A letter from T.U. to Angelina Baldoz and Beth Graczyk, March 2013

To

Dearest Beth & Angelina

Some stray lines around the title of our joint project,
Cacophony For 8 Players, that are in no way intended
to impose a certain view or even an uncertain view
as to the meaning of those three words and that number,
so here it stutters away?

As a preamble, let me share with you, and Molly, what happened just before settling down to write this. Or let me go back even a little bit. The other day, when we talked on skype, we told you about the new space upstairs, in what we always called the music room or the library or the library & music room, and how it's now minus the treadmill and the rest of the stuff, for you to indulge in, when you come down, to spread out your wings, your feet, your ears, your imaginal ways etc.

But we don't think we shared with you how, up on the wall on the left as you enter, we had put this enlarged photocopy of a page from a Morton Feldman score entitled "For Samuel Beckett", for which we have the music, and if we understand it right it's meant as a dedication, but in any case we thought it was a nice way to combine, with two favorites, the understanding of a library & music room.

Of course, I'm really straying here, but if I'm still circling even a little bit, it's around the word "for", the meanings of "for".

Then, since we talked to you, we received another Morton Feldman cd that we had ordered, called "Three Voices (and, after some space) For Joan La Barbara", maybe you know her, she also has sung with Cunningham and Cage etc., but I didn't know this piece, and thought I should, also in connection with our project, since she recorded this three times over on her own. Or, in performance, twice on tape over speakers and one live on stage (with a text from a Frank O'Hara poem). Now, the meaning of "for" here is probably a little different than the "for" in the Beckett case, isn't it? Maybe a dedication, for her, but also music for her three voices, a score for three voices: where the composer's voice is both inside and outside the work.

Then, a little while ago, and what I thought was amazing, I thought I would check, up in the library, what or if Morton Feldman himself had said something about this work (also since there were no liner notes with the cd). Then on page 272 of a book called Morton Feldman Says (2006), I found these lines:

One of my closest friends, the painter Philip Guston, had just died; Frank O'Hara had died several years before. I saw the piece with Joan in front and those two loudspeakers behind her. There is something tombstoney about the look of loudspeakers. I thought of the piece as an exchange of the live voice with the dead ones – a mixture of the living and the dead.

Something tombstoney, pretty good phrase. And that further connective to our work, the mixture of the living and the dead. Pretty amazing, I thought. And having seen it, I thought, maybe we ought to share that Morton moment first. End of preamble.

Or, to stay there another moment, as a kind of threshold or bridge to what I was coming downstairs to write a few lines about. To stay a moment with the way Feldman saw, or heard, his own piece: three voices, an exchange of the live voice with the dead ones (and maybe his two friends were still alive when he actually wrote it, composed it); and so what I mean, there's also his own voice, as composer, and then there's his later voice, the way he articulates his thoughts, now as a listener. How many voices are there, how many players?

Dearest Beth and Angelina, and Molly too, we're still circling around our title, the meanings of "for", etc. So he, Feldman, writes something, something for someone, this time it's three voices for La Barbara, but here, in terms of "for", if it's a dedication, it's also something for her to sing, several times over. So how many "fors" are here? End of bridge.

Cacophony. Comes, it's said, from the Greek, from kakon and phonia, bad or evil sound, like in the old dualisms, good and evil etc. But isn't it a collision of sorts, a clash, that it's come to mean, or maybe it was there all along, a compound, a dissonance. So maybe a cluster of sounds, displeasing. Then came Schoenberg, according to Kandinsky (around 1911):

Schoenberg starts from the principle that the concepts consonance and dissonance simply do not exist. A so-called dissonance is simply a further-removed consonance.

Going back close to our zero moment, back at the Erickson, waiting for Angelina to join us, those Schoenberg ways were of course already there, as were the idea of overtones or undertones of irony. And remember, what we had just seen or heard we thought was a tad trite or banal or bombastic. So right from the start there was this notion of a dis-sonance, something with a little more juice, a little more tension, something that might be a little dis-pleasing to some, a bit less smooth, whiff of mockery, irony itself stirring up some trouble. Something maybe disturbing, for some (later: dropping those balls on the floor). Repeating: for some, that word "for", some foul sounds for some ... figures, friends, performers, players.

