Next Time
It's Personal

2008

July

Still here.

2006

January

No Good. No good at all...

Goodbye Grant Burns

 

Life's like a mayonnaise soda
And life's like space without room
And life's like bacon and ice cream
That's what life's like without you

Life's like forever becoming
But life's forever dealing in hurt
Now life's like death without living
That's what life's like without you

Life's like Sanskrit read to a pony
I see you in my mind's eye strangling on your tongue
What good is knowing such devotion
I've been around - I know what makes things run

What good is seeing eye chocolate
What good's a computerized nose
And what good was cancer in April
Why no good - no good at all

What good's a war without killing
What good is rain that falls up
What good's a disease that won't hurt you
Why no good, I guess, no good at all

What good are these thoughts that I'm thinking
It must be better not to be thinking at all
A styrofoam lover with emotions of concrete
No not much, not much at all

What's good is life without living
What good's this lion that barks
You loved a life others throw away nightly
It's not fair, not fair at all

What's good ?
Not much at all

What's good ?
Life's good -
But not fair at all

-- Lou Reed. What's Good?
 

2005

Wed Nov 16

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mon, Nov 14

Atheism in a Post-Religous World.

This is a book review, but I can't find the book listed.

"Finally, to my mind, Tremblay misses the big picture. As Freud correctly noted a century ago, religion is a mental pathology. You cannot rationally argue with people whose judgment and reason are suspended. Distinctions between personal and objective beliefs are lost on delusional fanatics.

Religious people have faith in a god because it fulfills basic and entrenched (and unhealthy) emotional needs - not because its existence can or has been proven. We all - even atheists - hold irrational beliefs to some extent. Religion just happens to be a particularly virulent and insidious strain of irrationality."

Wed, Oct 26

Yeah, I'm with Crick...

In a review of "SPOOK" by Mary Roach

Her new book, Spook, chronicles her equally rollicking attempt to find out what transpires when we shuffle off our mortal coil -- what happens to our spirits when they leave their temporal homes. Or, rather, if we really have spirits, or souls, or ghosts, or whatever you want to call them.

Never mind Heaven, Paradise, or the nonsectarian Great Beyond. Roach is not out to debunk religion, for she has the good sense to separate faith from science. Those are two distinct and parallel realities that don't mix well (a fact that seems to escape rural school boards with unintelligent designs for their science curricula). What she wants to know is if there's actually something quantifiable within us -- call it a floating consciousness -- that leaves our bodies when we die and goes somewhere to say hello to all those consciousnesses that have gone before.

What is this consciousness? What is its shape? What color is it? How much does it weigh? How does it get in there? And afterwards, where does it go?

Or are these silly questions? Maybe the late Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, had the right idea: "You, your joys, your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

Mon, Oct 24

At the Smithville Methodist Church
by Stephen Dunn

It was supposed to be Arts & Crafts for a week,
but when she came home
with the “Jesus Saves” button, we knew what art
was up, what ancient craft.

She liked her little friends. She liked the songs
they sang when they weren’t
twisting and folding papers into dolls.
What could be so bad?

Jesus had been a good man, and putting faith
in good men is what
we had to do to say this side of cynicism,
that other sadness.

O.K., we said. One week. But when she came home
singing “Jesus loves me,
the Bible tells me so,” it was time to talk.
Could we say Jesus

doesn’t love you? Could I tell her the Bible
is a great book certain people use
to make you feel bad? We sent her back
without a word.

It had been so long since we believed, so long
since we needed Jesus
as our nemesis and friend, that we thought he was
sufficiently dead,

that our children would think of him like Lincoln
or Thomas Jefferson.
Soon it became clear to us: you can’t teach disbelief
to a child,

only wonderful stories, and we hadn’t a story
nearly as good.
On parents’ night there were the Arts & Crafts
all spread out

like appetizers. Then we took our seats
in the church
and the children sang a song about the Ark,
and Hallelujah

and one in which they had to jump up and down
for Jesus.
I can’t remember ever feeling so uncertain
about what’s comic, what’s serious.

Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes.
You can’t say to your child
“Evolution loves you.” The story stinks
of extinction and nothing

exciting happening for centuries. I didn’t have
a wonderful story for my child
and she was beaming. All the way home in the car
she sang the songs,

occasionally standing up for Jesus.
There was nothing to do
but drive, ride it out, sing along
in silence.
 

The Universe Is Too Big To Love
by Stephen Dunn


Some nights it's better not to look up there.
     The stars appear broken from certain angles,
certain imperatives of seeing.
Moods! Moods can alter mathematics.
     If only I believed I were unimportant,
a speck, as a mystic does.

This heaviness in my chest
                                wouldn't matter . I could make friends
with a pebble.

But I'm both a speck and important.
I'm the right size for love.
Still, there's no reason

for you, out there turning these pages,
to care about me.
                        When a night falls apart

it reveals more night
             and this is true perhaps
                               for only one person at a time.

Soon it will be your turn
                                 and I will be home reading a book,
            perfectly calm.

At the Restaurant
by Stephen Dunn

Six people are too many people
and a public place the wrong place
for what you're thinking--

stop this now.

Who do you think you are?
The duck a l'orange is spectacular,
the flan is best in town.

But there among your friends
is the unspoken, as ever,
chatter and gaiety its familiar song.

And there's your chronic emptiness
spiraling upward in search of words
you'll dare not say

without irony.
You should have stayed at home.
It's part of the social contract

to seem to be where your body is,
and you've been elsewhere like this,
for Christ's sake, countless times;

behave, feign.

Certainly you believe a part of decency
is to overlook, to let pass?
Praise the Caesar salad. Praise Susan's

black dress, Paul's promotion and raise.
Inexusable, the slaughter in this world.
Insufficient, the merely decent.

Sat, Oct 15

Balance
by Jane Hirshfield


Balance is noticed most when almost failed of-

in an elephant's delicate wavering
on her circus stool, for instance,
or that moment
when a ladder starts to tip but steadies back.

There are, too, its mysterious departures.

Hours after the dishes are washed and stacked,
a metal bowl clangs to the floor,
the weight of drying water all that altered;
a painting vertical for years
one morning-why?- requires a restoring tap.

You have felt it disappearing
from your own capricious heart-
a restlessness enters, the smallest leaning begins.

Already then inevitable,
the full collision,
the life you will describe afterwards always as "after."
 

Sun, Aug 7
Slip Sliding Away

That. Just that.

2004

Mon, March 29
You can have all these back

From a review of The Maine Poets

These poets write from heartfelt connections with land and sea, with joy and sorrow, as do most poets. Leo Connellan thinks about a 16-year-old young man, falling asleep at the wheel of his car: "God, if you need him, take him asking me to believe in/you because there are yellow buttercups, salmon for my heart in the rivers,/fresh springs of ice cold water . . ./You can have all these back for Scott Huff . . ."

 

Wed, March 17
Having a go

From a Mother Jones interview with Billy Bragg. Feels like a good quote to try to explain a bit about why I do the NewPages site. That it's worth "having a go" at changing things.

MJ: Can three singers really counter the disinformation of the Bush regime?
BB: It's not just three singers. When you pull into town, you have to act as a focus for people who are going to be staying around long after we've gone—they are the people who are going to make a difference. My bottom line has always been about getting people to engage and not just sit there being cynical. Whether or not we actually change anything is ever so hard to judge, but it's still worth having a go.

2003
 

Friday, Sept 6
Love Song

"Alan Dugan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose ironic and unsentimental verse pondered the challenge of finding freedom and purpose in moments of ordinary life, died on Wednesday, Sept 3..."

Love Song: I and Thou
by Alan Dugan
Nothing is plumb, level or square:
the studs are bowed, the joists
are shaky by nature, no piece fits
any other piece without a gap
or pinch, and bent nails
dance all over the surfacing
like maggots. By Christ
I am no carpenter. I built
the roof for myself, the walls
for myself, the floors
for myself, and got
hung up in it myself. I
danced with a purple thumb
at this house-warming, drunk
with my prime whiskey: rage.
Oh I spat rage's nails
into the frame-up of my work:
It held. It settled plumb.
level, solid, square and true
for that one great moment. Then
it screamed and went on through,
skewing as wrong the other way.
God damned it. This is hell,
but I planned it I sawed it
I nailed it and I
will live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm
to the left-hand cross-piece but
I can't do everything myself.
I need a hand to nail the right,
a help, a love, a you, a wife.

