One Day Blog Silence

I do plan to participate in the "One Day Blog Silence" tomorrow. The Buddha Diaries will go dark. The notion for the day of silence was prompted by the rampage of violence on the Virginia Tech campus, but my own observation is motivated also by the needless death of more British and American soliders this weekend in Iraq; and by the mindless murder of innocent people throughout the world, particularly the civilians being slaughtered in sectarian violence in Iraq and those suffering from the latest inexcusable episode of genocide in Darfur. Having just read the Jeffrey Gettleman article in today's New York Times "Week in Review" about the recruitment and abuse of children as killers in several African nations, I include these boys and their victims in my intention to observe the day of silence.

Dog Farts

It was quite en experience, yesterday, reading "Red Color News Soldier," the book to which you'll find a link in my last entry. While I had a general idea of Chinese history since World War II, Li Zhensheng's book and his photographs document it in dramatic and poignant detail. Particularly disturbing are the scores of pictures of public humiliations, with offenders agaist the current (and constantly shifting) brand of communist orthodoxy forced to stand on chairs for hours, heads bowed in shame, crowned with elaborately pointed paper dunce caps, their faces and clothes spattered with ink, and holding signs that detail such crimes as "careerism" and the ever popular accusation of representing the (apparently) odious "black gang element." As is common in tyrannical regimes, a good part of its strength derived from pitting people against people, encouraging ubiquitous betrayal and mistrust.

Li led me through the experience of one brought up and educated to believe that everything in Mao's communist China represented humanitarian freedom, while everything outside represented injustice and repression. The dawning of his own realization that things were less than perfect in his own country came, he told me, with the attack on a Russian orthodox church in his home town of Harbin in 1966 where, as he describes it in his book, "the city's rebel goups went on a rampage... tearing it down with their bare hands;" and shortly after, when "they sacked the Buddhist Jile temple.: Years later, he wrote, he could still not understand "why they smashed all the statues and burned the sacred books. They even made the monks hold up a banner that said, 'To hell with the Buddhist scriptures. They are full of dog farts.'"

I like to think that the Buddha himself would have had a good chuckle--not at the treatment of his monks, certainly, but at the absurdity of the intended insult. Actually, he might even have encouraged its propagation, because he always insisted that no-one should take his word as gospel. The idea was not to to simply accept it, but to subject it to constant questioning. "Dog farts," indeed. No text is sacred beyond questioning.

Li recalls, in his book, some less than honorable acts that he himself was deluded into commiting, either in the spirit of political correctness or simply in self-defense. Nonetheless, he concludes, "I think we must try, through serious reflection, through contemplation, to relieve those whose souls were tortured. I want to show the world what really happened during the Cultural Revolution." His book serves precisely that purpose. It's a powerful indictment of a tyrannical regime and its cynical abuse of power and of the people it holds in subjugation. I hope the current exhibition at the California Museum of Photography (see yesterday's link) serves to make it better known in these United States where, even today, we need to be on a guard against those who would set us against each other and deprive us of our freedoms. We hear quite a few dog farts, these days, from Washington, DC.

A (Brilliant) Mind in Space; and the Cultural Revolution

What a pleasure to see those pictures of Stephen Hawking delighting in the experience of weightlessness. I can only begin to imagine how it must have felt, after forty years confined to his wheelchair, for him to be released from the bonds of gravity, if only for a few fleeting seconds. I'm proud to say that we have a (very!) tenuous association: Stephen Hawking C.H., C.B.E., Ph.D., Hon Sc.D., F.R.S., is the current incumbent of the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at my old Cambridge College, Gonville & Caius (pronounce, please "keys.") Well, not much kudos to me, perhaps, but I can bathe in a little reflected glory, no? I am awed by the fact that the human mind is capable of the kind of brilliant imaginative flights that Hawking has taken in his researches in cosmology, black holes and quantum gravity, and doubly awed when it comes from a man who has had to struggle with such a pitiless debility as ALS.

On another front, I drove out to Riverside yesterday, where I was privileged to meet with another man who has made an important contribution to our human species. Li Zhensheng is a photographer whose superb documentation of both the aspirations and the ignominies of Chairman Mao's "Cultural Revolution" in communist China remained hidden for decades and were eventually revealed to the world in a remarkable book called "Red Color News Soldier." The exhibition of Li's work at the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside is a selection from some thirty thousand images shot by Li in the ten years of the revolution: at the beginning, he assured me, they were taken to celebrate the promise of a revival of the genuine communist spirit, a true hope for the future of the country under new leadership; but soon began to reflect the misery, the political and social constraints and the paranoia that a new tyranny engendered.

Li proved to be a wonderful interview subject. To listen to the flow of a language, not a single word of which I understood before the translator took over, was itself a remarkable experience. Add in the communication through the eyes, through the body language, through the peculiar process of triangulation with the translator, and the process becomes delightfully oblique and subtle, and requires a special sensitivity and attention. We ranged easily between the intense and the light-hearted and managed, I thought, to achieve a nice relationship. Our session lasted three times longer than I had anticipated--and only partly due to the translation process. I'm looking forward to reviewing the digital recording of our session.

After my additional, much briefer interviews with the museum director Jonathan Green, and the exhibition curator Robert Pledge--who has devoted years of time and energy to bringing Li's archive to the attention of the world--I sat for lunch at a sunny table on the Riverside mall with my hosts and the cheerful young Chinese student who was Li's diligent translator for his visit here. Li was busy taking pictures with his digital camera the entire time--throughout the interview, as well as over lunch--and after lunch a woman who had been observing us from an adjacent table offered to take a group picture that would include us all. Li happily accepted, delighted with the unsolicited offer from a stranger: such a thing, he said, could not have happened in China, where social mores dictate a certain reticence. Which led us into a discussion of how Robert had introduced the Western hug to the community of Chinese photographers... All in all, an entertaining moment. Our thoughtful new friend from the next table was surprised to learn she had been taking photographs of one of the world's great photographers!

Thirteen Thousand

Well, there you go. It seems like American business is doing well. The Dow Jones Industrial Average swept past the "historic" thirteen thousand mark yesterday, much to the glee of the financial commentators on the news stations. And I guess it's hardly surprising, given the obdurately pro-business policies of the current occupant of the most powerful office in this country. They color everything, including, of course, the war in Iraq--a disaster for this country's reputation in the world as well as for its military and political well-being, but seemingly a boon for the American companies to whom a good deal of military and civil reconstruction work has been outsourced. The privatization of government responsibilities in every sphere--from war to health care to education, to the national infrastructure and the prison system--has surely generously lined the pockets of the profit-making world of business, but has demonstrably proved neither as efficient nor as cost-effective as its promoters dreamed.

Meantime, the ranks of the billionaires' club continue to swell in outrageous disproportion to the financial security of the average middle-class American. The trickle of the trickle-down theory of economics has proved to be just that--a trickle, which seems to dry up completely before it could address the needs of the truly poor and the unemployed. The senior Bush had it right when he called it, famously, "voodoo economics." The son apparently clings to a belief in magic, despite all evidence to the contrary in almost everything he touches. "Denial"--Sen. Harry Reid's word, this week--seems but a pale adumbration of the stubborn rejection of real world facts by this singularly obtuse individual.

Ah, well. Deep breath. May he find true happiness in his life... (Should he find it, remember, the rest of the world would all be better off!)

Dreaming Again...

... this time of riding through Europe on the red drop-handlebar bicycle I bought for myself when I was fourteen years old. Moving along fairly easily, even though I have done nothing since that time to maintain it. I notice that the chrome on the inside of the front wheel has blackened with age and neglect: I have not taken the time to clean it before setting out. I have also neglected to oil the machinery.