At that very early moment, for me, maybe there were not eight, immediately. But within a few seconds there was the thought of a dual economy, both in terms of logistics and budget, and at the same time in terms of the living and the not-so-living, a two-by-four that would resonate with many of the structures of the eightfold, across the fields, and also keep this tension going, via the word "for", spilling into the ninth, the exceeding, our own voices, conjoined, the white thread, woven through (if we could live up to that).

If, later on, we talked a lot about the rasas of Muni, Abhinavagupta's addition, the myths of Graham, the I Ching of Cunningham and Cage, we never said that much, I think, about the Muses, the symbolism, the inspirational and representational aspects, across the spectrum of the arts. Not that we necessarily need to go into that, by now. But in order to also see some following quotes from Kandinsky, see what he means by Monumental Art, maybe we could just insert a few lines, the opening moments from a work by Jean-Luc Nancy, published in 1994:

The Muses get their name from a root that indicates ardor, the quick-tempered tension that leaps out in impatience, desire, or anger, the sort of tension that aches to know and to do. In a milder version, one speaks of the "movements of the spirit." (Mens is from the same root.) The Muse animates, stirs up, excites, arouses. She keeps watch less over the form than over the force. Or more precisely: she keeps watch forcefully over the form.
But this force springs up in the plural. It is given, from the first, in multiple forms. There are Muses and not the Muse.
Their number may have varied, as well as their attributes, but the Muses will always have been several.

Their number may have varied, as Nancy says, as well as their attributes: it's a force, he says, that springs up in the plural. Which may be the gateway to those Kandinsky quotes (But just playing with the eight-form a moment, let's say we here, but not otherwise, omit Miss Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, then we have Caliope who was said to be the Muse of epic poetry, Clio of history, Polyhymnia of mime, Euterpe of the flute, Terpsichore of dance, Erato of lyric poetry, Melpomeme of tragedy, and Thalia of comedy).

If we view the Muses as figures, see them in front of us, they may inter-play, moving between each other, in a sort of horizontal line, rather than in a dimension that has more of the feel of a verticality. I say this, first in relation to Kandinsky and the way he seems to articulate his ideas about the side-by-sideness of the arts; but also in order to, later, get into these different layers of interpretation, how our title may be understood to contain or refer to territories that through the ages may have been seen in a more vertical way, intertwined, still sort of stacked.

Let us here not abandon Miss Urania, maybe she'll guide us, into our tension between the eightfold and the ninth, bridging then or setting up the dynamics between the horizontalities and the verticalities, their meshings (not forgetting the temporal).

Kandinsky, then, and what he says about Monumental Art, a couple of fragments here, starting out from, as he says, the painterly, 'pure pictorial composition', chapter 7 in this 1912 edition of his book called in English "On the Spiritual in Art":

This dance of the future, which is thus raised to the level of the music and painting of today, will in the same instant become capable of contributing as a third element to the creation of a form of stage composition that will constitute the first work of Monumental Art.
Stage composition will consist initially of these three elements:
1. musical movement,
2. pictorial movement,
3. dance movement.
Everyone will understand from what has been said above on the subject of pure pictorial composition what I mean by the threefold effect of internal movement ( = stage composition).

And these lines from around the same time, from an essay called Content and Form:

This monumental art is the combination of every art in one single work, whereby (1) each art, while remaining exclusively within the bounds of its given form, becomes a joint begetter of the work, and (2) within this work, each art is brought to the fore or relegated to the background, according to the principle of direct or inverted contrast.
That is, the principle according to which this work is constructed remains the same as that which likewise constitutes the unique basis of creation in every individual art.

So I think we should be attentive to how he talks about 'initially', and then later on (in the Bauhaus period 1919-1923) expands on that three-some, now setting up six fields or "artistic means that, taken together, offer the greatest possibilities for a monumental abstract art." (notice also how he now adds the word 'abstract'): 1) Architecture, dealing with space and dimensions, 2) Painting, dealing with color etc., 3) Sculpture, comprising individual spatial extension, 4) Music, comprising sounds and temporal extensions, 5) Dance, with movement in space and time etc., 6) Poetry, the human voice, its spatial, temporal components.

And to Kandinsky's six, may we be bold and add a seventh, compositions in Light (thank you, Amiya), and an eighth: the Cameramatic, compositions in photo-filmic ways (Maya Deren, etc)...

