Read This Instead... Please!

I'm off for the weekend this morning. I'd ask anyone who might have checked in to read The Buddha Dairies to read this instead, as a favor to yourself. And while you're at it, this is important, too. And this, a valuable historical reminder. And then there's this. All from today's Op-Ed pages of the New York Times. Feel the outrage. One of the great teachings of the Buddha is that we must never stop paying attention. And as someone said, these days, if you're not ouraged, you're not paying attention. Have a great weekend, Buddha lovers!

Reading

I had fun last night joining other bloggers at a live reading put together by Leah Peterson at our local Tangier Lounge down on Hillhurst in Los Feliz. I found myself sitting at a table with fellow-blogger Deezee from Confessional Highway and Laura Viera Rigler, the author of a new novel, "Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict," to be published in August by Dutton. There were about eight of us who read selections from our daily labors, and it was interesting, given the variety of tones and voices, to find a common thread: it is, I think, a confessional medium. It attracts those of us who are willing--even eager!--to expose a deep part of ourselves in the often trivial events of daily life. We usually hide behind our computers, because there's a part of us that's shy enough to want to remain anonymous, but we're drawn irresistibly to reveal ourselves in our weakest and most vulnerable moments as well as in our strength.

I'm short of time this morning. I have a final interview scheduled for my next "Art of Outrage" segment for Artscene Visual Radio, and the rest of the morning will be taken up with organizing all the sound files for editing next week. Then off to Idyllwild for a weekend at Painting's Edge, and a full week in our little cottage in Laguna Beach for the Fourth of July. I'll plan on doing some linking to my genial fellow-bloggers in the coming week. Thanks, meantime, to Leah and the blogging gang!

Our House; Oh, and the iPhone...

Ellie hosted a meeting of professional women in the arts in our house last night, and it was a pleasure to see how well our new place worked to entertain a large-ish group of people. They arrived before sunset and enjoyed the daytime view of Hollywood from our balcony over wine and hors d'ouevres, then strolled in the garden before returning to the balcony for dinner around the big teak table there, staying on through the dusk into darkness, and well into the night.

I, meanwhile, was joined by the sole male guest--a friend and the husband of a member of Ellie's professional association. We sat and chatted together over dinner and throughout the evening, ending up with a long exposition from him about one of the great passions of his life: the Yiddish language--its history and practice, and its persistence despite the devastation of the Holocaust and the consequent diaspora of the twentieth century. A fascinating story. As one who studied languages and philology many years ago at university, I was able at least to contribute some interesting questions...

We talked, too, about the city and the undergraduate program I directed--also many years ago!--in which we took students for a full semester and immersed them in all aspects of art in the city of Los Angeles. Our first day, which started at four in the morning at the fruit and vegetable markets and lasted the full length of the day, was called "The City as Art" and involved a fast-paced, multi-vehicle tour of corners of Los Angeles that most students had never visited or known about--from the sublime to the ridiculous. We ended up at Forest Lawn cemetery, admiring the prim, fig-leafed copy of Michelangelo's David and the ghastly stained glass version of Leonardo's "Last Supper," viewed to the sound of pious organ muzak.

Interesting, though. My friend pointed out that many young people literally don't know where they are these days, In the geographical sense. The newest generation have grown up with navigation systems in their cars, so they drive without the faintest idea as to where they're going except as an electronic concept projected on those little screens. Without the digital assist, they would be lost. By the same token, we wondered, how many young people grow up with having to understand the basic principles of math? He told me that young employees in his office are astounded by his ability to work out mathematical problems in his head.

To what extent, I wonder, are we in the process of stultifying the human brain with our reliance on those marvelous digital gadgets? Are we at risk of sacrificing our own circuitry by outsourcing it to our machines?



It's today, is it not--or tomorrow--that the much-touted iPhone makes its public appearance. Predictably, there will be mobs of people storming the Apple stores to lay their hands on one. Another piece of miniaturized gadgetry that does everything but fly us to New York... How long will it be before everyone on Earth requires the help of such a device to ascertain where he is? Then we'll all be permanently lost.

Meditation

Today, as every day, I sit and watch the breath. I try to maintain my attention from the very beginning of the inbreath to the very last moment of the outbreath--each breath from birth to death. It's hard. My mind has many things to divert it, many threads to follow, many things to worry over. I watch it go to work, and each time it wanders, try to reel it back in. For a couple of moments, for a couple of minutes even... success!

Then off it goes again. Sometimes I catch it sooner, sometimes later. Sometimes I only notice it has wandered off minutes later. Then the judgments come: how come you can't make a better job of this, when you've been doing it for ten years? My mind jumps at them: something to get its teeth into. Great.

So, no, it's not about leaving your mind at the door, along with your shoes, as Christopher Hitchens too easily assumes. It's not about blissing out and escaping the mind. For me, it's about teaching the mind to do exactly what I want it to do, about harnassing the power of the mind by training it to focus and concentrate.

I'm finding myself, eventually, irked by Hitchens's glib dismissal of all spiritual exercise, along with all religion. I suspect an inner rage that pushes him further than even reason wants to go--the result, perhaps, of some as yet unhealed, unacknowledged wound. There's a lot of old emotional crap encrusted around his arguments, which somehow become personal, arrogant, even hateful.

Still, his book is a "good read," perhaps in part because it is unrestrained by the usual socially-sanctioned politenesses and tolerances around another man's religion. Raw intolerance makes for tough, sinewy prose, a refreshing change from that mealy-mouthed habit of tiptoeing around the feelings of everyone who might possibly be offended. Worth a try.

Conversations

Think Buddha
Excerpts from a great post about the social implications of "Couchsurfing"

For much of the time in Bulgaria (and in between, as I’m taking the train) I will be Couchsurfing. For those of you who don’t know about it, Couchsurfing is a web based global hospitality network. The dea is that you sign up, put up a bit of a profile, and then you can contact people all around the world and arrange to stay with them. It is all run on the basis of generosity and hospitality...

Some friends have said to me that they think such hospitality – whether offering it or receiving it (and, with hospitality, I think that one is always both offering and receiving it at the same time, that there is a hospitality to being a host and there is a hospitality to being a guest) – is foolhardy...

I suspect it comes down to the fact that something like Couchsurfing goes against the tenor of our times, and the reason is simple: that we feel uneasy with a transaction based upon generosity, openness and hospitality. We are reassured when money changes hands, because we understand financial transactions; but when no money changes hands, our suspicions are aroused. We do not know what to do with such a situation. We are not accustomed to this kind of thing happening. It does not fit in with our world view...

But then, our world view can be a bleak one. The prevailing impression one can get from the media is that every stranger is out there to murder and maim, that trust is a mugs’ game; and this leads to an all-pervading siege mentality. Yet there could be no sadder house to live in, to my mind, than one surrounded by barbed wire, with large metal gates and an intercom at the end of the drive, the grounds bristling with security cameras and patrolled by fierce hounds.

A Sideways Look at Womanhood
Miss Understood stumbles upon an ethical index of clothing companies in the UK, sparking a re-evaluation of her consumer habits, and a lively discussion in her comments section.

I wonder if it’ll change the way I shop? I’m highly unlikely to ensure that all the clothes I buy are Fair Trade or made from organic cotton, but I wonder if I’ll be able to walk out of Primark with a bulging bag and a flutter of excitement in the knowledge I’ve picked up some bargains, when the reality of the situation is that the labels which should inform me of the origin of the clothes is missing. Will I still have a smile on my face when I think about the working conditions of the employees who make it all possible for me?

