IF THIS, THEN THAT…

Best thanks to Carly for his provocative challenge in yesterday’s comment section. Writing about the movie “Michael Clayton,” I had occasion to use the words “unskillful behavior,” to which Carly responded:

The angle on behavior called "skillful" is interesting, manipulative, but interesting. I mean, an innocent person has no need for skill. The iChing, being a mathematical system, for instance, has 64,247 situations of wise advice. Would you do a piece listing five skillful behaviors for us please, in the typical style, perhaps just a sampling from your source? I am very curious how the advice is presented in English. Thanks.

Well, here's my best understanding in the matter: unskillful behavior, at its simplest level, describes actions—or patterns of action—whose results bring harm to myself or others. This passage from “The Wings to Awakening” might be more than the “sampling” Carly asked for and takes a good bit of reading, but I offer it as a serious answer to a serious question. It’s worth the effort. Here’s a small piece at the heart of what Thanissaro Bhikkhu has to say:

Anyone who has mastered a skill will realize that the process of attaining mastery requires attention to three things: (1) to pre-existing conditions, (2) to what one is doing in relation to those conditions, and (3) to the results that come from one's actions. This threefold focus enables one to monitor one's actions and adjust them accordingly. In this way, one's attention to conditions, actions, and effects allows the results of an action to feed back into future action, thus allowing for refinement in one's skill. By working out the implications of these requirements, the Buddha arrived at the principle of this/that conditionality, in which multiple feedback loops — sensitive to pre-existing conditions, to present input, and to their combined outcome — account for the incredible complexity of the world of experience in a way similar to that of modern theories of "deterministic chaos." In this sense, even though this/that conditionality may seem somewhat alien when viewed in the abstract, it is actually a very familiar but overlooked assumption that underlies all conscious, purposeful action.

I’m not sure that innocence enters into the picture here. All of us find ourselves in situations where actions are called for every day and the point, insofar as I correctly understand the Buddhist view, is that we are able to observe the results of those actions and determine whether they are desirable or undesirable by judging their effect. The unskillful action, as I say, is the one that results in harm.

Carly asked for examples of skillful behaviors. Let me take simple, personal ones, with the hope that they are not too trivial to meet his request.

1. A classic: I’m driving on the freeway in heavy traffic and someone cuts me off. The unskillful action is to allow my anger to get the better of me and return the favor in a rage. Or speed up beside him and offer him the finger. Undesirable result: everyone’s temperature goes up, and no one gets ahead any faster. The skillful action is to observe the anger as it arises, recognize it for what it is—just another passing feeling—and allow it to dissipate. Desirable result: a calmer ulcer, a more pleasant day, more harmony in the universe. And less harm to self and others.

2. Dinner time. I’m just a little overweight (true!) and I know that the second helping of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding (sorry, I’m English! Let's say, spaghetti alfredo) will do nothing to improve the situation. The unskillful action of course is to take the second helping. Undesirable result: more weight gain, less sound sleep, more discomfort in the morning. The skillful action, then, is to observe the desire arising, see it for what it is (greed!)—perhaps even find its source in old habits—and decline the second helping. Result: less harm to self and the environment (you’ve heard about beef, right?) along with better health for me, and the satisfaction of being in control of my appetites (I wish!)

3. I have an appointment for this afternoon, and need to prepare and leave in time to arrive at the appropriate moment. Unskillful action: I postpone my preparation and fiddle around instead with the damn blog. I get involved, fail to notice the passage of time, and leave later than I had intended. Undesirable result: I arrive late for the meeting, piss off the person I’ve arranged to meet, and don’t have the information I need to produce a successful outcome. The skillful action, of course, is to spend the time I need in the morning to put my facts together, to be aware of the time, and to leave enough of it for a prompt arrival. The desirable results are too obvious to mention.

I can count well enough to know that this is three, not the five requested, but you get the idea… I’m not convinced that any more would help. The Buddha’s most useful wisdom arises, I believe, from the observation of such everyday behaviors, and is most helpful guiding us in this way in our lives. The big abstractions don’t count for much, to me. It’s all about consciousness, about not sleep-walking through the day, about being aware of my actions and their results. It’s about the way I choose to live my life, the freedom from compulsions and addictions, and the progress toward as much enlightenment and happiness as I’m capable of.

Cardozo came up with the interesting idea, on reading the above, to open up a forum for those who might care to do so to write in personal examples of their unskillful behaviors and the results. A kind of Buddhist confessional, I suppose, which might stimulate deeper self-awareness---and perhaps an opportunity to share, mend and move on. We're debating how that might be done. I'd welcome your thoughts and suggestions.

Remember the Bamiyan Buddhas

I’m trying to remember where I first wrote about the Bamiyan Buddhas. I thought it was in my earlier blog, The Bush Diaries, but now I recall that the great Buddhas were wantonly destroyed by the Taliban’s dynamite in March, 2001, before 9/11 even, and long before The Bush Diaries started. And yet I do remember having written about these great monuments, the larger of which towered to 174 feet, and the smaller to 150. Ancient and venerable with history and religious significance, they were said to have been built in the years AD 554 and 507 respectively, at a time when the great Silk Trail was the major commercial route connecting East and West.




There has been speculation that these “twin towers” were destroyed at the behest of Osama bin Laden, in a kind of symbolic rehearsal for those other attacks that followed in September. Be that as it may, this needless, spiteful vandalism on the part of the Taliban stands as one of the great barbaric assaults on the splendors of human culture, conducted in the absurd belief that to destroy the symbols of a religion is to destroy the religion itself. Buddhism has not been substantially the poorer for the loss of these great tributes to its founder; for humanity, it’s a different story. We are all in some way impoverished by a grotesquerie of this kind.



These thoughts return thanks to the op-ed article in yesterday’s New York Times by Roger Cohen, written from Bamiyan itself, where he returned after nearly thirty-three years to renew his acquaintance with the site he had first visited on the “hippie trail” in a VW bus named Pigpen. Climbing to the place from which the great Buddha’s head had once looked out over the valley, he was as much moved, it seems, by the absence of the statues as he once had been by their presence. He demurs about the rumored intention to reconstruct the Buddhas, mentioned in this August 2006 issue of Tricycle and still, apparently, under live discussion. “Absence speaks, shames, reminds,” writes Cohen.

Even so, it would something of a miracle to see the Buddhas rise again.

"Michael Clayton": An End to Suffering

(NOTE: You might not want to read this if you haven't yet seen the movie, and plan to. I don't think I give away much, but just in case...)

It's dawn. Three horses on a hillside, powerful, serene, majestic. They are connected with their natural environment, at peace with their own nature... Behind the man who stands there, gazing at them, down at the bottom of the hill, his expensive black Mercedes explodes in a burst of searing flame. Explodes again.

He was supposed to be inside it.

This is Michael Clayton's moment of truth, in the film whose title is appropriately his name. It's the moment that he glimpses an end to his own suffering. And suffer he does. His life has gone awry, his moral compass long since lost. Separated from wife and family, awash in gambling debts, he has surrendered his career as a lawyer to acting as the "janitor" to his corporate law firm, doing whatever it takes to clean up those inconvenient messes that threaten the firm's image--or that of its clients. He has learned to skillfully manipulate the truth to serve the corporate interest.

From that start on the hillside, we are led back through the last four days that have brought him to this epiphany. He has been assigned the task of bringing back a partner, Arthur (wonderfully portrayed by that fine actor, Tom Wilkinson) who is also an old friend and colleague, into the fold of corporate contingency. Arthur has lost his senses--or, as we discover, found them. Building the defense of a corporate client desperate to save itself from the public exposure of its egregious poisoning of hundreds of its consumers--and potentially millions more--Arthur has done the unthinkable, switching his alliegeance from the client to its victims. A traitor to the firm and to its bottom-line "values," this miscreant must be brought back in line, and Michael Clayton is the man relied upon to do it.

