I enjoyed an excellent lunch yesterday in the gardens of the Huntington Library, up in San Marino. Well, the lunch itself was… cafeteria, okay. But the company was excellent, as was the conversation. Long-time readers may remember, back in July, when Ellie and I hosted a party for a dozen or so Caians—alumni of my old college at Cambridge, Gonville and Caius, who happen to be living now in the Southern California area...
My host for yesterday’s lunch was one of these, a distinguished professor of philosophy and religion, scholar, editor, writer, and activist in the field of interfaith understanding. Indian-born and educated by the Jesuits in his native country, he embraces the wisdom and the cultural history of both East and West—he calls himself a “Buddhist Catholic”… or was it a “Catholic Buddhist”?—with a blend of infectious passion and curiosity. A great talker, he proved also a good listener and, despite his outstanding credentials and the breadth of his learning, a comfortable conversationalist. It’s rare, these days, to be able to sit down for a couple of hours and penetrate some important and difficult issues in a shared language of understanding and compassion.
We talked first about politics. Not surprisingly, we found ourselves in agreement: for the good of the country, this is a must-win for Obama. My friend had read “Dreams From My Father,” I had read “The Audacity of Hope,” and we agreed that the man is an excellent writer—one who writes from the heart as well as from a wide grasp of the political and historical moment in which we find ourselves. We agreed on the steady mind and the firm hand. We agreed that the alternative would cast a great pall over the future of the planet.
But the real meat of our conversation came when we turned to more broadly philosophical questions about religion and its role in the contemporary world. My friend is a man of thoughtful faith, who deplores the excesses of extremists, no matter whether they be of Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or any other origin. He dedicates a good part of his life to the promotion of tolerance and understanding between religions, and is a board member of Parliament of Religions--an organization for which he serves as the program director for a 2009 conference in Melbourne, Australia. Being attached to no faith, but rather a skeptical follower of the teachings of the Buddha, I was glad to be reminded that the meaning of the Greek origin of the word “skeptic” is “inquiry.” It’s about asking questions, which I personally believe to be the business of religion, and it dismays me that so much of the religion that is practiced inn the world today is about providing dogmatic answers.
Speaking of the intolerance that pits religion against religion, my friend asked what I thought was the source of that intolerance. Without reflecting any too deeply, I came up with the answer: fear. It’s that old, instinctive fear of the unknown, fear of the “other,” fear of encroachment by inimical forces on our camp site, the fear that what we “have” may be taken from us. If that’s the case, he asked me, what is the antidote? And again without too much reflection I answered: self-examination, a study of the fears that can determine the direction of my life unless I understand them and observe how they function. And what’s good for the individual is good for the institution. Religions, too, would benefit from honest, fearless self-examination. We need to understand when fears serve us—as they sometimes do—and when they serve only to stand between us and those who share our humanity but may have different views.
It was good to be prompted gently into some useful and productive thoughts. I see no way, for myself, to come back to the religion with which I was brought up, and which I abandoned as a young man. I do believe that the intellectual and spiritual roots it provided me then continue to ground me in ways unseen and, perhaps wrongly, unexamined. I value that religious education much as I value having learned Latin and other, living languages in my youth; I would be less well equipped as a writer without that solid foundation of etymology and syntax, and I judge that such humanity as I possess is meaningfully informed by the spiritual training I received. I was much more cavalier about discarding it as a young man than I am now. What I learned about Jesus, though, as my friend and I discussed as we ate our lunch in the shade of some very lovely trees, differs very little in substance from what I learn from the Buddha much later in life: the good part is all about love, generosity, and the spirit of compassion—a part that unhappily seems to have been forgotten by fundamentalists and extremists on all sides.
After lunch, we took a pleasant stroll through the gardens to the new (since my last visit, years ago) Chinese garden, with its beautiful pagoda, green ponds and walkways—refreshing even in the current Southern California heat—talking of professional experiences, and personal matters, and books we love. A very civilized way to spend the afternoon…!
(As a philosophical footnote, a new subscriber wrote to remind me of Gary Snyder's dictum: "Just because you're a Buddhist, doesn't mean you have to be a good Buddhist." Hmmm...)
(And, for good measure, as a political footnote, check out this Rap for Obama
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Equal Rights for All
(Written yesterday afternoon.)
In an hour or so from the moment I sit here writing these words, the new California gay marriage law will take effect, and I imagine that thousands of couples will be clamoring to exercise that right at secular offices and religious institutions throughout the state. I say, hooray for those who seek to bless their relationship with this name, some of whom have been kept waiting for too many years for the rest of society to catch up with them. And a tentative hooray for California, depending on the result of that absurd petition--is it already on the November ballot--seeking to "define marriage" as solely "between a man and a woman"? What are these people so afraid of? Is marriage, in their eyes, so vulnerable an institution that it needs their intolerance to "defend" it?
These thoughts were inspired in part by an email, received Monday, with a link to the New York Times review of a new movie, "Chris and Don: A Love Story," about the British-born writer Christopher Isherwood and his life-long companion, the artist Don Bachardy. It was sent to me with a friendly reminder of Bachardy's gratitude for a catalogue essay I wrote for an exhibition of his "Portraits of Christopher"
at California State University, Fullerton, a number of years ago--an essay that started out with the words, "I learned to write from Christopher Isherwood." I was much moved by the pictures in the exhibition, in particular by the extraordinary depth of love they manifested between one man and another. Here's a part of what I wrote:
The "camera-curious eye" is of course a reference to that famous phrase from Isherwood's "Berlin Stories," recast first as a drama in "I Am a Camera," and later as the movie "Cabaret." It was in Isherwood's early work that I went to school on the serious, sometimes difficult art of exploring the world from that intimate point of view of the "I." He was the master--understated, precise, a little diffident, insistently clear and honest. His prose was the epitome of authenticity and almost transparent clarity. Like myself--though a great deal earlier, and with more scholarly application than I--he turned from an Anglican upbringing to a lasting interest in, and devotion to Buddhist teaching and practice. I was fortunate enough to meet him on a number of occasions much later in life, and treasure those memories with affection and respect. (I had cause to remember him, also, as the subject of one of the great early double portraits by David Hockney, when I was writing the Abbeville Modern Masters book about the work of that fellow Brit-in-exile.)
I re-read my essay on the Bachardy show this afternoon, and felt that it was good enough to share with those readers of The Buddha Diaries who might be interested. It's called, obviously enough, Don Bachardy: Pictures of Christopher, and I think it's worth a read, if only to get a sense of the depth of the relationship between these two men. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to see the movie.
As a footnote, Bachardy invited me once to pose for a portrait. It was an extraordinary and somewhat unnerving experience, to have that unblinking camera-curious eye trained on me for two hours at a time as he worked in silence at his easel. I was so interested in the experience that I actually asked the artist if I could return and pose naked for him, in another session. He happily agreed, and I must say that I learned a great deal about myself, about the difficulty of stillness and silence, and my feelings about my body under his scrutiny. I was immensely grateful for the gift. I will, however, refrain from sharing the results with you!
In the meantime, I'd be happy if you'd join me in celebrating the remarkable moment of 5:01 PM on Monday, June 16, in California--and voting, if and when it comes to that, AGAINST any attempt to reverse this long-overdue and simply humane law.
In an hour or so from the moment I sit here writing these words, the new California gay marriage law will take effect, and I imagine that thousands of couples will be clamoring to exercise that right at secular offices and religious institutions throughout the state. I say, hooray for those who seek to bless their relationship with this name, some of whom have been kept waiting for too many years for the rest of society to catch up with them. And a tentative hooray for California, depending on the result of that absurd petition--is it already on the November ballot--seeking to "define marriage" as solely "between a man and a woman"? What are these people so afraid of? Is marriage, in their eyes, so vulnerable an institution that it needs their intolerance to "defend" it?
