The Art of Inquiry

On Contemplative Practice, the Negative Capability and “The Baghdad Zoo”

Much of this essay comes from the introduction to a course taught at Madigan Army Medical Center in 2021, called Meditation and the Art of Inquiry

“We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty violence … ‘Seems like we’re just set down here,’ a woman said to me recently, ‘and don’t nobody know why.’” ~ Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“Life is like stepping into a boat that is about to sail out to sea and sink.” ~ Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

Someone else said and the boat is rickety, doesn’t seem to be built for the sea. [1]

“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.” ~ Agnes de Mille [2], American dancer and choreographer

“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next — if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions — you’d be doomed. You’d be ruined as God. You’d be a stone. You’d never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You’d never love anyone, ever again. You’d never dare to.” ~ Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“People say that what we’re all seeking is the meaning of life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” ~ Joseph Campbell [3]

“If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.” ~ Carl Sagan

Diane Ackerman, poet and a student of Carl Sagan, writing about human star gazing and about the listening humans have done for signs of cosmic life says “we are listening / the small bipeds / with giant dreams.” Ackerman also wrote a brilliant book on the human mind calling the brain an enchanted loom. [4]

Mindfulness meditation can be characterized and understood merely as a stress management technique. It has been marketed and offered through this lens. However, I think this is misleading at worst and incomplete at best. Mindfulness has a quieting dimension that is often associated with the parasympathetic nervous system. And we do learn to manage stress more effectively. But it also has a more active contemplative dimension. When we get quiet some very big questions almost inevitably make themselves known. Some of them come from the teaching of the dharma tradition. Some will come all by themselves, unprovoked and unsolicited.

And the quieting of the mind makes possible deep and clear inquiry. You have a marvelous mind. Why not use it?

This is the dharma of the poets, Emily Dickinson’s “accidental Buddhism”[5] and Rainer Rilke’s nondualism. [6] This is the dharma that can be seen in the contemplative mystics of the world’s diverse religious traditions such as Meister Eckhart, Rabbi Abraham Heschel and the Sufi mystics like Rumi and Hafiz. This is perhaps what is meant by the distinction between the dharma that is taught and the dharma that is lived and experienced. [7]

So, what is the art of inquiry? I think this is an art that has two broad dimensions, one that looks inward and another that looks outward to the world in which we live. Meditative inquiry is more about the inner dimension and contemplative work involves emphasis on the outer one. But, in a way they cannot be separated and must be balanced and mutually informative.

The art of inquiry as a whole is really about the celebration of mystery and the sacred nature of questions. [8] Questions are more spiritual than answers. “Art is more spiritual than dogma,” is how Santayana put it. And art is all about questions.

Zen too, at least half of Zen, is about “training the mind to look hard, to stick steadfastly to asking questions, hard questions.” [9] Zen is the discipline of tolerating, even celebrating, what Keats called the “negative capability,” the poet or artist’s ability to embrace uncertainty, mystery and doubt without the need to reach for definitive answers. This is difficult for the mind prefers the comfort of answers.

The art of inquiry as a whole is really about the celebration of mystery and the sacred nature of questions. [10] Questions are more spiritual than answers. “Art is more spiritual than dogma,” is how Santayana put it. And art is all about questions.

Evelyn Underhill, the great scholar of mysticism says that “The artist is no less than a contemplative who has learned to express himself, and who tells his [or her] love in color, speech or sound: the mystic, upon one side of his nature, is an artist.” [11]

There is a call here to the creative, the artistic, the profound, the subtle, a call to pay exquisite attention to oneself, one’s life and the world with the eyes of a poet.

Classical pianist Arthur Rubinstein, near the end of his long life, offered this advice: “I have noticed that through experience and through my own observations that Providence, Nature, God, or what I would call the Power of Creation, seems to favor human beings who accept and love life unconditionally. And I am certainly one who does, with all my heart.” [12]

Here is Leo Tolstoy on the vocation of an artist:

An artist’s mission must not be to produce an irrefutable solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations.If I were told I might write a book in which I should demonstrate beyond any doubt the correctness of my opinions on every social problem I should not waste two hours at it; but if I were told that what I wrote would be read twenty years from now by people who are children today and they would read and laugh over my book and love life more because of it, then I should devote all my life and strength to such a work. [13]

So the artist’s job and the point of the art of inquiry is to rekindle and deepen and enrich our love of life.

