What
is common to both is the suggestion of being transported, or
in the presence of something unknown and unknowable. How else
to justify the existence of intuition, intimation or inspiration
other than fallen crumbs from that ineffable table? Perhaps
such mysticism transcends religion altogether, if religion is
understood as an unseeing belief in the written, and mysticism
as unwritten faith in the unseen. Yet, this meditative/ecstatic
state is one that, I believe, can be accessed through religious
practices such as fasting.
“There
is only one religion, but there are a hundred versions of it,”
offers George Bernard Shaw, and the same may be said of the
practice of fasting. Besides Muslims, Baha’is, Buddhists,
Catholics, Copts, Eastern Orthodox, Hindus, Jews, Mormons, Pagans
and Protestants all engage in some variation on the theme. The
fast may take place anywhere from a day to around half a year,
yet it appears to be conducted in differently similar manners,
for similarly different reasons. People abstain from food and
drink, or just solid foods, or meat, dairy products and eggs,
or fish (on some days but not others).
The
reasons are as free-ranging as the human imagination: spiritual
nourishment, spiritual improvement, and/or spiritual warfare.
This translates into purification, freeing the mind, freeing
the body, compassion, solidarity with the poor, practicing austerity,
resisting gluttony, control of carnal desires tempering the
power of habit or the violence of instinctive desire, sharpening
the will, enhancing concentration, penance for sins, closeness
to God, petition for special requests from God, to advance a
political or social-justice agenda (as Gandhi made a way of
life and diet) or even as a counterbalance to modern consumer
culture (there is a television and entertainment fast). What
emerges from this diversity is an innate human balancing system,
feasting and fasting along the slippery road to moderation.
The
discipline of fasting seems to express a kind of body/spirit
antagonism, for fasting, which clearly serves some basic human
function, means in effect, punishing the body. How to feed a
god and beast, at once: a dilemma of human existence. In this
light, fasting acts as an undoing of the body, and a dimming
of its din. The suggestion being: if you wish to have an out-of-body
experience, you must deny the physical body, experience a sort
of semi-martyrdom or dying to the flesh in order to feed the
spiritual body. It is a reminder of our other-body selves, our
spirit-body and the otherworldly food it hungers for. This is
perhaps why David Blaine, street magician, and his ascetic spectacle
(of some years back) captured so much attention and speculation.
No
stranger to punishing practices, Blaine is a hybrid of showman
and fakir, perpetually testing the limits of his powers. One
of his feats of endurance (September, 2003) involved starving
himself in solitary confinement, suspended from a crane by the
River Thames in a glass box for 44 days. The illusionist believed
that living without food and human contact, he’d experience
“a higher spiritual state,” that would lead to “the
purest state you can be in.” At first, the public repaid
him for his efforts by pelting him with insults, paint-filled
balloons, tomatoes, golf balls and other forms of violent distraction;
i.e. trying to cut off his water supply, and flying a remote
controlled helicopter carrying a burger up to his box.
The
parallels between this ‘hunger artist’s’ reception
and Kafka’s protagonist (in the short story of the same
name) were unmistakable: the mob’s suspicion, nay, outright
hostility towards the exceptional. Perhaps, people are loath
to be reminded of their own neglected human possibilities; but
over time the public came round, demonstrating a less complicated
appreciation. At the end of his six week spell, witnessed by
some 250,000 pilgrims, Blaine emerged from his glass box pronouncing
tearfully: “I have learned more in that box than I have
learned in years. I have learned how strong we are as human
beings.” Nevertheless despite the triumphant tone of his
parting speech, and “considering the peculiar nature of
his performance” (Kafka’s words) the uncanny similarities
with Kafka’s disquieting moral parable linger.
Whatever
else The Hunger Artist may be, it is an allegory of
spiritual dissatisfaction, opening with the lines: “During
these last decades the interest in professional fasting has
markedly diminished.” The strangely affecting, self-dramatizing,
contrary narrator proceeds to chart this decline from the morbid
curiosity of the marveling crowds and their grotesque merriment,
to their eventual revulsion, malice and crushing indifference
to the “suffering martyr” who perversely fasts on
and on, after anyone, including himself, knew what records he
had broken. Interestingly, the longest period of fasting fixed
by the hunger artist’s impresario was at 40 days, the
length of Christ’s fast. “Just try to explain to
anyone the art of fasting! Anyone who has no feeling for it
cannot be made to understand it,” exclaims the narrator
in exasperation, at one point in the story.
The
unhappy ending of this human experiment, mercifully unlike David
Blaine’s, is the burial of the crazed old artist. And
rather than leave his ‘perfectly good cage standing there
unused,’ he is replaced by his antithesis: a young panther,
his “body furnished almost to bursting point with all
it needed.” But, more than anything else, it is the haunting
dying words of the hunger artist that best communicate the incommunicable:
“ . . . I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had
found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed
myself like you or anyone else.”
With
this in mind, I believe fasting to be a form of practical mysticism,
or a belief in privileged moments. Perhaps this is an “artist’s
metaphysics” (Nietzsche’s words) but I do think
that fasting can stir whisperings of another world or glimpses
into unchartered regions of the soul. “Only something
supernatural can express the supernatural,” says Wittgenstein,
which does not make it any clearer to the uninitiated. Yet fasting
is this, too -- a pursuit of clarity. And, just as regular baths
are prescribed during longer fasts, so fasting is a hygiene
of the spirit.
To
put it differently, when poet Philip Larkin sighs: “Deprivation
is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth,” he voices
the bitter-sweetness of self-sufficiency. It is not deprivation
per se that he is enamored with. It is having fallen in love
with a pain, not for how it impoverishes but how it enriches:
fortitude, profundity, insight. Likewise, thinker Foucault does
not explicitly speak of redemption through sacrifice, but he
does hint at the transformational process in his own terms when
he writes of: “a sacrifice, an actual sacrifice of life
. . . a voluntary obliteration that does not have to be represented
in books because it takes place in the very existence of the
writer.”
Naturally
(and unnaturally) there are other ways to willfully enter this
altered state. Whether such experiences go by other names --
Heidegger’s ‘unthought,’ or Jasper’s
‘boundary experience’-- is immaterial. The point
of the exercise is the salvaging of truths not afforded by everyday
experience. For in the act of fasting, it is not merely food
one renounces, but thoughtlessness. This is also evidenced in
Eastern mysticism in the practice referred to as ‘immaculate
speech.’ To maintain immaculate speech, often times silence
is required, another renunciation. In the final equation, it
is a question of attention, sustained attention; an idealistic
attempt to align what is thought with what is said and done.
Whether one can approach and enter this state having diligently
sought it or having been mysteriously granted it, fasting offers
a gradual awakening or gentle shock out of soul-deadening routine.
To fast is to slow down, almost to stillness, and distill what
is necessary.
