Sabbatical

The Buddha Diaries is going on sabbatical.

I woke up this morning--the first in a planned six-week stay at our Laguna Beach cottage--with that thought clearly in mind. I have long been postponing work on the book I have mentioned several times in these pages, and parts of which have appeared here from time to time along the way. It's time to clear the clutter of other stuff out of my mind and concentrate on that task, if I'm to ever get it done. I'm encouraged especially to get down to this by the interest of my friend Paul Gerhards at When this is, that is, and his imprint, Parami Press.

There's the accompanying fear, of course, that I will lose all those readers, whose presence here on The Buddha Diaries is often silent, but always felt and appreciated. If you include The Bush Diaries, I have rarely missed a day since that first blog started November, 2004. Even when traveling, I have managed to keep up with "the blog" on an almost daily basis. I have loved doing it, and particularly have loved knowing that my words reach people, and mean something to them. This is what a writer needs more than anything.

But the time has come to take a break. I haven't decided on a return date, since I'm unsure when the work I want to do will be finished, but I hope that you'll start watching for me again in early September. In the meantime, have a great summer. And wish me luck.

Elegy (the Movie)

I'm grateful to Netflix for providing me with easy leads to movies I might otherwise have overlooked. Such was the case with Elegy, the 2008 film by Isabel Coixet, based on Philip Roth's short novel, The Dying Animal, which I might have missed entirely, and that would have been a shame. I think it's a terrific piece of work, well worth the watching.

The story, frankly, is not a startlingly new or original one: aging academic, David, (Ben Kingsley,) more in touch with his libido than his heart, falls for Consuela, a stunning student, 30 years his junior (Penelope Cruz!) and gets in touch with all those difficult feelings he never knew he had. His closest friend and confidant, George, (Dennis Hoppe

r) tries to talk sense into him, but he's a goner. Subplot: an estranged middle-aged son (Peter Sarsgaard) with whom he finally, through near-tragedy, finds common ground. So it's all about age and dying, love and sexuality, fathers and sons and friends and lovers, in short, the vulnerability of the human heart...

I know, it all sounds a bit hackneyed. What makes it a truly engaging and touching story is the quality of the acting. Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz manage to create--and, harder, to maintain the spark of what the movie folk call "chemistry"; their passion seems real, at once tender and painful, edgy and profound. It doesn't hurt, of course, they they are both terrific-looking people, whose character shines brilliantly in their faces, and particularly their eyes. Their love scenes are frank, courageous, compelling, and erotic. And once they get past the bodies--and David past the difference in their ages--they find something very much like love.

As Consuela, Cruz manages to hold her own both as a character and an actress with the powerful Ben Kingsley. A young woman of extraordinary beauty, she exudes a power of her own that transcends her physical attributes. Unwilling to be David's toy or "mistress," she falls in love slowly, with mindful circumspection and full awareness of her own wants and needs; and when her great challenge comes, as it does, she handles it with equal measures of grief and grace, showing herself to be more mature, in important ways, than her older lover.

What a great role for Dennis Hopper, too--and how beautifully he plays it! As the poet-friend and academic colleague of Kingsley's character, George acts--surprisingly, perhaps, for Hopper--as what the French call the "raisonneur," the voice of reason, paled by the towering passion on the other side. He keeps trying to reel David back in to the safer path of sanity, to change him back into the simple, randy bed-hopper with whom he, George, had always been comfortable in the past, because in bed-hopping there is no risk, no emotional investment, no potential loss. I'll refrain from revealing the powerful even shocking climax in the relationship between these two aging charmers. Suffice it to say that this one scene alone is worth the price of the ticket.

The father-son relationship is also played out well, resolving itself in another turn of the plot that brings two together in a way that has eluded both of them since David abandoned his wife and young son years before. The son's anger and frustration, his struggle with self-pity and the need for his father's love, are delicately played by Sarsgaard opposite the domineering, seemingly uncaring Kingsley. It's only when they discover common ground that they can come to a still tentative peace between them.

In all, this "Elegy" is a satisfying and convincing human drama, one that engages us in the lives of its participants with very human feelings for their various predicaments and challenges. If you haven't yet seen it, I'd encourage you not to miss it.

Obama: Part V

I promised yesterday that I'd be writing more about a painting that startled me in our friend Lynne McDaniel's studio. Here it is:

(This past Monday, by the way, was the 30th anniversary of Jimmy Carter's malaise speech, in which he--modestly, but unwisely, as it turned out--itemized a long list of complaints about his presidency from Americans of all walks of life, invited to Camp David to meet with the President precisely for that purpose. In the speech, he identified the malaise of which he spoke as "a fundamental threat to American democracy... a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity and purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America." It seems a good time to revisit those remarks.)