Then if we have these eight players, fields, art, disciplines, 'artistic means', as Kandinsky says, are we seeing them, albeit in space, sort of side by side, together in a juxtaposition kind of horizontality? Now, not to get caught in the conceptual nettings of all this, another set of dualities, of the horizontal and the vertical: apart from the above six 'means', later on Kandinsky has an eight-list, where he places the following 'elements' underneath each other and says that these 'elements should be subjected to analysis' (Program for Bauhaus 1920):

1. Color
2. Plane
3. Volume
4. Space
5. Sound
6. Time
7. Movement
8. Word

So, to take up his instruction, please analyze, please analyze these eight elements, these eight players. Okay, here we go.

Then there's this other 'vertical' stuff, where you have a stacking of horizontals, meanings, going in an upwards direction, it seems, this layering of old, what the scholastics called the Quadriga, the fourfold way of interpreting (the Bible etc.), those classical hermeneutic levels: the literal, the allegorical, the tropological (or moral), the anagogical (or mystic). (And they used 'Jerusalem' traditionally as an example: the literal was the city itself, the allegorical was the city viewed as body of the Christian Church, the moral was the word Jerusalem to be understood as an image of the individual soul in its faith and its peace, and the anagogical, meaning 'leading upward' in Greek, was maybe something like the ways leading to union in Christ, abiding with God, the Godhead within, and so on.)

And, to open this up a bit, how we have much the same kind of foursome in the Jewish tradition, Rabbinic, Kabbalah, where the four levels of scriptural meaning are contained in the word PaRDeS, meaning paradise-garden, into which four rabbis of old entered together, but only one of them, Rabbi Aqiva, 'returned safely'. PaRDeS, as an acronym, may here be understood as follows: Peshat as the plain or literal meaning, Remez as the allegorical, the hinted, Derash, as the homiletic and moral meaning, and Sod as the secret or mystical interpretation.

Then, still with your kind patience, we may take this around a bit, the foursome, first to Islam and the Arabic language, where I thought this note from William Chittick was nice:

An old joke among orientalists tells us that every Arabic word has four meanings: It means what it means, then it means the opposite of what it means, then it has something to do with sex, and finally it designates something to do with a camel. Part of the truth of the witticism is the way it indicates how Arabic is grounded in everyday human experience. The rational mind tends to push the meaning of a word away from experience to "what it means," but the imaginal mind finds the self-disclosure of the Real in the sex and the camel – it is in the world's concrete realities that God is found, not in its abstractions.

That was taken from Tom Cheetham's book on Corbin, called "The World Turned Inside Out", 2003. There's also, from Dr. Ali Duran, the following concerning Levels of Meaning in Holy Scripture, The Holy Qur'an: "Traditionally in the esoteric traditions, understanding of Quran is regarded from the perspective of the student, and is usually divided into four levels of understanding": Shariat, Tariqat, Maarifat, and Haqiqat, where Shariat is the exoteric level and the literal meaning of the verses of the Quran, the visible; Tariqat is the beginning of the hidden; Maarifat is the station of gnosis, bringing into understanding the subtleties of the Quran; and Haqiqat, the fruit of maarifat, where the gnostic, the one who knows, becomes annihilated in al-Haqq, the Divine reality, and subsists only through the will of Allah.

Brief interlude: Hey, what's the mystic meaning of cacophony, what's the invisible meaning of eight, why did only Rabbi Aqiva come out alive?

Next, if we go to the Indian Continent and the Vedic tradition, Rev. Thomas Hickey says there are "four levels of intelligibility" (Sanskrit: nama) with corresponding levels of world or form (Skt. loka/rupa):

1. Vaikri- written or spoken level of gross intelligibility, corresponding to the gross world.
2. Madhyama- middle level or level of subtle intelligibility, corresponding to subtle world.
3. Pashyanti- celestial level or level of causal intelligibility, corresponding to causal world.
4. Para- transcendental level or level of pure intelligibility in which there is identity of name and form (Skt. nama-rupa), corresponding to Pure Knowledge which is Ultimate Reality (Skt.Veda/Brahman).

On the Mahayana and Vajrayana (Buddhist) side of things we might go to that work called "Tara's enlightened activity" by Khenchen Palden Sherab and Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal (2007), where under the heading 'The Four Systems of Meaning' they say:

The four modes are the tshül zhi. Zhi is "four," and tshül is "systems," "modes," or "aspects." The first mode is the word meaning: tshig gi tshül; second is the general meaning: chi'i tshül; third is the hidden meaning: be dön gyi tshül; and fourth is the ultimate meaning: thar thug gi tshül. From each of these modes of meaning emerges a particular approach to meditation and practice. Thus, we will apply each of these four to each of the Twenty-one Praises to Tara. In this way we will reveal and display the full depth of meaning of what these great masters taught.

