Defying Gravity with Crazy Wisdom
September 22, 2004
An interesting meditation from Tom Robbins, “In Defiance of Gravity: Writing, wisdom, and the Fabulous Club Gemini,” Harper’s Sept. 2004:“The fact that playfulness–a kind of divine playfulness intended to lighten man’s existential burden and promote what Joseph Campbell called “the rapture of being alive”–lies near the core of Zen, Taoist, Sufi, and Tantric teachings is lost on most Westerners: working stiffs and intellectuals alike. Even scholars who acknowledge the playful undertone in those disciplines treat it with condescension and disrespect, never mind that it’s a worldview arrived at after millenia of exhaustive study, deep meditation, unflinching observation, and intense debate.
Tell an editor at The New York Review of Books that Abbot Chögyam Trungpa would squirt his disciples with water pistols when they became overly earnest in their meditative practice, or that the house of Japan’s most venerated ninja is filled with Mickey Mouse memorabilia, and you’ll witness an eye-roll of silent-movie proportions. Like that fusty old patriarch in the Bible, when they become a man (or woman) they “put away childish things,” which is to say they seal off with the hard gray wax of fear and pomposity that aspect of their being that was once attuned to wonder.
As a result of their having abandoned that part of their human nature that is potentially most transcendent, it’s no surprise that modern intellectuals dismiss playfulness–especially when it dares to present intself in literature, philosophy, or art–as frivolous or whimsical. Men who wear bow ties to work every day (let’s make an exception for Pee-Wee Herman), men whose dreams have been usurped either by the shallow aspirations of the marketplace or by the drab clichés of Marxist realpolitik, such men are not adroit at distinguishing that which is lighthearted from that which is merely lightweight. God knows what confused thunders might rumble were they to encounter a concept such as “crazy wisdom.”
Crazy wisdom is, of course, the opposite of conventional wisdom. It is wisdom that deliberately swims against the current in order to avoid being swept along in the numbing wake of bourgeois compromise; wisdom that flouts taboos in order to undermine their power; wisdom that evolves when one, while refusing to avert one’s gaze from the sorrows and injustices of the world, insists on joy in spite of everything; wisdom that embraces risk and eschews security; wisdom that turns the tables on neurosis by lampooning it; the wisdom of those who neither seek authority nor willingly submit to it.”
This is Defying Gravity with Crazy Wisdom in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Don’t Hate the Player | Next: Pantagruel for the Present | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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