Lynne's double portrait of Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter (enlarge for full effect!) is called "Through Their Eyes." Presciently, it was done long before Obama's presidential campaign and election, and shortly after the famous speech he gave at the 2004 Democratic convention--the one that turned the nation's head in this young man's direction. Lynne used photographic images for her picture. A part of the reason it's so striking is that she made one significant change: Jimmy Carter has Obama's penetrating dark brown eyes, while Obama has been gifted with Carter's blue ones. Hence, of course, the title.

I think it's an extraordinary and challenging piece of work--and not only because the painting itself is so terrific. It is. Lynne has done an excellent job with the likeness; the quality of her line and brush-work needs no comment from me. Much more than that, however, the painting is rich in both profound and provocative associations--which is the reason that I felt the need to share it. It deserves a wider audience than the one it has thus far received, hanging quietly on the artist's studio wall. (Please feel free to forward the image, with or without this post.)

Let's talk about those profound associations first--the notion of two men from astonishingly different backgrounds who came to share the same destiny as the world's most powerful leader. The painting is a study of that power from two points of view--its devastating after-effects on the face of the older man, and its emanation in the form of hope and promise on the younger. It's a study, also, that tells us much about the psychology of the men themselves, and about the aging process; we read much in this simple juxtaposition of images about the physical effects of age on the human face, and the different kind of energy projected by two men at different stages of their life. It's also, profoundly, as a study of black and white America, about the inexorable process of historical change. The picture confronts us, unambiguously, with a reality that has changed radically for the better in the past forty years. Lynne's painting seems to assert that black and white are, quite simply and inarguably, equal.

Provocatively, though, the painting raises the frightening specter of the "Carterization" of Obama. I recall, as perhaps you do too, the hopes that we liberals and progressives pinned on Jimmy Carter when we elected him in 1977, after the bitter taste of the Nixon years and the interregnum of Gerald Ford. We wanted radical change, we wanted a more transparent and responsive government, we wanted an end to war and partisan strife, we wanted principled compassion and justice to prevail over heartless greed and power-mongering, and we projected the responsibility for all these needs onto this one, all-too fragile figurehead who could never have hoped to match them.

When he failed to meet up with our expectations and projections, we began to think of him as weak and ineffectual--and projected those qualities, in turn, on the man in whom we had vested so much power. The eventual failure of his administration was, to my way of thinking, as much ours as his. The electorate, childish as ever, began looking to Ronald Reagan for the daddy figure we seemed to need to take care of us, and to compare Carter's image unfavorably with the skilled performance of that screen actor, whose illusion of strength we were eagerly taken in by. (I say "We..." Not me, of course! It's never ME. Is it?) Sure, Jimmy Carter had his failings. He was, in reality, far from the perfect model of strength and manly authority we longed for. So we settled for the illusion instead.

It's my fear that we could easily end up doing the same with Obama. When I wrote the original essay in this series, "When Do We All Grow Up?" it was this fear I had in mind. Once more we have a President who is far from perfect and far from all-powerful. He needs the help and support of millions of others if he's to achieve those things he promised to strive for. Once more we are beginning to perceive--and name--the man's weaknesses, and our points of disagreement. And once more we risk creating the reality we project on him. Government, as I've tried to say, is a contract, depending as much on a willingness to be governed as to govern. I've tried to say that, certainly, yes, it's our job to criticize and hold our man's feet to the fire. We must do so, though, with a clear understanding of the risks involved in each of us insisting on the achievement of our own particular goals at the cost of the substantive change we need--a change that can only be arrived at through deliberate means. It's a big ocean liner we're all sailing on, to use that old cliche; it won't be turned around with a quick or easy spin of the wheel.

Obama is not Jimmy Carter. I happen to think he's made of tougher, less relenting steel. I don't see him offering a "malaise speech", like Carter's exercise in self-deprecation, in order to mitigate his falling poll numbers. But the juxtaposition Lynne McDaniel offers us in her painting is certainly striking, poignant--and more than a little worrisome.

(For an interesting historical reminder of the Carter speech and its ripple effects, see this book review in yesterday's New York Times.)

A Celebration

Our artists' group met last night for an end-of-season celebration at the home and studio of Lynne McDaniel, one of our members--a beautiful hundred-year-old craftsman house in the Altadena hills.





As usual, though we had the camera with us, I was not picture-conscious enough to bother with exterior--or even much in the way of interior pictures.  I wish I had paid more attention to the architecture than the furniture, but perhaps the above will give a flavor...

We enjoyed hors d'oeuvres in Lynne's studio--I'll have more to say about one of her paintings in a later post--and an alfresco potluck dinner with extraordinary artist-designed cupcakes by Midge Lynn...