Dharma Bums
Gorgeous nature photos posted by Robin Andrea today, followed by a discussion of Michael Moore's new documentary, Sicko, and then a call to action!

Moore goes to Canada, England, and France to talk to people about their experience with health care. Everyone he speaks with seems quite content with their national systems. No matter what, they don't really ever have to worry. Imagine that--No worries, and for less money than we spend.

Isn't it time for a revolution in this country? What will it take to get us off of our butts and out into the streets? What?

Swinesend Revisted

I have been reading Quink's book. Quink, attentive readers will recall from occasional recent observations in the "Comments" section of The Buddha Diaries, is a fellow blogger and a somewhat more recent graduate than I of the absurdly misnamed British "public school" system. "Public", of course, in Brit speak, in this context means private--and exclusive of all those whose families either have no long history of association with the school in question, or can't afford the fees. Quink's book, "Swinesend" (please check out this link!), is a hilarious satrical indictment of the system. I got a good few chuckles of recognition as I read--along with the occasional cold frisson of recollected dread, pain and fear.

One of the great benefits of the meditation practice in which I have been engaged for some years now is that it affords me the opportunity to observe those patterns of feeling and behavior that originate in those "public school" days, and which persist in attempting to make their appearance in my life even today. So long as I manage to remain awake, I am able to catch them: the armor I instinctively resort to when anyone happens to get close; the exercise of boyish charm to deflect attempts of others to reach the more tender inner places; the knee-jerk teflon response to unwelcome feelings of pain, fear, and grief. As a small boy entering the "system" at the age of six--this was boarding school, mind--I quickly learned these skills in order to protect myself from the slings and arrows of other nasty little boys. I perfected my skills as I went along, and exercise them today without a second thought--unless I happen to pause and have that second thought, and recognize that the devices I learned as a six year old are neither necessary nor useful to a man of senior years. That's where meditation comes in useful.

It's also where I find myself in disagreement with Christopher Hitchens, whose "God Is Not Great" I am also reading. In his eagerness to indict all religions, he castigates Buddhism with the familiar charge that it requires you to leave your mind at the door along with your shoes. Which is not my experience of Buddhism at all. The mind part. I can live without the shoes. My experience is that Buddhism has everything to do with the mind, with mind-fulness, with bringing things to consciousness that might otherwise negatively affect my life and that of those around me--precisely those things, in my case, that threaten to govern my life and my behavior patterns in unproductive ways. I'm grateful for the daily opportunity to observe, and in some cases to correct them.

It's interesting to observe, though, how I go along with virtually everything Hitchens has to say about religion--and how my back goes up when he attacks my own beliefs. Well, I'd argue, not so much belief as practice. Now I have to wonder about that other issue we've been talking about recently: the ease with which we see the faults in others' arguments and beliefs, and the trouble we have in seeing those in our own. Which brings me back to my recent contretemps with Carly, on the subject of contemporary art...

A Holocaust Weekend

Three searing reminders of the Nazi holocaust this weekend. First, Friday night, we watched the movie "Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary" (take a look at the "preview") which had arrived in our mailbox from Neflix. I can't remember how we were alerted to it, but it must have been on our list because someone had recommended it.. So, thanks to whoever did, because it's an amazing documentary. The camera dwells exclusively on the one person, Traudi Junge, who sits in the same position throughout a series of interviews, recalling her days as secretary to one of the great monsters of history.

Frau Junge's is an absolutely compelling story, from the time she had barely heard of Hitler as a young girl to her move to Berlin with the hope of becoming a dancer; to the secretarial skills tests she was urged to take and her first interview with the man she described as as a kindly older gentleman, and particularly as "fatherly"--she herself had grown up without one; to her recollections of typing to his dictation, mostly personal things, she said, and speeches, never anything that carried a remote suggestion of the evil that she later came to understand he represented... She recalled only one instance of his hatred of the Jews, expressed by no more than a curt response to a woman visitor who dared to mention hearing of the poor treatment of Dutch Jews being herded onto trains: the great dictator told her not to speak of things she did not understand and stalked out of the room. Frau Junge could remember nothing more.

Most compelling were her memories of the Stauffenberg attempt on Hitler's life and the last days in that bunker in Berlin, with Hitler's increasing alienation from reality, his marriage to Eva Braun, the six Goebbels children and their distraught mother, the constant din of bombing and artillery, the suicides... And the feelings of guilt she had lived with for the rest of her life--she was 91 at the time of the interviews, and remarkably robust and clear of memory, and died at the time of the film's release--for not having been aware, for having allowed herself to sleepwalk through the horror of the war and the holocaust, for having been an enabling cog in the machinery. Only at the very end, shortly before her death, could she tell her interviewer that she had begun to forgive herself. These days, we tend to scoff at those who claimed not to know what was happening in Nazi Germany: Traudi Junge's story, from the very center of it all, is a tragic example of the "blind spot"--or, more literally translated from the German title, the "dead corner"--that succeeded in numbing the consciousness of the great majority of her countrymen at the time.

We are, as members of the human species, responsible for our own consciousness. We need to remind ourselves to stay awake, because it is all too easy to close our minds to that which we choose not to see. It's a lack of consciousness, as I see it, that has led us to the current woeful predicament of our own country and its reputation in the world.

The two other Holocaust reminders of the three I mentioned were the review, in the New York Times Sunday Book Review section of The Years of Extermination, a new historical study of the holocaust by Saul Friedlaender, described by the reviewer as a "masterpiece"; and the repeat of a CBS "60 Minutes" report on the release of a vast archive of documentation: three survivors were invited to review the paperwork relevant to their capture, transportation and confinement in KZs (Konzentrationslager, or concentration camps.) Now old men, their recollections were almost too painful to bear.

I hate to bring this to you on a Monday morning, but there you go. It's absolutely vital that we not pass up a single chance to maintain this inhumanity in our consciousness. We must, as they say, "never forget." And yet, to our shame, we do. We keep forgetting. And forgetting, are condemned to keep repeating the past...

Artwalk (Second Lap)

(Scribbled down in ballpoint in the columns of the Op-Ed page of Saturday's NY Times in the parking lot at Trader Joe's Crystal Cove store.) Okay, Carly, consider me baited! (See "Comments", Thursday.) There's something to be said, for sure, for having a strongly-held point of view when it comes to art--or perhaps to anything else, for that matter. It provides a place to stand and, for an artist I'm sure, as for a writer, a framework within which to work. There's something to be said for standards--criteria by which to judge what's good, what's not so good, what's bad. They provide some clarity in an often confusing arena. But they don't always work, especially when they prove unusefully restrictive.

I take issue, then, with your too easy dismissal--my judgment--of the work of artists who don't fit in with your prior determination as to what qualifies as art and what does not. I personally respond to art that challenges me to think, to re-appraise, to widen my understanding of art--and eventually, most importantly, of myself. My point about Chris Burden was that it spoke to both the mind and the heart about the differences between youth and age. I found both humor and pathos in rhe insallation, as well as food for a good deal of reflection on wider social and cultural issues. Beyond the fact that it was not hand-made by the artist and not partiucarly beautiful in the conventional sense, the piece did have a certain "presence" in the gallery, as well as something interesting to say about the human body and the human spirit.

