propositions press... 2.0

a retreat report

A few years ago I participated in an eight-day “social justice leadership training” retreat offered by the Rockwood Institute, divided into two sessions over two long weekends a couple months apart. Though there were the expected trust games, ice-breakers, and listening exercises I was familiar with from years earlier, the training centered Rockwood’s own techniques and lingo. A noteworthy moment came at the very end, just before the gathering broke. Our trainers left us with a word of parting advice. Be careful about your re-entry, we were told. For some people it can be easy to return to their organizations and spout Rockwood methods and terms. For those who have not been through the training, it may sound peculiar or even cultish. This was a good piece of wisdom.

crescent moon and joshua tree at dusk 

I heard it again four years later, this time from the Against The Stream instructors upon completion of an eight-day meditation course held at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center. As is the ATS style, the advice came in plain speak: upon returning to regular life be cautious about what you share because, really, nobody cares. This is the problem with having experienced something profound or transformative, even in a minor way. One wants to share something about it, partly to help oneself process what they went through and partly because it is simply good news. But taking up oxygen with one’s conversion tale risks turning it into an unwelcome voice of recruitment and proselytization. In other words, just another ego trip.

Offering this report goes against advice. Nevertheless, I feel a responsibility to document my experience for those who fund the program. After all, I was on scholarship. The Hemera Foundation, at least, will care. At a deeper level, putting reflections into writing is a way to acknowledge that analysis and meditation are complementary, not mutually exclusive.¹ Finally, perhaps this reflection will reach somebody with the curiosity that I had, people who for whatever reasons of their own are considering paths involving Buddhism and contemplative practice.

Let me describe the course in outline and structure. Since I am but a novice, and on top of that working from memory, I am sure there will be inaccuracies in description. Also, since ATS is somewhat ecumenical in its evolving school of Buddhism (one of my attractions to it), I may mash up concepts originating from different schools of thought. I welcome corrections and suggestions, and beg forgiveness in advance for distortions and omissions.

I think of the course as having been structured in two ways, internally and externally. Internally, there is the structuring of behavior and thought through the adherence to the precepts of “right practice” so as to form sangha, an association of practitioners for the duration of the course. In combination, the dual structure enabled us to open ourselves to insight meditation as it has been traditionally practiced over the centuries. The precepts include a slate of renunciations. They went as follows:

No killing.

No stealing.

No intoxicants.

No sexual activity.

No impure thoughts—envy, lust, hatred.

Noble silence: no speech, no social media, no reading, minimal writing.

Committing to these precepts—to the point of treading softly to avoid killing insects—released oneself from toxic behaviors and mentalities. Without any of the harm or confusion caused by such simple acts as talking, eating meat, or allowing oneself to fantasize sexually—much less giving in to the cacoethes—a mental structure remained through which a fullness of mind could be cultivated.

The external structure was the daily schedule. The course divided days into repeated sessions of sitting or walking meditation broken only by meals, morning instruction, and evening dharma lectures. Meals were taken in silence. We were each also assigned a camp job, kitchen work and cleaning, mostly. There was an afternoon optional qi gong session for people who needed some low impact body work. These too were performed in silence. Students took shared rooms in either the dorm or the villas. Some paid extra for single occupancy and another contingent saved money by camping. Waking bells were tolled at 6 AM with our morning sitting session beginning at 6:30. Twice over the week, participants were broken into small group meetings with an instructor for verbal check-ins. These 45-minute respites from total silence were either a welcome break or an interruption of the flow. For myself, I appreciated them. They were a chance to momentarily detach from the detachment, to reorient my focus according to a verbal description of my psychological state.

The ATS retreat was not as strict as others I’ve read about. Although spare and monastic in routine, ATS, with its School of the Dharma Punx identity, draws people who are anti-authoritarian by nature; I felt at home among the rule breakers. Also, with over a hundred retreat students, there seemed at all times a few people quietly accomodating themselves according to their own limits. It helped that the only mandatory sessions were the morning instruction and dharma talk.