Along the road, however, Clayton is brought face to face with the venality of the system that he serves. Increasingly, he comes to realize that real justice is on the side of the plaintiff in the case in question, and that his friend is far from the lunatic he has been made out to be. When Clayton's counterparts, the "janitors" who represent his firm's corporate client, spring into action and resort, finally, to murder, he turns coat himself, sacrificing his own interest and that of his firm to the revelation of the truth.

Before I get lost in the complexities of this finely-conceived, finely-written, and magnificently enacted story, let me get back to redemption--for that, as I see it, is the story's theme. If Arthur forsakes the "meds" that have kept his life in balance and descends into a fit of madness that reveals itself as moral clarity, Michael's redemption is the greater struggle, because it involves the surrender of everything that has seemed important to him: money, status, the respect and trust of those he works for, his employment--and finally his very identity--in order to emerge from the hell he has created for himself. In a remarkable feat of acting, as the film comes to its close, George Clooney's face alone conveys the transformation from misery and desperation to a kind of happiness.

"Michael Clayton" kept me on the proverbial edge of my seat from beginning to end. It's the kind of film where you're never allowed to pause and glance nervously at your watch. It's a true thriller, but one where violence is reduced to the necessary minimum and where the characters and the complexity of their moral issues drive the action. It's tough, uncompromising, but not lacking in tender moments, and it grabs you where good art is supposed to grab you--round he heart. Clooney's Michael is at once strong and vulnerable, scared and angry, transparent and inscrutable. We can forgive him for having lost his way, because we share his human failings, his desires, his attachments. It's when he learns to let go of them--in good Buddhist fashion--that he finds the beginnings of his freedom.

The other part of the Buddhist lesson of this film, by the way, is the karmic teaching: that cruel, unskillful actions lead inevitably to unhealthy and undesirable outcomes, while skillful action brings about the results that satisfy the soul.

Breaking News!

The monks are back home. The Metta Forest Monastery has been spared the ravages of the fires that raged in the hills around it.

We arrived back at our beach cottage yesterday afternoon to find it in immaculate order, the yard swept, the plants watered. Word soon reached us that the monks had left earlier in the day--along with ten retreatants who had been evacuated with them, and who also stayed in Laguna Beach--and that Than Geoff had called to say that the monastery was safe. Naturally, we were overjoyed.

Here at the cottage, the presence of the monks is still palpable. Remember the days when we used to talk about "good vibes"? They're here. I was certainly aware of them during my morning meditation. The collective power of eight monks in one small dwelling space... May those whose lives were changed by the events of this past week find happiness in their lives.

I'm thinking now of those firefighters, still kept at the task of controlling the fires before the Santa Ana winds return, despite the waning interest of the media and the unaffected public. I suppose we'll now be able to return our attention to the unfortunate Britney Spears. May she find true happiness in her life, and the source of happiness...

Hope you all have a great weekend, friends. May we all find that happiness...

Cambridge Days

I was not a good student at Cambridge. That's the plain truth. Just out of twelve years in the internment camp of a couple of British boys' boarding schools (by the way, those interested or suffering from the post-traumantic stress induced by this experience would do well to check out Nick Duffel's organization, Boarding School Survivors,) I had been thrust all unprepared into "life," and set out to find out what it was all about. I discovered to my delight that there was another sex, about which I had learned nothing until then. Oh, and that beer tasted good and was fun to drink. So I spent three years studying mostly life and incidentally Modern and Medieval Languages and French Philology. (Three years was the norm for a Cambridge undergraduate degree. Not sure whether this is still the case.) At the end, I barely scraped past my "tripod" exams--quaintly named for the three-legged stool on which the examinee used to sit. My one moment of glory was the French oral exam, in which I scored a triumphant "first"--the equivalent, I suppose, of an A+ over here.

These thoughts occasioned by dinner last night in the company of visiting representatives from my old Cambridge college, Gonville & Caius (pronounced "keys"). The restaurant, which we picked from recommendations in a part of town midway between where we live and their hotel, proved undeservedly expensive: food not great, wine okay. But the moment gave me the opportunity to reflect on how greatly Cambridge, and Caius, have contributed to my life. I confess to having been profoundly--and I have to say ungraciously--disrespectful of the greater part of my highly privileged education. For the most part, it was an excruciatingly painful experience. But Cambridge... Cambridge was fun and freedom. Cambridge was exploration and experimentation. It was also a time of terrible mistakes, and heartbreak, and excess. It was punting on "The Backs" and dancing through the night. It gave me the first opportunity, really, to find things out about myself I had never known existed. The lectures, the tutorials, the exposure to truly disciplined, great minds--it was only much later that I began to value this.

I have learned, in recent years, to acknowledge and appreciate the privilege. Cambridge has opened doors for me that I would not have passed through otherwise. It gave me access to my first real studies, which led to a doctorate in Comparative Literature. It left me with an academic record that assured me a good place in line for a series of rewarding jobs in academia--before assuring me the inner fortitude to leave academia behind and become a writer. It was my boot camp as a poet. Privilege, I think, can be hard to bear with dignity and gratitude. It can lead so easily to snobbery and the unjustified, thoughtless assumption of superiority. Or it can lead to the reverse, a sense of guilt that festers into a kind of self-loathing, a self-deprecation, a lack of conviction in one's innate ability: it feels like too much has been given, and that without it one is nothing. As one victim of a different kind of privilege put it, "Less Than Zero." I believe that I have experienced both extremes.

But now is the time for simple acknowledgement and gratitude. I aspire to the grace to practice these qualities without reserve. Thanks, then, to Cambridge. Thanks to Caius for the many gifts received in my three years there. I was perhaps, in some ways, a better student than I knew.

In Memory: R. B. Kitaj

I was sad to read, in yesterday’s New York Times, the obituary of an old friend of the family—and a noted artist, R.B.Kitaj.


I had in fact heard a report of his death earlier, a couple of nights before, through a mutual friend, but neither one of us had been able to ascertain that the report was in fact no more than a simple rumor. It seemed he was simply too young to die. Yesterday, though, there was confirmation.

Ron, as he was known to the family—though he came to prefer the single “Kitaj,” and we eventually dropped the “Ron” out of respect for his wishes—was one of the great figurative artists of the post-World War II period. An expatriate American living in London for many years, he returned to make his home and work in Southern California a number of years ago, after the tragically early death of his wife, the artist Sandra Fisher. At that time, his important retrospective show at the Tate Gallery (this was 1994) had been widely, even cruelly, panned by critics, primarily on account of the lengthy explanatory texts he apparently felt necessary to include next to the paintings on the walls, in case they should be misunderstood. He bitterly and publicly denounced his critics for having contributed to Sandra’s sudden death of an aneurism, and later produced a painting called “The Critic Kills,” signed “By Ron and Sandra.”

Clearly, then, Kitaj was a man of quirks. He was a virtual recluse on his return to Los Angeles, and effectively discouraged visitors. Even so, I’m sad that we did not make the effort to penetrate his solitude at those times when he did put out the invitation. The truth is, I think, that both Ellie and I were not a little intimidated by the intensity of his intellectual fortitude and his fierce, single-minded dedication to the life of the mind. His closest friends included some of the great poets and writers of our time—Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Phillip Roth, among many more—and he was a voracious consumer of all things of cultural significance. He was also impatient of everything shoddy or ill-thought.

A prominent figurative painter throughout that period when the art of the human figure was sacrificed on the high altar of abstraction, Kitaj was willing to fight anyone for his convictions. His essay, “The Human Clay,” written in 1976, was a passionate defense of the “School of London” artists—Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff—who, like himself, persisted in finding inspiration and aesthetic necessity in the study of the human form despite the great American tide of abstraction championed by influential critics like Clement Greenberg. Kitaj’s own paintings defiantly combined narrative and history with a keen sense of social justice and humanitarian outrage. The one shown immediately below is subtitled "The Refugees." Kitaj's self-portrait stretches across the foreground, evoking his own sense of permanent exile and isolation.



