A DAY WITH LUKA

After setting up at the CAA exhibition hall, ready for a 9AM start this morning, a day with Luka. At home...

In the park...

With a new toy...

A delightful chap!

CAA

As I noted yesterday, I'm attending the College Art Association conference in Los Angeles over the next three days (table #217, exhibition hall. Please stop by!) The event has me recalling my former incarnation as an art school administrator--a stop along the professional path that lasted for a ten-year period from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. Had I chosen to continue along that path, I might have by now attained a comfortable retirement with some very nice perks--but I chose not to. I chose instead to pursue what I had always known to be my purpose in life: to write. It was a risky decision, back when I could foresee no reasonable alternative source of income, but one that I have never regretted.

Back in those academic days, I used to attend the CAA conference, and before it the MLA--the Modern Language Association--in a professional capacity, mostly either looking for jobs myself or on the search for new faculty for the college I served. The trips were generally a feast for the ego, a fine way to feel like an important person devoted to a significant career, but that ego gratification was always accompanied by a feeling of being out of place. I never felt entirely comfortable in the academic world. It always felt like I was acting out a part for which I was not entirely suited, as though I were wearing some other person's clothes. The throngs of colleagues around me seemed so much more comfortable than I, so much more knowledgable, so much... well, smarter. To attend a conference was to revisit my school years and the discomforts of adolescence.

I'm attending this CAA as a writer and exhibitor, and sharing my table with an artist, Nancy Turner Smith, whose lovely book I reviewed in The Buddha Diaries some months ago. Our hope is to introduce our creative work to the academic world--to libraries and teachers and, in Nancy's case, to curators of exhibits and special collection. I'll be "showing" Persist and Mind Work, and hoping to generate some interest in my "One Hour/One Painting" series. This involves, of course, a bit of self-promotion, but I'm not uncomfortable promoting ideas and programs that I very much believe in. Indeed, I have come to consider this kind of action to be an integral part of what I do, something I owe my work as a writer. I would, particularly, love to see Persist adopted as a text in graduating ("professional practices") classes for students graduating with BFAs and MFAs from art schools and college art departments, where I am sure it would be helpful. As I have said elsewhere, writing is, for me, an act of communication. I don't do it "for myself." I do it in order to connect with other human beings in the best way I know how, and these are opportunities it would be foolish to pass up.

So I'll be spending the next couple of weeks, at the CAA and, next week, at the NAEA (the National Art Education Association) in New York, in full conference mode. Wish me luck.

College Art Association

A note to readers planning to attend the College Art Association Conference in Los Angeles, starting tomorrow: I have booked table # 217 in the exhibition hall to display copies of Mind Work and Persist and will be there for most of the day on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I would certainly welcome it if you'd stop by and introduce yourself. See you there!

PEACEFUL REVOLUTION

We know all these things, don't we? We know about the "peaceful warrior." We know that "War Is Not the Answer" and that we must strive for "World Peace" if our poor planet is to survive the ravages of humankind. We know these things so well that we reduce them to bumper stickers and paste them on our cars. We know that violence begets violence; we know the golden rule, that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. We know in our hearts that love serves our common interests better than hatred. And still these things bear repeating, because even though we know them, we have not yet learned as a species to act consistently upon these truths. We persist in making war. We persist in enacting the rituals of violence, and in excusing ourselves with the delusion that this is our nature. We persist in acting against what we know to be our best interests.

So is there a Peaceful Revolution currently in progress, as the author Paul K. Chappell proposes, in his book by that same title? Is there a powerful paradigm shift in our thinking in the early 21st century, one equal in potential impact to the scientific discovery that the earth is round, or that it rotates around the sun, as Chappell argues? A young and conflict-seasoned soldier, a West Point graduate, and now a warrior for peace, Chappell writes from a personal pit of very human rage: born part-Korean, part African-American, part white, to a father whose emotional war wounds led him to violence inflicted on his son and, eventually, to madness, this writer made the journey from childhood innocence into the experience of deep terror and distrust too soon and too abruptly. When he writes of the worst of human suffering, he knows whereof he speaks. When he writes of violence, it is something he has experienced at first hand, and from the earliest age.

Chappell's personal salvation and his dedication to the cause of peace came from what seems at first to be an unlikely source: his training as a warrior at West Point. His argument proceeds from the West Point motto: Duty, Honor, Country. For him, he explains:

duty means taking responsibility for my actions and the problems I can help solve, and knowing I have a duty to serve others and make a difference. Honor means having integrity, being honest with myself and others, and treating people with respect. Country means being committed to and willing to sacrifice for something larger than myself.

