the habit of being

It is odd to me that such internal things as meditation should take near-endless practice, when in fact if you are making an effort to clear your mind, you have already made a mistake. Clarity is supposed to just happen, simply and without show.

That, I think, is my problem with Go. I think about the game as this lovely simple thing, a thing that should be beautiful, like vines growing, as Pierce the Punk says, and it keeps me from really seeing it, rationally, as a game. James talks of beauty and understanding often, as a coupling, and yet I wonder if there are not so many times when beauty hinders understanding. To value a thing as truly beautiful may mean to place it beyond your reach.

We find large things - oceans and sunsets, science and art - beautiful because they are too immense to be held within our minds all at once; they must be broken down in order to see them at all. It is the same with small things - cells and “Om” and quarks and love - which must be added up to be seen and broken down again to show their own immensity. Love is a special case because it cannot be broken down, and thus I called it the smallest thing in an essay for NYU.

Last I wrote on this topic, I was pondering those thing on our own scale which are worshipped and called beautiful. Does the practitioner of an ancient religion with a tortoise totem really have a better understanding of the turtle than those of us who never give creatures a second thought? If it is not so, then by finding Go instantly lovely and symbolic, I keep myself from ever becoming a good player, because I have placed the game beyond my grasp and cannot see it for what it is. I should instead discover beauty in degrees, perhaps.

I don’t really know. Maybe I just suck at strategy games.

James is gone to the gym to shower in the locker room, and I am sitting in our second campsite at St. John’s. It is a little cubby of trees outside of which lay rather large rocks at the bottom of a steep incline leading up to the sidewalk. I look up at the sky through a tangle of thin tree limbs, cutting the blue into little geometric puzzle pieces, mostly triangles. I am eating expensive soy and flax granola, given to us by a Santa Fean downtown who saw our hungry sign yesterday. It is so odd how we can go from broke ($10) to rich ($50) just by standing on a corner with a sign for a few minutes.

J has come and gone again to get water - they have lemon water in a big pitcher in the cafe. The Go Club meets at 2 today and we need to get some bread - I believe that is out entire agenda.

Yesterday we visited the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to really talk about art. I can say “I like this part” or “I like that part” but I cannot usually articulate why I like a work as a whole. I suppose it is best that way, with the beauty elusive. If it could be truly measured, it wouldn’t be nearly as great a concept or a reason for living.