Kalliyam Means I'm Gonna Leave You, Never

Babe, I'm gonna leave you
Oh, baby, you know, I've really got to leave you Oh I can hear it callin 'me
I said don't you hear it callin' me the way it used to do?

The traditions that sanction disaffection as a prerequisite for changing our ways agree that we are all complicit in the malaise and culpable for our shared circumstances.  No one gets a pass, not even those who would like to think they tried, they really  tried, they told you so, and for chrissakes it’s not our fault.  If you’re part of the world, you're part of the problem.  If you’re lucky enough to be alive, you made the cut and for that you should be grateful. 

That’s the paradox we’re going to need to embrace here.

 
The world is shameful mess of our own making but life, life is a gift to be cherished because there is, if we are privileged enough and lucky too, a chance for beauty, maybe creativity, certainly ink and paper.  I mean to think in analogue, if you will.

 

When the situation seems irreparable and the path forward not uncertain but decidedly worse by the facts, what are our choices?

 

Come what may, every day
Oh, mama baby
I'm gonna leave you go away

I’m not here comparing myself to anyone like the young Siddhartha who decided to go forth, leaving home and family after having confronted the ordinary existential facts: disease, old age, and death.  For when the prince-cum-bodhisattva saw in the Fourth Sight the ascetic he was not racing for the exits, looking for an escape, retreat, or bypass.  Rather he took the ascetic to be a signal, even a promise of something far better to which humans could aspire.  The world delivers only more world, Siddhartha comes to realize, but there could be a true extinction, a literal nirvana that procures an unconditional ecstasy and peace of mind.  This has proven in history to be a compelling choice and a genuine aspiration. 

 

Good luck with that, I say.  If the Buddha’s promise is somehow your religious aspiration---and don’t tell me that unconditional bliss (yeah, ananda) is not a religious claim, I won’t argue with you.  You could want worse things than compassion and unimpeded joy but there’s no other proof in that puddin’ but the claim itself---and I don’t fancy religious consummations any more than I am inclined to ordinary hope as a means of soothing our outrageous fortunes.  I don’t think Buddhas are in any way more than human and if they are still human then they too will suffer.  So let’s leave that at that.

 

 For my part I tell ya’, I’m not interested in any sort of soporific excision from the tumult of everyday existence.  I want to leave but not life.  I want to go but not far.  I need to run but not so fast that I wear myself out or make some terrible mistake.  We might be able to quit or escape from life if we decide to pay no attention to love.   But that is not to my tastes a worthy reclusion; it is only an abdication of self.  I still want to love and to love life and that has consequences.

We cannot love without,  at the very least,  the threat, the real anxiety, and the actual certainty of grief.  You only really care about things that can ruin you when they do.  So carry on if you want enlightenment but I’m here, in this world, and that’s what I’m going to care about.

 

I know, I know
I know I never never never never never gonna leave you babe
But I got to go away from this place

Now the “problem” isn’t that the Buddhists have the wrong diagnosis---to think that life is suffering, bad sky, a vale of incipient tears, and a clusterfuck of cataclysmic dimensions should seem self-evident.  Lincoln wisely knew that the truths held earlier to be self-evident were in fact propositions that must be argued with and fought for, not just as values or actions but for their very truth to obtain.  They are no longer self-evidently true but part of the contention for a meaningful life that must be made, no matter how we are made.  If rights like life, liberty, and life’s happy pursuit are inalienable that doesn’t mean that we won’t deny them and deny them to each other, turn them into misery, or just suffer because that will happen as sure as the sunrise.

It’s not a nice thing to say but if humans can screw it up, they will, they have, and they will again.  Some propose renunciation and systematic withdrawal into the coenobium or even further to the caves of the desert fathers and the Himalayan sadhus, the cloisters of the heart hard to be distinguished from a self-made prison.  

The Japanese tradition of the tonseisha are far more interesting because these cats didn’t buy wholly into the self-abnegation, stilling the mind, and retreat from the senses.  Quite the contrary.  Just because the world delivers it’s social and personal miseries doesn’t mean we should bring more willful travail upon ourselves when there is still beauty, art, music, poetry, ink and paper to love.  In fact, there is so much to love before we leave.

