NOT QUITE A NIGHTMARE

The mind plays funny tricks on us. Sometimes it seems to delight in tormenting us, as is the case with the kind of nightmare I had last night. Though actually what should have been a nightmare did not quite feel like one.

I am a long-time acrophobe. I first discovered how severe the affliction could be only later in life, at the top of the campanile in Florence, when I was seized with sudden dizziness and panic, and found myself clinging to the wall, as far as possible from the edge. But I do not remember having experienced this feeling as a child. Indeed, I remember distinctly standing at the parapets of St. Botolph's Church in Aspley Guise, where my father was Rector until I was twelve years old, looking far out over the flat lands of Bedfordshire.

No matter, there was this nightmare. I was close to the top of a tall building, a skyscraper, outside, where a stepped pyramid let on up to the very top. I do not remember how I got there--an unlikely event in real life. With me were two children and two adults, both men, if I remember right, at least one of them powerfully built. The steps were built in such a way that you could see through from one side to the other, and the idea was somehow to look through this gap and see the person on the other side. We were all climbing these steps, one by one, toward the top, and I was worried about the children--though they seemed to be playing quite happily.

The ascent did not seem as terrifying as it might have done, but I was very conscious of the importance of not looking down. More worrisome was the idea of the descent, which I imagined would be far more difficult. I knew I would have to ask for the help of the powerfully built man, and rely on him to support me. The dream ended at this point--I think before I had brought myself to ask this favor and risk showing my foolish weakness.

Does the dream have to do with aging? With the fear of having to rely on others for support? It is, after all, my birthday tomorrow. The children were playing, I note, "happily." And the "powerfulness" of the other man was clearly an important quality. If, as I have heard, every character in a dream is a projection of one's self, it's kind of a nice dream, with the manifestation of all stages of my life at the top of the tower. I note, too, that I did not actually feel dizzy or in panic. It was more the sense that I would normally, in such a circumstance, have those feelings. Interesting, too, that the dream ended without a conclusion. I had not yet brought myself to ask for what I thought I would need.

BAD BEAR?

I was chided last week—quite gently, to be sure—by a kind reader who was uncomfortable with my analogy between wolves and those human “king-killers” I was writing about. It constituted, if I understand her right, a defamation of the character of wolves, who are only following their nature and the survival imperative that motivates their actions. They need to hunt and kill their prey. The human predators of whom I happened to be writing—those who attack their leaders out of greed, envy, or a sense of their own powerlessness—act out of less natural, and therefore perhaps less noble impulses.

Still, without wishing to defame those marvelous creatures in any way, I stand by my analogy. They do, like those humans, hunt in packs. And I believe, though perhaps wrongly, that predatory animals like wolves are known to ferociously challenge leadership when they consider it to be weak or untrustworthy. Even pure malice, surely, exists among animals as it does among human beings, as does altruism. Not everything about the animal world is innocent and noble. (There’s an interesting debate, these days, as to whether animals have a “moral code”: this book review suggests that Wild Justice might be a very interesting read.)

These thoughts, this morning, in reflection on the news that a grizzly bear (“or bears”) attacked a group of campers in Yellowstone Park and succeeded in killing one of them, and mauling others. The rangers are out there now hunting down the bear(s) in question with the intention, presumably, of imposing the death penalty on the offender. The latest, I hear, is that they have trapped a mother and three year-old cubs, against whom the evidence looks damning: a piece of ripped tent in the scat, a broken tooth left at the scene of the crime… The bears are as I write en route to a location where their DNA will be tested against crime scene samples and their guilt or innocence proved. They will not have a jury of their peers to try their case, and are unlikely to be spared the ultimate penalty.

Should we feel greater—or qualitatively different—compassion for our own species than we do for others? Traditional western thought, both secular and religious, have taught us to believe that we are superior to animals, thanks to our great intellect and its ability to reason, and to the moral codes to which we supposedly subscribe. The theory, frankly, is infinitely more noble than the practice. We have little compunction about finding the justification for killing our own, a practice that shows no sign of abating even in this post-Enlightenment period of our history. (It’s revealing to note the different between Eastern and Western uses of that word.) We persist in fouling our own nest in ways that most of our brothers and sisters in the animal world would consider unacceptable; and, incidentally, fouling the nest for them at the same time, since we all share it.

On what grounds, then, do we earn the entitlement to consider ourselves rulers of the universe? By what right do we haughtily judge and sometimes sentence them? Should we assume that this bear’s behavior, for example, is deviant, and deserving of execution? Or is it not possible that she was acting in accordance with her own “moral” code for reasons we could never understand? We humans, after all, are the invaders in that territory. Our presence there has created ecological contingencies she must address, if she is to take care of her cubs and assure their survival.

Am I a “bleeding heart”? Yes. I confess that I’m the one who feels a wee bit awkward telling George to “Sit” or “Stay”? Why should he, just because I tell him to? He looks at me like I’m crazy, asking such things of him. He has his own logic, his own rules. I could argue, of course, that he must learn these rules for his own safety, living in a world of human beings. But the truth is, he must learn them more for my convenience.

From the beginning of human history, I know, we have had to protect ourselves from other species, especially the wild and the strong ones, like bears. We have had to eat them, as they have had to eat those less powerful than themselves. We have been able to domesticate some of them, like George, for our own purposes—work or pleasure, or the provision of sustenance. And it’s good to recall that not all human intervention is destructive: how else would George have regained his eyesight?

I have no question that Buddhism is right in teaching the interdependence of all things and, particularly, of all living beings; and in teaching that compassion applies not only to those we know and love, but also to those by whom we are threatened, those we dislike or distrust, to those we fear. Still, as always, the practice is very much harder than the preaching. There was a time when humankind and animals could inhabit, largely, different domains. These days, our proximity is such that we can’t avoid collisions and confrontations like the one in Yellowstone Park. I feel terrible for the man who lost his life and for those who loved him and will miss him in their lives. I feel terrible for those who suffered wounds in the attack. And I feel terrible for the bear and for her cubs. Living beings all, whose unwanted encounter produced tragedy.

