Shopping

Once every couple of years or so, Ellie manages to talk me into a shopping expedition for new clothes. I'm hard on clothes. When I get new ones, they look good for a while, but pretty soon I begin to look like my sloppy old self again. And I don't need to look like one of those models in the New York Times Men's clothing supplement. But I understand the value of looking reasonably well put together--especially now that I'll be venturing out into the world to spread word about "Persist."

So yesterday was the day. I had promised before Christmas that I'd spend an afternoon at Fashion Island (!) and take advantage of the seasonal sales. We drove up the coast in unpromising weather, a slow, steady rain of the kind that makes driving in California hazardous. It's well-known that Californians have no idea how to drive in the rain. The invention of anti-lock brakes is a blessing for all those who have never learned that you drive into a skid, not against it... But that's another story.

We started out at one of the (very) slightly down-scale department stores, where prices are more or less reasonable--and the products of correspondingly inferior quality. I have always preferred shopping in these stores: Mervyn's, while it lasted, was my major supplier, and Target does me pretty well, too. See, what a shopping snob I can be? I had expected the stores to be mobbed. This one was virtually empty--as bereft of staff, it seemed, as of customers. The only place where actual people were visible was at the check-out counters, where solitary employees struggled to keep up with long, impatient lines of those wanting to make purchases. Actual help was out of the question. I found some things that I liked, but naturally every one of them was in the wrong size. Try to find someone to ask if they had the right fit... well, forget it. (We did, in fact, finally find a woman who seemed anxious and ready to help--but who informed us that "everything was out," and if we couldn't see the right size, it wasn't there.)

So we trudged over to a definitely more up-scale store, also less than crowded with eager shoppers. And here we found--miracle of miracles--the best "sales clerk" we had ever encountered. This was a young man who was helpful and polite; friendly in exactly the right measure, not overly anxious to please; efficient and thoughtful. When asked for suggestions, he listened seriously to our attempts to explain the "look" we were after, and came up with useful and appropriate ideas; when asked for his opinion, he took his time to look carefully and offer an honest appraisal as to what worked and what didn't, what fit nicely and what needed adjustment. He was willing to spend the time that it took to get things right. And he sold us a whole bunch of stuff. I shouldn't say that: he sold us some excellent outfits, exactly what we had been looking for, selected with care and nicely co-ordinated.

Turns out, this young man is an actor and a dancer! Should have figured that out from the balance and poise of his presence, his clear articulation, his alert and imaginative approach to this audience of two. Toward the end of our two-hour session, he allowed himself a few personal revelations, including that he had spent time traveling the world in his "other" profession--a sure way to expand the horizons of one's life. I told him about my new book and its theme--the predicament of the artist in a culture that worships celebrity and money--and his response was that of virtually every creative person I speak to: that's something I need to read!

I left with thanks for his help, and contact information, should he wish to receive the copy I offered to send him by way of appreciation for his fine work. I look forward to hearing from him, and will be delighted if that happens. David, if you read this, you have my card...

My Grandfather

I woke this morning thinking about my paternal grandfather--the one I didn't know. Well, I did know him if you count that picture of me sitting on his knee, aged about one. Here he is:



a distinguished-looking man, and a man of no small distinction. I have always felt sad to have been deprived of his presence in my life. Grandfathers are important to their grandchildren, and it saddens me, too, now that I am myself a grandfather, to be so far from my own three grandchildren, who live in England. Henry William Clothier was an electrical engineer, an inventor of systems that made high voltage switchgear safe for industrial use. His Wikipedia biography includes this version of a story I heard frequently from my father as a child:

In those early days, the electrical manufacturers of England held exhibitions of their products at Olympia. The highest voltage available was 20,000 volts, and even 11,000 volts was then a high and awe-inspiring potential. There were a number of high-voltage switch-panels on show, with white porcelain insulators and red, white and blue painted bus-bars; and their manufacturers gloried at hanging notices on these panels “20,000 volts – DANGER”. But Clothier, with his protective metal-clad switchgear in place, hung up on his panel “20,000 volts – NO DANGER”.

My father's mother died when he was just a lad--an early teenager. His father died years later, in 1938, at what was then a great distance, in New Zealand. I have no recollection of him, other than that single photo of me as a baby sitting with my older sister on his knee. From this and other pictures, I imagine him gentlemanly, kind, perhaps a little formal in that old British way. He was also, as the Wikipedia biography notes, a brilliant and creative man:

Those that worked closely with him were impressed by Clothier's ability to convert a germ of an idea into freehand sketch design which could readily be made into a working drawing. His colleagues can confirm that by the aid of these sketches it was often only a question of hours between the first conception of the idea and the completion of the manufactured article.

And a generous one:

Socially and communally he always took an active interest in the life of the district. He was at one time a member of the congregation of St. Peters. His energy was unbounded and his enthusiasm for doing good to others extended far beyond his professional life.

I wish I had known him, and feel the poorer for that loss. I know that my father, who lived on into his eighties, was deeply wounded by his mother's early death, and that he regarded his father with a kind of awe and perhaps a sense that he could never quite live up to his example. I also know that I owe my years in private boarding schools--during which I received an excellent education but failed utterly to grow up--to the relatively small financial benefit my grandfather managed to reap from his inventions.

It's not clear to me why Grandfather popped into my head this morning. I opened up a little space and he just arrived. Perhaps it's a matter of age. I'm much aware of the reach of generations through time, from my grandfather down through my father to myself, and on down to my sons, my daughter, and my grandchildren. On the masculine side--and I will confess that this has a particular significance to me, as a man, even in this post-feminist age--that's Henry, Harry, Peter, Matthew and Jason, Joe... Not a preference, I hasten to add! It's just something in the male gut!

If this doesn't scare you...

... nothing will. This link was sent to me by my friend, the artist Gary Lloyd, along with his wishes for the new decade. The speed and quantity of information coming at us in this twenty-first century is astounding--more, perhaps, than the human mind can tolerate. It was T.S.Eliot, wasn't it, who wrote that "mankind cannot bear too much reality"? What would he have had to say about virtual reality? I plan to introduce each of my forthcoming speaking engagements with a poem. I plan to invite participants to close their eyes and slow down their minds enough to hear the words and see the images, to create space for the poem to simply be. I plan to contrast that endless flow of superfast information with a single breath, fully experienced... Thanks, Gary.

