notes on chinese lyric poetry (shih)

1. beginning with book of odes (shih ching) in 6th-c bc (to 10th-c bc) as 4 character lines (although use of interjection and nonsense characters could mean 2 or 3)

2. at this time, characters were one syllable but later sometimes 2

3. characters:

a. noun characters do not indicate number (thus no singular or plural)

b. verb characters do not indicate tense.

c. characters were not used in context of a picture poem.

4. shih form kind of fades away until it reemerges in later or eastern han dynasty (2nd c) as 5 or 7 character (each with full weight)

5. each line is a sentence. couplets are connected via parallelism and end rhyme between couplets, but no connecting words

6. caesura at 2 in 5 and 4 in 7, creates 2,3 or 4,3 units

7. anon Nineteen Old Poems is earliest most influential 5 shih

8. ts'ao chih (192-232) 1st major poet of chien-an period and 1 of top 3 poets in pre-tang era according to burton watson (see tao chien and hsieh ling-yun)

9. in tang time, shih undergoes a formal development. divided into 2 groups.

a. old style (ku-shih) with no fixed rules of number of lines or rhyme scheme

b. new style (chin-t'i-shih) in 2 types limited in rhymes scheme and number of lines

1) regulated verse (lu-shih) with 8 lines, parallelism in most lines, and elaborate tonal patterns

2) broken-off lines (chueh-chu) like regular verse but a single quatrain

10. in sung times begins the practice of 'rhyme following' (tz'u-yun or ho-yun) in which one composes a new poem utilizing the same rhyme or rhyme words as a previous one, usually responding to a poem of a friend or visitor. when copying one's own poems, it's called tieh-yun.

Bhakta Story

All emotions are love diminished. Memo to me: don’t deny emotions in some nihilistic way. 

Either deconstruct the thoughts behind them or melt into the love as one directly undiminished.

The former is the error of all religions including scientific materialistic atheism. The latter are jnana or bhakta. 

In the nineties, nature was my lover. She drove me like a Cadillac. I embraced her with my Frenchman Bay.

My nineteenth nervous breakdown was in 1984 when the Thought of God scared the Dying Jesus out of me.

In late September of 2005, a great blue heron lifted from a glacial island boulder in the middle of a cloud-colored pond like revelations in a vision quest.

Two years later, I am slowly climbing one thousand sacred stairs of Yamadera where Basho writes within his Oku no Hosomichi, stillness and cicadas.

Meeting in the River of Stars

As being is in the blood, self-awareness is its fountain spurting from the mind.

My insides are turning inside-out as the sea engulfs the universe in the curl of its crashing electromagnetic waves.

Every object is in the mind and the mind is in my being reflecting this non-objective omnipresence.

From black hole to self-awareness is just a big bang away; suns are falling back to black like saturn rockets

falling back to earth as this Apollo is forever pointing and always moving towards that moon in which I drown.

1. consciousness is glass. mind is lens and mirror.

2. the gospel according to the ouroboric universe.

3. in the name of the dreamstate, universal being, and that absolute self-awareness (by knowing i am the unknown, the unknown is fully known).

4. gimme shelter in the storm.

5. Li Bai drinking alone (with the moon, his shadow, & 43 translators)

Consciousness Is The Cure

Lightning

Just because you may believe it doesn’t make it so even if it is. Are we on the road to Damascus or just slouching more towards Bethlehem?

These days of viruses both biological and psychological, it’s no longer one day at a time; it’s stopping everything—to be timeless.

As one attains nirvana through samsara, one arrives at self-awareness via dream.

Revelation is the lightning of the absolute striking consciousness. Thunder is the inspiration of consciousness talking to consciousness. Call it self-awareness.

Sometimes I live in quiet desolation, sometimes I have a great notion. I forgot what I was going to say. Wait for it.

Myth is where attention is placed. Dream is where attention is misplaced. I’m giving it fifty-fifty he’s faking it or fifty-fifty he dies.

Thunder

Although it’s source is known, no one knows the cause of thunder.

One is to consciousness as zero is to personal deconstruction.

Everything appears in consciousness and that which doesn’t is its source.

All one really knows is consciousness and the rest that’s not unknown is belief.

And consciousness is god from the point of view of the mind for it’s the only unborn concept.

If belief is disease, consciousness is the cure. As belief is viral, consciousness is the cure. If consciousness is the cure, consciousness is the cure.