It was in part, I believe, under the tutelage of my father-in-law, Michael Blankfort, that Kitaj rediscovered and committed his art to his Jewish roots and to the too-often dark history of European Jews. The NY Times obituary had him headlined as the “Painter of Moody Human Dramas”—an epithet that does only part justice to the social and psychological intensity of his work. The bleak history of the diaspora was a theme he explored not only in his paintings but also in two key essays, “The First Diasporist Manifesto,” (1989) and “The Second Diasporist Manifesto,” (2005).

Michael was also a collector of Kitaj’s works, and gifted the Los Angeles County Museum with several important pieces, including an early large-scale painting, “Dismantling of the Red Tent,” (1963-64) whose bleak and mournful landscape marked the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.



One work from the collection, a charcoal drawing called “Terese,” (1978) ended up in my own hands in a curious way. Always fascinated by the mystery genre, I had just published “Chiaroscuro,” the first of my own two mystery novels, in the mid-1980s. It was set in the contemporary art world, and started with the description of my intense artist-hero—I called him “Jake Molnar”—making a drawing. The drawing was one I had often seen and admired on the walls of the Blankfort house, “Terese.” I have never made a point of it in public, but there was much about Jake that reflected what I knew of Ron through our family friendship. In any event, it was in celebration of the publication that Ellie’s parents were generous enough to make “Terese” mine. She hangs, today, in all her glorious nakedness, above the mantle in our bedroom, and she is admired every day.



A sad loss, then, of a highly cultured man and an extraordinary artist at too early an age. He was only 74. The NY Times quotes the accolade of Time magazine critic Robert Hughes: “He draws better than almost anyone else alive.” But let Kitaj speak here for himself:

If some of us wish to practice art for art’s sake alone, so be it… but good pictures, great pictures, will be made to which many modest lives can respond… it seems to be at least as advanced or radical to attempt a more social art, as not to.

To which I say Amen, Ron. And bon voyage, wherever the journey leads from here. May this restless soul finally find a home.

Many Monks

Concerned about the safety of our good Thanissaro Bhikkhu and his fellow monks down in San Diego County, I called our friend Eva, host of our Sunday morning sangha sessions, to ask if she had any information.



(That's Than Geoff in the lead, by the way, in this picture from the monastery's website gallery.) Turned out the monks had just been evacuated from the Metta Forest Monastery in Valley Center, just north of San Diego, and were all headed to Laguna Beach in search of shelter from the firestorm. Our cottage, of course, stands empty until Friday, when we plan to return to the beach for the weekend, so we offered it in case of need.

Our offer was gladly accepted. Last I heard, from a neighbor, eight men in saffron robes were on the steps to the cottage, searching for the key. Our neighbor revealed our top-secret hiding place, and our cottage has turned into a temporary monastery—well, at least a dormitory!—for the full complement of Buddhist monks from Metta. It will, I imagine, be somewhat crowded in there. And there’s only a single bathroom. But I trust that monks know how to handle such contingencies.

I wish I had a picture of their arrival…

I’m not sure how long they’ll have to stay, but we hope fervently that it will not be long, that the beautiful monastery and its groves of avocado trees will be spared, and that the monks will very soon be able to return to their habitat of choice. How dry and vulnerable it looks, in this picture--again from the monastery website.



For us… what a pleasure to be able to return in some small way the gifts we have received from Than Geoff over the years! And I can’t help wondering what our neighbors on this small street will think…

The Buddha Diaries Recommends

Guilty With an Explanation

We're not quite sure what the author means by this title, but we think it is a perfectly apt description of her readers, who are undoubtedly guilty of spending much too much time perusing her addictive site.

The explanation (uttered to disgruntled spouses and employers, perhaps?) is that HeartInSanFrancisco (HSF) wows her readers day after day with original content, surpassing in breadth and humor almost every other space on the web.

Much of the fun of Guilty with an Explanation stems directly from vitriol, in which the reader laughingly indulges because HSF has spent so much time assuring us of her underlying compassion and sensitivity. When miffed, HSF pulls no punches, which is bad news for those who, say, ram into her with their cart at the grocery store. Her lambasting is often so articulate and spirited that it evokes a deeply satisfying sense of vicarious revenge. This, from 2006.

My neighbor is a hooker. A street ho. A strumpet, harlot, trollop. A tart. I finally figured it out after I saw her in black bra and tiny shorts draped around a lamppost in the Mission, an area which has not yet been gentrified. I doubt she was in the neighborhood for the discount fabric store, as I was.

But I don't hate her because of her morals. I hate her because she's a vile neighbor.

Fans of David Sedaris will enjoy HSF's unsparing portraits of her past. In these entries, HSF's childhood self emerges in hilarious and heart-breaking detail, as the reader becomes privy to those poignant, tragicomic moments characteristic of so many of our childhoods.

And in addition to all of this fun, HSF entertains with legitimately interesting encounters with notable historical figures such as Gracie Slick and Che Guevara.

Bottom line, this blog has something for everyone, and we encourage you to visit.

Apocalypse? Now?

Those of us living in Southern California may be forgiven for a sense that the apocalypse is approaching faster even than some evangelicals would have us believe. The place is an inferno, with wild fires raging out of control from Malibu to the border with Mexico. Living here, you can't help but be aware of it.



(The above is not a minimalist abstract painting. It's a digital photo taken from the window of our car.) The smoke pollutes the air even in those areas, like our own, which have been spared the actual burn. You can feel the heaviness in the lungs, the burn in the nostrils. The sunset glows an ominous, but glorious red.

Should we beat our breasts? Should we do a Pat Robertson, blame the gays and lesbians and our other evil ways? Is God trying to tell us something? Well, maybe not... Brush fires are a part of the natural cycle, nature's way of clearing things out to allow for new growth, new life. If they are now so terrible, though, it's in part a result of human behavior: over the past century, we have made valiant attempts--often in the interest of "development"--to control nature's efforts. Our need for housing and transportation routes has defaced the natural topgraphy. We know, too, that our greenhouse gases have contributed significantly to the climate changes that have promoted drought in this part of the world, as in the southeast of the United States and elsewhere on the planet. This in turn has created ideal fuel for the fires, desert-dry brush and timber in huge quantities. Our drought has also depleted the wherewithal to fight the fires where they flare up. Our human obsession with control and exploitation has done much to bring these situations on.

And then... I can't help but see these local brush fires in the context of the global ones: wars everywhere, civil (though how can war be "civil," ever?) inter-national and territorial; famine and plague; disasters of the kind we seem to read about daily in the papers. We co-create these events with nature, as the California fires, or we invent them all by ourselves. The latest brush fire that I hear about is the one on the border between Turkey and Iraq, with Turkey now threatening to invade that benighted country from the north, to protect itself from Kurdish terrorists seeking to consolidate an independent Kurdish nation. The particular fire we Americans lit amongst the already many conflagration points in the Middle East is sending burning embers flying into the surrounding brush.

Here's the "burning" question: are we nearer to our annihilation as a species than we had ever imagined? Is the process of destruction already beyond all hope of control? Are we now fated to stand powerless in the face of hurricane force winds, like those California firefighters, and watch as the world burns? It's a frightening thought, but a frighteningly real one at this moment in our planet's history.

Ojai: Fun and Fire

Well, it was quite a trip. Here we are, safely back in Los Angeles--thanks, by the way, to those who wished us a safe journey. It actually felt like touch and go at times on the freeway coming home. More of that in a moment. Meanwhile...

