Quiddity
Suddenly, the little tab in the top center of my Yahoo inbox that used to say "Powered by hp," is fire-engine red and fires a new slogan one word at a time, Burma Shave style.
YOU (with a target for the O)
ARE
YOUR
PLAYLIST.
you + hp
There's a thought! Interesting timing, too: I hadn't noticed it until a couple days ago. Right on the eve of the GOP convention, which is described as the most scripted and theatrical ever.
I gather that on Sunday afternoon, as several hundred thousand of the unwashed mashes acted out their own playlists in the streets, the illuminati of the Republican Party were in the theatres enjoying special Republican Party-approved Broadway musicals, such as "The Lion King" and "Wonderful Town." "No one will be sent to see Mark Medoff's play 'Prymate,' . . . a show that confronts racial sensitivities and has a black actor playing a gorilla. They will not be sent to Tony Kushner's "Caroline, or Change," a serious musical about civil rights. In fact, they will not be sent to anything that touches on contemporary issues," the
New York Times reported.
In other words,
YOU
ARE
OUR
PLAYLIST.
you + GOP
Give my regards to Broadway.
Words on the street (blogging the RNC)
The devil in the details
All weekend the air hangs thick and heavy. On rare occasions when the sun peeks through the clouds, the woods and lawn turn into a Turkish steam bath. With barely a breeze at ground level or aloft, the numerous thunderstorms move at a snail's pace, like clipper ships becalmed in the Sargasso Sea. From Saturday afternoon on, one can hear an almost constant rumbling from storms in every direction.
When the storms hit, they bring brief downpours of monsoon strength. I sit on my porch and enjoy the tempest, teacup in hand. It's just as well that I decide to take a break from blogging on Sunday - the computer is off more often than it's on. My link to the web is through a wireless, so-called ethernet connection between here and my parent's house, and my father has learned the hard way - through two fried modems - always to unplug the jack from the wall at the first hint of a storm. The surge protector can't save the modem from a burst of electrons along the telephone line.
Yesterday afternoon we had two lightning strikes that almost certainly would have cooked the modem had it been connected. This wasn't one of those storms with lots of cloud-to-cloud lightning, "sound and fury signifying nothing." It was a thunderstorm that meant business: sheets of rain, long minutes between bolts of lightning that went straight to earth (or in fact, straight to sky, but I'm talking more about perception than reality here). The second close strike hit right behind my parent's house with an earsplitting crash. Ah, adrenalin! I do love a good storm . . .
I was attempting to read a book called
The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power, by Bruce Kapferer (University of Chicago Press, 1997), but it wasn't easy. The author plunges right into a dense, theoretical discussion in the Introduction, then proceeds to survey the entire field of "Sorcery in Anthropology" in Chapter 1. Only in the second chapter does he begin to get into the nitty-gritty, with descriptions of actual practices in the area where he has conducted fieldwork - among the Sinhalese Buddhists of Sri Lanka. Finally, my head stops hurting and I start finding passages I can sink my teeth into:
The supplicants to the shrines of Suniyam and the other demon-deities unite with the forces of magnified, transcendent, godlike human action. They join with the capacity of this action as a force in the destruction and re-creation of human realities, as a dynamic in the energies of exclusion and inclusion in the orders and relations of the life world, and as the expressive force of alienated and alienating power. When people visit the shrines to Suniyam and the other demon-deities or sorcery gods (usually to ask for assistance for some immediate practical matter concerning their everyday lives), they enter into the vertices of the turbulent power of human being. There they draw upon the magicality of human being and extend themselves into its magicality. This extraordinary potency of human beings is as apparent in lack and dispossession as in possession, to which Suniyam and other demon-deities give marvelous expression. I refer to the capacity of human beings to direct their consciousness actively and transformationally into the world, to make and unmake the realities of themselves and their fellows, to become intimate and influential in the actions of others, and even, as it were, to become consubstantial with the very bodily being of others. This is the potency of sorcery.
It occurs to me that a key phrase in all this is "as it were." With that last crash of thunder still echoing in my ears, I'm wondering in my usual way just how much it really amounts to, this "magicality" - Sartre's expression for the power of human intentionality arising from the formation of social bonds. How can you really compare the sparks from a human encounter with the awesome power of Nature? What do "godlike human action" and "the expressive force of alienated or alienating power" really amount to?
But then I remind myself of just how much destruction has been wrought by human beings since their adoption of the mechanistic worldview in the 17th century. Once alienated from the true wellsprings of Creation, the engineers, managers and economists, caught up in their boundless faith in the power and rightness of the human will, have indeed forged a terrifying global reality in which even the weather cannot now be ascribed solely to God or Nature.
The storm moves slowly off. With the last rumbles dying away in the east, it's time to reconnect the Plummer's Hollow intranet. But something's wrong; I can't get through. I use the pinging software installed by my techie cousin Jeff, and sure enough, there's nothing passing between the houses. I buzz my Dad on the intercom: is the modem working? Yep, no problem, he says. I run back and forth between the houses, trying this and that, dodging the ever-more-rampant tear-thumb - a moisture-loving plant that has taken over much of the lawn this summer.
We try our usual gambit when the connection fails: turn the main computer off and let it rest for a few minutes before restarting. Neither of us has any idea why this works, but usually it does. No dice this time, though. Finally, it occurs to me to try unplugging and reconnecting both wireless units. I reason that since they are plugged into unprotected circuits, a power surge from the lightning must have somehow knocked them off alignment, even though all their little lights are still glowing green.
It works! Or so the "WS Ping ProPack" suggests. I have to signal my dad to reconnect the modem briefly in order to verify the restoration of my connection. Another storm has already begun to move in.
Words on the street (blogging the RNC)
Gall
From
Reuters:
Police said there were more than 200 arrests during the day, most unrelated to the march, but there was at least one clash between self-styled anarchists and police along the route.
Why is it they never tell us about the well-behaved,
officially designated anarchists that must be out there? I mean, imagine if
everyone just called themselves anarchists whether they had any right to or not. It would be, like, anarchy!
New tricks
Most of my best correspondents are machines, I was muttering to myself as I scanned through my latest e-mail messages: automatically forwarded comments from Haloscan (5); automatically generated, monthly listserv subscription information (3); weekly updates from online dating services to which I had never subscribed and from which I could not seem to withdraw my name (2); spam addressed to people whose e-mail handle resembled mine (8); and a barrage of action alerts from close to two dozen do-gooder organizations. My favorites are the ones where all you have to do is hit "reply" and "send" and they do the rest - including sending a fax on your behalf. I love the idea of my lobotomized senator having to pay for the privilege of receiving tens of thousands of identical faxes on some issue he couldn't give a rat's ass about. The power of the people and all that.
Just then the phone rang. It was my mother. "Hey, you know that girl Joan you used to date? I just got the nicest letter from her! She mentioned she was doing a lot of driving for her new job, and said she'd be passing through in late September. It kind of sounded like she wants to stop in for a visit! Though she didn't come right out and say so."
"Huh," I said. A letter?
"So this morning I called her up, and we had the nicest conversation! She said she was sorry now about the way things worked out - or didn't work out,
you know - but that she had always admired our family so much, because her own had been so
dysfunctional and everything. She told me a few things that I can't really share with you, but it was just, I don't know,
nice.
"So anyway, she's going to drop in on the 28th and 29th - that's when we're all getting together for a late Labor Day celebration, and to see Tom and Crystal's new baby, remember?"
"Oh yeah, right."
"Well, I just thought, you'd be here anyway at that time . . . But with everyone else here too, there'd be less pressure on you to talk with her if you didn't feel like it. And you remember what a great cook she was! She said she'd be glad to help out in the kitchen - she sounded really excited about it. I mean, you know, I just feel sorry for her."
"Uh huh."
I guess I didn't really mind. Actually, I didn't think much about it at all, until the very morning of the reunion. My car's CD player wasn't working, so I was more or less forced to do some thinking for a while on the drive over. I started wondering about the logistics. Where was Joan going to sleep?
"She can sleep in your old bedroom, can't she? I figured you could just grab a sleeping bag from the attic and sleep on the living room floor," Mom said cheerfully when I called her on the cell phone. "It can't be much different from all that camping you do, right?"