Back to Work

So, yes, I will confess that I'm addicted. It feels all wrong to have spent these past few days--yes, even including Christmas--pretty much neglecting my daily writing practice, namely these Buddha Diaries. Last night I had two back-to-work dreams. In the first, I was anxious to show up on time for a fictional job, something I have not had for the past twenty-five years, since quitting academia in the mid-eighties. Getting there involved taking a small elevator from the shabbiest depths of some back alley, where a gang of aggressive louts took pleasure in beating people up. Waiting for the arrival of the elevator, I was aware of their lurking presence and waiting to be set upon. As one approached, I grabbed the nearest weapon, a gleaming, roundish metal object--but it proved to be covered with oil and slipped out of my grasp. Still, I managed to adequately defend myself and eluded my attacker... that one time. The next assailant was a hefty woman who, weirdly, approached me later in the dream to apologize...

The second dream took me back to the USC campus, where I taught many years ago. I had received a small envelope with my assignment of two classes, and showed up for the first at the appointed place. It was an unfamiliar and not entirely pleasant feeling, to be back in the classroom. Most of my first hour was devoted to the attempt to persuade one of the students, a rather ugly young man, that my class was not about facts and how-tos, but rather about the internals of the psyche. He was not having this, and had decided by the end of the session to withdraw from the class. I noticed, now that I looked carefully at his face, that he had no month--or rather than his mouth was misplaced, somewhere down below the jaw. I worried that the rest of the class--mostly, I have to say, attractive young women!--would follow his example and withdraw.

Leaving the classroom, I checked my envelope for details of the second class I was to teach and puzzled over the fact that there were only two. Was this a mistake? My full teaching load, I thought, should be three classes. I was quite relieved. But then, examining the reverse side of the envelope, I realized that I must have received the wrong one. This one was addressed to a Mr. Baines. (The bane of my life!) I would have to find the English office to seek a corrected version. But the campus was so much changed since my time there as to be unrecognizable. I had no idea where the English office could be. I tried consulting my I-Phone, but it proved unhelpful. I was still wandering around the campus when the dream ended.

I do feel the need to get back to work. There is much to be done. I'm happy, this morning, to be back to my writing practice. But my meditation was distracted by a thousand other things to do. I have neglected my email, and piles of messages have been arriving from new LinkedIn contacts, from Facebook, from Twitter. I have, perhaps foolishly, jumped into all these things in order to have means to spread word about "Persist." I do not know how to put these vehicles to best use, and feel obligated now to spend time getting familiar with the protocols and etiquette of each, and with their possibilities. I have review copies of the book to get into the mail, many of them to fill long-outstanding promises--I had expected to receive copies from the printer somewhat earlier than their actual arrival.

Looming ahead of me, too, are those speaking engagements I have been lining up. I have mentioned before in The Buddha Diaries that I don't consider myself a speaker, but a writer. Generally, in the past, when I have had to speak, I have written the words down and read them. With these coming events, I am determined to get past the hang-ups around speaking without notes. I can speak well. My voice, with its remnant English accent, seems to appeal to an American audience, and it remains a less-than-fully explored medium with which to reach out and touch people. As most of us, I suspect, I want my life to have had some meaning beyond the purely personal satisfactions, of which I have been blessed with many. I want to make a contribution of some kind to the lives of those with whom I'm fortunate to share this planet, and I see the challenge of this new medium as a way to expand my reach.

Has anyone noticed that the descriptive line below the title of The Buddha Diaries has changed from the one that used to evoke "the vicissitudes of life"? It's now simpler, more concise, more active in intention: "...getting to the heart of the matter." For me, it's an important statement of purpose about my writing. I can take it, also, as the motto for the practice of this new medium I'm approaching. I'll be reporting on it, I'm sure, in the first couple of months of 2010, as I begin to see how it all turns out.

A Boxing Day Card

My friend, the artist Stuart Rapeport, sent me a link to this snapshot of his Highland Park neighborhood, which I found to be quite delightful, and so much in keeping with what I have been saying recently on The Buddha Diaries about lifeboats. A neighborhood like this one is a lifeboat, too. Stuart's brief film gives a real sense of community, a particular kind of love in its loving attention to detail. The voice-over narrative is another plea for community, for a sense of common--and mutual--responsibility for each other as human beings sharing the plight and the joys of our human predicament. Please accept it, with my thanks to Stuart, as a Boxing Day card.

Breathing in the Buddha

Here's a fine new publication by the documentary photographer Alan Brigish. Breathing in the Buddha is "a photographic exploration of Buddhist life in Indochina," and it documents a journey that takes Brigish through thee major cities in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, and at greater length through city and countryside in that elusive country, Burma. (The old name has a resonance for me personally that the new one, Myanmar, seems to lack. Perhaps it's the bad old British Empire genes, but I go with Burma.)

Brigish sets out with his camera, "curious about how Buddhist daily life works" in these four Indochinese countries. His lens is then appropriately directed toward two points of interest: the faces and activities of the people--most of them living in states of economic deprivation--and the serene beauty of the Buddhist temples and the stunning artifacts that grace their often opulent interiors.

It is, frankly, at once a compelling and an uncomfortable contrast. The photographs are absolutely gorgeous, reflecting the beauty of their subjects--first and foremost the faces, young and old. The young are fresh-faced, bright-eyed, their emotions close to the surface, whether in child-like joy or, sometimes, pain, suffering and sadness. The old reflect the hardness of lives lived in circumstances far less comfortable that those in which we live here in the West; and, in the case of Burma, in a society repressed by a tyrannical regime. In this context, the aesthetic opulence of the temples reminds me inevitably of the disparity between the architectural grandeur of the medieval church and the real lives of people living in the shadow of the great cathedrals. The monks, saffron-robed and smiling, seem a bit removed from the social circumstance, protected in their spiritual cocoon; and yet their omnipresence clearly provides solace, along with their reminder of values that transcend the suffering of the daily grind.