Still, it seems to perform pretty much as it did back then--with the exception of the gears. As a teenager, I was inordinately proud of my (then) ultra-modern Benelux ten-speed derailer gear, even though I never quite mastered the art of making it work to perfection. I was constantly having to adjust it to keep the darn thing on track. And now, in the dream, true to form, it refuses to function properly as I make a steep turn on a rocky track, attempting to overtake a couple, also on bikes, who have been riding in front of me for some time. I dismount, deciding that it will do me no harm to settle for a single gear, and to walk the hills where necessary...

Well, riddle me that one. Actually, I suppose, it's not too hard to figure out. I have, after all, been riding this same old bicycle all these years, and the imperfections are more evident today than I would like. The gears no longer shift as easily as they were designed to do, and I have to get off and walk from time to time.

I did, in actual fact, do a bicycle tour of Europe as a teenager. I must have been fifteen or sixteen years old. My parents insisted that I go with a companion, and I chose a school mate, Proctor, who soon lived up to the suggestions of his name: he was a bit of a pain in the rear end, always straggling and complaining about this or that... the hills, the weather, the hard work.

It was hard work, no doubt about that. The equipment, in those days, was not as light and handy as today's: we had a heavy canvas "pup" tent and bulky sleeping bags, a change of clothes, some basic camping gear--it all added up to a significant burden on a bicycle. And the rain didn't help. As I remember, it rained a good deal of the time. We forged ahead, often on slippery cobblestones, hampered by our oilskin slickers and our heavy gear, riding from the coast of the English channel at Ostend, through Belgium and the Eifel Forest (scene of the Battle of the Bulge, for WWII fans!) to Cologne, then turned south along the Rhine to Bonn, and south and east again down the Moselle River to Trier, and back through Belgium to the coast. A long trip, which we completed, as I recall, in the space of a couple of weeks.

In the dream, I do remember thinking how cycling was a good way to stay fit. The mood was one of pleasant nostalgia, I think--despite those recalcitrant gears. And the scenery was grand--green fields and hedgerows, an occasional copse, and wildflowers by the roadside... More English, really, than Belgian or German. Well, imagine that.

Conversations

Twice weekly - in addition to my regular daily entry - I will be directing readers to other blog posts in the spirit of generating conversation, and also in the hopes of adding depth and variety to our ongoing dialog about Buddhism, culture, and politics. I hope it proves useful!

Today I'll be focusing on the theme of compassion.

• Find me a Bluebird: In this blog full of wonderful poems and images, MB discusses her recent encounter with the writer's worst nightmare...a plagiarist! MB's response to the discovery of a cyber-thief in her midst is worthy of a read. She writes, in part:
  

  I chose not to immediately move to shut this blog down. Instead, I sent a polite but firm “cease and desist letter” that gave this person a little time to remove my poems. Again with my husband’s help, I tried to phrase the letter in ways that they would understand that I saw them as a real person. It wasn’t much, but it was my attempt to avoid creating more negativity than was necessary to protect my work.

• Intent Blog - Anita Roddick: Founder of The Body Shop, a leader in corporate social responsibility, Roddick writes her first post in Intent Blog about the Angola Three, social activists who have been wasting away in solitary confinement in Louisiana for 35 years. She begins her excellent post this way:

  Today, two of my best friends will spend a day as they do every other – 23-plus hours alone in a 6-by-9 foot cell, with poor ventilation, little human contact beyond the blurred cacophony of the prison tier beyond. The hour or less they will spend on the other side of their cell doors they may spend exercising in a tiny cage by running in tight circles under the razor wire, or showering. All that will make this day different is that it marks the 35th anniversary of their placement in solitary confinement, a fact I still cannot fathom.

• Postsecret: This site filled with secrets spilled onto postcards, cannot but add to the net amount of compassion in this world.
  

Murder and Mayhem

In a dream last night, my mind contrived to arrange for the premature demise of a person who had once had the temerity to edit my articles and reviews. He died of AIDS. I read the obituaries in the newspapers, attended the funeral, watched him interred... Nice job, mind. Not very Buddhist of you. My only excuse for this execrable act of vengeance is that I had been watching "The Sopranos," and had likely picked up some useful hints about how to deal with those who cross me from the now (no longer so) cheerful band of brutes and bandits that populate its stories.

I will confess to taking nefarious delight in crime fiction, both visual and literary. It started early. Probably influenced by my father's love of Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie (as a parish priest in small English villages, he probably found a lot in common with Miss Marple!) I started out with Father Brown and Sherlock Holmes, and never looked back. I even wrote a couple of mysteries myself, back in the 1980s, which were well received--the second one even got a nice write-up in the New York Times. (I should mention also, in the spirit of full disclosure, that the same book was panned by a Los Angeles Times reviewer: that was the guy I should have whacked in my dream last night!)

It's clearly a fascination I share with millions of my fellow human beings, though I have noticed that women generally go for the mystery genre, while men devour the more violent thrillers, both on the screen and between the covers of a book. It takes more knowledge of human psychology than I possess to begin to explain why we find the killing of our fellow humans so absorbing, but I do wonder whether it's damaging to the psyche to read about or watch. Maybe it's a chicken-and-egg question: are we excited to violence by its explicit portrayal on film and television? Or do we love it on film and television because we have some natural propensity for violence?

What is the fascination, here? With mysteries, I believe it's the mystery itself: stories are compelling to the human mind, and we always want to know how a story ends. Thrillers are harder to explain, because the end is never hard to guess. The good guys win, the bad guys get their comeuppance. And what's the pleasure in seeing bodies torn apart by bullets or blown sky high? Some say that seeing others imparts the satisfaction that it's not happening to us. Others, that the adrenalin rush is a satisfaction in itself. As horror flicks show (and I'm NOT a fan of horror flicks: I don't think I've even seen one since "The House of Wax" scared the pants off me back when I was a lad,) the gap between terror and laughter is a narrow one, so these films must be tugging at some powerful subconscious emotions.

What's a Buddhist to do? Ideally, I suspect, he would avoid all such contaminants of the mind--though there must be a matter of degrees: Agatha Christie, surely, would have to be considered less harmful than James Bond, and Simon Templer (aka The Saint) than Tony Soprano. Ellie, in this instance, would have to be considered a better Buddhist than I, since she eschews all violence, whether fictional or real, and complains of having trouble sleeping if she sees anything distrubing before going to bed.

One thing I'll say for "The Sopranos": unlike "24," it's not completely mindless. Underneath the mayhem, there are some interesting emotional and moral questions explored. But then, I have to admit that even the mindless can be compelling narrative. As for the real violence that we see--from Baghdad to Virginia Tech--well, as they say, don't get me started... But let me hear from you if you have thoughts about this topic.

tags technorati : violence,agatha christie,mystery,The Sopranos,24

A Good Read

Carly sent me this link to an excerpt from Where Have All the Leaders Gone?, the new book by Lee Iacocca--a hard-headed businessman's look at the current administration and the state of the nation. From what I read here, and what I saw in a TV interview last night, it's a dose of sanity in a world where it's much needed. A foretaste:

Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course."

Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

Take a look...

Oh, Yes: Earth Day

That's today. As Ellie points out, every day should be Earth Day. I saw a brief clip from a televised interview with Rachel Carson, the author of the pioneering "Silent Spring," in which she wondered aloud about "what is going to happen to our children?" That was 1962. Forty-five years have passed since then. Children born that year are now forty-five years old. Who knows what cancers or other chemical imbalances of brain and body have manifested in their lives? There's still a huge amount we don't know about the effect our modern-era "progress" has had on our species and on the planet Earth, but we know enough to understand that Rachel Carson had foresight that few others had back then. To be sure, there has been progress. The Environmental Protection Agency owes its existence in part to Carson's activism. But how long it has taken us to come to a common agreement with her that we may well be destroying ourselves along with our habitat--and not only, now, through our ignorance, but rather despite the knowledge with which our scientists provide us, through our misguided public policies. And how much longer will we put up with the prevarications of an administration that puts cronyism and corporate profits above the common good? Happy Earth Day, everyone.