Whaddya mean eight players, four by two? Those meanings of the past coming down to us, preciously: repeatedly, it seems, structured in fours, four levels, four approaches, four? And those of this evening, as we join together, Beth, Angelina, Molly, T, each with our own ways of seeing things, yet coming together as one, one voice so to speak, the ninth. The ninth making something, a phoney cake, for eight players, levels, lands, portlands, eight directions, eight dustbins...

Then there are, if we hang around the Indo-Tibetan 'hoods-woods, the eightfold path of Patanjali's Yoga, 1) Yama, 2) Niyama, 3) Asana, 4) Pranayama, 5) Pratyahara, 6) Dharana, 7) Dhyana, 8) Samadhi, understood sometimes as discipline, ethics, posture, breathwork, pulling back of the senses, attention holding, meditative absorption, and ecstatic awareness, even as these translated terms (as with so many others) should be given more attention, or consideration, or imaginalization or...

And the eightfold Buddhist path of the Way to the ending of suffering, right vision, right resolve, right speech – until we come to right samadhi.

And then, and maybe this should be the last, since now the clock is ticking and I said to Molly maybe we should send this to you prior to our skyping at, yes, eight bells, and you could chew on this, and throw up, prior to an ecstatic landing in Portland, the eight kinds or classes of Consciousness in a Vajrayana setting: 1) ground-of-all consciousness, 2) deluded consciousness, 3) mental consciousness, 4) visual consciousness, 5) auditory consciousness, 6) olfactory consciousness, 7) gustatory consciousness, 8) tactile consciousness.

To which Ati yoga or Dzogchen school people often add a ninth, maybe a little like Abhinavagupta does with his pure peaceful thread, or like we do, with our ninth, even if we cannot get it very clean.

Saw a nice word the other day, think it was in a book by Agamben, quoting someone called Richards: inter-animation.

But our old friend inter-weaving still holds up pretty good, may this reach you in good spirits (you'll have needed them, by now), sending you all my Love, and from Molly, and from the old weaver Tantipa, who a long, long time ago is said to have sung these lines:

The weavers of this world
Produce varied textiles on their looms,
But thanks to the teachings of my master,
I'm now a weaver of all that there is.
With the thread of esoteric instructions
And the shuttle of discernment,
I weave the fabric of fivefold gnostic nothing
On the loom of the undivided expanses of awareness ...

Postscript

April 2013

So, the clock was ticking away, very loud, that afternoon and early evening before we were to skype, before you were going down to Portland. So it became increasingly evident that I couldn't quite get those things together, those quotes, that at first I had thought about getting in there, or maybe not thought through well enough, since some of them I had not even located properly. There was one about Sahaja, a Sanskrit term, that I thought could come either just before or after the above ending lines, but where was it, and did it really fit, did I remember it rightly etc. So now it's fast approaching seven, and Molly needed to format it and dispatch it, so I knew I had to let it go, and I thought: well, maybe next time, maybe when you come down in May we can add a couple or three, not necessarily to a piece of paper, but to the net of thoughts...

Then when we had heard from Portland that the four bulkier Players might fit, and we seemed to be on, I asked Molly if she thought it was an idea to add a p.s. to the above and get some of those quotes down on paper, so that we had them in a pile so to speak even before you came, and could use them, more collectively, as a diving board or whatever, down, up, sideways, spiraling (optimally, no splash when you hit the water).

And Molly said why not.

A first move in such a post piece, then, might be a step back, or the Step Back. We used it in the liner notes to the first film from the Lid, a step back from match play, a step back from practice, from running intervals, from weights, from the wall, from the ball, until you get to the step itself and maybe further. We tried to articulate that, Body & Being was the title, remember, the coming together, if possible non-dually, of the physical movement and the mental, the twelves, the grid etc.

The step back, in a different vein, can also be traced back to Heidegger, who said: "The first step to vigilance is the step back from the thinking that merely represents – that is, explains – to the thinking that responds and recalls."

