"Zen Myth(s), Zen Reality"

Like some Las Vegas dancer checking personal details before bursting onto the stage, I wake up in the morning and straighten the seams or apply one last dab or lipstick or powder: In bed, I am comfortable-ish after a night's sleep, but I need to arrange the aches and pains that will attend on the coming, stand-up-and-move day. It's not that I want them but rather that I know they are coming and I want to get my ducks in a row. Ribs? Check. Joints? Check. Neck? Check. Sprained finger? Check.

And once those ducks were more of less lined up....

Yesterday, I spent a good deal of time considering a friend's essay, "Zen Myth(s), Zen Reality." Somehow, Brian Victoria (a Zen monk and academic who lives in Japan) and I have come into a relationship in which I lend my eyes to articles he is currently writing. Besides grammar, spelling and other mechanics, there is substance to attend to and yesterday, that substance took the stuffing out of me, so there was little left over for easy-peasy writing that once dripped out of my mind like water from a leaky spigot.

The substance boiled down to a small tussle about the word "enlightenment." It is strange how, in spiritual adventures, there are some words that are blithely assumed and seldom examined. "God" drips off the lips of believers and non-believers alike. "Enlightenment" is grist for the Buddhist mill.

But if such touchstone/cornerstone references are central to the critique or encomium, isn't there an intellectual imperative (at a minimum) to say what you're talking about or to admit (full frontal nudity) that it cannot be adequately described and thus whatever the argument, pro or con, it is far weaker than the seriousness that can be brought to the discussion?

These are not questions I would put to the superficial critics or cheerleaders, but they are questions I would put to Brian because 1. I like him and 2. He's not dumb.

So I made my email-based pitch and by the time I was done, I was quite tired, mentally and physically. Digging in and digging down takes an effort I once would have found merely invigorating, a stepping stone to the rest of a hopefully-more-productive day ... going to the supermarket, perhaps, or making the bed or doing a load of laundry or making dinner... something concrete and useful. Who in their right mind wastes a lot of time on "God" or "enlightenment?"

It's like pissing into the wind, isn't it?

Yes it is, but sometimes it is fun -- or at least I imagine it will be fun -- and the idea of fun appeals to me, even if, like "God" and "enlightenment" and "love," finding an adequate definition is like nailing Jell-O to a wall.

Zen argumentation vs. making the bed ... I can no longer be quite so careless: I need to do some triage if whatever energies I have are to be well-spent.

end of the 'Great Recession'

Printed in the local Daily Hampshire Gazette yesterday under the headline "Whew, the recession is finally over."

By Jonathan Kahane

I've heard repeatedly on the TV and have read in the newspapers and magazines that The Great Recession is over.

Each time I get this information, I heave a sigh of relief, exclaim, "Finally!", and expect my financial situation to return to health within the following couple of minutes. I'm still waiting.

I can only suppose that everyone around me has recovered and I must be doing something wrong. I blame myself for not taking Economics 101 in college. Sometimes I blame my mother for throwing out all my baseball cards.

I have heard that often a person must reach rock bottom before one can begin to climb out of a bad situation. I tried this theory out the other evening by tuning into a Red Sox game. I watched them lose another heartbreaker in extra innings. It was 11:30 p.m. and I thought that surely I can't sink any lower than this.

Then, as if by magic, in support of the above-mentioned theory, the answer to my financial woes came to me loud and clear over the TV. A car dealer was exclaiming, "Save $7,000 by buying this Chevrolet."

Now I've heard of people claiming to have their problems solved by receiving a message from "above" or by having a vision, or by experiencing a dream. Surely, having one's problems erased by a car dealer must be a first.

It's amazing how one can get answers to seemingly impossible predicaments in the most curious ways. It would normally take me years to save $7,000 -- and then only if we had several winters where the average temperature was 60 degrees and if my refrigerator didn't continue to break down every month

I could barely sleep that night. I couldn't wait to get up and rush to the Chevy dealer to save my seven grand.

Naturally, I jumped out of bed at the crack of dawn the begin my new savings plan. On the way to the dealer, things got even better. There was a sign on the furniture store window telling me that I could save $500 if I bought a sofa. I made a quick stop.

In fact there were signs on every store informing me that I would save more money if I came in. Why hadn't I been aware of this before? Let's see, I saved $300 on a riding mower, $200 on a mattress, and finally $150 on that new refrigerator I needed so badly.

I then had to hurry to the Chevy dealer to save the big bucks. After saving my $7,000 and while I was driging home in my new car with a proud grin on my face, I stopped at the grocery store and saved an additional $6.73 on food. Every penny counts.

That came to a grand total in savings of $8,150.73 -- in one day! While accumulating all of this savings, I noticed that other stores could save me 15 percent on outdoor furniture, 20 percent on hardware supplies and 25 percent on a variety of online items. Heck, I can only save 1 percent at the bank. I got busy the next day adding to my savings. The is was alot easier than I thought.

Here it is a week later and I am feeling much more confident now about my ability to finally join the rest of my country and climb out of the The Recession. Hmmmm. Excuse me for a second. The sheriff is coming up my driveway. I wonder what he wants.

prescriptors, descriptors and callouses

Perhaps at the outset of spiritual adventures, the teachings and practices might be called "prescriptors" ... what to do, how to do it, doing it, etc.

But I wonder, as time slips away, if further down the road, spiritual adventure doesn't loosen its grip and become something more like a "descriptor" -- just a means of describing what actually happens ... no big deal.

When I first read of Zen Buddhist monks getting callouses on their asses, I was somehow taken aback. Sure, intensive and longtime meditation sitting was part of the program, but callouses?! I was doing a little sitting at the time and couldn't imagine getting callouses on my ass, even in a most intensive setting.

Nowadays, with dwindling energy and a greater reliance on sitting down as the days pass, there are collouses on my ass. It's hardly a wonder or a novelty or a mark of spiritual advancement. Callouses form anywhere there is repeated and prolonged use. Cause and effect ... no need to inject spiritual icing into an already-made cake.