George: the Up-Update

Well, it has been a week since surgery, and George continues to do well. He went in for his seven-day follow up exam today and had a good report on his progress. We had hoped--we had been kind of promising him--that we would be able to remove the Elizabethan collar today but alas, that seems a long way off. We had been told, originally, "seven to ten days," and were being perhaps overly optimistic. The doctor who saw him today, though, is much stricter than the previous one. She says she likes to be conservative, and wants to keep the collar on until his next appointment--in two weeks! Poor George! The disappointment is ours as much as his, since he didn't understand our promises in the first place. Still...

(This is my first attempt with a Flip Cam video! Hope it works)

Today...

... is the first day in what seems like three months when we wake up to a cloudless sky in Laguna Beach. The marine layer of cloud and fog has been more than usually intense this year, and the clear sky is welcome. Ellie, particularly, who was brought up in Southern California, is a dedicated heliophile. She wilts under the clouds. As for me, having been brought up in England... well, it feels a bit like home to me. Still, you can't beat this...

... or this...

George, The Update

George is doing extraordinarily well. Take a look at those eyes...

He still does not like that Elizabethan collar, but we keep reminding him that it's a small price to pay for getting his eyesight back.

I have been thinking a good deal about the cost involved. Before this all came about, Ellie and I had agreed--very sensibly--between us that we were not the kind of people who would spend inordinate amounts of money on a dog when we knew that countless people in the world were sick and starving and when, indeed, in this terrible recession, we were a bit insecure about our own financial future. But come the time to make a decision between shelling out the money and George being blind for the rest of his days, I have to report that we did not hesitate for more than a couple of moments.

Looking back on that decision and reflecting on it, I realize that we were caught between two conflicting sets of values. The one set had to do with a sense of obligation, from our position of relative ease in life, to sympathize with, and as we can to help those less fortunate and less privileged than ourselves. The other had to do with our love for this animal who has done nothing but return that love with interest, who is a living being we have taken into our care, and for whose life and well-being we have assumed responsibility. When it came right down to it, we made our decision not out of ideology but out of love.

On a Sunday evening news show the other night, we were deeply distressed by a report on the plight of the poor in a part of the American Midwest. Unemployment has left many working people homeless and destitute, resorting to food banks and soup kitchens much as they did in the Great Recession of the 1930s. It is heart-breaking—indeed, outrageous—to see children go hungry, scantily clad in freezing weather conditions, and physically, emotionally and mentally unprepared for what little education is offered them. Then, just yesterday, we took George for a walk in the coastline park a mile or so south of where we live. The park is bordered by a recent development area of brand-new, multi-million dollar ocean-view houses, the majority of which are used for only a few days of the year by wealthy owners for whom they are luxury vacation stops. We judge these people—and stand to be judged for a decision like the one we made for George by those who do not share our good fortune.

Injustice exists—and it’s a whole lot easier to take the moral high ground from the theoretical point of view than when the dilemma is immediate and personal.

MR. ELLIS: SECOND THOUGHTS

FORGIVENESS

I was much troubled last week by the response of a valued online friend to the words I wrote last week in The Buddha Diaries about forgiveness and compassion. I was reflecting in the piece on the experience of molestation, as a child, and she was the victim of an offense so much more severe than the one I was recalling, that she is unable to this day to find compassion in her heart for her attacker, and continues to wish him great suffering even after many years.

Her response is completely understandable to me. It’s completely human. It set me to thinking about the relative gravity of offenses, and to what extent this might contribute to our ability to feel compassion. Are there crimes so hideous that they can never be forgiven? Are there people so vile in their actions that they are unworthy of compassion? From this point of view, I was merely diddled as a twelve-year old boy; my friend was raped by a stranger at the age of eighteen. There are those whose children have been brutally killed by psychopaths. Are they to exercise compassion? And what about punishment? Do we have the right to mete out punishment to those who commit harmful acts against us? Society, clearly must have some recourse; but individuals?

These are vexing questions. Moved by my friend’s anger, and wanting to better understand what light the teaching of the Buddha might shed on them, I brought my dilemma to our sitting group yesterday, Sunday. What, I had been trying to recall, had Than Geoff (Thanissaro Bhikkhu) had to say on the subject? I remembered that he had spoken once, in a dharma talk, about a distinction between forgiveness and some other concept, but I had forgotten the other side of the equation. It was reconciliation, I was reminded. I can do forgiveness by myself; reconciliation requires a coming together, an agreement, an action on the part of the other party in the grievance—some act of contrition, perhaps, a make-up, a commitment to change the harmful behavior in the future.

Compassion is not the same as forgiveness, and not the same as tolerance for the offense. I can be compassionate for the perpetrator of an act I am unable to forgive. Indeed, as I understand the Buddhist teachings in the matter, I am not empowered to forgive. The responsibility for absolution and redemption lies primarily with the perpetrator, not the victim. Compassion, though I project it outward toward others, or another person specifically, is about releasing myself from the suffering that results from the painful experience. Its benefits may touch others than myself, but are most clearly evident in my own heart and the way I live my life. It’s possible, otherwise, to become addicted to something I have no power to change and which can only bring me further suffering.

The difficulty in all this, as I see it—and I mentioned this in our discussion—is that the theory is much easier than the practice. We are, after all, humans, and what lodges in the heart, what we nurse there, in our most powerful organ, comes to feel like a part of us that would require surgery to remove. It’s a part of our identity, of who we think we are. (And perhaps, then, an opportunity to exercise that mantra I keep coming back to: This is not me, this is not mine, this is not who I am…)

Compassion—and I speak here, as always, strictly for myself—needs to become a matter of practice as much as a matter of choice. I might not readily choose it, if I consider the magnitude or the repugnance of the offense. But if I choose to adopt it simply as a habit and enact it every day at the start of my meditation sit, I find that I can do it without question or doubt. I no longer debate the worthiness of the recipient of my compassion and choose, instead, to heal the wound in my own heart.

