Saturday, August 27, 1994
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS

The Mysticism That’s All Around Us
A conversation with James Carse

James P. Carse is author of “Breakfast At The Victory: The Mysticism of Ordinary Experience” (HarperSan Francisco, $21), a memoir that celebrates, among other things, the mystery of a cat’s unblinking stare, a high school wrestling match and a conversation with a friend over a cup of fennel tea. Carse believes that every experience has its mystical dimension; with that in mind, he examines his life and relationships through the eyes of Sufi poets, Buddhist monks, Hindu rishis, the medieval Christian mysticist Meister Eckhart and Sigmund Freud.

The book’s title comes from the name of a New York diner where Ernie, the proprietor, works the counter “like a Sufi dervish. bobbing and sweeping in long, slow circles, cutting a bagel here, popping the toaster there, opening the coffee spigots on two cups at once.” Without his ever knowing it, Ernie’s dance of life prompts Carse to reflect on the mysticism of life inside the Victory Luncheonette on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

From his readings of the various mystic traditions, Carse also observes a pattern of silence in his own relationships with family, teachers and animals. A high school wrestling coach advises “Don’t think”—and Carse defeats an opponent twice his size. A college professor stops talking midlecture, stares vacantly into space for five minutes, then mutters, “I’m sorry, I’m empty.” It’s a lesson that Carse never forgets: Silence awakens him to the mystical presence in his own life.

Carse is director of religious studies and professor of the history of literature and religion at New York University. He is a repeated winner of the NYU Distinguished Teaching Award, and his classes draw hundreds of students every year. At 61, Carse enjoys bird-watching and fishing, and recently returned from a two-week walk in the Lake District of England. He has three grown children and divides his time between New York City and a farm in New England.

Q There’s something very comforting about a good breakfast joint. But what’s so mystical about it? I mean, why is Ernie mystical and not simply a good entertainer?

A The mystical part is the hardest part to see; the entertainment part is the easiest. But what I noticed over the years with Ernie was that there was no show at all. One action led so seamlessly into another that it was hard to see what he was doing. And so I was struck not by what I noticed about his work, but that I didn’t notice his work at all. It seemed effortless, egoless, very much like an animal’s. There’s a kind of mindlessness about what an animal does that makes almost every move perfect. In fact, some people think yoga developed out of the observation of animals—watching a cat stretch, watching a snake wait for prey to appear. When an animal is hungry, it doesn’t think about being hungry; it’s just hungry.

Q So many people today opt for total verbal honesty in relationships, “processing” every word and thought with friends and family. Why is silence so important to you?

A The essence of silence is listening, and the deepest, most silent part of ourselves is that aspect which is open and aware of everything around us. What we call being open is, in fact, being closed. There’s something more important than honesty.

There’s a difference between telling the truth and being truthful. Telling the truth assumes that there is a truth to tell. Truth-telling is a very complicated process. You can tell the truth about yourself to someone in such a way that they may be so disturbed by what you’ve told them, that your relationship is so altered, that the truth is no longer relevant. Sometimes there’s an aggressiveness and hostility in our truth-telling.

Q You describe a conversation with your wife a few months before she died, in which she said: “You know what I have learned about myself, about life, from these months of illness, especially now that I know I won’t survive it? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing.” How did you interpret that?

A The remark was such a surprise to me that I interpreted it immediately in terms of my own feelings. I thought it was said in anger, and I thought, “Yeah, I know what she means.” I was very angry—that she was dying at the height of her professional career, that this was the end of our 37 years together. But the remark was much more. It was moonlight on the water, not an angry, heavy comment. And I realized at the same time that she didn’t care what she’d learned from life. It was enough to live it. Life is not a lesson, it’s not a test. You either live it or you don’t. She was much more present than I was in that moment, because I was thinking of the past and the future: What am I going to do without her? I wasn’t even there. She was there.

Q I’ve read about your cult-like following at NYU. Do you find that young people today are especially thirsty for spiritual understanding? And do you consider yourself a spiritual teacher?

A Students are always searching. But I think something else is going on. The universities were developed around a 19th-century confidence that someday we’re going to know everything there is to know—what a brain is, what a mind is. And now, in the 20th century, that confidence is almost entirely gone. People still talk about the theory of everything, but even the people pursuing it know it won’t explain very much, that we’re surrounded by the inexplicable. I think students today are drawn to teachers who feel comfortable with mystery.

I love to point out to my students that it’s the losses, the difficulties in their lives that will make them rich human beings—not the realized dreams but the failed ones that make us human. That’s why I never wish anyone good luck. Good luck may deprive us of spiritual progress. It’s one of the things I really hope my students learn. I also want them to learn there’s no such thing as wasted time; even when they’re lying on their backs watching TV, they’re learning something always. There’s no point in your life when you can’t look at your life and not learn really remarkably surprising things about yourself.

Q How much of your own life is spent abiding by these principles of silence, meditation and mysticism?

A I feel haunted by all of this all the time. Very often, people ask me if I’m religious. My feeling about this is that to say “I am religious” is like saying “I am poetic.” No genuine poet would say, “I’m poetic.” He would say, “I work at poetry.” My deepest goal would be to be religious. I hope one day it could be said of me that I am religious.

Mystics say that all of us are mystics, but we realize it to varying degrees. The difference is that some of us are more aware of it than others. I would say of myself that my spiritual journey of the last decade or two could be described as a growing awareness of the mystical.

I do meditate. I go to church, I go on retreats, I go on long periods of silence. I walked across Spain two years ago; I loved the idea of following an ancient pilgrimage, the most developed pilgrimage in Christendom. It seemed drenched with experience. My perspective on things changes in ways I could never have predicted. What usually happens is I go out with an agenda of items I want to think through, and I go back with none of those items solved but with a whole new agenda. Instead of getting questions answered, you find out they weren’t good questions.

Copyright 1994 San Jose Mercury News