You know those vivid dreams right before daybreak, where you feel as if you're lucid, as if your conscious mind is fully in control? But then you wake up and realize that it wasn't, and that you had had no more control over the way things turned out than in any other dream. That's kind of the way that weekend felt.
Joan was
completely different. It had only been twelve years since I'd last seen her - it seemed like yesterday. But in that time, evidently, she had worked at a half dozen different places, traveled all over the world, made (I think) quite a bit of money during the dot-com bubble, and when it burst, spent a couple years "getting her head together" at some ashram in Oregon or Washington state.
This last experience, she said, "totally changed my life," and I believed her. The thing is, I didn't much care for the change. The Joan I'd dated had been very opinionated, funny, decisive. She was the kind of person who knew exactly what she wanted out of life, which always fascinated me because it was so alien to my own, more contemplative existence. We liked each other a lot, but ultimately had decided that our constant disgreements were wearing us out.
The new Joan was anything but pushy. Even her voice had changed; her sentences now tended to trail off into the ether, or else would end with that peculiar rising intonation so popular among the younger set these days. And it was almost impossible to pin her down about anything.
"So what are you up to these days?" I asked after the obligatory long hug and effusions of warm mutual regard.
"Oh, so many things, you know? I mean, I'm just sort of
being, like in harmony with the universe? Living in the
now . . . "
"My mother said you were doing a lot of driving for your new job. You're in sales?"
"Oh, I don't know if I'd call it that . . . I mean, people do call it that . . . Like, you just did? But I don't know if that's my reality? . . . I drive . . . Sometimes I might get a sale . . . People in a rest area somewhere might read the side of my van and come over, you know, and talk for a while . . . If they don't buy anything, that's perfectly O.K.? Because I'm like in it for the whole journey?"
"Well, O.K., but what are you selling?"
She led me up to my old room and showed me what appeared to be an unpainted piece of lawn furniture. "I brought this one to give to your mother? I think they're so beautiful . . . But maybe you don't agree . . . "
"Um, well, I guess it is kind of . . .
compelling. It's a garden ornament of some kind?"
She let out an irritatingly tinkly laugh. "It's all hand-forged in the traditional way . . . No one makes them like this anymore . . . It's kind of based on a design, or really several designs, that I found in an old catalogue from 1898 . . . "
"You make them yourself?" I asked, remembering that her parents had been artists.
That laugh again. "Oh, it's not like I have a forge in my backyard or anything . . . "
Then, perhaps sensing my frustration, she knelt down and pointed out the outline of a dog sitting on its haunches. "They're so popular with dog lovers . . . Anyone who's ever had a companion animal knows what a deeply spiritual connection that can be . . . Like my Hermione here? Would you like to say hello to Dave? Dave, this is Hermione . . . "
There was a dog on my bed. A brown and tan mongrel - a beagle-border collie mix, by the look of it. "Hello," it said.
Joan let out another tinkle of laughter at my evident surprise. "Yes, she's quite a talker, aren't you Hermy?
"We met at the ashram?" Joan continued. "Sri Ramanujan - that's the guru - he tried to teach her a little bit of the Vedas? But I guess she didn't really care too much for that . . . She decided to start speaking English instead . . . "
"I said to myself, fuck this! I want to be able to go into the kitchen and place my order with the cooks! 'Hey, brother, how about forking over some of that sorry end of a sacred cow,'" the dog said in a gruff but perfectly intelligible voice, ending with a couple of short barks that were the closest she could come to laughing.
"We became, like, best friends?" Joan said.
"Nobody else wanted anything to do with me. 'Who wants a dog that can talk? Besides, she's so
judgemental,'" Hermione mimicked. "Idiots!"
I regarded her warily. "So what do
you do?" I asked, trying to steer the conversation away from topics that might offend the newly sensitive Joan.
"What do
I do? I'm a dog! I piss and shit, shed hair and scratch up the furniture. I live like a queen! And besides, let me tell you, it's a full-time job just keeping an eye on this flako nut-job!" Bark bark. "I have to take her for a walk every morning, or she'd do nothing but sit around and gaze at her navel all day. Honey, I say, if anything ever happens with your navel, I'll tell you! You'll be the first to know!" Bark bark bark.
"She plays piano, too? It's, like, so beautiful and spiritual," Joan said demurely. "She says she taught herself, but I think she must've remembered it from a past life?" Hermione replied with what can only be described as a snort.
So the visit turned out to be a lot more interesting than I had expected. I figured the only way to find out what had really happened at the ashram, and what was happening in Joan's life now, was to ask Hermione in private. Plus, I wanted to make sure she was really speaking on her own - I wouldn't put it past Joan to have learned ventriloquism.
But the dog really was that vocal - and that smart. "No, Joan isn't a ventriloquist!" she said as I pushed the bedroom door open.
Her words did sound a little muffled, though. She was lying on the bed as before, with one of my bathroom slippers between her teeth.
"Hey, that's my slipper!" I protested.
"Well, I figured it belonged to somebody," she said as she gave it a good shake. "Don't worry, I'll tell Joan to buy you a new pair before we leave." Chew chew chew.
"But
why . . . "
"Look, Dave, do you have any idea what it's like to be a carnivore? I mean a
real carnivore with
real canines that give you sharp jolts, unpleasant little reminders of their existence, if you go too long without ripping apart a rotting carcass. You know what I'm saying? Bad karma be damned! This isn't a lifestyle choice!"
I laughed. "O.K., but why
my slippers? If you have some issues, let's talk them out. I mean, you can do that, right?"
"Dogs don't have issues, Dave. They have
problems. Look, I know there are such things as pet psychiatrists, but you're not one of them, O.K.? I had no idea whose slipper this was. I'm sorry! You'll get a new one!"
And she
was sorry, too, I could tell that. She was, after all, a beagle-border collie mix - they have a gift for that sort of thing. I wondered whether her facility with human speech might have supressed her native capacity for empathy, though.
She let out a bark of laughter. "No, you don't do it like that! If you want to learn how to tell what others are thinking, you can't just look straight into their eyes - that's no good," she said.
I hadn't even known that that
was what I wanted to learn until she said so. It occurred to me that speech was perhaps the least of the tricks that Hermione had learned from hanging out with the guru at Joan's ashram.
"The corners of the eyes," she said, "and on human beings, the corners of their mouth - and the lines between the two. That's where you look."
I settled into the armchair next to the bed. "Do you mind if I smoke?"
Words on the street
Felonious bicyclists
If anyone's wondering how those
nice young bikers I blogged about last week might be faring in the mean streets of New York,
this morning's headlines gave a clue.
Inside the ruins of the machine
I've been reading
The Lost Heart of Asia, by the British travel writer (and novelist) Colin Thubron (HarperPerennial, 1994). He describes a circuit of the former Soviet Central Asian republics - the 'Stans, minus Afghanistan - just six months after the collapse of Soviet rule.
The Uzbekistan portion seems especially poignant, considering what that country has since turned into: a dictatorship more brutal and possibly even more corrupt than it had been when the Russians called the shots. Uzbekistan now also hosts a garrison of the American empire, a major anchor for a string of bases and "forward command posts" strung throughout the region. Under the just-announced restructuring of American forces abroad, Central Asia is slated to become even more central to U.S. global hegemony. One can't help but feel grim fascination at this complete repositioning of what had been, only a few years before, a region on the geographical periphery of Western interests.
Thubron's "Lost Heart of Asia" has indeed been rediscovered, albeit in a manner far different from the expectations of its inhabitants when he interviewed them in 1992. The most common dream then, he found, was for a pan-Turkic empire with its capital in Burkhara or Samarkand. Pan-Islam seemed a remote and distasteful possibility, even to Muslims. Some yearned for the return of Soviet stability; others with longer memories hearkened back to the benign neglect under the czars, before forced collectivization and Stalin's purges turned everything upside down. Environmental catastrophes present and imminent contributed to a general sense of "lostness" and malaise.