I found the sitting and walking to require such concentration that for several afternoons I skipped a session in favor of a nap. And once, in favor of a swim. Perhaps thanks to this self-regulation, I never fell victim to the struggle that some novices feel while meditating, that of fighting torpor and drowse. I lost count of how many sittings I performed over the week. It was between thirty and thirty-five. With such intensive practice one is bound to “get somewhere” even if sitting still. Especially, as I learned, if sitting still.

The most meaningful renunciation for me was that imposed by noble silence. Being an artist and writer, there is constant pressure to produce work, to “say something.” With a professional world that bleeds heavily into social media, there is very little space for measured speech, much less silence. Renouncing speech and social interaction immediately cleared space, as is the intended effect with all the renunciations. That space was just as quickly filled by my inner thoughts. Dialogues with myself crowded out inner silence. After several days of practice I learned to return to breath quickly enough to calm the inner noise. It was finally during sitting sessions on the last day that I realized an extended inner silence. Ah, mindfulness—for many years, I realized, I had known no such thing.

Unlike scripted religious services that deliver social but constrained experiences, this course opens doors, doors some of us novices did not even know were there. But little is said about what is inside, only that what one finds is oneself, whatever that is. Or is not, in the event that one goes down the path of confronting emptiness.² Given our extremely individuated lives in contemporary society, a retreat like this one will be experienced differently for everybody. I expect to experience a future retreat differently yet again, as circumstances both personal and global will have changed between now and then. An important thing to note is, even though I got “better” at meditating every day, my struggles and insights did not occur in linear progression.

To close I present my random notes, jotted either during the retreat or shortly after.

• For best sitting, hips above knees. Repeat, hips above knees.
• Though Joshua Tree was surely much quieter back at the time of Gram Parsons’ demise, it remains a mystical place. Even with the eighteen-wheelers barreling down Twentynine Palms Highway within earshot, the magic is sometimes overwhelming. The nightly howling of the coyotes is a perfect balance of desperation and exuberance. The joshua trees themselves exude a frozen kineticism.
• The emphasis on renunciations says something about who participates and why. Many of my fellow practitioners seemed to be on a path of recovery. They are the ones who have gone over the edge and lived to tell about it. Or they would, were it not for Noble Silence.
• Sitting in a chair for meditation, as opposed to the floor, does not produce second-class mindfulness.
• Instructor and founder of ATS Noah Levine seemed to put special attention to the hindrance that is lust. This spoke to the relative nearness many of us had to chemical abstinence as compared to celibacy, particularly in a situation of mixed company.
• The easiest way to ruin a sun drenched Lloyd Wright/Frank Lloyd Wright desert masterpiece is to install vertical blinds.
• Back jacks and retreat centers go together like peanut butter and jelly.
• The t-shirts sported by students made visible an unspoken renunciation, no music. They also painted a picture of the subcultures feeding the growing ATS scene: Neurosis, Sleep, New York Dolls, Bad Brains, Megadeth. The award for Band Seen On Most T-shirts goes to the good old Grateful Dead.

carpool gang upon the return from Joshua Tree to LAX

I post this report with a profound sense of gratitude. Special thanks go to the Hemera Foundation for its visionary Tending Space Fellowship.

*

NOTES

1. Paul Williams notes that though many, particularly from the West, tend to assume a separation between meditation and analysis, “Analysis, investigation of the way things really are, is an activity forming the principal ingredient of insight meditation (vipasyana), which leads to the different degrees of prajna.” Williams, p. 72.

2. According to the instructors, the concept of annata typically popularized in its Zen form as no-self is a misreading of the original teaching. The lesson is not that there is no self, but rather that the true self is not that which we commonly perceive. Only through deep and prolonged practice is the true self, connected to things both eternal and impermanent, encountered.

a field trip, in truths

[This essay was included in Meandering Methodologies, Deviant Disciplines, a publication produced by Public Art Saint Paul. The book is the final document from the four-year City Art Collaboratory project that brought scientists into collaboration with artists.]