Reading back over what I have written, I worry that the words might seem self-righteous or complacent. I’m far from intending my reflections as a sermon to others, because what I may seem to preach I find incredibly hard to practice for myself. For me, every act of writing is an effort to learn, and this one is no exception.

KING-KILLERS

THE ART OF PERSONAL AND POLITICAL

ASSASSINATION: Some Thoughts on the Tour de

France and the Shirley Sherrod Fiasco

In the men’s work in which I engaged for many years, we called them “king-killers.” These are men—or women, why not?—so consumed by greed or envy, ambition, insecurity or fear of weakness, that they are driven to bring down the one whom they have chosen, or the one who stands up for leadership. They tend to show up, like their cousins, the wolves, or like sharks in the ocean, when they smell blood; or when they sense weakness or hesitation. Then they attack in swarms…

From many, I choose but two notable current examples: the one-time leader of the Tour de France and the current “leader of the free world.”

I hold no particular brief for Lance Armstrong, though I confess that I would like to believe him to be real. He may, or may not have been aided in his multiple Tour victories by performance-enhancing drugs. I hope not, but I do know that these drugs are prevalent not only in cycling but in all professional sports. I deplore their use. It’s a sad fact that, today, we are unable to trust a winner—whether track star, tennis ace, home-run slugger, or cyclist. Winning by cheating is not winning. But this is not about doping, nor even particularly about Lance Armstrong. It’s about king-killing, about the desire to bring the man down.

In Armstrong’s case, the blood was smelled early in this year’s race. The first cut came even before the 2010 Tour de France with accusations from a former team-mate, Floyd Landis, timed to coincide with Armstrong’s participation in the Tour of California. When the—let’s face it—aging champion fell and abandoned that race with injuries, the Schadenfreude was already evident in the press. More recently, the New York Times reporter on the Tour de France chose to drag out the accusation again on the first day of this year’s race, and has reported almost daily since then on the federal investigation.

It was soon clear that Armstrong would be unable to win to 2010 Tour. When the disasters came—he crashed on several occasions in the early stages—we began to hear delightedly malicious comments from some quarters: he was too old, he could no longer stay upright on his bike, he had given up too early, or had not given up when he should have done and stayed too late… After the sixteenth stage, when he chose to ride with familiar aggression in order to take some small victory away from his last Tour, and after his still impressive display of strength in the climbs clearly provided leadership for others in the stage leaders’ breakaway, the New York Times banner headline read: “In What May Have Been a Final Push For Old Times’ Sake, Armstrong Fails.” Not inaccurate, but pointedly phrased. The French press, too, long inimical to the man who stole their Tour, has reportedly been happy to pile on.

Let me say again, it’s not my business to defend Armstrong, nor does he need any defense from me. What’s of interest to me is to take note of the attack. The attack on Barack Obama is something else. I have a stake in this young President. I voted for him, I want to see him bring his campaign promises to fruition. I believe in what he stands for. In fact, I myself stand for the most part to the left of where he does—understanding his need to hold the center, out of political necessity—but I’ll take what I can get.

Once again, however, the sharp knives are out; the king-killers abound, and to judge by his falling poll numbers, their attacks are taking a toll. They come from left as well as right on virtually every issue: the economy, the conduct of the wars, health care and financial reform, his choice of officers and judicial appointments—even, ironically, for our first African American in the Oval Office, race. The unprecedented speed and spread of the Internet and associated technologies facilitates the attacks: a blog entry, a YouTube video, even a casual email can set off a nation-wide storm and promulgate its progress. The memory banks are immeasurable and accessed with incredible ease. No President has ever faced the challenges that confront those of the 21^st century. No king-killer has ever had such a vast array of effective weapons within such easy reach.

It’s a fine line, certainly, between legitimate and necessary criticism and what I’m talking about. Let it be noted that I personally am far less than delighted with progress toward those goals Obama laid out in his campaign. But we must know how to make a usable distinction between the two, and I fear that we too often fail to exercise the judiciousness that is required of us to do that. Meanwhile, the welter of attacks and dissatisfactions increases daily, along with the all-too real disasters and the teacup tempests, despite the fact that many of them soon prove to be utterly without foundation in reality or truth—as in the latest Fox News-generated kerfuffle around Shirley Sherrod at the Department of Agriculture. The calculation is that if enough mud is thrown, some of it will stick.

Obama, certainly, like Armstrong, does not need my pity or defense. I am amazed, in fact, by his ability to rise above the pettiness that swirls around him, maintaining a voice of solid reason—when we get to hear it—in the cacophony of irrational anger, and sometimes the hatred hurled in his direction. The man is not perfect. He is a politician. Surprise! And no matter the damage they intend, if we listen carefully, these king-killers succeed mostly in betraying themselves and their own agendas. Examine what they say and how they say it and you’ll find that most often they are projecting their own worst qualities—their timidity, their incompetence, their racism and hypocrisy, their political partisanship—on to the object of their scorn.

When I hear the negative judgment of a king-killer, I try to remind myself to turn that judgment around and apply it to its source, to see whether the indictment not more about the accuser that the accused. I find this to be a useful and reliable test of the difference between sheer malice, for personal gain, and sound critical judgment.

Post-Op

George is home from surgery, a little bit dopey--and a bit grumpy--as is to be expected, but otherwise in good shape...

He thanks everyone who was so concerned about him. As you can tell from the cell phone picture, he is obviously NOT keen on his Elizabethan collar, and has not yet adjusted to giving things the necessary wide berth. Stairs are still a challenge for him, because he gets the edge of the thing caught on the stair he's trying to navigate. But he did manage to jump up on the bed this morning, unaided--and received inordinate praise for the achievement.