This is a part of the world where world-conquerors have come and gone with depressing regularity. Samarkand, the capital of Uzbekistan, was once the center of a vast empire founded by Tamerlane the Great. As Thubron points out, its very name has evoked the quintessence of the exotic in the Western European imagination for several hundred years. Samarkand was "the fantasy of Goethe and Handel, Marlowe and Keats, yet its reality was out of reach." For Thubron, its ruins even now seem inaccessible, "as if a whole secret city had died within the modern one."
The 20th-century philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari derived their crucial concept of a war machine in part from Central Asian historical models. Through war machines, the self-organizing and emergent powers in non-organic matter can be concentrated and turned upon the centralized hierarchies of states and empires; the latter attempt in turn to capture and transform war machines into armies. Tamerlane, as a Mongol and a Muslim, built an enduring war machine similar to what the Spanish conquistadors later employed against the Aztec and Inca empires: one part military, one part universalizing religion. Six centuries later, the landscape still bears witness to the monstrous imposition of his rule. Thubron writes,
I went out into the ruins of Bibi Khanum, feeling an obscure self-reproach. Even in desolation the mosque seemed to tower out of an era more fortunate than my own (but this was an illusion). Tamerlane had built it as the greatest temple in Islam. Thousands of captured artisans from Persia, Iraq and Azerbaijan had labored to carve its marble floors, glaze its acres of tiles, erect its monster towers and the four hundred cupolas bubbling over its galleries. The emperor flailed its building forward. He considered too small the gateway completed in his absence, pulled it down wholesale, hanged its architects and began again. But the mountainous vaults and minarets which he envisioned crushed the foundations, and the walls started to fracture almost before completion. People began to be afraid to pray there. It towered above me in megalomaniac reverie, raining the sky with blistered arches and severed domes. Cracks pitched and zigzagged down the walls. Tiles flaked off like skin. The gateway loomed so high that the spring of its vanished arch began eighty feet above me, and completed itself phantasmally in empty air. Gaping breaches had split the prayer-hall top to bottom, and the squinches were shedding whole bricks.
Everything - the thunderous minarets, the thirty-foot doors, the outsize ablutions basin - shrunk the visitor to a Lilliputian intruder, and peopled the mosque with giants. In the court's centre a megalithic lectern of grey Mongollian marble had once cradled a gargantuan Koran, but its indestructibility, and perhaps its isolation from the mosque's wrecked heart, had touched it with pagan mana now, and it had become the haunt of barren women, who crouched beneath it as a charm for fertility.
As I sat nearby, three young worldlings, urban and confident in high heels, went giggling and nudging towards it. Their shrieks rang in the ruins. Then, separately, they dropped on all fours and crawled in and out between the lectern's nine marble legs. At first they ridiculed one another at this place where fun and superstition merged. But once unseen by their companions, creeping through the marble labyrinth, an unease descended. Covertly they touched their palms to the stone. One of them kissed it. Then they emerged, straightening their stockings, and tripped away.
Perhaps this is the best that we can wish for: that the imperial state will be crushed under the weight of its own, vast machinery. Eight centuries from now, will the ruins of oil refineries be converted to some more benign use?
__________
See also
In the twilight of empire (August 18). I cribbed the stuff on D&G's war machine from
Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary, by
Mark Bonta and John Protevi (Edinburgh University Press, 2004), which you should all immediately
go buy. For more on the book, see
Forest time, forest space (May 25).
Words on the street
Barley wine poems
Yesterday afternoon and early evening I permitted myself to get a little deep into my cups for the first time since July 2, and just as I did then, I took a notebook out on the porch with me. This time I was drinking a spiced barley wine that I bottled way back in December 2002, after a year and a half in the cask (actually a glass carboy). I hadn't been too impressed with it on previous tastings, but perhaps it just hadn't aged enough.
I found myself jotting down short poems, or the notes for poems, with the kind of fury I can otherwise only manage first thing in the morning. Some of them don't seem too bad. With some, I'm not sure now exactly what I had in mind. But maybe that's all right.
UPDATE: Still revising as of Friday morning. It IS all in the editing!A gnat falls into my wine.
I sip around him.
After a while the pin-
prick flotsam washes
against the side
& sticks fast.
Revives.
Crawls all
the way up to
the rim. Inspired,
I down the rest of the wine
in two big gulps.
__________
That gnat must not have been
a poet, to survive such
a baptism in wine. I raise
the glass it escaped from
in solemn tribute,
resolve to keep drinking
until the moon comes up.
__________
Cicada drone. A flicker's
namesake call. Carolina
wren's insistent zipper.
Crickets, crickets, crickets.
The first desultory katydid.
It's not just in my head,
this hum,
this buzz.
__________
Drinking on the porch with
my feet propped up,
I forget myself.
What beautiful arches
you have, I murmur.
And the toes - what fine
fat targets. Ten
bleary half-moons
glimmer back.
__________
Six o'clock, but
no chipmunks chipping
as they almost always do
this time of year, standing at
the mouths of their burrows.
I wonder what's
in the news?
__________
A breeze: red
maple leaves turn
their backs.
Aspen goes wild.
White pine whistles
through its teeth.
__________
The bull thistle's clock
has three faces:
stubbled green; florid
purple; white hair
falling out in clumps.
At the peak of flowering, half
of every bush is already dead.
My eye follows
a spicebush swallowtail
making its unrepeatable way
into the treetops.
__________
In the end, the light
goes mute, retreats
one cricket at a time.
Deep in the grass, the faint
spots where glowworms
fade in, fade out.
__________
What am I missing
by writing? What
would escape me if
I didn't write? Wait
until it's too dark
to write anything,
listen as the katydids
start up: first this side
then the other, night
after night.
__________
Another glass of wine,
another drowned gnat.
God or evolution,
it's all in the editing.
__________
This whole
made world
is nothing but a conspiracy
between a rock and
a hard place, says
the all-night rain.
A reminder to the willful, to be the quest you seek
It wasn't a treasure hunt we were on, you said after reading
my account.
It seems the apparent quarry was incidental, a
trick of my imagination - and of my poor memory for dialogue.
What were we looking for then? I asked.
Whatever happened to be there, you said.
And anyway, what we found, those flowers - I already knew they were there.
But. Now I'm no longer positive about my identification. I just don't know whether they fall within the acceptable bounds of variation for the species.
So, no hunt!
Words on the street
Myotis lucifugus
The portico light had been left on, and after a while I noticed that bats had begun swooping in to catch the insects that swarmed around it. Eva and I went to the door to watch. Just as we got there, a bat flew in above us and didn't go back out. I opened the door and looked up. He had climbed into the crack between the end of the roof and the side of the house, and had begun grooming himself. With the aid of a flashlight, this turned into quite an engrossing spectacle.
The bat - a little brown myotis, presumably a solitary male - kept his face turned mostly away from us, so that what we saw most often looked like a big-eared mouse chewing on a tiny umbrella. Only when he worked on the surface of an open wing did we get a look at his face, dimly visible through the thin membrane of skin.
The contrast between the smooth wing and the deeply wrinkled, pushed-in face seemed to suggest some elemental truth about the night, and about the sort of consciousness one must evolve to fully inhabit it. I mean, one can easily follow custom and read into a bat's face the stamp of evil, or an eldritch wisdom. But nothing of that sort came to mind; only now, in retrospect, do judgements like these suggest themselves. We felt, I think, only a simple awe.
We watched so long, Eva started to complain of neck cramps, and both my arms got tired from holding the flashlight in turn. He spent most of his time on the wings, with only a few nibbles at his abdomen. Is this something that bats have to do every few hours to remain flight-worthy?
Bat Conservation International's website says only that
In addition to day roosts in tree cavities and crevices, little brown myotis seem quite dependent upon roosts which provide safe havens from predators that are close to foraging grounds.
So possibly the screech owl that we heard calling intermittently had been too close for comfort.
When the bat finished grooming, he turned his listening face full on me for a few seconds, then, rather than flying out the way he came, scuttled up feet first through a crack in the tiles and disappeared. It was only then that I thought to wonder if the flashlight had hurt his eyes.
Words on the street
The world doesn't end
We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap.
Charles Simic, The World Doesn't End
The Queen of Noisy Things says she misses the quiet. Everyone clamors agreement. Well, almost everyone.