Now a part of this is awakening to the mystery of life.

There is a children’s book entitled You Are Stardust. “Every tiny atom in your body came from a star that exploded long before you were born.”

Now that is poetic and that is also science.

“Everyone you know, everyone who you have ever heard of, every human being who ever was … live here [on this pale blue dot] — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Every day the author says you breathe in more than a million pollen grains.

So “each time you blow a kiss to the world, you spread pollen that might grow to be a plant.”

Yes, this is more poetic than science, but the image is still powerful.

We are creatures who live by images and metaphors that transcend science.

When I worked as an Army chaplain I often worked with depressed young men and women.

I often thought of Sylvia Plath and her image of depression as being in a bell jar, like being trapped inside a jar where no one can really see you or hear you. I remember that feeling myself when I too suffered through a depression.

That image has the power to give profound expression of what the experience of depression is like.

Image touches the imagination and holds out possibilities of awakening.

“We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty violence … ‘Seems like we’re just set down here,’ a woman said to me recently, ‘and don’t nobody know why.’”

We are train in meditative and contemplative practice the sensitivity to awaking.

Here is a poem for you by Mary Oliver called “The Whistler.”

This is about M., the woman Mary fell in love with when she was about 17 and spent her life with.

And she is writing about how there is an unknowability in another person that can never be exhausted no matter how well we get to know them. [14]

THE WHISTLER

by Mary Oliver

All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden I mean that for more than thirty years she had not whistled. It was thrilling. At first I wondered, who was in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild and cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds war- bled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.

Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled through the house, whistling.

I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and an- kle. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too. And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin to know each other? Who is this I’ve been living with for thirty years?

This clear, dark, lovely whistler?

This possibility of awakening to mystery is universal and can be provoked by many things, from encountering an eclipse (Annie Dillard), to an encounter with the stars (Alan Lightman) [15], to experience of psychedelic drugs (Sam Keen, Bruce Sanguin). [16]

Alan Lightman, a physicist who is a materialist and an atheist also has a sensitivity for the mystical.

To explain this sensibility he quotes my favorite poet, Emily Dickinson:

“Nature, is what we see / The Hill — the Afternoon / Squirrel — Eclipse — the Bumble bee / Nay — Nature is Heaven.” ~ Emily Dickinson

Lightman says, “In the last line, the poet leaps from the finite to infinity, to the realm of the Absolutes. It is almost as if Nature in her glory wants us to believe in a heaven, something divine and immaterial beyond nature itself. Nature tempts us to believe in the supernatural.” [17]

Now, Dickinson also said “Nature is a Haunted House / Art is a House that wants to be haunted.”

And it is this sensitivity to be haunted that I think spiritual practice must keep alive, haunted by the notion that the more we know about this world the more we are just setting out on the great adventure that is to be human floating like a mote of dust on a great sun beam.

Another mystical experience that the atheist Alan Lightman describes:

One August afternoon, the two baby ospreys of that season took flight for the first time as I stood on the circular deck of my house watching the nest. All summer long, they had watched me on that deck as I watched them. To them, it must have looked like I was in my nest just as they were in theirs. On this particular afternoon, their maiden flight, they did a loop of my house and then headed straight at me with tremendous speed. My immediate impulse was to run for cover, since they could have ripped me apart with their powerful talons. But something held me to my ground. When they were within twenty feet of me, they suddenly veered upward and away. But before that dazzling and frightening vertical climb, for about half a second we made eye contact. Words cannot convey what was exchanged between us in that instant. It was a look of connectedness, of mutual respect, of recognition that we shared the same land. After they were gone, I found that I was shaking, and in tears. To this day, I do not understand what happened in that half second. But it was one of the most profound moments of my life. [18]

Question: If you are like Chet Reymo (see note 15) or Alan Lightman, what “God” would need to disappear in order for everything to be holy for you?

Poetry is all about mystery and inquiry. This is its very nature.

Here is Rumi, “The Threat of Death”

For safe keeping gold is hidden in a desolate place

Where no one ever goes

Not in a familiar, easy to get to, spot

The proverb says, joy is concealed in grief

The mind puzzles with this

But that strong beast of soul, an ever lively animal

Will break such a tether

Love also burns away such difficulties

As the daylight does the night phantoms

So look for the answer

Inside your question

Cornered in the endless regions of love

You will see the opening that leads neither east nor west

Nor any direction

For you are a mountain searching for its own echo

Whenever you hurt you say ‘Lord, God!’