Then David Wood, in his book entitled The Step Back (2005), took up that theme, under the heading Toward a Negative Capability, a term coming from Keats. In her turn, the nice Korean-American writer called Jin Y. Park picked up this thread from David Wood, in her work called Buddhism and Postmodernity (2008), where she starts chapter 10 stating that Wood "characterizes postmodern forms of ethics as a 'step back'":

What Wood identifies as the characteristics of deconstructive ethics – that is, ambiguity, incompleteness, repetition, negotiation, and contingency – stands opposite to the general characteristics of normative ethics and moral philosophy. Normative ethics becomes possible through a clear cut judgment between binary opposites, whereas Wood's statement is characterized by a refusal to provide such a definitive mode in our ethical imagination. Instead of offering a ready-made recipe to answer our ethical questions, Wood suggests the ethical as a state of suspension. He explains this suspension by using John Keats' famous expression "negative capability," which Keats defines as a state "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

Without any irritable reaching: pretty good trope. Negative capability, too.

Refraining as action. A step back as a step of (continued) vigilance. Which way would that be, remaining quiet, would that be back or forth: always being situated in these oppositions (and then, on the dance floor, back or forth being just two different directions, or maybe not even 'different').

And then, in terms of time, of temporality, of timing, a step taking time, a step at the right time, traditionally those two, more opposition – as Agamben notes in his work The Time That Remains (2005):

Kairos and chronos are usually opposed to each other, as though they were qualitatively heterogeneous, which is more or less the case. But what is most important in our case is not so much – or not only – the opposition between the two, as much as the relation between them. What do we have when we have kairos? The most beautiful definition of kairos I know of occurs in the Corpus Hippocraticum, which characterizes it in relation to chronos. It reads: chronos esti en ho kairos kai kairos esti en ho ou polos chronos, "chronos is that in which there is kairos, and kairos is that in which there is little chronos."

The other day, or maybe a couple of weeks ago, when we revisited at the Yerba Buena, seeing some of that Shen Wei work, with perhaps 22 dancers on the floor of the 'stage', and us folks, the public, milling around on same stage, in between them, I thought perhaps that might be an example of chronos in which there didn't seem to be much kairos. (But to be fair, going back to my childhood, the Danish ballet, the elves, the trolls, the princes, perhaps not a great abundance of the kairological there either.)

So the step back, in chronological time, from here to Denmark, linking up with Hans Beck, with Bournonville, with Andersen, we come to Kierkegaard, a primary ancestor to try, impossibly, to live up to, right here, in this context, his connection to the Royal Theater, the frequent visit to the ballet, his language of the leap, the moment, the right moment, the landing, the passion, lidenskab, repetition, paradoxality, the stop, standsningen, silence, trembling, the works of love: staying with the kairological, how our task would also be, in Portland, to make a fabric of these terms, not as terms, rather voicings, rasas, rhythms, rags. Not as terms, rather as timings.

David Wood, again, links some of these elements together in another book, Time after Time (2007):

What Heidegger attempted to do in the early 1930s and in Being and Time was to conceptualize ontologically precisely the experience of kairological temporality in primal Christianity, which now became the paradigm of all experience for Heidegger. ... Here we come across the sources of many basic Heideggerian terms: e.g., the "kairological character" of experience, the moment (Augenblick), repetition (Weiderholung), "wakefulness," keeping silent (Schweigen), the passion (Leidenschaft) of temporal enactment and the inauthentic time that involves idle talk and the calculative awaiting of a fixed future.

The passion of temporal enactment. The possible passion in the inter-enactment of eight players, dead, alive, in between. David Wood, in that same book, has an interesting concept he calls 'time-shelters', and in a certain way, maybe that would fit here a little bit how I could also conceive of the sculptures, and ourselves, the eight of us (or nine or more), the various ways we are composed, complexities of memories, metabolisms, markers of time, pulses of mind, gut, skin...:

What is a time-shelter? Let me offer an account in a somewhat queer key: the universe as a whole is entropic. Human beings, however – indeed, all living beings – are essentially negentropic. In the midst of growing disorganization, we find creatures that consume and manufacture organization and complexity, whether at the molecular level or that of information. These frames generate internal boundaries within the world, ones that both establish and mediate the relationship of inner and outer. ...
This phenomenon of sheltering has enormously wide ramifications, but I would like to clarify its significance before offering some illustrations. Shelters are persistent forms of event-discontinuity in the world. They manage the boundaries of inside and outside by representing the outside within; by translating, buffering, and anticipating that which impinges; by resistance, accommodation, expansion, and exchange; and by establishing for these purposes rhythms, rules, and regularities.