We headed up the 5 freeway Saturday morning as far as Magic Mountain (unbelievable queues of vehicles blocking traffic as people lined up to exit the freeway there, to spend a joyful Saturday on the roller coasters and other instruments of torture!) and took the 126 east through Piru and Fillmore to Santa Paula, where we had been urged to stop to see an odd new show opening up in an odd new art space miles from the "art scene" in Los Angeles. The happily-named Kunstbarn--a play, no doubt, on the more august, ubiquitous "Kunsthalle," the venue of much avant-garde art in Germany and elsewhere--turned out to be just that: a barn. But a barn painstakingly converted into a small but pristine gallery space by the owner, Lotar Ziesing, who deals primarily in "Decorative Art and Antiques." His inaugural exhibition was entitled "Dysfunctional American Portraits, 1930-1960."

The dysfunctional portraits in question turned out to be mostly paintings by those anonymous, self-taught painters whose masterpieces you can pick up for a couple of dollars at garage sales and swap meets. If you have a good eye--as Lotar quite evidently does--you can find real gems, of the kind popularized by the artist Jim Shaw in his Thrift Store Paintings. Here's a couple of them, for your delectation: Lotar has graced each one with a title of his own invention. These two are called "Abused Child" and "Illuminated Shopper," respectively. The theme of the dysfunctional family makes an interesting and satrical comment on mostly post-war America and its illusions of domestic bliss.

It's a trek out to Lotar's place, but worth the effort. Lotar himself is a genial man, a generous host, and a source of endless knowledge about all things "mid-century." Parked outside his house when we arrived was a magnificent pillar-box red Lancia from the 1950s--or perhaps the 1960s, I'm no expert--and while we were still there a friend of his drove up with a beautifully restored Airstream-type trailer of the same period (it wasn't Airstream, but I didn't catch the make.) The late 19th century homestead, also restored with a finicky eye for detail, enjoys a spectacular view of the valley below with its wide arroyo and the mountains beyond.

We took the scenic route up over the hill to the outstkirts of Ojai, where our friends Chris and Nancy had generously invited us to spend the night in their guest house. We were greeted by three rowdy dogs, anxious to meet George, the newcomer. George is normally quite nervous around other dogs, and is known to lunge at them in a less than friendly manner. We assume that, being small, he needs to assert his dogulinity. It's a Napoleon thing. However, they all seemed to get along just fine as we settled down to an excellent lunch of home-brewed potato soup and salad. After lunch, the four of us--here are our friends--set out on a marvelous, long walk along a back road that soon led us through avocado and orange orchards, where George for the first time in his life learned the joys of running off-leash in the countryside. His long coat managed to pick up every burr along the way, but it was worth the work of pulling them all out one by one just to watch his doggy spirit run free.

We enjoyed a very pleasant dinner in the town of Ojai, and managed an early night and a good sleep, away from the light and sounds of the metropolitan area. We watched the sunrise on an exquisite morning that was marred only, moments later, by Ellie's accident with a glass tea-caddy--it slipped from her hand and shattered on the tile floor in a million tiny shards. Out with George for his morning poop walk, though, I was at once amazed and thrilled to actually hear the beat of crows' wings as a pair of them flew past. It was that quiet...

Breakfast of coffee and toasted English muffins with our friends on their enclosed back porch, surrounded by whispering trees--the wind had not yet risen to its later gusty strength; and a visit with a next-door neighbor, the artist Michael Dvortcsak, whose paintings we have been familiar with for many years.



Michael loves rough, volumetric shapes like ancient vessels and huge, craggy boulders which occupy his canvases like mythical, paleolithic presences set in dreamscapes of the mind. His studio is a solitary cave, hemmed in on all sides by racks crammed with paintings of all sizes and a single wall on which the works in progress hand are hung, awaiting his attention. It's always great to spend time in an artist's studio, and it was a pleasure to meet the man behind the paintings.

There was another studio visit in store for us. After a brief stop in town at the farmers' market, we headed out into the country in the opposite direction--to the south and west--to find the studios of an old friend, Gary Lang, and his wife, Ruth Pastine. Gary left Los Angeles years ago, in the early 1980s, as I recall, and spent a number of years in the contemporary art mecca of New York. He and Ruth returned to Southern California--and the paradise of the countryside around Ojai--a few years ago, and have built a magnificent his- and hers- studio, with a wing for each of them to work in privacy. In Gary's studio, we found a dozen new paintings in pursuit of his love affair--the word "obsession" came up--with color and movement. At one end, a large painting, similar to this one



(apologies to Gary for having lifted this absurdly too-small image, sans permission, from his gallery's site: it gives no feeling for the scale and grandeur of the actual work!) Where Gary works in wildly colorful, eye-popping abstraction, Ruth works much more subtly with shifting color gradations in canvases where serenity rules. Here's a blue one:



(Apologies to Ruth, too, from pretty much the same reasons!) We spent a good while in the studios, amazed, as always, by the endless inventiveness of artists and their dedication to their work.

We enjoyed a bite to eat at Ruth and Gary's, out on the shaded patio behind their house. It wasn't long, however, before we began to notice smoke in the air and smelled the burning brush--our first inkling of the terrible fires that were breaking out all over Southern California. After leaving their house, we headed into thickening smoke around Ventura, where traffic slowed to a crawl beneath a dirty red, hellish sky. Unsure whether the freeway would lead us, in this murk, to a dead halt between flaming hillsides, we debated leaving the 101 and heading back east on the 126 again. Not knowing which of the two routes was worse, we opted on instinct for the 101. It turned out to have been the better choice, I think, because a call to Lotar gave us notice of a raging fire in the hills above them, near Santa Paula; and later we heard that there were fires on either side of the southbound I-5, which we would have had to take after leaving the 126. Even so, as you can tell from this picture, it was bad enough. We were thankful to find our own area clear when we got home. Today we can look forward to heat--and more brush fires.

Sheer Terror

A classic thriller: an upper middle class family is terrorized by unknown, invisible assailants. The threat is clear and imminent, but unspecified. The father is in a state of high anxiety, needing desperately to protect his family. I watch all this as one does a movie, anxious and scared, but somehow for them, not for myself. But totally engaged, "on the edge of my seat." It's "so real." Intense. Then I wake up for a bladder break in the middle of the dream and realize that I'll never know the end. I'll never know who these people are, or who is threatening them, or how, or for what reason. I'll never know if--or how--the family manage to extricate themselves from their predicament. Very Kafkan. Before heading off to the bathroom, I lie in bed and try to write an ending that feels right, but you know that never helps. The dream is a world unto itself, and an ending written in the waking world just doesn't quite do it...

This morning we leave for Ojai, with a stop in Santa Paula. Exciting times. We have chosen the hottest weekend since the September heatwave, with fierce Santa Ana winds blowing in from the deserts. Wish us luck.

People With a Passion

It's always a wonderful experience to be with people with a common passion. This thought prompted by my having stumbled across "Word Play" on public television last night--a documentary about crossword puzzlers. The New York Times crossword happens to be a small addiction of my own, one that I share, I now discover, with such notables as Jon Stewart, Ken Burns, Bill Clinton and countless others. "Word Play" centers around the annual tournament in Stamford, Connecticut, hosted by NYT crossword editor Will Shortz, where puzzlers of all stripes gather to vie for the championship. The competition is intense. My own humble efforts pale beside these folks, who complete the simple, early-week puzzles in seconds flat, and the progressively harder puzzles toward the end of the week in minutes. Amazing to watch them.

The crossword puzzle, though, is just a pretext for this study of people with a passion, and for the community in which they thrive. Even though they meet only once a year in this fashion, their hearts seem to beat as one. There's a mutual admiration, a bond, even, yes, a kind of love that unites this vastly diverse bunch of human beings. What's extraordinary is how they are all leveled--rich, poor, lawyers, doctors, students, secretaries, scientists, musicians... you get the sense that their differences mean nothing in this context, where their common humanity simply surges to the fore.