Earth Day

A special thanks, on this lovely day, to Digital Dharma for the reminder that tomorrow is Earth Day, and that the Earth needs metta, too! And for providing this link to an urgently important essay by James Hansen, the NASA scientist who came out in public recently to complain that the agency had been trying to silence him on issues related to global warming.

Rain...

A welcome rain for much of the day yesterday. It has been too long since we saw any here in Southern California, and I think we are still twelve inches below normal for this time of year. That's twelve out of fourteen or fifteen... You could almost hear the sign of relief as the earth drank it in. Then last night, as I took George for his evening walk, a strikingly clear crescent moon and the shadow of the unseen remainder of its sphere amongst the few remaining wisps of cloud, along with the brilliant silver pinpoints of the stars and planets.

This morning, the birds sing joyfully...

I followed yesterday's meditation on happiness with a second one today. The first step of metta only, happiness for myself. And found myself, after a half hour, moving on naturally into that second step, the family, Ellie and Sarah, my two sons, the grandchildren, our sisters and their families... The breath felt effortless and smooth, and I managed to maintain a good level of attention throughout--though I did notice how the mind became impatient to move on to "more important" things toward the end.

As usual, I am happy to wake up here in our little cottage in Laguna Beach. There is a quality of relative calm here that contrasts with the intensity and bustle of Los Angeles, which makes itself evident even in the early morning hours. A kind of electricity in the air, a stir of energy, a glow of city lights throughout the night, a ceaseless hum of sound. Here, in the early hours, even where we live, a few blocks from the ocean front, you can almost always hear the waves break...

A Busy Week

It has been a busy week, and an unusually public one for me: I participated as a panelist in a discussion of digital media and the changes they have wrought in the art world at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, at a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Artscene magazine. Visitors to The Buddha Diaries will recall that I contribute a monthly audio piece, "The Art of Outrage" to Artscene Visual Radio, and it was a pleasure to sit on a panel with my fellow contributors to that site. The event was a great success and a fitting tribute to the efforts of the publisher Bill Lasarow--despite a chill wind that threatened the outdoor dinner in the museum's atrium court, and the performances laid on for the occasion.

Aside from the panel, I had two readings from The Bush Diaries and The Buddha Diaries at Democratic clubs in widely dispersed locations--one well to the south in Cerritos, the other a good way east in San Dimas. I enjoyed them both, and determined to do more of this--in part to do what I can to get juices flowing for the next election. My view--one shared at least by the enthusiastic gatherings I spoke to--is that we desperately need a significant win if we want to get our country back on track.

A note on the environment: Driving out to San Dimas along the 210 freeway was an inch-by-inch, foot-by-foot experience. I thought I had allowed ample time, but it took three times longer than I had expected. The four eastbound lanes were all choked with traffic. As I sat there--trying to practice my best equanimity--trains sped past in either direction on the Metroline tracks, set in between the east- and west-bound lanes of the freeway. I had plenty of time to take my eyes off the road for long enough to note that they were virtually empty--a sad commentary on the adjacent freeway lanes, crammed solid with mostly single-occupant vehicles. Like my own. But mine, at least, was a Prius! That's my excuse.

Metta

This morning I tried out one of the ideas I picked up from reading that Sharon Salzberg text on metta that I referred to yesterday. She mentioned having spent an entire week in meditation on the first step of metta--sending goodwill to herself: May I be happy. My I find true happiness in my my life. May I be free from stress and pain. May I be free from trouble. May I be free from animosity. My I be free from oppression. May I look after myself with ease…

I found it to be a wonderfully satisfying experience. Sounds selfish? Well, as Than Geoff likes to point out at the beginning of every one of his guided meditations, it’s not really a selfish thought, because my happiness does not involve depriving anyone else of theirs---unless, of course, I delude myself into thinking that my happiness depends on that new car, or getting rich, or sleeping with someone else’s wife… None of which, as Than Geoff says, is the “true happiness” that can only be found within. And, too, he adds, “my” happiness can only serve to increase the happiness of those around me: inevitably, by its very nature, it spreads to others. When I am truly happy, I can more easily share what I have with my fellow travelers on the human journey through life.

So I tried it out this morning, and had a very pleasant, very calming experience. I recommend it.

Conversations

I'd like to introduce an exciting new component to this space. Twice weekly, I will be posting links to other blog posts in the spirit of generating conversation, and also in the hopes of adding depth and variety to our ongoing dialog about Buddhism, culture, and politics. I hope it proves useful! Today, I'll be focusing my links on the shootings at Virginia Tech.

Bob Cesca (The Huffington Post)
In this piece, Bob Cesca pins much of the blame for the Virginia Tech massacre on the failings of our American culture:

The focus has to be aimed point-blank at the cold, brutal reality that there exists a serious inability to cope with American pop, economic and social pressures; a criminal lack of understanding of mental and physical health issues; and the problem solving examples instilled upon us by our elected leaders in a time when visual and printed access to information is at an all time high.

Pax et lux
Liberata riffs on Bob Cesca's post, stating:

...we certainly need to nurture more acceptance of ourselves and compassion for others... and, as someone once said, we need to learn to LOVE people and USE things (the former lavishly, the latter, sparingly), not the other way around;...resorting to violence is modeled at the highest levels of our American society, while cooperation and working out differences nonviolently are skills considered good only for weaklings...[H]ealth care --including mental health care-- should be universally available and FREE.

Silliman's Blog
Ron Silliman makes an astute connection between culture and individual psychology:

There is hardly anyone lonelier than a college student away from home the first time who doesn’t know how to fit in. Toss in paranoia & unfolding schizophrenia and you have a stew brewing that can turn into trouble.

(Thanks to Integral Options Cafe for bringing this post to my attention. Oh, and through that same source, here's Nikki Giovanni)


Watch out for future Conversations on a variety of topics.

How Metta Works

Carly is asking how metta works. It's a big question, and one to which I wouldn't trust my relatively little understanding to respond without the help of someone more experienced and wiser than myself. I checked to see what Sharon Salzberg might have to say on the topic, and found her essay on metta to be rich and satisfying. Let me refer you to it. Clearly, there's a bit more to it than "sending out good vibes"! I plan to re-read it myself. And to consult with Access to Insight to see what Than Geoff might have to say.

A Song For Sueng-Hui Cho

I saw the outtakes of your tapes—
the ones you took time out to mail
between shooting sprees.
You had
killed two already and would soon
kill thirty more, before yourself.
Thirty-three people, dead. Thirty-
three families left bereaved
including, grievously,
your own. I saw you brandishing
the pistols you had bought,
in some mad mimicry
of those martyr tapes of terrorists,
arms spread, eyes fierce
and focused on the plan
you had worked out
to wreak your vengeance on humanity.
I heard your rant—those parts
of it the network judged
fit to air—the spew of words
that must have seemed quite logical
to you, in your derangement.
And watching you, I thought
how easily the brain
can slip between that sane
and necessary sense of mission,
for a man, and vainglorious
obsession; how love
and hate are only
two sides of a coin; and how
your peculiar, deadly dedication
and crazed intensity
might well have served, in only
slightly altered circumstances, to save life
rather than destroy it.
Where good-hearted people
stood by to offer help,
your mind saw nothing
other than rejection—no more,
really, than a twist in the hardwiring
of the brain. I saw
a sad boy
desperate to prove himself
a man, and not knowing how,
unless by “killing Dick”—
your own revealing words—
in one ultimate, outrageous
gesture of hatred and defiance.
For this, in rage,
you found fault in everyone
around you but
yourself, and left us
gazing without solace, without
explanation, deep into the murk
of our own human souls.