Spritual adventure starts out as something "else" -- something that will ease or erase or bring relief. There are prescriptions and, often, hymns of one kind or another. Spiritual endeavor is "good" and as such, holds things at a distance, while claiming to bring them close. "Interconnection," dontcha know. A world of prescription.

But when things calm down and the bright lights are no longer quite so necessary ... well, you get callouses on your ass with or without a spiritual overlay. Spiritual life becomes one possible way of describing things ... and the things, as always, don't mind and don't require improvement.

Presciptors, descriptors and callouses.

It's raining around here today.

similar magic

"the wisdom of the elders"

(Associated Press) As students head back to school, here comes a big homework assignment: StoryCorps wants tens of thousands of teenagers across America to interview a grandparent or elder this Thanksgiving and upload their recordings to the Library of Congress.

The nonprofit oral history organization is asking high school history teachers to have their students record the interviews with StoryCorps' free smartphone application. Records sent to the library will become part of a publicly accessible archive at the American Folklife Center.

"The Great Thanksgiving Listen" is an assignment that will last for generations, StoryCorps founder Dave Isay said.

"When young people do these interviews and they hit `send' at end of the interview to the library, they know that their great-great-great-great-great-grandkids are going to get to eavesdrop on this conversation someday and get to understand where they come from, who their ancestors were," Isay said in a telephone interview.

He hopes it becomes an annual tradition that brings families closer together by using modern technology to preserve the wisdom of elders.

Why do I hunch that it is the 'elders' who favor such an effort. True, younger people may have some hunger for stories of the past, but as a matter of urgency and insistence and concrete usefulness, somehow I imagine that it is the older folks who think it's a good idea to pass the 'wisdom' along.

Not to put too fine a point on it, younger people, if they are anything like me, have not yet finished with the delights of  being an asshole ... and in that department, no one else's experience will have as much honest impact.

It seems that tales of the past are a part of every period in human history. Some stuff is worth knowing if you want to stay alive. But no matter how much desire there is to find a fruitful edge, there will always be someone -- or a group of someones -- to test the boundaries and push the envelope and risk death or destruction or sorrow all over again. Same shit, different day.

And if that is true, the question has to be asked, "what is wisdom" and how useful might it actually be? Isn't it only as useful as this current asshole is willing to make it?

I suppose I could frame this curiosity in more polite language ("asshole" sounds a bit cynical), but isn't the best experience in this life often premised on the all-too-personal screw-ups and errors anyone may have made? Isn't it that information that tends to drill down and deeply inform anyone's life in ways that reading a book or cheering with a crowd couldn't hope to achieve?

Mind you, I like the idea of people talking to each other and listening to each other. But I am suspicious of the notion that such conversation or complicity or 'learning' can actually achieve the status of "wisdom."

Older people can grow positively crabby about the unwillingness or inability of younger people to listen and absorb and "not be as stupid as I was." Love is the most important thing; war is edgelessly horrific; there is a reality even prior to heaven and earth ... blah, blah, blah wisdom, in one sense and, in another, there is a possibility of suggesting another way of looking at things. But that way is seldom if ever the way in which the crabby 'elders' might imagine it.

Younger people "gotta be free," just as their story-telling, wisdom-imparting elders once were.

fractals

Fractals:

-- Be quick, the autumn leaves proclaim:
Do not ignore this endless spring.
Slow down to this small speed of light;
Do not surrender to this night.

 -- In the stillness of a clear, cool dawn, the sun shines through "The Tree of the Hanging Squirrels" across the street. In the light, the Japanese maple leaves are almost black and oh-so-still except that this morning, within that shadow box, there are small kerfuffles of movement and leaping, small places of gymnastics where the squirrels have reappeared after what feels like a too-long absence to munch on rosy shoots.

-- Because of vacations, I think, two small neighborhood gardens are, for the moment, untended. Doreen's flower garden shows signs of having its way. She has gone to Colorado to be with her husband, Mike, for a bit of a vacation in the neighborhood where Mike has set up shop for a while, working on weather satellites. They planned to see some natural wonders. The flower garden that Doreen says is as good as any anti-anxiety drug, is missing her insistent and nurturing hand. It needs a bit of a haircut.

Mack and Claudia also seem to be away. In their absence, the squash has risen up as squash will in warm months, its tendrils reconnoitering in force, reaching, imposing, insisting that it alone deserves dominance on the ground. The tomatoes turn red and drop away. The morning glories seem to be in competition with the squash. The peas have run their course. And everything, like some insistent cowlick, needs a restraining and caring hand.

-- Today is my older son's birthday as tomorrow will be my wife's. My son will return from a weekend seminar for track coaches this evening and I'll make some lemon-chicken and rice, which he likes, and get a cake in which to stick some candles. Ask either one what they might like for a birthday gift and they will say "nothing." There is an irritating quality to that.

-- Old age seems to be a bit like being marooned -- washed up out of choppy and threatening seas, your life no longer in danger, saved by terra firma, a sigh of thankfulness in the heart ... no longer threatened. But having gained your bearings, the land is no longer quite so clearly "firma." A marooned person is a person alone and the question will need to be faced: Is death a fate worth fearing?

What is this land called "old age?" If I had to guess, I would guess it is a land in which what was always obvious is now obvious-er, if such a word exists: Experience cannot be shared. And since most of the training received up until this point is not capable of addressing such a fact, I am a novice, a tyro, a man without capacities to cope with the obvious. I am weak and uncertain of how I can become strong or uncertain that strength is even possible. Such is the nature of being marooned ... saved and yet incapable of embracing my good fortune. The line between ahhhh and eeeek dissolves. Being sad or happy, outraged or full of joy no longer computes. Everything is for free and still I am trapped.

Experience cannot be shared. Period. There is food and drink and air and sunshine ... and yet ....