These thoughts were inspired in part by an email, received Monday, with a link to the New York Times review of a new movie, "Chris and Don: A Love Story," about the British-born writer Christopher Isherwood and his life-long companion, the artist Don Bachardy. It was sent to me with a friendly reminder of Bachardy's gratitude for a catalogue essay I wrote for an exhibition of his "Portraits of Christopher"
at California State University, Fullerton, a number of years ago--an essay that started out with the words, "I learned to write from Christopher Isherwood." I was much moved by the pictures in the exhibition, in particular by the extraordinary depth of love they manifested between one man and another. Here's a part of what I wrote:
The portraits of Isherwood are exceptional [...] in that the relationship is exceptionally close. From them, we can only guess at his youth, since they cover only the latter half of his life. But we see his maturity, the decline of his body, his battle with illness and, finally, with death. Bachardy records it all for us with that camera-curious eye, sparing us nothing. What could be more honest, more touchingly vulnerable, than that 1985 picture of Christopher as a naked old man, reclining back away from us, his body exposed, with nothing left to hide? Or that haunting, unforgettable series of pictures of Christopher after his death, no more now than a useless, empty body, still strangely beautiful but ineffably sad, the abandoned remnant of a human life. In Bachardy's final tribute, we sense our own futile desire to cling despairingly to our beloved, and our own lives.
The "camera-curious eye" is of course a reference to that famous phrase from Isherwood's "Berlin Stories," recast first as a drama in "I Am a Camera," and later as the movie "Cabaret." It was in Isherwood's early work that I went to school on the serious, sometimes difficult art of exploring the world from that intimate point of view of the "I." He was the master--understated, precise, a little diffident, insistently clear and honest. His prose was the epitome of authenticity and almost transparent clarity. Like myself--though a great deal earlier, and with more scholarly application than I--he turned from an Anglican upbringing to a lasting interest in, and devotion to Buddhist teaching and practice. I was fortunate enough to meet him on a number of occasions much later in life, and treasure those memories with affection and respect. (I had cause to remember him, also, as the subject of one of the great early double portraits by David Hockney, when I was writing the Abbeville Modern Masters book about the work of that fellow Brit-in-exile.)
I re-read my essay on the Bachardy show this afternoon, and felt that it was good enough to share with those readers of The Buddha Diaries who might be interested. It's called, obviously enough, Don Bachardy: Pictures of Christopher, and I think it's worth a read, if only to get a sense of the depth of the relationship between these two men. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to see the movie.
As a footnote, Bachardy invited me once to pose for a portrait. It was an extraordinary and somewhat unnerving experience, to have that unblinking camera-curious eye trained on me for two hours at a time as he worked in silence at his easel. I was so interested in the experience that I actually asked the artist if I could return and pose naked for him, in another session. He happily agreed, and I must say that I learned a great deal about myself, about the difficulty of stillness and silence, and my feelings about my body under his scrutiny. I was immensely grateful for the gift. I will, however, refrain from sharing the results with you!
In the meantime, I'd be happy if you'd join me in celebrating the remarkable moment of 5:01 PM on Monday, June 16, in California--and voting, if and when it comes to that, AGAINST any attempt to reverse this long-overdue and simply humane law.
Monday, December 24, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Shakespeare, etc.
What a pleasure to spend the afternoon on Saturday in the company of a quartet of actors performing scenes from Shakespeare. Our friend Fred--a frequent visitor and sometime commenter on "The Buddha Diaries"--had invited us to the show that he and his actor friends had been preparing, and the occasion served to remind me of the extraordinary power and versatility of language. No sets, no costumes, just a row of chairs and four lecterns--and words! Shakespeare had written them, centuries ago, and they proved that the human imagination, with their aid, can easily span the intervening years to experience the joys and fears, the pain and anger of those who are given to utter them. Our actors obviously relished them, and their commitment to the words provided us, in the audience, with a rich tapestry of the human experience and a reminder that the dramas in which we play our individual parts are no more nor less illusory than those enacted on the stage in front of us. Thanks, Fred!
Saturday evening we came home to watch The Tibetan Book of the Dead on DVD. Narrated by Leonard Cohen, it's a two part investigation into the way in which that great text still plays out in the life of Tibetans today, illuminating the meaning and rituals of life and death in a remote part of the world where life is at subsistence level and where people still find solace and guidance in the old beliefs. And beliefs they are: here, Buddhism is clearly a religion, as system of beliefs that gives humankind place in the order of the universe and instructs about the mystery of death and afterlife.
Sunday morning we attended a book launch event for Ken McLeod's "An Arrow to the Heart." (A reminder: my review of the book can be found on The Huffington Post.) Ken offered a wide-ranging historical and philosophical introduction to the text of The Heart Sutra and, after a fine buffet lunch, to his book and the process he engaged in writing it. We began to understand more about the differences between Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism and more, too, about their common ground. Of special interest to me, given my intention to launch my "Accidental Dharma" site in the near future, was one of the interpretations of the word "dharma" as "a unit of experience."
It's precisely the intersection of lived experience and teaching--the more common understanding of "dharma"--that I'm looking to explore. Sometimes the richest lessons in life come wrapped in the most unwelcome of experiences--be it some casual insult, a personal disappointment or, at worst, the death of a loved one in a senseless accident like the one described in the Ram Dass "Rachel letter" to which I alluded in the last entry on this site. More of this in the coming week. I hope you'll bear with me.
Saturday evening we came home to watch The Tibetan Book of the Dead on DVD. Narrated by Leonard Cohen, it's a two part investigation into the way in which that great text still plays out in the life of Tibetans today, illuminating the meaning and rituals of life and death in a remote part of the world where life is at subsistence level and where people still find solace and guidance in the old beliefs. And beliefs they are: here, Buddhism is clearly a religion, as system of beliefs that gives humankind place in the order of the universe and instructs about the mystery of death and afterlife.
Sunday morning we attended a book launch event for Ken McLeod's "An Arrow to the Heart." (A reminder: my review of the book can be found on The Huffington Post.) Ken offered a wide-ranging historical and philosophical introduction to the text of The Heart Sutra and, after a fine buffet lunch, to his book and the process he engaged in writing it. We began to understand more about the differences between Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism and more, too, about their common ground. Of special interest to me, given my intention to launch my "Accidental Dharma" site in the near future, was one of the interpretations of the word "dharma" as "a unit of experience."
It's precisely the intersection of lived experience and teaching--the more common understanding of "dharma"--that I'm looking to explore. Sometimes the richest lessons in life come wrapped in the most unwelcome of experiences--be it some casual insult, a personal disappointment or, at worst, the death of a loved one in a senseless accident like the one described in the Ram Dass "Rachel letter" to which I alluded in the last entry on this site. More of this in the coming week. I hope you'll bear with me.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
An Arrow to the Heart
Today I ask you to check out myreview of "An Arrow to the Heart: a Commentary on The Heart Sutra" by Ken McLeod.
And a Bunch of Kids...
... with a mention of at least one show from the gallery rounds that Ellie and I did on Saturday. I’m getting a bit behind myself here, so I’ll make it brief. Of the several exhibits we saw, the one that lingers most in my mind is the work of Akio Takamori at the Frank Lloyd Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. Takamori is known for whimsical clay sculptures evoking memories of his early life in post-war Japan, and his latest body of work brings together a little community of quietly contemplative children, each about two feet high, their clothes skillfully, if loosely painted on the surface of the clay.
The figures in themselves are charming, but I especially loved the installation. Stand in the middle of the gallery space and look around, and you’ll find the children placed on pedestals, their backs to you, faces to the wall—with just enough space left for you to walk around them and inspect them close up if and when you wish to.
On the wall in front of them, the children are mirrored by a two-dimensional photographic image of their own face, each printed digitally on a rough drawing paper that gives each more the feel of a watercolor than a photograph. They stand there, gazing silently into their own visage, each strange and somewhat lonesome in his or her own space.As a viewer, you can’t help but be moved and drawn in by this installation. At first, from behind, you see only the reproduction of the faces; the backs of the figures lend the children a kind of reticence that makes them more appealing than might an initial confrontation. When you step around in front of them, you are so close that you get the sense of invading their privacy, an intimacy at once tender and intrusive.
The work is a hymn to childhood, to the awkwardness and the difficulty, the shyness and the beauty of it. If you were once a child yourself—as I suspect you might have been—you will not go away from Takamori’s work unmoved by its charms.
Update: We are pleased to correct a long-standing oversight by adding Tara Dharma to The Buddha Diaries' blogroll. Please be sure to check in there and have a look around.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
And Now For Something...
... completely different--though nothing ever is. As we shall see...
