"The Reader"

I went to see "The Reader" yesterday, expecting great things. I came away confused, disappointed and, yes, not a little angry. I was confused by the counter-intuitive historical time-line of the narrative; disappointed because I had been led by the film's wide recognition in the awards season--and by reviews--to expect something different, and better; and angry because... well, I'll get to that.

Let's start with the confusion. The little dates flashed at the bottom of the picture as time sequences changed were entirely inadequate to orient this particular viewer in the historical context. Maybe they worked for others. Not for me. The character at the center of the story, Hanna Schmitz--superbly played, I have to say, by Kate Winslett--is a woman who of her own free will, it seems, served as a guard in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. The story's narrator, Michael Berg, an attorney in current time played by Ralph Fiennes, looks back with infinite sadness and regret on his seduction as a teenager by this woman, and their subsequent summer-long passionate affair--an affair that centered around Hanna's almost compulsive delight in hearing the lad read aloud to her from the classics he was studying at school.

My confusion resulted from my initial--mistaken--understanding that the affair had taken place before the war. It took a while, and a good deal of mental calculation as the movie progressed, to adjust to the realization that it must have taken place after the war. The confusion was compounded, I think, by the lack of any effort at this early juncture to establish the visual, physical, or even psychological context of the after-effects of war. (I myself lived in Germany for two years staring in 1959, and believe me those scars were everywhere apparent.) It became clear later in the film that Hanna had to have been suffering, at the time of her steamy affair, from the trauma of her wartime experience; at the time we witnessed it, though, she could simply have been a rather straight-laced, closed-in Nordic type as I supposed, and of which there are many in this world.

Okay, mea culpa, I didn't read the caption. Or I missed it. And it all worked out eventually. Hanna was born in 1922. She would have been 17 or so at the start of the war, perhaps 20 plus when she went to work at Auschwitz. Young for the job, I'd say, but there you go. Michael was 15 when the narrative begins at the time of the affair, in the late fifties, when Hanna would already have reached her middle 30s. He was a law student at the time of her arrest and trial in the late 1960s. So, yes, it does in fact work out, but only after a lot of mental arithmetic that, for me at least, proved a serious distraction.

All of which is purely technical stuff, of course--the mechanics of narrative--and could be considered a quibble, more my fault than the movie's. It was compounded, though, for me, by a much bigger, and related flaw: the film's moral obtuseness. In the scene that is the critical turning point of the plot, at Hanna's trial, along with five other camp guards, for the murder of three hundred of their charges (in the context of the much larger crime of participating in the act of genocide), Michael arrives at the sudden realization that she can neither read nor write, and her conviction for more serious responsibility than her co-defendants hangs upon her refusal to offer a sample of her writing. Rather than reveal her illiteracy, Hanna opts for the life sentence that she knows awaits her. Her former teenage lover, Michael, now a law student witnessing the trial, refrains from sharing his exculpating knowledge either with Hanna or, as would have been the simple moral imperative, with her attorney or the court.

Does he do this in order to avoid publicly humiliating her for her illiteracy? Or to assure her the worst punishment for her crimes? Michael comes off as something of a moral and emotional wimp, himself incapable of accepting responsibility in his life. Whatever his reasons, though, the film drops from this moment into an inexcusable moral abyss, suggesting that the shame for the monumental crime of the Holocaust is trumped by the shame for the educational lapse of not being able to read or write. Hanna is convicted for her participation in the former, certainly, but her punishment is for the latter.

The moral ambiguity of the court scene is compounded as the film progresses by its increasing concentration on the theme of literacy--following Michael in his guilt as he records and mails audiotapes to Hannah to relieve the misery of her prison sentence, and Hannah as she uses the recordings to teach herself, finally, to read. And the more the film becomes about literacy, the more uncomfortable I become. It's a betrayal of the six million victims of the Holocaust, as I see it, to allow that historical atrocity to become the vehicle or pretext for anything other than itself. Are we to think that Hannah's complicity--and the complicity of the vast majority of the German people at that unfortunate time in history--can be deflected into a minor personal failing of this kind?

This context aside, "The Reader" is a touching love story. It would have reached my own heart more convincingly had it addressed the effects of shame and guilt on a passionate personal relationship more directly, without deflection, and with greater honesty. I'm sure there are those who disagree with me about this movie. I'd love to hear from them.

Alice Neel: The Movie

Alice Neel is one of those many artists who were sidelined, for too many years, by the great sweep of 20th century modernist abstraction and the "conceptualist" trend that followed in the last years of the century. It was a time when portrait painting was given short shrift, and Alice Neel was a portrait painter. She has, of course, since been rehabilitated in the eyes of the art cognoscenti--what little they know!--and is regarded with belated esteem for pictures that penetrate their subjects' heart and soul.

Now comes this documentary movie, Alice Neel, from her grandson Andrew, just recently made available on Netflix. It's alternately touching and infuriating--the latter, for me, at moments when it gets to be entirely too arty, reflecting on the process of the documentary itself more than on its subject. Get over that, and you'll enjoy this tribute to a feisty woman who cared little for anyone's opinion save her own.

It's clear from this story that Alice Neel lived to paint. Marriage, children, and the other contingencies of life seemed to happen along the way to the studio--a tiny apartment in Spanish Harlem that was cluttered with the results of her labors. Here her sitters sat. She painted them most often face-on, wide-eyed, unsmiling, stripped bare--whether clothed or naked. Neel shuns superficial physical beauty in favor of the deeper human qualities her studies reveal. Her people evince a peculiar, unpretentious nobility, a kind of stoic acceptance of what life has brought them by way of both body and social standing. If her painting seems rough, even at times unkind in its realism, it also reflects a profound compassion for her fellow human beings. Rooted in the expressionistic, leftist social realism of the pre-WWII period, when she started out, her art never wavers from its attention to the human predicament. Here's her picture of a young pregnant woman, a striking image that evokes all the joys, the anxieties, and the physical discomforts of that condition.



And here's a self-portrait that speaks eloquently of the aging process:



And the portrait of a fellow artist, Faith Ringgold:



The movie is the portrait of an artist, a mother, and a grandmother, and the picture it paints is a complex one. Neel emerges as an energetic, focused, uninhibitedly emotional woman, intellectually sharp, with a touch of lively cynicism in her view of human nature. Even in the year or so before her death, when the film was made, the juices flow. Asked about the appearance of multiple penises in one of her paintings, she responds exuberantly that it's not that she enjoys looking at them, it's that she wants to have them in her! She quite clearly loves the human body, loves nudity, loves the flesh. We see her, in a clip from a videotape made years earlier, delighting in the nudity of her grandchild--later the maker of THIS movie--as he delights in it himself, as children do, prancing around the studio while she paints him. You have to love this joyful part of her, thoroughly engaged in fleshiness of life and its rendering, through painting, into art.

The film does not flinch, though, from exploring the dark side of this woman whose art-making came first and foremost in her life and who seemed unable to form a stable and lasting relationship with the men who were attracted to her. The outcome of early broken marriages and separations, her family relationships are almost too byzantine to follow. Andrew's film offers acerbic sidebars with another grandchild, the daughter of a daughter Neel virtually abandoned as a young mother, allowing the child to return to the father's family in Cuba--and failing even to recognize, let alone acknowledge her at an art event later in life. Neel's two sons, Andrew's father and his half-brother, appear in the film as adults clearly suffering, each in his own way, from parental neglect and maternal narcissism. Neel was too busy in her devotion to her art to notice that her younger son was being subjected to physical abuse by his stepfather.