... as delicious, I have to say, as their outward appearance.

We will not be meeting over the summer months, but will start again as usual in September.  Ellie and I have lost track of the number of years we have been working together with this small, select, and ever-evolving group, but some of our number say it is at least fifteen.  We have certainly treasured--and continue to treasure--the experience, and the artists who join us appreciate the benefits of a shared community of interests and, always, conversation that takes us thoughtfully, often deeply, into matters of mutual concern.  

It is easy for an artist--or a writer, for that matter--to get isolated in the studio, particularly at a moment in our history when so many truly talented people are starved for the response their work deserves. I have always disagreed with those who say that we make art primarily for ourselves. It is an act of self-examination, for sure. But making art--writing--is also an act of communication. And in a world where communication has been so thoroughly commercialized, those who get seen and heard are mostly those who are ready and able to get swept up in the march of commerce. All the more need, then, for communities like ours, where we can show and speak with the assurance that we will be both seen and heard.   It's a necessary part of the creative process.

Le Tour

Those who have been with me on The Buddha Diaries since this time last year may remember that I'm an avid follower of the Tour de France.  Have been since I was a teenager in the early 1950s, with my own spiffy red drop handle-bar sports bike with a ten-speed Benelux derailer gear--very fancy equipment for its time--on which I raced around the Sussex downs.  It was mostly, I fear, to get away from school and enjoy one of the little Woodbine cigarettes to which I soon became addicted.  

The Tour, of course, is a more benign addiction.  It's the only sports event I ever watch on television--though unfortunately it lasts for twenty-one days!  These days, I have the luxury of recording it on Versus, with the ability to surf through the commercials and the boring bits at high speed.  And, with the return of Lance Armstrong after a four-year "retirement," this year's has been one of the most fascinating races I can remember, including a compelling and as yet unresolved drama on the Astana team in which he rides.  Last year's Tour winner, Alberto Contador, finds himself unexpectedly in competition for the team leadership--and leadership of the Tour itself--with this rugged and canny old-timer who has won the race seven times and appears to be gunning for an eighth.  Team-mates, some of them real contenders for the win themselves, are increasingly in a situation of divided loyalties, and their unity or disunity as a team will certainly have a significant impact on the outcome.

As for Lance, well, I assume he will still be riding the Tour in his seventies, and likely even then ahead of the pack.  



French fans have long delighted in grumbling about him, attributing his historic success in their race to doping; this year, to judge from media reports, there is less nasty whispering and more admiration and support for this peculiar giant of a sports event his presence has dominated for the past decade.  In interviews, he's playing it very cool indeed, embracing the role of the good team mate even while everybody knows he's out to win.  At the moment, he's in a comfortable third place, eight seconds behind the Tour leader and two behind Contador.  But there is still more than half the race to go, and some of the stages in the Alps will be the hardest yet.  We'll see if he continues to press his case in the mountains.

 

Contador has age and Armstrong's four-year absence working in his favor.  He's also a spectacularly strong climber. He needs to be careful, though, about alienating his team--as he did a couple of days ago--with an attack on them at the end of a hard day's ride, in which they loyally worked to pave the way.

Come to think of it, it's exactly what I was talking about yesterday. It's all a matter of discipline, right? Priorities, strategy, persistence...

So I'm looking forward to watching the coming stages of the race--and Ellie will have to put up with being a Tour widow for a couple more weeks. 

Discipline: Obama, Part IV

It occurs to me that our culture does not much encourage us to respect discipline, much less practice it. We grow up believing it to be the enemy of creativity and an obstruction to our imagined freedoms; and while we grudgingly acknowledge its value--for others, chiefly!--it is not something we embrace with enthusiasm in our own lives.

This is a shame, because it's discipline alone that can teach us to prioritize, to strategize, to persist, and to achieve.

Each one of us, I think, faces multiple choices in our daily lives, and we do not have time for all of them. I don't know about you, but for me the days are more likely to seem too short than too long. Between the chores and errands and the necessities (like eating!), it's often hard to find the time to do those things I actually want to do; and there are so many of those that I won't get any of them done unless I make some choices. I have to prioritize, to choose among them those that are the most important. It's a kind of mental triage, much better performed when it's done mindfully that when I allow pure circumstance to make the choices for me.

Once the choices are made, it's a similar practice of discipline that I need in order to strategize the implementation of my plans. Without some basic organization, things tend to go rapidly awry. I will need the basic materials, I may need to enlist the support of others--who may be more reluctant than I to see it through. I will certainly need to organize my thoughts; or, if I prefer not to start out with the thoughts but rather develop them along the way, at least find that starting thread that will lead me where I want to go, and determine the time and place I need to make it happen.