There is a learning curve which feels suspiciously like a curve of unlearning. There may be caterwauling or panic or surrender and none of it matters ... nor is it sad. It may feel constricted or constricting and yet, facing in any direction at all, things are clearly and enormously free.

But there is no sharing freedom, so how might a marooned man find his footing?

beauty and the weight lifter

To be both a beauty queen and a champion weightlifter is not unheard of nowadays, but in 1940s Singapore it was a very unusual path for a young girl.

Ho Lye Toh was a teenager who could lift weights of up to 100kg (220lb). Now 92, she might be Singapore's most famous nonagenarian after her remarkable life story surfaced in an article earlier this year and enraptured the city.
Her father was Ho Peng Khoen, a school teacher and former Malayan weightlifting champion. In 1941, he made a decision that changed her life.
"I was 14 and I fell sick quite often, sometimes so bad that I would pass out. So my father decided I should begin exercising to build body strength," Madam Ho said.

 It's all "ancient history" ... just like today.

no-kidding dangers of belief

Niloy Neel

Discussions of spiritual persuasions are often imagined to be held in a room full of smooth and soothing gentlemen wearing leather patches on their elbows. Or perhaps in some lavishly decorated bit of temple. Or at some gathering where everyone hums harmoniously "ommmmmmm."

OK. But I think it is worth the effort to be informed about the crass outcroppings of belief ... not just the ones attributed to "extremists" or "fundamentalist wack-jobs," but to the very one looking back from the bathroom mirror. No shit ... anyone with any belief can be a flaming asshole ... which is human and OK except when that fire is rained down on someone else.

Belief, any belief, deserves serious scrutiny.

A Bangladeshi blogger known for his atheist views has been hacked to death by a gang armed with machetes in the capital Dhaka, police say.

Niloy Neel was attacked at his home in the city's Goran area.

He is the fourth secularist blogger to have been killed this year by suspected Islamist militants in Bangladesh.

No bobbing and weaving. No "my belief is not capable of such extremity." Cut the crap. Own the violence and horror that is inherent is the most swooning credulity. Sip the laced Kool Aid belief brews by its very nature. Anyone trying to explain it away ("the true faith is not like that") is whistling past a graveyard in which others -- but not me -- are invariably buried.

starting a Zen Buddhist practice

On a Buddhist bulletin board, there was a question about how to enter into Zen Buddhism. Naturally, I couldn't resist sticking my oar in ... to wit ...

If you are interested in Zen Buddhism I would suggest:

1. Do your very, very best not to teach anyone. In that way, your teaching may turn out to be worth something.
2. Be patient. Study, read, and most of all, practice: It is hard to imagine when starting out, but practice will always outstrip anything you "know." Build the practice experience with a firm, persistent kindness.
3. When it comes to kids, I guess everyone comes up with his or her own program. Mine, with three children, may have been summed up in the thought, "I am not interested in creating 'good Buddhists;' I would prefer to help create 'good people.'" I may not have done a very good job, but that doesn't mean I was wrong.
4. Don't trouble yourself too much with the environmental elements that brought you this far in your life. Whether you grew up with or were indoctrinated by Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, baseball or banking ... it's all OK. Hold on to what you need to hold on to ... but do your practice ... and see what happens.

Best wishes.

I guess I'm posting this as much as anything so that others can know how far off-base I am.

just a memory I enjoy

The remembrance has the feel of a potential column, so I guess I will give it a little rein, however much I may dislike old-fart recollections:

By six o'clock I was where I was supposed to be -- standing outside an elevator on an elevated floor of an apartment building overlooking the East River in New York. Rich-folks territory. Rarefied air. There was a single doorway off the landing where I stood -- the one leading to the apartment where I had promised to give a painting estimate. I had promised to be there and I was there, but I was tired.

The day had begun at about 4:30, rolling out of bed, hiking down to a Zen Center I then attended, doing a couple of hours of morning meditation, heading out to a painting job I was in the middle of, working eight hours, returning home for a quick shower and then out the door for the appointment I had made. In my one-man painting business, I had several rules and one of them was to do what I said I was going to do or, if that didn't work, to assume the responsibility for not performing as promised. Over time, it proved to be a good business model: Trust was important.

I stuck out a finger and rang the door bell. I could hear it going off behind the door and almost immediately I heard something else -- a yapping dog. I waited ... and was tired. I could hear the dogs yapping get louder as it, and presumably its owner approached the door.

The door opened.

The dog -- about the size of an American Kennel Club toaster -- yapped wildly, standing at its owner's feet but making protective lunges in my direction. And suddenly, I had had enough and the first words of greeting to this potential customer were:

"Madame, if that dog bites me, I am going to kick it through the window."

Though I said this in an even tone, it was as if I had bitch-slapped the woman. I was fully prepared to see the door slammed in my face but instead the woman became apologetic in the way that dog-owners do when they love their pets and can't quite understand why others would not feel the same. She picked up the dog and invited me in and ....

It was the beginning of a long relationship in which I worked for her and her husband on a number of occasions. They proved to be the exception to the rich-and-entitled-folks rule of thumb in my head... the rich may have the money, but they didn't get rich by being honest and nice and I preferred some semblance of nice and honest in my environment....

Well ... this is too slow-moving. Maybe I'll work on it, maybe not, but I'll keep it as notes....

Aug. 6, 1945

dying to be relevant

A morning cool as autumn today -- crispy, crispy cool and bright, though it's not yet fall.

Yesterday, I received a note and newest article from an aging friend who is keen to be part of the "humanist" realm ... smart and logical and fighting the good fight against various sorts of religious and other mindless assertions. She is on the right team, from where I sit, and yet there is a desperation I sense in her writing, as if arrogating to herself an importance resulting from having lived so long and thought so much and found meaning in her lifetime that others might do well to acknowledge.

But no one gives a shit ...

That is the desperation I sense in her somewhat unfocused argumentation and recollections. The world has moved on and left her voice and experience unheard. Where once there was careful and particular thought and effort and involvement, now "there's an app for that."