 

Saturday, June 21
Denise Rose Hill

Good Thing
by Patty Larkin

Well I've heard enough
And I've seen enough
And I know enough to know
I know a Good Thing when I see it
And it's a bad thing to let go

Well I've been around
I've been up and down
Until I bent out of control
With your world all in motion
Got to put a ball and a chain on your soul

All those angels running
Picking up the pieces
Putting back together hearts broke long ago
I know a Good Thing when I see it
And it's a bad thing to let go

There will always
Be lovers
With borders of their own
And you may charge across
In a golden chariot
But you will never be home

I had dreams like distant thunder
I had hope like a prayer unheard
Now this is nothing
Less than perfect
In a less than perfect world

All those angels running
Picking up the pieces
Putting back together hearts broke long ago
I know a Good Thing when I see it
And it's a bad thing to let go
 

Wednesday, April 23
Interview with Tom Robbins

...I gather your own personal theology is a mixture of pantheism, animism and an assortment of concepts derived from Eastern religions. Is that a fair statement? If so, do you feel you are proselytizing your personal theology in your novels?

I'm both pantheistic and monotheistic. Simultaneously. Spiritual truth reveals itself when we interface with Mystery, and contradictions are to Mystery what waves are to the sea. Those poor perplexed pilgrims who shun paradox to go chasing after certainty are spiritual hamsters and intellectual mice spinning in a cage.

Each and every one of us has to establish his or her own one-on-one relationship with the Divine, his or her personal religion. Allowing a priest, pastor, rabbi or imam to do it for you is like allowing a surrogate to make love to your spouse while you, virginal and celibate, stand off to the side and cheer them on. Or something like that.

Elements of Zen, Taoism, Sufi, Tantra, Gnostic Christianity and, especially, Tibetan "crazy wisdom" have all gone into the creation of my unorganized religion. Some other loose cannon might profit from my theological tomfoolery, I don't know, but for me to proselytize it would be to violate its basic principles--especially since its major principle is the refusal to take myself too seriously. One thing this befuddled planet doesn't need is another cosmic salesman with a once-in-a-lifetime offer.

Do you think the world would be better off without Christianity?

If taken literally and actually followed, the teachings of Yeshua bin Miriam (the itinerate rabbi we know as Jesus Christ) would be an enormous benefit in the world. "Love they enemy." "Turn the other cheek." Etcetera. However, this hypocritical perversion, this organized betrayal we call "Christianity" has been directly responsible not only for a shocking amount of blind human ignorance but for so much death and suffering we can barely calculate it all.

Jesus is reputed to have said, "It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven." Yet, except for a few monks, I've never met a Christian who wasn't hell-bent (pun intended) on getting his or her hands on as much money as humanly possible. Either they think Jesus was only kidding or they believe they can beat the odds.

If you could show me a believer who's Christian enough to love his or her enemies, I'd wash their feet and anoint them with oils. So, I'll wager, would Jesus.

Do you think humans always wear masks, that they always pretend to be something other than what they are? Is this dangerous? Do we have a choice?

Most of us wear masks, even when we gaze in the mirror, but I don't think we're actively pretending. Rather, it's just that we don't have a clue as to who we really are. People who've never meditated, experienced psychedelic drugs, studied Taoism or one of the other systems of Asian liberation mostly sleepwalk through life, identifying with their name, address, job, race, school, nationality, and political or religious affiliation without even suspecting that their true self (or Self) neither knows nor cares about any of those superficial trappings.

 

Wednesday, April 9
Doesn't usually work out that way..

(From a review/article in the Boston Phoenix) Mary Gauthier digs up her own roots. "An intimacy-fearing loner turns up in 'Walk Through the Fire,' a track filled with desperate emotions that seem close to Gauthier’s heart. 'The powers that push me/They move me they own me/They constantly tell me to run,' she sings plaintively. Does Gauthier herself have a fatalistic view of romance? 'I think the word is realistic. I hope for the best, but it doesn’t usually work out that way.'"

 

Monday, April 7
Stones...

from Stones of the Sky,
by Pablo Neruda

But man cannot master this lesson,
the lesson of stone:
he tumbles, his body crumbles,
his word and voice unravel.


Fire, water and tree
steel themselves:
dying, they seek a mineral body
and find the road to glory:
steady, the stone shines
like a hard new rose.
 

Sunday, March 16
Theory...

From an interview with David Cronenberg

All makers of monolithic theories want their theories to explain everything, and they want them to be strong and relatively simple. That's just the way it is, whether you're Marx or Freud or Christ.

Sunday, Feb 16
As we plod along...

Butterfly Effect
by Ed Ochester

Forgive me, friend, because
I am thinking of a particular
sad Buddhist who has no
real friends anymore and
worries about his alcoholism and
is convinced that he desires nothing, and
I'm thinking of my old friend Walter
who talks to Jesus now and lectures
on creationism because he hasn't
held a job for twenty years and
whose wife died young of cancer
and who knows that he is "saved," and
I'm thinking of all the Americans
who believe that in former lives
they were Catherine the Great or Nefertiti,
and all the ones who believe
in the butterfly effect, e.g.:
some jerk who farts in Albuquerque
might trigger a typhoon in Sumatra,
though if that were true
we'd have more storms than Jupiter and
the earth already would be destroyed--
maybe the fluttering butterflies and the farts
cancel one another out, except for
particularly strong ones--and
I am thinking: "the greatest
country in the world since Rome" and
all us poor dumb fucks
heads filled with shit
muttering to ourselves
as we plod along.

 

Friday, Feb 14
Take your place with grace

I believe it's a sin to try and make things last forever
Everything that exists in time runs out of time some day
Got to let go of the things that keep you tethered
Take your place with grace and then be on your way

-- Bruce Cockburn, Mighty Trucks of Midnight

 

We all got holes to fill
Them holes are all that's real
Some fall on you like a storm
Sometimes you dig your own
But choice is yours to make
And time is yours to take
Some dive into the sea
Some toil upon the stone
To live is to fly
Low and high,
So shake the dust off of your wings
And the sleep out of your eyes
So shake the dust off of your wings
And the tears out of your eyes

-- Townes Van Zandt, To Live is To Fly

 

Buddhist Retreat
Why I gave up on finding my religion.

Four years ago, I joined a Buddhist meditation class and began talking to (and reading books by) intellectuals sympathetic to Buddhism. Eventually, and regretfully, I concluded that Buddhism is not much more rational than the Catholicism I lapsed from in my youth; Buddhism's moral and metaphysical worldview cannot easily be reconciled with science—or, more generally, with modern humanistic values.

...

All religions, including Buddhism, stem from our narcissistic wish to believe that the universe was created for our benefit, as a stage for our spiritual quests. In contrast, science tells us that we are incidental, accidental. Far from being the raison d'être of the universe, we appeared through sheer happenstance, and we could vanish in the same way. This is not a comforting viewpoint, but science, unlike religion, seeks truth regardless of how it makes us feel. Buddhism raises radical questions about our inner and outer reality, but it is finally not radical enough to accommodate science's disturbing perspective. The remaining question is whether any form of spirituality can.

 

2002
 

Wednesday, Dec 25
Blah, blah, blah, platitude... cliché

These words are from a eulogy for a child in the movie Big Bad Love. Thank you, k, for writing them down. Coleman Barks, acting the part of the minister, spoke:

see they rise
and become the first fruits of those that slept

we are born of woman
and live but a short time

we come up like a flower
we flee as shadows

so grant the children
a tabernacle in the sun

and the disciples came unto jesus
and said, 'who shall be greatest?'
and he set a child in their midst
and said, 'except ye become as little children
ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven'

so suffer the little children to come unto me
for of such is the kingdom

for we are born of woman
and live but a short time

we come up like a flower
we flee as shadows

see they rise
and become the first fruits of those that slept

blah, blah

she shall suffer no more

blah, blah

platitude - about the mysterious ways in which god works
platitude - about faith
platitude - about grief

cliché - about god calling his children home
cliché - about angels

blah
blah

she shall suffer no more

blah blah

in the twinkling of an eye

blah

for the trumpet shall sound

blah
blah

and the dead shall be raised incorruptible

blah, blah
blah

and we shall be changed
 

 

Monday, Oct 28
Many wild men lied, Many fat men listened

 

Today I listened to Buffy Sainte-Marie's version of this Leonard Cohen poem for the first time in... 20 years? More... less? Maybe I've been "dancing on a clock"...