Ellie and I walked down the hill yesterday, late afternoon, to enjoy a glass of wine with our neighbor, the artist Marcia Hafif. A painter in the tradition of minimalist, monochromatic work, she's just completing a new series of bichromatic paintings and has them hanging in her living room. I didn't count them, but I guess there are perhaps a dozen of them, each square divided vertically into two non-equal parts whose graduated width evokes the rhythmic progression of a spare, musical composition as the eye follows the series around the room. The paintings have a silvery, silken glow to them, with barely perceptible modulations on two subdued colors, both difficult to name; one is a kind of subtly mauvish grey, the other a reduced celadon green. They would have the fluffy seductiveness of cotton candy, but for the carefully-structured formal context that lends them a quiet sobriety and depth. In keeping with the history of Hafif's work, their Zen-like reductiveness induces a state of meditative attention and serenity, but there's a gentle quality in the touch that keeps them from being severe. Up close, the artist's hand is everywhere evident in the patient brushwork and this, I think, is where the viewer is invited into the work. This is chink in the formalist armor where we come in contact with the human presence and the human values that give the work its depth of content.
Not an adequate description, perhaps, because such work defies attempts to translate it into language. I was reminded once again of the seeming contradiction in my aesthetic passions: while I'm attracted to the work of artists who persist in looking to the human form and to the landscape that surrounds us, I also get that frisson of recognition, of acknowledgement--that YES!--with reductive, even monochromatic work like Marcia's. It's the response that tells me that what I'm looking at has something vital to tell me about my own humanity.
Outdoors, on Marcia's deck, with a glass of wine, we got to talking about art, and music, and literature--but not in that awful academic way, that one-upman trade of esoteric information and display of intellect. Our conversation came, I think, out of mutual experience and the process in which we are engaged in our creative work, and the ways in which that process is fed by others who have walked the path before. So Marcia could speak easily about Fra Angelico and the painting he had made for himself, in his cell, beside the window, competing with that light source, so that its whiteness--the painting's--became central to its meaning. And somehow this gave another dimension of meaning to the work we had just been looking at, and led to more thoughts about painting and writing, and engagement with the medium as having meaning in itself. And how emotion is conveyed more vitally not by the heavy sighs but by the unspoken subtleties--which brought me back, again, to thoughts about Jane Austen.
All interesting stuff. Thinking back to yesterday's entry, and the anger, and the reticence about giving vent to it, and wondering how "Buddhist" it might be, I realize that the relationship between passion and dispassion is a close one indeed. The idea that passion can be experienced perhaps more deeply through restraint, that equanimity does not imply removal--this idea is one that's worth exploring.
I trust I haven't bored you all today, with my aesthetic speculations. To me, they're anything but abstract, like Marcia's paintings. Very present, very real. See? As the French say, Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. (Approximately: The more things change, the more they stay the same.)
AND ANOTHER EPIPHANY...
... sent to me by my friend Marsha, also an artist (though spelled differently from the Marcia above; just another of those strange coincidences!) who was reluctant to use the "Comments" button. It's a lovely story, so I append it here. Enjoy...
Ellie and I walked down the hill yesterday, late afternoon, to enjoy a glass of wine with our neighbor, the artist Marcia Hafif. A painter in the tradition of minimalist, monochromatic work, she's just completing a new series of bichromatic paintings and has them hanging in her living room. I didn't count them, but I guess there are perhaps a dozen of them, each square divided vertically into two non-equal parts whose graduated width evokes the rhythmic progression of a spare, musical composition as the eye follows the series around the room. The paintings have a silvery, silken glow to them, with barely perceptible modulations on two subdued colors, both difficult to name; one is a kind of subtly mauvish grey, the other a reduced celadon green. They would have the fluffy seductiveness of cotton candy, but for the carefully-structured formal context that lends them a quiet sobriety and depth. In keeping with the history of Hafif's work, their Zen-like reductiveness induces a state of meditative attention and serenity, but there's a gentle quality in the touch that keeps them from being severe. Up close, the artist's hand is everywhere evident in the patient brushwork and this, I think, is where the viewer is invited into the work. This is chink in the formalist armor where we come in contact with the human presence and the human values that give the work its depth of content.
Not an adequate description, perhaps, because such work defies attempts to translate it into language. I was reminded once again of the seeming contradiction in my aesthetic passions: while I'm attracted to the work of artists who persist in looking to the human form and to the landscape that surrounds us, I also get that frisson of recognition, of acknowledgement--that YES!--with reductive, even monochromatic work like Marcia's. It's the response that tells me that what I'm looking at has something vital to tell me about my own humanity.
Outdoors, on Marcia's deck, with a glass of wine, we got to talking about art, and music, and literature--but not in that awful academic way, that one-upman trade of esoteric information and display of intellect. Our conversation came, I think, out of mutual experience and the process in which we are engaged in our creative work, and the ways in which that process is fed by others who have walked the path before. So Marcia could speak easily about Fra Angelico and the painting he had made for himself, in his cell, beside the window, competing with that light source, so that its whiteness--the painting's--became central to its meaning. And somehow this gave another dimension of meaning to the work we had just been looking at, and led to more thoughts about painting and writing, and engagement with the medium as having meaning in itself. And how emotion is conveyed more vitally not by the heavy sighs but by the unspoken subtleties--which brought me back, again, to thoughts about Jane Austen.
All interesting stuff. Thinking back to yesterday's entry, and the anger, and the reticence about giving vent to it, and wondering how "Buddhist" it might be, I realize that the relationship between passion and dispassion is a close one indeed. The idea that passion can be experienced perhaps more deeply through restraint, that equanimity does not imply removal--this idea is one that's worth exploring.
I trust I haven't bored you all today, with my aesthetic speculations. To me, they're anything but abstract, like Marcia's paintings. Very present, very real. See? As the French say, Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. (Approximately: The more things change, the more they stay the same.)
AND ANOTHER EPIPHANY...
... sent to me by my friend Marsha, also an artist (though spelled differently from the Marcia above; just another of those strange coincidences!) who was reluctant to use the "Comments" button. It's a lovely story, so I append it here. Enjoy...
The lucky thing about my childhood was my father's sense of adventure and his total lack of care as to where we might end up. We went on great trips all over the west, driving for hours, days. I spent all that time looking at the land, the forms, and the horizon line. I think that is where I learned what America really is. Anyway, one summer we were traveling through Navaho country and my father announced that we were going to stay the night at Goulding's Trading Post in Monument Valley. Goulding's was known because some of the great westerns were made there by and with John Wayne, John Ford, etc. Needless to say it was not a tourist destination, as it is today. To get there meant driving miles on a two lane road through the reservation and then off on a dirt road for a while.
We arrived late in the afternoon. A storm was coming in. The place was situated high against red cliffs, overlooking the spectacular valley with its endless flat land and scattered red buttes and mesas rising straight up. It was a working trading post with some out buildings, two of which were the low slung guest quarters and the dining hall.
Once we were settled, I wandered out to where the dirt road began to slope toward the valley. There was another girl standing there looking out. She was a guest too. I don't remember her name, but I do remember being impressed because she was thirteen, which made her a big girl, and she wanted to be an anthropologist. We talked a while, watching the storm move in across the valley as the sun began to set. Then we wandered into the trading post.
It was dark with log walls. Lariats and silver necklaces hung from pegs, sort of glinting because they caught what light there was. At the back of the store in the darkness was Goulding himself, leaning on the counter with his hands spread apart. My new friend said, "It's windy outside". Goulding answered, "That's what spreads the seeds". At that moment I got the big picture. It was as if I could see and feel the whole universe and the interrelatedness of everything. The experience washed over me and was very quiet, very deep. Still is.
The storm arrived after sunset. Lighting strikes, long , skinny ones from sky to earth, lit the valley in high contrast black and white. We were so lucky because we could witness it from our little room against the cliffs.
I never told my parents or anyone about my experience for a long time. I was sort of mute about it. I just felt it and knew what it was, even as a little kid...
Sunday, August 26, 2007
A Mile in Her Shoes
I notice that I have been reading more than my usual share of novels this summer, and finding them more than usually pleasant reading. The latest is Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler, which I thoroughly enjoyed. 