Of all the disciplines involved, however, I think persistence is the most important--and possibly the most difficult. There will inevitably be many distractions and many disappointments along the way, any one of which can weaken my resolve. The telephone rings, it's an important call that needs my immediate attention. The dog barfs on the carpet. The bills have not been paid, the leaves need sweeping outside in the garden. Or... the work is proving harder than I had imagined. The words won't flow the way I want them to. What I thought at first was an excellent idea turns out to lead me nowhere. I begin to worry about whether I've said it right, about how I might be judged by others.

I can soon find myself in a stew that only persistence can help me out of. Persistence is a discipline, too. It's a rejection of every distraction and excuse that comes along and a return of the attention to the task at hand. It's a refusal to be deterred from the purpose I have set myself, a quiet insistence on the pursuit of this particular goal. If I don't have it and put it into practice, I can forget about achievement. I'm not going anywhere.

These thoughts were prompted in good part by a much broader concern, this one on the national, even global scale: my continuing--even increasing--worry that we stand to squander the very opportunity we created with the election of President Obama. I keep coming back to this because I believe the country--and indeed the world--to be in very real danger. We're at a moment in our history where we need ourselves to exercise some of the discipline that attracted us to Obama in the first place, after the spectacle of a president who seemingly had none, and who drove us mindlessly into the abysmal mess in which we find ourselves today.

As I said earlier, we grudgingly admire in others the discipline that we lack ourselves, or fail to exercise. At the same time, it unnerves us. Our natural tendency--eternal children that we are--is to rebel against it. Barack Obama, it seems to me, is a man of steely resolve. How else could he have achieved what he has already achieved? How else could he have won the presidency, other than with those abilities to prioritize, to strategize, and to persist? And yet when we see him now--prioritizing, strategizing, persisting--we get impatient. Because the achievement of a particular goal might require a sidestep, a feint, a parry rather than a thrust, we are ready with accusations of backsliding and promises unkept. If a principle we hold dear becomes a willow rather than an oak, adapting its strength to the force of the wind instead of snapping in the attempt to remain upright at all costs, we natter on about the loss of integrity and the abandonment of principle.

I only hope that Obama's discipline will outlast our impatience and our skepticism. A man of willowy strength, he understands better than his adversaries the power of knowing when to bend--and when it's important to stand straight. I choose to believe in his integrity, that those things he put forward as his beliefs and the promises he made when he campaigned and we elected him are still his beliefs and promises. He may not be able to achieve them all in the time at his disposal. It's possible that he'll be brought down by the weight of the multitude of less disciplined minds who seek to satisfy more immediate needs and reap more immediate rewards. For myself, having trusted him enough to cast my vote for him, I'm planning to trust him to take the longer view.

Wet Dog

George came back from an early morning walk at the beach so wet and sandy that he needed a bath. Luckily, there was someone on hand to give it to him. I wonder at the life this creature leads. His every need is taken care of, and he accepts it all with imperturbable aplomb, aware that this is no more than his due...

It's George who supervises the morning wake-up in our household. He stirs pretty much at first light and takes care of his ablutions--a ritual that involves a great deal of chewing, scratching and licking, with particular attention to the crotch, and considerable thumping of the hind leg on the bed. That done, he'll quickly sense if I'm awake and make a nest for a while between my legs, until he decides it's time for Ellie to wake up--a favor he bestows with noisy licks to the cheek. She calls it love and kisses. I call it the cream she uses on her face.

Once he's sure that everyone is properly awake and at his service, George requires his morning walk for a pee and, usually, a couple of poops; after which, of course, it's breakfast. And time to get back to the major work of the day: more sleep.

Freedom: Simple Thoughts

I've been thinking about my freedom and my rights... without, perhaps, much consequence or depth. It's simple, really. I've been thinking that no one can give me freedom, no one can assure my "rights"--except myself.

There are many freedoms I am required by law to surrender: I am not free to drive a hundred miles an hour on the freeway--or only at the risk of incurring a big fine, or a stint in jail if I happen to have been drinking alcohol at the same time. I am not free to walk into my neighbor's house and walk off with that Tiffany lamp I have long admired. There are many freedoms that I surrender voluntarily: I am not free, by choice, to walk into that same neighbor's house and seduce his charming wife. Nor am I free, by choice, to live on a diet of hamburgers, french fries, and ice cream.

Given these conventionally accepted restrictions on my freedoms and my rights--whether social, moral, or purely practical--I think my way back to the irreducible wisdom and sanity of the Buddhist teachings: the only real freedom, like the only real happiness, is what I work mindfully to find within. Freedom and rights, and their exercise, are skills, to be practiced with the circumspection required by doing no harm--whether to myself or others.