"If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?" "If a life and its experience goes unacknowledged by others, is it really a life at all?"

This daunting question may be more apparent to those of a certain age, but I have a hunch that everyone has a wee corner in which such a question might be asked ... whose claws might dig in a draw blood: Who will hear my dearest thought, answer my most-closely-held question, acknowledge me where it counts and in so doing, free me from this strange, dank cell?

It might all be written off to loneliness, but I have a further hunch that even the most socially immersed can feel the lash. How is this to be addressed?

Sometimes I feel fortunate to have had a period when I was interested in Zen Buddhism. Its tendrils and teachings reach out and inform and I wouldn't recommend it or praise it to anyone else. It just has information that I find useful. Not perfect, but useful... and I am grateful for the experience.

No one gives a shit.

And why should they? Or shouldn't they?

Today, on the front page of the local paper, a couple of car-repair places were shown in flames.

The fire seems to have started in the roof (the best place for a fire that wants to insure a "total loss"). The owner said he had insurance, so rebuilding was in the cards.

The first thought into my head was what a an almost-perfect crime arson is: With luck, the evidence is consumed by the fire; insurance companies are disinclined to carry out an investigation that would cost more than the payout on the policy; and, in hard times, the arsonist comes out ahead.

In Hiroshima, Japan, today, many remembered the day -- Aug. 6, 1945 -- when the first atomic bomb was dropped on a city and obliterated it. 80,000 died. Many others were savagely maimed. In John Hersey's "Hiroshima," I remember the tale of one person trying to help another by reaching down and offering a hand. But when the victim's hand was grasped, the flesh slipped away like some charred glove.

I once did some research on arson. I once read Hersey's book. How is it possible that no one remembers as I remember ... and yet what an arrogant question that is. George Santayana observed that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it, another egregious piece of witty arrogance: Of course people do not study history and even if they do, what could it possibly tell them in ways that would prevent or encourage a better/worse outcome?

And likewise if this life's tree falls in the forest, who could possibly know or hear or give a shit?

Whining is not the point of all this ... or maybe it is partly the point. But most interesting is the factualness that the loss of relevance imposes. What secret place goes unaddressed? Why does no one care as once I imagined they did? Why, in this secret place, do I maintain my secret and yearn for it to be addressed even as the realization creeps up like a filling bathtub ... no one cares. But no one cares not because they actively don't care, but because experience cannot be shared and imagining that it can is the very tap root of this desperate situation.

Experience is just a gift. Like a pair of socks they can be delightful, warming, cheesy, slick ... but they are just a gift under each (wo)man's Christmas tree on this crispy morning.

Oh well ... I need to sharpen this observation, but I doubt that I ever will. I guess the fact is that I don't really give much of a shit.

a little magic

Passed along in email. I have no clue what it is, but it sure is magical:

Brian Victoria article

Smiling Burmese soldiers trained by the Japanese who 'freed' their country from its imperialist English yoke are seen in this photo on display at  Mount Koya in Japan. The "independence" the Japanese brought with them to Burma would eventually lead the country to a new revolt. Brian Victoria photo.

What follows is an article by Brian A. Victoria, scholar and Soto Zen priest, that appears in Japan Times:

As the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II approaches, questions related to Japan’s wartime actions once again come to the fore. For example, will Prime Minister Shinzo Abe make an offering to Yasukuni Shrine on Aug. 15, as he did a year ago? Will he admit Japan was an “aggressor nation” in his much-anticipated address to mark the occasion of Japan’s defeat?
The annual fuss about what will and won’t be said and who will and won’t visit Yasukuni always begs the question: Why can’t Japan do what Germany did, i.e., admit it was wrong and that it did some horrible things, and make a sincere apology that isn’t almost immediately contradicted by other Japanese leaders? [Click link above for complete essay]

I do not read Brian's article entirely as an indictment of those balky Japanese leaders who refuse to admit to an imperialistic past. Yes, that finger can be pointed.

But in a wider sense, what nation that sent its young people into battle can ever be free of the stigma of creating and sustaining a valorous past that tries to excuse the wracking sorrow and loss of those who actually participated? To have "given their last full measure" is not just a mantram of winners and losers. It is the mantram of those who shaped and made possible the conflicts that claimed so many. It is a way to deflect attention from their own limping and self-serving rhetoric. The subtext is, "if those who died in battle died valorously, then I too, as a policy-maker, am off the hook and in some sense valorous."

And this is as disgusting as it is untrue. To walk proudly across the bodies of the men and women who fell valorously in battle ... it may not be unusual, but that doesn't make it any more palatable.

vocabulary

As my vocabulary dwindles, I am always somehow heartened to find a new word to forget. The following was passed along in email:

letter to a cousin

I spent my morning energy writing the letter below to a cousin. It may not be coherent, but it is what I seemed to have for the morning:

Bea -- I have a hunch that the same-sex discord in your church, while perhaps sharper than others, is about par for the organized-religion course. On the one hand there is an implied or expressed open-heartedness -- a wide and wonderful everything-ness -- that draws adherents towards religion. On the other hand -- or perhaps together with it -- there is a recognition that spiritual endeavor requires discipline and discipline means doing what anyone might prefer not to do. Without discipline, spiritual exercises remain frothy doo-dads ... cozy and warm, but thin as cotton-candy and essentially self-referential. Is either of these positions or religious lenses perfectly correct or perfectly incorrect? I doubt it, but others may not. As far as I can see, individuals are forced, to the extent they want to plumb important realms, to make up their own minds, fish in their own ponds and stop relying on others ... a thing that is pretty hard to do: Let's face it, social support is important both in human and 'religious' terms: How the hell is anyone supposed to stand alone with a group? Is this a blessing or a curse ... but ... what other choice is there? Sometimes I think the Quakers were onto something ... at least they take the trouble to shut up.

