CURVES, CIRCLES AND SQUARES

by Hugh M. Lewis

Turning back is how the way moves

Weakness is the means the way employs

The myriad creatures in the world are born from

Something, and Something from Nothing.

(Verse XL, Book Two of the Tao Te Ching, D. C. Lau, 1963:101)

Few squares occur naturally in the world. To find squares, we must look at the human made world, where we will find many examples. On the other hand, naturally flowing curves are not common in the human world, but abound in a fountain of chaotic beauty in the natural order. Where human's draw perfect circles, natures circles are found in the sun and full moon, in the orbs of eyes and in the centers of flowers. Nature's equivalent of the human's perfect circle is of course represented as a cycle of time, the clock of the day with the arc of the sun across the sky, and the seasonal paths of the moon against the stars.

We now live in a world in which it would be unwise to strictly separate all of our squares from the curves and circles of our world. To do so would be to draw a rigid and arbitrary boundary between the human-made and the natural order, and to forget that the human-made order is itself rooted in the natural scheme of things.

Earth being can be found in the most repetitious and rectangular of city scapes, as well as it can be found in the ocean and the flow of earthlines across the landscape. Thus there is hope for our salvation, for the salvation of the earth, even in the dankest and most seedy corners of little apartments and in back alleys of the most desolate and crowded of megalopolises.

Nature retreats from the onslaught of development, only to recover itself and burst forth in every nook and cranny, in every inbetween space that civilization has not covered over with concrete. In the long run, nature takes back that which was stolen from it, it recovers that which was lost and destroyed by the short-sighted ravages of humankind. Humankind sets its own epithet in the cement of the new global foundations of its world order when it continues to ignore unimpeded the danger signals that something is wrong with its mother earth. Given enough time, life will adapt to the new human-made order of squares. It will recover its spaces and transform the geometric landscape into a jungle of newly entangled life forms.

Even now its newly emergent adaptive forms are appearing--in new strains of viruses and bacteria, in new strains of insects, new weeds, in the florescence of cockroaches, rats, coyotes, crows and monitor lizards that have made the inbetween spaces of the square landscape the foundation of a new adaptive plateau. Nature will learn, however blindly by trial and error, to fit its natural evolutionary curves into the square inbetween spaces of the human order, and in the process, which succeed where human beings will have failed.

We now live in a world of entangled curves, circles and squares. We cannot separate these things in some simple matter. It has become part of our earthbound dilemma to fashion a new sense of order in which these things can be reconciled and mutually adaptive. We have the responsibility to shrink and round the corners of our squares in order to leave more room for the growth of natural curves and circles.

In this endeavor new earthbound responsibilities and dilemmas have come to the forefront of our lives--modes of work and play, the central dilemma of making money when doing so entails indirect participation of the destruction of the natural order. We must figure out and implement new compromises in our earthbound existence--compromises that will steer us clear of global disaster.