What Brigish is anxious for us to see, I think, is that human beings can find fulfillment and contentment in their lives, a kind of happiness, without those things that have come to seem essential to the Western mind; property, convenience, comfort--material well-being. The text of his book is the narrative of his journey and his observations along the way. Its subtext, importantly, included at intervals throughout the book in font that mimics the handwritten word, is the Buddha's fundamental teaching of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. It's a point-counterpoint strategy, image and text, narrative and teaching, that creates the rhythm that moves the reader through the book.

Brigish is wise to have hewed to the photo-documentary format here, and to have insisted as much on text as on image to convey his story, as well as on a modesty of scale. I'm sure it could have been tempting to go for a large-format, coffee table book replete with the kind of full-page, sumptuous images his photographs could have lent themselves to; but that would have been to introduce another, more damaging contradiction--the condescending Romanticization of hardship, the beautifying of the deprivation and suffering of others. Brigish has managed to avoid this trap with the commendable restraint of his presentation, a desire to share his observations without fanfare or eclat.

In the same context, I was happy that Brigish kept his story personal. It reads like a journal, the intimate record of a journey and of the meanings he himself discovered. His inclusion of the Buddhist teachings feels more like an act of personal realization than a need to preach some pre-established dogma or illustrate a point. Rhyming with his images, they offer themselves for reflection and establish a perspective through which the reader/viewer is invited to share the experience in a meaningful way, to "breathe in" the pages as they turn.

Not having visited any of the countries through which Brigish leads us, I am grateful for the opportunity of this glimpse into a world that was previously unknown to me--which is, after all, the familiar pleasure of all good books.

An Unexpected Pleasure

Here's how it went: on returning from my usual Sunday morning sit at the Laguna Sangha yesterday, I found a message on my Facebook page from a regular Buddha Diaries reader, to say that she was spending a few days in Laguna Beach on a visit from Europe, where she lives. She had been hoping, she said, to run into Ellie and George and me on one of her walks, sure that she would recognize us from our pictures on the blog. So far, though, no luck. I wrote back to her Facebook page to say I'd be delighted to meet her, and to suggest the best way to contact me.

Meanwhile... Ellie, who had chosen this particular morning to take a long walk instead of joining the sit, returned with George to say, You'll never guess... But of course I already had: this woman had approached her up on the cliff in Heisler Park with a tentative, "Ellie...?" She had recognized George first--George being the most recognizable of the three of us...

... and Ellie next. So a little later she called and we invited her round for afternoon tea at the cottage--very English!--and she came, with her brother, bearing gifts of fruit cake and coffee cake, and we sat and spent a delightful while chatting and getting to know each other.

And I realized of course that The Buddha Diaries is one of those lifeboats I have been writing about. Some of my readers are family, some friends, but the vast majority are people I don't know and who don't know me, spread throughout the world in an invisible network of mysterious online connection. Sometimes I hear from one or other of you--some from a great distance--and that's always an added pleasure, and added sense of connection. Some of you I almost feel I get to know, through your reaching out and reading what you have to say in your own writing. So to actually get to know someone from a very distant part, someone to whom the words I sit here writing every day do mean something, was to experience the transformation of the virtual into the real, and to realize that the gap between the two is no greater than that between Alice and her Wonderland.

When I check the Clustrmap or the Sitemeter, as I do from time to time, I can get a surprisingly accurate image of the network that connects the readers of The Buddha Diaries, a kind of snapshot of the lifeboat that has only a virtual existence. In a curious way, I feel it more than I can think it. And I take immense pleasure in being one of millions of other, similar lifeboats that offer refuge to countless millions of human beings, each one of us looking for the right connection, the sense that we belong somewhere. In no way does it replace those other lifeboats I have mentioned, the live ones--the sangha, the community of artists Ellie and I have built, the worldwide organization of men of which I am a member. But it feels good and satisfying to me to have built this one, too.

So I thank my visitor from Europe. It was a fine reminder, and a special treat at this season of (hoped-for) connection. It gives me, too, the opportunity to reach out and thank all the rest of you for stopping by, however occasionally, to visit in these virtual pages. I wish every one of you the peace and freedom you would wish for, and all the joy in the world. And I know that Ellie and George would want me to add their wishes to mine. May all who join me here find true happiness in their lives! May all of us know peace, and practice compassion in the coming year! May all of us continue to share with others the best of what it means to be a human being!

Serious Men

I have been thinking a good deal about the two films we saw last week. The first, "A Serious Man," I wrote about in The Buddha Diaries on Tuesday. You might remember that I did not like it much. Then Saturday night we went with friends to see Up in the Air--a film about an unserious man. At the beginning, at least, he's unserious. Arrogant, self-involved, superficial, slick, casually promiscuous... and very good at his job. He works for a corporation that specializes in firing people for other corporations, too cowardly to do their own. As his CEO gloats, in an early scene, this is their moment.

It's a good film, and it has been widely touted as an Oscar front-runner. George Clooney does an excellent job as Ryan Bingham, and he is more than ably supported by Vera Farmiga as his on-the-run luxury hotel sexual interest and Anna Kendrick as a feisty young corporate wannebe whose goal is to cut costs for the company by converting the live encounters with its victims--the job at which Ryan excels--with remote video technology. The story is a sad and disturbingly accurate reflection of our current social and cultural environment, from its cutthroat, bottom-line corporate practices to its self-congratulatory promotion of the phony values of positive thinking. Ryan does both, as a company hit-man who profits on the side from his motivational "What's in your Backpack?" conferences. His theme in life, which he readily promulgates, is travel light, keep moving, and avoid attachments--whether to possessions or to other people.

Okay, so far so good--and on this level the film would have to count as a major success. For me, though, there was a major flaw in the mythical pattern of the story that left me, at the end, feeling dissatisfied, almost cheated. The missing ingredient is redemption. Here's an empty, heartless, soulless guy who is set unexpectedly--and unwantedly--on the path to discovering a heart and soul that he never thought he actually possessed. From the high point of a hugely successful career and a life that's happy, at least by his own estimation and intentions, he's led on an increasingly precipitous descent, to a point where he's brought face-to-face with the emptiness of his life and discovers in himself a capacity to love and a need for deeper connection.