GOD IS ALIVE
MAGIC IS AFOOT

God is alive, magic is afoot
God is alive, magic is afoot
God is alive, magic is afoot
God is afoot, magic is alive
Alive is afoot, magic never died
God never sickened
Many poor men lied
Many sick men lied
Magic never weakened
Magic never hid
Magic always ruled
God is afoot, God never died
God was ruler
Though his funeral lengthened
Though his mourners thickened
Magic never fled
Though his shrouds were hoisted
The naked God did live
Though his words were twisted
The naked magic thrived
Though his death was published
Round and round the world
The heart did not believe

Many hurt men wondered
Many struck men bled
Magic never faltered
Magic always lead
Many stones were rolled
But God would not lie down
Many wild men lied
Many fat men listened
Though they offered stones
Magic still was fed
Though they locked their coffers
God was always served
Magic is afoot, God is alive
Alive is afoot

Alive is in command
Many weak men hungered
Many strong men thrived
Though they boast of solitude
God was at their side
Nor the dreamer in his cell
Nor the captain on the hill
Magic is alive
Though his death was pardoned
Round and round the world
The heart would not believe

Though laws were carved in marble
They could not shelter men
Though altars built in parliaments
They could not order men
Police arrested magic and magic went with them
Mmmmm.... for magic loves the hungry
But magic would not tarry
It moves from arm to arm
It would not stay with them
Magic is afoot
It cannot come to harm
It rests in an empty palm
It spawns in an empty mind
But magic is no instrument
Magic is the end
Many men drove magic
But magic stayed behind
Many strong men lied
They only passed through magic
And out the other side
Many weak men lied
They came to God in secret
And though they left Him nourished
They would not tell who healed
Though mountains danced before them
They said that God was dead
Though his shrouds were hoisted
The naked God did live
This I mean to whisper to my mind
This I mean to laugh within my mind
This I mean my mind to serve
Til' service is but magic
Moving through the world
And mind itself is magic
Coursing through the flesh
And flesh itself is magic
Dancing on a clock
And time itself
The magic length of God
 

 

Sunday, Oct 6
Religions... and war

Interview with Salman Rushdie.

Also reinforced by the fatwa was Rushdie's nonreligious upbringing, which taught him to believe that God is more trouble than he's worth. In his essays, Rushdie is the supreme advocate of man as a moral animal, deriding religion as a force that "essentially infantilizes our ethical selves."

Writing a 1997 letter to the world's 6 billionth person, Rushdie advises the child to "Imagine There's No Heaven":

"As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn't get it right. ... The wrongness of the sacred tales hasn't lessened the zeal of the devout in the least. If anything, the sheer out-of-step zaniness of religion leads the religious to insist ever more stridently on the importance of blind faith."

A little harsh?

"I think it's true that on the subject of religion, clearly I've had rather a course of aversion therapy to it," Rushdie said. "No doubt that shows."

...

"War scares me. I feel that war is a very much last recourse and the idea of using war as a first recourse, preemptively, worries me a lot. ... If America decides that it will give to itself the right to go after anybody, in any country, before they've actually committed a crime, because America judges they might at some point in the future do so, well, it's going to be very difficult to complain if people come after America. It just makes the world a kind of no-holds-barred place."

 

Thursday, Sept 12
Up on the roof...

Frisbeetarianism, n.:

The belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.
 

Wednesday, Sept 4
Delicious

Affirmation
by Donald Hall

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.
 

Sunday, Aug 11
"the world's end"

This makes me think about cleaning out Kris's drawers after he died and finding old pictures, love letters to his girl friend, bottle caps, baseball cards, the stuff of emptied pockets... quarters, dimes, pennies, ride tokens from the amusement park, ticket stubs, old batteries, keys to godknowswhat, junk...

Apple
by William Hedrington
 

The dead litter so,
leave clothes in drawers,
old photographs, everything,
and go.

They are as thoughtless as children,
who will get up with the sun,
take an apple,
and set out for the world's end.

 

Sunday, Aug 4
Skeptics and a crisis of doubt

A long, long time ago... I was mowing the back acre. Blue sky. Bright sun. Tall grass. Stage set. And "out of nowhere" I became "one with the universe." So when I read about mystical experience, I can safely say "been there, done that." The amazement left soon enough, but I still remember the fact that it happened, felt real, and felt very good. I don't attach it to any notion of a god. Rather more to a Scroogian "underdone bit of beef, or an undigested bit of potato." (Although I may have been a vegetarian at the time...)

"It takes faith to believe, and it takes courage not to, and who is to say which is the deeper and more truthful."
-- Herbert Weisinger

"You often hear about believers who have a crisis of faith, but what of the skeptics among us who have a crisis of doubt? For years we skeptics have decisively refuted the metaphysical claims of the great religions and scoffed at the pretensions of newfangled spiritual fashions. But then our doubts are suddenly shaken by an unbidden mystical experience. The power of this direct cognition of ultimate reality, beyond word or image, is undeniable. But does it prove the existence of God? If you remain skeptical, you find yourself in a difficult state. You now seriously doubt your doubt and yet have no abiding faith to replace it. How do you proceed? You can no longer be atheistic because you've communed with the divine. You can't be religious because the existence of God is still in question; what's more, religious representations of God now get in the way of your direct mystical experience. Nor can you be agnostic because you're far from neutral on the subject. You must become a skeptical mystic. As you cut your own singular path to the great whatever, you must now treat your own experiences with the relentless skepticism you once reserved for the claims of others.


I am One with a God I do not believe in."

--from "Daily Afflictions," by Andrew Boyd
 

Thursday, June 13
Ken Kesey: Don't search for answers

"The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer—they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek the mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."

Tuesday, June 11
Chris Smither: Life is not a negotiable asset

...the New Orleans native took an incredible 10-year break from recording... He explains the reason for his lengthy hiatus with a refreshing and disarming nonchalance.

"Oh, I was drinking," he says without a trace of the kind of dramatic self-revelation that seems all the rage on talk shows these days. "Being very unhealthy and unmotivated. It's like most drugs, it robs you of motivation, and once you get clear of that, all the reasons you liked to do other things come back and make more sense again. It was a basic life-and-death situation. If I didn't stop, I was going to die. And I wasn't ready to die. Some people are. Alcohol is a losing game, and it's like 'How much can you afford to lose and be willing to lose?' And for some people, their lives are just the last negotiable asset. Fortunately, I didn't see it that way."

 

Sunday, May 26
The only life you can save.

THE JOURNEY
By Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice ---
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundation,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that you kept company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do---
determined to save
the only life that you could save.

 

LOVE AFTER LOVE
By Derek Walcott

The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other's welcome,

And say, sit here, Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you

All your life, whom you ignored
For another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
 

THE TIME BEFORE DEATH
By Kabir
(Version by Robert Bly)

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think ... and think ... while you are alive.
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time
before death.

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will rejoin with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten---
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simple end up with an apartment in the
City of Death.

If you make love with the devine now,in the next
life you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that
does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.

 

Saturday, May 25
Clutching the pearls.

Hitchens counts among his friends and dinner guests conservatives such as the Republican strategist Grover Norquist and former-radical-turned-neocon David Horowitz — people of whom the mere mention, among more traditional leftists, would cause a panicked clutching of the pearls. His airy and slightly spartan apartment serves, on occasion, as a kind of Washington salon. “We’re making the most of where we agree,” Hitchens says. “Why not have a generous discussion with people who have a principled view on the other side who say, ‘Well, where might we agree on this?’” from Confrontation and Enlightenment

 

Monday, Apr 21
Your mind like rocks... all changes

Riprap
by Gary Snider


Lay down these words

Before your mind like rocks.

placed solid, by hands

In choice of place, set

Before the body of the mind

in space and time:

Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall

riprap of things:

Cobble of milky way,

straying planets,

These poems, people,

lost ponies with

Dragging saddles

and rocky sure-foot trails.