I did not see the Charles Ray piece as a vain attempt to copy--still less to equal--nature, but rather as an homage to natural beauty and a confession of the futility of trying to match nature in art. Why else would the process of the craftsmanship be made so evident as to draw attention to itself? No, it was clear that the piece acknowledged itself as an art object, not a natural one, and as such it's still no less an awesome presence, compelling in its size as well as in the detail of its surfaces. Unlike yourself, Carly, I believe that the Zen mind would be as much attracted to this beautifully-crafted artifact as to those near-immaculate temples and gardens we associate with the Zen culture--down to the smallest utilitarian object. I see it as an act of love and veneration and not, as you seem to do, as a cynical exploitation of the art market. So here we differ.

As for abstraction--and your dismissal, sight unseen, of the work of Helen Lundeberg--well, there are authorities I find more persuasive than the ever-pompous Salvador Dali, himself an artist who betrayed the insights and achievements of his early years and devoted much of his life to the pathetic celebration of the sacred cow of his supposed "genius"! To dismiss all abstraction as "about nothing" is to say exactly nothing. In this, Dali descends to the absurdity of the "my child could do it" school of criticism.

As I say, Carly, consider me baited by your comment! Art, for me, is in part about opening up the mind to possibilities undreamed-of, about revealing aspects of humanity about which I need to be reminded, about creating grounds for reflection on the human condition. Figuration is one way of achieving that, to be sure. It's not the only way. A Zen garden can do it for me too.

Dinner With Friends

Readers will remember our friend Dr. Steve from several entries in The Buddha Diaries as a great healer. Now we know that he's also a great cook! I don't think he'll mind if I mention that we went over there to dinner last night and had a great evening of food, wine, and conversation with Steve and his partner, Tim--that passionate collector of sometimes difficult, always engaged political art whom I interviewed a while ago for my "Art of Outrage" series on Artscene Visual Radio. They live in an elegant home, architecturally designed by Tim himself in uncompromisingly hard edge style. It's always a pleasure to be in a home where art is taken seriously, and where it makes its presence known. And always a pleasure to engage in real conversation--impossible, generally, at large dinner parties or in noisy restaurants. Steve's home-made pasta was delicious--so much lighter, somehow, than the store-bought variety. Enhanced by an excellently-crafted sauce and followed by an incredible chocolate cake, it made for a first rate dining experience. In our busy lives, it's easy to forget the importance of this kind of human intimacy and exchange.

Artwalk

Ellie and I made one of our periodic forays into the gallery scene on Wednesday, and came upon some current shows that seemed to warrant a few words of commentary.

First stop, the expansive (and expensive!) Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, where we found an installation by Chris Burden, whose work will be familiar to anyone even vaguely familiar with the Southern California art world: who could forget his crucifixion on the rear end of a Volkswagen, his shots fired at a jetliner landing (or taking off?) at LAX, his crawling naked through a bed of broken glass? It gives pause, these days, to observe his recently-abandoned tenure as Chair of the prestigious Art Department at UCLA, and to find him enshrined in this established mecca of the currently superheated art market.

Still, there he is, with “Yin Yang,” an installation that consists of two machines from the artist’s personal collection of strange and exotic exemplars of vehicular transportation—a sleek, low-slung1973 Lotus Europa racer and a klutzy, rusting old bulldozer, an International T6 Crawler.



(The above is obviously a promotional rather than an installation shot, shamelessly purloined from the gallery's website.) Yin Yang indeed. The one is the symbol of speed, precision design and engineering, superlative performance, streamlining; the other, a slug of the mechanical world, is slow, plodding, heavy on its tracks. (Both, incidentally, seem to be rudely leaking oil on the polished gallery floor.) On the walls alongside of each, Burden has tacked up a series of large scale, roughly made photographs depicting the vehicles and their (be it said, kindly though, from one who shares that seemingly inevitable spread, now rather more stocky) artist-owner with various expressions of bemusement on his face—and one with the contrasting figure of a man young enough to be his son.

I see both these vehicle as Burden: the once sleek, once fast-paced, once young body; and the older, more plodding, stockier version, slightly the worse for wear, and slower in performance. I see this piece to be in good part about the physical human body and the aging process, and I share viscerally in the pathos of it. It's the yin and yang of life itself.

And I must say I liked the simplicity of this statement. There will be those who ask whether this simple juxtaposition is enough to justify its exhibition in one of our major galleries, but I had fun with the show. Aside from the deeper and more disturbing implications, Burden’s boyish fascination with all things transportational will appeal to anyone who has ever loved a train set; and the film in the adjacent gallery, “Metropolis,” suggests that there are wider cultural issues at issue. The film documents another, earlier installation, this one a complex, miniaturized citiscape with dozens of toy cars speeding along roller-coaster highways and multi-car trams darting endlessly along their tracks. It’s a bewildering—and hypnotic—evocation of the edgy hum of mechanical urban thoroughfare, reminding us of the impossibly fast-paced, barely organized structures of our city lives, at once a critique and a celebration of the power of the machine.

It's also, in its network of nerves and pulsing circulation, another powerful metaphor for the human body.

On to Regen Projects, and the current work of a contemporary of Burden’s, Charles Ray. Ray is another artist who established his reputation with edgy, sometimes disorienting or discomforting work involving, often, like Burden, his own body—and another who joined, in a sense, the ranks of the academy as a faculty member at UCLA. He offers an exhibition every bit as simple, on the surface, as Burden’s pair of vehicles: “Hinoki,” Ray’s single—singular—object in the gallery space is a massive rotting tree trunk.

Well, not quite. It’s the recreation of a massive, rotting tree trunk, one spotted by Ray along Highway 1 on California’s Central Coast.


(Photo: courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles, photographer Joshua White)

Wishing to celebrate and breathe life back into this noble carcass which spoke so eloquently about time, entropy, and the forces of nature, the artist had casts made of its various parts and shipped them off to Japan for recreation in “hinoki” wood—Japanese cypress—by Yuboku Mukoyoshi, a master carver who specializes in Buddhist temples and sculptures. The work took the master and a team of assistants more than five years to complete, and the resulting object is a marvel of craftsmanship.

The eye is drawn first, of course, to the huge overall shape of the thing, and to its evocation of the original object of Ray’s interest. But it’s the paradoxical details that draw the eye next: the dovetail joints left visible, the marks of the chain-saw that carved up the tree and the chisels of the carvers—all those things that contradict the initial impression and set the mind off in an irresolvable spin between reality and illusion, object and artifact, nature and art. The viewer is seduced by the compulsion to keep looking further and for greater detail, exploring the pits and flaws of both surfaces and interiors, caverns and canyons--and by the nearly irresistible urge to touch, to feel the shapes and the texture of the wood, to somehow surrender to its massive, in some way humbling power. While very different in appearance from Burden’s vehicles, this awesome “sculpture”—I’m tempted to use the word in quotation marks, even though that is precisely what it is—shares the mature artist’s fascination with the aging “body” and the marks that time leaves on both its surfaces and its inner core.

Okay, two exhibitions well worth a visit. And, once in the neighborhood of Regen Projects, don’t miss the elegant paintings of Helen Lundeberg at Louis Stern.