Our midnight adventure was to be woken by this small, plaintive bark--to discover that he has pee'ed all over our bedroom carpet. Further investigation turned up more pee soaked into the duvet. I had taken him out for his usual before-bedtime walk, but I guess he was too dopey to perform. They had him on IVs during surgery, and probably dripped him lots of water to keep him hydrated. Poor dog! I think he was somewhat mortified by his accident. For us, well, if the worst thing is cleaning up a little pee in the middle of the night, we can't complain too much.

As for George's eyesight, I did notice, in the vet's office while we were waiting for the final paperwork, that he seemed to be taking unusual notice of what was happening around us, as though seeing things for the first time. The doctor says his eyesight is one hundred percent improved. The ball test remains to be applied.

I won't mention the bill, except to say that I put it on the credit card. Maybe the extra miles with provide us with a free first class flight to the New Zealand... when we can bring ourselves to leave poor George behind.

MR. ELLIS: A VERY PERSONAL ENCOUNTER

NOTE: I have hesitated a bit before posting the following entry on The Buddha Diaries, but decided to go ahead on the understanding that most readers will already expect to find much more about me than they ever needed or wanted to know! And I do think it offers a different insight into a disturbing problem. I hope so, anyway. Thus forewarned, read on:

I have been watching the recent agony and embarrassment of the Catholic Church with some personal interest, for reasons I will soon explain. It is now several years since the issue of priestly sexual abuse surfaced, though it has likely persisted for centuries in the dark corners of the vestries and the shadows of the cloisters. And, sadly, is likely to persist so long as the Church insists on clinging to the absurd requirement that its priests be celibate. Human beings are, after all, human beings. For now however, the Church seems intent on digging itself deeper into the mire, and I think a part of the problem has been its inability to see the issue other than through its medieval lens of sin and redemption. Those in authority seem not to have accounted for the significant social changes that have taken place in the past few decades, or for the fact that the vast majority of us now see the issue in a quite different light: not the actions themselves, but the harm caused by these predators and the sometimes devastating consequences of their actions.

You will understand why I have been thinking about these things when I tell you about Mr. Ellis. Mr. Ellis was a teacher of mathematics at the private boarding school I attended in the south of England from the age of six until I was twelve years old, when I moved on to “public” school. He was a small, ordinary-looking, bespectacled man with thinning grey hair, an earnest mien, a ridge of wrinkles across his brow, and the smile of a benevolent uncle. With a white dog collar and a black cassock, he could easily have passed for a Catholic priest. Outside of school, in his regular life, he happened to have recently inherited a farm not far from the Hertfordshire village of Braughing (say it like “laughing,” with an American accent) where my father was, at the time, the vicar of the parish. Learning of this felicitous proximity, and needing to spend a weekend away with my mother at a diocesan conference, my father gladly accepted Mr. Ellis’s offer to put me up for a night while they were gone.

They drove me there in my father’s sporty grey Armstong-Siddeley automobile and left me off in Mr. Ellis’s charge. I was, as I remember the occasion, at once reticent and excited. It felt odd, certainly, to be staying with one of my teachers, but he welcomed me kindly and we spent the afternoon exploring the farm-yards and the barns, discovering in one of them an ancient, upright motor car with dusty, decaying leather seats and brass lamps for headlights, now dulled with age and neglect. Mr. Ellis let me sit in the driver’s seat and pretend to drive this magnificent relic from the early days of horseless carriage vehicles. There was much else, too, of similar vintage to be discovered and explored, and the afternoon passed quickly.

Then it was dinner in the cold, bare, stone-floor kitchen… and time for bed. I was eleven years old. Nothing, as yet, had alerted my body or mind to the advent of adolescence, but I was aware of a certain discomfort as Mr. Ellis helped me into my pajamas and tucked me up in a bed adjacent to his own. I lay there without sleeping for the longest time, listening to my teacher’s movements in the darkness as he prepared himself for bed. I was aware, too, of his breathing, his awakened state, and I think I may have held my own breath—in fear, or anticipation of I knew not what. Until he spoke… and there was a strange hoarseness to his voice.

“Are you awake?” he asked.

I barely managed a whispered, “Yes.”

“Are you cold?”

It was, in fact, cold in that big old house. I was shivering.

“Would you like to come into my bed?”

I recognized that this was not an invitation. It was an instruction, coming from my teacher. I had been taught to do as I was told. And, really, I knew of no possible evil intent.

I did know, however, that what ensued was not right. Imagine my shock when his head slid down under the covers, breathing heavily, and took that part of me into his mouth. I felt the response, felt a strange and—I knew—forbidden but still intensely pleasurable sensation that I tried simultaneously to resist. It was not right for Mr. Ellis to be doing this. I could not imagine what it was all about, but I was quite sure that my father would not approve.

After some minutes down there, engaged in this peculiar activity, my teacher re-emerged, and I was left with the clear impression that there was something that remained incomplete, something that had been expected of me that I had been unable to fulfill. There followed more movement down there, the sensation of something strange and hot and fleshy pressed up against my body, along with a dangerous, musty smell that was entirely new. Then I heard Mr. Ellis say--coldly, I thought—“You can go back to your bed now.” And I did, appalled by what had happened, yet shamefully excited in a way I could not understand. Back in my own bed, I felt suddenly alone, dismissed, and with the feeling that I had somehow proved a failure…

My father came to pick me up the following day. On the way back home in the car he chided me for having seemed rude and ungrateful when we said goodbye. He, too, was disappointed in me: he expected better manners from his son. I said nothing. What could I have said?

It was a year or so later that my father came up to my room in the vicarage one evening, before I went to sleep. He had received a telephone call from the headmaster of my school, to let him know that Mr. Ellis had been sacked for “playing around” with boys. Had anything happened, my father wanted to know, that night I had spent with Mr. Ellis on his farm? I acknowledged, yes. A grave silence. Did I want to talk about it, my father asked? I said, no. I would not have known how to talk about it. And my father said, alright then, and quietly left the room. Closing the door behind him. I think he was simply too embarrassed, too ashamed of having misplaced his trust and exposed me to this abuse, too devastated to know what to say himself. We never spoke of it again.