2020 Happening

You know the universe is one but still pretend there’s multiplicity because we are addicted to the other. Knowing there is only one is not a thought to be believed in some philosophy or god forbid religion but experiential only. For the self so loved this self-awareness that it sent its being into matter to be resurrected.

Although legitimate experience records the happening into memory, the happening does not originate in memory. The happening in memory turns into thought. The happening is not a thought. There are no words for Tao. Being was happening before memory built its empire and being is still happening now.

In this feature, self-awareness is happening. What’s happening in the Buddha over there? I remember when Monument Valley was the playground of the gods. Turning attention from memory for a moment and resting it on the infinite eternity of being is like self-awareness. I am sitting in Death Valley. I am standing in the Garden of the Gods.

Mapping Self-Awareness

A funny thing happens on the way to self-awareness. This axe of thought begins to think that it's the hand which wields it.

This fall of intentional tool to chaotic weapon is comic from the point of view of the hand of the heart but tragic as seen through the eye of the weapon.

Separation is the weapon. Division is the ammunition. The universe is the target. Compassion is the witness. Love is acting for the defense. There's nothing wrong with the tool. 

Primordial conditioning sharpens it. Self-awareness requires a razor's edge. That the mind is conditioned from the big beginning to usurp the absolute proves its innocence.

Divine imagination is the mythical map of kundalini thunder emanating from the mystical lightning of the absolute black whole.

footnotes

I like dreaming. I love waking up.

Consciousness is the only knowledge. Only the unknown knows this.

There is no self-awareness without the molecular structure of pink cadillac granite.

Mind and no mind. Manifest and unmanifest. Knowledge and knowing.

The power of three. Positive, negative, and neutral. Love, compassion, and forgiveness.

2020 Consciousness

Consciousness is the big bang. Consciousness is the immaculate conception beyond the yin and yang of wave and particle or sex.

Consciousness is the only knowledge and what the world calls knowledge is like dividing the indivisible and ciphering the value of exactly two.

Everything appears in consciousness even all the vain absurd attempts to prove appearances create the consciousness in which they are appearing.

My projection is my mirror. The sixth matriarch calls it Chinatown. Attention paradise the fall arrives in just three days.

It's not the goldenrod sitting in the sun but the ragweed in the shadows making tears. It's not the transformation that hurts but believing in the form.

Last year on this date I was in Avon on the Outer Banks watching the silvery walls of a hurricane above the tumbling surf.

Prescription 2020

Deconstruction is the negative. Love is the positive. The absolute is neutral. Don’t fall in love with the negative. Don’t disintegrate the positive. Look, this never happened.

Cherry blossoms fall. Get over it. An emerald hummingbird! Don’t overthink it. Space-time is the stuff of dreams and self-awareness is the greatest show on earth.

The narcissistic nihilist with a knife in the dining room is your clue. Surrealistic pillow is the soundtrack. Absolute-awareness being self-aware.

Whether one calls this the holy trinity, trimurti, or some other power of three doesn’t matter. It’s spontaneous.

Psychological deconstruction is like lighting a fuse. Get it started. Then step away as soon as possible.

Myth or any other guided meditation is there to be your runway only to consciousness only.

Believing consciousness is a product of the brain is the greatest virus ever told.

64 hexagrams of the I-Ching. 64 codons of DNA. Zero gravity.

Thorn of Belief

If you believe in materialism, you’ll believe in anything. If you believe in a personal god, you believe in materialism. 

Whether it’s religious materialism or scientific materialism or esoteric materialism, it’s all materialism. 

Thought is utilitarian. But belief itself is materialistic. Thought deals in transformation. Belief deals in form.

The more belief one is entertaining, the less wisdom one is contemplating. I used to believe but I’m younger than that now. 

One deconstructs belief with wise thought. Throw away that thorn of belief. But you can share this thorn of thought.

Focusing Consciousness

Consciousness before sensation, before imagination, before identification. Being before before and after.

Like a lens is glass ground from glass, the mind is consciousness ground from consciousness.

Absolute awareness is reflecting in consciousness. The mind is focusing awareness into self-awareness.

There are seven evolutionary stages. The first is light. Two, nuclear probability of particle and wave. Atomic identity is three.

The great turn is in the fourth sub-stage of the fourth molecular stage as organic chemicals and sex hormones come into separate being.

Vegetable, animal, human: in the big picture, consciousness is focusing consciousness.