A complicated family life, then, and one that bequeathed these two sons with a mixture of bemused adulation for their mother and--in the latter case, particularly--bitterness and barely concealed anger. In the broader view, this is not just a film about AN artist, it's about the self-involvement that drives some artists--not all, by any means--in the conduct of their private lives, outside the studio. It can lead to behavior that is destructive to the point of cruelty. Those who take a more romantic view of the artist than I do will argue that this kind of singleness of purpose is the necessary path for a great artist. I recognize the trait, but do not myself subscribe to the notion of its necessity.

At any event, I'm glad to have seen this film, and glad to be reminded of the celebration of humanity that is the work of Alice Neel, the painter. In one of my own former lives, back in 1983, when I was Dean of the arts at a Southern California university, I was proud and pleased that our gallery pioneered a substantial exhibition of her work in the days work before the "art world" began to deem it acceptable again. We invited her out to our campus for a lecture, and were captivated by the astute observation and the delightful wit of a woman who was already in her eighties and as full of life, it seemed, as ever. She died, as it turned out, just one year later. After seeing the movie, I pulled out a copy of the catalogue from our art library shelves and found it dedicated "To Peter Clothier from Alice Neel '83." Quite a thrill!

Milk

I sat through Milk with the knowledge, of course, that this dedicated, charismatic leader would be killed before the movie ended, so there was some inner resistance to getting too attached to him. Still, the incredible performance by Sean Penn left me no choice: I was totally seduced by the man's infectious enthusiasm, his compassion and his joie de vivre, as much as by his dedication to the cause that came to consume his life. The film left no question about his historical contribution to the advancement of freedom in a country that had respected it, for many of its citizens, in name only. Alas, as the passage of Proposition 8 so recently reminded us, the truth of "Milk" is as alive today as it was at the time when its hero was triumphantly elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors: we Americans gladly pay lip service to ideals that, when required to practice of our humanity, we all too easily abandon.

The film, though. In part it's the story of a rocky, life-long love affair, interrupted by Milk's realization of his mission and his single-minded dedication to the cause of gay rights. In part it's the story of that movement itself, in its raucous pioneering days in San Francisco--a time when gay men and women said Enough and protested and marched their way to the first glimmerings of the victory that still, it seems, awaits them. In part it's the story of the conflict between two men, Milk and his fellow supervisor, Dan White, whose right-wing conservatism and neurotic homophobia set the two at odds and lead, eventually, to the infamous double murder of Milk and then-Mayor George Moscone.

All three stories converge in the character of Milk, and Sean Penn's powerful portrayal of the man's human strengths and weaknesses lends them compelling credibility. I realize that it's a bit of a cliche to say that a film is about "the triumph of the human spirit," but the well-worn cliche does capture something of the essence of "Milk." As a audience, we are captivated by the sheer force of this character and his beliefs. His death comes as no surprise, of course, at the end of the movie, but is no less affecting for the anticipation: there were audible sniffles in the theater all around me, and I was aware of the tears gathering in my own eyes. The solemly silent candle-light march of tens of thousands on City Hall that followed the announcement of his death was equally moving--and a vital demonstration that the spirit that was Harvey Milk lived on. And indeed lives on today. Would that he were no longer needed in our society.

I'm sitting a lot these days with that notion of service. Those who follow The Buddha Diaries will know how much it has been on my mind. Harvey Milk was by any standard a man of service, who made the most of the time he was given on this earth to create something of great and lasting value to his fellow human beings. I'm choosing to believe that our Barack Obama is a man of comparable dedication, and my hope for the coming year is that he will be able to inspire the same in the rest of us.

Frost/Nixon

I mistrusted Nixon from first sight. He just looked shifty. Something about the eyes, the bearing... I could never understand how the American electorate could have chosen him over McGovern. I could never understand how the man could have been trusted by enough voters to be re-elected for a second term. Come to think of it, I could also never understand how Reagan could have been elected, then re-elected. Not to mention the current, soon to be former occupant of the White House. I still can't het my head around the Reagan hagiography. It was the Reagan policies, far more than Nixon's, that brought us to our present plight.

All of which brings me to Frost/Nixon, the movie. It's one terrific piece of work, not least because it makes us believe in the power as well as the pathos of the only man ever to be compelled to resign from the American presidency. Frank Langella turns in a magnificent performance. At first sight, because of the physical differences, I had doubts that he could bring it off; I kept seeing the real Nixon--or my clear memory of his face--and making the comparison. But Langella moved me rapidly beyond that doubt and had me convinced by the intensity of suppressed emotion, the commanding rhetorical skill and, yes, the shiftiness he managed to convey. By the same token, Michael Sheen was a pitch-perfect David Frost, at once cocky and self-assured, dapper and glib, at times impish and narcissistic, yet proving eventually capable of serious concentration, matching wit and intellectual intensity with that of an old pro. I had seen Sheen previously in his excellent portrayal of British Prime Minister Tony Blair in The Queen, and was equally impressed. The supporting cast was also impeccable, especially Kevin Bacon as the steely, protective Nixon aide, Jack Brennan.

The success of the movie clearly, depended on the reconstruction of the famous interview, presented as a a battle in which the heavyweight Nixon, in the first two rounds, was able easily to toss the seeming lightweight Frost around the ring. His politician's skill in taking a question and turning it to his advantage left Frost gaping in amazement and grasping for something solid to hold on to. This Nixon managed to look, well presidential. Frost looked like the talk show host he was, out of his depth in challenging this titan. The turning point--brilliantly captured in the film and presumably based on the actual fact--was a late-night telephone call to Frost, in his Beverly Hills hotel suite, from a different Nixon, one softened up by a few too many shots of bourbon and ready to reveal his vulnerability--a sense of social insecurity, victimhood and self-pity. If we're to believe the story the director, Ron Howard, tells, Nixon later had no recollection of this call, but it gave Frost the edge for the third and last round of the interview.

The subject, here, was Watergate, and Frost came armed with information from the Oval Office tapes that left Nixon bereft of prevarications and confronted him with the unpalatable truth that had destroyed his presidency. Langella and Sheen play out this act with devastating drama, switching roles from victor to vanquished and vice versa. To watch this Nixon collapse into defeat and to be brought to admit to the historic consequences of his actions and his betrayal of the trust of the American people is to begin to understand the tragic complexity of the man and even to sympathize with his downfall. In a poingant final scene, we end up aching for the man we always thought to have despised.

It's a compelling story, superbly told. Despite the fact that we know the outcome in advance--if only for having seen so many teasers in the television ads--there's not a moment in the movie where the attention wanders for lack of suspense or visual interest, and the dialogue never loses its confrontational edge. And then, too, the history lesson is as valuable and relevant today as it was in its own time: the lies and deceptions to which we have been subjected in the interest of political advantage in the past few years have proved no less damaging to our national integrity that were Nixon's. "Frost/Nixon" comes as a reminder--as though we needed it--of the urgent need for a radical change in the way we do our business as a country. The kind of deception, obsessive secrecy and obfuscation that characterized the Nixon presidency have brought us once again to the brink of disaster. It's time for some transparency, honesty, and fearless truth-telling. I'm hoping that our soon-to-be President Obama will be up to the task of putting us back on track in the coming year.

Simplicity

We watched a truly wonderful movie last night called Simplicity. Ellie brought it home on loan from her Wednesday morning art teacher and, since it's a movie about artists made several years ago, we were surprised that we had never heard about it before. If you're interested in the creative process and what it means to be an artist, this one's for you.

(Please note that the images below are pirated from the internet without the artist's specific permission. I trust that I'll be forgiven for reproducing them on this small-circulation site.)