So, yes, it was a wound. Yes, I was abused. Yes, it went deep, and yes, there is a reason that the memory has stayed with me so clearly. There is a scar. I could attribute to the experience some of the inhibitions and reactive patterns that remain with me to this day: my reticence, my guardedness, my distrust of authority, my aversion to what I perceive to be any invasion on my privacy… Such explanations belong in the realm of therapy, and I do not discount their significance or value. It is possible, our culture has discovered, to repair such damage by means of bringing it to the surface and examining its effects.

In so far as I understand Catholic dogma, to sin is to require confession and absolution—which is perhaps a kind of personal therapy. Sins can be “washed away” by “the blood of the lamb.” But such putative redemption for the sinner fails to address the harm brought down upon the victims of his actions, for which actual reparations may be needed. This is the piece that is missing in the response of Church authorities. It’s not just about finally holding the wayward priests accountable and protecting the Church they betrayed, or even about preventing such behavior from occurring in the future. (I have my doubts as to whether that would be possible); it’s about the harm that persists, and festers in the lives of those who have been abused.

The strategy of the Catholic Church has done little to resolve the issue. Rather, it has left the whole thing bogged down in guilt, recrimination, anger and defensiveness. The missed opportunity is for the make-up—not the words of regret or apology, or the breast-beating, but the action that lays out the plan for more skillful behavior in the future, for Church policies that unflinchingly and publicly recognize its responsibilities to its flock, particularly its children.

But what, I ask myself in retrospect—and with regard to my own experience—would be the Buddhist view?

Let’s not excuse the inexcusable. I have no wish to be what Thanissaro Bhikkhu jocularly calls a “Buddhist doormat.” I’m not sure that it helps, though, to write Mr. Ellis off as “evil.” His behavior comes in part out of ignorance, in part out of misguided concupiscence, in part out of the man’s inability to control his appetite. All “unskillful,” to say the least. Mr. Ellis must surely by now be long gone from this world, but there are millions like him; and if we are to take the Buddha’s teachings seriously, they are all deserving of compassion. That is not the same as tolerance, nor obviously of approval. It’s simply the recognition that I do myself more harm by clinging to the offense than by acknowledging it, and letting it go.

To extend goodwill, to wish for the true happiness of such creatures as Mr. Ellis is not to excuse them, then, but rather to extend the wish for them to see the harm they cause to themselves and others by their actions. I believe, too, in this aspect of karma: that their actions are inevitably followed by proportionate consequences, and that they bring as much suffering on themselves as they do on those they harm. I see the likes of Mr. Ellis not as monsters, but as desperately unhappy beings, condemned to live out a life of torment unless they find in themselves the capacity to change. Society, of course, must act to protect its young from such people. If that involves locking them up, so be it.

For myself, I am not condemned to allow this past abuse to cause me perpetual suffering. I am blessed with the ability to choose the path of freedom. For those men and women, boys and girls who have been the object of similar abuse, I wish the same. From the work I have done with men like myself, I know they are more numerous than most of us can possibly imagine. The deeply human gift of sexual desire and the equally human joy of sexual experience can all too easily be perverted. For those so dreadfully cursed in their lives, I wish the release of enlightenment, which would be a gift to us all.

George Needs Surgery

I know I have written recently about George's problem with his eyesight. It has been going on for a while now. His favorite occupation is chasing his tennis ball, and we started noticing a while ago that he was having difficulty locating it. If it was thrown even a little bit beyond his immediate vicinity, he would stop in mid-charge and turn around and look at us, bewildered. It got to be so bad that he could only chase the ball if we threw it directly over his nose as he was running away, so that he could track it--whether by smell or movement, I don't know. And he started bumping into things. Well, not exactly bumping, but coming so close that he'd see an obstacle only when it was right in front of his nose, and startle away in alarm.

So we took him to the dog doctor, who gave us a hefty bill and the advice to visit a dog eye doctor. Which we did yesterday. After examination by an army of technicians and doggie ophthalmologists, we were delivered the verdict. George has cataracts in both eyes, and needs surgery if his eyesight is to be saved. Here he is, looking understandably plaintive...

... in a photo taken by Amy Inouye of Future Studio Gallery last week.

I will spare you details of the punch-in-the-stomach cost of eye surgery for a pooch. But to let the poor old boy go slowly blind for the rest of his years does not seem like a conscionable choice. We will simply have to go without dinner for the next sixteen years. He goes in for surgery tomorrow.

THE TEACHING OF THE BENTLEY (THAT WAS NOT A BENTLEY BUT A BULLET-PROOF ROLLS ROYCE) AND THE DONKEY CART

(I choose to post the story of these events as I wrote it, even though it is followed up by a second teaching, at the end: having sent it to my friend Michael to check the facts against his memory, I received from him the corrections that I append. The lens of memory tends to distort, and I’m interested in those things I mis-remembered over time, as well as those I seem to have remembered rightly.)

My old friend Michael wrote to me just the other day from Barcelona, in response to one of my entries in The Buddha Diaries. I have known Michael since the 1940s, when he would come to stay with my family in England during the school holidays; and when his parents, whose family had lived for many years in Spain and who owned a long-established family business there, invited me over to spend a summer vacation. Like my own parents, they have now passed on, and it was my essay on the death of two loved ones that prompted a poignant response from my friend. I remember his parents as warm and generous people, as sunny as the climate in which they lived.

After hearing from Michael, I woke in the middle of the night and lay for a long time, sleepless, my mind engaged in memories of my two visits to their home. One story, in particular, has stayed with me all these years. It concerns a salesman, a Bentley, and a donkey cart…

Before I start, however, another searing memory came up, which makes me smile as I recall my twelve-year old self. Michael and I—and I think his brother, Christopher and a friend—were allowed, without adult company, to make the train journey from Victoria Station in London, where my parents saw us off, to Barcelona. It was a trip that involved a change of stations as well as a change of trains in Paris, and was therefore quite an adventure for a handful of young boys. But Michael was already an old hand, having done it many times before.