I think we bloggers are like that. It has come to be the thing I value most about this peculiar, near-daily obsession of mine. It's done in private, but the sense of community is increasingly powerful. (A propos, Cardozo is in the process of editing a new installment of "The Buddha Diaires Recommends," and I hope to have that posted early next week.) I know not a single one of you out there in person, but I come to recognize your voice, your vision, and there's a particular joy in finding common cause.

"Word Play" put me in mind of the first "YearlyKos" conference I attended a couple of years ago in Las Vegas, where a thousand progressive liberal bloggers gathered to meet not only each other, most for the first time in person, but also a good number of the Democratic Party leaders who had just begun to understand something of the power of the blogosphere. Barbara Boxer was there, and Harry Reid, Bill Richardson, Wesley Clark, and several other potential presidential contenders. I myself was working on my first blog at the time, "The Bush Diairies," and had just published a book version, "The Real Bush Diaries." It was a thrill to find myself amongst so many "of my own kind," all passionate about their politics and a little tipsy on their effects of their growing influence.

So this entry is just a way of saying thank you to those who blog and those who read the blogs and those who add their comments to the blogs they read. It's a joy to feel your presence out there and to sense that this small circle of Buddhists, near-Buddhists, and those attracted to Buddhism by its simple humanity, is making its own contribution to the conscience and consciousness it will take to save the planet that we share.

Free Tibet: The Dalai Lama Gets the Gold

Gotta love that Dalai Lama, right?



That smile, that giggle. That ability, despite obviously vast intellectual and diplomatic power, to maintain an apparent childlike innocence and wonder... That ability to look upon the disasters of the world with equanimity, and to find his happiness where he is.

Still, I could wish he had not chosen to accept his congressional gold medal from a man with so much blood on his hands.



I suppose he had to do it for his country, poor Tibet. But isn't there some rule about a monk accepting gifts of gold? I suppose it's uncharitable of me to be pissed off that Bush should be able to pick up so much in the way of brownie points by inviting His Holiness into his office to spite the Chinese, and use the occasion to lecture them on democracy and the freedom of religion. Very un-Buddhist of me.

And isn't there some rule about monks getting kissed on the cheek?

Ah, well, I'm off to try to practice a little metta.

Hell (Part II): In Iraq

Speaking of hell, I have been promising to write about Aidan Delgado’s book, “The Sutras of Abu Ghraib: Notes from a Conscientious Objector in Iraq.” As the title suggests, it’s the personal—very personal—memoir of a young Buddhist man who had the extreme misfortune to be in the process of enlisting in the US Army on the very day those Muslim miscreants chose to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He had, in fact, signed his enlistment papers only minutes before hearing the news.

It was a rash act, for someone ready to declare himself a Buddhist, and plainly out of integrity with his still rather tenuously held beliefs. Delgado's father was a diplomat. As a boy growing up, he was exposed to a number of different cultures throughout the world and was easily bored by the academic tedium of a small Florida college. Judging himself out of place in that situation, somewhat supercilious in his attitude and dismissive of his class mates, he decided to enlist partly out of youthful rebellion and partly out of simple boredom and unease.

Would he have chosen differently the following day? Surely, in view of his experience in Iraq, he would later have chosen differently with the wisdom of hindsight. It is to Delgado’s credit that he does not gloss over the mistakes he makes, nor offer excuses for them. He writes this book, he says,

because I want to share a lesson I learned in the desert, in the hope that it will inform [the reader’s] view of the war in Iraq, of politics, of religion, of all the choices you make as a moral person… I want this book to serve as a hanging question about what it means to be an ethical soldier, to live an honest life…

He learned his lesson the hard way. Delgado’s descriptions of life on active duty, at times under mortar or heavy arms fire, at times in fear for his life and always, always, in extreme discomfort--from the sand that finds its way into everything to the cold at night and the raging heat by day--are eloquent, often truly appalling. Trained as a vehicle mechanic, he was not in the front lines of warfare, but he was witness to the boredom, the rage, the xenophobic distrust, the religious intolerance and the racial hatred among American troops that led to the outrage of Abu Ghraib, where he was stationed at the time of the atrocities. Without in any way condoning them, his book helps us to understand how it came about that otherwise decent but poorly educated young American men could become complicit in such dreadful acts of torture and humiliation.

Delgado also learned the hard way about the Buddhist path, which he acknowledged too late having abandoned. It took one of those epiphanic moments, in his case the sight of dead and dying insects on a window screen and “a strip of putrid flypaper coated in glue” to bring him to the realization of his fundamental error. “I can honestly say,” he wrote in that anguished moment, “that I am the worst Buddhist in the world...”

When I look at [the fly strip], I want to cry. A trapped and dying insect moves me almost to tears and here I am in this great and victorious war. I’m supposed to be a soldier, some kind of tough guy, and here I am writing about a poor moth. I hate it. I hate seeing any living thing suffer, I can’t stand it…

This is only the start of Delgado’s peculiar hell, the moment at which he understands that, to be back in integrity with himself and his beliefs, he must file for discharge from the Army as a conscientious objector. Word of his action soon gets out around his unit, and he falls victim not only to the pangs of his own conscience but to the fury and contempt of most of those he serves with. He survives a hostile assault by dint of resorting, himself, to violence—defending himself against an aggressor with a timely remembered martial arts move—and seems to gain, in this way, a certain grudging respect from his fellow soldiers. He recognizes the irony in having to earn it with his own act of violence.

Some of the toughest—and most poignant—moments in this book come at the time of a rebellion amongst the detainees at Abu Ghraib, in reaction to overcrowding, inedible food, and generally abominable living conditions. In watching his fellow countrymen respond with deadly force to defenseless, unarmed prisoners, Delgado is brought face to face with the glaring racial and religious hatred that contributes to their rage; and must confront the bitter reality of the intolerance that fuels it, despite his own growing awareness of the shared humanity of people on both sides.

In too many ways, this is a heart-rending book. The story is told without fuss or frills, without pretense or dissimulation. It acknowledges its author’s responsibility in the tragic passage of events in a war that, later, as a veteran, he will come to denounce for its needless inhumanity. At the same time, in its own terrible way, it does help to “make sense” of it all. It places us, as readers, slap in the middle of the action, gives us a feel for that “band of brothers” loyalty between those men who serve and who bond together in a powerful compact of love, and lets us know what it is to share the fear and rage.

I was writing just a couple of days ago about Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s uncompromising rejection of violence. Delgado is one “Buddhist” who came to an understanding of the precepts too late, and who seems, now, to want to devote his life to making up for that mistake. Non-violence is a difficult practice in a violent world, and Buddhism proves a salvation fraught with personal sacrifice and agony. Delgado has done an excellent job of showing us just how hard the path can be for one who takes it seriously. He has also done a service to the country by adding this personal experience to the ever-growing mass of evidence of the human fallout from the US invasion of Iraq.

Hell

"L'enfer," wrote Jean Paul Sartre in his play, Huis clos ("No Exit"), "c'est les autres." Hell is other people. Mind you, he carefully crafted his characters to prove the point. And then there's the famous "War is hell" quotation from General William Tecumseh Sherman--though if you read the full text of the impassioned letter in which he expands upon this thought, you'll see how inadequate its famous abbreviation sounds. In any event, war--like Sartre's, like every other imaginable hell--is man-made.

My thoughts of hell, this morning, are inspired by watching only a few minutes (sadly, I would have liked to watch more, but my weary head dictated otherwise) of a program about hell on the History Channel. I had surfed there somewhat idly on my way to sleep, and was grabbed by the (man-made) images and words that have defined humanity's view of hell throughout the ages. It seems that most religions preach some form of hell, where the wicked are punished for their evil deeds in an afterlife. Regrettably, Budhhism is no exception. I checked with Access to Insight on the subject, and came upon these faintly risible verses--in translation by none other than Than Geoff. Here's one I thought should be heeded by those generals in Burma:

An ochre robe tied 'round their necks,
many with evil qualities
— unrestrained, evil —
rearise, because of their evil acts,
in hell.