The president of a small company whose one plant is far from the action says,
We can only compete by focusing on quality. That's the burden this isolated location has visited on us. In return, our workers get quality of life, close to the land. The plant sits a few miles from the exact center of the country. What could be more convenient? If you stand facing north, the sound of the ocean is just about the same in either ear.
The queen muses. It can crush you, that quiet. Hanging from a rope inside a crevasse in a glacier, out of the howling wind, hearing a sudden creak from deep in the ice: an extra shiver. Or in the silence after love, with the pounding of the blood slowly diminishing in the ears. So much tenderness, a single word could ruin everything.
The plant burned to the ground. The next day, everyone showed up as usual. The president, himself a line-worker then, remembers how the workers had to first draw up their own templates. In the temporary absence of everything but faith, without the clamor of machines to come between them, they pulled together. Production resumed within a month. The fire lived on in the workers' bellies.
Words on the street
Comparative religion: a brief exercise
1.
Jesus wept.
Sarah laughed.
Gautama touched the ground.
2.
The Messiah came, and is expected to return.
The Messiah will come when all hearts are ready, when all minds have turned.
The future Buddha is still a bodhisattva, but you can visualize him as a Buddha in the present if it helps.
3.
With God, all things are possible.
With God, all things are possible except the forgiveness that only the person you have wronged can give.
With bodhi-mind, all things are as they are: impossible.
Dust
Some
responses to a poem of Kurt's over at
Coffee Sutras put me in mind of the
Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. Unfortunately, the only translation I have is pretty clunky, but it's part of a thick volume of sutras, published in Taiwan back in 1962, that contains classical Chinese and English on facing pages. I remember just enough Chinese from college to be able to figure out how to improve on the English (which I otherwise use as a crutch).
Please note that I am not a Zen Buddhist, however; I welcome suggestions on how to improve the translation and commentary that follow.
The
Platform Sutra is in my opinion a classic of world literature on the level of St. Augustine's
Confessions. Like that work, it does get rather dull in parts. But the opening section contains an autobiography that is remarkable for the author's insights into the mental condition of his would-be adversary Shenxiu, the head monk at the Chan (Zen) monastery where an illiterate Huineng - the future Sixth Patriarch - is stuck in the kitchen, put on rice-hulling duty.
The central drama concerns the contest over dharma transmission, a perennial, defining feature of hierarchical politics within the Chan sect. Like the aging Isaac in the Bible, who to the utter perplexity of most modern readers has but a single blessing to dispense to one of his two children, Chan masters apparently could only transmit the mystical essence of their teaching (dharma) to one pupil. Such transmission can only occur if the pupil has attained some form of enlightenment. That's the theory, anyway.
So one day the reigning patriarch announces what amounts to a poetry contest for the monastic succession. After a protracted argument with himself about what to do, Shenxiu sneaks out after dark to graffito his submission anonymously on the side of a wall:
The body is like the bodhi-tree,
The mind, a bright mirror.
Hour by hour one wipes it clean.
Dust never gets a chance to settle!The sutra describes Shenxiu returning to his room and lying awake until dawn, plagued with doubts. "In the quiet of his room he pondered: 'When the Patriarch sees my stanza tomorrow, if he likes it, it will show that I am ready for the dharma. But if he disapproves, it will mean I'm unworthy, owing no doubt to misdeeds in previous lives, karmic accumulations thoroughly beclouding my mind. What will he say about it? It's so hard to predict!'"
Huineng doesn't say how he gained this omniscient narrator's perspective; perhaps the pious reader is supposed to take it as a sign of his unique attainment. But I wonder if this might not also hint at some otherwise secret rapprochement between adversaries, whose respective followers would maintain a strong rivalry for centuries.
At any rate, the next day when the Master comes across the verse, he diplomatically orders incense to be burned before it, declaring that anyone who follows its teachings would gain great merit. The monks lose no time in figuring out its author, and many of them quickly commit it to memory. That's the other great thing about this sutra: its wholly convincing portrayal of monastic politics. Noble intentions and genuine insights mix with insecurity, arrogance and obsequiousness. The master himself, we soon learn, isn't exactly a free agent, and fears violence and general insurrection if he passes over the head monk in choosing his successor. He sends for Shenxiu the following night, imparts some gentle words of instruction, and urges him to keep trying.
Huineng, engrossed in his kitchen duties, remains blissfully unaware of this swirl of political events. But one day, an acolyte passes by the kitchen loudly reciting Shenxiu's verse.
"What poem is that?" I asked the lad. "You dumb hick! How could you not know about it? The Master told all his followers that, since the question of rebirth was so difficult, those who wish to inherit his robe and teaching should write him a verse, and whoever managed to express the true nature of the mind would become the Sixth Patriarch. Elder Shenxiu wrote this free verse stanza on the wall of the south corridor and the Master told us to recite it. He also said that those who put its teachings into practice would benefit tremendously and be saved from rebirth in the Hell realms."
I told him I wanted to learn it too, so I might have the benefit of it in the future. Even though I'd been at the monastery for eight months hulling rice, I'd never had occasion to go to the meditation hall, so I asked the boy to show me where the poem was written so I could pay my respects.
He led me to the spot. Since I was illiterate, I asked him to read it to me. A petty officer of the Canton district named Zhang Zhiyong happened to be passing by, and he stopped and read it out clearly for me. [This presumably means he translated it into the vernacular.] Then I told him that I too had composed a poem, and asked if he could write it there for me.
"How extraordinary!" he exclaimed. "Can someone like you really compose a poem?"
"Even if it's the highest form of enlightenment you're after, you shouldn't look down on a beginner," I replied.
"Please recite your stanza, then," he said. "I'll write it down. But if you should succeed and win the dharma, don't forget to bring me along!"
My stanza read as follows:
Bodhi has nothing to do with a tree;
Bright and reflective, the mind is nothing like a mirror.
Without so much as a single attribute,
How could there be any place for dust to collect?"
Later on, attracted by the gathering crowd, the Master came over and erased the poem with his shoe to prevent anyone from getting envious and beating me up. When they saw this, the monks assumed it meant that the poem's author had not yet realized the essence of the mind.
The next day, the Patriarch came secretly to the room where rice was milled. Seeing me at work with the stone pestle, he said, "A seeker of the path risks his life for the dharma. Is this proper?" Then he asked, "Is the rice ready?" "Ready long ago," I replied. "It's just waiting for the sieve." He knocked the mortar three times with his stick and went away.
Guessing what the signal meant, in the third watch of the night I went to his room. Using his robe as a screen so that no one would see us, he expounded the Diamond Sutra to me. When he came to the line, "One should use one's mind in such a way that it will be free from attachment," I suddenly became thoroughly enlightened and realized that the mind's true nature can't be differentiated from the world at large.
On re-reading this, I'm struck by the reverence for the text displayed throughout the
Platform Sutra. Though the story of Huineng gaining enlightenment without the benefit of literacy would play a role in the development of anti-intellectual tendencies in some later versions of Zen, in his own teachings the recitation of texts occupies a central place. Silent reading won't do; one must hear, take to heart/mind and speak. But as the example of Shenxiu demonstrates, words themselves, however worthy of respect, can be of little use to the mind that still sees itself as apart from its words and images, the "ten thousand things" that accumulate seemingly of their own accord, like dust.
It's no wonder, then, that the portrait of Shenxiu is so sympathetic and psychologically realistic: we are meant to hear ourselves in his agonized self-doubt.
Words on the street
On a wing and a prayer
I'm tired. I woke up earlier than usual with stranger than usual phrases dancing on the tip of my mind's tongue:
still life with homunculus. The automata of experience. Three feathers for the last emir. There was also one that tasted deliciously ordinary, but melted before I could get downstairs and commit it to writing.
*
Crescent moon long set, starlight's enough to make the mist visible in the corner of the field. On the other side of the driveway, a round, white spot the size of a small pumpkin. It isn't moving. I carry my empty cup into the kitchen, fetch a flashlight, train it on the spot: it's a balloon. Maybe one of the ones left over from when my niece was here last week, blown down from my parent's house. I could make something wistful out of all this, I know. But one thing about living on a mountain is that the wind has a way of dropping off balloons let loose many miles away. "Happy anniversary," they say, or "Congratulations on your retirement." You know how it works, I'm sure: they rise only so high, the wind takes them a ways, then when enough helium leaks out they sink to the ground. A bit like prayer flags, a bit like roadside trash.