It was really, really good
You made me happy every single day
But now
I've got to go away

 

 

These erstwhile Japanese monks weren’t very interested in monasticism but they did take retreat, reclusion, misanthropy, and constructive cynicism into new realms of aesthetic indulgence.  Chomei in particular was aware not only of his monastic hypocrisies but of his privilege and self-allowance in the pursuit of things he truly loved, especially music, art, literature, and the deep desire to record his idle thoughts.  As one scholar put it, these tonseisha were more reclusive aesthetes than monks engaging the ascetic disciplines so carefully enumerated in the vinaya of the Buddhist canon. 

 

So much the better, I say.  Like some Chinese Daoists, the Japanese tonseisha Chomei and Kenko were intent upon both reclusion from the world and criticism of the political regime.  In contrast to several of the so-called Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove who were persecuted and even executed for their political dissent, these Japanese recluse were a bit more temperate and a lot less oppressed.

 

Tradition tells us that the Bamboo Grove sages were also poets, artists, musicians, and writers, and also not the least bit averse to the occasional dram.  The Japanese tonseisha can hardly to be compared to Sage Liu Ling who asked his man-servant to carry a shovel wherever they went in case he passed out and died drunk---so he could be buried, naturally on the very spot .  

 

What we can say is that these obstreperous souls were deeply committed to personal freedom, that they had a passion for living, and wanted to celebrate the natural world.  In short, they genuinely loved the gift of life but were stricken and scarred by what the world might readily proffer, particularly the corruptions of political life, incompetent governance, disease, war, and the capricious indignities of a mortal life.

 

Part of the riposte of the Japanese tonseisha “Buddhists”and these particular Chinese Daoists was to take refuge in beauty, be it natural or cultural, and devote themselves to creativity, writing, or craft, including instrument making, ink technology, almost anything that might exalt imagination and artistry and so offer respite from the world.   

They did not retreat into a blithe indifference or ignorance of the affairs of the world, which then further caused them to offer comment and their own witticism and retort.  Their personal disaffections and misanthropy notwithstanding, they were looking for relief from the desolations of the heart, the kind that come from just feeling too much.

 

When I started reading the tonseisha’s musings,  I was particularly touched by their unaffected style, their willingness to write about anything and by that I mean whatever it seems comes to mind.  They call this zuihitsu, a kind of stream of consciousness, fragmented, truly spontaneous writing.  The word zuihitsu means to “follow the brush,” thus the brush acts with tzu-jan, more naturally and effortlessly, in an involuntary rather than deliberate stroke, better for absence and without care for motive.  One writes to observe, to play, one writes to write.

 

This blogspot would have been called zuihitsu, because I confess that was my intention. But of course that was “not available” as a name and who would be surprised?  It’s not as if what I am considering has not been considered by better minds and more talented brushes.

 

The Indian traditions, with which I am far more familiar, use the term sahaja, literally “born together” for a comparable sense of spontaneity and unaffected familiarity---but with a much more mystical bent.  This term too is “unavailable” for a blogspot name but it’s also too loaded.

 

These are not meant to be more than idle ramblings, contemplations on beauty, comments that come from the moment, from passion, love, hate, the news, the heart.  Sahaja is too weighty and serious a state for that and, like I said, far too mystical because even a little mystical would be too much for me.

 

The word kalliyam is from the Tamil language, which happens to be rich with terms for intoxication, intemperance, and procured elation.  It’s yet another word (among many) for moonshine and for the idle, fermented state of mind that causes one to ramble.

 

I ain't jokin' woman, I got to ramble
Oh yeah
Baby, baby, babe, I believin'
We really got to ramble

 

Pandemic, politics, professional burnout, age, I’ve conjured plenty of reasons why I need some zuihitsu in my life, if only to keep me from a short step off a tall building.  I don’t ramble-write just because I want to or can make the time.  I do it because it happens.  I’m writing to my old friend Sanity looking for advice.  Who has come to answer?   It is Kalliyam,  which can be found in a shot of toddy but more properly in the state that relieves the burdens of a world that went from mere banality to its current all too dangerous urgencies and boredom---all in a long, slim, precarious two years.

 

So this is Kalliyam.  Call it writing about nothing.  Call it what happens when you spend far too much time in idle self-quarantine from a world that will kill you for just breathing shared air.  Kalliyam isn’t drunkenness, though it can mean that.  And it’s not just another kind of palm wine, no matter what the dictionaries tell you.  Kalliyam is about the hardest thing we all must learn to do better: live with yourself.  To that end, let there be beauty and plenty of laughter; let there be time enough to love life with words in the company of other words when no other friends can be safely nearer.

 

I can hear it callin' me the way it used to do
I can hear it callin' me back home