That's simple. And, yes, liberating.

Unfinished Dreams; and R. Crumb

I dreamed I was a rookie cop. I was unfamiliar with the city where I was supposed to go to work, and unfamiliar with the procedures. The cops who came to pick me up to show me the ropes were patient, but I was unable to find my clothes. We had just moved into this new place where we were living, and I was unsure where Ellie had put everything. She was still fast asleep. I managed to find a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and asked if these were appropriate. The female cop told me they weren't so I set about looking for other things to wear--a pair of sweat pants, no shirt... and it was particularly galling that I could find no underwear. Eventually we set out to the city streets in the unmarked cop car...

Sorry, friends, I don't remember any more. I do remember, though, the fragment of another dream. I had started smoking cigarettes again, after twenty years. I was lighting up these long, thin, poorly packed home-made jobs, and Ellie was mad at me because she said I had smoked at least five or six already that day; to which I retorted angrily that, no, I had only smoked two or three. However, curiously, I did wake myself up with a smoker's cough. I used to have one, so I know what it feels like, and this was definitely a smoker's cough. I woke up hacking away, and feeling that nasty tickle in the throat...

So there you have it. I had to get up very early today, to record an interview for my Art of Outrage series. My next piece will be about R. Crumb, whose hilariously indecorous cartoons have been a vital feature on the comix landscape for the past forty years.


(This image pirated from the artist's website, with apologies...) The show I'm working on has been traveling for a while, ending up at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana. The artist, I hear, is currently working on his own version of the Genesis story...


Have a good one.

Zen: The Boot Camp

Zen. It’s a word so much bandied about, in our Western culture, with often so little understanding that it has come to mean, to paraphrase the Red Queen, whatever we want it to mean. Most of us agree, though, that its many associations encompass a special kind of discipline of mind, a special kind of formal perfection in all things material, and an acknowledgment of the irreducible enigma of human existence.

Now learn about Zen as it is practiced in the training monastery at Eiheiji in Kaoru Nonomura’s book, Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan’s Most Rigorous Zen Temple, originally published in Japanese in 1996 and recently translated into English—(and not to be confused with Elizabeth’s Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love.”) Nonomura, renamed Rosan for his life as a Zen monk trainee, chose to drop out from the Tokyo business rat race at the age of thirty in order to find deeper meaning for his life, and signed up instead for a demanding existence of hard work, spiritual practice and self-denial at Eiheiji. As we find out from his story, he got more than he bargained for.

I have always admired what I have known about Zen, but I have honestly never warmed to it. Rosan’s experience helps me to understand why. To describe Eiheiji as boot camp does too much honor to the US Marine drill sergeants, who seem positively avuncular by comparison with these monks. Subjected to a daily regimen of constant physical, verbal and emotional abuse, sleep deprivation, and illness-inducing dietary insufficiency, the trainees at Eiheiji are required to perform every task to perfection or risk the kicks, beatings and tongue lashings that rain down upon them at the slightest deviation from accepted standards.

The rules are written down in the 13th century text by Dogen, the founder of Zen Buddhism. They are prescriptive down to the last detail and cover everything from washing the face and use of the toilet to the sounding of each bell and gong—and there are many of these at Eiheiji, each sounded for a differently prescribed occasion at a differently prescribed moment in the day. The rules are also inflexible. They must be learned and followed. Infraction is punishable, and punished without mercy. The same with procedures for cleaning, sitting, serving, eating… A new trainee may not make eye contact with an older one, but hurry past with eyes averted and hands clasped in respect. Eye contact, even inadvertent, is rewarded with an immediate cuff and a shouted rebuke.

Rosan’s narrative in this short book is as crisply detailed as the monastery’s rules, following the day-to-day physical existence of a trainee and describing the rituals and practices with such precision that we are drawn in to feel actually present and engaged ourselves. We feel the hard edge of the winter’s cold and the incessant pain in legs and knees that accompanies motionless sits that last for days on end. There comes a point when you begin to wonder, in all this insistent physical detail, where the spirit enters into this religious life—and then you remember that, for the Zen practitioner, the spirit is precisely IN the physical detail. It’s a matter of surrendering the distractions of self and the self’s needs, and paying unwavering attention to what is there—even if only the blank surface of the wall in front of you—or to the task at hand. “Eat Sleep Sit” provided me with an experience as close to Zen as I’m ever likely to come.