This early 20th century California artist, wife of Lorser Feitelson and at least his equal as a painter, created wonderfully simple, mysterious, austere architectures in her work which tease the brain into finding the exits and entrances of her deceptively flat spaces. For the meditative mind, a special treat, as are the spectacular, late-career abstract expressionist paintings of Norman Bluhm around the corner at Manny Silverman Gallery. It’s amazing to see how the culture of street art and graffiti found its way into the exuberantly colorful vision of a painter who earned his chops many years before those whipper-snappers came along.

Also of note, on Beverly Boulevard at Crescent Heights: at Michael Kohn Gallery, a wonderfully-paired exhibition of the work of Carl Andre and John McLaughlin. The exchange of rhymes and the rhythmic echoes in the subdued palette and geometric shapes of these two artists creates a quietly lyrical ensemble, and the artists they serve usefully to inform and enrich each other. And, at df2 gallery, an interesting and challenging exhibit by three contemporary Chinese artists who "address notions of isolation and communication through the artist's placement of their own bodies in physically extreme conditions." I'm still thinking about this one, and may get back to it. Curiously, it's where Chris Burden and Charles Ray both started out...

Conversations: Quotes to Chew On

Here are choice bits from some great blogs.

Letting me be...

I wonder what it's like to be real, without people looking. I know for a moment or two every once in a while.

Chattering Mind

Pop culture is teaching material. Better to just use it than avoid it altogether.

(Following this quote - in the comments section - is a great discussion about the benefits and pitfalls of influencing your child's interpretation of pop culture.)

Dharma Bums

A thin reed of non-native sawgrass, absurdly planted by our predecessors, whipped across my face and left a nice sharp bloody line from my nose to the tip of my chin...Compared to everything else, being whipped by sawgrass is nothing.

Engagement

I think we're at risk of dancing on heads of pins here. What I see, in reading recent comments from all directions, is a common concern that our spiritual values not be dissociated from our our moral and practical responsibility for our fellow beings in this world. We can fuss over the terminology and its meanings, but I would argue that there's nothing, in Buddhist thought, that precludes social action. Intervention can take different forms, however. I suppose it might be argued, for example, that the Dalai Lama's pacifist, non-violent positiion vis-a-vis the Chinese presence in his country is passive and permissive; but there he is, rushing around the world, bringing his country's plight to the attention of admittedly mostly disinterested world leaders.

Is this "engagement" or "non-engagement"? Semantics, as usual, do more to muddy the waters than to clarify them. Are we not better off looking at practical outcomes rather than theoretical foundations? Or am I misunderstanding here?

Maybe I'm just being muddle-headed and not listening closely enough. Chalk it up to an unusually busy week: another reading from "The Real Bush Diaries" last night, this time for the good people at the Alhambra Democratic Club. Along with the blog, I'm finding this to be a useful and important way of making the kind of connection we're talking about. It's a matter of helping to raise and maintain consciousness in the world--and to keep the juices flowing in anticipation of next year's election. I'm also scheduled to record a public television interview later this morning, so my time is limited.

Meantime, best thanks for the great conversation. That, in itself, is engagement of the best kind--butting up against each other with the most potent of all weapons: ideas.

Comments...

There I was, yesterday, wondering why the silence--and this morning find a welter of welcome comment, all thoughtful, smart, and focused. Thanks to everyone who joined in. Welcome, Lindsey. I'm not sure I fully understand the distinction you make between tolerance and acceptance--though perhaps acceptance goes a bit further in the positive direction. And I think I see some common ground in this with Carly's rejection of "disengagement" as not viable in today's world, and his proposal instead of "non-action" engagement. In Buddhist terminology, I think the concept of equanimity is a good analogy to what he's talking about. As I understand it, this is a kind of compassionate non-attachment. Cardozo's "isolation"--whether personal or geopolitical--sounds to me impractical, as Carly suggests. The dinner conversation that started this discussion--concerning the differences between twin sisters at opposite ends of the political and social spectrum--reminds me that it is possible to maintain a close and loving relationship even with those with whom one profoundly disagrees. My wish is to learn to better see things from the other person's point of view: too often I find that I'm simply blinded to their angle of vision by my own.

Conversations...Lives and Lessons in L.A.

Some recent high-quality posts from fellow Los Angeles-area bloggers:

Janitors March in Century City
Metroblogger Helen Jupiter offers this nice bit of journalism about the recent SEIU strike against Pegasus Building Services. Si se puede!


Two Weddings, Two Divorces
By Jane - whose candid blog currently traces her progress towards divorce - posts some bittersweet memories of her two weddings.

Good for the Ride, but Few Places to Park
Eric Richardson at Blogdowntown discusses the inevitable challenges (and occasional delights) of the pursuit of alternative transportation in L.A.

Differences

It's amazing, isn't it, how one person's passionately held belief can seem so foolish and wrong-headed to another? We've seen evidence of this in The Buddha Diaries recently: I confess I find it virtually impossible to "understand"--or even accept--the thinking of those who profess a certain kind of Christianity; what I broadly refer to as the fundamentalist kind. These folk embrace positions that seem profoundly un-Christian to me, who was brought up in the Anglican version of the Christian faith. Take, for example, their rejection of evolutionary theory and their hatred of homosexuality.

These thoughts are promoted, this morning, by a conversation at dinner last night with a friend--a good, right-thinking, and likely religiously skeptical liberal like myself--whose twin sister is a right-wing, evangelical, fundamentalist republican. They have, our friend reports, a very loving relationship, but they have learned to avoid certain topics in their conversations. Amazing! That twin sisters should hold such diametrically-opposed beliefs. Their shared wisdom, of course, lies in their mutual tolerance, their tacit agreement to disagree.

I have to tell you that I find it extremely hard to practice such tolerance. It's work for my struggling intellect. Not necessarily because my beliefs are passionately held or intolerant, but because I find it hard--along with most of us, I think--to maintain a healthy separation between belief and reason. But then, I know that there are those who question the validity of reason. Is it not possible that new scientific evidence, two hundred years hence, let's say, will modify our current understanding of Darwinian theory? Of course it is. There were those whose reason led them to believe, not so very long ago, that the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around us.

One of the reasons I'm so attracted to Buddhism is that it's founded in an essential pragmatism. It's not about belief so much as what works--and what doesn't work--in my life as I progress from day to day. It's not so much a suspension of disbelief (Coleridge's famous formulation) as a suspension of belief. When we look around the world today, it's impossible not to conclude that passionately-held beliefs cause a lot more problems than they solve. (I guess that's MY belief!) From the absurd stalemate in our own government to the disastrous crises in the Middle East, is it not all about one side not being able to imagine--let alone tolerate--the other's view? I recall that wonderful artwork that I saw in Munich--the neon blue lettering installed on the facade of a venerable old building: you can imagine the opposite. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

Would that we all could.

A Visitation: Sunday Afternoon

Here I am, sitting quietly on my balcony on page 55 or so of “God Is Not Great” when this hummingbird appears a couple of feet from me, sinking its tiny, needle-long beak into the business end of a plant that happens to be set on the table next to me. I turn my head, very slowly, to avoid disturbing this marvelous creature, and watch… It continues on about its business, refilling the nectar tank, and then, as if aware of my observation, swivels around to take a look at me. I hold my breath. Curious, it leaves the plant and comes to inspect me in a closer view. It’s now hovering with its familiar hum no more than six inches from my face, and staring at me intently. I return the gaze. After a moment, my visitor gets bored and heads back to the more satisfying task of feeding. But then it repeats the maneuver, closing in on me again, almost strafing my cheek; and then again.