The worlds like an endless

four-dimensional

Game of Go.

ants and pebbles

In the thin loam, each rock a word

a creek-washed stone

Granite: ingrained

with torment of fire and weight

Crystal and sediment linked hot

all change, in thoughts,

As well as things.
 

Sunday, Apr 14
Get on with it

Paul McCartney in an interview. He was asked if the death of Harrison made him think about canceling his new tour...

"Unfortunately during the buildup to that, George died. I suppose in some ways when you lose someone important who you love, it reminds you to get on with your life and enjoy it, because it doesn't last forever."


Thursday, Apr 4
The one hand... and Live in the layers.

Searching online for a poem by Alan Dugan. Read these lines in a review of his latest book "Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry"... "Loves,/marriages, families are stultifying in/accumulations of debris of love and artifacts"... "Let it all go, as it will, upwards in the fire after death."

Didn't find that poem, but found these...

True Love

David Whyte

There is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.

I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.

Years ago in the Hebrides
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the gray stones
to the shore of baying seals,

who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,

and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them,

and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking
and that calling,
and that moment we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly,
so Biblically,
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love,

so that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and everything confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don t
because finally
after all this struggle
and all these years
you don t want to any more,
you ve simply had enough
of drowning,
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness,
however fluid and however
dangerous, to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.
 

-----------------

The Layers

Stanley Kunitz

......

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
Toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
in my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
 

Sunday, Mar 24
Too philosophical...

Shelves full of Buddhist books which I haven't looked at much in the past year. (Am I becoming unattached to all those books?) And yep, at the bookstore last night, I bought Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life. Why? The first paragraph of the Introduction sort of hooked me:

The Reader will notice that throughout this book I rarely use Zen or Buddhist terminology, such as emptiness or nonduality. In language and in content, I have tried to avoid the esoteric and philosophical. This aversion to the philosophical has been a consistent theme in my life; in fact, I left graduate school in philosophy because it was too philosophical!

O, and the dust jacket was a picture of sand with a solitary rock. I have a few that look very much like that rock.

Also bought a couple books on Cascading Style Sheets, and those have even less philosophy in them. If the store would have had a book called Zen and the Art of Cascading Style Sheets, I could have bought just one book, a bag of Italian Roast coffee, and saved some money...

Tuesday, Mar 19
Red suits...


from an book review of Richard Ford's new book, "A Multitude of Sins"...

He creates no "instant karma" endings for his characters. "I don't damn them," he says. "I do note that there are perils in this kind of behavior. But I don't judge them. We're all subject to temptation." He smiles. "If the devil always came dressed in a red suit you'd know to stay away from him."



Saturday, Mar 16
Waiting for the geese to fly north

What We Need Is Here

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
- Wendell Berry




Friday, Mar 15
Axis of Evil

From an interview with Christopher Hitchens:

Q: What do you consider to be the "axis of evil"?

A: Christianity, Judaism, Islam – the three leading monotheisms.


Monday, Mar 11
Anniversaries and Threads

Today is the 6-month anniversary of Sept. 11. The buildings explode all over again on cable and network news...

While cleaning out my bookcase today, I found this poem that I had saved from a publisher's catalog. Naomi Shihab Nye wrote about using this poem as she discussed Sept. 11 with her students:

The Way It Is
by William Stafford

There's a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.



Sunday, Mar 3
Universal Blank Dog Looks  and Jogging Another Day

Last night I found a link to this short story in MobyLives. Then doing the Weblog today, I found this movie review. I had that thought that maybe "something" was trying to tell me "something"... but have decided that it is more like when you *always* bang your finger right where you just got a cut. The night Kris died, we were supposed to meet for dinner, but he called to say he was going to go out with a group of friends. No problem, we agreed. We'd do dinner another night...


Explaining Death to the Dog. from The Missouri Review.


He looked at me with the universal blank dog look. He had no idea what I was talking about. "No baby," I said again. It was then that I realized the impossibility of the situation. It wasn't even like trying to explain death to a child. The dog simply couldn't understand the language. He had a brain the size of a walnut and all he knew was that the baby wasn't where she was supposed to be. I imagined it must be even worse than knowing the baby was dead...

I sat on the couch with Stu and waited. Stu put his head on my thigh and looked up at me. I wanted to do something for him, take him out to dinner with us to get his mind off the mystery of the missing baby. We sat there for a few minutes. I couldn't hear any noises coming from the bedroom, so I got up and went down the hallway. I looked in the door and saw Todd sitting on the edge of the bed. He was banging the side of his head again, but this time he was crying while he was doing it. Actually he wasn't really crying. He was more making little howling noises with his throat. And he just kept whacking himself on the head.



Good Grief. Dealing with loss in The Son’s Room.

"But as the film goes on to insist, such tedium is life, and it is precious. Nothing can prepare Giovanni or his family for what’s to come, though by now you’ll likely have a sense that this surplus of comfort is about to crack open. As it usually does, life-changing disaster comes unexpectedly...

In doing so, he breaks a jogging date he’s made with Andrea. At the time, the change in plans seems insignificant; Andrea is reluctant, more interested in going diving with his friends, and Giovanni is also vaguely distracted. They can always go jogging another day. Then, Andrea has his accident — ... And suddenly, Giovanni’s decision looks like a tragic, horrific, unforgivable error...

The rest of the film concerns the survivors’ efforts to live with their guilt, rage, sorrow and frustration — and, especially, with each other. Their initial collapses are followed by displays of stoic resolve, mutually supportive and self-isolating. At the funeral home, they view the body, surrounded by family and friends, then, as the others clear out, Giovanni watches as workers drill the coffin shut. The sound, so everyday, is harrowing. And his visit to a marine shop to inquire about the workings of oxygen tanks leads to further frustration. There is no reason for what went wrong, no explanation — only anger, grief and endless loss."



2001

Wednesday, Dec 12
I've won the lottery

"My rosy view of the world is something grabbed screaming from the dark corners of the world," Crace says. "It's better than the Hollywood kind of optimism. Face up to the fact that there are foul noises in the world. This is a roller coaster. Knowing that it ends finally with death, and that there's nothing after it, our experience of life should be that we've won the big lottery."
     -- Jim Crace, author of Being Dead and The Devil's Larder



Thursday, Nov 29, 2001
So long, George...

Sunrise doesn't last all morning
A cloudburst doesn't last all day
Seems my love is up and has left you with no warning
It's not always going to be this grey

All things must pass
All things must pass away

Sunset doesn't last all evening
A mind can blow those clouds away
After all this, my love is up and must be leaving
It's not always going to be this grey

All things must pass
All things must pass away
All things must pass
None of life's strings can last
So, I must be on my way
And face another day

Now the darkness only stays the night-time
In the morning it will fade away
Daylight is good at arriving at the right time
It's not always going to be this grey

All things must pass
All things must pass away
All things must pass
All things must pass away



Tuesday, Oct 30, 2001
What? No harp music? What?! We're roadkill?...


Chowing down. Jim Crace, author of Being Dead and literary fiction's most eloquent atheist...

Life is a weird narrative. Life itself. Now, people say that my version of what happens after death is a very pessimistic one, but I actually think that the Christian version -- and the other religious versions of what happens -- is immensely pessimistic because it's entirely false. They say don't worry about death because there'll be eternity ever after and you'll be living in heaven eating yogurt and listening to harp music.

It isn't going to happen. That may provide some kind of comfort to you, but it's false comfort. So let's actually look at the real world, and realize that if we're lucky, we're here for the span three score years and ten, and when that's over, it's over. We have to look for optimism somewhere else. And that's a hard journey. It's an easy journey to say "Oh, you're going to be here for eternity." It's nonsense, but it's an easy journey. So I'm giving my readers a hard time in "Being Dead," by saying where's the optimism in this? We live for 70 years and we die, we're roadkill. We rot away like shells or sea gulls on the beach. We're like that; we're that kind of dead. What that book does is then say that if there's going to be optimism, it has to be found in the life lived. We have to backtrack and look at the impact we have on those people who survive us for a short while, the love we make, and for the shallow imprint we make in the sand, which is soon erased by nature.