My interest in science and art resonates with what philosopher Alain Badiou calls the “truth process” in his book Ethics. Written as the Yugoslav Wars unfolded, and particularly with the failed response of the Western powers in mind, Badiou composed his system to counter moral systems based on the so-called natural rights of man. He targets the cynical flexibility resulting from the universalizing claims of liberal humanism. With Badiou’s framework in mind, I found myself intrigued by the field trip taken by City Art Collaboratory scientists and artists to Coldwater Spring, as reported on the City Art Collaboratory blog. Knowing that the area around Coldwater Spring, above the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, was the site of an anti-road campaign only several years after the Yugoslav Wars, I wonder if applying Badiou’s language to a consideration of that site adds productive complexity to his ethics of truth, between abstraction and materiality, in space more than time. In understanding Coldwater Spring as a source not only of water but also of truths, and considering the ethical demands it might make in turn, I hope to advance Badiou’s political aims, which I share.

Reviewing Badiou’s system is the place to start. Greatly simplified, Badiou describes the truth process as opening with the event—a specific circumstance that occurs in time, immanently rupturing a situation, and that, whatever its temporal duration, “vanishes as soon as it appears.”1 The event divides consciousness, or a historical narrative, or a demarcation between self and other, or one’s relation to an imagined ideal, into the situation before and the situation after. But once perceived, the event is always already over. Those who experience the event are afterward called to observe a fidelity to it, and this is the basis for Badiou’s ethics. Performing this fidelity—thereby becoming an agent of truth, touching the eternal—is the ethic of the truth process. In plain language, I take this to mean carrying forward with new being, new thinking, or changed conduct that has been demanded by the revelatory event. A basic ethical failure is to go forward as if the event had not happened. The most extreme infidelity is the simulacrum of a truth, a dishonesty that legitimizes war. For Badiou, this is evil.

To support his analysis, Badiou returns repeatedly to his four-fold subjective “types”, across a spectrum from intimate to public realms: politics, love, science, and art. In politics, the subject is induced through mass experience; society is the actor. Love resides at the opposite end of the intimacy spectrum, inducing a subject in the space between individual persons. Science and art serve as intermediate zones in which the individual and the social meet. To take one of the many instances where Badiou uses the fourfold matrix to illustrate his point, he lists as exemplary events in order of politics, love, science, and art, “the French Revolution of 1792, the meeting of Heloise and Abelard, Galileo’s creation of physics, and Haydn’s invention of the classical musical style.”2 Thus, in politics he means revolution. By love, he means the life-changing intensity of amorous relations between individuals. Science and art, activity attributable to either individual practitioners or group efforts based on shared frameworks, produce paradigm-shifting insights. But he never presents his cherry-picked examples of events as existing within layers of history, much less in relation to one another.

Moving beyond the decontextualized examples of truth events he prefers, grounding Badiou’s language in a particular place reveals that different subject types may articulate truths along a common thread; in the Coldwater example that follows, in some sense all four are present. The different events entail multiple fidelities but are bound by relation of varying depths of time to the same place. Together, they produce a compound truth, at times contradictory but moving toward resolution. We could say the original truth is the spring itself, the existence of which was and is a hydrogeological event that occurs outside of human purpose.

Science can make truths legible in ways that no other endeavor can, but in contrast to the theory of relativity or the invention calculus, the self-evidence of the spring precludes the need for a formally presented insight. All science of the spring, from the earliest descriptions by explorers to latter-day hydrological measurements, only supplements the fundamental fact of flowing water.

 3

A series of Coldwater truths across subject types can be traced back to a work of art: a shimmering 1856 watercolor landscape by Alfred Sully, a commissioned officer and West Point graduate. The painting depicts the area from the perspective of the western bank of the Mississippi, above the confluence; Coldwater Spring is in the wooded foreground and Fort Snelling is off in the distance. The picture glows with summer light and the expansive skies of the northern prairie, capturing a moment when the settling of Minnesota was beginning to accelerate, and the sacred place Mndota (“where the waters meet”) was subsumed by its strategic significance. As the subject type art, the watercolor preserves a truth in the image and also exists as a truth-event in its objecthood. Sully’s image presents an event not as artistic innovation (Badiou’s preferred art reference), but as a document of opposing vectors—that of the free Dakota lands as represented by the unfenced terrain, or the simulacrum of democracy advanced by the settler nation, monumentalized by the fort. Competing fidelities ensued, resulting in the Dakota Uprising of 1862.

