sturen dus geen zorgen over spam. De meditatie gaat via een livestream op dit Telegram kanaal. Gratis, vrijwillige bijdrage.
Een dag van stilte in het teken van de herfst in een prachtig bos in Maarn op woensdag 4 oktober. Voor meer informatie en om je aan te melden, klik hier.
Op vrijdag 15 december een stiltedag in het teken van de stilte van de winter. Klik hier voor meer informatie of je aan te melden.
Now, for the letter:
Let’s start with some questions.
In my last blog, seemingly out of nowhere, the poet David Whyte and Elvis Presley (the singer) started a conversation…
Elvis has mainly been singing his B-sides, while David Whyte has been reciting old Welsh poetry in his cosy chair near the fire, overlooking some Loch in West-Ireland. But mainly they were having a rather deep conversation on the nature of questions.
It all started with Elvis singing his astoundingly heartfelt and beautiful ‘If I can dream.’
Somewhere halfway during the song, David's ears, eyebrows, forehead and upper body perk up when he hears Elvis singing these lines:
Deep in my heart there's a trembling question
Still I am sure that the answer, answer's gonna come somehow
Out there in the dark, there's a beckoning candle
But wait, much better to hear it from Elvis himself:
Elvis finishes the song, leaving a trembling silence, made all the more tangible by the crackling fire in the background. After a while, the silence still softly reverberating in the room, David finally succumbs to the tension and remarks:
‘Trembling Questions! I’ve been questioning those bastards for a while now. If you are so inclined, here is what I’ve come up with so far: questions create tension.’
Elvis, unimpressed, raises one of his eyebrows and starts strumming and humming a very sad minor chord but David, being a poet and thereby quite experienced in people not being impressed and connoisseur of eyebrows raised, bravely continues:
(… if you want to read how this poor poet bravely continues, you can read it here in full. In favor of brevity, we, and David, will continue here in a more concise form:)
‘Questions create tension, AND, our conditioned response is to dissolve this tension as quickly as possible. I guess this has something to do with our education (and evolution) and, well, that seems quite reasonable. Have a problem? Solve it!
However, what we don’t learn is that there are questions that don’t really have an answer.
These questions create a tension in our hearts, our souls, our being. If one was feeling poetic and wanted to write the most important lyric of his life, one could describe it as ‘a trembling question, deep in our hearts.’
When confronted with these questions, we can do two things: live with this tension or look away.
Depressingly enough, looking away is actually mainstream behaviour for most adult human beings. Why do we do this? Well, fear. For these questions are quite dangerous - their answers may spell the end of the meticulously and carefully constructed cathedral of our well-curated identity: a cosy, warm, safe, strong beautiful cave church where EVERYTHING IS WELL AND GOOD THANK YOU VERY MUCH. And who would want to destroy their very own cathedral-cave-church?’
David looks up and sees Elvis, wide-eyed, profusely sweating from his face, trembling lightly, staring down into his folded hands in his lap. Then, something miraculous happens. The surroundings dissolve and resettle into a studio while Elvis slowly transforms into his younger self. They are transported to a pivotal moment earlier in Elvis’ life involving one of the most important, essential, life-affirming decisions he ever made.
For those of you who unwisely haven’t clicked on the Wikipedia link before, some background information, from Wikipedia:
Composer Billy Goldenberg and lyricist Walter Earl Brown were asked to write a song to replace "I'll Be Home for Christmas" as the grand finale on NBC's Elvis, taped from June 20–23, 1968 (now also known as ‘68 Comeback Special). Knowing about Presley’s fondness for Martin Luther King Jr., and about his devastation related to his then-recent assassination in Memphis, Brown wrote "If I Can Dream" with Presley in mind. After Presley heard the demo, he proclaimed: "I'm never going to sing another song I don't believe in. I'm never going to make another movie I don't believe in.”
It is the moment where Elvis stopped looking away, and instead decided to look straight into the trembling question, deep inside his heart, and said YES. Yes to the true song inside that needed to be sung, thereby saying NO to his very own cathedral, (let's call it Graceland), destroying it in the process, but actually freeing him. The decision that directly led to this moment:
‘Well goddamn it!’, David exclaims. ‘The climax of this whole goddamned whateverthisis was supposed to be my poem!
So.
What I wanted to say.
These irritating Very Important Questions. The questions that we look away from. All of us. These fuckers. They actually AREN’T fuckers. Because, like you just showed us Elvis, when we confront these questions, chest up, eyes a-blazing, they turn out to actually be Very Important… Friends. Friends helping us steer clear of our old habits, away from our old identities; friends urging us on, ever onwards towards a truer self, a truer life. Friends, in short, that we have no right to ignore; friends that have patiently waited for us, friends that have every right to stay’:
Sometimes
Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories
who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,
you come
to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.
David Whyte
(inspired, allegedly, by Elvis)
…
And so ends a conversation between a somewhat grumpy David Whyte and a somewhat shaken Elvis Presley.