The key to it all is suggested in the title: simplicity. The artists are extraordinarily diverse, ranging from the late minimalist painter...



... Agnes Martin--aged 86 at the time of the movie--to the wild, cartoon-based maximalist, Robert Williams; from the bare-bones tinkerer, Richard Tuttle...

... to the man widely known as the mentor of California conceptualism, John Baldessari (look for "image results"; the East Coast painter, Joan Snyder (ditto); and the much younger, relatively new arrival on the "art scene," Amy Adler (ditto). If this list of contemporary artists sounds unfamiliar and possibly elitist, please don't let it put you off watching this introduction to each of them and their work.

I have worked closely with artists and have written about their work for many years, and what struck me most as I watched "Simplicity" was the clarity these fine creative people have about themselves and their lives. While critics bloviate and museum-goers sometimes scratch their heads at the spectacle of much contemporary art ("You call THAT art???"), what's remarkably similar about these very different people is their uncomplicated dedication to what it is that they do. In the words of the dreadful current cliche, they "just do it."

They do it because they know, as Agnes Martin is seen saying at a particularly poignant moment, that this is what they are given to do with their lives. It's no more complicated than that. Even Baldessari, whom many would suspect to be "difficult" to understand as an artist and complex in his thinking about art, declares what is obvious about those famous colored dots that cover the faces in photo-based collages like this one...


They hide the face because the face is not what's important to him. He wants the viewer's attention to go elsewhere. It's no more difficult than that.

Richard Tuttle achieved notoriety with works of astounding and evidently disconcerting simplicity: a short length of rope, a few inches only, attached with a nail to the wall; a wire bent in the rough shape of a rectangle... Others, critics, fuss about challenges to the whole idea of what art is about, or castigate him for making a mockery of it. To the artist, it's all about making things, putting things together, pretty much to see what they look like. It's as simple--and as tough--as living out on the edge of the desert in New Mexico, as he does; it's as vast as the unending landscape and as intimate as the crack in the floor.

These are all artists who have met with considerable "success" in the art world, but seem utterly unfazed by their success. What's clearly--and exclusively--important to each of them is to have the kind of space that is conducive to the doing of what they do, and the time in which to do it. It's a very practical matter, and you leave with the sense that they lead the most practical sort of lives. They seemed to be notably lacking in pretension, or even particularly ambition. They just do what they do because that's what has been given them to do.

There's a lot more that goes on in the artist's mind, of course, than they may be willing to share in ways other than what they make. I have always felt that the "artist's statement" about the work--which seems to be a requisite today for anyone seeking gallery representation, and is taught as a necessary skill in graduate schools--is a really bad idea. All it succeeds in doing is reducing a complex of thought, feeling and action in the world to an oversimplification of the experience that the finished art work offers. All I want from artists is to show me what they've done and let me have the adventure of discovering it for myself--an experience that, like much human experience, is both irreducibly simple and incredibly complex all at once.

War Victims

How many living beings died in the wars of the 20th century? How many had their lives destroyed, both military and civilian? How many lost sons and daughters, mothers and fathers? How many lost limbs and bodily functioning? How many lost minds? Incalculable, I guess. And how many more have suffered similarly, already, in the twenty-first century?

These thoughts were prompted the other night by watching the recording we had made of The Rape of Europa, the documentary film that tells the story of the looting of Europe's private and museum art collections by the Nazis during World War II. This part of the story would have been horrifying enough by itself, but the film goes further: it also tells the story of the vast numbers of art works and irreplaceable architectural landmarks that fell victim to Allied bombs and artillery, and of their wanton, systematic destruction by retreating German forces. It includes amazing footage of the hordes amassed by Nazi leaders--Field Marshall Goering for his own aggrandizement, Hitler in order to fulfill his overweening ambition for a "Reichsmuseum" in Linz, Austria, the modest town of his birth.

That some significant part of the European patrimony survived is thanks to the efforts of many who risked their lives to pack, remove and hide the treasures from the Nazi invaders, and to those who prevailed upon the Allied armies to respect, where possible, the artistic heritage of the countries they liberated--no easy task, as the film makes clear, when infantrymen in the field, under attack from fortresses like the monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy, were forced to make agonizing choices between that heritage and their own lives.

It's an inspiring and, in may ways, a horrifying film, in which we learn much about the boundless greed and vengeful fury that warfare inspires in the souls of men. To steal or destroy a country's art is to disempower it by draining its cultural lifeblood: the toppling of that Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad is but one recent example of the powerful symbolism involved. So, too, sadly, was the destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas by the Taliban not many years ago in Afghanistan.

And yet... and yet... From the Buddhist point of view, of course, all these things are just that: things, no matter how beautiful or filled with symbolic or spiritual value. Transience, in this view, is a relative term: even the mountain crumbles in the course of the millennia. Life, on the other hand, transient though it might be, is the ultimate value. Given the choice between art and life, I assume that for the good Buddhist there is no contest. But the great achievement of "The Rape of Europa" is in reminding us just how morally complex and emotionally agonizing those choices can be.

W., the Movie

(Please first click on this link to go to my nightmare scenario for the Electoral College, as posted on the Huffington Post. I'd appreciate your visit and your comment. Thanks!)

Yesterday, we went to see W.--the new film by Oliver Stone about the current tenant in our White House. Having seen Stone's earlier movies, I was expecting frankly something more tendentious in its political leaning. What I got was more of a character study, the portrait of a man constantly trying to make up for his wasted younger years with a fear of failure so intense that the ends up courting it. Dominated by a father whose standards he can never satisfy, hiding his inner insecurities with macho shows of bravado, Stone's W comes off as more pathetic and ineffectual than ill-intentioned, manipulated by others who use his malleability as the vehicle for their own nefarious needs, notably Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.

Stone's movie effectively focuses on the story of the Iraq war--its boastful assumptions, its incompetent pursuit, its eventual descent into impenetrable chaos--as a kind of necessary projection of the Bush character. Aside from oblique references, and much to its credit, I think, it avoids the temptation to exploit the 9/11 disaster. I thought it succeeded very well in what it attempted, but felt uncomfortable about making a "story" out of the Bush debacle. It reduced the scope of the effects of his presidency to a character flaw--mythical in dimension, yes, but somehow intimate and personal in comparison to the vast damage his tenure in office has wrought in the real world. I wanted something bigger in its reach, in the light of this historical moment, perhaps more damning than this very humanly compassionate portrayal.

Sounds un-Buddhist, no? But for me, in this instance, it's not about the man; it's about the planet and the survival of all living species, including our own, which have been needlessly endangered by this one man's blind arrogance and presumption of divine approval. The damage is far more extensive and potentially catastrophic than the Iraq war, and I think for this reason that "W" gets off much too lightly in Stone's movie. He's human-scale. The fallout of his reign is global.

Children of Heaven

(This one's for Thailandchani, who was kind enough to request another film recommendation.)

Is there something, I often wonder, that we have sacrificed along the way to the material comforts we enjoy in our society? There's a precious innocence about Children of Heaven, a 1997 Iranian movie about Ali, seen here,

and his sister, Khore,
living in the poorest quarter of what I take to be Teheran--or some other great Iranian city. Charged with taking his sister's shoes to be fixed, Ali loses them on the way home, and they agree to hide the loss from their impoverished parents, for fear of punishment. For each of them to get to school, they are reduced to sharing a single pair of sneakers--a trick that involves a lot of running through the narrow back streets to facilitate a timely exchange. At the end, a big interschool running competition holds out the offer of a new pair of sneakers as third prize, and Ali enters, with the desperate hope of taking third place... (I'm not revealing the outcome!)