I'll confess I would likely not have picked it out from the bookstore shelves, had I not bumped into the author at a reading a couple of months ago. I'm glad I did, because her book reminded me of the gentle pleasures of reading Jane Austen, of the English countryside and the now somewhat faded elegance of Bath, and of the polite eccentricities of the English character. It also put me in mind, throughout, of a valuable Buddhist teaching.
Rigler's conceit is an amusing one. Our Jane Austen addict, Courtney Stone, a twenty-first century, post-feminist, Los Angeles-based protagonist-- she has her own MySpace website--wakes up one day to find herself inhabiting the mind and body of "Jane Mansfield" in Austen's early nineteenth century England. The ensuing romp through the exquisite agonies and politenesses of that era shed light not only on the nostalgic view of a life more simply defined by a rigorous social code--but also on its too readily forgotten hazards: its awful sanitary conditions no less than its relegation of women to the property of males. Rigler's Courtney observes it all with the cynical eye of a "liberated"--and recently jilted--woman who obsesses not only about her beloved Jane Austen but also about such things as cleanliness and creature comforts of the kind distinctly unavailable in Austen's day.
And then there's "love"--so differently defined and practiced in the two eras that clash together in this book. For Courtney, it's about sexual politics, sexual freedom, the freedom to choose partners, it's about her womanhood, her individuality, her strength--and weakness. And she suffers. For "Jane", it's about financial security and social convention, family, propriety and property. "Love" as we understand it in our century--something to be fallen into--has hardly entered into the social vocabulary of Jane's time, it's there only as a glimmer of romanticism and the freedoms that aesethtic movement had begun to claim. It's there, in Jane's heart, as a hope almost beyond hope to be fulfilled. Sex, so subtly sublimated in Jane Austen's world into the delicate, precise dance of language and social mores, is an omnipresent but forbidden topic, a delicious undertow fraught with fears and inhibitions.
Rigler, herself clearly a Jane Austen addict, has a sure feel for these matters in both "Jane's" world and Courtney's. Venturing into the risky territory of nineteenth century English as a contemporary American whose native language is the vernacular of twenty-first century California, she proves sure-footed amongst the booby-traps--and as a native English English speaker, I'm sensitive to the potential lapses. Her plotting, too, is nicely handled: the reader's attention is engaged by the story line throughout, and the ending--long anticipated, because we're kept wondering how our Courtney is ever going to escape her predicament--is astutely satisfying: it serves at once to resolve and deepen the mystery of Courtney's time-warp, and leaves the reader empowered to speculate on its meaning.
For those who fall into the trap of dismissing Jane Austen's novels as romantic fluff, and might be tempted to do the same with Rigler's, it should be added that Courtney takes her identity crisis seriously even as she seems to simultaneously enjoy the ride and worry about the return trip to her "real self." Along the way, this material girl is required to re-evaluate her own sense of self, and is confronted constantly with that great teaching of Buddhism I mentioned earlier: the "other" mind-body she inhabits requires her to actually experience the conundrum of not-self, "this is not me, this is not mine, this is not who I am." And thus confronted, she sheds some of her narcissism along the way and learns the value of compassion for those who share the journey with her.
A good read, then. I learn from an email from Laurie, received coincidentally this very morning--that she has reached #15 on the LA Times bestseller list for fiction. Here's hoping, for her, for a #1 spot soon!
I'll confess I would likely not have picked it out from the bookstore shelves, had I not bumped into the author at a reading a couple of months ago. I'm glad I did, because her book reminded me of the gentle pleasures of reading Jane Austen, of the English countryside and the now somewhat faded elegance of Bath, and of the polite eccentricities of the English character. It also put me in mind, throughout, of a valuable Buddhist teaching.Rigler's conceit is an amusing one. Our Jane Austen addict, Courtney Stone, a twenty-first century, post-feminist, Los Angeles-based protagonist-- she has her own MySpace website--wakes up one day to find herself inhabiting the mind and body of "Jane Mansfield" in Austen's early nineteenth century England. The ensuing romp through the exquisite agonies and politenesses of that era shed light not only on the nostalgic view of a life more simply defined by a rigorous social code--but also on its too readily forgotten hazards: its awful sanitary conditions no less than its relegation of women to the property of males. Rigler's Courtney observes it all with the cynical eye of a "liberated"--and recently jilted--woman who obsesses not only about her beloved Jane Austen but also about such things as cleanliness and creature comforts of the kind distinctly unavailable in Austen's day.
And then there's "love"--so differently defined and practiced in the two eras that clash together in this book. For Courtney, it's about sexual politics, sexual freedom, the freedom to choose partners, it's about her womanhood, her individuality, her strength--and weakness. And she suffers. For "Jane", it's about financial security and social convention, family, propriety and property. "Love" as we understand it in our century--something to be fallen into--has hardly entered into the social vocabulary of Jane's time, it's there only as a glimmer of romanticism and the freedoms that aesethtic movement had begun to claim. It's there, in Jane's heart, as a hope almost beyond hope to be fulfilled. Sex, so subtly sublimated in Jane Austen's world into the delicate, precise dance of language and social mores, is an omnipresent but forbidden topic, a delicious undertow fraught with fears and inhibitions.
Rigler, herself clearly a Jane Austen addict, has a sure feel for these matters in both "Jane's" world and Courtney's. Venturing into the risky territory of nineteenth century English as a contemporary American whose native language is the vernacular of twenty-first century California, she proves sure-footed amongst the booby-traps--and as a native English English speaker, I'm sensitive to the potential lapses. Her plotting, too, is nicely handled: the reader's attention is engaged by the story line throughout, and the ending--long anticipated, because we're kept wondering how our Courtney is ever going to escape her predicament--is astutely satisfying: it serves at once to resolve and deepen the mystery of Courtney's time-warp, and leaves the reader empowered to speculate on its meaning.
For those who fall into the trap of dismissing Jane Austen's novels as romantic fluff, and might be tempted to do the same with Rigler's, it should be added that Courtney takes her identity crisis seriously even as she seems to simultaneously enjoy the ride and worry about the return trip to her "real self." Along the way, this material girl is required to re-evaluate her own sense of self, and is confronted constantly with that great teaching of Buddhism I mentioned earlier: the "other" mind-body she inhabits requires her to actually experience the conundrum of not-self, "this is not me, this is not mine, this is not who I am." And thus confronted, she sheds some of her narcissism along the way and learns the value of compassion for those who share the journey with her.
A good read, then. I learn from an email from Laurie, received coincidentally this very morning--that she has reached #15 on the LA Times bestseller list for fiction. Here's hoping, for her, for a #1 spot soon!
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Reading
A strange and disturbing experience yesterday morning. I woke to find myself nearly unable to see. My vision was severely blurred by a kind of dancing aura of light that prevented me from focusing on any single point. By coincidence, I had made an appointment for an eye check-up the same afternoon, and the doctor had no difficulty in diagnosing what he called an ocular migraine. No headache, just the aura I've known about before as a symptom of the more familiar type of migraine. A "blinding headache" minus the ache. I did worry, for the few minutes that it lasted, that my eyesight was finally failing. My first worry was how I'd ever manage to write the blog: visions (!) of having to dictate it to Cardozo! And would I have to learn braille if I wanted to read?
Would I learn the equanimity I might need to cope with such an affliction?
Well, it only lasted for a half hour or so, and I soon managed to write the entry which you undoubtedly read. Well, I like to think you might have done. This morning, I just wanted to add a few more words about The Glass Castle, which I also managed to finish despite the earlier eye problem. I loved the book. It's one of those stories where you end up rooting so hard for the protagonist that it hurts. It's hard to imagine such a nightmare of a childhood in the United States, with children literally sifting through the garbage after school lunch to devour the left-overs of their school-mates, and living amid filth and decay in a desolate mining town in the "care" of parents whose neglect of their children is determined not so much by a lack of education as by their willful, adamant rejection of conformity to social norms.
For the author, Jeannette Walls, who from her earliest years adored and defended her aberrant father as only a child can, her upbringing was at once a curse and a blessing. Inculcated by her mother with a love of books and by her father with an insatiable curiosity about the physical world around her, she was possessed of a mind that devoured whatever came her way. Her unconventional education required that she develop her own skills for acquiring knowledge and putting it to use--skills that have evidently stood her in good stead, in her adult life, as a successful researcher and writer. The poverty and deprivation she was forced to endure at least endowed her with a toughness of mind, a self-reliance and a resilience to the vicissitudes of life that are notably lacking in many of those growing up in the comfortable, even pampered environment of middle-class America.