As a footnote to this reading, I happened to tune in to "Nova" last night on the television, and found myself watching a marvelous episode, Secrets of the Samurai Sword. It's a fine reminder of the symbiosis between Zen practice and others aspects of Japanese culture. In the sword-making process, strict attention to detail and observation of ritualistic detail, from the preparation of the steel to the honing of the sword's edge, assures a quality unmatched in any other part of the world. Distinctions between craft and art vanish in this process, as do traditional distinctions between matter and spirit. In the context of our culture of mass production and mass consumption, the patience, focus, and insistence on perfection leave the viewer awe-inspired and nostalgic for a time when such qualities were valued.

Jury Service Redux

I was happy to see that the story of my jury service got some legs with a link on my friend John Bisnar's blog the other day. As a follow up, I did get a nice response from the defendant's attorney. As yet no word from the plaintiff's. I would have thought the latter would have had more to learn about the juror's experience.

Here's a link to the original story.

Michael Jackson: The Memorial Today

I've been struggling to understand what it is about Michael Jackson that his premature death has been allowed to dominate the media for the past... what?  Ten days?  

I'm in no position to judge his talent.  I do not have much of an ear for music, though from a broadly cultural point of view I can understand that he ranks somewhere up there with Elvis Presley as a pop icon.  Was Beatlemania any different, I wonder, from the Presley worship that verges on idolatry?  My sense is that even John Lennon, whose assassination was a tragic reminder of the insanity of gun violence in this country, has not been sanctified in quite the same way as Elvis.  Michael Jackson, though, seems headed in that direction.

It's not just a matter of hero-worship.  We do need heroes, especially in a world where each one of us risks being lost in the crush of humanity around us.  We like to have heroes with feet of clay, and Jackson's--to put it nicely--oddities with regard to his physical appearance, his racial and sexual ambiguity, his unhealthy predilection for the company of children lent his life story a drama that was an endlessly fascinating source of public controversy.  He needed, and attracted, those who would rush passionately to his defense.  

He also cultivated the image of himself as a Peter Pan, a child who did not wish, or was not allowed to grow up.   As such, perhaps, he spoke to the child in his fans--the child in each of us--in a world where the gap between the innocent dreams of childhood and our experience of life as adults gives rise to so much dissatisfaction and unhappiness.  Those who loved him with such intensity were surely seeing some part of themselves in him--the part that dreams of wild success, universal love and admiration, along with unimaginable wealth and the illusion of freedom that accompanies it.        

And yet the illusory nature of this pop idol's success became sadly evident in his obsessive habits, including an apparent inability to nourish himself properly, his dependence on powerful drugs to kill the pain, his isolation and reported paranoia and his erratic behavior patterns--all suggest a man whose life was far from a fulfilling one.  Perhaps his death and the surrounding hoopla will serve, at some deep level of consciousness, to make us all aware of the discrepancy between the illusion of celebrity and the reality of a profoundly unhappy life cut short by self-destruction; and remind us of the need to look for true happiness elsewhere.

If I believed in an afterlife, I would wish Michael Jackson a far happier existence than the one he was given to experience this time around. 

Obama: Is It Time to Give Up?

This is the sad--and sadly serious--question I'm asking myself today.  Is it time to give up on a political system that is now so irremediably broken that it has become impervious to our needs and irrelevant to our lives?  Do we just leave those we elected as our representatives to get on with their incessant partisan blather while we get on with our lives?   Is it time, as Voltaire suggested at the end of "Candide", to "cultivate one's garden"?  Many friends have taken this path ahead of me, good-hearted and intelligent people who are no less concerned than I about the quality of our lives and our common future.  I have understood and respected their choice without, myself, wanting to make the same.  

I'm not sure what, right now, may have triggered this question.  Perhaps it was watching Future By Design, the film about Jacque Fresco, who advocates a (quietly) revolutionary approach.  He sees no beneficial outcome for the human species in adhering to outworn habits of thought and action; as he sees it, the old model of corporate, economic and political power is serving to get us only deeper into the mire we have already created.  What's needed now, he says, is a whole new model, a whole new way of thinking about ourselves, the way we live with each other, the way we make decisions...

I have been clinging on to the notion of hope.  I think I will still cling to it, when all's said and done, for at least a while longer--perhaps for long enough to see what happens with the health care legislation this year.  But I have watched with increasing dismay as "the system" manages to re-establish itself after the ripple of the Obama election, which I had seen as a greater disturbance than it seems, from our current perspective, to have been.   It has not taken long to return to the depressing, circular cliche of "politics as usual."  I have watched a mind I still consider to be superior and visionary constrained by political and social contingencies that stubbornly reject the possibility of change--out of fear, our of habit, out of ideologies long since proven to be barren.  I have watched the ranks of the nay-sayers grow serried on both left and right.  I have watched the failure of a social system born out of a belief in the rights of the individual, as the individual grows more strident in demands whilst the larger needs of society are buried in the resultant discord.  I have watched as once-great states--most notably our own, California--become ungovernable and jettison even the safety net that protected the children of the poor.  I continue to watch as the world goes mad with greed and commerce and the obsession with "growth," on the one hand; and with need, hunger, war and pestilence on the other.  I watch as the world's population continues to grow beyond our ability to cater to the needs of all, or even most of its inhabitants.  And I watch as those in power stand idly by and bicker over trivialities as the planet speeds on toward its possible destruction.