It's a thoroughly enchanting movie, not least because it's shot with such an eye for the beauty of detail--from the gutters running through the streets, to the faces of the children, to the street vendors' stores and the rugs at the local mosque. A brilliant sense of color pervades the every frame, along with a rhythm in the movement of the characters and the camera's eye. Beyond that, it's a story of utter simplicity, told at a leisurely pace and with an understanding that the tiniest of things (like William Carlos Williams's "red wheelbarrow," perhaps) can have the greatest of significance: the treasure of a gleaming, fake gold ballpoint pen, the opening of a bread oven, the bell-push at the gate of an impossibly wealthy mansion... Every image in this poetic movie seems to carry its own emotional weight, every relationship is sweet and subtle in its complexity, and the sense of community is palpable.

You have to wonder, don't you, how this kind of a movie emerges from this midpoint on our Bush's "axis of evil," our supposed archenemy in the Middle East, while our own "land of the free" produces its endless stream of violence and gore. I wrote a moment ago about the innocence of the film: it is innocent of guile, of irony, of malice. It's suffused with love--even though that love might be forbidding, at times stern. The children are allowed their childhood; even in these poor streets, they have no more to fear than a grown-up's anger. Protected by the community in which they live, they are safe to roam at will. Their deprivation of virtually all material goods--and sometimes of necessities, like shoes--does not deprive them of their humanity. Rather, it enriches them as human beings.

Okay, there's some idealization going on here. Life in the poor district of any city must surely be less benign than what we witness in "Children of Heaven." And yet... we hear, we read about those nine-year old American children in suburban Waycross, Georgia, plotting to harm, even possibly kill their teacher and it's hard not to conclude that there is some deep flaw in the way we raise our children in this largely rather affluent society, that we have lost some of the innocence that goes with the absence of material expectations. As for the protection of community... we have been taught to live in fear--of each other, of outsiders, of the dangers of the street. I watched this movie with both joy and sadness for own own current plight, let alone the plight of its young protagonists.

The Counterfeiters

I have another movie to recommend--this one in current theatrical release: The Counterfeiters. Set in the German concentration camps during World War II, the based-on-fact story concerns the Nazis' attempt to scuttle the Allies' economic standing by flooding the global economy with counterfeit pounds sterling and American dollars. To that end, they assembled a team of the most skillful Jewish artisans and put them to work in a privileged quarter of the Sachsenhausen camp, under the leadership of one Salomon Sorowitsch (Sally), portrayed here with intense conviction by Karl Markovics.

Under the constant threat of death and at the dubious mercy of their Nazi overseers, they managed to produce several denominations of English banknotes that were declared genuine even by experts at the Bank of England. Put back to work on the production of the American dollar, the team's efforts were delayed by a single recalcitrant fellow-prisoner whose conscience balked at the idea that their work risked helping the Germans win the war. As the war's end approached, the threat became more imminent: produce, or die. One of the many great, irresolvable moral questions at the heart of the movie was whether to betray one of their own--whose choice was inarguably the right one, from the idealistic point of view--and save themselves; or whether to tacitly go along with his sabotage at the certain cost of their own lives.

What gives the movie its edge, I think, is the constant imminence of death. The barbarous brutality of the German guards and their bland, unquestioning assumption that their charges are subhuman, scheming Jews unworthy of anything but contempt reinforces this sense of imminence: as we see at several dreadful moments in the course of the film, it means nothing to their keepers to exterminate those they consider to be vermin. Knowing this, the Jews are forced into cowering servility, simply to stay alive. As viewers, we cringe for them and are sickened by the treatment they receive.

And yet, compared with others just beyond the fence that separates them from the main camp, they realize that they live in relative luxury. They are fed, clothed, have a thin mattress and a blanket on their beds, have running water, showers... All of which become a source of greater guilt that comfort. In a wrenching scene at the end of the film, when the guards have fled in the face of the oncoming Russian army, they are confronted with enraged survivors from beyond the fence, and survive the fury of those less fortunate by displaying the tattooed numbers on their arms.

Central to the movie is the transformation of the main character, Sally. We see him first after the war, in Monte Carlo, with a suitcase full of the results of his wartime productivity, bent on the cynical exploitation of the tragedy he has been forced to endure. An expert gambler as well as a world-class forger, he starts to rake in money at the gaming tables. A hotel room tryst with a courtesan who draws attention to his tattoo, however, shocks him into a recognition of his rage-driven cynicism, and the final scenes show him furiously frittering away the fortune he has (literally) created, and retreating to the solitude of the shore-line to contemplate his life. The final shows him in a tango on the pebbled beach with the woman who has showed him the way, unwittingly, to his redemption.

A powerful and gripping movie, then--and one which fully earns its Oscar as last year's Best Foreign Film.

Love, Love, Love: In Homage to The Beatles

We finally got around to watching "Across the Universe" last night--the Julie Taymor movie based on songs by The Beatles. Since we don't go "out" to the movies very much, we tend to rely on their availability on Netflix, which naturally involves some delay. This, particularly, is not one that's best seen on a television screen--though ours is of adequate, if not excessive size. The play of image, color and movement cries out for the big screen but, well, we made do with what we have...

... and loved it. I generally get nervous when artists in one medium start messing around with art that's generated in another, and part of the reason for the delay mentioned above was frankly my own hesitation about what I feared might be the Hollywoodification of a phenomenon that meant much to me in the Sixties. As I'm sure for many others, The Beatles were in good part responsible for the change in my life from shrink-wrapped British public schoolboy and somewhat snobby intellectual into, well, I suppose kind of a hippie. Or as close as a shrink-wrapped British public schoolboy could get. I flirted with marijuana and LSD. I expanded my mind. So to speak.

It was fun. (It was also quite painful, as I recall!) From my first encounter with The Beatles as a grammar school teacher, shocked by the rebellious length of their hair and the freedom of their ways, to the time of their last concert on that rooftop on Abbey Road, I was a fan--and their progress reflected in many strange ways the course of my personal life.

So I brought a big stake to this movie, and was pleasantly surprised to find myself, after the first few minutes of suspicious reserve, thoroughly engaged. I loved the way the story kept shifting around, refusing conventional linear narrative and yet returning often enough to its theme to be emotionally coherent. I loved the easy movement from real time to dream time, from real life to dance, from speech to song. I loved the bold use of image, color and rhythm which made of the screen a painting in action--as, in one scene, the splash and fury of action painting itself. Even the psychedelic scenes--hard to accomplish without degenerating into cliche--worked well for me.

What also worked well was the casual play with the history of the sixties--from race riots to Vietnam protests, from pop art to the music scene. The movie felt free to evoke characters in new, an-historical contexts--Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix--and mingle them in emotionally and aesthetically satisfying ways. It recaptured the spirit of the times, the joyful excesses along with the real agonies, the two sides of that always elusive coin of the "love" that John Lennon preached.

Clearly based on the Liverpuddlian Lennon himself, the main character manages to be charming and, at times, indignantly childish and provocative. The support characters engage us with their struggle for freedom, their spirit of fun, their sheer energy and verve. The love story blends fantasy with reality in finely-tuned balance, and its outcome satisfies the soul and brings a tear to the eye. Love, appropriately, triumphs over discord and strife. And all in all, the movie provides a delightful and thoroughly entertaining experience.

A Dream...