It's not the kind of upbringing I'd recommend for anyone. Few, I think, would survive this kind of hardship with the success of Jeannette Walls. What saved her from a fate of resigned, redneck ignorance was surely the intellectual qualities that her parents possessed, even if they sorely misused them. Walls, in a word, is not a poster child for poverty, but rather a shining example of one who managed to escape it and a testimony to the power of the written word. Her passion for reading, this book suggests, was her salvation. Eventually it all comes down to strength of mind. Reading can do that for you. The practice of meditation, I like to think, is another way to go about it.
Even so, I'm glad to have my eyes back.
Would I learn the equanimity I might need to cope with such an affliction?
Well, it only lasted for a half hour or so, and I soon managed to write the entry which you undoubtedly read. Well, I like to think you might have done. This morning, I just wanted to add a few more words about The Glass Castle, which I also managed to finish despite the earlier eye problem. I loved the book. It's one of those stories where you end up rooting so hard for the protagonist that it hurts. It's hard to imagine such a nightmare of a childhood in the United States, with children literally sifting through the garbage after school lunch to devour the left-overs of their school-mates, and living amid filth and decay in a desolate mining town in the "care" of parents whose neglect of their children is determined not so much by a lack of education as by their willful, adamant rejection of conformity to social norms.
For the author, Jeannette Walls, who from her earliest years adored and defended her aberrant father as only a child can, her upbringing was at once a curse and a blessing. Inculcated by her mother with a love of books and by her father with an insatiable curiosity about the physical world around her, she was possessed of a mind that devoured whatever came her way. Her unconventional education required that she develop her own skills for acquiring knowledge and putting it to use--skills that have evidently stood her in good stead, in her adult life, as a successful researcher and writer. The poverty and deprivation she was forced to endure at least endowed her with a toughness of mind, a self-reliance and a resilience to the vicissitudes of life that are notably lacking in many of those growing up in the comfortable, even pampered environment of middle-class America.
It's not the kind of upbringing I'd recommend for anyone. Few, I think, would survive this kind of hardship with the success of Jeannette Walls. What saved her from a fate of resigned, redneck ignorance was surely the intellectual qualities that her parents possessed, even if they sorely misused them. Walls, in a word, is not a poster child for poverty, but rather a shining example of one who managed to escape it and a testimony to the power of the written word. Her passion for reading, this book suggests, was her salvation. Eventually it all comes down to strength of mind. Reading can do that for you. The practice of meditation, I like to think, is another way to go about it.
Even so, I'm glad to have my eyes back.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
The Improbable Dream
I dreamt last night that my mother told me she had asked my father for a divorce. An improbable scenario. First, both my parents died more than a decade ago. They had been married for more than sixty years and, while my mother once confessed that things had not always been easy for her in their marriage, they came from a generation and a culture in which divorce would have been inconceivable. My father, as I mentioned recently, was an Anglican minister, and my mother was the daughter of a minister of the Church of Wales.
So the dream was clearly not about my parents. As with most dreams, I'm taking a wild guess that it was actually about myself. With no divorce on the horizon--Ellie and I have been together for more than thirty-five years--there has to be some other answer to the puzzle. I do believe that dreams come along to tell us something, they are not just random nonsense. Here's my thinking: I believe, with C.G.Jung, all of us have a masculine side and a feminine side, and my own interpretation of the dream suggests that here was my feminine side (mother) telling my masculine side (father) to get lost. Perhaps it's my more intuitive self rebelling against that rational authoritarian who spends his time telling her how to live her life.
The dream may also be related to the book I'm reading. Awaiting a trip to the bookstore to replenish my summer supply, I picked up a copy of Jeanette Walls's The Glass Castle which Ellie had borrowed from friends. I was soon hooked on this remarkable story of a child growing up with unbelievably impossible parents--an alcoholic dreamer of a father whose get-rich schemes lead inevitably to disaster, a brilliant tinkerer and rationalist; and a scatterbrain, would-be artist mother whose rampant narcissism and dedication to "adventure" results in an airy neglect of her children and their needs. Notwithstanding the dreadful abuse and the rootlessness as the family struggles to stay one step ahead of police, penury and ruin, the children benefit in unexpected ways from what love and attention their parents manage to spare them. They learn a fierce spirit of independence and creativity from their mother, and a keen understanding of the workings of the universe from their father's scientific bent.
And we readers learn a lot about the resourcefulness of children. So far as I've got in my reading of the book, they have survived. More about this, perhaps, as I get further into the story. But you can see how it might provoke an improbable mother-and-father dream...
Friday, August 10, 2007
Oppression Stories
"May I be free from oppression..."--The Sublime Attitudes
I have been traveling. In my mind, that is. I have been reading novels. They have transported me effortlessly through time and space, and given me hours of out-of-this body experience. It has been a while since I spent so much time in novel-land, and I had almost forgotten what a pleasure it can be. Let me tell you...
... about my trip to pre-World War II Europe with Alan Furst, who writes about the period as though he had lived it (he can't have done: he looks much too young and besides, his website informs us that he was born in Manhattan.) His characters move typically not at the center of historical action, but at the periphery; not primarily in the familiar theaters of war--Germany, France, England--but at the uncomfortable edges, places like Spain and Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria; and they are drawn in by the centrifuge of history into the mass of small intrigues that fuel it. I first learned about Furst from my son--thank you, Jason--and just recently finished the third of the three books I have read, "The Foreign Correspondent," whose central character is an underground Italian journalist, engaged, with a small coterie of associates, in the dangerous work of keeping the flames of freedom safe from the oppression of fascism with the small-circulation Italian newspaper that he covertly writes and edits. It's absorbing to accompany him on his missions through the crowded cafes of Paris, the seedy hotels of Hitler's Berlin, and the oppressive back streets of his Mussolini-dominated homeland. It's Furst's instinctive grasp of the history, of the diverse national identities, of the currents of power and cultural detail that sweep me into the experience of an historical period from whose example we should now, in the present, be learning about the dangers of secrecy and the seizure of civil rights.
I have also made a painful journey into the heart of Afghanistan, courtesy of Khaled Hosseini, whose first book, "Kite Runner," was the gripping tale of a boy growing up in that cauldron of the current Middle Eastern struggle with its own history, and the conflict of its religious and cultural traditions with the modern age. "A Thousand Splendid Suns," Hosseini's second book, follows the dreadful, ever worsening fate of two women through the recent history of Afghanistan--from the quasi-medieval pre-contemporary period to the Soviet occupation and the armed resistance of the mujahadeen, to the expulsion of the Soviets and the arrival of the despicable Taliban, and the eventual rout of the Taliban after jihadist attacks on New York's World Trade Center. Theirs, too, is a story of oppression--by a society traditionally dominated by men, whose sense of honor, entitlement and religion justifies any abuse they choose to visit upon their wives and daughters, from the deprivation of education, to virtual imprisonment, all the way to physical abuse and murder with impunity. The two brave women at the center of this story--one of them from the country, barely educated but innately sensitive and intelligent, the other from the city, secretly educated by an enlightened father--are married to the same monster of a man, to whose abuses one eventually succumbs, while the other barely survives. This, in the context of flying bullets and raining morters, destroyed lives at times near starvation. The reader is relieved, at the end, by a note of hope and the miraculous survival of love--along with the realization that the post 9/11 American intervention in that country was truly an act of liberation, but one from which, tragically, our own country was distracted by the ill-thought invasion of Iraq. To any reader of this book, the notion that the Taliban might be permitted to reestablish power in Afghanistan is an unimaginable nightmare.
Ah, yes. And then Australia, where Richard Flanagan's "The Unknown Terrorist" takes place, in a society depicted in a way that the American reader cannot but make comparisons with our own. Flanagan's Sydney is a city whose denizens are obsessed with materialistic notions of well-being and success, where the media become the willing vehicle for product promotion and the expansion of corporate control, where politicians cynically distort the truth in order to satisfy their egos and consolidate their power, where the police capitulate to the whims of the politicians and the media, where the rich parade their wealth and the poor descend into despair, prostitution, drug and alcohol abuse, and degradation. Against this backdrop, the book's main character and focus, the Doll, a pole dancer in a strip joint, falls victim to lies, calumny and innuendo in a momentary bout of civic hysteria about a supposed terrorist plot (non-existent, as we eventually discover) to attack the city. We follow her as she becomes, innocently, more and more deeply entangled in the twisted schemes of evil men who claim to have the interests of the homeland at heart, and accompany her in a tragic descent into a finally inescapable destiny.