So many talented, experienced people to choose from

So why not pick the best, and leave all the rest behind

No need to settle for seconds

There is no more point in my trying to compete

When there is less and less to go around

And more and more people demanding their share

There is no more place in the world

For me or my kind

We may wish or hope in our hearts

or refuse to believe otherwise

but this is a poor substitute

for the real thing

A position with a purpose in life

beyond the immediate rewards of doing another's bidding

I can live with my own disillusion in the world

But do not ask me to bear your illusion as well

It is one thing to continue casting stones

It is another to deny doing so

I can sit still in silence

time is on my side

because I have learned the lesson of patience

I meet the critical moment

with a studied, deliberate silence

the well-aimed words

miss their mark

and bounce hollowly off the walls

the subtle effect of the silence

that speaks louder than all the words

leaving what's known and what's not

an unfinished field of possibility

leaving nothing left but to fill in the absence

between the presence of the words

I met a long haired young man

in the library today

we exchanged side-long glances of immediate recognition

he was in one of my classes

I asked him what he was studying

and we immediately began discussing things

that we had been talking about in class

our conversation ranged over the whole of human evolution

or the dynamics of civilization

the difficult future of humankind

the issues of anthropology

upon the edge of science

we discussed electro-magnetism in humans

and cannibalism

we talked about reification

and non-beingness in the modern world

we wondered if primitive humankind reified their world

and we touched upon co-dependency

he was only twenty-one

and already worried about what kind of future

his children and grand children would have

he talked about learning how to live off the land

and about how to cope with the system

we talked about evidence of class relations within our class

and we talked about what it took to be a warrior in life

to face the heart of darkness

to deal with the evil of others

in ourselves

and how not to let the System get us down

I lost track of the time

and was late to my next class

I have grown alone

but I have not grown lonely

I've become quite comfortable

living within my aloneness

It has become a good substitute

for all the loneliness of the past

many people come and go in the world

and they make the world a lonely place

But I am always left all alone

Remaining by myself

with myself

My aloneness is not a selfish way of being

But it is a selfless way of becoming

Loneliness is the empty reflection in the world

Aloneness is the self which is reflected

Loneliness seeks refuge

In the weakness and darkness of the self

Aloneness seeks modest compromise

with all the many mistakes of the world

it cannot do more than to correct itself

in harmony with the ways of the world

in finding my own aloneness

I can let go of my loneliness

and I can find the aloneness of others

and learn to live with it

in silent respect and tolerance

if you ever look for me

you will not find me in a crowded place

seek for me in some empty space

Dreams seeming so real

It sometimes becomes hard to tell

which is real from what isn't

waking up confused and disoriented

inbetween states in an inbetween world

what if our dreams were our reality

and our waking states but a continuous dream

where is the clean line

the clear boundary separating one form of consciousness from the other

between our inner worlds of imagination

and our outer worlds of existence

that does not sometimes become obscured

waking up is sometimes difficult

especially when we do not know

what we are waking up to

or when and if it is any more real

than the dream we are waking from

sometimes our dreams

are but an extension of our realities

sometimes our worlds

are but permutations of our dreams

and we have no real way

of telling the difference

or understanding why

where do we end in the world

and others begin in our lives

how do we define the boundaries of ourselves

that are not continuously changing with the world

how do we know what we are really being

when we are always becoming or unbecoming something else

we carry a name and a fragile sense of self-identity

bound forever by the morality and weakness of our bodies

when we awaken to our worlds

we become aware of the difference of others around us

we become sensitive to the differences within us

It comes with letting others into our own world

and allowing ourselves to enter the world of others

then the boundaries separating our self and our world

become blurred and broken

our destiny becomes bound by the fate of others in the world

and the destinies of others becomes our own narrow fate

waking up in the world

is to relinquish a false sense of control over our lives

and to gain a limited sense of control in the world

waking up is always difficult, but never mistaken

what we have gained is always more than what we've lost

though it may sometimes seem otherwise

though we may never really know

all that we've gained

and all that we've lost

waking ourselves up, we also always wake other's up

and others waking up always arouses us from our own slumber

waking up in the world and an awakening world

may lead us along ways we may not want to go

but once awakened

we cannot return undisturbed to the dreams that we once had before.

weaking up also entails learning when to fall asleep

sometimes slumber is the only solution

sometimes it is better to dream about reality

thant to live in a reality that is a nightmare

waking up sometimes entails learning when we are tired of the world

and need the illusion of our dreams to entertain us

sometimes a world without illusion becomes a seemingly impossible place

beyond the edge of our tolerance or ability to understand

sometimes we must seek refuge

in a small harbor of illusion

where the world of others and others in the world will no longer encroach

waking up entails finding a place in the world

for our illusions

It entails learning how to live within our limits

and allowing our dreams to sometimes entertain us

waking up does not deny illusion

it only destroys its hold upon our lives

waking up does not forever dispel us from our dreams and delusions

it only helps us better to know the difference

and play the part

Waking up is more than a matter of knowing

It entails a way of enacting the difference

waking up is a matter of motivation

willpower and volition

It is not enough to passively wait

understanding comes through its motioning

Its practice and performance in the world.