... from last night: I fly over to England to visit my parents (both now, in reality, long gone.) I take an old-fashioned steam engine train from London north toward Bedford--a slow train with frequent stops at unfamiliar stations--aware that I'll be arriving late in Bedford and that I'll need to get from there to Sharnbrook, the village where they live. My father, I know, is too old--or perhaps too ill--to ask him to pick me up, so this will be a problem. I get off the train early, thinking obscurely that it will be easier to get to Bedford this way, and notice long lines of people trying to get on board. I start to walk, wondering how I'll get a ride, asking at a major intersection which road leads north, to Bedford. Pointed in the right direction, I find myself riding a child's bike--all chrome with white and mauve trim--and leave it in an open lot where children are playing while I stop off at a wine shop to pick up something to bring home. I buy a very expensive bottle which turns out, after long delays, to be something called "Barbeque Bay Rum"--a small bottle of yellowish liquid that I would normally never buy, still less drink--and return to find the bike has been stolen by one of the children. I get it back, leave it again--and it's stolen again. By this time, I'm getting angry. I chase the children and catch a little girl with the bike. When I scold her, she tells me I'm drunk, and I'm glad to recall that the seal is still unbroken on the bottle of Barbeque Bay Rum that's in my pocket, as proof that she is wrong. Still, I'm thinking about how comforting it would be to take a little nip. Holding her up in the air by her two wrists--I realize I'm in danger of being physically abusive--I warn her not to do such a thing again and ask for her parents' telephone number so that I can let them know if she does. End of dream. Sorry, I can't remember any more. What does it all mean? Hmmm. Beats me.

A movie recommendation: " Les Choristes." Belgian. About a boys' reform school, straight out of Dickens, with a draconian headmaster. Salvation of a kind arrives in the form of a sweet new teacher and his love of music. Sounds weird. Try it. You'll love it, as we did.

In haste....

"The Story of the Weeping Camel"

Enough of politics for the moment. Let's talk movies. Ellie and I Netflixed "The Story of the Weeping Camel" last week and enjoyed it immensely. What a treat! It's not about camels. Well, on partly. Mostly it's about this extraordinary Mongolian family of sheep- and goat-herders in the Gobi desert, who live in circumstances that we Americans, with our material well-being and our creature comforts, can scarcely imagine. Here's their little nest of yurts...


(is that the right term for these circular dwellings put together out of skins and wooden supports and camel-hair ropes?) in an environment as remote inhospitable as any I could dream of. And yet the interior is rich with carpets, tapestries, and all kinds of beautifully


made utilitarian artifacts and religious objects. Here, as you see, the family gather over tea, four generations of them so far as I could tell, from ancient, hoary great-grandparents to sweet-faced children. I imagine--what else can I do?--that they are not poor by the standards of their own society. They have plenty of livestock and can afford, so it seems at the end, a black and white television set with a satellite dish outside their home. Is this a suggestion, I wonder, at the end of the film, of the dangers inherent in the encroachment of technology on what must be one of the last enclaves of its kind on earth? Their distant neighbors in "town", a long camel's ride from their encampment, have motorcycles, cars, trucks, computer games...

Well, now, the story concerns the difficult birth of a white calf to one of their camels, who soon rejects his every advance to her, whether for food or affection. She turns him away, sulkily, and refuses the family's patient and loving efforts to bring mother and calf together. A heartless mom, indeed. In desperation, the family finally settle on a remedy and send their two young sons off on camel-back to the big city in search of a skilled musician! Just the thing to cure an an emotionally deficient camel! When he arrives on the scene, he readily grasps the situation and woos the mother camel with his two-stringed instrument,


until she finally weakens and allows her calf to suckle. Her tears at the eventual reunion, we suppose, are of repentance for her earlier intransigeance. A touching scene, for those of us who have soft hearts for other species and tend to humanize them. Here they are, reunited:


The wonderful part about this movie, though, is not the sentimental "story" at the heart of it, but rather the humanity of the people around its edges. They remind us that we are pleased to call our "civilization" has cost us dearly in terms of our relationship with the earth that nurtures us, with our fellow beings--both animal and human--and with that great, mysterious spirit that informs it all. Where we are scattered, individualistic, ego-centric, the people we meet in this film share a powerful bond of common interest: call it survival, call it love. They share everything. And the hardship of their lives serves to give them a strength and wisdom and clarity of purpose that is hard to find in our society, while the paucity of material goods provides little room for selfishness or greed. It's a film that has much to offer in understanding the best about our human species, along with a great deal of sadness that the last of this wisdom is so rapidly giving way to "progress."

The Holocaust--Revisited

Readers who have followed these pages for a while will know that the Holocaust is never very far from my mind. I'm not sure of the reason: I'm not Jewish, though my wife Ellie is. But I am of European origin, and of an age to have personal experiences of World War II. I was much aware, as a child, of the conflict whose effects were so devastating just to the south of us, in London, and which raged in the skies above us and across the Channel. But I had no idea, of course, of what was happening in the concentration camps, and I think that my family knew about it only after the liberation of those camps beginning in 1944.

With the history, the Holocaust has remained like a great shadow in my consciousness, always present, and never far from the surface. I believe this to be true of most Europeans of my generation. The unimaginable barbarity of those who perpetrated this ultimate act of inhumanity and the unimaginable suffering of those who died and those who managed to live through it--these are not easily repressed or forgotten by anyone who lived in a world that allowed them to occur. When American leaders rattle sabers, preach righteous, nationalistic patriotism, and argue in public about how much torture is permissible, such people shudder with dread lest those memories be forgotten.

Two reminders came my way last week. A while ago, we had placed in our Netflix queue the movie "Steal a Pencil For Me," without knowing much about it, and it arrived in the mail and sat for a few days before we got around to watching it. It's the very touching love story of two elderly Dutch Jews, looking back at the time they spent in a way-station concentration camp in Holland (not a death camp, but no Disneyland, either,) where they managed to fall in love in a few stolen moments before being transported off by the Germans to worse camps to the east. Both survived, by miracle, got back together after the war, and lived--as they say--happily aver after.

Remarkable about the documentary was the spirit of this now aging pair, the joy and gratitude they share with family and friends, the depth of humanity achieved in part, surely, through the intensity of their deprivation and suffering. Their capacity to love seemed multiplied exponentially by the tenuousness of their survival as young people, and the witness they bore to the suffering of others.

Shortly after seeing this film, I found myself with a copy of Primo Levi's "Survival in Auschwitz" in my hands. It must have been around the house for a while, unread, and I'm honestly not sure how it surfaced from among the stacks and shelves, but there it was, and I opened it up--and could not put it down.

Primo Levi, you'll remember, survived the last year of Auschwitz and lived, barely, to be liberated by the advancing Russians--only to die, as suspected suicide, forty years later in his native city of Turin. "Survival" is the story of that year--a powerful description of life in the camp, of forced labor under the worst of circumstances, the lack of food and adequate shoes and clothing, the intense cold, the mud and filth, the shared bunks where sleep was constantly interrupted, the constant beatings and the fear of "selection." Survival involved the surrender of all normal moral codes, of friendship and respect for the property of others, of love and compassion for those who compete, tooth and nail, for the necessities of life. It also involved innate smarts, ruthlessness when necessary, a willing suspension of emotional response, a constant alertness--along with a kind of meditative distance from the surrounding reality.

Levi is not only a keen observer--that, too, is a survival tool--but also a moral and social philosopher. Consider this: in ordinary life, he writes (life, that is, outside the camps,)

a man is not normally alone, and in his rise and fall is tied to the destinies of his neighbors; so that it is exceptional for anyone to acquire unlimited power, or to fall by a succession of defeats into utter ruin. Moreover, everyone is normally in possession of such spiritual, physical and even financial resources that the probabilities of a shipwreck, of total inadequacy in the face of life, are relatively small. And one must take into account a definite cushioning effect exercised both by the law, and by the moral sense which constitutes a self-imposed law; for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.