I purely love the "Thought Moments" video for exactly the reason you point out. It makes me wonder at my own assured constructs of what is beautiful, loveable or whatever. In the realm of assumption, I just know these things. But when asked point blank about them, I falter and squirm and doubt. It may be unpleasant, but squirming has the virtue of  being honest: Where are the hand-holds when the hand-holds dissolve?

I saw a TV documentary (or anyway that's what I half-remember... I suspect it was this program) about Atul Gawande. I haven't read his book. I remember him as an attractive guy doing what I think of as important work ... pulling back a carefully-constructed curtain around the practicalities and factualities of death and dying. It's not as if he were 'right' in some sense ... it was just that he opened a door for others to walk through: That's a kindness from where I sit. But the Buddha wasn't whistling Dixie when he observed, "All fear dying; all fear death" so it is understandable if Gawande's matrix and outlook would scare people... me too, perhaps ... no one's exempt from being scared, no matter how many fairy tales are told.

I remember in my Zen travels when I stumbled accidentally across the bone-deep appreciation: Death is part of life. It smacked me upside of the head. This was nothing fancy. It was simply true. No need to ask anyone else: Look around at the roses and milkweed and oak trees and beloved kin. And since it is true, it is clear that fearing death is fearing life, though those who fear death sometimes create symphonies to the wondrousness and beauty and blessing of life. Praise-mongers are a dime a dozen. It's a small and very human hypocrisy (a thought moment perhaps?), but hypocrisies have a way of nagging and nattering and taking the shine off the realms of an imagined heaven. I'm not quite sure what I'd do with "77 virgins," but I can imagine desiring such an afterlife scenario. It may be easy to praise the blessings, but addressing the 'curses' is part of any real-life agenda that seeks peace ... and each (wo)man does so on his/her own terms. What a pisscutter. On the other hand, what other choice is there? How much self-imposed bullshit can anyone swallow? Belief implies doubt and doubt is not very peaceful.

Oh well, it's early in the day and it's my time to prattle. I hope you are well and not too discomforted by the recent hot weather. The older I get the hotter 'it' gets and humidity is a hands-down victor in my life. Bleah!

Best always,

adam

bastards

Apps and Facebook and Twitter and who knows what all else stand evidence to my advancing archaism, if that word is not too archaic. Usually, like any person of advancing age, I try to keep my mouth shut and not remember with voluble critiques when "things were different" and my assumptions were part of some wider social flow. Usually, my lingering assumptions are good enough for me, even if they go increasingly unshared. But sometimes they get up in my face and underscore the passage of time ... honest injun: Time passes.

"Honest injun" ... well, shit!

Leaving "honest injun" out of it for a moment, consider the bastards of Valley Street -- the street on which I live or, more properly, the street whose environment I create and assume and mingle with. I am Valley Street and Valley Street is me, in one sense. I rest on this unannounced presumption. I'm not pushy about it: It is just a pillow on which to lay my metaphorical head. But that head carries with it archaic stuff, which occasionally, as with the bastards, gets called out.

An Internet definition of "bastard" includes:

archaic derogatory

 a person born of parents not married to each other.

synonyms:

illegitimate child, child born out of wedlock

Across the street, my neighbor Joe's daughter is preparing for her second child. Another earlier child, I believe, was born out of wedlock. She is achingly bulbous at the moment and Joe told me yesterday that the medical professionals are guessing the birth will take place "within 20 days" ... and the two of us old farts laughed at the ludicrousness of medical people who tell expectant parents ... something. "Twenty days," my ass! Or maybe it will be 20 days .... who knows? The relationship between Joe's daughter and the baby's father rests unspecified in my mind. And Joe's method, as a good Christian, of addressing another bastard in the family is beyond my willingness or even desire to find out. The daughter spends much of her time at home with Joe and his wife. Where the father is, I have no clue, but things seem, somehow, to be amicable.

And then, a couple of doors away, there is Mike and Doreen's latest grandchild, Tucker, offspring of their son Matt and a woman whom he plans to marry, and perhaps, for all I know, already has. Great name, Tucker. I would like to meet him at some point and to congratulate Matt and Tucker's mother, whose name I don't know, but Matt's visits from Rhode Island appear to be occasional.

When I grew up, the sanctimony surrounding matrimony -- nourished largely by a widely-adorned Christian constabulary that was abroad in the land -- was buried in social understanding and the word "bastard," as indicated by the archaic dictionary definition, was derogatory, no matter how many bastard sons and daughters the kings of England sired. At a minimum, when appended to an "illegitimate" birth, it was a reprovable offense. It had a "tch-tch" implication.

I kind of like the fact that beloved bastard children -- if they are -- are on the rise. Clearly marriage has a minimal impact on whether anyone can or will get pregnant. There's biology ... and biology trumps social and/or religious niceties. It's nice to have that fact reiterated from time to time.

But it also leaves me with a hole in my long-standing assumptions. It's not that I feel that my morality, such as it might be, is under assault. I don't want a soap box from which to declaim or even complain. It's just that I have to revamp and reconfigure the jigsaw puzzle of assumptions. I feel delighted on the one hand and strangely left out on the other.

And as it goes with "bastards," so it goes with other stuff as well ... a shape-shifting of emphasis and meaning and from there, infusing whatever position I might hold on the human stage. What was my "Valley Street" is still Valley Street (the road sign says so), but who lives there and how their status is asserted varies. As American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin observed on The Daily Show the other night, there was a time when people wrote letters and kept diaries and historians had something to hold in the palm of their hands. Now, all that's left is Internet offerings and occasional tapes. Writing? Who bothers with or is capable of that?

I guess that now, I am someone's "old bastard of Valley Street," but that too is outside my knowledge. So many things seem to be "outside" these days that I find it more taxing than it's worth to rest on what's "inside." It's lonlier than before, but isn't that as much as anything due to my inability/unwillingness to take a closer look?

I don't know, but I do know that from time to time it can be a needling "bitch."

a cappella

Passed along in email was this a cappella group from Exeter University:

"above the heavens...."