Mass Murder

What to say about an event as unimaginably awful as the mass murders at Virginia Tech? It seems inadequate, almost impertinent to bemoan the loss of life, to express sadness for the families of those who lost loved ones… as though a few words could in any way reduce their suffering. An action so monstrous, so heart-rending, so cruelly random is virtually beyond comprehension, let alone the pale compensation of pious homilies—no matter how compassionate. “Our hearts go out…” echoes emptily in this dark pit of senseless, rageful depravity to which the human soul can sink.

It’s natural, I suppose, to search for explanations—and for someone to blame. The media have been busy doing both. From what I hear, the main target for blame has been the campus police, as though they should have anticipated the rampage that was to follow, on the basis of what reasonably might have seemed an isolated incident. Through the intermediary of the media, there is no shortage of second-guessers asking them why did they not “lock down” the campus after the first shooting. As though this were a simple matter, as though these fallible humans should have been gifted with infallible clairvoyance.

More to the point, though, it's clear that a vital system failed, allowing enough cracks for a man like the deranged Cho Seung-Hui to slip through. According to the news I heard today, he had drawn attention to his potential for violence in a variety of ways and had even at one point been committed--though I have no idea how briefly. Despite police reports and referrals for psychiatric counseling, and despite faculty and peer warnings of predictive behavior, the system apparently allowed no way to remove the clearly disturbed young man from the path of murder and self-destruction. Do we blame those who designed the flawed system? Where do we find them? Perhaps we should rather set about the task of fixing insofar as possible it to circumvent such tragedies in the future.

As for the explanations, I predict that one and one, in this case, will never make two, nor two and two make four. No matter how complete a psychological profile may be made of the young man who perpetrated this atrocity, it will always remain an irreducible mystery. As Pascal wrote so many years ago, “The heart has its reasons which reason will never know.” It seems that sometimes people snap, particularly people who lack the skills to give expression to those inner tempests of emotion. Whatever has been building up inside in the form of pain and rage simply explodes, and woe betide anyone who happens to be within range of the explosion or its fall-out.

In such a circumstance, we hear a great deal about prayer--an intercession that springs, surely, from the compassion of which the human heart is capable, and one which assumes the presence of some external power that will respond in the desired manner: to bring relief or consolation to the bereaved. For one who, like myself, has trouble with deities, I suppose that the practice of metta is the closest thing to prayer, but it's done without the intermediary. To send out metta--"May they find consolation, may they be spared further pain and suffering"--is an simple act of compassion that goes from human soul to human soul. For me, it will have to suffice.

Mute

I've been rendered mute today, and not only by yesterday's events at Virginia Tech--though that would have been reason enough in itself for silence. No, I've been offline for a good part of the day, thanks to a cable glitch. All better now, I hope. I'll be back tomorrow.

Wolfowitz: Not So Holy

That sense of moral rectitude with which the Bush administration swept into power... remember? They possessed the truths, the keys to the nation's progress. They were holier, by God, than thou. They were going to clean up the White House, clean up the government, clean up the country, clean up the world--and make it safe for their vision of democracy. Now, with virtually every last shred of the Bush retinue's reputation in tatters, comes Paul Wolfowitz, cheerleader in chief of the war designed to clean up the Middle East and the Bush appointee to head the World Bank. He marched into that office with missionary zeal and righteousness in his eye, bent on cleansing the institution of corruption--and brought his well-paid team of fellow missionaries with him, to the dismay of many who had been laboring there before. It seems, though, now, that as with so many of the Bush zealots, the rules simply did not apply to him personally. Seems that his lady friend deserved the boost his power could provide her with, to rocket her up the rungs of employment and remuneration.

Now comes the apology, the wish that he'd acted in a wiser fashion than he did. Shades of Don Imus, late of talk radio celebrity.

So is Wolfowitz any better than the Don? The problem lies in his assumption of privilege and rectitude, the blithe assumption that this kind of action was his right, that no one would stop to question it. And the truth is, that almost no one did. He could have gotten away with it, because so much of the Bush administration's policies and procedures went unquestioned for so long. It's a bleak picture these days, now that the questions are finally beginning to be asked, and no matter how bleak, I for one am grateful that the truth is coming out.

I tend to think that this is all a part of that "American literalism" I was talking about the other day, to take everything we're handed at face value. We could use a healthy dose of skepticism... Which brings me back, as always, to the Buddha. As I understand it, this august and enlightened mind cautioned us against taking even what he himself said at face value, and insisted that we not simply accept the "truths" that others lay on us, but rather test them out for ourselves through careful thought and critical observation. Do they work, in the real world? Do they bring about good results?

Sadly, in the case of our current administration, it turns out that virtually nothing holds up to that simple test. It's all, as we liked to say back in the homeland, an unmitigated cock-up.

Another Artist

Ellie and I did one of our regular gallery crawls Friday, and I was especially glad to have caught a friend of many years, Scott Grieger, before his show closed at Patricia Faure Gallery. Along with the consummate skill of a meticulous painter and a deep engagement with art history, Scott has a wickedly keen satirical eye and a healthy skepticism about the values of our current cultural circumstance.

His work has ranged easily over a wide variety of topics in the more than thirty years spanned by this retrospective exhibition. Early on in his career, he was happily “taking the mickey”—as we used to say in merrie olde England—out of the mainstream artists of his day, using self portraits to ape Robert

Rauschenberg’s famous goat, for example, with a tire around his middle, tilting up against the wall like a Richard Serra, or painting a football with a Barnett Newman stripe.

He has always paid critical attention to the icons and clichés that we so easily absorb into our culture, and to which we all too often risk surrendering our humanity. With the advent of the computer age, Scott’s hand was busy doing mock medieval illuminated manuscripts to explicate technological terminology like ROM.
He had fun with those artists who delight in reducing the act of painting to making words—and with art criticism’s infatuation with semiology—in works like “BEWARE OF GOD”, whose words were painted in huge white letters against a wall-sized red (for warning, I suppose) background.



(Thumbnail version: imagine MUCH larger!) He mocked the Italian arte povera gang with the mass production of gold-plated turds (his own) entitled “Crapola” to be sold in little boxes for $50 a crack.

He can also be pointedly political: one large painting mimics a blackboard with a large map of America (think Jasper Johns) emblazoned with the chalk-written message, “United States of Anxiety.” In the era of the Bush administration, the label is uncomfortably apt.

Along with this production, Scott has always exercised his painting chops with immaculate, often quite tiny paintings that rival old masters with their precision and skill—but usually with a twist of parody or dark humor. We happen to have an example in our house: against a washy background, two diminutive deer-like creatures, realistic in detail but for the placement of miniature Frank Stella paintings where there heads should be…

So, a pleasure to renew acquaintance with a sharp intelligence and an ability to share a good laugh at the expense of some of the pretensions of the art world and the culture. I trust he'll forgive my having somewhat abused his copyright to include pictures that I have pirated from various sources. I do have, after all, a rather limited circulation…

Racism: The Confession

I promised the day before yesterday that I would do some personal accountability on the subject that has been predominant on these pages for the past few days, but I got side-tracked by my affection for Kurt Vonnegut and my sadness that we had lost the voice of his humanity. Anyway, the confession: here we go… It’s a story. Bear with me.

I’m a nice liberal boy. Well, maybe not such a boy any more, but basically “nice”, and “liberal.” It would have deeply offended me, before I learned better, had anyone accused me of racism. But I was offered an object lesson quite some time ago, which taught me to see myself a little differently. The story concerns Charles White, an artist who achieved a certain prominence in the post-war years and who was a distinguished member of the faculty at Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design) when I went there as Dean of the College in the mid-1970s. It was a tough time for the school. The Los Angeles County Supervisors, who had munificently funded the entire school since its founding in 1918, had recently bowed to the Howard Jarvis taxpayer revolt, and had voted to cut off all funds forever at the end of that school year. The school’s Director resigned, and I was left, a neophyte administrator, still wet—no, dripping—around the ears, to try to secure the school’s future.

