Jesus, Jazz, and Buddhism

One of the wisest people I know is paralyzed from the waist down.  He lives in a wheelchair and offers me what he calls "wheelchair theology."  Part of his wheelchair theology involves taking time to look at the world slowly and carefully, in a Zen-like way.  And part of it is to negotiate the turns and corners of life with creativity moment-by-moment.  He's always finding ways of doing things differently.

In Whitehead's philosophy the process of 'finding ways to do things differently' is a form of spirituality: a way of walking with the God of love, even if your legs can't do the walking.  God is the source of novel possibilities in human life, and when we are receptive to them, we are receptive to God.  People who live with disabilities are quite adept at receptivity to God. 

Of course none of us are able-bodied the whole of our lives; we all die.  And in the course of a lifetime there may be times when we live with physical, mental, and emotional disabilities.  This is part of our humanity.  We are not gods, we are people. 

But in our able-bodied moments, those with more permanent disabilities are nevertheless our priests.  With their embodied minds and hearts, they show us how to do things differently, how to be open to novelty.  This is one of the ideas I present for your consideration in this essay.  I'll be drawing insights from Whitehead, Buddhism, and Christianity in order to explore the poetics of disability.   

Beauty is a Verb.  What a beautiful idea.  What a Whiteheadian idea.  But I cannot take credit for it.  I take the title from a recent book by that name: Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability.  It is edited by Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, and Michael Northen; and published by Cinco Puntos Press in 2011.  I hope you will buy it or check it out from the public library.  It is an anthology of poetry written by people living with disabilities.  As I was reading it, I came upon the following  sentence:

I am not a practicing Buddhist, but the longer I live with two chronic diseases, the more often I turn and return to Buddhist theology and poetry as a way of helping to conceptualize and accept the unpredictable. 

So writes Brian Teare in his essay Lying Meditation, which appears along with his poetry in Beauty is a Verb.  Teare's own writings concern embodied and medicalized consciousness, and address both the problems and symptoms of gouty rheumatoid arthritis, celiac disease, and multiple food sensitivities.  

The idea that we need to accept the unpredictable is another part of the wisdom of disability.  There are some who wish that the world was machine-like, predictable, efficient, and surprise-free.  But that is not the world we live in.  We live in an unpredictable world in which the future is open, even for God and certainly for us.  How to live with the unpredictability: that's why we need the wisdom of disability.

In his essay Brian Teare explains that Buddhist teachings have helped live with disability, among other ways, by helping him better understand two illusions.  One is the illusion of a boundary between mind and body, by which mind and body are understood as two utterly distinct realities.   The other is the illusion between abled and disabled consciousness on the other hand.   Of course Buddhism is not simply about dispelling illusions.  It is also about affirming the sheer connectedness and fluidity of all things: the pure becoming, which is the only dance there is.   Those of us influenced by Whitehead see things this way, too.  That's why we feel such affinity with Buddhists.  Our task in the dance, say Christians and Buddhists and so many others, is to take care of each other, respect each other, help out each other, honor each other.   The Only Dance There Is.  I didn't invent that phrase either.  It's the title of a famous book by Ram Dass.  But it captures the spirit of a Poetics of Disability, the way in which people who live with disabilities become priests of the dance.

What does the word poetics mean?  In JJB we understand poetics in a very broad sense.  It is more than commentary on the act of creating poetry; it is the activity of seeking wisdom for daily life, relative to the circumstances at hand.  It is an attempt to make poetry of one's own life, given whatever conditions, impairments, limitations, or deprivations one faces.

People with disabilities are making poetry from their lives in light of difficulties that are physical, cognitive, mental, sensory, or emotional.  As Jennifer Bartlett, one of the editors of Beauty is a Verb explains, they live with physical limitations and with society's critique of the non-normative body.  It is often said that poetry can only emerge from friction: that is, from rubbing against things.  This is what people who live with disabilities rub against so many days of their lives: bodily limitations and social attitudes which relegate them to objects of pity or objects of medical analysis.

According to Brian Teare, living with disability requires the relinquishment of two illusions that are often found in conventional thinking.  The first illusion is that mind and body are utterly distinct.  From a Whiteheadian perspective this is indeed an illusion.  There is not an ontological gulf between mind and body, as if, the mind were one kind of substance (consciousness) and the body quite another (matter).  Whiteheadians believe that there is always embodiment in minds, however distinct we might feel from our bodies.  The mind and body are not one, but also not two.

What, then, is the mind?  From a Buddhist and a Whiteheadian point of view, it is like the crest of a wave.  It is an evolving seat of consciousness within a body which is deeply shaped by experiences from the body and with the body, otherwise called experiences in the mode of causal efficacy.  These experiences are rarely lifted into consciousness, but they are deeply influential in human life.  If you are a wheelchair user, the position of your body in the wheelchair shapes your consciousness throughout your waking day.  You see the world from a certain angle, from our body's point of view.

Moreover, so Buddhists emphasize, the seat of consciousness is not simply a single self-same reality.  It is a stream of experiential activities -- a stream of concrescing subjects -- that can be different moment to moment.  This means that you can be temporarily able-bodies and then temporarily dis-abled.  Brian Teare writes:

Okay. Sure.  On those days when I walk with a minimum of pain and digest my food without incident, I do feel "temporarily able-bodied," and I am grateful.  But still those days when I'm unable to walk or digest my food without symptoms are totally impossible to accept with equanimity.