In preparation for a memorial service scheduled yesterday for Taitetsu Unno, one-time professor of world religions at Smith College up the street here, I dug out an old and favored fan. It was a warm day and I could imagine being hot while sitting with others as Tai was remembered at the college chapel. I wanted to go because I felt, without much specificity, that I owed him a thank you for the generosity he had shared with me when I was a reporter and he was one of my go-to sources when it came to spiritual matters about which I might have been writing.

My body was not in a cooperative mood as the memorial service drew near and so, in the event, I didn't go, wasn't hot and didn't wave my fan. My gratitude remained but I think Tai would have understood: Old age has its own exigencies.

But the fan had been scooped up in preparation and sat awaiting my pleasure.

The calligraphy on the fan is a reproduction of some famous Zen teacher's brush. I used to remember his name, but no longer do. The words were attributed to the Buddha (Gautama) and have long managed to rattle my cage, no matter who, if anyone, uttered them: "Above the heavens and below the earth, I alone am the world-honored one." I don't even care if the translation is flummoxed ... those words, whether true or false, dangle and tease like a worm on a hook. They are serious even if they are wrong.

Did anyone else ever notice that sometimes serious questions are little more than a way to obscure -- or perhaps bury -- serious questions?

For example: A student who sets out on a spiritual practice almost invariably does so because of some sort of discomfort. On discovering a spiritual discipline that seems to address the discomfort, s/he signs on and gets cracking: attachment, expectation, ego and whatever other frailties are approached according to the discipline chosen. Meditation, chanting, incense, altars, bows ... they are accepted tools in an effort to clear away delusions that have fogged the scene and scored the heart. It's a serious effort, no kidding. Years may pass and practice may wax and wane. There probably comes a point when someone is willing to say, "I am a Buddhist" or "I am a Christian" or "I am a Hindu" or "I am a Muslim.

S-e-r-i-o-u-s.

Or perhaps a dollop of flip is thrown into the mix. The serious savvy gets so savvy and serious that laughter or teasing may tint the canvas. It's still serious, mind you, but there is also an element of not-so-serious ... Still, the elements that led to practice hover and persuade. I-am-weak-it-is-strong, I-am-impure-whereas-it-is-indubitably-pure. Practice is still on a war footing, however subtle and wily. Beware the imagined foe! Grasp the hand of a vaunted ally.

 But, using "god" in the wider sense, did it ever occur to you that god (pick your format) is highly unlikely to take him/her/itself seriously? Does a robin hop across the lawn and search out worms with an awareness or interest in the fact that it might be a "robin?" Hunting worms is a serious business but what robin in its right mind would do more than hunt worms. Anything more would be to detract from the serious business of hunting worms.

And likewise the seriousness of god cannot be serious as far as god is concerned.

And likewise the seriousness of being you is never an issue where you serious up.

Tall, short, weak, strong, holy, unholy, certain or uncertain ... it cannot be dismissed and it cannot be clung to. Where there is nothing to compare to or with, who makes a serious case where the seriousness of the case has long since been made?

I alone am the world-honored one. You alone are the world-honored one. Is there a potential for ego-tripping? Sure. But is that potential any less ersatz-serious than flexing some serene understanding? Is it worth the effort -- hiding serious issues behind 'serious' screens?

Is this serious?

Seriously.

Relax. Eat some worms.

whimsy

Like some shy and smiling sylph peeking from behind a boulder along the trail, I sense a fierceness in my heart when it comes to whimsy... as if whimsy were simultaneously utterly ephemeral and desperately important.

"Whimsy," an Internet definition explains, is, "a thing that is fanciful or odd." It makes no money and nourishes no social importance. It peeks from its hiding places and lays claim to no social hand-hold. With it, a man may be whole and yet bearing no banner. Without it, he is bereft and his soul ill-at-ease.

Yes, the scowling and tears of arenas like war and starvation and cruelty cry out for relief. Yes, the platitudes and well-ordered morality of joy beckon and enfold. Yes, such matters snort derisively at whimsy's delicate touch.

And yet, and yet ... what is a life without whimsy -- a giggle that no solemn man would dare?

In a men's rest room in Berlin, some graffito artist once penned, "A kiss that lasts forever is a strange gift."

And, as alluded to earlier in this blog, somewhere someone constructed a hitchhiking robot and then sent it on its way. Its serious whimsy was well received until someone decided to wreck it. And yet even in the whimsical thought, there is a shy smile that many might return.

I suppose speaking of whimsy is like dissecting a joke or parsing laughter. No one can do it and yet the heart of the matter pumps rich, red blood and the trail through the woods, while still and inexplicable, springs to life.

Whimsy: I guess you can have it, but you can't love it.

hitchhiking robot's travels end

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A hitchhiking robot that captured the hearts of fans worldwide met its demise in the U.S.

The Canadian researchers who created hitchBOT as a social experiment told The Associated Press that someone in Philadelphia damaged the robot beyond repair early Saturday, ending its first American tour after about two weeks.

"Sadly, sadly it's come to an end," said Frauke Zeller, one of its co-creators.

The kid-size robot set out to travel cross-country after successfully hitchhiking across Canada in 26 days last year and parts of Europe. It's immobile on its own, relying on the kindness of strangers. Those who picked it up often passed it to other travelers or left it where others might notice it.

tectonic disaster

Passed along in email was this quietly-spoken and apparently well-researched New Yorker article about the tectonic disaster looming over the West Coast.

It is both persuasive and too huge even to be depressing.

before the words

The most interesting things are the things before the words.

Assuming anyone might enter this oxymoronic playpen, then, as I hear it, there are soothing, compromising, self-affirming voices raised.

"Words may not be much, but they're all we've got." The wheedling and the attempt to apply some balm to a fiery challenge -- the cry for absolution and forgiveness ... oh, it is so compassionate. No one wants to be lonely. Human beings are social creatures. Are we not to be forgiven this small transgression? We try. We are frail. We are imperfect. We ... yum, yum, yum.