So is it time to give up?  Not on humankind, for God's sake, no.  But on the system we have created in order to govern ourselves and serve our common interests and our common goals?  Last summer I visited a friend in Oregon and was disappointed in his lukewarm reaction to Obama.  He had already given up on the old, and was embarked on the search for something new.  Perhaps out of despair, but not despairingly.  His wisdom was/is to see stalemate for what it is, and to test the potential for salvation in small groups gathering together to cultivate individual integrity and responsibility, and to take action in the world in the context of a communal good.  He was, as I see it, beginning to "cultivate his garden."  He calls it creating sacred lifeboats.

I have been telling myself that I'm not that far along that I need to jump overboard.  I have been persisting in the hope that things can change within this broken system; that this Barack Obama can change hearts and minds, as a preliminary to making those significant changes in health care, the economy, the environment, world peace... the changes that we sorely need.  Call me quixotic, naive, gullible, but I want to hold on to that hope a while longer yet.  Which is why I have been posting these Obama pieces in the past couple of weeks, in the attempt to get my own head straight--and convey something of my personal struggle with others who may share my views.  

The fact that I have received so much response in bringing up these matters suggests that there are many who share my doubts as well as my by now somewhat desperate hope.  I'm particularly saddened that there are those who have read my words as a dismissal of the importance or urgency of gay rights.  I understand, I think, where they're coming from, but that was far from my objective.  It's one, only, of many points on which I personally disagree with the President without dismissing him, and without using my disagreement to withdraw my support or undermine his efforts.  As he has often said, it's not about him; it's about us.  He needs me, as he needs all of us who seek to bring about serious change in America.  I was talking with a gay friend at the gym today, who said this: "I need to believe in that man."  We agreed that Obama is having to walk a crooked path, not the straight (no pun intended) line that those who hew to a straight (ditto) ideological path would have him do.   For now, I'm choosing to believe that he's playing a canny game to reach goals that we share.  And unlike Rush Limbaugh, I do want him to succeed.

So my answer still is No, it's not yet time to give up.  It's a time to be pragmatic rather than ideological.  Time to push forward, against the deadwood opposition.  Time not to let personal needs and anger get in the way of a last chance to return to sanity.   It's no sacrifice of principle to recognize that uncompromising adherence to principle can sometimes serve only to achieve the opposite of its goal.  As Shakespeare cautioned us in one of my most frequently used quotations, it's sometimes necessary to follow the crooked path in order to find our way: "by indirection," Hamlet said, we "find directions out."

That said, and while I understand the caution of his approach, I would wish that our President could see his way to be more bold in word and action, and take more risks than he has been willing to do thus far.  So far as I can tell, the worst is already happening.  We have nothing left to lose.  

Palin: Strictly Un-Buddhist...

... thoughts.  Is there not somewhere, still, at least one Republican leader willing to step forward in the attempt to spare us from this woman's voice for the next--big gulp!--two and a half years?  

Ever the masochist when it comes to politics, I listened to the full 18 minutes of her inane "announcement" speech yesterday.  The quacking of ducks and honking of geese in the background seemed like an entirely harmonious accompaniment to her chirpy bleat.  

The upside, of course, is that--should the media perform according to expectations--she will provide an ever-present, all-too-obvious reminder of the alternative to the cool, measured, commanding--and, yes, less than perfect--governing style of President Barack Obama.

Imagining the Future

I no longer remember who it was that suggested I should take a look at Future By Design, the movie about Jacque Fresco, a man who has spent his already long life imagining the future. If it was you who made the suggestion, thank you: I watched it last night and found it fascinating and provocative. Here's a link to the trailer.

Fresco's vision goes further than a simple utopian dream. He is a practical man, a designer and inventor, who realizes his vision in multiple ways--everything from the large-scale completed architectural structures in the exemplary site that is a part of The Venus Project, to tiny surgical instruments. It seems, to judge from the story the film tells, that his genius has not reached to turning his invention to financial profit, and that he continues to labor more for the joy and dedication than for the material return. He wants nothing less than to revolutionize the way we humans think about ourselves and inhabit the planet on which we are fortunate to live--from habitable, well-organized, people-friendly cities...