All went well until I woke up in the middle of the night on the Paris to Barcelona express with the urgent need to pee. I must have resisted for a while, as one does, hoping to postpone the necessity—a postponement that of course succeeded only in increasing the urgency. Finally, unable to wait a moment longer, I hurried from the compartment down the corridor to the WC… only to find it occupied. Interminably occupied!

I hung on—literally! You know how that is!—for as long as a small boy could, until I could wait no longer. I was bursting. In desperation, I stepped out into that concertina’ed junction they used to have between two carriages, as close as I dared to the thundering gap where I could see the rail bed rushing past below. Fearful lest some other passenger pass by and see me, I unbuttoned (yes, we had buttoned flies in those days…) and, at great risk to that tender part of my anatomy, poked my pecker toward the gap and let loose a flood of urine—some of which, to my infinite chagrin, failed to make it through and ended up on the violently jolting walls and floor. I fled back to my compartment in a fit of embarrassment and shame.

I have better memories of Barcelona, even though we stayed in the city no more than a couple of days. Heat, brilliant sunlight. The Ramblas. Steep hillsides. Shimmering tram tracks. The Guardia Civil, with machine gun nests on the streets, outside of banks, on top of street cars… This was 1948, not long since the end of the civil war.

Then we drove up to Caldetas, a small town just south of the Costa Brava, where Michael’s family had a summer home. I remember sunlight-flooded days, hot sand on the beach, and warm, salty water; and sultry evenings on the plaza under strings of lights, buying lengths of sweet-sticky churros and ice-cold, nutty horchatas de chufas to slake the thirst, and watching the circle dances to the haunting, plaintive music of sardanas… To this small visitor, brought under drab, cloudy English skies, it was all unbelievably exotic, magical, intoxicating…

And I remember too the wrought iron grill of the gate that separated our house from the tree-lined alley on which it was situated; and, beyond the grill, the near-naked gypsy children, wide-eyed with penurious envy as they gaped through the fence at us, their faces and bodies streaked with grime. It was, I think, the first time I was brought into glaring, irrefutable confrontation with the evidence of my own privilege, and with the discomforting recognition of the deprivation of others.

And then, one day, there was the Bentley parked outside that gate. It was brand new, blue, as I remember, gleaming in luxurious splendor. The owner, as we soon discovered, was a visiting salesman who had business with Michael’s father—a brash, rude, ruddy, broad-waisted man, brimming with self-confidence and self-congratulation. I did not like him. We children—I think I can still speak for all of us—did not like him. But we were awed by the energy and power he projected, as well as by the wealth his Bentley represented. So we were quick to accept his offer, after lunch, of a ride in this splendid motor car.

He drove us up through the village into the hills behind, bowling through dusty, vine-bordered lanes at a rate of speed intended, clearly, to impress us. And we were impressed, no doubt. Until he came to a downhill stretch that led to a narrow bridge with, on the opposing hill, a farmer also approaching the same bridge on his hay-laden donkey cart, more slowly than ourselves, but just as surely…

It did not for one moment occur to our driver that that farmer would not stop at the other side and wait for him, so he drove blithely ahead and came to a halt, in the middle of the bridge, only when he realized that this was not to be the case. Indeed, the farmer seemed to barely notice the big and beautiful car that stood glittering in his path. We all sat breathless, incredulous, as the cart rumbled on slowly towards us, with exquisite inevitability, until its metal hub engaged the front wing of the Bentley with a dreadful screech. Even then, it did not stop. The farmer, unmoved, continued on his way as the hub gouged an unremitting, raucous path through the sheer steel of the Bentley’s metal siding, until it reached the rear end of the car and broke free.

For a moment—is this my imagination?—total silence, as though our driver were simply unable to register what had happened. Then he wrenched open the door, gaped at the damage to his vehicle, and let loose a stream of enraged invective in the direction of the departing farmer. To no avail. We watched, our little group of pale-skinned aliens in the dusty Spanish back hills, as the donkey cart creaked and rattled its way slowly up the hill whence we had come, and disappeared over the crest with never a pause or backward glance from its driver.

Well, I’m sure that Michael’s father must have been profuse in his apologies to this business associate. But I’m pretty sure, also, knowing his capacity for seeing all things in perspective and for enjoying a good laugh, that he must have had to work hard, as he did so, to suppress a secret smile of solidarity with the farmer—who was, after all, simply doing his own thing on his own turf, and whose values did not include a greater respect for a brand new Bentley than for his own ancient donkey cart. Both, to him, I suppose, were nothing more than a means of transportation, both subject to the inevitable wear and tear inflicted by an unkind world.

I learned a lot that day. I learned to take nothing for granted, when it comes to other cultures. I learned that rich people should not be allowed to rule the world, simply because they happen to be rich. I learned something weird and indefinable about inevitability. I learned something about arrogance—call it hubris—and our vulnerability to the vicissitudes of circumstance beyond our control. I learned about impermanence and the fallacy of attachment to material things…

Well, actually, I don’t suppose I learned all this on that particular day. But it’s fun to look back on the incident and realize just how much life can teach us in a single blow! My thanks to my friend Michael for having brought it all to mind. Here is the letter he wrote in response, with some correction to my memory, and some interesting additions. I have edited it slightly :

Peter...that is so good! Just a couple of comments for a small correction. The car was in fact a bullet-proof Rolls Royce. My father's business friend, Charles Rycroft, owned some rubber plantations in Malaya, which during its last years as part of the British Empire was at war with communist guerillas. Hence the order for this formidable Rolls Royce special in which CR drove around his plantations.

Spain was impoverished at the time but there was a Rolls Royce agent in Barcelona, and a mechanic with a very small repair shop. The car was taken there by my father and Charles Rycroft. Of course there were no spares for such a car, but the RR rep humbly offered to hammer out the badly dented and scratched doors, adding that it would take a day or two to do. And so it was. Later, on returning to England, the car was taken to Rolls Royce to have the whole job done properly. After careful inspection, the engineers there looked up at the incredulous Charles Rycroft and said that they themselves could not have done a better job. Their man in Barcelona had done the job to perfection, the car was as good as new, perfect craftsmanship. CR was astounded but accepted the verdict.