These are thoughts as applicable today as when they were written, or in the time they were written about. We look around us and see evidence of this balance of social and moral contingency being lost. We risk descending into a place where the powerful are ceded too much power, and where the weak are allowed too easily to crash down into that "total inadequacy in the face of life" that Levi describes as existing in the camps. All the more reason, then, to be vigilant. All the more reason, in this political year, to listen carefully to those who seek to lead us.

Two Films

It was a strange pairing, I have to say. We had DVDs of two movies, and watched them one after the other on Saturday evening: "No Country For Old Men," and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly."

"No Country" came first. I had been puzzling over the title for a while, knowing the quotation so well but not being able to recall where it had come from. A friend reminded us yesterday, reading the W.B.Yeats poem at our meditation, Sailing to Byzantium. "That is no country for old men," it starts. The key lines, so far as the film is concerned, are these: "An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/Soul clap its hands and sing..." And these: " Consume my heart away; sick with desire/And fastened to a dying animal/It knows not what it is..." I found the movie powerful, but bleak. A terrific performance by Tommy Lee Jones as a tired old sheriff who has seen more than his share of greed and violence, anger and despair. Far from the old Western sheriff, the Gary Cooper who sees evil and is willing to risk even his own life to remedy it, this character essentially surrenders to his impotence. As one of our sitting group members pointed out, he provides the moral core of the movie, recognizes good and bad, and ends up clinging sadly to what's left--his dreams. But along the way he makes countless promises he fails to keep, to protect the innocent and punish the evil-doers and the moral of the movie seems to be that evil triumphs--even if its victory is a pyrrhic one. As I saw it, it was a despairing picture of the human condition: suffering without hope of either release or redemption.

What a contrast, between "No Country" and "The Diving Bell," whose hero is literally trapped in a condition that seems to invite nothing but despair, but which brings about instead an extradorinary liberation. Here the hero, Jean-Dominique Bauby, until now at the center of the good life as editor of Elle magazine, is felled suddenly at the age of 43 by a devastating stroke, losing everything but the movement of a single eye--with which he manages to write a deeply moving account of his condition. The story leads from the moment of his awakening from a coma right up to his death, shortly after the publication of the book.

I have written previously about this beautiful, short work, the at first despairing words from within the "diving bell" and the discovery of the "butterfly"--the freedom of the human mind and the compensatory joys of the imagination. Julian Schnabel's film is an extraordinary visual interpretation of Bauby's poetic words. A painter--with two previous powerful feature films to his credit--Schnabel manages to convey both the darkness and the beauty of Bauby's experience in images, shifts of focus and camera movements that seem at times to take us inside the narrator's head and allow us to experience his frustrations, his anger, his sense of impotence, and his moments of triumph. He films all this like a painter, with passages of pure abstraction and kinetic color, along with grand gestural sweeps that remind us of his work on canvas.

Two powerful films, then. I found both of them compelling, richly visual viewing. Through my Buddhist window, though, "The Diving Bell" wins, hands down, as a life-affirming vision of the power of the human mind.

Here’s Pieter Brueghel…

… brought to life in modern, feminist garb in Antonia’s Line, the 1996 Dutch movie that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. We rented it a couple of nights ago and enjoyed immensely. Its setting is a small Dutch village in the period shortly following World War II and its hero the matriarch called Antonia, whose love embraces the entire village in its gentle reach.

Where does Brueghel come in? Well, first in the look of the film, its overall brownish tonalities with flashes, here and there, of brilliant color, and in its plain, coarse costumes in black and white and brown and grey; in the village itself, with its farms and barns, its cottages and its church, its dirt pathways and wooden fences, the winter mud and ice and snow, and the springtime greening of the fields and hedgerows.

And then in the cast of characters, a glorious spectrum of human woes and wonders, eccentricities and foibles: Antonia herself, big as life, stout of girth, filled with love and tenderness and broad humor—though rough and tough and pitiless when needed; her artist daughter who decides on a practical plan for pregnancy before settling for lobe-for-life with a Lsebian lover; her granddaughter, brilliant and aloof, who gifts her, via a violent rape, with the sweetest great-granddaughter a matriarch could wish for. This is the matrilineal line referred to in the title.

And then the motley, Brueghel-esque band of villagers: the Catholic spinster who bays at the full moon, and her Protestant would-be lover who live one above the other and look out over the same village square but who meet only in death; the village priest, a gawky sensualist, too full of life and libido for his robes of office; the lovable half-wit (sorry, correctness thrown to the winds in this report—as well as in the movie!) and his half-wit girlfriend; the village bully, the rapist who takes refuge in self-imposed exile and returns in military uniform to wreak further havoc—and meet a timely, satisfying end; the manic depressive village sage who quotes from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and provides sanctuary and education for the precocious child…

Those who have ever heard the Dylan Thomas radio play, Under Milk Wood, will find themselves in familiar territory here. The “story” is the village itself, the lives and loves and deaths of its inhabitants, the teeming vitality of human survival amidst hardship and adversity. Judgments are few, and love is bountiful. Suffering is everywhere, but so is joy and celebration. “Antonia’s Line” invites us frequently to join in the communal banquet at the long wooden table in Antonia’s yard. The film itself is a feast, a roll in the mud, a roll in the hay, a roll in the whole tragi-comic mystery and physicality of human existence.

The Butterfly

(cross-posted with Accidental Dharma)

Thanks to my wife, Ellie, who put this book into my hands--with the words "Accidental Dharma." It's very short, for reasons that will become obvious. I read it in a couple of hours... and she's right, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the archetype of the "gift wrapped in shit." Jean-Dominique Bauby, its author, was at the prime of his creative and, yes, rather glamorous life as the editor of the French magazine Ellewhen he was struck, at the age of 43, by a massive stroke. (Ram Dass, remember, fondly calls it being "stroked.") Bauby was left totally debilitated, but for the ability to blink his left eye. The "diving bell" is the metaphor for the nightmare prison in which he finds himself isolated, and deprived of even the least of those things that had brought joy into his life: his family, his work, the physical activity of the body, food and wine...

The gift was the "butterfly," the life of the mind which becomes his last refuge ad solace. With it, he studies the inside of his diving bell with feelings ranging from despair, to inner rage, to bemused irony and gentle, self-directed humor. When self-pity rears its head, he nudges it away with wit or memory, reliving incidents of his past life with gratitude and pleasure. Or rides on the wings of his butterfly into the world of the imagination, inventing vistas of which he is physically incapable. All in all, Bauby takes us with him on an agonized--but also tender and delightful--voyage into the furthest reaches of the human mind.

How does he manage this, with his near-total disability? He blinks an eye. Working through the alphabet with the aid of an able and infinitely patient assistant, he stops her with that one good eye at the letter that he needs, and thus dictates the words, the sentences, the paragraphs that make up this short but powerfully eloquent little book. Reading it, we come to understand that human life stripped of everything but the barest of essentials can still be a life worth living, thanks to that invisible, intangible and infinitely mysterious of qualities, the mind and its ability to experience love.

Julian Schnabel has created a film version of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly which has already been honored with multiple awards and nominations. Schnabel, known first for his work as a painter, is also the creator of two earlier outstanding biographical films, Basquiat, about the ill-fated young African American graffiti artist, and Before Night Falls, about the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, both men who faced great adversity in their lives and whose creative minds proved at once their burden and their triumph--either one, if you haven't seen them, a great rental.

Signing off here, for Christmas, with all good wishes to those generous to read my ramblings. May you and yours be blessed with peace and happiness in your lives.