What the mythic pattern requires, at this point, after all the protagonist has gone through, is at least the possibility of redemption. And there seems to be a glimmering of recognition of that need. Ryan achieves his life-time dream of amassing the ten million airline miles that have been his lifelong goal, and gets the precious little platinum (?) card--his is only the seventh in history--along with a personal visit from the airline Captain (a benevolent Sam Elliot, we presume a stand-in for God) who blesses him with vacuous platitudes. But then the film ends with Ryan's dispirited return to the empty arc of his life, "up in the air" again, in constant flight to his next dispiriting assignment, with no visible hope of any real change or redemption.

It's interesting that to me the protagonists of both these films were in desperate need of some form of salvation, and neither got it. The hapless Job of "A Serious Man" ends up holding hands in the synagogue with his feckless wife while their slacker son cheats his way through his bar mitzvah; and the film ends with the arrival of God's wrath in the form of an approaching tornado, likely to sweep the whole lot of them into oblivion. Ryan Bingham ends up succumbing to emptiness and disconnection as the inalterable fact of his life, and drifts off into the clouds aboard an endless flight.

It should be noted that my friends who saw "Up in the Air" with me, and Ellie too, praised what they saw to be the realism of its ending. I was alone, it seemed, in my discontent. Perhaps it says more about me than the movie!

I Dreamt...

... that I woke in the middle of the night and tapped the button on my I-Phone to see what the time was. My I-Phone told me it was 6:30 AM. Then I actually woke and tapped the button on my I-Phone to see what the time was. It was 3:49. Confusing, no?

Exams

An exam dream--though I'm not taking it. I'm supposed to be working with a colleague (not anyone I know) on MFA examinations for students which involve a twenty-minute written part and a twenty-minute oral. The process is not made easier for the fact that it all seems to be conducted in an outdoor cafeteria. We have a handful of examinees, and we're trying to time it so that one is sitting in a private area doing the written part while we're doing the orals at a table on the other side. My attention, though, is distracted by a particularly tricky New York Times crossword, and I lose track of the schedule. I go over to fetch a young woman after her written piece, and she comes over to the oral table with two very chatty young women friends. I try to tell them that this in an examination area, and that they may not sit here while the oral is taking place. Meanwhile, other customers file past our table to an adjacent one. The whole area is getting too crowded to conduct the oral, and besides, I have forgotten what the questions are supposed to be.

Looking for Lifeboats

Some of you will remember my having written before about those "sacred lifeboats" that a friend up north promotes as a way to survive the coming cataclysm. Reading the newspaper these days, I can't escape the feeling that the cataclysm is indeed coming, in one form or another. (It could be a benign one, if there is such a thing as a benign cataclysm!) The apparent stalemate on important issues in Copenhagen, the Senate's surrender on health care to that arrogantly stubborn spoiler, Joe Lieberman and his act-alike Republicans, the quagmire of the Middle East, the economic situation here at home with millions living in or near poverty and millions without jobs... all these and more suggest, increasingly, that we humans are unwilling or unable to do the things that need to be done to assure the health, happiness and survival of our fellow beings. And that includes the non-two legged kinds.

Last night we sat through (well, agonized through) a rented version of The Baader Meinhof Complex--the story of Germany's Red Army Faction of the 1960s-1970s. The surprise was not simply the violence and delusion of this murderous group of young terrorists, responding to what they saw as the perversities of the capitalist world, but the depth of support they enjoyed among other young people at the time. The terrorist option, as we know to our cost, has been still more widely embraced throughout the world since then, and the values and methods of extremists are perceived as acceptable and necessary to vast numbers of the dispossessed. Even here, in America, the anger roils, barely below the surface any more. There is anger on the left as well as anger on the right. It arises out of real frustration and suffering, and a recognition that the economic and political system we have historically embraced no longer serves a vast number of the people it was supposed to benefit.

Still, a revolution--whether from left or right--does not seem imminent. Sheep-like, we accept the inaction of our representatives with a good deal of grumbling and whining, but little in the way of action. Perhaps this is because we have been brought to the realization that action, this far along the line, accomplishes nothing. We dutifully write our letters, make our telephone calls to Senators and Congressional representatives, and send in our donations--only to be checkmated by a Joe Lieberman or his Republican act-alikes. Having just last year elected a President who we hoped might make a difference, we watch him rapidly ensnared, as we are, in a system designed to disempower and mired in inertia. The futility of it all is numbing to mind and spirit.

My book, I realize as I write these words, is in part about this same paralysis as it manifests in the cultural arena. It's about the creative person's struggle for survival--"persistence"--in a cultural environment dominated by powerful corporate profit-making imperatives. In this predicament, the artist has all too often come to feel powerless, unrepresented, voiceless. To whine and grumble about this situation, though, is to become its victim, and we artists need to be made of sterner stuff. We are blessed with creative, imaginative minds--minds we can put to use to create strategies that allow us to persist.

Which brings me back to my lifeboats. Lifeboats, as I understand it, are small, manageable, mutually supportive communities of like-minded people, tough-minded in their commitment to values other than those that have brought us to this pitch. They can be the source not only of personal and emotional support, but also of practical, systemic social and economic support. If I write about them today, and in this broader context, it's because I have been coming to the understanding that such lifeboats can become the context for the "success" of my book--and I think of success in part as selling copies, yes, the financial part; but also, and more importantly for me, of sharing its ideas, these ideas about which I'm writing at this very moment, and bringing them into the forum of discussion. What strategies do we need to develop, as artists, to survive?

Community is an important component in the overall survival strategy, and "Persist" is finding a gratifying response in small communities of artists, communal knots or nodes, particularly at first in my own neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Across the 5 Freeway in Atwater, for example, artists Ed and Vivian Flynn have invited me to lead a discussion and sign books at their space in the Atwater Village Art Center, where they teach classes and plan exhibitions and community events. The vibrant community of Atwater has attracted artists as a less-expensive area to live and work for a good number of years, and Ed and Vivian have created a fine working space for their lifeboat operation in a new complex that includes studios and a small theater.