His point is that in the course of a day, even the course of an hour, our minds may be able-bodied and non-able-bodied, and that our sense of identity changes with these vicissitudes.  The Buddhist idea is that we are never quite the same at any two moments.  It is an illusion to think we are one thing over time. 

Buddhist teachings have also helped Teare appreciate the views of Antonio Damasio in Descartes' Error: Emotion Reason and the Human Brain.  Damasio shows that our sense of our own bodies arises in dependence on our brain's interactions with our bodies, some of which are unconscious and some conscious.  As the body changes, so Damasio explains, "we construct the mind of the moment." (p. 184).

The idea that we construct the mind of the moment also resonates with Whitehead's idea that in each moment of our lives we are creating ourselves even as we are influenced by our bodies and our past, by the society around us and by our history.  Whitehead calls it self-creativity.  Many who are disabled may be especially adept at this construction, their lives require that they improvise our lives in a conscious way, again and again, in light of the unpredictable circumstances of our bodily and psychological lives.  If the healthy life is an improvisational life, then the improvisatory capacities of the "disabled" may be especially edifying to the "non-disabled." 

The idea that we improvise our lives also points to the reality of agency.   As Teare explains, and as most of the poets in Beauty is a Verb insist, disability is best understood, not as an object of pity or as a medical condition, but as a form of agency, a form of self-creativity, with beauty of its own.  Often but not always the beauty arises out of difficulty, as does poetry itself.  This difficulty is not something to be pitied, but it is real, and it is part of what gives a poetics of disability its zest.  Of course this raises the question: What is disability?

Jennifer Bartlett explains in the Preface to Beauty is a Verb that the very word "disability" has many meanings.  The poets who are anthologized in her volume are people who struggle with physical limitations (which in themselves can be a construction) and with society's critique of the non-normative body.  One of the pioneers of disability poetics, Kenny Fries, edited a volume called Staring Back which, in the words of Bartless, "became a manifesto for disability literature." 

The phrase staring back points to one aspect of contemporary disability literature which Whiteheadians will appreciate: namely its emphasis on a world in which difference is accepted, relished, and encouraged, not disparaged.  So often dominant society brings with it images of a normative body which is "good" and "normal" and somehow "right."  These images become cages from which all suffer, because they cut us off from one another.  One of the values of "staring back" is that it deconstructs the images and allows us to share in a common humanity without eliminating differences.

When a person who is disabled "stares back" at those who stare, they assume a prophetic role.  She is like Jeremiah or Isaiah or Jesus in the Bible.  Implicitly she denounces the status quo of the dominant society and announces a more hopeful possibility, namely that of living in a world where differences are sources of delight. 

For Whiteheadians, this more hopeful possibility is an important feature of the basileia theou (the reign of God) for which Jesus yearned in his healing ministry.  His ministry was to heal people of physical difficulties as best he could, but more deeply to heal them of an absence of love.  He hoped for a time which beloved communities could emerge, amid which the will of God would be done on earth as it is in heaven.  And what was this will?  For Whiteheadian thinkers, the will of God is that each and every living being on our planet enjoy whatever form of beauty is possible, relative to the situation at hand.

In the philosophy of Whitehead beauty is name for two qualities of experience that can inform a human life: harmony and intensity.  Most humans at most moments of their lives are aiming at one or both of these forms of beauty in combination: a harmonious intensity and an intense harmony.  Sometimes, though, a choice must be made between the two.  We live for intensity even if harmony is impossible, or we live for harmony because things are too intense.  In certain forms of disability, one's body is not easily harmonized with one's mind.  There is an intensity in the relationship but not a harmony.  But in this intensity itself, there emerges a kind of beauty which would otherwise be lacking, and which has a wisdom of its own.  We might call it the wisdom of the focused mind.

In The Empty Form Goes all the Way to Heaven Brian Teare gives us a sense of intensity as it pertains to the sheer process, and the sheer stillness of being unable to open a window.  As you read this excerpt from his poem, you can sense the intensity of his focus, combined with a sense of what Buddhists call the pure becoming -- the no-thing-ness -- which from a Buddhist perspective is the heart of all reality, and which is, from a Whiteheadian perspective, the ultimate reality of which even God is an expression. 

pure process
like art stillness is

mostly the mystery
of why one window
opens slowly

why one window
remains locked

hours without
words I can't

form space
contour can't
hold anything


As I read these words, I hear the pure process in the intensity of staring at the window, including even the locked one, without being able to alter the situation.  The intensity is not happy, but it has wisdom and beauty: the wisdom of realizing the sheer contingency of things and the beauty of being present to what is, but could not have been.  This is how Whitehead understands consciousness.  Consciousness is an awareness of the facticity of what is contingent.

From a Whiteheadian perspective, Briane Teare's rheumatoid arthritis makes possible this wisdom -- this deep sensitivity to contingency -- which others among us may lack.  In the basileia theou this wisdom will be appreciated, celebrated, for its beauty.  In the only dance there is, in the no-thing-ness, we are all beckoned to honor one another, to say "yes" to those who are temporarily able-bodied and temporarily dis-abled.  We are all in the dance together, all seeking and sometimes finding that beauty which is, after all, a verb.