So, he says, the outside within, the boundaries of inside and outside, we are still a little in that two-some landscape, the ins and the outs, then within these there are new boundaries of number, eight players, four levels, nine Muses etc. But we're still trying to come up with one coherent work, aren't we, that cacophony for those players. I was thinking of those words from Jean-Luc Nancy above, where he counts the Muses and ends up with what he calls the singular plural, I always thought that was a useful term: not a single conception, but after nine nights, before the divine order:

The Muses are daughters of Mnemosyne – not in a single conception, but after nine nights spent with Zeus – and they carry the memory of what comes before the divine order.
In a sense, there is a privilege of art here. But it is the privilege of an index, which shows and touches, which shows by touching. It is not the privilege of a superior revelation. The most difficult thing, no doubt, in talking about art is to move the discourse away from a sacred reverence or a mystical effusion. This is what we must begin to do through an obstinate return from the discourse on "art" to the discourse of its singular plural. For the plurality of the arts must finally make perceptible a fundamental double law.

A fundamental double law, let me get back to that one. But before we wrap it up (and now the clock's heard ticking again), I came across this fragment which we hadn't looked at before, I think, on the nine, nava, rasas in George E. Ruckert's book Music in North India (2004), where he talks about the four and four and "how the first eight moods would leave the audience with a feeling of the ninth, peace":

Navaras – the nine moods...
karuna ... sadness, pathos
shringar ... love, joy
vira ... heroism, valor
hasya ... laughter, comedy
raudra ... anger
bhayanaka ... fear
vibhatsa ... disgust
adbhuta ... surprise
shanti ... peace

In a dramatic performance (which includes classical dance), it is felt that a judicious use of the first eight moods would leave the audience with a feeling of the ninth, peace. In a musical performance, the first four, and the ninth, find expression in the ragas, or musical modes. The moods of the other four, that is, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise, are not regarded as inherent in the ragas themselves, but rather can combine with stage action to create a greater dramatic effect.

Then in a book on Deleuze and Religion, edited by Mary Bryden (2001), there is a piece by Michael Goddard called "The scattering of time crystals: Deleuze, mysticism, cinema", where Goddard quotes Michel de Certeau who has some good lines, I think, on "somatisation" etc. I thought of adding those lines in particular hearing of that exiting news that Angelina would join the Players, so to speak, and embody, somatise, articulate, express, both the compositional and the choreographical orders:

What de Certeau can add to this discussion, in proximity to the work of Deleuze, is an understanding of mysticism in terms of the body and temporality. For de Certeau, not only does mysticism have recourse to a social language whereby singular experiences are returned to the social world from which they originate, at times in the form of a minor language, but mystics are themselves the embodiment of a spiritual 'language', a writing of gestures, movements and sensations, of which mystical writings will only ever be a translation:

The mystic 'somatises', interprets the music of meaning with his or her corporeal repertoire. One not only plays one's body, one is played by it. [ ...] In this regard, stigmata, visions, and the like reveal and adopt the obscure laws of the body, the extreme notes of a scale never completely enumerated, never entirely domesticated, aroused by the very exigency of which it is sometimes the sign and sometimes the threat.

One not only plays one's body, one is played by it, double dutch, maybe approaching Nancy and the double law above, the singular plural.

So finally, finally, we get to within the realm of Sahaja, as mentioned in the beginning of this long drawn, too longdrawn p.s., sahaja (as an adjective) as maybe the realm of the co-emergent not-two, sahaja being Sanskrit for being born (ja) together with (saha), also according to Per Kværne's book An Anthology of Buddhist Tantric Songs (1986), and where he also talks of sahaja in Western ways in terms of 'simultaneously-arisen', the indivisibility of transcendence and immanence, of bliss and gnosis, samsara and nirvana etc., and in addressing the songs in the book themselves, he says 'once their essential structure becomes apparent: they reveal the nature of the ultimate state through the systematic ambiguity of their imagery'. Then later on he says the following, and I say, again, love you and ask forgiveness for putting you through this long ordeal:

...it follows that the sahaja, too, can be personified and regarded as being the highest Person &endash; the Purusa – of Indian religion as a whole; and in fact we find a passage in the Sadhanamala which describes the Coemergent in explicitly personified terms: "In all directions it has hands, feet, and so on, in all directions eyes, heads, and faces; in all directions it has ears in the world – constantly embracing all that is".