Better to eat an iron ball
— glowing, aflame —
than that, unprincipled &
unrestrained,
you should eat the alms of the country.

It does seems strange to me that those who preach the gospel of a loving God should envision one so cruel and vengeful in the afterlife. There had to be some way, of course, to control the behavior of naturally wayward human beings, and the threat of damnation to an eternity of torture seems like an effective way to maintain the upper hand.

The Evangelical Christians, it seems, have an interesting twist on the Sartrian concept: for them, "Hell is for other people"--i.e., not for me. Unconverted Jews join Muslims, Hindus, atheists--and, presumably, Buddhists--in the fires of hell. They, the Christians, get raptured away to heaven. Although they might want to take note of another of Than Geoff's translations:

Ashamed of what's not shameful,
not ashamed of what is,
beings adopting wrong views
go to a bad destination.

Seeing danger where there is none,
& no danger where there is,
beings adopting wrong views
go to a bad destination.

Imagining error where there is none,
and seeing no error where there is,
beings adopting wrong views
go to a bad destination.

But knowing error as error,
and non-error as non-error,
beings adopting right views
go to a good
destination.

I'm all for heading for the "right destination", of course. But I believe in neither heaven nor hell. Except, of course, those made by man. How about you?

Buddhism and the Pacificst Dilemma

I finished Aidan Delgado's book, "The Sutras of Abu Ghraib" over the weekend, and I do want to give it some thought in these pages. I need to take a bit more time, however, to let it all sink in, and don't want to write about it under the kind of pressure that Monday morning inevitably brings as we prepare for the return to Los Angeles from the beach. So please stay tuned. I know that I'll have something to say a little later in the week.

In the meantime, yesterday was the monthly visit to our sitting group from Thanissaro Bhikkhu. It's always a great pleasure and a great learning experience when Than Geoff comes. He leads us into an hour-long sit with guidance that is by now long familiar, but which is still a helpful reminder of the meditation practice that he teaches. After the sit, he answers questions for another hour--always with patient wisdom, a profound sense of humanity, and often just plain good sense. Gifted with a wry and generous sense of humor, he often has us laughing at the predicament of simply being human, at ourselves and our pretensions, even at himself.

He brings books, too. He has written so many of them that I sometimes suspect that he's up every day at four and has another one ready for the press by eight. They are all give-aways, their production and distribution made possible, I suppose, by the generosity of those who support the Metta Forest Monastery of which he is the abbott.



(This beautiful photo comes from the monastery's website.) Aside from the books, Than Geoff's articles are constantly appearing in Tricycle--and probably other journals of which I'm unaware. A naturally quiet and scholarly man, he seems to have some kind of inner fount of wisdom that is inexhaustible. Added to which, I'm sure that the focus and concentration developed through years of intense meditation practice enable this incredible creative flow.

I asked him about Buddhism and warfare and, thinking of Aidan Delgado and, of course, Burma, whether it would ever be permissible for a practicing Buddhist to engage in military action. His answer was a clear "No." He was critical of those Burmese monks for stepping beyond that line in marching in the streets. The monk's true moral authority, he said, comes from the ability to turn his bowl upside down in a gesture that refuses alms--and the blessings and implicit approval that the donor can expect to receive in return. That gesture, in a Buddhist country like Thailand or Burma, is itself sufficient reproof and political protest. To march in the streets, as Than Geofff sees it, is to sacrifice a good part of that moral authority.

A fellow sitter asked about the history of the samurai warrior and Zen Buddhism: was this not a warrior tradition with Buddhist underpinnings? Than Geoff argued that the samurai myth was an invention of 19th century Japanese revisionists, who needed for political reasons to discredit the pacifism inherent in Buddhist teachings. Interesting. Was there anything, ever, I wondered again aloud, that would justify a true Buddhist taking arms? Than Geoff remained clear and unambiguous: nothing. Ever.

The Women and Children of Africa...

... were the beneficiaries, last night, of a concert sponsored by Gail Chasin and Kelly McMahon with Gather the Women at a small venue in Laguna Hills last night. "One Sound," as the concert was titled, provided us with an amazing evening of music and fun. As I've said before in other contexts, I am awed by the ability of musicians and singers to open up their depths as human beings and put it out there in front of an audience. The closest I come myself is in my readings--where I have always the benefit of the text on the page in front of me. It's a wonderful experience, to have that sense of contact with others--but I wouldn't attempt it without the prop of the written word. Musical performance seems to me so much riskier, so much more vulnerable, so much more... revealing, in some way. Having little knowledge of music, I'm not planing to even try to reduce the whole experience to a few inadequate words. Enough to say that I came away delighted that our friends had alerted us to the event, and had taken us along with them. More tomorrow...

Teaching (Part II); and a Challenge

It's a privilege, really. I was ungracious to be unable to see that in my younger day, when I had the opportunity to teach. Now the opportunities are rare--at least in the way of classroom teaching--and seem all the more to be valued when they come along. My two days at Cal State Fullerton, as usual, were filled with opportunity and fulfillment, with some doors opened, I would like to think, and some insights gained. To each his or her own small piece, whatever they choose to glean. For one young woman yesterday it happened to be the word "surrender," which cropped up in a poem that I read and provoked her question. I explained that my understanding of surrender was more than simply giving up, yielding, giving in, but involved also the embrace of opportunity, and this seemed to allow her to resolve some inner struggle she had been confronting and to give her some new sense of peace.

For myself, I think, the learning part has also to do with a kind of surrender--to the recognition that the less I strive to "teach" the more I manage to open up the field for learning. Once I start to wrestle rationally with a question, to "understand" it and provide the "answer," I tie myself down to head-driven logic which is very limited in its usefulness. If I try instead to feel where the questioner is coming from at heart-level and answer from the same place in myself, the result is a kind of opening of possibility that is much richer, much more fully human, much more connected. I don't know whether this makes any kind of sense to anyone else, but it makes perfect sense to me.

I can count on one hand the number of teachers who truly reached me in the course of my education, all the way from kindergarten through doctorate. Those were the people who inspired me not with how much they knew (although this may have been impressive, too) but with their peculiar passion, their inner sense of self, their uncompromising readiness to show the inside out.

I wonder if you had teacher like this? I think we all did. I'd love to start a thread of tributes to such teachers--is this what's called a "meme"?. Would anyone out there care to pitch in?

Who inspired you? Who led the way to those insights that have guided your life? Whose teaching continues to resonate in your life? Please let me know, and pass on the invitation if you find it interesting.

If you decide to take up these questions in your own blog, please drop the link to the comments section of this post. I'm planning to compile excerpts of the submissions in an upcoming post.

Many thanks to those readers and bloggers who have already contributed.

Teaching

This morning we leave early to head back down south. For the next couple of days I will be doing my twice-yearly teaching gig. For more than ten years now I have been invited to teach in a class at Cal State Fullerton called “Character and Conflict.” It’s the kind of class I wish I might have taken as an undergraduate student, back in the 1950s—though this kind of class, this kind of self-examination was virtually unheard of back then, particularly in England; it would have been an unwelcome addition to a university curriculum. From what I understand, it can still prove controversial. Best described, perhaps, as an introduction to the understanding of the self as an integrated whole, it challenges students to look into themselves and their relationships—with friends, with families, with life partners—and to find ways to heal those areas that may be broken. It treats such matters as pain, grief and anger seriously, as they deserve to be treated, and invites them to be brought out into the open rather than repressed, allowed to fester, and destroy lives.