In one sense, "we are not perfect" camouflages another less soothing suggestion: "We are spineless." But even this cannot wrap up the case. Criticism is as cheap a date as praise.

The most interesting things are the things before the words. Isn't it true? Isn't it laughing at the fumbling petitioner seeking to bolster and buttress all these words that create ever more distance from what is most interesting?

Is this a playpen worth entering? Since, like a block of implacable ice melting before the eyes, it cannot be escaped, I think maybe it is. Better to fail at something true than succeed at something as strained and bland as baby food.

All this strikes me as beyond wheedling confessions of weakness. What is interesting doesn't care if anyone is weak or strong. What is interesting plays its music and locks the lips within and without. No lock, no key, just interesting music.

Isn't it worth making this peace?

"You think white is one color...."

Budget cuts and a declining attendance has put the last Roman Catholic priest in Antarctica out of business.

Father Dan Doyle, who lives in Christchurch, New Zealand, would spend summers on the remote continent and serve the population in the area of about 2,000, the BBC reported....
He served a daily Mass, performed last rights and even a few baptisms. There are some religious constraints by living in the most remote corner of Earth. For example, you cannot be legally married or buried on the continent because no one country stakes claim on the land.

And Doyle once told an interviewer:

You think white is one color.... But white is a thousand colors when you get inside a glacier and it’s all around you.

the Spanish hunting dog

Here's a blog focusing on the Galgo or Spanish hunting dog:

The Spanish greyhound, or Galgo, was traditionally used for hunting by royalty and was so revered that to kill a Galgo was a crime equivalent to murder....
A Galgo that is too old or too slow or too weak or just not into a crappy game of chase-the-hare tends to meet a brutal death because they have shamed the hunter.  This is tradition.

making things "better"

Was there ever a time when the longing to make things "better" was not in play? And if there was, would that be "better?"

Last night, I got hooked on "The Dead Poets Society," a 1989 movie about an English teacher at a tony, WASP-y boarding school in 1959. The teacher inspires his students from within a rigorously regimented system that freely admits its attempt to send its students out into a world they were bound to rule. Everyone is white. Everyone wears a tie. Many come out of rich or wannabe-rich families. But ... they are kids, adolescents who, whatever their circumstances, are as confused and uncertain as any other raging-hormone, trying-to-be-a-grown-up teenagers. Peter Weir, who was responsible for "The Last Wave," a movie I consider one of the gutsiest (if not the gutsiest) movies I ever saw, directed.

What held my attention was the fact that I too came from such a cossetted environment -- an all-boys  school at which everyone was pretty smart and pretty well-heeled and terribly white and yet, because they were kids, were largely unaware of their privilege. There were classes in Latin. There was a "chapel" each morning at which Christian values were enunciated. Grace before lunch. No matter that the smartest kids in my class came from Jewish families, a man of parts should know something about the prevailing persuasion of his country. There was a compulsory Bible class. There was tennis. And there was a good education ... but who could know that: Collegiate School was just the way things were ... wasn't it?

High school was the time when my single-parent mother was busy being an alcoholic, a universe I was drawn into and wounded by. No matter: School was school and we wore ties and people were destined for Ivy League colleges. My mother sent me to dancing school.

I desperately wanted things to be "better" somehow but of course I didn't know what better might consist in. Like me, my hang-with group of friends had family difficulties as well. We were wowed by Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," and yearned for the kind of freedom that seemed to be written in those pages. Maybe that would be better.

The teacher in "The Dead Poets Society" urged and pushed the students. "Carpe diem!" was the rallying cry. Seize the day -- follow your dream. But the problem was that it was not exactly clear what the dream was outside of being somehow, amorphously, better. We were privileged, but I imagine we might have felt the same yearnings and the same confusions if we had not been what today I call "privileged." Looking back, as the movie forced me to do, I am somehow embarrassed by the riches I enjoyed and yet how can a kid know what is rich and what is poor? A kid sucks up what is put on his plate to suck up. This is what is and that's all.

In my own defense, I remember speaking with the representative of a prospective college -- one of several I met with when the time drew near to pick a college. And when he, like other representatives of other colleges asked, "Why do you want to go to college, young man?" something in me snapped. I was sick to death of parroting, "Because I want to learn, sir." And so I said instead, "Can I tell you the truth?" "Sure," he said as if any admission I might make would be something he had already heard a hundred times before, whereas for me it was a terrific act of courage. And I said simply, "I don't know what else to do." And there it was ... out in the open ... and I felt a lot better, if no less uncertain and confused.

I didn't much like wallowing in the past, as last night's movie invited me to do ... or perhaps "insisted" is a better word. But I watched as a matter of some discipline that said, "own it!" I watched and watched and tried to get a perspective on the privilege that had been mine ... all pink and well-educated and knowing how to dance.

And then I relaxed, somehow. Yes, I have wanted in a hundred hundred ways to be "better," but the characteristics and clothing in my life's closet are just the characteristics and clothing in my life's closet. Smart, dumb, privileged, neurotic, strong, weak, wise and incalculably asinine ... it's just the clothes I am stuck with. I am like a tenant farmer, tilling the soil beneath my feet and there is no "better" way. There is this way ... with occasional modifications. Comparisons are unnecessary. Doing harm is probably not a good idea, but I am bound to do it. Praise and blame are not the point.

Carpe diem? How could such a thing be possible when the day itself has dawned long before I ever set to work to make it somehow "better?" Don't bullshit me with "karma." Just lend a hand and, in the kind of heat that we've been experiencing around here lately, try to stay cool.

Even if I wanted to, I couldn't dance as once.

But there is music.

Good, better, best ... get a life.

"The God Delusion"

Passed along in email for those not yet overstuffed with such argumentation, was this British film, "The God Delusion." I suppose, in some senses, it is satisfactory as it points out the grotesqueries of Abrahamic persuasions. The geographically-limited, western-religion observation, "nothing east of Suez" pretty much applies to the film, but you have to start somewhere, I suppose. I found the film's intellectual adroitness a bit tedious, but that's just me and the depredations referred to are no fucking joke.