*
I wonder where the intrepid bicyclists spent the night. I'm talking about a group of twelve who left Pittsburgh on Friday, bound for New York City to protest at the Republican National Convention. The point of going there by bike is to draw attention to our gasoline addiction, apparently. But J., our contact with the group, admitted that she was mainly just curious to see if she could do it.
There weren't any convenient state parks or state forests to camp in on the second night of their sojourn, so we offered use of the (ahem!) Plummer's Hollow Private Nature Reserve. But they badly underestimated the distance and the extent to which Central Pennsylvania topography would interfere with cell phone reception. Many became separated from the group and got lost. In the end, only the four hardiest bicyclists made it this far, straggling in well after dark. The other eight ended up scattered all along the Allegheny Front.
By 9:00 a.m. yesterday, only one was still unaccounted for, and they arranged to reunite at the bottom of the hollow before continuing east. "Give 'em hell in New York, if you get there," I said rather thoughtlessly as I waved goodbye from the porch. "Hey, we'll make it!" the leader shouted, dismounting and lifting his bike over the first of the 45 grating-topped culverts that keep the Plummer's Hollow Road from washing into the Little Juniata.
I hope the thick fog that had been blanketing the valleys at 7:00 when I walked up to the top of the ridge had burnt off a bit by the time they got down there. Good luck, y'all. Keep your powder dry.
*
The balloon turned out to be trailing a long, silver ribbon, so it wasn't one of ours. I wonder how far it traveled to get here, and what might have been the occasion of its escape - or release? It's completely blank. Supply your own message.
The ineffable, with a sore bottom
For Beth, because she liked it You sit, spine arrow-
straight, aiming at
the center of each
ripple: that spot where
a mayfly guttered,
where a thought-
fish rose. Unwatched,
your face begins to show
its phylogeny, relaxing
against the skull's
inverted cup. You start
to glow, like any primate
being groomed - though
there's no other.
The preceptor's long-
ago story has set
root: how the only guard
on duty left her post
because she forgot the
watchword, bought
herself a bottle &
drank & drank until
she forgot her own
name. So the city
was overrun: that's
how you're sitting.
Through the open window
the sound of rain like
the body's finest hairs
whispering with static.
You sit as if you were
no longer waiting
for anything, as if your
bones were tired of talking
among themselves,
as if they could climb
an upside-down tree
of lightning.
If only they weren't
sewn up in a bag like
field mice in their
cave of grass: all flesh,
all blister. I mean
this grab bag,
this very poem
so far from where
you sit.
The head cook's instructions for Dogen
(Dogen's Tenzo Kyokun
, "Instructions for the Head Cook," became a central text for the Soto school of Zen, which he founded in the 13th century. In a beautiful series of images, Dogen urges his monks to exercise the tender care of a parent or grandparent toward each other, toward themselves, toward all things, animate or otherwise. "Handle the grains of rice as if they were your own eyes," Dogen preached. I started thinking, what a pain in the ass he must have been if they ever actually let him in the kitchen!)Oh childless father,
let me tell you about
this Grandmother
Mind: she slices.
She minces.
She chops.
She makes short work
of fat monks.
Go to the Dojo.
If you want to eat
on time, let
me nap.
Words on the street
Child's play
Inside the play-ground an absolute and peculiar order reigns. Here we come across another, very positive feature of play: it creates order, it is order. Into an imperfect world it brings a temporary, a limited perfection. Play demands order absolute and supreme. The least deviation from it "spoils the game," robs it of its character and makes it worthless.
- Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Beacon Press, 1950)
The hasidim tell the story of Rabbi Baruch, whose grandson Yechiel was playing hide-and-seek with a friend. Yechiel hid himself cleverly and waited for his friend, who never came to find him. Realizing that he had been abandoned, he ran crying to his grandfather and complained about his faithless friend. Rabbi Baruch's eyes, too, filled with tears, as he told the young boy: God says the same thing: I hide, but no one wants to seek Me!
- Rabbi Amy R. Scheinerman, ELUL WEEK 1 -- RESPONSIBILITY (via Velveteen Rabbi)
I hid too well. I lay under the tarp in plain view and willed myself into a clump of weeds, a mound of dirt. Springtails and inchworms began to claim me as an extension of their territories. A daddy longlegs scaled my torso and ran across my face, palpae ghosting over the Braille of my cheek and forehead.
My niece ran around the house, peering into all the obvious places, hollering my name. I lay still, certain the slight crepitating of the tarp in time with my breathing would give me away. But in less than ten minutes, everything was quiet. A vole began rustling against one of the corners farthest from my head, and I began to think my presence there was unwelcome. But I waited, trusting that the seeker would not abandon the chase without signaling surrender.
I'm not normally inclined to claustrophobia, but after twenty minutes it got too hot under the tarp and I had to get out. I eased it off me as quietly as I could and stumbled to my feet, dislodging several ants and caterpillars in the process. The thing to do now, I thought, was creep around the house and take a seat on the verandah, where she'd find me right before she gave up.
But when I rounded the corner of my parent's house, there she and my dad sat, reading a book together. "Where were you?" she asked with feigned unconcern. I stood there blinking in confusion. "Where did you hide?" she persisted. I brushed at an imaginary spider. "You think I'm telling
you? Don't you even know how to play hide-and-go-seek?" I demanded angrily.
But of course she didn't know. Without siblings, and with precious few playmates her own age down in Mississippi, where would she ever have learned the rules of engagement?
***
Thhhnk! Thhhnk! Thhhnk! Eva's fist slams into my diaphragm with all the strength she can muster. She stands with one foot forward, in prizefighter form. Then for variation she crouches and aims a karate kick at my head. "Hey! Where did you learn to do that?" I barely dodge in time, grabbing her foot. "From watching my mommy!" Then she's back to punching my flabby gut.
"Does your dad let you do this to him?"
"Uh, well, I don't know. I guess not."
"So why pick on me?" I whine. "Can't you pick on someone your own size?"
She giggles. "No! I only punch my Uncle Dave! Because I know you're FIERCE!"
If only that were true, I think to myself - but already the game has morphed into something else. "I LOVE you, Uncle Dave!" she says in her most melodramatic voice, throwing her arms around me. Good grief! What next?
There's no question the kid's got brains: it didn't take her long to figure out the one kind of attack I'm not very good at fending off. "Put your arms around me!" she commands. I reluctantly comply, thinking: another eight years and this girl's gonna be hell on ice.
***
The crudely drawn map had shown only a few, tentative landmarks - lines that might or might not have been trails, an "x" showing where the treasure chest had been hidden "at ye base of ye white pine tree between two okes." Additional inscriptions hinted at the forbidding nature of the terrain: "BEWARE: Many Spyders," and "here there bee squirrels."
The doughty female pirate, accompanied by her two chief scientists, was unperturbed. She hacked mercilessly at the webs of the spiny micrathena with her vorple, cardboard blade. Any squirrels that hadn't fled at the sound of her bloodthirsty cries must've been struck dumb by the terrible device with which her shield was emblazoned: a skull swimming in a pool of blood, encircled by a ring of fire. It looked a bit like the cover of a Slayer album.
Even with the help of scientists, the map's instructions were difficult to follow.
Where was that scurvy pine tree? Disoriented, they found themselves stumbling in circles, the thick vegetation tearing at their clothes, vultures circling. But just as they were about to abandon the search, the chief scientist spotted a scrubby sapling with dark needles. "Hey, there's another pine tree! And look, there's the chest!"
And there it was, a classic, green sea chest with tarnished brass fittings, gleaming in a patch of sunlight. Eva let out a triumphal shriek, and she and her grandpa pushed their way through the laurel to claim their prize. But just then they heard a crashing noise off to their right, the sound of pirate boots scuffling on dry leaves. Sun flashed on metal. The air filled with the smell of brimstone. They stood transfixed with horror as the apparition hove into view: a bearded, black-bandanna'd pirate ghost clenching a scimitar-shaped machete between yellow teeth. "WHO DARES DISTURB THE LOST TREASURE OF PLUMMER'S HOLLOW?"