Country, he adds, "extends beyond our national borders... In the twenty-first century, our global community has become so interconnected that our country truly is the planet earth." His mission, the reader learns, is to serve that global community on the path to a viable future where war and violence are as obsolete as the concept of a flat earth.

The discipline learned at West Point is crucial both to Chappell's mission as a peaceful warrior, and to his work as a writer. He martials and deploys his material with meticulous organizational skill, around the central metaphor of muscularity. He wants us to understand that to be tough and disciplined in practice in no way conflicts with the compassion and empathy he preaches. His chapter headings--"The Muscle of Hope," The Muscle of Appreciation," "The Muscle of Reason"...--are key to the clarification of his intention: these muscles, like those in the human body, must be conscientiously exercised if they are not to atrophy and die. He leads us toward his central point with finely-honed logic: violence is not inherent in human nature, it must be taught. If we are to save the planet and our species, we need to educate and nurture our natural propensity for compassion, empathy, and love.

Chappell textures his argument richly with references not only to contemporary social science and current research in the still-developing field of neuroscience, but also with quotations liberally culled from the history of human thought and literature, from such great teachers as Jesus and the Buddha to modern pioneers of the philosophy he embraces: Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King Jr.; from Daedalus to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; from Aesop's fox and his sour grapes to Chicken Little and the falling sky. A major--well, the major influence on his thinking is the study On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, an examination of the methods needed to train the mind of a normal human being into one prepared to kill. Soldiers, particularly, need to be taught to override their natural inclination to flight in order to prepare them to fight. Ironically, it turns out, the best tools in this endeavor turn out to be... empathy and compassion: the warrior is induced to fight most willingly if aroused to what Chappell calls "fury" in his instinct to protect. Think "Band of Brothers." Think what your own instinct might be if your family were threatened.

So it's in the appeal to that "fury" that Chappell sees not only the strength of the individual warrior but also the will of our species to transcend old patterns of behavior and enlist in the growing army engaged in the needed "peaceful revolution." His book is a persuasive and inspiring read. As one known to cast a skeptical eye on our national and global politics, I found myself able to connect with the hope that there is, indeed, a shift in human consciousness that is now taking place on the planet, an evolutionary change, if you will, instigated by our instinct for survival, and by our understanding that cooperation and compassion are, in truth, the only viable weapons to insure it.

Chappell's argument is in every way consistent with good Buddhist thought and practice. Toward the end of his book, he hints at a sequel that will explore the methodology and the results of meditation on the path to peace. I look forward to his insights.

Peaceful Revolution: How We Can Create the Future Needed for Humanity's Survival

by Paul K. Chappell

Easton Studio Press

www.peacefulrevolution.com

SERIOUSLY?

I do not normally watch such programs as Face the Nation--not out of disinterest in the political world but because it seems such a terrible way to spend a Sunday morning. I did, however, for some reason watch a recorded version of the interview with the current Republican "front-runner" Rick Santorum. And the only thing I could think to myself as it went along, and as it ended, and as supposedly smart reporters discussed it in retrospect, was: Seriously?

I mean, do we take seriously a man who wants to put an end to public education in America, whether federal or state? He seems to envision a return to the small, local schoolhouse of the 19th century, or to home-schooling, whereby parents make decisions about what is fit to teach and how it is to be taught. Seriously? He makes a thinly veiled attack on President Obama's supposed religious beliefs in the absurdly misplaced context of prenatal testing, no more informed or creditable than those catering to the malign or ignorant doubts about the president's nationality. He accuses the president of promoting abortion--to save money! He trots out the canard about climate change, insisting that it is not man-made, and that to assert otherwise is to "serve the Earth" instead of acting in a "stewardship" capacity--by exploiting it for the benefit of our superior species. His science seems derived from Old Testament teachings, his reasoning ability from pre-Enlightenment days.

Seriously?

And the problem is far greater and more alarming than just this one deluded individual pandering to those on the far right wing of conservatism, and far greater than the fact that he has reached front-runner status amongst Republican voters. The problem, as I see it, is that this kind of nonsense is discussed by our media representatives as though it made some kind of sense. They do it too much honor. I try to respect the Buddhist principle of "right speech," but right speech does not, surely, include condoning those who lie, or speak half-truths, or simply utter palpable delusions. Right speech, as I see it, requires that I expose such things, when I hear them, for what they are--whether malicious or simply ignorant. Right speech does not require me to remain silent in the face of the demonstrably untrue, but rather to speak out.

Seriously.