Is there anything -- rationality or theology included -- that cannot be turned to galling bullshit or offer up a bit of useful truth?  I doubt it. The question I find most useful for either construct is probably, "If you're so well-informed or deeply and credulously imbued, how come you're not happy?" I guess my premise is that if someone's happy, there is no reason to be getting others to agree or applaud or even demur: What the hell -- happy is just happy, isn't it?

So ... FWIW:

dreaming of "Tajikistan"

Suddenly, the Romantic ignorance and excitement came flooding back, plump as a wet cotton ball -- a sense of delight at the possibility of going to a place I had never been before, if only in a second-hand capacity.

Yesterday, my younger son said that two men from his National Guard platoon would be detailed to a security assignment in ... wait for it! ... Tajikistan. My son said that he had offered to go. Whether he will or not is up in the air ... a short assignment next month ... a couple of weeks ... but still ... "Tajikistan!"

On the one hand, my parental concerns for an offspring revved their motors. It was so far from home, so far from a place where, with luck, I could protect and defend him. But that is the nature of being part of a military unit: No parents are allowed to participate. Weep and writhe, sure -- but not participate.

And then the old Romantic idiot kicked in and, like my son himself, I felt the warm winds of excitement and adventure and ... Tajikistan ... wowsers!

Of course my son saw the matter from behind lenses I was not wearing. This was an adventure, a grown-up, can-do, real-world assignment, even if he didn't know what the assignment consisted of. He would be among others assigned to be armed grown-ups fulfilling a mission no matter what the environment.

But me -- I had first of all needed a map to tell exactly where Tajikistan was. I had only the vaguest of ideas. And where it was was another of those confluence points of many cultures, where traders and cultures mingled and squabbled and traded goods in the past. A small, poor country with an economy centered around cotton and aluminum and some drugs ... a place that depended on the many Tajiks who had gone elsewhere and sent money back to relatives left behind. A land bordering some of the biggest players on the world stage at present: China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan ... with a history of Russian invasion that had left behind an educational system that meant over 99% of the population was literate, but also found those capable of higher education dismissing the opportunity because there were so few job opportunities that required advanced smarts. A place of beauty and poverty and religions (heavily weighted towards Islam) pretty much getting along.

I read up on the history and wondered how hard it would be to learn a little Tajik, the focal language, or Russian, a language employed by many. My son didn't see mixing and mingling as part of the assignment or even a very useful pastime. He was doing a military thing in his head. When I suggested that the military man who does not scope out his environment and its customs is a half-trained soldier, his eyes took on a dismissive glow. No matter: My parental habits may fret, but the idea that my children might visit other lands -- lands beyond the barriers of Atlantic and Pacific oceans -- has been a long-held dream I could not finance.

In earlier times, I had had dreams of visiting Tierra del Fuego and Afghanistan (before the American invasion that followed the Russian invasion), and the Orkney Islands ... places far away and foreign and utterly outside my ken. Those pipedreams had receded, or so I thought until yesterday, when "Tajikistan" provided a whole new possibility and sense of excitement and wonder. Not knowing there are others on the planet who live quite different lives in quite different ways is a gaping bit of ignorance in my opinion.

Anyway, I dreamed yesterday, rolling around in a half-formed idea the way a dog might wriggle and roll in the beach sand.

"Tajikistan."

Imagine that!

intelligence, artificial and otherwise

More than 1,000 tech experts, scientists and researchers have written a letter warning about the dangers of autonomous weapons.

In the latest outcry over "killer robots", the letter warns that "a military AI [artificial intelligence] arms race is a bad idea".

Among the signatories are scientist Stephen Hawking, entrepreneur Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

The letter will be presented at an international AI conference today.

Does anyone else sense, as I do, that this apparently-heartfelt letter is a little like the mother who, as she prepares to leave home, counsels her children, "... and while I'm gone, do not stick beans up your nose?"

You just know someone is going to find a way and an excuse for "improving" things.

And then there's the question of whether, given the sometimes stumbling and sometimes horrific uses to which the intelligence in hand is used, creating an artificial intelligence makes a whole lot of sense. Wouldn't you first want to learn the uses to which current intelligence could be put before you added another stratum of intelligence on top? Is a naturally-occurring intelligence somehow lacking? How? And wouldn't it be worth correcting that first ... and then get out the Tinker Toys?

the price of small chores

Yesterday was a day of doing. Today is a day of paying the price.

The front stoop, whose black paint was flaking and peeling, got scraped and repainted. I did half and, much to my delight, my younger son did the rest. Then the same son roped in a friend and they stacked the fire wood that was piled in the driveway.

Since I do few Mr. Fixit chores any more, the painting part seemed a simple task. And it was ... but it did not account for my weaknesses, which, these days, are stronger than my strengths. Today I ache all over and probably will for a while. I had tried to make a bargain with my inabilities -- I'll just do a little now and then -- and the inabilities replied, "Sorry -- no deal."

Well, the stoop has a refreshed look and my wife got some impatiens for the flower cups built into the concrete ... pink ... which will look nice against the black paint. But in the meantime, my pain pills have gone missing and I could use one. I guess I'll practice being content with the sort of joke passed along in email yesterday:

Three old Indian women were discussing the travails of getting older.

Mvskoke woman said, "Sometimes I catch myself with a jar of mayonnaise in my hand, while standing in front of the refrigerator, and I can't remember whether I need to put it away, or start making a sandwich."

Seminole woman chimed in with, "Yes, sometimes I find myself on the landing of the stairs and can't remember whether I was on my way up or on my way down."

Cherokee woman responded, " Well, ladies, I'm glad I don't have that problem. Knock on wood," as she rapped her knuckles on the table, and then said, "That must be the door, I'll get it!"

I don't mind being a wimp; I just don't like being reminded.