In this circumstance, Charlie was an always cheerful friend and supporter. When other faculty were understandably tearing out their hair—and sometimes mine—for fear of losing their jobs, and students doing the same for fear their degrees would be worthless, Charlie was a rock. Better still, he was a solid three-martini lunch man, and in those days my own metabolism was capable of absorbing that kind of intake, no sweat, and leaving me still capable of a long afternoon’s work. Too bad he was also addicted to cigarettes, which he chain-smoked to the eventual cost of his health—and indeed his life.

Once the Otis matter was resolved—a long story, not relevant here—I decided that it was past time for Charlie’s work to receive more attention than it had done in recent years and, inspired by the added incentive of a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, I embarked on the research for a book-length monograph. By this time, Charlie’s nicotine addiction had complicated an existing lung malfunction that had developed during the years of his World War II military service when, as an enlisted black man, he had been sent off to labor in the murky swamps of some remote facility that had, as I recall, no particular connection with the war. By the late 1970s, his health was seriously failing and the prognosis for his survival was dim, but he insisted on making himself available for a series of long interviews, in the course of which I learned much about his life and the ups and downs of his career.

Sadly, Charlie died before we could finish the interviews, but he left me with a large number of leads to follow up. My first lesson in the institutional racism of the contemporary art world came with the gradual discovery that none of the usual research methods seemed to apply. There were simply insufficient written materials about White, his work, and the socio-cultural milieu in which he worked in his most productive years. To find what I needed, I would have to rely on the memory of men and women who had been there with him in the trenches, so to speak—and I would need to travel to find them. It was not to be a matter of art history so much as oral history.

There followed a year in which I traveled widely throughout the United States, went to some places (Jackson, Mississippi, for example) which I would otherwise never have visited, and met some extraordinary people from Charlie’s past. A solid socialist and activist from the mid-1930s until ill health put an end to that kind of activity in the mid-1950s, he had worked with other “Negro” movers and shakers of the period (and yes, “Negro” was the preferred appellation in those days)—artists, writers, actors and intellectuals coming out of the great wave of the Harlem Renaissance in the early decades of the 1900s. I found myself talking to some who subsequently became well known—to Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier—and also to artists like Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, who achieved considerable and well-deserved renown in the art world, at least in circles that paid attention to artists other than those in the mainstream of American culture. Then there were those eminently respectable and diligent artists—too many of them—who would never achieve recognition outside the small circle of their regional and racial circumstance.

I was, in short, discovering a new world of art history and artists. Not really a new world, but one that had previously been unknown to me, and whose successors remain, to this day, invisible to what we’re pleased to think of as the “art world.” There existed a whole culture whose marginalization could only be attributed, so far as I could see, to inherently racist attitudes to which I had ignorantly subscribed. As a Dean, educator, writer, critic, I was a part of a culture that systematically excluded, apart from those few who were permitted to cross the line, a whole category of artists on the basis of their race and their alienation from the mainstream path.

As I listened to a multitude of stories and became more and more aware of this systemic racism, I also learned to watch myself a bit more critically. Oh, I was not an intentional racist, for sure, but there were subtle signs that I had missed before. I noticed certain attitudes and expectations I brought with me to certain places (Jackson, Mississippi, for example, or the streets of Harlem) that dictated how I carried myself and spoke—with a certain wariness, a certain self-consciousness, a certain diffidence and awareness of difference. In my interviews, I noticed a special care with my locutions… and my circumlocutions. I noticed a different sensual awareness in my body. And I noticed that I spoke and acted in subtly different ways with black people than with white.

The book I wrote was never published. It took two years to complete, and I think it was a useful and overview of the work of an artist who had made a special contribution to the history of African American art. The responses I got from publishers were polite enough, but the chorus was plain: no one could see a “market” for the book. The best of Charlie’s work—the height of his career was really in the 1950s and 1960s—was exclusively figurative and the best of it graphic, rather than painterly. He had eschewed the path that led the mainstream artists into abstraction, into pop, into minimalism and conceptualism and hewed to the path of his own social conscience. He was not hip. He was not a “seller.” Not to make too fine a point of it, I was convinced that racism played a part in my failure to find a publisher—but I could never prove it.

Okay, hardly rabid stuff. But the experience left me with a real and personal understanding that racism runs deep in our society, and that I could not too easily let myself off the hook. I have had the opportunity, since those days, to learn more about interpersonal communication skills, and have come to understand that I get nowhere in a situation of conflict unless I first fully acknowledge what I bring to it, what part is mine. Conflicts start to get resolved when both parties are prepared to begin with some hard, honest self-evaluation; when I am right and you are wrong, there’s basically no resolution possible.

Which is why I see no purpose or promise in this supposed “national dialogue” on racism until we’re all prepared to look into ourselves before we start hurling brickbats. I have not heard any of those self-appointed defenders of black dignity speak up as loudly for the racially-tarred and feathered Duke University athletes as they have done about the Rutgers team; and while I understand there’s a serious need for advocacy, and honor these leaders’ sense of mission to provide it where there was none, this might be an excellent opportunity to open themselves up to the recognition that racism works two ways, and that it will continue to be a blot on our society until we acknowledge equal responsibility on all our parts. If I were close enough to the Reverend Al Sharpton call him Al, I’d challenge him to make a public avowal of the baggage that he himself carries around with him, and then continue with the important work of advocacy for those whose voice needs the megaphone he offers.

Vonnegut

I promised the confessional piece today, but of course I can't let the moment pass without a word about Kurt Vonnegut. I was sad to hear that we had lost one of our most humane of literary voices. I knew Vonnegut a bit back in the 1960s, when I was at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and feel privileged to have known him--even though just a bit. I read a good deal of his work over the years, and was always enchanted by his peculiar spell as a writer (no pun intended...) I was moved by his last book, the overview of a man of a good number of years examining the world and our place in it, as a nation, with something approaching despair. I wrote about it in "The Bush Diaires"--the blog out of which "The Buddha Diaires" sprang. Here's what I said, in part, on Thursday, May 18, 2006:

"Just finished reading Kurt Vonnegut's "A Man Without a Country" last night. I started days ago and it's a very short book, a very easy read. I guess I'm a slow reader. Actually, I'm a fitful rather than a slow reader. But the book has been on my mind all this time. I've read extracts to friends. I've recommended it. It has to be one of the sharpest indictments of our culture you can read anywhere. An elegy for the human species and the planet earth in what he sees to be their final throes.

"But it's also kind. Avuncular. Full of quiet wisdom. Honest. Plain-spoken. Clear-sighted. It's the kind of talk you'd want to hear from your grandfather, out of the depth of his experience of the world. Funny. Witty. Angry. Full of grief and sadness that things have reached this pitch. Unadorned, unsparing of himself as well as others. And full of love for the world and, particularly, its people. He just loves people. All kinds, particularly those as plain and honest as himself. He reserves his wrath for those who are dishonest, stupid, short-sighted, self-serving, self-righteous, exploitative..."

I wonder what he'd have to say about the current affaire Imus? I'd like to think he'd be as bemused as I by our common aversion to the insults we gladly pay to have flung in our direction.Anyway, thanks to Vonnegut, for everything he had to teach us. Bon voyage to him, wherever he may be headed. Or not. And apologies for the bad taste of quoting myself. As for the confession, well... later. Or tomorrow.