"The Unknown Terrorist" is a compelling read--one of those books you want to read at a single sitting--and one that offers a terrifying picture of the current state of the world, dominated as we are by genuine fear and pumped-up paranoia, and where we all too willingly surrender our rights--along with our good sense--to the hysteria of the moment. Fear itself, readily exploited by those hungry for wealth and power, is the oppressor; and the book is a timely reminder of our need to remain conscious and alert to the ever-present danger of being swallowed up in the nightmare.
As a part of my daily meditation practice, I include that wish from the Sublime Attitudes: May I be free from oppression... May all living beings be free from oppression. These three books make that wish all the more urgent, all the more needed, all the more real.
I have been traveling. In my mind, that is. I have been reading novels. They have transported me effortlessly through time and space, and given me hours of out-of-this body experience. It has been a while since I spent so much time in novel-land, and I had almost forgotten what a pleasure it can be. Let me tell you...
... about my trip to pre-World War II Europe with Alan Furst, who writes about the period as though he had lived it (he can't have done: he looks much too young and besides, his website informs us that he was born in Manhattan.) His characters move typically not at the center of historical action, but at the periphery; not primarily in the familiar theaters of war--Germany, France, England--but at the uncomfortable edges, places like Spain and Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria; and they are drawn in by the centrifuge of history into the mass of small intrigues that fuel it. I first learned about Furst from my son--thank you, Jason--and just recently finished the third of the three books I have read, "The Foreign Correspondent," whose central character is an underground Italian journalist, engaged, with a small coterie of associates, in the dangerous work of keeping the flames of freedom safe from the oppression of fascism with the small-circulation Italian newspaper that he covertly writes and edits. It's absorbing to accompany him on his missions through the crowded cafes of Paris, the seedy hotels of Hitler's Berlin, and the oppressive back streets of his Mussolini-dominated homeland. It's Furst's instinctive grasp of the history, of the diverse national identities, of the currents of power and cultural detail that sweep me into the experience of an historical period from whose example we should now, in the present, be learning about the dangers of secrecy and the seizure of civil rights.I have also made a painful journey into the heart of Afghanistan, courtesy of Khaled Hosseini, whose first book, "Kite Runner," was the gripping tale of a boy growing up in that cauldron of the current Middle Eastern struggle with its own history, and the conflict of its religious and cultural traditions with the modern age. "A Thousand Splendid Suns," Hosseini's second book, follows the dreadful, ever worsening fate of two women through the recent history of Afghanistan--from the quasi-medieval pre-contemporary period to the Soviet occupation and the armed resistance of the mujahadeen, to the expulsion of the Soviets and the arrival of the despicable Taliban, and the eventual rout of the Taliban after jihadist attacks on New York's World Trade Center. Theirs, too, is a story of oppression--by a society traditionally dominated by men, whose sense of honor, entitlement and religion justifies any abuse they choose to visit upon their wives and daughters, from the deprivation of education, to virtual imprisonment, all the way to physical abuse and murder with impunity. The two brave women at the center of this story--one of them from the country, barely educated but innately sensitive and intelligent, the other from the city, secretly educated by an enlightened father--are married to the same monster of a man, to whose abuses one eventually succumbs, while the other barely survives. This, in the context of flying bullets and raining morters, destroyed lives at times near starvation. The reader is relieved, at the end, by a note of hope and the miraculous survival of love--along with the realization that the post 9/11 American intervention in that country was truly an act of liberation, but one from which, tragically, our own country was distracted by the ill-thought invasion of Iraq. To any reader of this book, the notion that the Taliban might be permitted to reestablish power in Afghanistan is an unimaginable nightmare.Ah, yes. And then Australia, where Richard Flanagan's "The Unknown Terrorist" takes place, in a society depicted in a way that the American reader cannot but make comparisons with our own. Flanagan's Sydney is a city whose denizens are obsessed with materialistic notions of well-being and success, where the media become the willing vehicle for product promotion and the expansion of corporate control, where politicians cynically distort the truth in order to satisfy their egos and consolidate their power, where the police capitulate to the whims of the politicians and the media, where the rich parade their wealth and the poor descend into despair, prostitution, drug and alcohol abuse, and degradation. Against this backdrop, the book's main character and focus, the Doll, a pole dancer in a strip joint, falls victim to lies, calumny and innuendo in a momentary bout of civic hysteria about a supposed terrorist plot (non-existent, as we eventually discover) to attack the city. We follow her as she becomes, innocently, more and more deeply entangled in the twisted schemes of evil men who claim to have the interests of the homeland at heart, and accompany her in a tragic descent into a finally inescapable destiny."The Unknown Terrorist" is a compelling read--one of those books you want to read at a single sitting--and one that offers a terrifying picture of the current state of the world, dominated as we are by genuine fear and pumped-up paranoia, and where we all too willingly surrender our rights--along with our good sense--to the hysteria of the moment. Fear itself, readily exploited by those hungry for wealth and power, is the oppressor; and the book is a timely reminder of our need to remain conscious and alert to the ever-present danger of being swallowed up in the nightmare.
As a part of my daily meditation practice, I include that wish from the Sublime Attitudes: May I be free from oppression... May all living beings be free from oppression. These three books make that wish all the more urgent, all the more needed, all the more real.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
****s (Four-Letter Words)
Another taboo that D. H. Lawrence challenged in "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was, of course, the use of those four-letter words. They were still able to cause shock waves in society when they led to the frequent arrests and indictments of the comedian Lenny Bruce in the 1950s and 1960s. His famous outloud public listing of them in defiance of his persecutors might mark the moment of their liberation from the constraints that had persisted in conventionally banning them from public discourse.Today they are as common as pebbles on the beach. You overhear them used in causal conversations in cafes and restaurants. You hear them liberally uttered in movies and on television--at least on channels freed from the controls of those government censors, who still seek to protect the young and innocent from words they hear every day on the streets and in their schools. For the same reason, I suppose, you do not read them in newspapers. The New York Times still boasts that it provides all the news that's fit to print--presumably in appropriately fit language. The family values folks are still that powerful.
But the real news is quite different: words, friends, have escaped their caged and run amok in our society. No matter how we try to put them back, there are too many of them for us to control.
The four-letter words are the names of body parts and body functions. They are good solid words with noble histories. Fuck, piss, shit, cock, cunt... I'm forgetting a couple here, I know. Lawrence, I think, wanted simply to recognize them honestly as words, and rehabilitate them from the bleak, moralistic dungeon into which they had been thrown by those seeking to denigrate the human body and its natural acts as shame- and sinful. Along with the natural beauty and joy of the body we are given to inhabit, he wanted to restore words to their original authenticity and power.
There are, certainly, those who continue to dishonor words by their misuse and abuse. The sad part is that we unconsciously perpetuate precisely that secret shame that Lawrence wanted to unmask by using these noble words in contexts that are disconnected from their meaning. I myself am guilty of those expletives. When I say, casually, Oh, shit! I am not referring to the function that depletes my body of unneeded waste. When I explode, as I am known to do, in traffic, and call someone a "fucking idiot," I am not evoking his skills between the sheets.
And then there are the derivatives--the -mothers and the -suckers--whose common use has different implications. Some might suggest that it has deep undertones of a homophobia and an Oedipal neurosis that say much about our society.
The Buddhist teaching of "Right Speech" is a useful guidepost here. I'm for honest language, language freed from artificial restraints--but also for the use of language that does not egregiously harm or hurt. I have been thinking recently, in this context, of writing about those racial epithets that arouse such controversy... but that's for another entry. As a lover of language, I embrace words in all their manifestations and all their multiple meanings. Expletives have their place, especially when they help us to let off steam. But I do prefer the intentional and conscious use of language over the casual, imprecise variety. I prefer, in the immortal words of Dr. Seuss, to "say what I mean and mean what I say."