Now that may be a slim kind of optimism, and the route to it may be ugly and hard, but it's a real optimism. It recognizes the world for what it is, not for what it isn't. So here we are. I'm making the claim that I'm as optimistic as they get. I'm not cynical -- I think the other kinds of optimism are quite deeply cynical and dishonest.



Wednesday, Sept 5, 2001
3 years now...


Dirge without Music

by Edna St. Vincent Millay


I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the
     hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.


Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, - but the rest is lost.


The answer quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter,
     the love,-
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant
     and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do
     not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all roses in
     the world.


Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.



Thursday, Aug 30, 2001
Kid's books...


I keep running across reviews of these books that make me want to read them...


...books by Philip Pullman - whose The Amber Spyglass has been tipped to become the first 'children's novel' to win the Booker Prize - are subverting the influence of the religious Right at the moment of its greatest political triumph.

At their core, Pullman's books are profoundly humanistic. Joan Slatterly calls them stories 'about love, seizing the day and being alive'. 'For all the qualities they have,' says Pullman, 'mine are ordinary children who come to realise that the world is a wonderful place whose destiny is not their birthright. There are no hereditary traditions or magic wands like in Harry Potter. There is the occult but not in the sense I see in other books. I don't give people magical powers.'

At the end of the trilogy, love - 'the cause of it all', says Pullman - is some thing that has to give way to solitude. But the compensation is in life itself: 'The kingdom of heaven was over. We shouldn't live as though it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.'


Thursday, Aug 2, 2001
Hey!


So I'm listening to this Ram Dass tape on a drive downstate last week, and he's going on about a lot of Hindu ideas that just don't hold much interest for me -- talking about the next hundred or so lives he thinks we'll all come back for to get rid of our karma type of stuff -- when at the end of the tape he says something like... "My main point is: Lighten up! Hey! Hey!"


And the way Ram Dass said "Hey! Hey!" instantly reminded me of one of my favorite Chris Smither songs. When Chris sang it in concert in Suttons Bay last year, he said something about it being his "Buddhist tune"...



Hey, Hey, Hey

I am not a prophet,
I wouldn't be one if you paid me, But it doesn't take a lot to see ,
Just where you're headed lately,
Pretty soon you're gonna ask me,
How come the life you lead, Doesn't make you very happy,
Or satisfy your needs,
You talk about your needs as though
You know just what they are,
When in fact to really know them,
Is like travelling to a star,
It takes so long you die along the way,
So I say hey, hey, hey.

C'mon, siddown,
Let's talk about illusion,
How everything is made of it,
No wonder life's confusin',
All this stuff we take for granted,
So solid to the touch,
Is just a concrete indication,
That we love ourselves too much,
But if we don't love ourselves, you say,
Who will? Whatever for?
I say, that's a better question
Than the one you asked before,
But the answer is still just as far away,
So I say hey, hey, hey.

Let go of all of this,
Forget about your reason,
You can leave it all behind you,
You can start another season,
All these silly little fictions,
Are gonna take you by surprise,
When you see them in the daylight
And finally realize,
You told them to yourself,
Nobody else was listening,
You'll be standing broken-hearted,
Like a disillusioned Christian,
With your mouth open but nothin' left to say,
So just say hey, hey, hey.




Wed, Aug 1, 2001
poem


"Creaking to the post office
on my rusty bike
I saw one purple iris
wild in the wet green
of the rice field.
I wanted to send it to you.
I can only tell you
it was there."

-- Maura O'Halloran.



Mon, July 30, 2001
Louie L'Amour?

Found this while toddling around the web tonight... did he really write this?

There will come a time
when you believe 
everything is finished. 
That will be the beginning.

-- Louis L'Amour



Thur, July 26, 2001
Lighting another cigarette...


from Portrait of the artist as a wild old man

For someone who believes that we are living in 'a dark age', John Berger seems remarkably free of depression. 'I'm full of beans,' he says, 'and, touch wood, I seem to be in good health. I have, I think, a tragic view of life, but I joke, and try to live intensely, and draw flowers in the garden, things like that. I don't think one faces that tragic sense, except at certain moments, by lamentation, but in trying to recall that something else is possible, and there are human consolations, as well as pain. It seems to me that happiness is not a state, that it's an instantaneous flash, which almost always comes unexpectedly. Yes? The wider the view you have, the more pain you are aware of - and the closer the pain comes, but there are these flashes of illumination.' For a moment, as he lights another cigarette, he looks ecstatic.



Wed, July 18, 2001
Failure


"Don't remind me of my failures / I have not forgotten them."
     --Jackson Browne


From an interview with Terry Gross of "Fresh Air"

AJR: The last time AJR visited with you, in 1989, you said that "what's interesting about a person is not just their successes but their failures, not just what makes them happy but what they're scared of. To me the world is a pretty scary place, fraught with all kinds of dangers real and imagined." Do you still subscribe to that notion?
TG: Absolutely. I often talk to people about their failures. Someone I used to work with once said that he thought I tended to talk to the "dark side" of people. If that's true, I think that's because we're defined at least as much by our failures, the contradictions in our lives, as we are by our successes... That's why I also like to talk to people who have a sense of humor about themselves and can kind of recognize those failures with, you know, with some humor and irony.



Mon, July 9,  2001
Richard Dawkins: The prophet of reason

"It is absolutely true that the ecological niche that was filled by religion is now filled by science, and perhaps above all by the evolutionary science that I cling to myself," he says – that word "cling" so hesitantly voiced that I have to rewind the tape several times to make it out. "I do feel that science is absolutely not a religion when you mean it is held on faith, but it fills the same ecological niche as religion in the sense that it answers the same kind of questions as religion, in past centuries, was alleged to answer.

"So I have respect for religious people in so far as they are asking important questions. They want to know why we exist and why the world exists, and they don't just want to know who's going to win Wimbledon and what's for dinner. And to that extent I have great respect. But I get irritated at the way those deep and fundamental and mysterious questions are hijacked – because I think that science can answer most of them, if not all of them."

...

Darwinians ask meaningful "why" questions, he says. Those that ask "why is this leaf this particular shape?" or "why does this animal walk like this?". What about, "why are humans so credulous?" I ask. So happy to pay through the nose for an aura massage or crystal healing. Mustn't gullibility have an evolutionary explanation too?

...

The vulnerability of children to such parental downloads is one source of Dawkins' fierce opposition to religious schools (he recently described government plans to encourage the spread of single-faith schools as "evil"). The subject briefly makes him forget his self-denying ordinance: "I can't bear the religious labelling of children,"




Tues, June 26,  2001
Hello?

Someone sent me an email yesterday and pointed out that I hadn't posted here for almost 2 months...

Here's a link I found tonight to an Allen Ginsberg poem...
"Is About" (1996)



Thur, May 3,  2001
And flying machines


"Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone...

I've seen fire and I've seen rain
I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I'd see you again.

...sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground"
     
-- sweet dreams, Carole


Wed, Apr 18, 2001
Where are the Geese?

It occurs to me that I have not yet heard the geese honking their way northward. I asked CJ if she's heard them or knows when we might expect to see them flying overhead, and she said she only notices them when they fly south for the winter. Maybe when they fly north they don't have a good word to say?


Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.



Sun, Apr 15, 2001
No surrender


Tonight on the Simpsons, this quote from Lisa:

"Intelligence goes up, happiness goes down."



And as I was doing my taxes tonight (I know, why so soon?), this Jackson Browne tune was playing in my head:

"I'm going to be a happy idiot
And struggle for the legal tender
Where the ads take aim and lay their claim
To the heart and the soul of the spender
And believe in whatever may lie
In those things that money can buy
Though true love could have been a contender
Are you there?
Say a prayer for the Pretender
Who started out so young and strong
Only to surrender"



Fri, Apr 13, 2001
Anything


"When they say, 'Gee it's an information explosion!', no, it's not an explosion, it's a disgorgement of the bowels is what it is. Every idiotic thing that anybody could possibly write or say or think can get into the body politic now, where before things would have to have some merit to go through the publishing routine, now, ANYTHING." - Harlan Ellison



Sun, Apr 8, 2001
Ecstasy and so much junk

Review of new book of interviews with Allen Ginsberg. 