Racist Words: Another Perspective

Alright. Racism bad. Insult bad. Bad Imus. True. But there's a piece in all this fuss that leaves me very uncomfortable with the way it's playing out. It's associated with what I think of--and have written about--as our American literalism. It's an almost childish inability to see things in context, an inability to perceive or understand irony, a way of taking everything as a personal insult, as though the world revolved exclusively around ME. It's perhaps a paucity of that imaginative faculty that allows me to see the world from multiple points of view, which results in a self-protectiveness that says. Oh, yes, of course, say anything you want--so long as you don't step on MY toes.

In this literalist context, by all means, Imus's words were unforgivable. But what else do we expect, for God's sake, when we Americans--black and white--delight in precisely the kind of language for which we now condemn Don Imus? And even demand it from our radio shows, our comedians, our musicians... We actually PAY them to do it for our amusement. I keep hearing that there's a line that mustn't under any circumstances be crossed, a sacred line that protects every God-fearing American from offense--and should by rights protect us, also, from the vicissitudes of life. But if that's true, it's a line that each of us draws according to our own sense of entitlement and our own fragile ego.

So I say, Bring it on. Do your worst. Offend me. Challenge my most basic assumptions and my most cherished beliefs about myself, about the world, about God... About the society and culture that we have created for ourselves and in which we live. I may smart when I hear it. But that way I hope to learn, to grow, to see myself in perspective, and get to be a better human being as a result.

So this dread insult may turn out to be a better thing that we imagined. Okay, bad me. But are we really ready to talk honestly about racism in this country, and about the real damage it wreaks on human souls? With poor people everywhere suffering from its ravages, with our schools increasingly de facto segregated, with our inner cities impoverished and neglected? With gangs marauding, with rage and ignorance abounding? Do we dare to talk honestly about racism?

The topic has been manifesting in our collective lives in a variety of ways in recent days, from the Imus gaffe to the dropping of charges in that infamous case against the Duke University lacrosse players and--for those who happened to watch it--the powerful American Experience piece on Jonestown on PBS last night. What a bitter irony that Jim Jones started out with a radical vision of social and racial equality, and ended up a demented tyrant bringing about the needless death of those whom he had enslaved to his overweening ego. In the Duke case, surely, the shoe was on the other foot. How many black leaders were ready to jump in and say, Wait, hold on a moment, before we condemn these white boys, let's first see where the evidence points? How many white civic leaders, for that matter, had the courage to resist the emotional prejudgment and the risk of being labeled with the "r" word? (I actually loathe that habit of substituting the initial for the word we pretend to be too sensitive to utter in polite society--for fear, presumably, of being tainted by it.)

Listen, I'm all up for some real talk about race. It's well past time we had that conversation in this country. But pointing the finger does not a conversation make. As I pointed out recently, the conversation has to start with an owning of responsbility. I'll practice what I preach in tomorrow's entry. Meantime, I will take hope when I hear the Reverend Al Sharpton copping to his own racism as loudly as he talks about the racism of others. Until then, brothers and sisters, it's frankly all hot air.

Right Speech, Again

I’ve been thinking a good deal about what Carly wrote yesterday in his comments. I respect the fact that he’s unwilling to duck issues or tolerate stupidity and ignorance. I’m also acutely aware of the possibility that certain “Buddhist” attitudes could make me sound like some kind of milquetoast, and it bothers me a good deal that I might be perceived as such. I don’t like waffle, and I don’t respect tolerance at any cost. I’ve noted in the past what Than Geoff has said: Being Buddhist doesn’t mean you have to be a doormat. If anything makes me cringe, it’s the fear of being perceived as one who lacks convictions, and lacks the strength of character to follow through with them.

That said—and a shared impatience with rednecks notwithstanding!—I still think that the concept of Right Speech serves me better than speaking out of anger and intolerance. If anything demeans me, it’s my own attachment to the rightness of my opinions and my own harsh words, much more than the judgments of others. Carly speaks—unconvincingly, to my ear—of “indifference” as a possible solution. As I understand the word, it implies a studied lack of care, and I don’t get that from the tone of what he writes. I get aversion, even disgust. Indifference suggests a hardening of the heart--and with it, possibly, a self-harming hardening of the arteries. I'd personally far prefer to have a hard head than a hard heart. For me, the Buddhist notion of equanimity is far more appealing than indifference—and far less harmful in its effect on me and on those around me, since it seeks to avoid both aversion and approval. It simply recognizes what is.

I want to believe, also, that such an attitude reflects a strength of mind rather than a weakness. It’s a challenging refusal to be drawn into senseless conflict either by instincts or by intellect (as I've said, I do share Carly’s instinctive and intellectual distrust of ignorance, prejudice, and intellectual indolence) in favor of a willing suspension of judgment which spares both the heart and the gut, not only emotionally but physically as well.

I’m honestly not sure how Taoism differs from Buddhism in regard to the way in which we talk to each other, and the way in which we deal with what we perceive to be dangerous ignorance and prejudice. But I’d sure be interested to hear. I’m also not sure whether Carly was speaking out of his Taoist convictions, or giving vent to a more personal view. Carly?

A final word: after watching the victims of Imus's intemperate remarks on the news this morning and hearing their sense of having their wonderful achievement in some way tarnished by what he had to say, I think it's important to remember that his words have the power to shame no one but Imus himself.

Right Speech: The Imus Flap

At last! Something for the media to get their teeth into! A racial slur, no less. And now it's all the news, all the time. Don Imus regrets. The Rev. Al Sharpton objects. Don Imus apologizes. Apologies rejected. Actually, it's not even much of a debate. If there's been a word of defense for the talk show host, I haven't heard it. And who would dare?

Okay, it was a hideous thing to say. The best thing I've heard or read about it from the plethora of commentators was Gwen Ifill's op-ed piece in today's New York Times, in which she castigates Imus on behalf of those girls he insulted so casually: they had worked too hard, she suggested, to achieve their moment of glory, to deserve this slap in the face from a self-important shock-jock like Imus.

Fair enough. The words he used may have been a casual aside in something that was intended as a comedy routine. They may, as Imus has been at pains to point out--have their origin in the commonplace black-on-black denigration of women in street talk and hip-hop lyrics. But their use suggested an unwarranted--and hugely arrogant--assumption on his part that he had somehow earned the right to use them casually, as he did, with a self-congratulatory chuckle, and without regard to any effect they might have on those who heard them.

There's a good reason for the Buddhist teaching on Right Speech, the third of the eight path factors in the Noble Eightfold Path that leads to the end of suffering. The principle of right speech includes "Abstaining from lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, & from idle chatter," so I guess that Imus's remark falls squarely into the last three categories to be avoided: it was divisive, abusive, and certainly qualifies as idle chatter. Had Imus spoken in full consciousness of what he was saying, I'm sure the words would not have left his mouth.

Such wisdom in this Buddhist teaching. It's not hard to see how this not-right, careless act of speech brought suffering upon the man who uttered it, as well as those who were its target. His endlessly repeated, abject apologies throughout the day yesterday and again today have apparently done him little good. His detractors--and they are legion--are still after his hide. It might be useful, however, to point out that the principle of right speech should apply equally to them. If not abusive--and I guess it depends, here, on your understanding of what constitutes abuse--their words are unquestionably divisive. Good liberals and conservatives alike, everyone is quick to condemn a racist.

But if we're really intent on healing the wounds of racism, self-righteous finger-pointing is hardly the best approach. A good place to start might be the recognition of our own responsibility. When it comes to racism, we're all busy with denial: who, me? A racist? No, no, not me. I'm not a racist. I wonder if it's real honesty that promotes this knee-jerk denial, or true self-examination. The fact is, I know that there's a racist part in me. I've seen it. I have experienced it in my daily life. If I examine my actions and reactions without the blinkers of what I'd like to believe about myself, I have to cop to succumbing to some of those prejudices, preconceptions and stereotyping habits that are symptomatic of racist attitudes. It's not something that I'm especially proud of, but I'd be a damn liar if I denied it.