Skinheads

Salomon Huerta, Untitled

Interesting, isn't it, that the shaved head should have come to be in such vogue as a statement about personal freedom and power? Back in the sixties, it was... hair. Remember? An abundance of it. A strange reversal, specific to our times, perhaps, because hair has been associated with power throughout the ages. Just think of Samson and Delilah. I'm waiting for the Broadway musical, "Bald." Interesting, too, that the shaved head should find practitioners at both ends of the social spectrum, the saints and the reprobates, the monks and the skinheads. Which begs the question as to whether its popularity is any way associated with the popularization of Buddhism. Clearly, in both cases, cutting off one's hair is an act of renunciation of material and social values, as well as a powerful visual statement about identity. For a monk, I suppose, it's a positive act of liberation; for skinheads, we tend to read the same statement as angry and aggressive.

We have talked before, in The Buddha Diaries, about the phenomenon of tattoos in this same context. The two come together in a gripping movie that we watched last night, "This Is England." It's about the bonding of young males, about bullying and fierce tenderness, about the grief and deprivation and despair that contribute to acts of violence and retribution. It's about the fears and fury of young men when their masculinity is threatened, about rivalry and racism. While it's set in contemporary England, it could just have well been set in the United States.

Shades of "A Clockwork Orange"--that terrible, compelling story about the adolescent male ego gone amok. But here the alienation is of a different, less glaringly surreal, more socially realistic kind.


Shaun is a twelve year old whose father has just been killed in Margaret Thatcher's senseless invasion of the Falkland Islands. He is adopted as a kind of gusty little mascot, first by a relatively harmless gang of hooligans, then by a seriously sociopathic hoodlum recently released from jail and bent on taking his revenge on society with a gang of demented skinheads. Drummed into a racist frenzy by an England-first ideologue, they wreak havoc with their anti-Pakistani agenda, and little Shaun learns to his cost about the consequences of rage and hatred.

For those who choose to avoid movies that show violence, it should be noted that there is one scene in this film where rage explodes into explicit, momentarily uncontrolled brutality. Generally, though, we are shown the damage wrought by rage and hatred on the human psyche, less so on the human body. Violence is below the surface, omnipresent, threatening, but expressed more in language and attitude than in blood and gore. I kept thinking about this country, about Minutemen, about the shameless exploitation of the immigration issue by Republican demagogues in the presidential campaign, about not so deeply buried racial fears and hatreds, about not so deeply buried rage... "This Is England" is as much about America as it is about the country of my birth, as much about the growing global problems of population growth, wealth and resource distribution, climate change, and consequent migration patterns as it is about Merrie Olde... A disturbing, thought-provoking piece of work, and easily accessible thanks to Netflix.

"Fierce Grace"

It's wonderful how things come together with mysterious and impeccable timing, just exactly when they're needed. We received in the mail the CD version of "Ram Dass: Fierce Grace," which had arrived fortuitously at the head of our Netflix "queue" at the end of the very week in which I had written the "Dear Ram Dass" letter that follows. The film retraces the path that took Ram Dass from childhood privilege to an Ivy League professorship; from Tim Leary/LSD-inspired explorations into the workings of the human mind to the feet of the guru, Maharaj-ji, and a life devoted to teaching and the cultivation of love in a Western world where the worship of reason seemed to have left it far behind. It also describes the devastating stroke, that "fierce grace" he understood as a "stroking" from his guru, which arrived to shake up all his preconceptions about how he himself would reach old age and die. It was the ultimate "gift wrapped in shit" about which I have been thinking and writing all week, as I pursued plans for the "Accidental Dharma" site that I've been planning for.

There are many moving moments in"Fierce Grace," but the most powerful of all is surely the reading of a letter that distills all the wisdom, love and understanding that Ram Dass has come to represent for so many throughout the world. The Rachel letter, as it has come to be known, was written to the parents of a girl who died in a senseless accident caused by a drunk driver. Listening to it read aloud by the girl's mother, Ellie and I were brought to floods of tears by the parent's suffering and by the profundity of compassion from which Ram Dass's words arose. It's an extraordinary piece of wisdom, and it describes better than I could what is meant by the concept of that "gift wrapped in shit."

While I'm still not there with Ram Dass in his ecstatic vision of the universal force that he calls God, he provided me with some wonderful guidance along the path that I have been following in my life. I wrote my letter simply to say thank you to a man whose words and example have given so many cause for gratitude. Here it is:

Dear Ram Dass,

I woke this morning with the realization that I have never done the graceful thing and paused for long enough to express my gratitude for your help in turning my life around at a time when I was in deep distress and trouble.

I met you in 1994. Not in the flesh, of course, but in the mind. It happened following a workshop in which I participated at the Esalen Institute with Dr. Ron Alexander, a psychotherapist who was profoundly influenced by Buddhism and other Eastern religious teaching. After the weekend workshop, I made an appointment with Ron in hopes of getting some clarity in the darkness that seemed to be closing in on me, and he suggested that I read your book, “The Only Dance There Is.”

I did. I think what impressed me most was your joy, mixed with the simple realism with which you viewed the world. The blend of the two seemed quite extraordinary to one who had been looking at a bleak and problematic world with something closer to despair. A friend loaned us a collection of your tapes—yes, this was the way we listened to sound recordings, back in those days!—and my wife Ellie and I played them in the car on our weekly pilgrimages to our weekend retreat. Together we chanted along with you those words from the Heart Sutra: gate, gate, paragate, parasumgate, boddhisvaha for an hour at a time. I had no idea what the words meant, and I have to tell you I felt more than a little foolish at first, but the chant did work, mysteriously, to alleviate the pain.

I had first heard of you much earlier in my life. Back in the early 1970s, remember, you had become quite the fad—so I judged—with one of your other books, “Remember, Be Here Now.” It was a book for that historical moment, appealing to the flower child generation and to those who opposed the Viet Nam war. In my ignorance, however, I was far too smart to be seduced by what I judged to be your simplistic view of the world, and my intellectual roots in the cultural traditions of the Western world had me rationalizing that it was a kind of arrogance to poach on the religious traditions of the East. Ram Dass, I was content to tell myself, is a fraud, a Pied Piper leading the flower children off into some impossible enchanted garden. What a farce! (I also had my judgments about all those drugs...)

That was then. I was not ready, obviously. I was blissfully unaware of my own ignorance and self-delusion. I was stubborn in my rejection of anything the smacked of soul or spirit. I was, as I have written elsewhere recently, embarrassed by my heart and especially by the whole idea of the "love" you preached. Life could not be that simple.

But in 1994, “The Only Dance There Is” was a revelation. It came when I was more than ready, desperate, even, for some kind of a perspective on the world, the suffering I was experiencing, and the suffering I saw around me. I found an extraordinary opportunity in the words you wrote, in the joy that they expressed, in their simple clarity and sanity. They opened the door for the meditation practice that has been my daily anchor ever since.

Then, soon after I had “discovered you,” you were stricken. But that stroke in 1997, it seems, failed to destroy your spirit. By the year 2000, I was far enough along the path to be reviewing books with spiritual content for the Los Angeles Times, and "Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing and Dying", the book about your stroke and its aftermath came into my hands. I was astounded by your ability to find the grace in your misfortune, and to find a powerful—even joyful—life lesson in the state to which you were reduced, needing help with the most elementary tasks in taking care of yourself.