I’m astounded by the fearlessness of this tiny creature, and humbled in a certain way by its interest in inspecting me. I suspect that the bird’s eyes are better by far than mine, and wonder what this extreme close-up of my face can look like, with its outcrop of bristly hairs, its many wrinkles, and a thousand barely visible pores. I wonder what the bird makes of this carefully motionless, gigantic fellow being, so intent on staring back at it—and so awed by its minute and miraculous presence and by its ability to literally stand still in mid-air, with only the whirring of those infinitely fragile wings to support it. Anyway, I’m deeply touched by the encounter, and somehow honored to have been chosen in this way. Thanks, hummer, for the reminder of the fragility that we share.

Another odd bit of business, quite different, though, and raising certain interesting ethical issues. Here goes: in our small cottage down here, near the beach, we have a neighbor with a ficus tree next door. Our large picture window offers us a daily view of the huge tree—and a nightly one, since we light it from below. It’s a living sculpture right outside our sitting room, and we treasure its presence there.

But it brings with it one enormous problem: its roots. They reach down under the foundation of our house—where they have as yet done no damage, at least none that we can see. But they have mercilessly penetrated the cast-iron pipes of our aging drainage system. Three or four years ago, we were forced to spend a huge sum--$12,000, for the curious—to replace the section of drain that leads from the corner of the house to the main drain at the center of the street. Recently, with raw sewage backing up into our bath and shower whenever the toilet flushed, we learned from the plumber that a whole new section of pipe, running down the side of the house to where it was repaired before, would need to be replaced—at the cost of another $10,000!

We gulped, we got an alternative bid, much lower, little more than half the cost, for a process that would line the broken pipe rather than replace it—and come accompanied by a guarantee of fifty years, rather longer than we expect to be around to enjoy the fruits of our expense. Thinking, well, it’s HIS tree, after all, we approached our neighbor with a super friendly and carefully unthreatening request, this time, to share the cost. He dillied and dallied, the drains backed up, we were forced to move—and accepted the lower bid. The work was done, the bill was paid. And the neighbor sent a letter back denying responsibility for the roots of his tree and claiming, anyway, that it could have been done at far less expense.

The instinct, of course, is to fight back. Get angry. Send another letter explaining in still greater detail the predicament and presenting still more evidence of the culpability of the ficus tree. Does our neighbor not bear some responsibility for the destruction to our property? In fact, from the legal point of view, he does: I had earlier sought legal advice, and we would have ample grounds for action. Obviously, though, it’s just not worth it: the satisfaction of getting even--perhaps even recovering some part of our cost--pales beside the prospect of protracted neighborly warfare. The line from the “Sublime Attitudes” rings true to me: May I be free from animosity. In the Buddhist view, I believe, any action on my part would end up harming me more than it would harm him.

Or am I just a patsy? It's small matters like these that test the convictions. What do you think? If you were me, would you pursue things with your neighbor? If you were him, would your instinct have been to help me out--assuming you could reasonably afford it? Or would you have told me to get lost? I like to think I'd have been on the helpful side... His tree, my property. It's a conundrum.

About Those Crack Dealers...

.... Our voluble correspondent, George, seriously mistakes the Buddhist view of happiness if he believes "there are many crack dealers... that are happy doing what they do." Not to mention the child molesters. The Buddhist view insists on the primacy of doing no harm--to oneself or others--a condition that hardly applies to either crack dealers or child molesters. True happiness, as I understand it, in the Buddhist view, is achieved by doing the hard work needed in order to learn to relinquish all attachments to passing pleasures and satisfactions, as well as all aversions to unpleasantness and pain. Happiness, then, has nothing whatsover to do with the illusory pleasures of material life or the satisfaction of desires. Happiness is precisely about liberation from such things.

That said, I have no wish to get into the argument about the relative value (or "truth") of different religions. It's not particularly useful or productive to argue about beliefs--especially those that are so passionately held. I'm with James in making a case for tolerance and mutual respect. And I react quite negatively when I get the sense that someone is trying to shove THEIR belief down my disbelieving throat. In a word, I gag. Otherwise, if a person wants to believe that the world was created in seven days (or six, if you discount the day of rest) six thousand years ago, so be it. He's welcome to his belief. I happen to think that such a person is willfully blinding himself to a universe of fascinating science and impoverishing his access to the wealth of human knowledge. Too bad. In such a case, I have to say that while I respect that person's right to believe whatever he chooses, I reserve the right to disrespect the content of his belief. By analogy to what some Christians profess: love the sinner, hate the sin. Except that, I see it, willful ignorance is not sin. It's just willful ignorance.

Which brings me to morality. First, do no harm. Everything fall in place behind that single tenet. I don't believe that morals are "established by God." But I hope and believe that God would agree with me on that general principle. Think about it.

Ah, yes. My sit today. I returned to my Sunday sitting group for the first time in several weeks--and brought my cough along with me. Within two minutes, I was disturbing everyone else's peace along with my own, but Ricola rode to the rescue and kept me quiet for the rest of the hour. A wandering mind, of course, brought more or less successfully back on track by renewing attention on the breath. This Buddhist meditation practice is hard work, I promise you. No wonder that Bhanta-Ji, our visiting monk from India, talks so often about "effort." Don't know about you, but I find it hard to discipline my unruly mind!

A Lively Bunch...

... those Lagunatics! Met with the Democratic Club last night, as planned, and enjoyed the evening enormously. It was HOT in the little hall where we met, with virtually every seat taken, and human bodies adding to the accumulated heat of the day. Even the open windows and main doors did little to relieve the heat, and I was sweating profusely before I got the first piece read. I decided, too late, that I would have done well to have spec'ed out the space a little more thoroughly beforehand, and to have created a better perch from which to read and hold forth. That lack of foresight left me standing throughout, book in hand, with too much energy draining into pacing back and forth.

But I quibble. I found the audience very receptive, very warm to The Bush Diaries and its positions, and generally eager to respond. My hope is that the energy of the reading/performance will help to keep things stirred up as we approach the next election. We can't afford anything approaching a repeat of the Bush disaster, and what I dread is that liberal voters will not have the patience to last out the current, pathetically small Democratic majority and the stonewalling of a stubborn and inflexible president, so convinced of his own rectitude in all matters that he ignores the words and actions of anyone who does not toe his line; and that, as they have begun to do already, they--the liberal voters--will lose sight of the greater need and once again set to squabbling needlessly amongst each other, leaving open the field for another "strong", "decisive" Republican. This is my fear.

I would love to see the troops withdrawn from the Iraq fiasco, this afternoon if not sooner. I would love to see this president and this vice-president impeached, along with their attorney general. They most richly deserve it, and it would be a needed vindication of the power of the Constitution. But not at the larger cost of creating further divisions among passionate and thoughtful democrats, and making them look small-minded, "political," and vindictive. If this country is to rediscover its humanity and its leadership in the world, we liberals need to find the unity of vision and the resolve that have served the right wing so well in the past half-century.

That's why the Buddhist values seem so essentially important to me in our current predicament. Values like compassion. Tolerance. Patience. Generosity. A suspension of animosity. Unselfishness. Breadth of vision. A firm rejection of the ignorance of easy answers... Are you listening, Al Gore?

This Bloody Cold...