When I say I wish I might have taken it, it’s because it took me decades to learn what these—mostly young—people learn in this one class in the course of a semester: that the integrated life is not lived in the head alone, but also in the heart and soul. For too many years, I remained closed to the possibility that I had either one of these, and it took a serious crisis in my family life to pull me up short and re-examine my assumptions. It took some serious work with other men who shared the same predicament to come to understand that we had an emotional life whether we paid attention to it or not; that we had a heart, and that its proper functioning was vital to our health—not to mention the health of our families.

And having rejected the notion that I had a soul after years at Anglican Christian schools and a home life presided over by an Anglican minister father, it took an initial brush with Buddhism to bring me around to the understanding that the spiritual life was also a part of that integrated whole; that without it I was something of a human cripple. I am grateful, now, that I was introduced to Buddhism more than ten years ago, and my life would be poor indeed without this spiritual dimension.

When I tell people that I will be teaching, the first question is almost always, What to you teach? My glib answer it, Myself. Which in a sense is true. I just go in there with a class of forty or so students and try to be as much myself as I can be. I tell them the story of my book, “While I Am Not Afraid’”—which most of them will have read by the time I make my appearance in their classroom—a book which follows me along the path described above, the path into the heart and, further, into the soul; and I try to answer any questions they have with all the honesty I can muster. It’s about the importance of not holding oneself back, of not hiding the feelings behind an armored chest, of speaking one’s truth.

I spent many years of my life as a teacher and, sadly for myself, I saw it mostly as a burden, something that had to be done in order to earn a living. One of the things I have learned from Buddhism is the importance of teaching and the vital role of the teacher. And one thing I have learned from life is that teaching is not about having some special knowledge and passing it on; it's about showing others who you are and what you believe and inviting them to share in it if they will. It’s a privilege to be invited to participate in the process of this class and, sometimes, I hope, to touch lives in the same way mine has been touched by those in my life who have truly taught me. It does mean, though, that my time is limited for the next couple of days, so don’t be surprised if you find me slacking off in The Buddha Diaries. Blessings all around….

Making Plans (Part II)

So here's how it went yesterday. Remember, I had been making my plans on Monday for the week. There were two projects due for completion, one of which was a new submission for my "Art of Outrage" podcast series for Artscene Visual Radio, the other the completion of a 2,500-word catalogue text for the artist Masami Teraoka. I had been working on the latter during the week we spent in Laguna. For the former, I had the pre-recorded sound files of some interviews with artists, ready to be introduced with the narrative sections which were yet to be written and recorded. Still, the two days we have in town this week looked to be enough--just barely, I thought--to get both projects finished.

And then the disaster of Monday afternoon, mentioned yesterday in these pages. Returning home from our week in Laguna, I found that the sound files had disappeared from my computer. Every last one of them, with the exception of the file for a single interview which, when I opened it, I discovered to be empty. It was a case of "the computer ate my homework."

Panic time, right? I mean, such circumstances normally put me into panic mode. This time, nothing. Barely a ripple in the emotional surface. Somehow, my mind had decided that if the files were lost, they were lost. I would have to start over, explain my embarrassing predicament to the artists who had been kind enough to give me their time in the first place and, with their agreement, record another interview. First, though, I wanted to make the effort to see if they could be recovered.

I slept well. I got up in good time--though without haste and with still no sense of panic or approaching doom. I did my forty-five minute sit. I took an exercise walk around the hill with Ellie and George (by now you know who George is, no?) and cooked up some porridge (that's oatmeal to you Yanks) for breakfast. Then, before even broaching the computer problem, I took some time to review the work I had done on that catalogue text and passed it on to Ellie for her thoughts, as I often do. I trust her judgment in these matters.

Calm, see? I amazed myself. Then I got into the computer and searched for the files again. Nothing. The Garageband folders empty, seemingly dead. Did I panic? Not I! Cardozo--my part-time assistant arrived. I'd pinned my hopes on him, but he too found nothing. I put in a call to Apple support and waited for help while Cardozo went up to Ellie's office to help her with the library reorganization project she has embarked on. I waited...

I waited and waited. The first Apple supporter knew nothing about Garageband. I waited for another. Calm? Oh, yes. I managed to read a good few pages of "The Sutras of Abu Ghraib" (more on this at a later date.) I finally found someone who thought he could help, but then himself needed help from a more expert expert. I was on the telephone, friends, for two and a half hours non-stop!

The result? Nothing. No sound files.

Did I fret? Nope. I kept my head, I kept my calm--this meditation practice must be paying off, I thought! I decided, well, now is the time to surrender to this new reality. Then, at just about his quitting time, Cardozo decided that he wanted to give it one more try. I went upstairs, convinced that he would be simply wasting his time...

But no! Miraculously, a few minutes later, he followed me upstairs to announce that he'd managed to locate a file in backup--we had been trying to do this all day--and transfer it! Minutes later, we had the ones I needed. Well, not quite all, since one important piece, recorded after the last back-up date, was lost. But I had enough to put together a submission for "The Art of Outrage"! I listened to the recording, found it to be good enough to use, made some notes that will enable me to complete my submission, hopefully this morning. (There I go: another plan!) Not long after, Ellie came down with a big thumbs-up on my catalogue text, so that got sent off to the artist--a day ahead of schedule.

Wonderful. Then, in the evening, we had a terrific session with the artists' support group that we facilitate and host. A great evening, filled with useful and important work.

There's a valuable teaching in this experience, of course--the gift wrapped in shit: when I manage to stay calm no matter what comes at me, everything gets done. It's the staying calm that's the hard part.

A New Read

Thanks to a forward from Robin at Dharma Bums, I have a new book in my hands. It's called "The Sutras of Abu Ghraib: Notes from a Conscientious Objector in Iraq" and promises to be a valuable read. I'll be writing about it more once I get into it, but here's a foretaste from the introduction:

"I wrote this book because I want to share a lesson I learned in the desert, in the hope that it it will inform your view of the war in Iraq, of politics, of religion, of all the choices you make as a moral person. I can't bear to hear any more stories about battles and uncompromising heroes, with flags waving gently in the background. I want this book to serve as a hanging question about what it means to be an ethical solider, to live an honest life. I want to give you a military life in shades of gray, filled with doubt, moral outrage, and moral cowardice."

A Buddhist military experience? A conscientious objector at war? An unconscionable war, at that... It sounds like something all of us should read. Having read just the first few pages, I'm hooked. I won't say anything more about the book for now, but I'm sure I'll be coming back to it in these pages. For this morning, though, on with all those things that need to get done by the end of the day on Wednesday, when I leave for my teaching gig.

(Oh, by the way, a footnote to yesterday's entry on the fallibility of plans: I mentioned that I need to get my "Art of Outrage" podcast posted to Artscene Visual Radio this week. Turning on my computer yesterday, on my return, I discovered that all my Garageband sound files had disappeared. Every last one of them. If Cardozo can't help me recover them later this morning, I'm sunk. I'll need to redo hours of work and thought... See what I mean about plans? And so it goes.)

Making plans

It's usually the same on Monday morning. I sit and ponder the necessity of the return to Los Angeles for the work week. I wonder what the traffic will be like. I wonder what the temperature will be like when we get there. I make lists of those things that need to be accomplished in the course of the week.

Today is no exception. I have that catalogue text to finish. I have a new "Art of Outrage" segment to submit... October 10 is the deadline for both. Ellie and I have an artists' group on Tuesday. And then Thursday and Friday I have to be back down south, since I have two teaching days at Cal State Fullerton. It seems like a lot...

The trick, of course, is to be where I am now, at 8AM Pacific time in Laguna Beach, ready to get down to the gym in a few minutes...

But there, see, already I think ahead. Who was it said that life is what happens when you're busy planning something else? John Lennon? And there's that joke about giving God something to laugh about... just make plans.