... to fast, clean transportation systems ...


... and energy efficient housing.



But for Fresco, it's not just about the buildings, the technology, the things. These are simply the tools by which to achieve the larger vision, which is to re-invent the way society works, based on the availability of resources rather than the exchange of money. He is convinced--along with many others these days--that we cannot survive as a species if we continue along the path of cutthroat competition for resources that only seem to be increasingly scant: they are readily available, he argues, if only we devote our scientific research and our technological skills to bringing them to the service of all, rather than exploiting them for the benefit of the few. It's what he calls a resource-based economy.

An adamant and eloquent opponent of the magical thinking of religion, he sees our salvation in science. We are hamstrung, he argues, by social convention, and by habits of thought that we elevate, without scientific basis, to the status of immutable truth: war, sickness, hunger and poverty would be non-existent in a world in which science and technology are dedicated to the common good. We allow our beliefs, though often groundless and counter-productive, to stand between us and a healthy future in which all people share in common prosperity. All we need to do, in effect, is change our minds.

I think this is something like what the Buddha said two and a half thousand years ago--at least the part about changing our minds. The Buddha, of course, was less concerned with material well-being and comfort, and more with what he saw to be the lasting happiness that can only be found within. Perhaps that's the spiritual counterpart to Fresco's vision--which is well worth checking out.

Up

We went to see Up last night and found it quite charming. Our daughter had insisted that we should see it in 3-D, but it didn't seem to be available in that version any more locally. I guess the 3-D theaters had moved on to new material. Still, I'm just as happy that we didn't. I discovered that dizzying heights bother me just as much on screen as in real life, and much of the film takes place at dizzying heights, with dizzying dives in space! For all that critics have swooned about it being a movie for adults as well as for children, I left with some of my usual reservations about Disney films. This one had its share of those cute and sentimental qualities that I tend to recoil from. Churlish me, I guess. Like the film's hero, Mr. Frederickson, who finds salvation through the adventure that he thought to have missed out on while his beloved wife (Ellie!) was still alive. As I say, we found it charming.

It was the previews, though, that had me wondering about what we're feeding our children in the guise of entertainment. Clearly, it's unfair to judge films on the basis of a two-minute preview, but I was struck by the eerie similarity of the several that we saw: all were big-screen, animated affairs, featuring battles between monstrous beings ranging from prehistoric dinosaurs and mammoths to sci-fi alien invaders from outer space. Accompanied by sound as violent and clashing as the images themselves, and created with a technology so sophisticated as to engulf the viewer with its overwhelming "reality", I could only imagine how these stories could impose on the receptive mind of a child.

It's a frightening aspect of our culture, I think, that we have reached the point where this kind of violence is what we present to our children in the form of summer entertainment. And, by some strange paradox, Disney has seen fit to bowdlerize the stories of the Brothers Grimm! Somehow, the image of the woodcutter opening up the belly of the wolf to release Little Red Ridinghood's grandmother was deemed, not too many years ago, to be unacceptable, while today the cacophonous clash of titans roars across the giant screens. The Grimms, it seems to me, understood the formative power of inviting the child imaginatively into the dark side of the psyche. The films today make it all too powerfully real.

So much for cute and sentimental!

Pina Bausch

I was shocked and saddened to read, in this morning's New York Times, of the death of Pina Bausch, a mere five days after her diagnosis with an undisclosed form of cancer. I saw only two performances by her Wupperthaler Tanztheater, and that was--really? Really!--twenty-five years ago, at the time of the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in 1984. The concurrent arts festival, put together with genius by an old friend, then President of California Institute of the Arts Robert FitzPatrick, was instrumental in introducing California to a hitherto-unknown constellation of international performers, including the "butoh" theater of the Japanese group Sankai Juku, and Pina Bausch.

The two Wupperthaler Tanztheater performances I saw (having seen the first, without knowing what I was getting myself into, I rushed out to buy scarce tickets to the second) left me with a lasting impression like few other artistic events I can remember. At once profoundly primitive and astoundingly new, sophisticated, hypnotically rhythmic, intensely emotional and meticulously staged, the choreography gripped me with its theatrical blend of tragedy and the absurd. Bausch managed to tap into the full range of the human experience, from our incipient cruelty and violence to our capacity for openness, vulnerability, and love. She offered all this, it seemed to me, untempered, raw, irresistible in its impact, probing her fingers into parts of my psyche that I barely knew existed. The experience was shattering, deeply moving, unforgettable. For this, I thank her memory.

This video, posted on UTube, gives a very inadequate sense of her achievements. There may be others... If you've never seen the work of this now-departed genius, it's worth the search.