And what's good for the goose is surely good for the gander. It seems to me that all of us, black and white, would do well to start the healing, not with denial but with truthfulness and clarity about ourselves--an admission that is sadly lacking in today's debate, but which might prove a much-needed first step toward an exchange of Right Speech with each other. I'm not optimistic, though, that Buddhist wisdom will prevail over indignation and retribution in this particular scrap, nor that those involved will be able to let go of the attachment to outcomes that might allow a peaceable resolution. There's too much at stake.

Easter

Well, it was Easter Day yesterday, and I missed my entry in The Buddha Diaires. Also missed sangha--Ellie and I did our sit out on the back patio of our little cottage, surrounded by the sounds of the birds and our Buddha fountain. And missed, to my regret, Than Geoff's monthly visit to our sitting group: we joined our friends for a family Easter lunch and it lasted until, well, seven in the evening... I had planned to take a quotation from the Ariyapariyesana Sutta (pronounce that one!) to ask about, but that will have to wait for the next opportunity.

We did, though, place Easter calls to my two sons--one in Iowa City, the other in the South of France, visiting in-laws with his family. We spoke to our three grandchildren. It's a pleasure that they're all old enough now--our granddaughter, Alice, eight, and the twins, Georgia and Joseph, five--to actually have a bit of a conversation. It's hard to maintain some sense of family connection when they're growing up so far away, in England. Having treased ourselves with the idea for months now, we're planning--at both ends--to explore the possibilities of video communication. We're so often told "it's easy." It's for such reasons that I wish I were more comfortable with the technological aids available these days. For the moment, we're having enough trouble learning how to get the I-Pod working properly for Ellie.

The headline in this morning's Los Angeles Times? Ten more American soldiers killed in Iraq. And anti-American demonstrations promised for today, the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. It's maddening, to see power still held in the hands of that tiny group of men who persist in believing that this misbegotten war is anything other than a national and international disaster...

Suffering & Redemption

It seems like the season to talk about suffering and redemption, what with Good Friday just past and Easter Day arriving tomorrow. It just happens that we have watched two rented movies, on consecutive nights, whose theme is that same age-old human obsession.

The first, Come Early Morning, is the story of a Southern woman, Lucy, whose addiction to booze and sex threaten to ruin her life. Her emotionally unreachable father is a might-have-been guitarist whose performance anxieties prevented him from fulfilling his promise and who has fallen victim to his own addictions--to booze, also, and to religion. Lucy has taken to drinking too much at the local saloon and waking up in bed the following morning with strange men. The willful destruction of a possible relationship with the one nice guy who takes her seriously and treats her with respect, leads her finally to accept the fact that she will never be able to reach her father and she wakes up to the realization that no one will save her but herself. I enjoyed this film a lot. It's what they call, absurdly, a "small film," but it's very well done. Superb acting by Ashley Judd, and a great sound track of mostly country music. It manages all of the above without becoming maudlin or looking for simple answers to complex human problems.

The second film, which we missed in the theaters, was Blood Diamond. It's not a film for the squeamish, or for those who avoid any kind of violence on the screen. The dreadful scenes of civil war depicted in the movie are shown in unsparing detail, with brother fighting pitilessly against brother, and with boy-children trained to kill innocent villagers mercilessly with the assault rifles put into their hands. Manipulated at far remote by corporate European diamond traders, these desperate people slaughter each other in pursuit of a global commodity that most of them never even see.

The redemption myth centers on the post-colonial adventurer played (extraordinarily well) by Leonardo di Caprio, whose cynicism and greed drive his quest for freedom through the wealth to which diamonds offer a desperate, violence-strewn path. Partnering at gunpoint with an unwilling village fisherman whose family has been torn apart by war and who holds the secret to a spectacular fortune in the form of a diamond he has found and hidden in the African dirt, our hero survives endless conflict and betrayal for long enough to hold the diamond in his hand--and ends up with the realization that it was his reluctant African partner who was focused all along on the greater treasure: reuniting with the family he has lost, and redeeming the abducted son whose innocent soul had been hardened by the rebels who had taken him.

The stated lesson of the film: don't buy one of these luxury baubles unless you can be sure it's not a conflict diamond--a stone that has been mined at the cost of human families destroyed by warfare, and of human blood. From a broader view, I saw the diamond as a metaphor for all of the earth's dwindling resources, and the film as sounding the alarm for worse violence and bloodshed to come as those resources become more scarce with time, and men more desperate to cull them for their own. Like the character played by di Caprio, we are at serious risk of sacrificing our humanity to our greed.

Good Friday

Ah, yes, Good Friday... I guess I have aging on the mind because I woke this Good Friday morning thinking about Jack Palance and his one-arm push-ups at the Academy Awards and then I thought about his great scenes in Shane in the black pants and the black shirt and the black hat and how he gunned down Van Heflin with a curl of the lip and a glint in his eye and how he then got his in turn from sad-eyed good guy Alan Ladd who had to ride off into the sunset to save his soul and of our avenging gun-toting Jesus-loving cowboy president who listens only to God the Father and his corporate sponsors riding to the rescue with his gang who couldn't shoot straight... and then I thought of Cat Balou and Lee Marvin and his hilarious spoof of Jack Palance in his black pants and black shirt and black hat totally soused and riding to the rescue of Jane Fonda and then I thought about Hanoi Jane and the outrage in America and how thirty or so years on it doesn't matter any more and soon I found myself thinking about this whole goddamned awful tragic mess in Iraq and the Middle East and about the simple-minded trust in the myth of the good guy gunslinger who rides in and saves us all from those who threaten us when in reality only we can save us from ourselves... and then there's that other myth of our president's personal redeemer Jesus dying on the cross and saving us from evil...

A Dream: the Fear of Public Speaking

Mirabile dictu, thanks to a couple of Aleve and light exercise, my back seems to be recovering nicely. Yesterday's caterwauling notwithstanding, the progress has been from agony to a mere ache. Now for a dream:

I have accepted a position as President of Loyola Marymount University. (I was in reality Dean of the arts there in what seems like a former life, back in the 1980s, in the days before I awoke to the fact that I was not supposed to be spending my life in academia--having already spent nearly a quarter of a century there.) It is the day of my inauguration, and I realize that I have not prepared a speech. I have been relying on my ability to ad lib, and have assumed that it would be enough to utter a few pleasant words. Now that the moment is arriving, it dawns on me that a full speech will be required, and I recall in something of a panic that I'm more likely than not to freeze in such situations. I have taken too much for granted. There is no time to write a full speech, so I begin to scribble cue words on the back of an envelope in the desperate attempt to have something to work from. When I wake up, a good few minutes pass before I realize that my mind is still writing that speech that will never need to be made...

A big day at the computer today, editing and stitching together all the telephone interviews I've done in preparation for my next " Art of Outrage" column for Artscene Visual Radio.

Bad Back... and ALS

OUCH! I put my back out this morning. Three huge spasms within the space of ten minutes, and for no apparent reason. No sudden twists or turns. The first happened in the kitchen as I was making our morning cup of tea: I turned--quite slowly and without any unusual twist--from the counter to the sink, and then it hit. I screeched--loudly enough, I later learned, to awaken Ellie in the bedroom downstairs. The two aftershocks came within minutes, less powerful but painful nonetheless. I'm lying in bed now with my laptop, trying not to feel sorry for myself.

Nor should I. Having intended to get to bed early yesterday after a late night at the seder the night before, I made the mistake of tuning in to the first few minutes of Frontline's airing of So Much, So Fast and got hooked on the story of Stephen Heywood who suffered from ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. And watched to the end.