The answer lives in that which bends you low

And makes you cry out

They make you clear [pain and death]. When they are gone, you lose purpose. You wonder what to do, where to go.

This is because you are uneven in your opening: sometimes closed and unreachable,

Sometimes with your shirt torn with longing.

Your discursive intellect dominates for a time

Then, the universal, beyond-time intelligence comes

If I had more space I would turn to poets like Emily Dickinson and more contemporary one like Billy Collins and Jane Hirshfield and Marie Howe and many others.

I will settle for two more: Sharon Olds and Ocean Vaugn.

What is the relationship between risk and safety, being willing to enter into the flames of real living and of getting burned up?

Sharon sparked by her terminal cancer diagnose. All of a sudden, her boring life seems unacceptable. It is brilliant and I can relate.

Sharon Olds remembers once lying outside at night in the midst of thunderstorm. And her friend yelled out to her that there might be lightning. And how she immediately went indoors realizing how much she had been in danger.

… “it was the only time I’d taken a risk”

And you get a feel for the urgency of the question — how to live, how much to risk, how much safety is stifling to the spirit?

How do you break through without breaking bad?

The first of the two suicides we have had in the Soldier Readiness Unit (SRU) [19] in the last couple months before I retired from the Army, the soldier drove all the way to Portland and jumped off one of Portland’s bridges.

So I was thinking about what Ocean Vaugn wrote in an essay about the suicide of his uncle, who was just a few years older than him and like an older brother.

And how he had shared lunch with him not long before he died and how his uncle had been unable to really communicate his despair.

And how Ocean laments that he had not been able to share anything of his poetic gift with him in a way he wonders now could have helped him.

And wondering how we use language and poetry to save each other.

And as he was wandering around the city the night he learned of the suicide he started noticing all these fire escapes.

And he thought the fire escapes are expressions of how “we are capable of disaster and we are afraid.”

Olds has a poem where she wonders about the fascination of Breaking Bad.

What draws us to such portrayals if not a hint of risk and adventure and the subtle wonder of whether we have played it too safe?

I think to of the new television series, Dying For Sex, where a woman has a radical sexual awakening sparked by her terminal cancer diagnosis.

It seems like getting close to death is what it takes to awaken many of us to life.

It seems paradoxical to me that often the dulling of life can bring one closer to life by means of a suicidal crisis. Survivors of these crises often speak of waking up in way similar to near death experiences. [20]

If the person survives the attempt. I think of Kevin Hines who survived his plunge from the Golden Gate Bridge. [21]

And so Ocean wonders how we can be fire escapes for each other.

*I wonder what would happen if I were to bring the fire escape back inside. In fact, what would the fire escape look like if I were to wear it on my person, personality — in public? What would a fire escape sound like if it was imbedded into my daily language — and if I didn’t have to apologize for it? Could this be one reason we create art — one reason we make poems? To say the unsayable? I don’t know — but I’d like to think so. After all, the poem never needs to clear its throat or talk of the weather or explain why it’s here, what it’s looking for. It doesn’t even need its creator to speak. Its importance springs from its willingness to exist outside of practical speech. It possesses no capital yet still insists on being worthy. I come to the poem and it offers me immediate communication with someone’s secret self, a self preserved from the mainstream and its hunger for order through emotional sterilization. “Why, as poets,” says Carl Phillips, “[should we] strip and, thereby make visible, difficulty instead of satisfying the majority of people by veiling it? Because poetry is not only what reminds us that we are human, but helps ensure that we don’t forget what it means to be so.” In this way, the poem is more than paper and words, more than the obscure fiddlings of the high-brow, it is an invitation to a more private, necessary dialogue. I approach it as if climbing the rungs of someone’s fire escape — whether I go up or down is between me, the reader, and the poet. And maybe nothing is burning at all. Maybe we are only up here for the view. But it’s up here that I wonder, at the risk of asking for too much, what if a fire escape can be made into a bridge? [22]*

So I wonder if the art of inquiry is like building bridges, bridges between science and spirituality, fascination with what can be known and what cannot be known, bridges between our differences and that which connects our heads and our hearts. The arts, poetry and meditation can turn bridges from instruments of death into connections back to life and perhaps a richer and more alive kind of life.