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Meditation
Today, as every day, I sit and watch the breath. I try to maintain my attention from the very beginning of the inbreath to the very last moment of the outbreath--each breath from birth to death. It's hard. My mind has many things to divert it, many threads to follow, many things to worry over. I watch it go to work, and each time it wanders, try to reel it back in. For a couple of moments, for a couple of minutes even... success!
Then off it goes again. Sometimes I catch it sooner, sometimes later. Sometimes I only notice it has wandered off minutes later. Then the judgments come: how come you can't make a better job of this, when you've been doing it for ten years? My mind jumps at them: something to get its teeth into. Great.
So, no, it's not about leaving your mind at the door, along with your shoes, as Christopher Hitchens too easily assumes. It's not about blissing out and escaping the mind. For me, it's about teaching the mind to do exactly what I want it to do, about harnassing the power of the mind by training it to focus and concentrate.
I'm finding myself, eventually, irked by Hitchens's glib dismissal of all spiritual exercise, along with all religion. I suspect an inner rage that pushes him further than even reason wants to go--the result, perhaps, of some as yet unhealed, unacknowledged wound. There's a lot of old emotional crap encrusted around his arguments, which somehow become personal, arrogant, even hateful.
Still, his book is a "good read," perhaps in part because it is unrestrained by the usual socially-sanctioned politenesses and tolerances around another man's religion. Raw intolerance makes for tough, sinewy prose, a refreshing change from that mealy-mouthed habit of tiptoeing around the feelings of everyone who might possibly be offended. Worth a try.
Then off it goes again. Sometimes I catch it sooner, sometimes later. Sometimes I only notice it has wandered off minutes later. Then the judgments come: how come you can't make a better job of this, when you've been doing it for ten years? My mind jumps at them: something to get its teeth into. Great.
So, no, it's not about leaving your mind at the door, along with your shoes, as Christopher Hitchens too easily assumes. It's not about blissing out and escaping the mind. For me, it's about teaching the mind to do exactly what I want it to do, about harnassing the power of the mind by training it to focus and concentrate.
I'm finding myself, eventually, irked by Hitchens's glib dismissal of all spiritual exercise, along with all religion. I suspect an inner rage that pushes him further than even reason wants to go--the result, perhaps, of some as yet unhealed, unacknowledged wound. There's a lot of old emotional crap encrusted around his arguments, which somehow become personal, arrogant, even hateful.
Still, his book is a "good read," perhaps in part because it is unrestrained by the usual socially-sanctioned politenesses and tolerances around another man's religion. Raw intolerance makes for tough, sinewy prose, a refreshing change from that mealy-mouthed habit of tiptoeing around the feelings of everyone who might possibly be offended. Worth a try.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Swinesend Revisted
I have been reading Quink's book. Quink, attentive readers will recall from occasional recent observations in the "Comments" section of The Buddha Diaries, is a fellow blogger and a somewhat more recent graduate than I of the absurdly misnamed British "public school" system. "Public", of course, in Brit speak, in this context means private--and exclusive of all those whose families either have no long history of association with the school in question, or can't afford the fees. Quink's book, "Swinesend" (please check out this link!), is a hilarious satrical indictment of the system. I got a good few chuckles of recognition as I read--along with the occasional cold frisson of recollected dread, pain and fear.
One of the great benefits of the meditation practice in which I have been engaged for some years now is that it affords me the opportunity to observe those patterns of feeling and behavior that originate in those "public school" days, and which persist in attempting to make their appearance in my life even today. So long as I manage to remain awake, I am able to catch them: the armor I instinctively resort to when anyone happens to get close; the exercise of boyish charm to deflect attempts of others to reach the more tender inner places; the knee-jerk teflon response to unwelcome feelings of pain, fear, and grief. As a small boy entering the "system" at the age of six--this was boarding school, mind--I quickly learned these skills in order to protect myself from the slings and arrows of other nasty little boys. I perfected my skills as I went along, and exercise them today without a second thought--unless I happen to pause and have that second thought, and recognize that the devices I learned as a six year old are neither necessary nor useful to a man of senior years. That's where meditation comes in useful.
It's also where I find myself in disagreement with Christopher Hitchens, whose "God Is Not Great" I am also reading. In his eagerness to indict all religions, he castigates Buddhism with the familiar charge that it requires you to leave your mind at the door along with your shoes. Which is not my experience of Buddhism at all. The mind part. I can live without the shoes. My experience is that Buddhism has everything to do with the mind, with mind-fulness, with bringing things to consciousness that might otherwise negatively affect my life and that of those around me--precisely those things, in my case, that threaten to govern my life and my behavior patterns in unproductive ways. I'm grateful for the daily opportunity to observe, and in some cases to correct them.
It's interesting to observe, though, how I go along with virtually everything Hitchens has to say about religion--and how my back goes up when he attacks my own beliefs. Well, I'd argue, not so much belief as practice. Now I have to wonder about that other issue we've been talking about recently: the ease with which we see the faults in others' arguments and beliefs, and the trouble we have in seeing those in our own. Which brings me back to my recent contretemps with Carly, on the subject of contemporary art...
One of the great benefits of the meditation practice in which I have been engaged for some years now is that it affords me the opportunity to observe those patterns of feeling and behavior that originate in those "public school" days, and which persist in attempting to make their appearance in my life even today. So long as I manage to remain awake, I am able to catch them: the armor I instinctively resort to when anyone happens to get close; the exercise of boyish charm to deflect attempts of others to reach the more tender inner places; the knee-jerk teflon response to unwelcome feelings of pain, fear, and grief. As a small boy entering the "system" at the age of six--this was boarding school, mind--I quickly learned these skills in order to protect myself from the slings and arrows of other nasty little boys. I perfected my skills as I went along, and exercise them today without a second thought--unless I happen to pause and have that second thought, and recognize that the devices I learned as a six year old are neither necessary nor useful to a man of senior years. That's where meditation comes in useful.
It's also where I find myself in disagreement with Christopher Hitchens, whose "God Is Not Great" I am also reading. In his eagerness to indict all religions, he castigates Buddhism with the familiar charge that it requires you to leave your mind at the door along with your shoes. Which is not my experience of Buddhism at all. The mind part. I can live without the shoes. My experience is that Buddhism has everything to do with the mind, with mind-fulness, with bringing things to consciousness that might otherwise negatively affect my life and that of those around me--precisely those things, in my case, that threaten to govern my life and my behavior patterns in unproductive ways. I'm grateful for the daily opportunity to observe, and in some cases to correct them.
It's interesting to observe, though, how I go along with virtually everything Hitchens has to say about religion--and how my back goes up when he attacks my own beliefs. Well, I'd argue, not so much belief as practice. Now I have to wonder about that other issue we've been talking about recently: the ease with which we see the faults in others' arguments and beliefs, and the trouble we have in seeing those in our own. Which brings me back to my recent contretemps with Carly, on the subject of contemporary art...
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Murder and Mayhem
In a dream last night, my mind contrived to arrange for the premature demise of a person who had once had the temerity to edit my articles and reviews. He died of AIDS. I read the obituaries in the newspapers, attended the funeral, watched him interred... Nice job, mind. Not very Buddhist of you. My only excuse for this execrable act of vengeance is that I had been watching "The Sopranos," and had likely picked up some useful hints about how to deal with those who cross me from the now (no longer so) cheerful band of brutes and bandits that populate its stories.I will confess to taking nefarious delight in crime fiction, both visual and literary. It started early. Probably influenced by my father's love of Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie (as a parish priest in small English villages, he probably found a lot in common with Miss Marple!) I started out with Father Brown and Sherlock Holmes, and never looked back. I even wrote a couple of mysteries myself, back in the 1980s, which were well received--the second one even got a nice write-up in the New York Times. (I should mention also, in the spirit of full disclosure, that the same book was panned by a Los Angeles Times reviewer: that was the guy I should have whacked in my dream last night!)
It's clearly a fascination I share with millions of my fellow human beings, though I have noticed that women generally go for the mystery genre, while men devour the more violent thrillers, both on the screen and between the covers of a book. It takes more knowledge of human psychology than I possess to begin to explain why we find the killing of our fellow humans so absorbing, but I do wonder whether it's damaging to the psyche to read about or watch. Maybe it's a chicken-and-egg question: are we excited to violence by its explicit portrayal on film and television? Or do we love it on film and television because we have some natural propensity for violence?