And that’s all very good and nice.
But, looking back, this isn’t quite the end of it. It may very well be the start of it. In this beautiful (Dutch) song they sing: ‘today I started walking, and from this moment on, where I’ve walked, there now is a way.’
A path appears, unfolding from David Whyte’s conversation with Elvis leading back to my previous letter. Let’s retrace the steps, thereby, strangely enough, going forward.
Saying yes to something new, means saying no to something old. Stepping into a new, and by definition unknown future, means stepping out of an old, known and therefore (seemingly) safe past.
First, some summer reading music:
From my blog post pure freedom addendum:
In Guide for the Perplexed, E.F. Schumacher writes the following on what constitutes the true progress of a human being:
His first task is to learn from society and ‘tradition’ and to find his temporary happiness in receiving directions from outside.
His second task is to interiorise the knowledge he has gained, sift it, sort it out, keep the good and jettison the bad; this process may be called ‘individuation’, becoming self-directed.
His third task is one that he cannot tackle until he has accomplished the first two, and for which he needs the very best help he can possibly find: it is ‘dying’ to oneself, to one’s likes and dislikes, to all one’s egocentric preoccupations. To the extent that he succeeds in this, he ceases to be directed from outside, and he also ceases to be self-directed. He has gained freedom, or, one might say, he is then God-directed. If he is a Christian, that is precisely what he would hope to be able to say.
The third task is one, says Schumacher, ‘for which he needs the very best help he can possibly find.’
What is this very best help and why do we need it?
Let’s explore.
Start with why!
Why need help?
Following a true calling requires courage.
Why?
Here is Herman Hesse describing it in his book ‘The Glass Bead Game’. In it, the main character Joseph Knecht, still a boy, is called, called by an inner voice that he truly hears after he meets a music professor. After this encounter, where they make music together (“The best way for two people to become friends. There is none easier,” he tells the boy), Joseph steps outside and finds the world transformed.
‘He had experienced his vocation, which may surely be spoken of as a sacrament.’
But following this call has consequences, for the old jacket no longer fits.
Some of his enemies now openly mocked and hated him, and he found himself more and more separated from and deserted by former friends. (…) They had become temporary companions of the road, now left behind. He was no longer in the right place. Everything he had known had become permeated by a hidden death, a sense of belonging to the past. It had all become a makeshift, like worn-out clothing that no longer fitted. As the end of his stay approached, this shedding of a way of life no longer right for him, became a terrible torment to him, an almost intolerable pressure and suffering. Among the pangs inherent in a genuine vocation, these are the bitterest. One who has received the call takes, in accepting it, not only a gift and a commandment, but also something akin to guilt. Similarly, the soldier who is snatched from the rank of his comrades and raised to the status of officer is the worthier of promotion, the more he pays for it with a feeling of guilty conscience toward his comrades.
We need help.
Help from ‘masters’ who travelled a similar path before us, and, ideally, help from those around us. However, as Hesse describes, not many of those around us will be friendly to a vocation followed.
In the Bible, one of the most-used words is ‘go.’ It is the encouragement to step outside, to dare, to bare your soul in all its vulnerability. ‘Sin’, in contrast, means ‘missing the mark.’ In this way, sinning is the opposite of going, for it is staying, not listening to the call, thereby missing the mark.
Help from masters, then. More help please!
Oh no wait, more struggle…
Reading ‘Fragrant Palm Leaves’, the diaries by Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn, written when he was in his mid thirties:
Of course, one cannot expect too much too soon. Casting off the old skin is not something a culture does overnight or without resistance. The fear of challenge is often accompanied by a subservient mentality. And if there is subservience, culture is not true culture, just a tool for controlling others. Hardships and conflicts caused by challenges to the old cannot be avoided. That is why the path of struggle is the only path worth following.
He is talking about the resistance he experienced in founding a more common Buddhism, a Buddhism for the people. However, you could also read it as a personal story of change. Culture can be seen as your own inner critical voice, or your old friends, telling you to stay, not to change, not to go.
Struggle thus, as an inevitable aspect of change.
But enough with the struggle already! How about some help?
All right.
Moving on to another path, a path with heart:
To enter this path consciously challenges all we know of our identity. Yet it is the path to freedom. The Zen teacher Karlfried von Durkheim spoke of the need for this process when he wrote:
“The person who, being really on the Way, falls upon hard times in the world, will not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers him refuge and comfort and encourages their old self to survive. Rather, he will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help him to risk himself, so that he may endure the difficulty and pass courageously through it. Only to the extent that a person exposes himself over and over again to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found within them. In this daring lies dignity and the spirit of true awakening.”
A true help, a true friend then, is someone who will faithfully and inexorably help you to risk yourself.
Right! The ones that encourage change, but even more so: the ones that keep egging you on, even when you yourself can’t see which way to go anymore. Friends, sometimes in the form of questions, that have no right to go away, as David Whyte might say.