Maybe the baboon in the below poem, confused by the insanity of war, is something of a stand in for us. Only by allowing for disruption, even confusion, may we have hope to awaken to the mysteries and wonders of our strange alien lives.

The Baghdad Zoo

by Brian Turner [23]

An Iraqi northern brown bear mauled a man. on a street corner, dragging him down an alley. as shocked onlookers shouted and threw stones.

Tanks rolled their heavy tracks past the museum and up to the Ministry of Oil A gunner watched a lion chase down a horse.

Eaten down to their skeletons, the giraffes looked prehistoric, real, their necks too fragile, too graceful for the 21st Century.

Dalmatian pelicans and marbled teals flew over, frightened by the rotorwash of Blackhawk helicopters touching down.

One baboon escaped the city limits. It was found wandering in the desert, confused by the wind, the blowing sands of the barchan dunes.

[1] I think also of Audre Lord who said “we’re not meant to survive.” It’s better to brave the fear and speak remembering.

[2] Epitaph to Pema Chodron’s chapter “The Fundamental Ambiguity of Being Human,” in Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change, (Shambhala, 2012), 1–14.

[3] Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, (Anchor Books, 1991), 1, 4–5.

[4] Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain, (Scribner, 2004).

[5] R C Allen, Emily Dickinson: Accidental Buddhist, (Trafford, 2009).

[6] Rainer Rilke seems to have resisted reading about Buddhism apparently not wanting to be influenced too much by it.

[7] Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving Kindness, (Shambahla, 2018), 89–94.

[8] David Dark, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, (Zondervan, 2009).

[9] Susan Blackmore, Zen and the Art of Consciousness, (Oneworld, 2009), 5.

[10] David Dark, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, (Zondervan, 2009).

[11] Quoted in Matthw Fox, Original Blessing, (Tarcher/Putnam, 2000), 230. See also Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, 12thRevised Edition, (Public domain, 2010). First published in 1910, the 12th edition published in 1930. Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941), a novelist and poet, published her first book in 1902 but her growing interest in mysticism led in 1911 to her greatest work. A comprehensive study of the spiritual life and religious experience, Mysticism remains a classic. In 1921 she was Upton Lecturer on the Philosophy of Religion at Manchester College, and was the first woman to give a series of lectures on theology at Oxford.

[12] Matthew Fox, Daily Meditations, “The Spiritual Role of Art,” 14 October 2019. https://dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org/2019/10/14/the-spiritual-role-of-art/.

[13] Matthew Fox, “More Thoughts and Thinkers on Art as Meditation and Our Prophetic Vocations, Daily Meditations, 30 June 2019. https://dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org/2019/06/30/more-thoughts-and-thinkers-on-art-as-meditation-and-our-prophetic-vocations/.

[14] See Maria Popova, “Mary Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy for Her Soul Mate,” Marginalian, 20 January 2015.

[15] “Alan Lightman on the Longing for Absolutes in a Relative World,” Marginalian. Maria Popova is reviewing Lightman’s Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine.

[16] “Neuroscientist Sam Keen on Happiness, Spirituality Without Religion, and How to Cultivate the Art of Presence,” Marginalian. This is Maria’s review of Sam’s Waking Up. Sam says the experience of the drug made him feel “sane” for the first time in his life and included the feeling of boundless and unconditional love. Bruce Sanguin’s memoir on the use of drugs for spiritual breakthrough is Dismantled: How Love and Psychedelics Broke a Clergyman Apart and Put Him Back Together, (Viriditas, 2018).

[17] What does Lightnman’s “atheism” really mean? Is it close to Chet Reymo’s When God is God Everything is Holy? Both are close to the nondualism of the mystics and to the radical openness of Zen.

[18] Alan Lightman, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, (Pantheon, 2018).27.

[19] Soldier Readiness Units were created for those transitioning out of the Army for medical reasons during the Iraq/Afghanistan War. These were created to help process wounded warriors.

[20] See Richard Heckler, Waking Up Alive: The Suicide Attempt and the Return to Life, (Author and Company, 2020).

[21] See Kevin Hines, Cracked, Not Broken: Surviving and Thriving After a Suicide Attempt, (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013).

[22] Ocean Vaugn, “The Weight of Our Living,” The Rumpus, 28 August 2014. HTTPS://THERUMPUS.NET/AUTHOR/OCEAN-VUONG.

[23] Brian Turner, Here Bullet, (Alice James Books, 2005), 5.