Dialogue | The Journal of the Shivas Irons Society

BERNARD DARWIN \| A COMPREHENSIVE VIEW Part 3 [Part 1] [Part 2]
DIALOGUE
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN JEFF SILVERMAN & MICHAEL MURPHY
S	When we last talked about Bernard Darwin, you mentioned "The Links of Eiderdown." I was struck that you saw it as remarkably similar to Eastern mystical literature, and Darwin probably knew nothing about Eastern literature.
M	Well, it's the kind of thing that keeps appearing in the golf literature and in other literatures as well. To call it mystical is a little too easy. It's a story thaI reveals the enchantments of everyday life and reveals a magic in the world, reveals a capacity in us not only for enchantment, but a deeper joy—let us call it a deeper knowing. I think at once of a couple of other books that provide the same revelations. One is John Updike's Golf Dreams—particularly the stories "Farrell's Caddie" and "The Pro"...
S	"Farrell's Caddie" is very similar to Golf in the Kingdom in suggesting the cosmic consciousness of the game.
M	—and the other is Breakfast at the Victory by James Carse who is a professor of religious studies at NYU. His subtitle, appropriately, is "The Mysticism of Ordinary Experience." "The Links of Eiderdown" stands squarely in that genre. Let's call it the mysticism of ordinary life, the illuminations or epiphanies that come to us all in circumstances that are not formally religious or contemplative. But suddenly this deeper light glows forth and this enchantment appears. First of all, we've all experienced that delicious feeling of having to go to bed because we're just sick enough. I recently had to go to bed with the flu and was reminded of the serene relief of just lying down in bed. One of the surest signals of God's mercy is the flat position. No matter how bad you feel, if you lie down, you feel better. So Darwin lies down. He's in a slightly fevered state and suddenly the world becomes more diaphanous than before. His bed sheets, sloping off his knees, reveal a golf course. But it's a golf course that can be altered with the slightest movement of his body. He becomes godlike-his eye becomes the eye of god. He's creating his own golf course at will, as it were. 50 in his god's-eye view it's a golf course that can shift and change. And you could argue that there is an urge in all golfers to rise above the torment and the challenges of the game and see it with this view. It also speaks to the desire we've all felt to change this or that golf course; get rid of that trap, bring the hole closer, have some of those trees CUI down, or maybe plant some other trees over there. So you could argue that Darwin's golfing unconscious comes to life in his fevered state. But his golfing unconscious reaches down deep into what we would call the transcendent dimension. The beauty of it is that he doesn't say any of these things. It's all implicit. As we go deeper, it's better sometimes to say less. He's a minimalist in this regard. There's no metaphysics there at all.
S	He's just describing what he sees.
M	It's so simple. In that respect, I'd argue that John Updike's "Farrell's Caddie" is doing the same thing. It's not encumbered with metaphysics. It's simply the experience that reveals it. I'm going to call it knowledge by identity, okay? And I thought I might just read you a couple of brief excerpts from Carse's Breakfast at the Victory. This is an essay called "Vision in a Death Wrap," and it bears on the magic of "The Links of Eiderdown:" "Sufis speak of the nafs, or the false self that lakes the place of the soul. Somewhat more complicated than the concept of the ego, the nafs refers to all that in ourselves which has become an object for others or for ourselves. It is our visible self, the tangible, public aspect of a personality. It is what we see when we look al ourselves, it is what we present to others to be seen by them. It is what stands in the way of our oneness with others, with ourselves. with the Divine. The nafs in each of us has a life of its own—logical, powerful, real. Sometimes the Sufis describe it as a hungry yellow dog that stays begging at our side until we learn how to drive it away." He goes on to say, "The mysticism of our seeing and knowing is precisely what our nafs tries to hide from us—once again, this public self. Our nafs want its worlds to stay fixed, opaque, hostile to deeper vision. At the same time, and paradoxically, the nafs is a creation of our mystical longing for oneness—or as we usually experience it, familiarity." And then he concludes. "Knowledge, therefore, is a recognition of our otherness to an other, but when you get to this deeper knowing suddenly you become the thing perceived."
S	I think of Darwin in his bed and there's no false front. It's just who he was at that moment. This was written when Darwin was in his fifties or early sixties, and yet he's returning to a state of childlike wonder.
M	As children we would do this. I can remember seeing things in the clouds, faces in the clouds, or big monsters rising from the sea on the beach. And even as adults we can do this—we can let our vision go. Darwin was doing thaI. It was very childlike, very basic, and very delicious. In a sense he becomes the golf course. Indeed, the golf course is the wrinkles in the sheets draped over his knees.
S	Yet, without him the golf course wouldn't be there-it has momentary reality but no permanence. It's like a group of Tibetan monks creating their fantastic sand mandala and then rubbing it away. As much as Darwin might experience enchantment, at any moment any move he makes alters or obliterates it. Nothing is permanent. And nothing is permanent in golf, either. The course changes with every day, every moment. To say nothing of our golf swings.
M	It's the same with all of life. Every moment is new. My teacher Sri Aurobindo says. "Never try to have the same experience twice." If you practice emptyness as they say in much Buddhist practice, if you truly practice it, suddenly everything is alive and fresh. The Sanskrit word anagura means "ever new" —each instance completely, uniquely, radically new. Even in the most humdrum seeming circumstance. And that newness and freshness of perception is part of Darwin's moment, too; though I suppose we might be faulted for reading too much into this simple tale.
S	But we're having fun doing it.
M	We're having fun and one reason that an essay like this lives on is because it touches us deeply. It touches this deeper recognition in us of the world's ever-present, secret enchantment. Like "Farrell's Caddie." That enchantment and that deeper knowing is always there—lurking. We have the worlds within and around us that we close ourselves off to every instant. The world is much deeper, richer and greater than our habituating selves normally recognize. We become creatures of routine—we get stuck. A wonderful writer like Darwin, even in the simplest situations, helps us get unstuck.
S	Don't you think it's remarkable that Bernard Darwin, who began writing about a game almost 100 years ago, still speaks to us, still fresh and new?
M	This is the beauty of good writing. It speaks to you. It opens up a world. C.S. Lewis says about literature that lives, "A world appears or is created that readers want to inhabit." It's a beautiful explanation of why Darwin remains so fresh. He perceives and opens up worlds of experience that people keep wanting to enter. Now Darwin does it in golf, but he reminds us of all that we tend to forget or overlook or want to hold fixed. It opens the doors of perception. When we cleanse the door of perceptions we shall see things as they are—infinite. Blake's line there.
S	Darwin has opened doors for me not only on the golf course, but also beyond the golf course. One learns to appreciate the stuff you don't normally pay attention to. What a gift.
M	Amen! This is how we should live. This is the secret of the contemplative life, the Zen life. You can be anywhere and suddenly the doors of perception swing open. And it isn't just perception, it's knowing. And it's not just knowing, it's reaching out and trying to find common ground with people and to appreciate them and to love them more deeply. And it's also to find new powers in yourself, powers to move through the world and create. And in all these senses-in our perceptions, feelings, and understandingit enhances our capacity to be better people.
	END