''Life should be ecstasy,'' Ginsberg says here, and poetry, he implies, should be life. His poetics was shaped by an adolescent encounter with Williams and Pound, their rejection of what he called the metronomic ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum of iambic pentameter for the flexible, complex rhythms of everyday speech. As informed by his later discovery of Buddhist meditation practice, this recognition led to the idea of poetry as breath, an emanation of the body as much as of the mind (one reason he gave, and attended, so many readings). Indeed, Buddhism taught him to eschew rationality in favor of ''ordinary'' or ''spontaneous'' mind, the vast sea of consciousness upon which our concepts and categories, anxieties and prohibitions, float like so much junk.


Mon, Apr 2,  2001
Box of Ashes


A review of Studs Terkel's upcoming book on death. I wish this topic wasn't so vivid for me...

Genial and witty, Terkel offers endless literary references when asked for his feelings on the subject of death. The topic is vivid for Terkel, who keeps fresh daisies beside the metal box containing his wife's ashes, all next to a living-room window that overlooks the yard.

"I'm curious about `what's next?'" Terkel said. "Although my own feeling is `what's next' is nothing. It's a terrible thing to say, I suppose, if you ever face it. That's why what you do on earth, now, here, is what it's all about, I think.


Sun, Apr 1,  2001
Fellowship

This will probably sound like an Apirl Fool's joke, but I really did go to "church" last Sunday. Actually, it was to the Unitarian Fellowship. I don't think they refer to it as "church"... We all stood up and sang a hymn at the beginning of the service. It did not mention Jesus, the Lord, or God.... It did mention keeping an inquiring mind! It just felt odd standing up and singing from a hymnal but having it be so... in the head? It's not that I'm looking forward to singing songs about Jesus, the Lord, or God, or Buddha, or Vishnu, or Yogi (Bear or Berra) -- it's just not what I remember about hymns from my Methodist days! (Yes, I can remember *that far* back.)

A week later, I'm still wondering what the purpose was, or if I'll go again. I got up this morning to go, but ended up reading in bed instead. Bought Mark Epstein's new book Going On Being: Buddhism and the Way of Change last night.

Great article on Garrison Keillor ("Church on Saturday Night") in the Winter 2001 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review. Here's a paragraph that speaks to me of my experience at the Fellowship...

In 1985 he [Keillor] went out of his way to heap praise on Jimmy Swaggart, at a time when Swaggart was wildly controversial. "They are the rock-and-rollers of the Church," Keillor told The Door. "Evangelists are supposed to get out there and shake it... [Their] one simple job is to shake people loose from their illusions... to look us straight in the eye and say, 'Whatever you are doing doesn't matter. None of your illusions matter. There is only one thing that matters.'" What Keillor can't stand is a liberal clergyman giving "well-crafted sermons" instead of saying "something that the Spirit has put in his heart to say... We don't go to church to hear lectures on ethical behavior, we go to look at the mysteries."


Sun, Apr 1,  2001
Next

I was talking on the phone trying to help someone install some software on his computer. He would read the screen instructions to me & ask what to do. After making some selections on a screen, he read the following instruction to me: "If satisfied, click next."

The phrase struck me immediately as a very philosophical statement for a computer program to include. I really like the way it sounds.

"If satisfied, click next."


Mon, Mar 12, 2001
Gone At Last

From one of the many news articles recently on The Afgan Buddha Crisis. "... the statues' demolition had begun and all other "moveable statues" in Afghanistan had been destroyed. The Taliban said that 59 Buddhist images were destroyed in the national museum in Kabul."

It does seem to me that Buddhists should not be too attached to these statues. Buddha did speak a bit about impermanence... 

Also, see the Jan 21, 2001 entry, It's Already Broken. (scroll down to the guy drinking the milk)


Mon, Mar 5, 2001

From a Salon review...

Be brave enough to be inside your own head, he suggests; there's a level on which your memories, your dreams, your regrets are real -- they take up space in your head and in your days...

DeLillo includes in the novel a journalist's description of a show Lauren performs called "Body Time": "Hartke clearly wanted her audience to feel time go by, viscerally, even painfully," it reads. "This is what happened, causing walkouts among the less committed." Like his heroine, DeLillo knows that the kind of abstraction he's purveying is difficult and even boring, but that's his point.


Fri, Mar 2, 2001
quote for the day

Found this in Salon in letters in response to the Buddha Boomers article. The line about every religion having it's "trivial fringe" read to me as "frivial twinge." I like the sound of that. Yes. I'm on the frivial twinge of Buddhism...

OK, every religion has its trivial fringe -- the Mahayana path of commercialism. But what's trivial about the art of happiness? Here's a snappy little quote from Albert Einstein:

"Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and longing are the motive force behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present themselves." (From the essay "Cosmic Religious Feeling.")


Thur, Mar 1, 2001
quote for the day

"But the information age offers all of us the power to bore people with the details of our own existences."  
  -- from a Suck.com article on journalist's weblogs


Thur, Feb 22, 2001
quote for the day

"I think if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn't happen, I may lose a little of the sense of loneliness and desolation which abides in me."
  --Alice James


Mon, Feb 19, 2001
advertise!

Working on the weblog, just had this thought about searching for poetry on the web. So I Googled "Poetry to break your heart," and this is one of the links that came up... Wasn't really what I was looking for! I thought maybe I'd find some Leonard Cohen or Jane Kenyon...

Putting Your Heart Online
CREATING A SUCCESSFUL AD

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From the New Yorker online. An interview with Alice Munro...

New Yorker: There's a beautiful description in "The Beggar Maid" [The New Yorker, 6/27/77] of a marriage that's going to end, and that in many respects is disastrous from the start, but the passage describes moments of rescue that will keep the characters going: "Sometimes, without reason or warning, happiness--the possibility of happiness--would surprise them."

Munro: "The complexity of things--the things within things--just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple."


Sun, Feb 18, 2001
no guarantees

Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body was a life-shifting book for me. She has a new book, The Powerbook, and this interview... 


"Eleanor Watchtel: Throughout your novel, Ali [the narrator] makes references to and tells her own version of stories of "great and ruinous lovers" -- Lancelot and Guinevere, Paolo and Francesca, even Burton and Taylor. To misquote Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, are all unhappy love affairs alike in some way?

Jeanette Winterson: Yes, but then I think that's because they embody a kind of sensual yearning that we all feel, that there's always more to life than this; there's always something worth seeking for. It's really the Holy Grail myth, isn't it -- that there's something outside of yourself that you have to go and quest for. That's why most of my books are really quest novels. In a love affair, you sense that here is the beloved; here is the great passion, the great thing that will change your life, and you know that at the same time it will ruin your life. It always does because anything of that size doesn't sit comfortably in the normal environment.

That's what I've always tried to explore. What do you do with these grand passions, because you can't take them home with you? They don't do the washing up or switch on the electric blanket. It's all just Wuthering Heights: you're out there on the moors shouting at one another!

... 

It's insane, but it's also about the glory of the recklessness of human life, and that's something we need. Perhaps we want things to be safe too much too often and we always want to know what we're in for how to limit our risks, how to have guarantees. But really there aren't any guarantees."

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Read a short notice of Jane Hirshfield's new book of poetry Given Sugar, Give Salt. Here's some lines the reviewer quoted that I liked. Especially since I have a few thousand stones here in the apartment:

"Each pebble in this world keeps
its own counsel"

and

Rocks "do not question silence,
however long"

I think this book is "calling me" to read it!

I Googled Jane. Found this poem. I'm guessing it's in the book.


Rebus

You work with what you are given
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottom of rivers or dust.

Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
There are honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.

This rebus—slip and stubbornness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life—
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.

The ladder leans into its darkness.
The anvil leans into its silence.
The cup sits empty.

How will I enter this question the clay has asked?