I seem to remember we saw more of him through those years. I must confess I do not remember taking a dislike to him - I was impressed though, and he was extraordinarily kind and generous to my father who only a year before had come out to start the family biz from nothing - all lost during the Civil war - and it was in great part thanks to CR he got the business going again, buying crepe rubber from CR for Spanish shoe-makers. Do you remember the soldiers here only wore slippers then!!

Great account of the train journey!!!

What memories---well, well remembered and well, well written!! Oh the machine gun posts… are you sure about that, or just gingering up the story? I’m doubtful myself! Otherwise flawless, a memorable account. Thank you so much!

Love,

Michael

A final note: The machine gun posts are a "clear memory," but I’m ready to believe that my mind invented them. It's possible they didn't exist! Otherwise, it’s clear that my memory has been unkind to the man Michael remembers as generous and kind, Charles Rycroft. He, too, as he appears in the story, is a construct of my imagination. The distortion is clearly the result of my prejudices, formed later in life, and has more to say about myself than about the man I write about… The border between fact and fiction is a porous one! And the teaching, finally, is that we remember things to suit our own particular agenda.

A Few Words...

... for the parish magazine of St. Peter's Church, Sharnbrook, Bedfordshire, England. This is what I wrote in response to the Rector's request, and in the context I describe:

I received a phone call recently from my son, who now lives with his family in Harpenden. He had just returned from a local art fair, where he had seen paintings of St. Peter’s Church in Sharnbrook...

... by the artist Lucas Witte-Vermeulen (the above image--yes, a painting!--is purloined from the artist's website, with apologies and thanks; you'll enjoy the meticulously painted nude on his home page!) and he--my son--wondered if this could be the same church where his grandfather had served, as Rector, when he was just a baby?

Well, yes, it was, and his call had me reflecting on those days when my father, Harry Clothier, was Rector of St. Peter’s Church and responsible also for the parishes of Souldrop and Knotting. A teenager at the time, in the early 1950’s, I do remember those lovely churches, each so different from the others—and each so beautiful in its own way. I have fond memories, too, of the good people of Sharnbrook, though I suspect that by now, some sixty years later, the village will have a quite different cast of characters. I suspect, too, that it is very much larger.

It has been a long journey since those days. I have lived in London and Germany and, on this side of “the pond,” in Halifax, Nova Scotia and Iowa City, Iowa. Since 1968, I have lived here in Los Angeles, in the Hollywood Hills. I could scarcely have imagined such a journey, back then, as the son of the Rector of Sharnbrook! It has been a good one in so many ways—particularly in my good fortune in having ended up as the writer I always dreamed myself to be.

I have to say, with some feeling of sadness, that I no longer follow the faith to which my father devoted his life. Indeed, I abandoned it as soon as I left school and moved away from the village where I had spent my adolescent years—except for the considerable time I spent away at boarding school. I had no particular quarrel with religion. Though I was required, at school, to spend a good deal of time in chapel, I was never one of those who complain that they had religion thrust “down their throat.” I just drifted away.

It was not until much later in life that I came to realize that some important part was missing. Whatever else I had learned—and forgotten!—from my childhood years, there remained an inner part of me that recognized the need for spiritual practice, in order to be whole. Understanding that need, I began to find it in a daily meditation practice which led me increasingly into an appreciation and study of the teachings of the Buddha. After some fifteen years following this path, I realize how much there is in common with the teachings of Christ—at least the Christ who taught, above all, reverence for life and compassion for one’s companions on the path we share.

While I no longer believe in the God I was brought up with, I think that the values I embrace today are not much different, if at all, from those my father taught me. One of my most enduring memories is the blessing he used to offer me at the altar rail, while I was still too young to take Communion. I have often felt, since then, empowered to take that blessing and pass it on; and I would like to take this opportunity, if it is not presumptuous, to pass it on to those who read these words. Should there be any who happen to remember me and feel so inclined, I would be more than happy to hear from them. The Rector has my contact information…

TWO DEATHS

(NOTE: This summer, I am planning to work on a new collection of essays, some of which are already written, others still the glimmer in the eye, and others as yet unimagined. The essay below was recently completed, and is a likely candidate for inclusion.

TWO DEATHS

I understand that I will likely have little choice in the matter, but if I did I would wish to die a conscious death. I heard one friend, quite recently, express the hope that she would die peacefully in her sleep, and there is certainly an appeal to slipping off quietly into the unknown. My own preference is to have learned sufficiently from my meditation practice to be awake and conscious enough to be able to bear witness to the moment of my death. It is, after all, one of the great experiences—the ultimate experience, really—of life itself. I would not want to miss that moment of transition if I had the chance.

I have attended two people at the moment of their death. I have watched at the deathbed of others, but was no longer at their bedside when they died. From those two, however, I learned important lessons about death and dying, and how to go about it, and I am immensely grateful to both for what they had to teach me. Both were women, and to both I was related through my marriage to Ellie. One of them died without a struggle, in peace and harmony with the world she was about to leave. The other did not, decidedly, “go gentle into that good night.”

Dorothy, Ellie’s stepmother, enjoyed enormous privileges in life, and suffered great and lasting wounds. The most severe of these, I came to believe in the course of the many years I knew her, was having been sent away from home for almost all of her formative years. She was born in Vienna, the daughter of an opera singer more concerned with his career, I gathered, than with his family. Her parents separated; her mother remarried a man of significant wealth and immersed herself in the life of a New York socialite. Dorothy—“Dossy”, as she was universally known—was packed off to be raised, principally, by the family of an academic in Maine.

