Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Meditation in This is All
Meditation is addressed in different ways throughout This Is All. Cordelia speaks of meditation early in the book, but is referring to an instinctive and spontaneous type of meditation. Perhaps sometimes thought of an epiphany, Cordelia speaks of those fleeting moments when everything suddenly makes sense. Too often, these moments pass, unable to be recalled in the same visceral manner. “I met inside me at that moment a great deep beauty which I knew was my soul” (p 41) she says, and in this one moment understands her unadulterated self. Deeper into the story, she refers to another kind of awareness that is also a form of meditation. At several different intervals Cordelia confronts, through poetry and words, the place where the corporeal and the spiritual intersect. She uses her connection to language to explore her losses and her grief. “My mother’s hand in my hand on my mother’s hand on the arm of my mother’s now my chair” asks whether the absence of her mother is real or just a construct of our understanding of time and space (280). Cordelia meditates on these kinds of issues deeply and often throughout the book, which is why when Julie offers to teach her a conventional form of meditation, her experience becomes all the more comic. “...My legs started to hurt, my bum felt on pointes, I wanted to scratch my nose, and rub my eyes, I wanted to drink because my mouth was dry from sleep, and worst of all I needed a pee” is Cordelia’s initial reaction (421). Eventually, Julie’s instruction takes hold and Cordelia finds peace in the meditation. Meditation is intended to remove the thinking mind and replace it with the perceptive mind. Cordelia spends much of the book attempting to understand life; the moments in which she finds the most active answers are the moments in which she is trying the least.
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Going with Giuliana's very last comment, "the moments in which she finds the most active answers are the moments in which she is trying the least....”
ReplyDeleteThe most active actions come from her absorbing, without distractions or advice or other opinions. The vast outside is impossible to understand. It evokes ponderings which cannot be resolved. When she questions too much instead of listening to the world, to herself, she feels lost. “Here lies the body of Cordelia Kenn. She died as a student of what, why and when.” (287).”
While she feels lost when she questions too much, she has also discovered how to find answers:
“I’ve learned I need time on my own in my own space. I need it no matter how happy I am, no matter how much I love someone. One of the necessities of life…Silence as active as the sea. To swim in the depths of it, like exploring a vast, limitless ocean." (277)
I especially relate to this quote as do, I suspect, many other people. While we love to believe that all of our feelings and emotions are self-inspired and that no one else has the power to move us, or fool us into thinking that we are what we aren’t, most of us are reactive beings. When we aren’t careful, our knee-jerk reactions to those around us are manifested in verbal or physical responses, whatever they may be, and we lose ourselves in our responses to the world around us.
The still repose of silence allows us the liberty of freeing ourselves from the pressure of the mind-provoking outside. Meditative silences are the “dreams in which you fly effortlessly and with silent excitement above the world, entirely weightless, free of all ties and entanglements, and at peace.” (261)
As I have mentioned in Esther Pearl's blog before, Cordelia's mopes were her way of coping with things. So too, meditation helped her too. And it was all thanks to Izumi who taught her how.
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