Similarly, a few miles to the east in the Highland Park/Mount Washington area, another thriving community of artists is gathered around an impressive nexus of galleries and exhibition spaces. Here my friend Stuart Rapeport has suggested a session either at Future Studio, the gallery that represents him, or perhaps at the local Highland Park Ebell Auditorium. Further to the west, I'll be doing a talk and leading a discussion before (I hope) signing a few books at the Los Angeles Art Association--an artists' collaborative that sponsors exhibitions and art-related events of all kinds.

So I'm looking for lifeboats. In this world which has become so impossibly large that its problems are unmanageable, they seem to me to offer hope for the future, a new way of co-existing and managing our lives that relies more on mutual love, respect and support than on systems that have proven, are proving inappropriate for an overpopulated, overcompetititve world. If you happen to know of any, please let me know!

A Serious Man

Ellie ran into a couple of friends at the gym who raved about A Serious Man, the new movie by the Coen Brothers. We had to see it, they said. So we dashed out and saw it.

Hmmm. What to say? "I hated it" would be pretty close to the truth. Its dark, mordant humor presents a bleak view of small-town America, a bleak view of Judaism, a bleak view of college education (Larry, the protagonist, a modern-day reincarnation of the unfortunate Job, teaches at a local university; he is being alternately bribed and threatened for a grade by a Korean student; and his job is at stake) and a bleak view of love. Among other things. In other words, a bleak view of humanity and human life in general.

Am I getting old? (Yes.) I used to find black humor funnier than I seem to find it now. My only laugh came at the end of the movie, when Larry's son, Danny, arrives in the august presence of the third and highest of the spiritual advisers Larry has desperately sought out (this one, unsuccessfully,) to relieve him of his tsuris. The wisdom from the lips of this supreme authority of the local temple, this guru of Judaic lore? "When the truth is found/To be lies...

... and all the joy/Within you dies..."

It's Grace Slick, of course, of the Jefferson Airplane. The story is set back in those good old days. I hear that the film has autobiographical references, and I suppose the Coen Brothers would have been growing up around that time. Anyway, the thought that the eternal truth of man's existence on this planet would emerge from the blown minds of the Jefferson Airplane did seem kind of funny. Otherwise, I failed to have much fun with these god-forsaken characters in this god-forsaken world. Larry is a gormless weakling, unable to summon the courage to face anyone, let alone his slacker son and thieving daughter (she wants the money for a nose job); or his pretentious, snappy wife and the pompous "friend" she wants to leave him for.

There's a fine line between the absurd and the simply bleak, and the Coen Brothers, in my view, lack the sensitivity to know how to walk it. Sometimes they hit it, sometimes they don't. The absurd reveals the fundamental, existential predicament of being human in a world abandoned by the gods who we used, for so many centuries, to make sense of it all. There's real tragedy inherent in absurdist humor. As in Greek tragedy of old, the hero is at the mercy of powerful universal forces beyond his control: the taxi filled with clowns explodes, and the audience roars with laughter. The simply bleak is pathos rather than tragedy: the hero is the victim of his own human inadequacies, his failure to take responsibility for the course of his life and the events that govern it. Larry is such a man. You want to slap his face and tell him to wake up.

The absurd, eventually, is uplifting. You come away cheered by having witnessed the worst, with the realization that this, in some way, is your life, your predicament as a fellow human being, and you have been able to laugh away the nightmare. The simply bleak is a downer. You come away angry at characters with whom you do not sympathize precisely because they seem pathetic and powerless. You do not want to be like them, nor to inhabit the nihilistic universe to which they are subjugated.

But maybe you'll feel differently. Clearly, our friends at the gym saw the film in a different light than I. Perhaps... perhaps I should be looking in the mirror, where the shadows lurk!

Just Wondering...

Is a headache like a tree falling in the forest? I mean, does it exist when there's no one around to (consciously) experience it? I ask myself this because I woke at 1:15 or so with a furious attack of what I have been calling my cluster headaches--that's what I believe they are--but managed to get back to sleep fairly quickly. Then I woke at 5:30 or so and the headache was still there. So the question is, did I actually have the headache all that time?

I'm inclined to believe I did, since I woke up feeling less than fully rested, as though I had been in pain all night. Is pain some kind of objective reality, existing whether it's perceived or not? Or is it in the mind of the perceiver? Or part and part? I know that we all experience pain in our different ways--some are more, some less tolerant to it. And it sure seems real when I'm experiencing it. But if I use what meditation skills I have developed over the years to detach from it, I can experience it without the suffering that can prolong it and make it worse.

This morning--now seven-thirty--the pain persists. I'm down to wishing it would go away!

From the Heart

(I persist! Please order my book today, if you have not already done so! Thank you!)

I absolutely love this image, created by the artist Gabriel Orozco. It's called...

... "My Hands Are My Heart." I first saw it years ago and fell in love with at once.

What do I love about it? I loves its irreducible simplicity--and its extraordinary complexity. I love the sheer beauty of it, the rhyme between the humanity and the clay, between the maker and the object made. I love the warm, rich color. I love the humanity of the gesture, the way the fingers close, and open. It love the shape and substance of the heart, in the place of the heart, at the center of the chest. I love the masculinity and the femininity of it, all at once. I love its physical generosity and its generosity of spirit. I love the way it offers itself to my eyes, without reserve.

Enough reasons? Those are mine. In invite you to find your own. Have a good Sunday!

TV Star!

So here I am...

... sitting in the make-up room at Charter Communications in Irwindale, getting ready for an interview to be broadcast in January at frequent intervals on Southern California Charter Local Editions of CNN Headline News. My friendly make-up artist took the picture--you see her reflected in the mirror, armed with my I-Phone.