... hangs on obstinately. Okay, it's better. Much better. It has degenerated now into this nasty little tickle in the throat that keeps me coughing incessantly. Very irritating. This morning it was so persistent that I had to interrupt my meditation and go find a cough drop--whose slow process of melting in the mouth proved an interesting point of focus for the wandering mind. I guess we've all heard that old "false friends" translation from the French "Voici l'anglais avec son sang-froid habituel:" Here comes the Englishman with his usual bloody cold. Well, you have to know a little French to get the joke.

Yesterday was a clean-out day. I put the finishing touches on the travel log, got that posted in the sidebar to The Buddha Diaries, and sent out a few preliminary notifications to fellow-travelers from the trip. Done. I sorted through all the papers left in piles around my study, filing, paying bills where necessary, clearing the decks. Done. I went out for a haircut, much needed after a month of inattention. Done. Got the car washed. Done. That kind of a day. In preparation, this week, for an early departure for Laguna Beach where I'll be doing a public reading of extracts from The Real Bush Diaries and, likely, too, from The Buddha Diaries for the Laguna Beach Democratic Club. This morning I need to get myself prepared by picking out some appropriate passages and deciding on an outline.

I actually love to read and I'm good at it, though I still get nervous about it in advance. My English accent stands me in good stead over here, where it still sounds a bit, er, distinguished. So I'm told. But reading is intensely satisfying because there's a tangible relationship with the audience: for a writer, used to hearing his words as a kind of echo in the head, it's nice to feel them going out and reaching someone else's ear, and sinking in. As is readership itself, it's a natural and essential part of the writing process. I've always thought that this business of "writing for oneself" is nonsense. I write only to be read, or heard--no matter how small the audience.

So I'm looking forward to tonight, with perhaps some special edge of anxiety about doing it well because there will be friends, I hope, out there in the audience. I need to put my best foot forward. Or rather, to be in my best voice, and I'm worried that this cough could prove an obstacle. In meditation this morning, before succumbing to the cough drop, I spent a good while trying to use the breath to relax the throat around the source of irritation--with, as you know, a notable lack of success. Note to self: Need better concentration, more skillful ability to relax. If that's not a contradiction. No, actually, try it. The two can work together.

An Invitation

Readers will note a new image in the right hand column of The Buddha Diaries--a picture of the Danube taken from the hills above Kehlheim. It links to an edited version of the travel log that has been following our journeys in these pages, complete with a number of pictures I was unable to post along the way, because of time and access constraints; and with many of the typos and other errors corrected. I hope all, but likely not! Should anyone be interested, here's the invitation to click on the link and check it out. If you happen to have been a fellow passenger on the Viking "Spirit" and have the email addresses of others who might be interested, I'd be grateful if you forward this invitation to them. The direct link is via The Viking Cruise... and Beyond.

The Malingerer--Part II

I was gratified to hear from my fellow-malingerers yesterday in the "Comments" file. I did actually see the Sopranos' finale--a day late. We missed it Sunday night, having missed the previous two episodes while we were in Europe, so we caught up with our recordings last night, on our return to Los Angeles. Onion rings, eh? Not sure of their therapeutic effect, Anonymous, but I agree that they made a great ending to the series. After all that agony and gore, it was good to end up with a laugh of relief and dismissal. Garlic, Carly, yes, I know of its health benefits.

But back to our sheep. I was tickled to hear from Quink, whose website I quickly surfed to--a satirical take on the British boarding school and a gathering place for some of its victims. Skimming through the site, I found a quote from the novelist Evelyn Waugh, a product of my own alma mater, Lancing College. He had as little love for his experience there as I for mine. In my last year at Lancing, my co-editor on the school literary magazine had the cheek to write to the by-then eminent Waugh, requesting a submission for our journal. Waugh responded--but dismissively: all he had ever learned at Lancing, he wrote (and I paraphrase here: this was many years ago,) was how to avoid hard work. My friend wrote back to ask permission to publish the response, and to ask if Waugh could give his assurance that he would never write for our distinguished magazine, to spare future editors the trouble of writing to him. He received a postcard in response (and this I remember word-for-word): "Yes to both questions, E.W."

Here's some of what Waugh had to say about the boarding school experience: "Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums ... who find prison so soul-destroying." (Decline and Fall). And "Our form-master is one Woodard, a new parson who, people say, is related to the misguided old gentleman who founded us. He seems quite decent but undoubtedly means to make us work - a fad I abhor in masters." Waugh's acerbic wit was surely honed on the miseries of the public school experience.

Anyway, thanks to Quink for putting me back in touch with that world. I wonder if he ever came across an organization called Boarding School Survivors? I came across this support group for those living with the wounds of boarding schools back in the early 1990s, when I had begun to do some men's work over here wih The Mankind Project here in the U.S. Satire is one way to salve the wounds; some form of psychological/emotional therapy is another, for those who are beyond finding it funny. I happen to like both approaches. "Quink"? That must be the dreadful blue or purple Parker's liquid I used to get all over my little fingers as I struggled for mastery of the pen and nib at prep school.

I never suffered the kind of abuse that Dr. Steve describes in his comment. I was ritually strapped and caned, but ony because that was the accepted form of punishment in the ethos of the private school in those days. I was also buggered by a dirty old math teacher at the age of twelve--a not uncommon experience, often overlooked if not exactly condoned by that same ethos. And my natural teenage appetites for sexual exploration were all satisfied with boys: there was no one else around to play with--or to fall in love with. The first time I fell in love with a girl was the actual, very same day that I left Lancing, when my parents arrived to drive me off with a French girl in tow--an exchange student who had come to spend a month with them. Her name was Jeannine, and I fell in love with her instantly.

So much "stuff", eh? All grist for the mill of learning to understand myself, and learning to see what still stands in the way of the spiritual liberation that is the quest of my life. Another word about Dr. Steve: readers may recall that I spent a couple of hours in his office in the weeks before I left for Europe, and found him to be a healer of the very first order, keen of hearing and sensitive of touch, and one who combines insight with a true feel for the body's energies. A man, then, who--as he suggests in his comment yesterday--has learned to listen to the powerful voice of the body-mind, and who has transformed the experience of those abusive wounds into the remarkable ability to heal.

The Malingerer

An interesting and possibly useful insight during meditation this morning. It started out with the observation of the discomfort and un-ease of the breath, with this continuing cold, and moved into an annoyance with its recurrence and its refusal to quit. I began watching the flow of energies in the body and asking myself where the blockages were: the throat, certainly, and the lungs--the whole upper torso. Then I thought to ask myself what the old emotional blackages might be: what was it, I wondered, that the mind could be setting up to impede the natural healing process--because I do believe that the body wants naturally to heal itself, and has the knowledge and the power to do it.

Okay, so the mind came up with a very interesting memory: as a boy at boarding school, from the earliest age until the day I left at the age of eighteen, I had learned to practice the art of malingering. The "san"--the sanitorium, the little school hospital at each of the two schools I attended--had appealed to me as a wonderfully safe refuge from boyworld out there. In my experience, this meant school work (essays, learning the rules of math and algebra, learning the tenses and cases in Latin and other languages, learning great chunks of Caesar by heart--thank God, I've forgotten them, though I still remember whole poems by LaFontaine that I learned back then); and sports, which I hated with a passion--I was never able to see a ball approaching me through space; and teasing--especially about the plump little body of which I was inordinately ashamed.