There is a beautiful episode of Star Wars: Visions on Disney+, Aau’s Song, in which a little girl is called, by crystals, weirdly enough. These crystals are the source of power of the light saber, the legendary weapon carried by those wise space sorcerers known as Jedi knights.
One of these Jedi pays regular visits to the girl and her father, for they mine this crystal for the Jedi. In one of these meetings the master senses the girl has a calling, and that the girl can hear the calling, without yet understanding it.
‘They call to you.’
The master sees it, acknowledges it and carefully points her onwards, and the pupil slowly understand what was always apparent under the surface. There actually is a calling, she actually has a calling.
As the Jedi master leaves and thanks the father, he says it’s the calling of their people to mine the crystal. The master turns around and says, seemingly to the father, ‘and it takes courage to heed the call.’
Similarly, in the Glass Bead Game, when the Music Master is leaving Joseph Knecht after their first meeting ‘he turned once more and gave Joseph a parting greeting, with a look and a ceremonious little inclination of his head.’
A recognition of a common understanding, acknowledged by the old carrier, to the new. A torch lighted, shared. A light, a flame that is burning brightly and steadily in the old, but is still just a fickle flame in the young. A shared holding of the flame, a future passing of the torch announced; a ceremony of sorts.
This kindling of the flame by a master is one form of help. The other form of help, that of our loved ones supporting our path, oftentimes isn’t as easy, and understandably so.
At the end of the episode, inevitably, a choice must be made by the girl Aau. But what choice, exactly?
‘We cannot choose where our calling takes us. Only whether or not to answer,’ the Jedi says.
Not a choice of where, but a ‘simple’ yes or no choice.
Help may be needed. Someone who faithfully and inexorably helps her to risk herself. What will her father do? His first reaction:
‘But her life is here!’
But then, seeing his daughter for who she truly is, he knows to let her go: ‘you are the first of our kind to step out into the stars Aau, I’m proud of you.’ ‘I’ll miss you dad’, his daughter says, and hurries to the master and her spaceship, waiting to take her out into the stars.
Now that is true help.
True help is given, can only be given, by those who can let you go. That is true love. Letting the other be, completely; even when that means letting go of the person you love most in the world.
So.
Help.
First, by ‘the stranger who knows’ that crosses your path: ‘the master.’
Then, if you’re lucky, by true friends, who truly love, truly see, and will truly let go. This is not for everyone. But no matter.
For the most important ingredient is something we all have: courage. The courage to say YES to a calling, not knowing where it will lead you, not knowing what you will encounter. The courage also, to leave the old, even when the old is taunting you, seducing you, doing everything in its power to keep you right where you are.
The funny thing about courage: everyone is capable of it; it is not something only (Jedi) knights have. If you know fear (and who doesn’t?), you know courage. For courage isn’t the absence of fear, it’s facing that fear. This path, with all of its challenges, is the path to freedom, Kornfield says. To find your calling, your truth, and to follow it, can only work by living it. ‘Truth is lived, not taught,’ the master tells young Joseph. ‘Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see they have already begun.’
…
And now, to complete this particular journey, let’s leap ahead a life’s worth of years. For where does this path full of conflict lead? Well, no one knows. Maybe Hesse knows.
Knecht, many years later, meets his now old master, and recounts this most remarkable experience to a friend. During the meeting, the master shows his pupil (and maybe us), once again, a possible outcome of his path:
‘You are tiring yourself, Joseph,' he said softly, his voice full of that touching friendliness and solicitude you know so well. That was all. ‘You are tiring yourself, Joseph.’ As if he had long been watching me engaged in a too-strenuous task and wanted to admonish me to stop. He spoke the words with some effort, as though he had not used his lips for speaking for a long time. And at that moment he laid his hand on my arm - it was light as a butterfly - looked penetratingly into my eyes, and smiled. At that moment I was conquered. Something of his cheerful silence, away from words and toward music, away from ideas and toward unity. I understood what I was privileged to see here, and now for the first time grasped the meaning of this smile, this radiance. A saint, one who had attained perfection, had permitted me to dwell in his radiance for an hour; and blunderer that I am, I had tried to entertain him, to question him, to seduce him into a conversation. Thank God the light had not dawned on me too late. He might have sent me away and thus rejected me forever. And I would have been deprived of the most remarkable and wonderful experience I have ever had.
A cheerful silence, away from words and toward music, away from ideas and toward unity.
Isn't that beautiful.
Such cheerfulness, writes Hesse, is neither frivolity nor complacency; it is supreme insight and love, affirmation of all reality, alertness on the brink of all depths and abysses; it is indestructible and only increases with age and nearness to death.
Only to the extent that a person exposes himself over and over again to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found within them, remember?
And now we’ve seen how ‘that which is indestructible within’ shows itself: not as some residue of the harshness of the world, nor as sharp edges chiselled through defeats suffered, not as darkness. Our deepest and indestructible part is light and serene: cheerful serenity.
I’ll say ‘yes’ to that.
Love,
from,
Louis
.