What a surprise! Two days ago, when I wrote my appeal for my new book (please order your copy today!) I had no idea that I'd be doing a television interview so soon. It came as a gift from above. I had signed up for a speaking engagement with The Inside Edge, a prestigious Orange County organization that sponsors breakfast events for the local community to hear current authors speak about their work, and just lucked into the month during which the CNN interviews will be promoting them. The broadcasts, as I understand it, reach some 500,000 homes and 1.2 million viewers. What a great opportunity! I'll plan to post a link to the 4-minute interview when I get a clean copy from the producers, and will also post whatever I know about air times.

As you can tell, I'm plunging into the art of self-promotion with considerable gusto! I tell myself it's all in the interest of reaching out to people with my ideas, but you can bet there's a big chunk of vanity involved. I'm really hoping to get a groundswell going around "Persist," and will be grateful for any help you can give me along this interesting new path. Let me know if you have any suggestions...

Persist

Forgive me if, today, I toot my own horn unabashedly--and boldly ask for your help...

Yesterday, anticipating the imminent arrival of my new book off the press, I launched my personal PR campaign on Facebook and was gratified by the immediate response. For those who have missed previous mention--and at the risk of repeating myself for others!--the book is called Persist: In Praise of the Creative Spirit in a World Gone Mad with Commerce. Its intention is to hearten creative people of all kinds to "persist" in the work they're given to do, despite a cultural climate that too often rewards only celebrity and proven commercial success.

It also proposes practical strategies for redefining what real and lasting success is all about. The artist Roland Reiss, whose influence as a teacher is unparalleled in this community, calls the book "the first and ultimate survival guide for any creative person," one that "will heal your soul and help you find your way. All artists should keep it close at hand."

So today I write to ask a favor. Well, actually, several favors... First, I'm asking for your support in placing an advance order for the book.

I have not asked for help at this site before, so I'm hoping that you won't mind my asking for it now. I started writing an (almost) daily entry in The Buddha Diaries very nearly three years ago. Before that, I wrote an (almost) daily entry in The Bush Diaries, my first blog, which started in November, 2004. Some of my readers have been following me for more than five years, and I'm honored by your interest in what I write.

My blogs have been a glorious and personally rewarding giveaway, one thousand seven hundred and twenty-nine entries in all. Today is my one thousand seven hundred and thirtieth...

The book will be available in the coming week, and you can advance-order it NOW--this very moment, before you forget!--at Parami Press. If you've been a regular, or even an occasional reader of The Buddha Diaries, I'm confident you know that the writing is good, the ideas worthwhile, the voice authentic. Think Christmas! Dare I say... buy an extra copy, for a friend?

The second favor is to give the book a mention on your blog, and/or forward some mention of it to your own email lists. I know that many readers of The Buddha Diaries have their own blogs, and that their interest would be invaluable in helping me spread the word. Others have friends and associates in the creative world, who might be interested to be informed. My immodest goal is to start a fad, a trend, a movement...!

If you have a Facebook page--and don't most of us, these days? We so easily get hooked in!--you'll find a page that's dedicated to Persist; and word will also go out via Twitter. I'd love you to be a "fan" or a "follower", and join in the dialogue. I already have thoughts of a revised and expanded version, incorporating response.

And finally... so much to ask! I'm already beginning to schedule dates for speaking gigs next year. If you have ideas for venues, I'd be grateful to hear from you. My email address is all over this site, if you click around a bit. I'm NOT trying to make huge profits, either from the speaking dates or from sales of the book. As I've said many times in many different contexts, my goal is more simply to reach out and touch the lives of those with whom I share this planet Earth. I'd MUCH appreciate your help.

The Art of Happiness

I mentioned a while ago that I was having difficulty with the advance copy of this book, The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World which purports to be "written by the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, MD." I say "purports to be" because it's not, and that's the difficulty I have. It's really a book written by Howard C. Cutler MD, based on his interviews with the Dalai Lama. It's the third in "The Art of Happiness" series. I reviewed the first for the Los Angeles Times about ten years ago, and I had the same discomfort with that book as I have with this.

The preponderant bulk of the book is written by Dr. Cutler. True, he includes ample quotations from the Dalai Lama, but His Holiness's actual words occupy, at a guess, no more than a tenth of the book. Otherwise, it's Dr. Cutler's gloss on the Dalai Lama's words, or Dr. Cutler's leading questions, which can go on for literally pages. At times, it's Dr. Cutler putting words in the Dalai Lama's mouth. All of which is intensely distracting, for this reader, from an otherwise useful and interesting book.

Does it matter? Is this just a quibble on the part of a cantankerous writer who has enough difficulty getting his own words into print?

I think not. Because there's a troubling dishonesty here which can only be explained by either the contingencies of marketing or the ego of the primary writer. The latter can be intrusive, at times self-congratulatory, at times self-effacing to the point of obsequiousness. As for the marketing, "The Art of Happiness" has by now become a best-selling brand whose huge success must surely be attributed to the fact that people believe they are reading a book "by the Dalai Lama", whose world-wide popularity knows no bounds. There's a cachet value to His Holiness's name and the publisher is trading on it shamelessly. My feeling is that this is rampant exploitation, and it bothers me deeply that His Holiness is complicit in it. Is it possible that he genuinely doesn't realize that he's being used in this way? Or does he simply believe that getting the message out is more important than this slight manipulation of the truth?

That said, "The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World" has much to recommend it, and it would have been a simple matter to have labeled it differently, and accurately, as a book by Howard C. Cutler MD based on interviews with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Because the wisdom of the Buddha and of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition has much to teach a world that is beset by troubles today: war and violence, disease and hunger are the prevalent conditions in too many parts of the small planet which is increasingly overpopulated by our species. Through our human attachments to our own needs and greed, we are despoiling our environment and depleting our resources at an alarming rate, and creating the conditions for unimaginable suffering and grief. That the Dalai Lama is able to smile and nod and spread compassion, as he does, despite this monumental mess is certainly worth Dr. Cutler's efforts to understand the fundamentals of his beliefs and practices.

And it's not too complicated. The Dalai Lama believes in the fundamental goodness of his fellow human beings. He believes that all conflict and violence can be attributed not to some evil gene in the human species but rather to ignorance and misperception of reality. He believes that if we were to see things clearly, without the narrowing of vision and the distortion brought about by our delusory thinking, we would all get along because it is in our interest to do so. That if we were able to listen to each other with compassion, to truly put ourselves in place of those we oppose or hate, then such abominations as racism, religious intolerance and extremist nationalism would be seen for what they are--distortions of reality rather than truths about our human nature.