Dossy was an exceptionally beautiful, even stately woman, a grande dame who prided herself on observing the social proprieties—even though, as a young woman, she fell for a married man, Ellie’s father, Michael, and entered into a lasting relationship with him before Ellie came into the world. A trust fund beneficiary, she had great wealth at her disposal while she lived, but was reticent about using it. My guess is that she never really felt that it was hers—and indeed, on her death, the entire fund reverted to a family she had never known. She chose to live by her own strict code of ethics that made for sometimes difficult demands on herself, as well as on those around her. I can only imagine the humiliation and anger this woman must have felt, later in life, when the man for whom she had broken this code betrayed her and, for a while, lived separately from her. (It was at this time that she told Ellie, in a moment of brutal honesty, that her birth had been "a parting gift" to her mother!)

In language, as you might expect, Dorothy was a strict grammarian; she would return letters written to her by Ellie, as a child, with corrections in red ink. She was well able to afford maid service, and could be queenly in her treatment of those who worked for her. She had a perfectionist turn of mind that could manifest as cynicism and judgment. She was both generous and parsimonious, loving and demanding. Herself extremely intelligent, she valued the intellect above almost everything. She prided herself on her knowledge of the arts, and was at her best and brightest hosting a dinner party with prominent guests from the world of arts and letters, whose conversation skills she could admire—and match or parry with her own.

Dossy’s husband, Michael, predeceased her, and she was left a widow for a good number of years before she herself began to fall into senility—a condition complicated by the further ravages of diabetes. Aware that her mind no longer functioned as it once did, she struggled mightily against the inevitable loss of memory and the growing confusion. Having taken such pride, for so many years, in her intellectual acumen, she was unable to watch it slip away from her without despair and anger. She was unprepared for old age, and found it repugnant when she saw herself increasingly consumed by it. Unable to resist its onslaught, she fell into a remorseless internal battle that was painful to watch; debilitated and weakened by this conflict, she surrendered physically far sooner than was necessary, retreating to her bed and, as her dementia progressed, refusing more and more to leave it.

We knew, of course, when her death was imminent, but were shocked by the way in which it came. We had been sitting with her for some hours, during which she seemed to slip into a coma. Then, quite suddenly, she sat bolt upright and glared—glared is not too strong a word for the expression on her face and in her eyes—glared out for a moment, unseeing, defiant, in a kind of impotent rage, before falling back into the arms of death.

Laurie, Ellie’s birth mother, suffered equally painful wounds. As a young child, she lost her mother, who died in childbirth when her younger brother was born. Her father then expired in the arms of lover while she was still a young girl; his estate, if I have the story right, was left to be managed by a friend, later to be brought to court by Laurie and her brother, accused of mismanagement of the funds. As a young woman, Laurie plunged into the bohemian life

of a painter in Greenwich Village in the 1930s, and married a young playwright, Michael, Ellie’s father--and the son of the very man who was later the object of her lawsuit. A tangled web, indeed, had begun to ravel...

Lured by the financial rewards of the screenwriter’s trade, Michael brought his wife west in the late 1930s, where their two daughters were raised. Soon dazzled by the glamour of his Hollywood agent (Dorothy, see above,) he left the family to be with her when Ellie was five years old, and her sister, Susie, seven. Laurie, then, suffered another traumatic abandonment—and one from which she never fully recovered in the course of her long life. Her interests as an artist turned to ceramic sculpture and this, along with her teaching, became her avocation for the many years she had yet to live. She remarried very much later in life—in her mid-eighties!—with a man who had been her faithful and attentive companion for decades; and then only, we understood, as an estate-planning strategy.

Perhaps as a result of her childhood deprivation, Laurie combined a curious mix of dependence and independence. On the one hand, she had an almost child-like need to be taken care of; on the other, she took good care of herself. She nurtured a bohemian streak that led her into a multitude of what, in those years, many would consider off-beat health practices, from yoga to Bach flower therapy, from daily eye and breathing exercises to the Alexander Technique. For years, she would travel every summer to Switzerland, where she would treat herself to the luxury of the expert body pampering available at the Bircher-Benner clinic.

She lived on into her nineties, maintaining her studio and her teaching practice until only weeks before she died. And when the time came, she refused to be hurried out. It simply became clear that her body was slowing down, and she was helped off to bed where she lay, quietly and patiently for two weeks, slipping off more and more into some netherworld where she was neither entirely here, nor entirely gone. Even after it seemed that her consciousness had left us, she proved capable of rallying; knowing that there was unfinished business between mother and daughter, I spoke to her at one point to remind her that her daughter, Ellie, still needed assurance of her love; and, though her eyes remained closed and her head in a seeming daze, we watched in amazement and awe as her hand reached out from under the bedcovers and came to rest, in a kind of blessing, on Ellie’s heart.

It took those two full weeks to die. She just kept slowing down, until she stopped. At the very end, we were counting the seconds of the longer and longer intervals between her breaths until… the next one simply never came. At that very moment, Ellie looked out through the bedroom, across the lawn to Laurie’s studio, and saw a white dove flutter up into the sky. Her mother was gone. I feel privileged and humbled by the experience of having watched these two women die. Each death seemed like a confirmation of what I have come to understand about karma, the Buddhist concept of how our actions bring about results that are inevitably consistent with those actions. In life, Dorothy was inquiring, intellectually combative, intolerant of not-knowing; she died resistant, unwilling to surrender. Laurie was acquiescent, internal, cocooned; she allowed death to enter without fanfare or drama. Like the dove ascending from the roof of her studio, that spirit part of her seemed to just lift gently from the body, leaving it cold and empty, useless and abandoned, a prison she was finally able to escape.

There is much about me that is more like Dorothy than Laurie. Indeed, of the two women, I found it much easier to get along with Dorothy while they were alive. If I were able to choose my death, however, it’s clear to me which one I would prefer. Laurie modeled a way to die that I consider dignified and enviable. Given my choice, I choose her way—along, perhaps, with a little more consciousness of the moment. But then, who knows what clarity she was granted in this most mysterious of all human events.