What is the fascination, here? With mysteries, I believe it's the mystery itself: stories are compelling to the human mind, and we always want to know how a story ends. Thrillers are harder to explain, because the end is never hard to guess. The good guys win, the bad guys get their comeuppance. And what's the pleasure in seeing bodies torn apart by bullets or blown sky high? Some say that seeing others imparts the satisfaction that it's not happening to us. Others, that the adrenalin rush is a satisfaction in itself. As horror flicks show (and I'm NOT a fan of horror flicks: I don't think I've even seen one since "The House of Wax" scared the pants off me back when I was a lad,) the gap between terror and laughter is a narrow one, so these films must be tugging at some powerful subconscious emotions.
What's a Buddhist to do? Ideally, I suspect, he would avoid all such contaminants of the mind--though there must be a matter of degrees: Agatha Christie, surely, would have to be considered less harmful than James Bond, and Simon Templer (aka The Saint) than Tony Soprano. Ellie, in this instance, would have to be considered a better Buddhist than I, since she eschews all violence, whether fictional or real, and complains of having trouble sleeping if she sees anything distrubing before going to bed.
One thing I'll say for "The Sopranos": unlike "24," it's not completely mindless. Underneath the mayhem, there are some interesting emotional and moral questions explored. But then, I have to admit that even the mindless can be compelling narrative. As for the real violence that we see--from Baghdad to Virginia Tech--well, as they say, don't get me started... But let me hear from you if you have thoughts about this topic.
Friday, April 13, 2007
Vonnegut
I promised the confessional piece today, but of course I can't let the moment pass without a word about Kurt Vonnegut. I was sad to hear that we had lost one of our most humane of literary voices. I knew Vonnegut a bit back in the 1960s, when I was at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and feel privileged to have known him--even though just a bit. 
I read a good deal of his work over the years, and was always enchanted by his peculiar spell as a writer (no pun intended...) I was moved by his last book, the overview of a man of a good number of years examining the world and our place in it, as a nation, with something approaching despair. I wrote about it in "The Bush Diaires"--the blog out of which "The Buddha Diaires" sprang. Here's what I said, in part, on Thursday, May 18, 2006:
I wonder what he'd have to say about the current affaire Imus? I'd like to think he'd be as bemused as I by our common aversion to the insults we gladly pay to have flung in our direction.
Anyway, thanks to Vonnegut, for everything he had to teach us. Bon voyage to him, wherever he may be headed. Or not. And apologies for the bad taste of quoting myself. As for the confession, well... later. Or tomorrow.
I read a good deal of his work over the years, and was always enchanted by his peculiar spell as a writer (no pun intended...) I was moved by his last book, the overview of a man of a good number of years examining the world and our place in it, as a nation, with something approaching despair. I wrote about it in "The Bush Diaires"--the blog out of which "The Buddha Diaires" sprang. Here's what I said, in part, on Thursday, May 18, 2006:"Just finished reading Kurt Vonnegut's "A Man Without a Country" last night. I started days ago and it's a very short book, a very easy read. I guess I'm a slow reader. Actually, I'm a fitful rather than a slow reader. But the book has been on my mind all this time. I've read extracts to friends. I've recommended it. It has to be one of the sharpest indictments of our culture you can read anywhere. An elegy for the human species and the planet earth in what he sees to be their final throes.
"But it's also kind. Avuncular. Full of quiet wisdom. Honest. Plain-spoken. Clear-sighted. It's the kind of talk you'd want to hear from your grandfather, out of the depth of his experience of the world. Funny. Witty. Angry. Full of grief and sadness that things have reached this pitch. Unadorned, unsparing of himself as well as others. And full of love for the world and, particularly, its people. He just loves people. All kinds, particularly those as plain and honest as himself. He reserves his wrath for those who are dishonest, stupid, short-sighted, self-serving, self-righteous, exploitative..."
I wonder what he'd have to say about the current affaire Imus? I'd like to think he'd be as bemused as I by our common aversion to the insults we gladly pay to have flung in our direction.
Anyway, thanks to Vonnegut, for everything he had to teach us. Bon voyage to him, wherever he may be headed. Or not. And apologies for the bad taste of quoting myself. As for the confession, well... later. Or tomorrow.
Monday, March 5, 2007
Ishmael
I picked up a copy of "Ishmael" yesterday, and started to reread it after, what? fifteen years since I first read it. The pages of my paperback edition have turned brown with the years, but it's still an amazing read. A novel of sorts, by Daniel Quinn, it takes the form of a Socratic dialogue about the relationship between us humans and the planet we inhabit. The participants are two characters, a teacher and a student. I know it sounds kind of boring when I desribe it that way. Perhaps it will help when I add, for the benefit of those who have not come across this marvelous book, that the teacher is a gigantic, full-grown gorilla whose name, of course, is Ishmael. Since his physical configuration disallows the command of human speech, he communicates through a kind of mental telepathy whose vehicle is the eyes.
A strange premise? Let me quote a passage from the beginning of the book which conveys some sense of its tone, its content, and the quality of thought. Ishmael starts out with a question: "Among the people of your culture...," he asks,
Which, so far as I'm concerned, is what the Buddhist meditation practice is all about. It's about learning to recognize in what ways I am captive to systems that control the way I think and the way I act, and learning to free myself from them. It's about learning to be human, and to live in as enlightened a manner as possible. Ishmael will soon begin to instruct his student about the difference between the culture he calls the Leavers and the culture he calls the Takers. The people of our culture--the one that is destroying the world--are the Takers. The Leavers are those who leave no footprint where they walk, and for whom all resources are renewable. We Takers, believing unquestioningly in the myth that this our god-given right, are busy taking the planet from them.
"Ishmael" was first published in 1992. Its warning was already obvious by then, to anyone who wished to see. But in the world of power politics, Al Gore's was the only voice in the wilderness--and look what happened to him. The fact that we have begun to resurrect him now from the oblivion to which we sought to consign him does not compensate for the ridicule to which he was subjected for so many years. It's sad that Quinn's voice, one of the relatively few, along with Gore's, was not more widely heard, or at least more widely heeded, fifteen years ago. We have squandered a good deal of the precious time that has been granted us to save ourselves, and save the planet Earth--if not for our own species, then for some future species on the evolutionary path.
In the meantime, may we all learn to leave more and take less. May we all learn to free ourselves from those systems we have designed for our own destruction. May we all be more conscious of what it is we do.
A strange premise? Let me quote a passage from the beginning of the book which conveys some sense of its tone, its content, and the quality of thought. Ishmael starts out with a question: "Among the people of your culture...," he asks,
"... which want to destroy the world?"
" As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world."
"And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world."
"Yes, that's so."
"Why don't you stop?"
I shrugged. "Frankly, we don't know how."
"You're captives of a system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live."
"Yes, that's the way it seems."
"So. You are captives--and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it?--your captivity and the captivity of the world."
"Yes, that's so. I've just never thought of it that way."
Which, so far as I'm concerned, is what the Buddhist meditation practice is all about. It's about learning to recognize in what ways I am captive to systems that control the way I think and the way I act, and learning to free myself from them. It's about learning to be human, and to live in as enlightened a manner as possible. Ishmael will soon begin to instruct his student about the difference between the culture he calls the Leavers and the culture he calls the Takers. The people of our culture--the one that is destroying the world--are the Takers. The Leavers are those who leave no footprint where they walk, and for whom all resources are renewable. We Takers, believing unquestioningly in the myth that this our god-given right, are busy taking the planet from them.
"Ishmael" was first published in 1992. Its warning was already obvious by then, to anyone who wished to see. But in the world of power politics, Al Gore's was the only voice in the wilderness--and look what happened to him. The fact that we have begun to resurrect him now from the oblivion to which we sought to consign him does not compensate for the ridicule to which he was subjected for so many years. It's sad that Quinn's voice, one of the relatively few, along with Gore's, was not more widely heard, or at least more widely heeded, fifteen years ago. We have squandered a good deal of the precious time that has been granted us to save ourselves, and save the planet Earth--if not for our own species, then for some future species on the evolutionary path.
In the meantime, may we all learn to leave more and take less. May we all learn to free ourselves from those systems we have designed for our own destruction. May we all be more conscious of what it is we do.
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