The skeptics will regard these arguments as pollyanna-ish nonsense. There is in the contemporary world an ingrained, deeply inherited belief to the contrary: that the human species is by nature violent, aggressive, competitive, protective of its territory, rejective of the "other." And yet, as Dr. Cutler points out--and this is really the thesis of his book--there is an ample and growing body of scientific research that supports the Dalai Lama's position. The multi-million year hard-wiring of the human brain is not exclusively geared, it now turns out, to the aggressive qualities long thought to have been essential to the "survival of the fittest." More recent studies of human behavior, and of the behavior of our cousins, the primates, are revealing that survival skills also required such qualities as compassion, mutual understanding and collaboration, even selflessness.

Which brings me back to the other book I mentioned in these pages a while ago, The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness, a collection of essays edited by Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh and Jeremy Adam Smith. It's no coincidence, surely, that these two books should appear at a moment when we badly need to reappraise the way we share this planet, as a species, with our own and others; and when we are stand poised on the brink of the global disaster that could so easily be caused by the delusions of ignorance, mutual suspicion, fear, and greed. I trust that my difficulties with "The Art of Happiness," in particular, will not deter readers from appreciating its very real truths.

Secrets & Lies

We're back in L.A., Ellie and George and I. The plan was originally to spend the entire month of December in Laguna Beach, but we decided a while ago to make the trek back for this one week, in part to meet with our artists' group, in part to take care of other business. So here we are. It's Monday morning, and it's raining. It must have rained hard during the night; when I took George out for his morning poop, the paved surfaces were still glistening with runoff, but the rainfall itself was light.

A great surprise on our return: our nephew stopped by to visit. We don't see him too often, and had certainly not expected to see him yesterday, so it was a special pleasure. He is a follower of The Buddha Diaries, and in fact started his own blog, The Wandering Jewish Dreamer--an apt title, which says a lot about him. He loves to travel, and gravitates constantly in the direction of his family's ancestral origin in Eastern Europe. His blog is, as I read it, a blend between autobiography and fiction, little quasi-Kafkan episodes which combine whimsy with a strange kind of earnestness. I'd love to see him get more consistent!

Anyway, Naftali--as a TBD reader--wanted to know what I thought about Tiger Woods and wondered why I had not written about him. I have purposely NOT been writing about Tiger Woods because all the world and her brother has been doing it for me. But just for Naftali, here's what I think: as I see it, it's about trust--and a sad reminder that trust is in very short supply these days. Tiger, particularly, crafted an image of trust for an adoring public, and must share ownership of it with those who bought into it. While I am personally sympathetic to his claims to privacy--his sex life is really none of my business--I believe he made a bargain with the devil in embracing the role of superstar and is now being called upon to pay his dues. Like John Edwards, who also projected the image of a cherubic, fresh-faced, squeaky-clean exception to the sleazy, feet-of-clay public figure we have come to expect, his breach of trust is all the more inviting for media scrutiny because of the discrepancy between image and reality.

It's okay to keep secrets. Indeed, it's often preferable to blurting everything out--especially when the "it" is one's personal dirty laundry. I know I write a great deal about what others prefer to keep to themselves---most notably my inner conflicts. I absolutely honor those who treat these matters as secret, private parts of their lives, parts I would consider it rude and intrusive to pry into, unless specifically invited.

Lies, though, are different, and I believe that--let alone the personal betrayal involved--Tiger was offering an implicit "truth" about himself to those who admired him, even worshipped him, and that his deception therefore is no different from a lie. Lies, as in Tiger's case, have an unfortunate way of coming back at you when the "real truth" is revealed, and cause infinite ripples of suffering to the perpetrator himself, to those he loves and who those love him, and so on, in ever-widening circles. I believe also that keeping a lie--unlike keeping a secret--is sure to cause lasting inner harm to the psyche. I don't wish to come off as self-righteous I have told lies myself, in my own life. I have told serious, hurtful lies, as I suspect most of us have done. And it has been important for me to recognize them and to know the consequences.

So I can feel compassionate toward Tiger without letting him off the hook. His lies were public, publicly hurtful to family, friends and fans, and he owes something more than the half-hearted, behind-the-curtain apology for "transgressions" that he offered. He needs a make-up. One way to start, in my judgment, would be to tell the truth---not as some kind of shameful public confession, but as a way of simply getting the facts of the matter out from under the carpet and being accountable for them. I honestly don't know how this would look. Not Oprah, for God's sake. But a serious public forum--a Charlie Rose, perhaps, or a Travis Smiley--which could avoid the salacious detail in favor of simple, factual honesty.

In his private life, a man must do his make-ups as best he can. But also, having prominently occupied public space, the Tiger will only be able to restore himself to favor if he finds the right way to do his public make-up too. Only then can the broken trust be re-established. That goes, as they say, with the territory. If he can manage it with the grace with which he drives a golf ball, he should do okay.

Trash Cans

This morning's dream: there are lines of trash cans to be taken out. I am pissed that there is this chore to be taken care of, especially since we are leaving and I'm anxious to be on the road, but I haul out the trash cans to the side of the curb. Then I realize that it's not my trash cans I have taken out, but the neighbor's! So now I have to start on my own. How aggravating! And there's a big van parked in the driveway, preventing me from putting them in their usual place. And the gate to where we keep the trash cans--a gate that does not exist in the real world--is stuck. It used to open one way, now it opens the other, leaving too small a gap to drag the trash cans through. It's a battle. Eventually--I think!--I manage to get the trash cans out onto the street. We're ready to leave.

Now, about those cluster headaches. They're back. I should say, they never really left. It's just that they have been far less intense, far shorter, and far less regular in their arrival times than the usual clusters. I have been worrying about them precisely because they felt so UNfamiliar. If I had been able to write them off as simple clusters, they would have worried me less. But then, last night and the night before, they came back with familiar, excruciating intensity--and right on time. The first, the most intense, arrived at 2:15 in the morning; the second at 5:30. They both lasted one half to three quarters of an hour.