So if I was fortunate enough (I thought of it this way!) to get sick, I made it my duty to myself to find ways of prolonging the sickness and the stay in the "san." I got to be quite good at it. I could develop a fever at the drop of a hat, and my symptoms, mysteriously, seemed to hang around indefiitely. In my last year at boarding school, I spent the second (winter) term of the school year as an exchange student in Germany, where the DKW (now the Audi: I have never liked those cars since then) skidded on an icy road and ended up in a head-on collision with a tractor. The impact was so great that it broke the heavy farm equipment neatly in two--and cracked my head in a nasty way against the windshield. Returning to school in England, at the most miserable of periods in my life, I found comfort in the "san", where the good nurse was sweet and kind and motherly, and delivered nice little pills at night to help me sleep. I suspect she knew that I was malingering at the time, so I'll never forget her kindness.

Kind of pathetic, no? But there's a sad truth here: what I learned--what my body-mind learned--was that you make the most of your sickness when you have it, you protract it as far as possible to derive the last little piece of benefit from it. Sickness becomes a great, protective force which excuses you from any other unpleasantness that life may bring.

Will this insight--and the power of the mind--help me get past this dreadful cold? Or is just a piece of fanciful gobbledy-gook? The medical profession, certainly, would have me believe their story--about infections, the need for anti-biotics, etcetera--and the rational western mind with which I have been trained finds it hard not to go along with them. Still, an interesting insight, no?

Return of the Dreaded Lergy

Those unfortunate enough--or young enough--to have missed out on the British radio comedy of the 1950s, The Goon Show, will not catch the reference in the title. The Goons--Peter Sellers, who later achieved film fame, got his start here--would refer to any dire sickness as "the dreaded lergy." Not that it made much sense, it wasn't meant to: I guess 'allergy' was in there somewhere.

But no matter. The sad truth is that I'm as sick as the proverbial dog. (Why dogs? Because they look so pathetic when they're under the weather? Maybe.) That cold I got in Budapest...? Seems I passed it on to Ellie, and appeared to be recovering nicely myself. Until yesterday, when it hit me again: sore throat, nasty cough, congestion, fever, the whole bit. From noon on, it was all I could do to struggle out of bed for the occasional trip to the bathroom, and drag myself to the couch in the evening to watch a movie. (We stumbled on "Munich"--not a cheering choice, but we got hooked.)

This morning, better, but not well enough, sadly, to attend our little sitting group, as we usually do on a Sunday morning. Ellie was well enough to make it there, so here I sit, all sick and lonesome, having made the effort to do my own brief sit and give the body permission to do the work it needs to do to heal. Too often, in my own experience, the mind gets hung up on the suffering and delays the healing process with its own self-pity. I'm trying to avoid that trap, and listen to what the body tells me about what I can do to help.

More later, from a better place. It feels good, by the way, to be back from the travel log and into The Buddha Diaries...

A Reunion

Well, we were reunited yesterday with George. Our dog. He was pleased enough to see us again, if much leaping up and licking of the face is to be taken as a sign of doggie pleasure; and we to see him. We have missed him on our journeys. He was well provided for, however: Lisa, who takes good care of him while we're away, has a King Charles Spaniel of her own, another (brown and white) Blenheim named Chaz; and another of her charges is a third King Charles, a ruby (chestnut brown only) named Abigail, so George was not without a peer group to run around with. We wonder if he misses the company of his own kind now. Anyway, there he was, sharing our bed with us again last night after a three-week hiatus. He likes to nestle in the crux of things, especially between human legs if he finds one of us sleeping on our back. Otherwise, he contents himself with the crook of a knee or close contact with a back.



You may think that George is spoiled, and this is undeniably true. But Ellie always reminds me that there's another way to look at it: that we're the spoiled ones, with a faithful pooch who brings so much pleasure into our lives. And if you look at things from a Buddhist point of view, our fellow creatures on the planet deserve their happiness no less than we do--and perhaps have a better sense than we of what true happiness might look like. Certainly, for them, it's not a matter of material possessions, and I don't get the impression that their minds are full of worries about the future or the past. George manages pretty nicely in the present moment, thank you. He does have one serious attachment--to the tennis balls he loves to chase. And I must confess that he suffers--untypically for his breed--from a little animosity, directed mostly toward other dogs whose acquaintance he has not yet made (he's quite friendly once he gets to know them); and, sometimes to our embarrassment, toward small children, whom he seems unwilling to trust--again, until he gets to know them.

So we're happy to have him back in our lives. Carly will surely understand. In case other readers had not picked up on this, I'm sure he won't mind if I share with you that he's another infatuated owner of a King Charles Spaniel. And "owner" of course is the wrong word entirely. We share our homes with them, but they remind us constantly that their spirits are their own.

Six AM, Again...

... this time, Pacific Daylight Savings Time. I'm back at my study desk in Los Angeles, overlooking that familiar view of our back yard and, beyond, of Hollywood. The fountain is gurgling its familiar tune, the birds are singing. Home. It's at once a strange and a welcome feeling, after a good while away: so this is where I live, when I'm at home. It doesn't yet seem quite real, and my mind is having a hard time adjusting.

But first--and this is perhaps why--I need to get back to the last day of our European trip, Tuesday, Greenwich Mean Time. The grandchildren were back at school,



and Matthew was able to take a day out of his busy work schedule to join us for a day in town. London, that is. I used to know it well, but it has changed a lot since the years I lived there, in the late 1950s. These days, if you want to understand the meaning of the word "cosmopolitan," London is the place to be. It teems with every human race and every human language. Back then, in my young, post-Cambridge days, you could still feel something of the insularity of England, even in its capital.

Expensive! Unbelievable! Now that the dollar is worth a scant half of a pound sterling, you double the price of everything to come up with its dollar equivalent--and the prices themselves look the same. Ten pounds--twenty dollars--for a lunch is barely adequate. Ah, well, no point in dwelling on the obvious. Everywhere in Europe seemed expensive. And to think there was a day when Americans crossed the Atlantic for a cheap vacation!

London. With Ellie's cold and the prospect of a long day's travel ahead of us, we decided on a leisurely day, with just a couple of easy destinations. We took a morning express train from Harpenden, and were in London within half an hour. Then on by the still-easy and convenient "tube" to South Kensington station, whence we walked the few blocks up through the museum area to Hyde Park.




Still green, still filled with magnificent trees, still serene despite the traffic.

Our destination was the Serpentine Gallery, where we have seen interesing work before, and we were not disappointed by the current exhibit of Paul Chan--an unusual and effective use of the medium of video. Chan projects his images from above onto the floor or a tabletop, where they end up looking more like moving silhouettes rather than the familiar video images. The overall impression is of things falling--leaves, chairs, motor cars, kitchen appliances, cell phones, everything imaginable... and people. Human shapes, some almost too tiny to be recognized at first, others larger, falling across the surface of the floor. My eye kept watching for their appearance at the edges and following their drift, even as my mind was drawn irresistibly to that dreaful day at the World Trade Center in New York. Mixed in among all the other falling objects, the human shapes took on a sudden, almost tragic poignancy each time they appeared. Reflections about time, the unending passage of time, the equivalence of all things, including ourselves, their disappearance beyond the edges of our consciousness...

We walked back through the park and admired the renovations to the Albert Memorial--Victoria's inordinately grand tribute to her lost love--and past Kensington Palace,



the erstwhile home of the ill-fated Diana, still much in the news because of the NBC broadcast of images of the accident in which she died. A great debate in England at the current moment: her death can still cause controversy. Hoping for a good pub lunch, we stopped off at a pub--the wrong one, it turned out, for a good pub lunch--and had a beer there before finding a small Italian restuarant on a side street that offered a better menu.