"Avast!"
"Have at ye!"
"ARRRR!"
The fight was long and - needless to say - terrible. Blood was curdled. Timbers were shivered. When it was over, the undead defender of the lost treasure lay in a pool of gore, torn limb from limb. The female pirate and her assistants ignored the threats of revenge that still issued in a hoarse whisper from his bloody lips. They broke the lock on the chest and lifted the lid: another strongbox! They tore savagely at the duct tape. Oh my god! Styrofoam packing peanuts!
A small jewelry case lay hidden at the bottom of the box. Cautious now despite her great excitement, Eva pried it open. At last, the treasure was hers! It sparkled between thumb and forefinger as she gazed for a moment or two in uncharacteristic silence.
"AHA! Feast your eyes on this, me maties! The world's most precious and only
clear ruby!"***
"Yes, Eva, there
are female pirates - or were." One of the encyclopedias we consulted even included portraits of two of the most famous women pirates from the late 18th century. We were careful not to mention the reality of modern piracy in places like the Molucca Straits, nor to bring up the only slightly more figurative piracy that is contemporary monopoly capitalism.
The idea of a treasure hunt on the last afternoon of Eva's latest sojourn in Plummer's Hollow had come from my dad - her grandpa. Which is ironic, given his strongly pacifist views. They'd hung out together all morning, telling stories. "Geez, you were never this much fun when
we were kids!" I said jokingly during lunch.
But the truth is that when my brothers and I were kids, living on an isolated, mountaintop farm, we had each other as playmates and fellow adventurers; Eva is an only child. Now, thinking it over, I'm forced to reevaluate my childhood memories a bit. However much each of us three brothers might choose to dwell on the times when we fought, when we dominated and made each other miserable for no good reason, the fact is that we were extraordinarily fortunate to have grown up the way we did, our imaginations virtually unimpacted by television, pop music, and all the other anodynes of post-industrial civilization whose side-effects seem to include a general stifling of the imagination and a fracturing of the attention span.
The most salient fact of my pre-pubescent history remains my unusual capacity for self-induced misery. I was a displeasure addict, throwing tantrums at the drop of a hat. Even so, I can easily recall dozens of memorable adventures that I had in the company of one or both of my siblings. There was the time we went looking for Middle Earth in the hollows beyond the Far Field, mysterious with fog. I got completely disoriented and frightened, and was forced like Rabbit in the
House at Pooh Corner to humble myself before my little brother, who led us unerringly home. Then there was that time when my big brother led the way into a giant blackberry thicket - at a rabbit's-eye level. The three of us spent a lovely couple of hours on our hands and knees, gingerly excavating a long tunnel, then hollowing out a sanctuary in the thicket's impregnable heart. Talk about a pirate fort!
On rainy days, we set up makeshift tables in front of the doors to our rooms, set out all the toys, knick-knacks and gee-gaws we could afford to part with, and then took turns "shopping" at each other's tables. No money was necessary; even questions of trade, fair or otherwise, didn't intrude. These were, as we called them, "give-away sales." And just as in the
kula system of ceremonial exchange described by Bronislaw Malinowski in
Argonauts of the Western Pacific, the same items circulated from owner to owner.
Raised by liberals who believed in treating their children as intellectual equals, the problems of the world were never far from our minds. Our parents didn't try to shield us from the knowledge of such nightmare-inducing horrors as mass starvation, genocide and nuclear Armageddon. But we remained kids; such knowledge only challenged our imaginations to work harder. Now, from the perspective of a quarter century later, I am struck by the fact that the adult reality we lived under, the Cold War, has utterly vanished, while the worlds we conjured up in its stead have lost none of their power to enchant. The buried treasures and dragon hoards we sought then seem, in a strange way, realer than the stock-optional wealth of the dot-com boom or the ebb tide of investments that devastated the economies of Southeast Asia a few years back. My brothers and I each remain idealists, and on the rare occasions when the three of us get together, the B.S. sessions are a wonder to behold. We may disagree about the nature of the quarry now, but the rules of the game are still intact and the search is still on.
Words from the street
Both sides now
Away from home today. All I can come up with is a brief bit of moralizing poetry.The view from
inside the glass
house distorts:
every darting
wren looks like
a stone. Only
the hummingbird seems
driven by harmless
desire. She
hovers, hangs
in place for
a long moment, bill
millimeters from
the pane, still -
apart from
the fury of
her wings. But
of all the ranked
blossoms, what
can she see?
At best, a faint wash
of exotic hues.
What's drawn
her in is green,
hateful green -
guerrilla foe
who blocks her
every advance,
matches her
zig for
zag but will
not, will not
engage.
Education for healing
I recently finished the book I blogged about
back on July 9,
Boiling Energy: Community Healing Among the Kalahari Kung (Harvard U.P., 1982). The author, Richard Katz, is both an anthropologist and a psychologist, so he writes with unusual authority. He also did fieldwork in Fiji, and in contrasting the two very different societies - the formerly cannibalistic Fijians and the largely peaceful and egalitarian Kung - uncovered some lessons that he feels will be of use to community psychiatrists in the West.
Boiling Energy is a fascinating and clearly written book that anyone with an interest in healing, comparative religion or spirituality should find rewarding. My only wish is that Katz had written a bit more about the ideological foundation for Kung healing. What are the relationships between the tutelary spirits of the dances (giraffe, trees, kite, puff adder) and the various participants in those dances? Presumably, the author felt that since he could not say anything definitive, he'd be better off saying almost nothing. While this is laudable, I fear that he allowed an unconscious humanistic or anthropocentric bias to blind him to the central importance of non-human species, which clearly resemble humans in being simultaneously bodies and spirits (a distinction foreign to the Kung). Since many species regularly give up their bodies for food, might the Kung perceive the human-non human relationship as a template for the relationship between healer and community? After all, every time the healer enters into a healing trance, she or he is said to die and then experience rebirth - and this is meant quite literally, as we saw earlier.
Boiling Energy is a model of anthropological circumspection. Katz makes the provisional nature of some of his conclusions abundantly clear, and in describing the Kung he manages to avoid the twin pitfalls of idealization and subjection to alien worldviews and theories. Only in the last chapter, "'Tell Our Story To Your People,'" does he venture to draw some tentative conclusions about the applicability of Kung healing methods and philosophies to Western cultural contexts. Since this is the part most likely to be of interest to a general audience, I thought I'd share a somewhat lengthy excerpt. Katz writes,
Several general principles characterize the education of Kung healers, one of which is the healer's experiences of transformation. Becoming a healer depends on an initial transformation of consciousness, a new experience of reality in which the boundaries of the self become more permeable to an intensified contact with a transpersonal or spiritual realm. At this juncture, prospective healers experience a sense of connectedness which joins a transpersonal or spiritual healing power, themselves, and their community. But gaining access to the healing power is not enough; healers must then learn to apply that power to healing within the community. This application occurs as the experience of transformation is continually enacted and reaffirmed in the healers. This transformation both initiates the intensive phase of becoming a healer and characterizes the healer's subsequent development.
In these transformations the emphasis is on the psychological process of transition rather than on the nature of barriers crossed or stages reached. Healers move continuously between their fear of transforming experience and their desire to heal others, their search for increased healing power and the difficulty of working with it. The emphasis on transition establishes flexible boundaries between career phases and psychological states. The healer's career focuses upon one recurring developmental issue, which may or may not be resolved at increasing levels of difficulty, namely, to die to oneself to accept boiling num, or to transcend fear and pain, even of one's death.
A second principle is that the experience of transformation, which makes healing possible, does not remove healers from the context of daily living not diminish their everyday responsibilities. Kung healers are as hard-working in ordinary subsistence activities as nonhealers, and they contribute fully to their communities. The service orientation of the healing work is a third principle. Although healers themselves must become engaged in a difficult educational process, they do so as their community's emissary. The healers' commitment is to channel healing to the community rather than to accumulate power for personal use. Healers struggle for a sense of connectedness joining self, community, and the spiritual domain, and their commitment to community service guides their healing practice and their lives.