The first night, the night before last, the pain became such that I could no longer lie in bed. It was that bang-your-head-against the wall kind of pain that makes it impossible to lie still. So rather that lie there suffering, I chose to go to the sitting room and try sitting in meditation instead. I have found some strategies to be... I won't say successful, because they won't drive away the pain, but useful in being able to tolerate it while it's there.

The first is to breathe directly into it, allowing the breath to expand at the center of the pain and dissipate from the point outwards. The attempt is to allow the pain to dissipate a little bit more with each breath.

When that one fails to "work", I move on to the second strategy: to direct the breath to some other place in the body. It could be the most distant place, the fingertips or the toes. I actually find it most beneficial to create an imaginary line from the base of the torso to the base of the throat, moving through the navel, the sternum and the heart space, creating--as it were--an opening the whole length of the torso through which breath enters and leaves the body. If the mind wanders, I add a mantra I learned years ago from one of Ram Dass's books: it goes, on the out-breath, "I am love"; and on the in-breath, "I am loved." It's surprisingly comforting, when in pain.

So here's the third strategy, the one I resort to when all else fails. I first pay careful attention to the pain, and then step away from it. Hard to describe, really. It's a matter of allowing myself to become the observer rather than the participant in the clusters. I suppose, in Buddhist terms, it's a way of stepping away from the attachment that turns simple pain into complex suffering. I watch my self having a headache, and it becomes as though this self is someone else, someone for whom I can feel compassion and empathy. I can't drive away the pain. No point in trying to deny it. It will persist for as long as it persists. But in this way, if I'm both skillful and attentive as I breathe, I do find it possible to step gradually further and further from the pain, and suffer from it less and less.

The great thing about the Buddhist teachings, for me, is that they're so darn practical. If I put them into practice in my life, they actually work. That, after all, is what the Buddha sought to stress: don't take my Word for it, try it out for yourself. Give it a test run. So here's one place in my life where I have found meditation to be an invaluable tool--one that spares me the worst effects of pain. At some point in my life, I realize, the challenge may be greater; but for now, I'll gratefully accept what I have been given thus far.

Bread & Tulips

A quick word for those who enjoy the films that I enjoy and write about occasionally on The Buddha Diaries: here's an utterly delightful one to add to your list. It's called Pane e Tulipani ("Bread & Tulips"), and it's the story of a slightly ditzy Italian housewife who comes to the unexpected realization that her life is a bore, her husband a boor, and who just kind of wanders off into an excellent adventure of her own. It brings her to the back streets of Venice, where she bumps into a handful of oddballs like herself and creates a community in which she's able to rediscover herself, her humanity, her bliss. The movie is funny, moving, thoroughly entertaining. It's filmed with loving attention to the small details of life--the ones that count, in the heart as well as to the eye. A great rental, see if you don't agree.

Hamlet

Last night I dreamt I was Hamlet. I mean, I was cast as Hamlet in a theatrical production. Which is ridiculous, of course. At my age? Lear, perhaps. Hamlet, no. But this was a dream. It was, actually, a nightmare, because I forgot my lines. It must have been a very long dream, or the dream must have covered a lot of time, weeks maybe, because I remember all of the rehearsals. Or think I do. The director is a person known to me, but I don't remember who he is.

Anyway, here we are on the night of the performance and my mind goes blank. I mean, completely. It's not just a matter of needing prompts. I can't remember a single word. Not one. For the first few scenes I muddle through by making them up. My words, not Shakespeare's. The rest of the cast seem able to muddle through with me, I don't know how. But then we're in the middle of one scene and I realize I can't get away with it any more. My own words dry up. I freeze. I fall silent, standing there for a full minute while the audience and cast seem to hold their breath. Then I step forward to the front of the stage and say, "This is hopeless. I can't remember a bloody word. Not a bloody word." And the audience grumbles a bit and slowly breaks up and disappears. I wonder if they're going to get a refund.

There's an altercation with the director and the actors backstage. I'm hugely embarrassed and repentant. It doesn't help. I have let everyone down. I wake up laughing at the absurdity of the whole thing.

Did I mention how uncomfortable I am standing up in front of an audience to speak? Oh, yes. That was just a couple of days ago. Yesterday, I spent part of the day thinking about those speaking engagements that I'm preparing for. Looking for the words...

So Much to Learn...

The gift of another insight today. Well, it's not exactly new, but it arrives with good timing and particular focus. A peculiar set of circumstances led me this morning to this video interview on Living Smart with the Jungian scholar, therapist and writer James Hollis, who--among a great many other useful thoughts--challenged me with this question: What did I internalize from my parents' lives? My mind went immediately to my father and this mantra, which he repeated often enough out loud for it to stick in a prominent place in my skull: "What do I know? I'm just a simple country priest."

My father allowed this mantra to define his life--and to limit it. Beyond being a "simple country priest", he was also an extraordinarily insightful man when it came to human behavior. From his constant reading as well as from his studies at Cambridge, he had a solid understanding of psychology and its various proponents, Jung and Freud and Adler. His intellectual capacity raised him far above the level of the "simple country priest" he chose to remain. He was gifted and qualified enough to rise in the ecclesiastical hierarchy much further than he ever did. He also had the intuitive power of the healer and believed fervently in the healing potential of the "laying on of hands." He himself had the gift, but practiced it with timidity and reservation.

What I internalized from my father was the underestimation of my own gifts, the reticence that holds me back from realizing the full extent of my potential. In some all-too often unconscious place in the mind, I repeat my version of his mantra: I'm just a little writer on the fringes of the real action. I not only repeat it, I believe it, and in this way it gets to be the truth. The insight comes on the eve of the publication of what I think of, timidly, as my new "little book", Persist; and at precisely the moment when I need to learn the lesson that the book itself explores: there is no success of any kind--whether internal or commercial--without persistence. And persistence requires a fundamental and unswerving belief in the task at hand. We teach, as I have reiterated many times, only what we need ourselves to learn.