Sully seems to have observed a fidelity to the events of his own artistic creations. Even as he carried out his orders to secure territory, Sully is reputed to have been an advocate for Indians, treating them fairly and honestly, if not softly. To add to the truth in art already present in his Mississippi riverscape, an event in love seems to have emerged between the Anglo Sully and the great romance of his life, Manuela, his first wife, a Californian Chicana who died tragically young. Later, perhaps readable as a sort of fidelity to his mixed first marriage, Sully wed a French-Yankton woman in the Minnesota Territory, thereby contributing to the polyglot universe he found in the territorial settlements. One of Sully’s granddaughters was Ella Deloria, an ethnographer who conducted formal research on Navajo, Lumbee, and Lakota cultures. The social scientific reports she helped author contributed to both government recognition and tribal self-recognition. These published reports were events in Badiou’s sense; the reclamation and growth of tribal identities are the fidelity.

To add to these linked events in art, love, and science, and to complete the poetic redemption of the compound truth, one of Sully’s further descendants, the activist writer Vine Deloria Jr., carried forth a four-generations-late fidelity to the 1862 Dakota Uprising that Sully himself played a part in suppressing. Deloria’s 1969 book Custer Died for Your Sins helped to shape contemporary indigenous political consciousness and became a key text in the resurgence of native resistance against the imperialism of which his great-grandfather was a historical agent. Moreover, Custer Died for Your Sins came wrapped up in an event of its own moment—in the subject type politics at global scale, i.e., the worldwide systemic convulsions of the late 1960s and early 70s. A generation after that, a fidelity to the heyday of Red Power was an element in the production of a new political event, one that returns the thread to Coldwater Spring.

In 1997, in response to a planned highway widening and new interchange that threatened the spring and nearby sacred stand of oaks, a resistance movement rose up and established itself physically as an outlaw road-block encampment that became known as the Minnehaha Free State. Eventually, this became the nation’s longest ever blockage of a government road construction project. The campaign was comprised of those fighting to preserve the oaks, property owners resisting eminent domain, and the Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota, whose claims to tribal identity are interwoven with their claim on the spring. The Minnehaha Free State produced a militancy that kept the encampment going for sixteen months—we could say this was partly in fidelity to the indigenous rights and identity articulated by, among others, Vine Deloria.

The area being defended was the geographic heart of a truth-event, fidelity to which was evident not only in the road-block, but even more so through the years of grassroots political action, testimony in public hearings, court challenges, and other kinds of dedicated resistance. That fidelity prevailed to the degree that Coldwater Spring remains free flowing, and, through persistent striving, it was eventually granted governmental protection. In grappling with the problem of ethical consistency—key to combatting the moral flexibility of the neoliberal human rights frame—Badiou posits perseverance (in performing one’s fidelity to an event) as the opposite of opinion. The preservation demands made by the activists of the Free State may not have been achieved in total (the oaks were destroyed), but the perseverance following the event undoubtedly exposed the original position of the state—technocratically insisting on the road and dismissing concerns about the spring, but then later scaling back those plans—as mere opinion.

The truths of Coldwater Spring described in terms of Badiou’s system of ethics begins with the spring itself. Additionally, the spring exists as, and in relation to, multiple events, with fidelity to one event sometimes contributing to the production of another. It meanders through all four of Badiou’s subject types, by way of bloodline or political narrative. In a constructive departure from Badiou’s theory, applying his language to Coldwater Spring shows that a particular point of departure in space breaks linear time, stacking events into a single, compound truth. Furthermore, the original event, unlike the disappearing acts of Badiou’s exemplary events, remains open, perpetually reinvigorated by its flowing water.

Seen this way, the City Art Collaboratory visitors who quaffed clear water from the spring may yet express fidelities to the land in ways unforeseen, or may find themselves ensnared in their own Coldwater-threaded events—certainly in the science or arts of their training, but equally as likely, in politics or love. The hypocrisies of capital’s moralistic cloak will never be punctured without the blades of compound truths—Badiou supplies the language, but Coldwater Spring is the pure fact and the gushing event.

1 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, translated by Peter Hallward (Brooklyn: Verso, 2001), 67.

2 Ibid., p. 41.

3 Image supplied by Beinecke Digital Collection of Yale University Library.