 

Fri, Feb 2, 2001
It's all the same to me

I was listening to Boston folk music station on the internet this morning while working on the Weblog. An older 10,000 Maniacs song came on. The lyrics to this tune by Iris Dement just caught my ear. Finally paid attention to them... So I Napstered the song, and I Googled the lyrics:


LET THE MYSTERY BE (Iris DeMent)

Everybody's wonderin' what and where they they all came from
everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go
when the whole thing's done
but no one knows for certain
and so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be

Some say once you're gone you're gone forever
and some say you're gonna come back
Some say you rest in the arms of the Saviour
if in sinful ways you lack
Some say that they're comin' back in a garden
bunch of carrots and little sweet peas
I think I'll just let the mystery be

Everybody's wonderin' what and where they they all came from
everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go
when the whole thing's done
but no one knows for certain
and so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be

Some say they're goin' to a place called Glory
and I ain't saying it ain't a fact
but I've heard that I'm on the road to purgatory
and I don't like the sound of that
I believe in love and I live my life accordingly
but I choose to let the mystery be

Everybody's wondering what and where they they all came from
everybody is worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go
when the whole thing's done
but no one knows for certain
and so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be
I think I'll just let the mystery be


Mon, Jan 29, 2001

Now I still don't have to actually practice yoga... I can just watch it on my computer? How easy is this?

Yoga on the Internet: Finding Inner Peace With Your Keyboard


Sun, Jan 21, 2001
It's Already Broken

Reading The Sun. Sy Safranski has an essay about a house about to be torn down for a high rise office building. The house was an early and long part of the history of his magazine. He thinks about impermanence.

"In Breath by Breath, meditation teacher Larry Rosenberg writes that, after a six-month meditation retreat, he returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discover that a familiar building had been knocked down. 
     'There had been an old-fashioned homey restaurant,' he recounts, 'where a bunch of us had enjoyed hanging out, the kind of place where you could have a muffin and coffee, sit and read the paper, talk to friends. But when I came back from my retreat, it was no longer there. In its place was an upscale clothing store, a window full of mannequins in all kinds of enticing poses. I had a stark realization of impermanence. I kept looking at the new store, remembering the old restaurant. The place I'd had such affection for no longer existed.' He continues: 'Sometimes, when people really see the law of impermanence, they finally understand: it is unintelligent to attach to things that are changing."

...

"...The Sy who was a day younger: gone. The amazing conversation he had with his wife last night, the touch of her hand, the press of her lips: gone. What's the Buddhist chant? Gone, gone beyond, gone beyond beyond."

...

"I remembered a small, scribbled sign I used to keep over my desk there. The sign had been meant to remind me of a favorite story: A student asks his master how he can ever be happy in a world where nothing remains the same, where loss and grief are unavoidable. The master holds up a drinking glass. 'You see this glass?' he says. 'For me, this glass is already broken. I drink from it. I enjoy it. I admire the way it catches the light. But if, a week from now, my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the floor and shatters, I'll say, "Of course." If I can understand that this glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious. Every moment is just as it is.' "

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A Quote of the Day:

"You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly."
-- Sam Keen


Mon, Jan 15, 2001
I'm Going to Graceland...

Reading Rolling Stone. From an interview with Paul Simon when they asked him why he was more relaxed onstage, more inspired:

"When asked what prompted the change, Simon's tears well up -- it was a kind of spiritual awakening. 'I become very aware of how grateful I was to be alive,' he says. 'I had a great feeling of awe. I thought, The only thing that God requires from us is to enjoy life -- and love. It doesn't matter if you accomplish anything. You don't have to do anything but appreciate that you're alive. And love, that's the whole point.' "


Wed, Jan 10, 2001

I Googled "Casey Hill"... found this. Don't know what it means... I don't think I know the person whose website this is on...

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From a Salon interview with Mark Salzman...

In the wake of publishing this book, Salzman created not one but two stories. The novel is about a nun who learns her religious visions and channeled poetry may not be ecstatic gifts from God so much as symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy. Her conflict revolves around choosing between physical health and the psychic fireworks she has come to associate with her relationship to God...

It seems the Catholic contemplatives have been experiencing a renaissance -- Hildegaard von Bingen is selling millions of CDs; people are reading the mystical poets. What do you think it is about these characters that speak across the centuries to people who don't even hold their beliefs?

I think it's because the mystical traditions deal with doubt more than a lot of other religious people. It's true of Thomas More and St. John of the Cross, and true of the contemplatives in general. They put the struggle with doubt right in the forefront of religious experience. They say that it's when you think you know God that you're farthest from knowing him.

We live in an age when certainty is passed off as spirituality -- like the fundamentalists who are so sure of their beliefs -- and what I love about the contemplatives is that they are willing to acknowledge their doubt.

One of my favorite moments came when I was talking to a Carmelite nun and I asked her what she struggled with most and she said: "Doubt as to God's existence. Every day we're searching for God -- you have to confront that you have doubts." ...

There's a theme in much of your work about wanting to be good at something. In "Iron and Silk" you confess this desire to one of your Chinese friends. But in some way Sister John is struggling with the same desire -- in some sense she wants to be good at her calling: to be totally unselfish. Yet ironically, this is also a selfish desire in some way -- or at least she suspects it is. Do you think the desire, say, to be good at martial arts is roughly equivalent to her spiritual ambitions?

A better comparison would be my early interest in Zen Buddhism -- and the idea of becoming enlightened. I thought it would make me datable. You want something that's really transcendent but you also want something for yourself and it's sort of a contradiction. The same is true of wanting to become holy --

I do think that's a universal problem with reaching for an ideal. You feel called to move toward it and you reach for it but fall short. What's the point? It's a recurring theme and one of the great challenges we all face being idealists and having to be realistic. And yet you've got to move on, you've got to have some kind of faith.


Wed, Dec 13, 2000

The finality of George Bush actually becoming President... This story helps me when I fear the worst.

"The situation we always live in is like that of the wise Chinese farmer whose horse ran off. When his neighbors came to console him the farmer said, "Who knows what's good or bad?"

When his horse returned the following day with a herd of horses following her, the foolish neighbor came to congratulate him on his good fortune.

"Who knows what's good or bad?" said the farmer.

Then, when the farmer's son broke his leg trying to ride one of the new horses, the foolish neighbor came to console him again.

"Who knows what's good or bad?" said the farmer.

When the army came through, conscripting men for war, they passed over the farmer's son because of his broken leg. When the foolish man came to congratulate the farmer that his son would be spared, again the farmer said, "Who knows what's good or bad?"

When do we expect the story to end?"

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When Theory Becomes Too Much

A literate Panda bear walks into a bar, sits down at a table and orders a beer and a double cheeseburger.

After the Panda finishes eating, he wipes his mouth, pulls out a pistol and tears the place apart with gunfire. Patrons scatter and dive under chairs and tables as the bear disappears out the door. After making sure that no one is hurt, the bartender races outside and calls after the bear, "What the hell did you do that for?" The bear calls back, "I'm a Panda bear. Look it up in the dictionary."

The bartender returns and pulls out his dictionary.

panda, Pan"da\, n. (Zo["o]l.)

A small Asiatic mammal (Ailurus fulgens) having fine soft fur. It is related to the bears, and inhabits the mountains of Northern India. Eats shoots and leaves.


Fri, Dec 8, 2000

The Bodhisattva of PR. 

"We know this much, and we can picture his maroon robes, his trademark eyeglasses. Still, some mystery persists, even under the bright searchlights of fame: Why is the Dalai Lama laughing? What's so funny? Is it us?

...Maybe he thinks we're funny. Maybe we are. We love Buddhism but misrepresent it, spinning our wheels on the slippery patches -- is it a religion or a philosophy? Is there a difference? Our skepticism gets in the way.

The monk does occasionally emerge, in the West, from behind the diplomat, and the teachings we receive exceed the wisdom of the average politician: "I try to treat whoever I meet as an old friend," the Dalai Lama has said. "This gives me a genuine feeling of happiness. It is the practice of compassion."


Thur, July 27, 2000

Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki. 

"Chadwick as biographer is remarkably nonjudgmental, though he doesn’t gloss over the difficulties, outbursts or tragedies. Zen has no use for the concepts of sin or guilt and Chadwick understands Suzuki’s (or his students’) foibles as rest stops on the road to more perfect realization. The result is a subtly shattering but hopeful work."