I woke thinking of you today, perhaps, as a result of a conversation with Michael, a visiting artist friend last night. Michael is a man who has suffered extraordinary pain for years, and has undergone more back surgeries that most of us could bear. Our conversation took place in the context of the article by Daniel Bergner in last Sunday’s New York Times about the right to choose death with dignity over prolonged, incurable debility—the right to commit suicide rather than endure suffering. My Western, rationalist instinct is to support such choices, and the right to make them… until I think of your example.

Ellie asked me on our walk today about animals. We have put a number of them to sleep when the time seemed right. I still think those decisions were right: how could we stand by and watch the innocent suffer? What about people then? Ellie asked if I would “encourage” her to seek a peaceful death if she were ever in such a situation. No, I would not encourage her. But I would be there, I hope, to help her come to her own decision, whatever that might be.

So this will express my gratitude, Ram Dass, for both your example and your teaching. Both have been an inspiration to me, as I suspect they have been to many millions of others on this planet. I trust that you continue to prosper in adversity, and send with this note the love and admiration of a stranger.

In gratitude, Peter

Forgive my wordiness today, friends. And thank you, if you have taken the time to read thus far. Have a great weekend.

"Michael Clayton": An End to Suffering

(NOTE: You might not want to read this if you haven't yet seen the movie, and plan to. I don't think I give away much, but just in case...)

It's dawn. Three horses on a hillside, powerful, serene, majestic. They are connected with their natural environment, at peace with their own nature... Behind the man who stands there, gazing at them, down at the bottom of the hill, his expensive black Mercedes explodes in a burst of searing flame. Explodes again.

He was supposed to be inside it.

This is Michael Clayton's moment of truth, in the film whose title is appropriately his name. It's the moment that he glimpses an end to his own suffering. And suffer he does. His life has gone awry, his moral compass long since lost. Separated from wife and family, awash in gambling debts, he has surrendered his career as a lawyer to acting as the "janitor" to his corporate law firm, doing whatever it takes to clean up those inconvenient messes that threaten the firm's image--or that of its clients. He has learned to skillfully manipulate the truth to serve the corporate interest.

From that start on the hillside, we are led back through the last four days that have brought him to this epiphany. He has been assigned the task of bringing back a partner, Arthur (wonderfully portrayed by that fine actor, Tom Wilkinson) who is also an old friend and colleague, into the fold of corporate contingency. Arthur has lost his senses--or, as we discover, found them. Building the defense of a corporate client desperate to save itself from the public exposure of its egregious poisoning of hundreds of its consumers--and potentially millions more--Arthur has done the unthinkable, switching his alliegeance from the client to its victims. A traitor to the firm and to its bottom-line "values," this miscreant must be brought back in line, and Michael Clayton is the man relied upon to do it.

Along the road, however, Clayton is brought face to face with the venality of the system that he serves. Increasingly, he comes to realize that real justice is on the side of the plaintiff in the case in question, and that his friend is far from the lunatic he has been made out to be. When Clayton's counterparts, the "janitors" who represent his firm's corporate client, spring into action and resort, finally, to murder, he turns coat himself, sacrificing his own interest and that of his firm to the revelation of the truth.

Before I get lost in the complexities of this finely-conceived, finely-written, and magnificently enacted story, let me get back to redemption--for that, as I see it, is the story's theme. If Arthur forsakes the "meds" that have kept his life in balance and descends into a fit of madness that reveals itself as moral clarity, Michael's redemption is the greater struggle, because it involves the surrender of everything that has seemed important to him: money, status, the respect and trust of those he works for, his employment--and finally his very identity--in order to emerge from the hell he has created for himself. In a remarkable feat of acting, as the film comes to its close, George Clooney's face alone conveys the transformation from misery and desperation to a kind of happiness.

"Michael Clayton" kept me on the proverbial edge of my seat from beginning to end. It's the kind of film where you're never allowed to pause and glance nervously at your watch. It's a true thriller, but one where violence is reduced to the necessary minimum and where the characters and the complexity of their moral issues drive the action. It's tough, uncompromising, but not lacking in tender moments, and it grabs you where good art is supposed to grab you--round he heart. Clooney's Michael is at once strong and vulnerable, scared and angry, transparent and inscrutable. We can forgive him for having lost his way, because we share his human failings, his desires, his attachments. It's when he learns to let go of them--in good Buddhist fashion--that he finds the beginnings of his freedom.

The other part of the Buddhist lesson of this film, by the way, is the karmic teaching: that cruel, unskillful actions lead inevitably to unhealthy and undesirable outcomes, while skillful action brings about the results that satisfy the soul.

Nightmare!

It was one of those dreadful nights you wouldn't wish on anyone. It started out okay. We watched "The History Boys"--one of those Brit schoolboy flicks with a good few laughs along the way and a good few poignant moments as the band of engaging ruffians grow up. We should have quit when that one finished. Instead, we slipped "Zodiac" into the DVD player (we had run out of Netflix, and picked up two movies at the local video store in the afternoon. Mistake.) "Zodiac"--which had great reviews when it came out, remember?--was the interminable story of the attempt to track down the killer of its eponymous title, with more tedious detail than anyone could possibly want to know and, after hours of teasing and hooking the viewer with the promise that one day this monster would be found, concluded with the revelation that he never was. Not really. We had to be satisfied with the exchange of a signifcant stare--indicating, presumably, that this was indeed the guy, though the case was unindictable. Ah, well. Give this one a miss.

And so to bed, much, much later than our usual time. Then the bad part started. I spent half the night, it seemed to me, embroiled in this dreadful dream--that also never ended. Coincidence? I don't know, but it started out with us going to a conference in a strange city in a foreign country--Spain? Mexico? It seemed somehow Latin--and parking the car at the outskirts because, well, you know why: it's impossible to park in the inner city these days, and taking the tram from there. Anyway, the conference was long and deadly dull on a topic that had no conceivable interest to us and it went on and on and when finally it ended we took the tram back to the area where we had parked the car...

... and found ourselves walking along a narrow path behind a crowd of impossibly slow fellow conferees until I gave Ellie the high sign and we managed to jump ahead which was when we suddenly realized that George the dog had been with us all along and had disappeared but then he happily reappeared and went ahead tail wagging for some reason off-leash which worried us of course but we didn't have one to put him on...

... and then we found ourselves in this strange kind of civic building with shopping mall attached and everything was closed and empty and we couldn't find our way out the other end and by this time of course we were totally lost but we finally did see "light at the end of the tunnel" in the form of big glass doors but the only way to reach them was down a steep slope of very fine sand with footprints sinking three feet deep so we looked for another way and found some concrete steps...

... but when we got down to the bottom of the steps a line of uniformed cops was barring the exit even though one of the doors was open a crack and we slipped through but one of the cops stood in our way and stopped us from getting out into the street until another friendlier one finally stepped in and let us pass with something like a shrug and a smile...

... and then soon we found ourslves in a strange house looking down into a kind of Dickensian parlor filled with the kind of things that fill a Dickensian parlor all for some reason in high color and high contrast and George the dog who was also in high contrast seemed to recognize this place because he began to bark excitedly though we ourselves still hadn't the first idea where we were and a portly old gentleman in the parlor looked at us askance over his newspaper as we walked nervously down the stairway into his parlor and slipped out through his parlor door and out of the house still hopelessly lost and kept on walking through the streets feeling, well you know how it feels to be lost in a strange city...

... and then when I woke up in our little cottage in Laguna Beach that feeling persisted and I found I couldn't stop looking for the damn car even though I was awake and aware that it had only been a dream. I just couldn't stop looking for the longest time until I finally got up to take George for his morning poop walk.

So riddle me that one, friends! I checked in with the Buddha a little later, to see what he might have to say about it. But he just kept saying, Breathe. Bring the attention back to the breath. I guess it helped.