A fourth principle is that transformation sets in motion an inner development which is not manifested or rewarded by changes in external [social] status. A fifth principle is the emphasis on heart as a critical context for healing and healing technology. It is qualities of heart, such as courage, that open the healers to the healing potential and keep them in the healing work. And a final principle is that the education of healers stresses the proper performance of the healing ritual rather than discrete outcomes. The cure of a patient assumes importance only in the larger context of the community's healing ritual. Proper performance demands that the healer serve as the focal point of intensity, embodying dedication to healing and reaffirming the community's self-healing capacity.
Reading this summary without reference to any concrete examples may leave quite a few readers more confused than enlightened - if so, I apologize. A closer examination of any one of these principles could yield a lengthy blog post in itself. Even as I input the quote, I thought of multiple connections I might draw to the subjects of previous Via Negativa posts: for example, to some of my disquisitions on the grotesque body or on the fraught terrain where healing magic meets the quest for personal power/knowledge. But this post is already long enough - and besides, I don't know beans about psychiatry.
__________
Katz's findings about the Kung seem to resonate with the service ethic outlined by Rachel Naomi Remen in an essay reprinted by Sussura de Luz the other day: "We don't serve with our strength, we serve with ourselves. We draw from all of our experiences. Our limitations serve, our wounds serve, even our darkness can serve. The wholeness in us serves the wholeness in others and the wholeness in life. The wholeness in you is the same as the wholeness in me. Service is a relationship between equals. . . . 0ur service serves us as well as others. That which uses us strengthens us. Over time, fixing and helping are draining, depleting. Over time we burn out. Service is renewing. When we serve, our work itself will sustain us."
In the twilight of empire
This just in from
Orion Online: a brief, lyrical appreciation of the contemporary USian landscape painter Linden Frederick by the author of
The Geography of Nowhere.
Frederick's method is to capture his subjects in crepuscular light. This allows a kind of natural editorial process in which the superfluous visual clutter recedes and the seemingly banal buildings can be viewed in full frontal nakedness, like old prostitutes in a dim room. Often a light is burning somewhere in or around the subject to remind us that inside dwells the remnant of a human spirit. Other times his subjects appear to be derelict or abandoned. The beauty of the evening skies Frederick depicts is in vivid contrast to the mood of ruin and anomie that pervade his scenes.
- James Howard Kunstler
Words on the street
Running water (August 17, 1851)
The man must not drink of the running streams, the living waters, who is not prepared to have all nature reborn in him,—to suckle monsters. The snake in my stomach lifts his head to my mouth at the sound of running water.
The Blog of Henry David Thoreau
Overheard
There is so little left that hasn't been said . . .
Ah, but this is most untrue! What do you mean by said? Nothing, but nothing, can be repeated identically. . . .
[T]here is so little that has been said, such huge empty spaces where understandings and communications have never even been started. . . .-
The Coffee Sutras__________
"Does it matter who says it?"
"No, so long as it is said right. The saying has its own existence: people knew this long before they tried to prove it with marks on clay and papyrus leaf and tortoise shell."
"Yes, assuming it is uttered in full awareness. A true saying is unique and unrepeatable, however the words might choose to repeat themselves."
"But given such ideal circumstances, again it shouldn't matter who says something, because anyone can say anything - you never know. In other words, if the autonomy of the saying derives mainly from its originality, that fact takes precedence over the happenstance of its occurrence."
"But it does matter, because in fact the saying lives only in the moment, indivisible from the vibration of the vocal chord, the exhalation of breath, the movement of hand and torso.
This body,
this breath. It's sheer fantasy to locate its originality elsewhere."
"Both these positions are in error. The saying lives in its situational and linguistic contexts, as one element in a communally created, autopoietic system of signs and signifiers."
"But that's a lot of fashionable-sounding nonsense. The empirical world does not and will never conform to theories, which seek nothing less than to overthrow the horizon, that unattainable or unknowable dimension in light of which all original sayings - and thus language itself - take wing."
"Then at the heart of language we shouldn't expect to find some 'deep structure,' but incommensurability: pure sound. Holy silence."
"What about the saying? Are the words I say the same as the words you hear?"
"Perhaps we should think of words as analogous to germs - not just the bad ones, but the ones we need to fight those others off, or to digest food. They use us, we use them. They bind us together in many ways both wonderful and terrible. They cannot exist apart from us, and we would do poorly without their help."
"What about
this saying, this conversation?"
"Who cares! I am only interested in
you. Whoever you are."
"Then we must begin to assume responsibility for the words that come out of our mouths. You
must care - one slip, one terrible sentence can destroy a relationship. Every true thing we say to each other is formed in light of that knowledge."
"Then we have yet to exchange a single honest word."
"We have been licentious. There was never a true assent, only lack of refusal. No?"
"No. I mean, yes. Well, maybe . . . "
Words on the street
Back to the complexities
This is my contribution for the Ecotone wiki topic RePlace.A spot of poison ivy between the first and second knuckle of my left thumb has been lurking there since late May. I never knew exactly where or how I made contact with the plant, but by now, in mid-August, its berries must be ripening. In two weeks or less they will redden and the
leaflets three will color up to match - signal flags for the small birds of passage who will drop from the sky each morning for a quick nosh. For them the first leaves turn: poison ivy and Virginia creeper along the woods' edge, fox grape and dogwood and a hundred acres of tupelo, red-orange-yellow right underneath the canopy's stalwart green. The migrants won't have much time and the banquet is overwhelming, so the foliage has to shout:
Get your high-fat berries here, at the drive-thru window!But Jesus, these birds! Only a fool could dismiss them as ordinary because frequently seen. Steering at night by the stars, their vision by day encompassing ultraviolet light and polarization caused by the earth's magnetic field, traveling thousands of miles through every kind of weather, year after year venturing everything to come and breed in woods like these, then leaving their nests and returning to the far more fecund South - the Indians were right about them. How could they not be messengers, couriers of the otherwise undeliverable hope to the otherwise unthinkable destination?
It is the time of year that approximates that late stage in an urban civilization when works of art and language start to give off a faint odor, bending under the weight of footnotes and allusions. Wasp nests bulge with larvae, Luftwaftes of termites take to the air. More moth species than lepidopterists have yet been able to catalogue, most of them naturally rare, seine the forest air for the exact scent of their shorter-than-a-needle mates in the landscape's haystack. Overlooked for their apparent sameness by generations of collectors, agog at polyphemous, the leaf-winged luna, the riddle-winged sphinx.
The last of the huckleberries are ripening, and the first of the apples. The peaches are at their height. The air we breathe teems with more life than most of us would even want to imagine. The soil in the woods gives off an odor so much a part of the general gestalt that the overwhelming majority of humans heading out for a week or two of camping have no clear notion of what it is that draws them, year after year, to the same spot in some park or national forest, relinquishing the hard-won comforts of home for the pleasure of sleeping on the ground, their nostrils just a couple layers of fabric away from the sweetly rotting earth. The sternest teetotalers are led around by their noses. The juice in its stoneware pitcher grows mutinous with yeast.
Winter is as far behind us as it can get, now, and the growing chorus of northern true katydids each night reminds us - those whose grandparents grew up on farms, and were full of such sayings -
six weeks till frost. We're as far as we can get from February's spare forms, blue shadows and that crystal-clear air that always leads my mind upward and away. One may or may not tire of August's filigree and fandango, but for me the sense of mystery in this season is undeniably more profound. If in January I am a desert ascetic, in late summer I return to the full-course spread at the Life and Death Café. There's nothing like it for ambience, for service, for live entertainment: a small combo with trumpet and upright bass, ride cymbals going
lush . . . lush, the blues singer shouting
sundown as if he meant it.
Waiter! I'll have another bowl of the primordial soup!
Words on the street
The binding
Only one time in my life have I ever let my guard completely down. It was, of course, for love.
"My guard" - please forgive the cliche. I mean, you know, that imaginary wall - "security barrier" if you like - that protects, indeed defines our autonomy as free and sovereign individuals. Or, in a less Kantian sense: the door that we prefer to keep firmly shut in order to avoid being overwhelmed and destroyed by Whatever.