Fri, July 21, 2000

Raymond Carver's grave...

"Beside it already is the stone awaiting Tess Gallagher. Bridging the two is a third stone, bearing an engraving of Carver and Gallagher, cheek to cheek, and the text of the poem, Gravy, which Carver wrote shortly before his death:

'No other word will do. For that's what it was. Gravy. Gravy, these past ten years/ Alive, sober, working, loving and being loved by a good woman...'

Behind the grave is a wrought-iron stand, hung with wind-chimes sounding in the stiff breeze off the strait. Gallagher has installed a granite bench for visitors and a metal box containing a notebook for messages. 'Ray,' one visitor has written, 'you've got yourself a very nice spot here. Couldn't be better. A friend of mine in New Orleans who passed on was cremated and his ashes were in a car that was stolen and never found. Oh well, thought you'd get a kick out of that. JT, Portland.'

People have also left tokens and mementoes in the box: a pen, a candle, a couple of cigarettes and a lighter (there is some irony here: Carver died, at the age of 50, from lung cancer).

.....

His greatest skill was in anatomizing the terrible fragility of relationships, the moment at which a life may turn, for reasons which can't always be explained, usually for the worst, but occasionally - just occasionally - for the best.

'Ray,' says Gallagher slowly, 'is a heavyweight ghost. He's a heavyweight in my personal life, because I really cannot relate any more without him. If I'm walking by the river, I walk by the river with Ray. If I see a duck fly up I think, Oh Ray would enjoy that; if I see a big ship I'm thinking, Ray, look at the ship.'

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J.K. Rowlings. Buddhist...

"Yet Rowling concentrates not on the fairytale but on what came immediately before. The fact that she has been seriously depressed and desperately short of money are defining factors for her. She is also aware that without that failed marriage in 1993, there would be no Jessica and possibly no Harry. Life does not come in a neat package, I say, and she pounces on this. 'People do want life to be neat. That is undoubtedly true. But you know the four great truths of Buddha: the first one is "Life is Suffering". I love that. I LOVE THAT. Because I think YES. Life is not supposed to be neat. And it's a comfort. It's a comfort to all of us who have messed up. And then you find your way back, bizarrely. And I'm sure to mess up again at some point - though, I hope, not on such a grand scale'."


Wed, July 12, 2000

The Name of the World. by Denis Johnson. Austin Chronicle review. 

"As for Michael Reed, he feels virtually dead because his wife and daughter are absolutely, positively, and quite suddenly dead. His wife "wore the world lightly, and that was important to me," he confesses. "I didn't think often about that which people called God," he states in one of the blackest moments of the book, "but for some time now I'd certainly hated it, this killer, this perpetrator, in whose blank silver eyes nobody was too insignificant, too unremarkable, too innocent and too small to be overlooked in the parceling out of tragedy."

----------

Raymond Carver. "Carver lost the wife, but he beat the alcohol and, over the next decade, in his 'miraculous second life' with Gallagher, he returned to writing. When he died of lung cancer in 1988 -- he once described himself as 'a cigarette with a life attached'... "


Fri, May 25, 2000

Donald Hall. in conversation with Judith Moore. San Diego Reader. 

Mr. Hall murmured what I took as agreement, then said, "What was the most beautiful thing in our marriage was when we weren't aware that we were going to die. And we just had our routine. You know you look back on it, and you think, 'Why wasn't I aware of how blissful that was?' But if you'd been aware of how blissful it was you would have been dreading losing it. Anybody who's been through anything like this knows what I mean."


Thur, May 24, 2000

Ani DiFranco. Interview by Matthew Rothschild. The Progressive.

"Q: On Up, Up, Up, Up, Up, Up (1998), you have another religious reference. You say, "God's work isn't done by God. It's done by people." What are you driving at there?

DiFranco: Well, I'm not a religious person myself. I'm an atheist. I think religion serves a lot of different purposes in people's lives, and I can recognize the value of that, you know, the value of ceremony, the value of community, or even just having a forum to get together and talk about ideas, about morals--that's a cool concept. But then, of course, institutional religions are so problematic.

And that line from the song, anyway, is how unfortunate it is to assign responsibility to the higher up for justice amongst people. My spirituality tends to be more in the vein of, if there is a God it exists within us, and the responsibility for justice is on our shoulders. What if we just looked to each other in this way? What if the steeples didn't all point up? What if they all pointed at us, and we had to care for each other in the way that we expect God to care for us? I'm much more interested in that."


Wed, May 24, 2000

Ok. I'm still not meditating... Maybe I have a nasty band of anti-meditation memes in me? Ya think?

Meme, Myself, I New Scientist.

Some would even say that belief in a permanent self is the cause of all human suffering--of fear, jealousy, hatred and unkindness.

But is it possible to live life without the illusion? One way might be to calm your mind. Techniques such as meditation, say, can still the memes that are constantly competing for your brain space, forcing you to keep thinking. Long traditions of training in meditation show this is possible: that years of practice can bring emptiness, compassion and clarity of mind. Meditation, at its simplest, consists of just sitting quietly and clearing the mind of all thoughts, and then, when more arise, just letting them go.

Meditation is itself a meme, but is, if you like, a meme-clearing meme. Its effect is not to obliterate all awareness, but rather to create an awareness that is more spacious and open, and seems, perhaps paradoxically, to be without a self who is experiencing it.


Tue, May 23, 2000

Thoughts on addiction from a London-based magazine.


Addiction addicts. The tendency to see addiction in everything from smoking to shopping is a morbid social symptom, argues Dr Michael Fitzpatrick LM.

"But though the anti-smoking lobby plays up its offensive against the tobacco industry, its real threat is to the status of the individual and to civil liberties. If people who smoke - more than a quarter of the adult population - are defined as being in a state of drug addiction and are considered, as a result, to be incapable of making rational decisions, then the state is justified in taking ever-greater control over their behaviour."

...

"In this climate, the concept of addiction - the idea that a substance or activity can produce a compulsion to act that is beyond the individual's self-control - has a powerful resonance. The notion of the individual as an independent person who decides his or her destiny has given way to a more diminished interpretation of autonomy, as the pathology of addiction provides a new standard for determining behaviour."

...

"Whether the discussion is about tobacco or drugs, sex or shopping, the inflation of addiction is a morbid social symptom, assiduously promoted by the therapeutic entrepreneurs of the worlds of counselling and therapy and by the cults of self-help, personal growth and victim support. It encourages people to regard themselves as passive victims of external forces, of demonised 'substances' or 'toxic' relationships, even of their own biology. The widespread acceptance of this outlook is all the more remarkable if you consider the extent to which it contradicts most people's experience. As Stanton Peele writes, 'people regularly quit smoking, cut back drinking, lose weight, improve their health, create healthy love relationships, raise strong and happy children and contribute to communities and combat wrong - all without expert intervention'."


Mon, May 22, 2000

There's been a lot of information on genetically manipulated (GM) crops. I haven't paid that much attention to the arguments. I guess I just sided "naturally" with the "anti GM" crowd. But I'm not sure why... I couldn't defend that position intelligently. Just that "anti-corporate" mindset I suppose. This letter from Richard Dawkins makes me think that I ought to think more about it... 

An Open Letter to Prince Charles by Richard Dawkins. The Edge. (In reply to A Royal View)

"Incidentally, one worrying aspect of the hysterical opposition to the possible risks from GM crops is that it diverts attention from definite dangers which are already well understood but largely ignored. The evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria is something that a Darwinian might have foreseen from the day antibiotics were discovered. Unfortunately the warning voices have been rather quiet, and now they are drowned by the baying cacophony: 'GM GM GM GM GM GM!'"

...

"Of course that's bleak, but there's no law saying the truth has to be cheerful; no point shooting the messenger - science - and no sense in preferring an alternative world view just because it feels more comfortable. In any case, science isn't all bleak. Nor, by the way, is science an arrogant know-all. Any scientist worthy of the name will warm to your quotation from Socrates: 'Wisdom is knowing that you don't know.' What else drives us to find out?"

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