What an incredible man... and what a marvelous family! Stephen's fight, after his diagnosis, against this terrible, debilitating affliction and his remarkable ability to maintain his will to live and his good cheer in the direst of circumstances were truly inspirational. His wife, who went along with his desire to have a child in the full knowledge that his chances for survival were virtually non-existent, seemed to share his persistent good humor and his determination, and we watched their child grow from crib to toddlerhood with much more delighted empathy than pity. His siblings, most prominently James, his older brother, rallied to his support and brought all their skills and resources to the formation of a foundation for the search for a cure for ALS.

It was painful enough to watch the slow, inexorable deterioration of this extraordinary man's body, while his mind remained alert and his appetite for life as keen as ever. It was a dreadful irony to learn that two years after the end of the filming of this extraordinary documentary he had finally succumbed--not to the disease itself, but to the accidental disconection of his oxygen supply during the night, while he was sleeping.

Stephen's patient, unselfpitying tolerance of years of relentless bodily decay sure puts my little bad back in perspective. How could I feel sorry for myself with this man in mind? I have learned from past experience that gentle exercise is a much faster route to recovery than immobility, so I plan to be up shortly and to take a walk around our hill--and to remind myself to keep moving through the day rather than get trapped into sitting for hours in front of my computer. Meantime, my thanks to Stephen and his family for the example of their courage and their loving devotion to each other.

Passover Seder

It was the first night of Passover last night and as usual we joined in a family seder with friends. I guess I'm a bit of a religious mongrel, really: brought up an Anglo-Catholic, married into a Jewish family with a tradition of observing the Friday services and the holidays, an atheist by conviction and a Buddhist in daily practice, I still find a great deal of soul resonance in the rituals and liturgies of religion. There's something comforting and moving about words and practices that have been repeated by countless numbers of people for centuries, and the Passover seder is no exception.

We used a Haggadah (a form of service) that I had compiled for a seder at our own house a number of years ago. I had rescued it from my computer and had put it aside days ago for us to think about taking with us, but Ellie and I had both postponed reading it until the last moment, just a couple of hours before we were due to leave for the evening. Finding that we both still rather liked it, I set about copying the nearly twenty pages on our pokey office machine... which made us late starting out and late arriving at our seder. Still, sight unseen, our hosts graciously agreed to use my Haggadah, so we got the chance to see it in action once again.

Haggadahs come in countless manifestations. As a non-Jew--or less politely, a goy--I had compiled this particular version in part for my fellow goyim, to make things clear and simple, and in part for my own satisfaction. The haggadahs I was familiar with tended to fall into one of two categories: either they were very traditional, somewhat slow and stodgily religious, or they went too far to the opposite extreme, becoming loudly political or fashionably hip. I liked a lot of the old language, but also wanted to clarify the relevance of the ritual to the current situation of a world where social injustice and all forms of violence persist--up to and including genocide.

The festival of Passover is, after all, intended to celebrate that liberation of the Jews from slavery in Egypt, about which we read in the Bible. It received a cruel and unwanted update in relevance in the 20th century, when Hitler and his Nazi Germany "enslaved"--and, of course, murdered--millions of innocent Jews, along with untold masses of gypsies, communists, homosexuals and others deemed undesirable in the wisdom of that oppressive state. The scourge of human bondage continues to this day with relative impunity, with girls and women being sold world-wide into prostitution, and boys being commandeered from their villages to carry arms and kill in greed- and ego-driven wars.

But I wanted to see slavery in a still larger context. I wanted to recall, in my Haggadah, that millions more are enslaved today without their realizing it, to swell corporate coffers and obey the powerful who exercise their control in countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways. I think of the power of the lobbyists in our government, of the role of money in matters of public policy in everything from health care to environmental pollution. I think of the power of the commercial media and the willingness of the powerful to exploit them in bending us to their will.

And then there's the matter of personal liberation. The Haggadah reminds us that it's the responsibility of each of us to assure our own. I know something of the habits and unconscious patterns of behavior that keep me in some basic way "enslaved," and the role of mindfulness in freeing myself from the unhealthy or unskillful ones. And I think of our alienating consumer society, where so many are addicted to so many different "needs": to drugs or alcohol, to food, or sex, or shopping. Do we not allow ourselves too easily, as a society, to be enslaved? Do we not, in some way, welcome and encourage it?

All this, then, was a part of my thinking as I put together my own concept of what a Haggadah might look like in the contemporary world. Going through it last night, I realized that if I were to rewrite it today, I would reinstate more of the ritual aspects that had somehow been lost or downplayed in the text I had created. All in all, though, I was pleased with the directness and clarity of much of what I had done, and was happy to have it back in use after hiding in the depths of my computer files for so many years.

No matter, the seder was, as always, a very special night. Thanks to our hosts for including us, and for all the work that went into the preparations. There's a common human bond that manifests itself on such occasions, and it's a wonderful feeling to recognize and participate in it. At this time of year, I think of my father, an Anglican priest, and Ellie's father, a Jewish pater familias, coming together over a seder at her parents' house, and how my father found so much in the service that connected with his own experience and faith. For him, this first seder he had ever attended was the Last Supper reenacted. And for all of us, a joy to bring our families together from across the ocean and across cultural divides.

A Perfect World--and the Insanity Donut

Interesting talk, as usual, at yesterday’s sangha—beginning with a passage read from the Tao Te Ching which included the proposition that “the world is perfect; we can do nothing to change it.” (I’m paraphrasing the translation here, though I hope without distorting it. My memory is not so trustworthy these days.)

So is it? Perfect, I mean. My argument was that it depends on the way you look at it—and on the way you understand the words. On the other hand, some of our group proposed what I understand to be a karma-based vision: that everything results from actions whose consequences are not always foreseeable, but which offer lessons from which, if mindful, we can learn. No matter how dire, and no matter whether we approve of them or not, events in the world may prove to be a part of its “perfection.” Perhaps this perfection can be understood as the necessity of the cause-effect continuum.

Which sounded uncomfortably Panglossian to me. Pangloss, remember, was the peripatetic mentor of that simple-minded literalist Candide, the hero of Voltaire’s merciless mockery of the philosophy that “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” I myself have trouble accepting the agonizing death of millions of human beings as the result of war, disease, and famine as a part of some cosmic vision of a perfect world. I don’t even think that it’s perfectible. The enlightenment of the Buddha himself, after all, arose from the perception of the inevitability of suffering—manifestly in the form of aging, sickness and death. I doubt that he could have envisioned such present-day scourges as genocide and man-induced global warming.

It also seems to me dangerously close to trivializing the suffering of a vast number of human beings to see it, essentially (and I realize that this is to put it far more crudely than it was meant) as a teaching offered to our species. Okay, we should doubtless be learning from these dreadful outcomes of our unskillful actions and behaviors. But doesn’t it seem callous to attribute the suffering of all these innocent victims of their fellow man’s indifference and cruelty to some kind of karmic outcome of unknowable past actions?

On Than Geoff's monthly visits, after our meditation hour we join in chanting the Sublime Attitudes, a lovely litanyy that reminds us that “All living beings are owners of their actions, born of their actions, heir to their actions, related through their actions, and live dependent on their actions.” I see the wisdom in these words, and kind of grasp the concept behind them. But somewhere at gut level it remains a conundrum for me in the light of these troublesome thoughts. Which suggests to me that I have work to do before I more fully understand it.

Meantime, there's what one of our number felicitously calls the "insanity donut." In the middle is what you can actually be responsible for, surrounded by everything you somehow feel responsibility for without being able to control it. That's the part that's not so good for you, I assume. Nice metaphor, anyway. I recalled Than Geoff’s earlier responses to my questions about political and social responsibility: do what you can, he suggests, and have the good sense to recognize what’s beyond your capabilities. Know the limitations, and acknowledge them. Don’t waste time and energy on those things that you can’t hope to affect. And be aware that even the small things matter in the grand scheme. As the chaos theory has it, the beat of a butterfly wing in one corner of the globe can result in a tempest in another.