What the imagination can build, I said to myself, the imagination can remove. Without telling my lover what I was doing I began, figuratively speaking, to strip. Looking full into her face, one by one I took off every mask, every cloak, every pretence - and I have many. I was enough of a would-be Buddhist to realize that there was no true face or essential self "underneath," but I was determined to show it to her anyway.
It helps to know that she was a mind reader, one of two I've dated. (Both were women who had been abused as children; mind reading was pretty clearly a survival tool.) We were sitting in the back of a funicular car at the time. When we got to the bottom of the mountain some ten minutes later, I broke the spell. She said quietly, "That felt like a thousand years." Which might have been sheer glibness (another defense mechanism of hers), but I think she meant it.
She was leaving Japan in two days, and I would be staying on in the Far East for another six months. Our relationship had never been more than another life experience for her - a circumstance for which I never blamed her, because she had been honest about it from the start. I, however, had fallen deeply in love for the first time in my life. The sex had never been that good, for reasons I wouldn't fully understand until years later, when additional experience and the achievement of some measure of distance permitted a more dispassionate judgement. Removing my guard, letting her completely
inside, was the only thing I could think of that might have a chance of making her as attached to me as I was to her.
In part, it was simply an effort at communication, true communication. You've heard, I'm sure, that "show, don't tell!" is the poet's dictum. I wanted to show her what actual love was like, and the only way to do that was by showing what it could do.
Even aside from romantic love, the fact is that we cannot communicate in any real sense without communion, without opening ourselves up - imitating Christ or Isaac or some other poor rooster, all potential wound on the altar of the soul. The exchange of information is either completely peripheral to true communication, or else our concept of information must be radically expanded to include such embodiments as breath and heart.
The Japanese understand this. They have a strong cultural preference for non-verbal communication, and tend to feel that if close family members or lovers depend too much on speech, it's a sign that their relationships are weak. But as
Butuki said recently about his attempts to negotiate with Japanese businessmen, the entire language works through innuendo. Definitive statements are rude. A typical sentence concludes with a diminuendo of self-deprecating qualifications: "you-know-isn't-it-perhaps-I-wonder-but," accompanied by the baring of teeth in a subordinate's grin or the slightly more restrained and tolerant smile of the superior.
Wordless or otherwise, communication on the level I attempted that day cannot help becoming a form of sorcery, a manifestation of power. This was not, as the cliche has it, "naked power," but power incidental to a demonstration of psychic nakedness. Had our relationship been more balanced, perhaps it wouldn't have seemed like such a big thing. I imagine that anyone reading this who has been married for a long time will be feeling a mixture of amusement and pity that I never got beyond all the
sturm und drang . . .
It almost worked. After her return to the states, she stayed faithful for what she later told me was a record for her - four months. As for me, I descended into squalor and drunkenness, changing so completely that by the time my parents flew into Osaka three months later, my own mother walked by me three times in the airport terminal without recognizing me.
I have hated Japan ever since.
Words on the street
Milosz in prose
So Czeslaw Milosz
finally kicked off (thanks to
Siona for the link). He was 93! I find it encouraging that someone so fundamentally dour could live so long. It challenges our idiotic pseudo-Christian cultural predilection to look askance at anyone who dares to utter a discouraging word.
In the last year he lived in the United States, Milosz kept a journal subsequently published as
The Year of the Hunter (translated by Madeline Levine, FSG, 1994). On March 30, 1988, Milosz contrasted his worldview with that of the hugely influential Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz:
Do you really like Gombrowicz's novels and plays? Now, be honest! No. I don't envy him his having written them; I would not wish to be their author. Do they disturb me? Yes. Because if people really exist only for other people, if the cocoon we have spun vanished in a cosmos about which we can say nothing, not even whether it exists (at most, that it exists in our minds), if this is so, then perhaps we really do live in hell. My anxiety derives from my thinking of Gombrowicz as a modern writer, so that I have to consider myself old-fashioned. A polite little boy who believes in a dear little God, who tries to avoid sin, encounters an uncivilized rapscallion who sticks out his tongue and thumbs his nose at the authorities of two millennia. In the final analysis, what I can oppose to Gombrowicz comes straight from the strorehouse of ancient concepts:
"The world exists, not just in my mind."
"How do you know that?"
"Because it is observed by God."
. . . I have a tremendous need to go outside of myself, beyond my persona; the more I am aware of my aging organism, the stronger is this need, this desire to be somehow a part of God's thoughts when he observes the world, a need for perfect objectivity, for a sphere that endures independently of people's fleeting interconnections. I have tested this; my poetry is like that, it moves outward, it travels beyond me. The ideal: to be able to say that, although things are not good with me, the world endures and moves along its path, and in this world, despite all its ghastliness, there is another side, a true side, a lining visible to the eyes of Divinity. In other words, my quarrel with Gombrowicz really revolves around his "argument about the existence of the world"; that is, his stubborn denial of assertions that something other than our perceptions exists. That is one of his attacks on objective truth. The other is the way that people entangle themselves in a single interconnected body; hence, the truth is always their truth, God is their God.
Milosz's view was essentially tragic. Later in the same entry, describing a Palm Sunday mass, he muses on his feeling of identification with millions of other believers over the centuries, and his intuition that a figure like Christ is necessary because "every individual is alone with his threshold of pain, of dereliction, and I in my egotism am unable to enter into my fellow man."
A day later (April 1), Milosz references the Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani, whose critique of Sartre and Nietzsche for their "subjectivization of atheism" also seemed to fit Gombrowicz.
What remains is to reflect on the virtually inescapable conclusions of extraordinary intellects like Gombrowicz (because, after all, Sartre and Gombrowicz arrive at the same conclusion independently of each other), and to consider also the probability that the post-Christian West opens to the philosophy of the East where the subject-object problem is crossed out.
Farewell, old prophet.
__________
For appreciations of Milosz as a poet, see the cassandra pages, the vernacular body and languagehat. And be sure to check out Siona's recollection of a classroom visit by Milosz linked to above.
Back on January 26, I quoted from Milosz's appreciation of a poem by Izumi Shikibu, also in A Year of the Hunter.
Words on the street
Honey from the comb
I don't know if I'll get to write an original post today or not. But I want to alert my regular readers to some terrific essays that have appeared elsewhere in the last day or two.
At
Creek Running North, Chris writes about
Comfort Food:
This raw, empty feeling; this gnawing void in my gut I find so compelling: it's just like Mom used to make.
Elck meanwhile describes a
dinner of dangerous ideas:
The party was held in a large, book-lined apartment on the Upper West Side belonging to M.K.'s uncle. There were twelve people present, and all of them were very interesting. Most of the guests were people I was meeting for the first time. From the moment I stepped into the building, until the moment I left (some three-and-a-half hours later), I did not speak one single word.
Dale just wrote what may be
the perfect blog post.
I walk by exhausted rhododendrons. Pick a brown shrunken flower-corpse. To my surprise it is supple and responds to my fingers. Not dead, not stiff. Nothing can be quite dead today. Worn, fragile, faint, loved to gasping by the overbearing sun, but not dead.
And
Paula has turned out another post that is more than an essay, it's a
visual and intellectual treat. She describes working in a small factory making silicon chips back in 1973:
It was a fascinating place and I had a fascinating job. There were long, tubular furnaces into which I had to slide trays of silicon wafers, thin and perfect as communion hosts, to imbue them with boron and phosphorous and turn them into semiconductors. Then there was the little plexiglass hood, bigger than a breadbox, smaller than a coffin, under which I scoured the wafers with a waterpik-like sand jet. It seemed far too delicate an operation for its name: sandblasting. The radio played Killing Me Softly over and over that summer. To this day the song reminds me of sandblasting silicon wafers -- the hiss of sand on silicon, the slowly burnishing surfaces.
Finally, be sure to stop over to
The Middlewesterner for
Saturday's Poem: this week, one of the most interesting poems about angels since Rafael Albertí.
Surrounded by such riches - as all of us are every day in this world, whether we know it or not - why should I ever write more than words of praise?