The Buddhist teaching? Simple, as usual: Be here now. Breathe. But even though I "know" better, I persist in living so much of my life in the future, consuming energy in useless preparation for events that will never turn out exactly as I expect them to anyway.

How about you?

Nightmare!

It was one of those dreadful nights you wouldn't wish on anyone. It started out okay. We watched "The History Boys"--one of those Brit schoolboy flicks with a good few laughs along the way and a good few poignant moments as the band of engaging ruffians grow up. We should have quit when that one finished. Instead, we slipped "Zodiac" into the DVD player (we had run out of Netflix, and picked up two movies at the local video store in the afternoon. Mistake.) "Zodiac"--which had great reviews when it came out, remember?--was the interminable story of the attempt to track down the killer of its eponymous title, with more tedious detail than anyone could possibly want to know and, after hours of teasing and hooking the viewer with the promise that one day this monster would be found, concluded with the revelation that he never was. Not really. We had to be satisfied with the exchange of a signifcant stare--indicating, presumably, that this was indeed the guy, though the case was unindictable. Ah, well. Give this one a miss.

And so to bed, much, much later than our usual time. Then the bad part started. I spent half the night, it seemed to me, embroiled in this dreadful dream--that also never ended. Coincidence? I don't know, but it started out with us going to a conference in a strange city in a foreign country--Spain? Mexico? It seemed somehow Latin--and parking the car at the outskirts because, well, you know why: it's impossible to park in the inner city these days, and taking the tram from there. Anyway, the conference was long and deadly dull on a topic that had no conceivable interest to us and it went on and on and when finally it ended we took the tram back to the area where we had parked the car...

... and found ourselves walking along a narrow path behind a crowd of impossibly slow fellow conferees until I gave Ellie the high sign and we managed to jump ahead which was when we suddenly realized that George the dog had been with us all along and had disappeared but then he happily reappeared and went ahead tail wagging for some reason off-leash which worried us of course but we didn't have one to put him on...

... and then we found ourselves in this strange kind of civic building with shopping mall attached and everything was closed and empty and we couldn't find our way out the other end and by this time of course we were totally lost but we finally did see "light at the end of the tunnel" in the form of big glass doors but the only way to reach them was down a steep slope of very fine sand with footprints sinking three feet deep so we looked for another way and found some concrete steps...

... but when we got down to the bottom of the steps a line of uniformed cops was barring the exit even though one of the doors was open a crack and we slipped through but one of the cops stood in our way and stopped us from getting out into the street until another friendlier one finally stepped in and let us pass with something like a shrug and a smile...

... and then soon we found ourslves in a strange house looking down into a kind of Dickensian parlor filled with the kind of things that fill a Dickensian parlor all for some reason in high color and high contrast and George the dog who was also in high contrast seemed to recognize this place because he began to bark excitedly though we ourselves still hadn't the first idea where we were and a portly old gentleman in the parlor looked at us askance over his newspaper as we walked nervously down the stairway into his parlor and slipped out through his parlor door and out of the house still hopelessly lost and kept on walking through the streets feeling, well you know how it feels to be lost in a strange city...

... and then when I woke up in our little cottage in Laguna Beach that feeling persisted and I found I couldn't stop looking for the damn car even though I was awake and aware that it had only been a dream. I just couldn't stop looking for the longest time until I finally got up to take George for his morning poop walk.

So riddle me that one, friends! I checked in with the Buddha a little later, to see what he might have to say about it. But he just kept saying, Breathe. Bring the attention back to the breath. I guess it helped.

Lying

I lied, she said. Marion Jones broke the hearts of millions of sports fans yesterday, after years of denial, when she admitted her use of steroids at the time of her triumphant Olympics.



After Barry Bonds, after all those other baseball players, after Floyd Landis and half the contestants in the Tour de France, it has come to this. Is it about the money? Is it about the desperate need to win? It seems that cheating is endemic in our sports today. Who knows what victory can be trusted any more?

Actually, when you think about it, sports are no different from the society they reflect. The same values pervade our society: win at all costs, take the money and run, defeat is not an option... I think back, for example, to the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. I think back to the record of the Bush administration. Our president makes it look as easy to lie as did our Marion Jones.

Is this just America, friends? Are we any worse than the rest of the world? I hope so. I hope not... If you'll forgive the paradox.

I do have something to say for this young woman, though. I was impressed by what seemed to me her genuine tears, the depth of her contrition, her acceptance of responsibility for her actions, the absence--too late, perhaps--of evasion. I was impressed that she seemed fully aware that "sorry" doesn't hack it, after so much damage done. I hope she realizes that there is big make-up work to be done, to reconstruct herself from the core out, in order to rediscover that self-respect that we all need to see us through. To rebuild trust...

It would be something, wouldn't it, if we were to see the same readiness to accept responsbility, the same accountability from those who purport to lead us? More denial, yesterday, from Bush, in the matter of torture, on the same day that Jones was able to find some honesty in her heart. More lies, too, about that incomprehensible veto of funds for medical insurance to cover the vulnerable children of our near-poor. More twisting of the truth to justify an unjustifable ideological agenda. If the man truly wanted to shrink goverment and accept fiscal responsibility, he should have started long ago. Conclusion: he didn't. All he wanted was to serve the interests of the corporations and the super-rich. In which, if in no other area of human concern, he has proved eminently successful.

"The Lives of Others"

This seems to be a week for movie reviews. Last night we rented "The Lives of Others"--a great film, and an uncomfortably timely reminder of the cruelty and the futility of torture in a week when the Burma junta of generals again comes to world attention with their human rights abuses; and on a day (yesterday) when the New York Times headlined the shameful story of Bush's continuing, secret authorization of techniques "to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics" in the course of interrogation.



"The Lives of Others" is the story of a state-sponsored eavesdropper and torturer--not the kind who pulls out toenails and applies electrical shocks to the genitals, but one who gets results by sleep and sustenance deprivation and prolonged, relentless and implacable questioning followed up by threats to the subject's loved ones. The first scene shows that he's very good at what he does. He's on his way up in the Stasi (the former East German secret police) organization. He seems bloodless, pitiless, intent--and deadly fearsome in his impassivity. (A brilliant performance, by the way, by the actor Ulrich Muehe.)

Once it begins, the story involves a famous playwright of conscience and his actress lover--the unfortunate object of lust of a senior state official who orders the exposure of the playwright as a national enemy. Our hero is given the assignment to bug and monitor the apartment that the couple share, and the story is of his gradual awakening to the realization that neither he nor the state have the right to spy on the private "lives of others." Falsifying the reports from his nightly surveillance from a loft above the apartment, he increasingly puts his own career on the line, risking exposure, disgrace, and imprisonment himself.

The plot thickens with the suicide of a despairing friend of the writer in this oppressive regime, and his decision to smuggle an illegal article on the subject to a West German magazine. The events lead to a climax that is at once heart-breaking and, finally, uplifting, as our spy comes to listen to the voice of his own conscience with unintentionally tragic results. Forced by the Stasi to practice his dark art on the actress this lonely man has come, in some strange way, to love, he is confronted decisively with the inner conflict between the path his life has taken and a good, human, even compassionate heart.

The tragedy here is the senselessness of it all, the way in which truth evaporates in the grip of the police state, where torture and compulsion stifle it, wrecking lives along the way. It is shameful, indeed, to think that our own country practices such methods, employing terror in the name of fighting terror. It is shameful to have a President and a Department of Justice who sanction such behavior, in the face of common consensus that it is not only inhuman but that its results are as likely to be false and unreliable. We are not a police state in this country, but we have unforgivably allowed our government to adopt some of the police state's tactics; and to see this gripping movie about a period we have supposedly left behind us, along with the Cold War, is to be reminded, tragically, of what is still being perpetrated in our name.

(Oh, and then I open up my New York Times this morning and find this picture on the front page.



Remind you of anyone?)