After lunch, we wandered on through the back streets of Kensington toward the museum. It's an attractive area, with grand squares, elegant mansions and tiny mews--the old stables turned in post-carriage days into small but appealing--and highly "desirable"--living quarters.



By the time we reached the South Ken underground station again, there was time only for a quick stop at the Victoria and Albert Museum gift shop, then back to the tube and a train from Kings Cross back to Harpenden. We had wanted to get back in time to pack, because we'd need to leave early for our flight from Heathrow.

A leisurely last dinner with Matthew and Diane



at a local, very fine restaurant, and time for a good talk and promises of a return visit with the family as soon we we could all manage it. Five thousand miles is too great a separation for grandparents from their growing grandchildren...

As for the flight, well, it was uneventful. Enough said. More later, when I get myself back onto Pacific time.

Six AM...

... British time, and off to the airport. Thanks to all for the welcome comments, whether published or unpublished. See you all soon. Cheers, PaL

Conversations: The Other Side

I owe a large debt to Dr. Greg Baer for instilling in me a conviction that people are always good, though they may be lost or misguided ("drowning" in Baer's terminology). Professor George Lakoff , in his book, Moral Politics, applies a similar lesson to politics by suggesting that both the progressive and conservative political movements have the same goal in mind, in the broadest terms. The main streams of both movements want peace and prosperity, though the means (and trade-offs required) to arrive at that utopian end differ starkly.

I'd like to use this edition of "conversations" to invite TBD readers to submit a person, idea, or organization with sharply contrasting views from your own. Along with a sentence about why you find this entity to be so wrongheaded, write another sentence or two affirming the existence of common ground. I'll start:

Dennis Prager. One of the most ubiquitous conservative Jews in the American media, Prager constantly frustrates my naive desire to think of Judaism and progressivism as natural bedfellows; he lands on the "other" side of nearly every issue I care about, including immigration, Iraq, the Middle East, capital punishment...the list goes on.

In his recent "Letter to Our Soldiers in Iraq," Prager argues that "a society unwilling to fight for its values does not have values worth sustaining," thereby implying that the war in Iraq was necessary to the long-term protection of "freedom and democracy." While I flatly disagree with the assumption that acts of aggression are the best path to ultimate peace - and strongly believe that punitive warfare is nearly always counterproductive - I also believe that Prager's support for the war is based on a genuine desire for "good." Mr. Prager, if you are reading this, I would be happy to have you over for tea to discuss these matters as adults. :)

Ok, your turn!

Changes

Perhaps spurred by the thought that I'll be back in the United States tomorrow, I checked in to the New York Times today for the first time in three weeks. It seems that virtually nothing has changed in the important things--things like war and peace--except that relations with Russia have deteriorated since we left. Do we blame Putin, for his insistence on making a grab for the power that his country and its satellites once wielded in the world: or Bush, for his arrogant bellicosity? Does it matter who deserves the blame? The world, it seems, is still in the deathly grip of men who are incapable of change, and for whom the old--and by now widely discredited--models of power, territoriality and ownership are still the governing principles.

I note from Bob Herbert's column that Al Gore has a new book out, attacking the Bush administration's assault on reason in favor of an extreme and misguided ideology. Good for him. Gore, I mean. As Herbert is at pains to point out, the world would look very different today if the man who won the most votes in the 2000 presidential elections had actually moved into the White House. With regard to running again this year, Gore tells Herbert that he now realizes that he's "not a very good politician." Just what we need, in my view. I wish he'd heed the many voices begging him to run. He's the most fully qualified, the most visionary, and the least compromising of the lot.

All this from Harpenden, Herts., UK, where I sit looking at my adoptive country from a useful distance. It has been good, honestly, to be away. It has felt like there is still some sanity in the world, though perhaps not much. There are many huge changes that we must make, if we're all to survive the results of our own base impulses.

A Family Day

A day with the family at home in Harpenden. Breakfast. Inflatable pool for the kids.





Lunch. A walk in the country.



Dinner. Pleasure. Exhuastion!

England

Okay, it's a day for family pictures. A glorious day in England. All sun. No cloud, no rain. Just clear blue skies, warm sunshine. We all piled in the family Toyota Previa



and drove over to Knebworth Manor, the family home of the Lytton dynasty. Admired the manor house




--from the oustide only--and the lovely gardens.





(Alice--the promised face shot.)



(PaL with son and daughter-in-law.)



(Ellie, with Alice and Georgie.)

I'm not sure why, but my eye has been drawn especially to the trees on this visit.







Perhaps it has grown weary of palm and eucaplyptus! We roamed along the dinosaur trail,



nicely done; had a good lunch (I couldn't resist the hangers and mash!) in the tea room; and wandered on down to Fort Knebworth, an eleaborate and delightful playground for the children.



In the evening, a wonderful dinner in the back garden: Matthew's hors d'oeuvres (bacon-wrapped asparagus, grilled squash chunks) and his risotto and pork steaks, along with Diane's salad. And to bed. An uncomplicated, wonderful family day.

From Harpenden: A Shock

What a shock! I caught my wife sleeping with another guy, and I have the evidence to prove it. Here it is:




The culprit? Joe, our grandson. Age five. Here's the mug shot:




And here's his twin sister, Georgia (another Georgie, by coincidence!)




And his BIG sister, Alice, eight. who apparently wouldn't sit still for long enough, yesterday, for a face shot--have to remedy that!



What a joy to see them all! And what a surprise to find Joe curled up in bed with us this morning. I felt Ellie shoving me over during the night, but I attributed this to her usual imperious territoriality in t

he bed department. I was not aware of our night visitor until this early morning, when I awoke.

Anyway, yesterday: we left Harpenden shortly before noon, a little earlier than planned because I was a bundle of nerves about the coming long drive (on the left hand side, shift stick, no rain!) through unfamiliar country roads from Cirencester to Harpenden. As usually happens, the anxiety disappeared as soon I was back in the driver's seat, and we stopped for a quick coffee in Burford, a charming village in the Cotswolds where Joe and Georgie and Alice's great aunt, Jenny lives--but unfortunately we had no number for her.

A while later, on the road, we were looking for a convenient, quick lunch stop and on impulse turned off, following a brown historical road sign to Waddesdon Manor, which proved to be a far bigger commitment than we had imagined. The ancestral home since the mid-19th century of the British branch of the Rothschild family, built in imitation of an 18th century French chateau. The exterior is hardly modest, as you can see from these pictures:







and the interior is extravagant almost beyond belief--the Rothschild's collections of elaborate and rare French furniture and knick-knacks, Sevres porcelain, and art works of all shapes and sizes. My favorite: a small "fete galante" painting by Watteau. There was more, far more than we could have hoped to take in on so brief a visit, but we enjoyed the glimpse. Then on through ten thousand roundabouts and sometimes heavy traffic to Harpenden and the grandkids!

Ellie took on grandmotherly responsibilities while Matthew joined me in returning the rental car to Luton airport. Bringing it in two hours later than the required time cost us an extra day's rental fee: Hertz allows a twenty-nine minute grace period. Generous. Then back to Harpenden via taxi, a good Scotch with Matthew and Thai hors d'oeuvres on the lawn with the family, before dinner and a rather early night. Then, of course, in the middle of the night--the betrayal!