THE BUDDHA'S APPRENTICE...: CHILDREN'S BOOK REVIEW

The Buddha’s Apprentice at Bedtime, by Dharmachari Nagaraja

It’s my fervent hope that the practice of reading stories at bedtime is not being superseded by the seductions of television and computers.  There’s an intimacy involved in sitting down with a book and reading aloud to a child that is missed in the more solitary experience you get in front of a screen or monitor.  The “teaching” part goes beyond the relay of information and into the realm of the human heart, body contact, intonation, and relationship.  My own children are grown now, but I believe that story time was an important and memorable part of their childhood experience, and one they pass on to their own children. 

My youngest grandchild, little Luka, is not yet old enough to sit still for a story.  At nineteen months, his little body resists the requirement of sitting still, and his hyperactive mind, that of paying attention.  When he gets to be old enough, though, I’ll be reading to him, starting with the nursery rhymes and fairy tales intended for the very youngest ears.  It will be a little while before he’s ready for something more sustained, but when he is, I’ll look forward to reading him the stories from this book.

I have learned so much, myself, in recent years, from the teachings of the dharma that I would want to pass on to Luka, but the question is always, what is he ready for?  I don’t want to come across all preachy and heavy-handed, because that can as easily turn a young mind away as turn it on.  But the stories in this book—the subtitle calls them “Tales of Compassion and Kindness for You to Read with Your Child—to Delight and Inspire”—live up to their billing.  They are good stories, adapted from traditional sources, based on the common values of kindness and compassion.  Their teaching is exemplary rather than didactic, and each one has its own simplicity and charm.  They are told in language that is comfortably readable, and are accompanied by brief, useful essays suggesting how they are best used.

Each of the stories begins with the injunction, “Relax, close your eyes, and imagine…”—an opening intended to introduce a child to the pleasantly attentive state of meditation; and in fact several meditation practices suitable for children are suggested in the last pages of the book.  Since I have no children or grandchildren of appropriate age, I have no way of knowing how they might take to them.  I have often wondered, though, when and how it might be possible to introduce a child to a practice that has become so meaningful in my own life, and would be curious to know what kind of response could be expected from those described.  I’ll admit to having my doubts, I suppose in part because it took me so many years, myself, to be ready for its benefits!

The acid test: would I read this book to Luka, when he’s old enough?  Absolutely.  It’s a book I’m sure any Buddhist-inclining parent would welcome in their children’s library.

A SHOUT-OUT...

... for Wendy Davis, who for eleven hours straight filibustered the Texas state senate to prevent a draconian abortion law from passing.  Prevented by senate rules from sitting, eating, even leaning on the podium, she was monitored every minute by Republicans determined to find some excuse to stop her.  They even tried to object as a fellow-Democrat, after seven hours, helped her out with a back brace.  Finally, it seems, when the Lt. Governor tried to rule her out of order, the crowds her effort had attracted broke out in rage, and helped her run out the clock.

A brave effort, which Davis promises to repeat when (not if!) Gov. Perry brings the bill back on July 1st.  It is, frankly, hard to believe that men could be so adamant and cruel in their demand to exercise control over women and their bodies.  And yet these things are happening not only in Texas, but throughout the country.  The "vast right wing conspiracy" to which Hillary Clinton referred so many years ago--correctly, in my view, but to universal mockery--has assured itself a seemingly unshakable foothold in state governments, where such basic democratic principles as the right to vote are under constant attack, along with the rights of more than half the citizens of this country: women.

(In my personal belief system, I am no fan of abortion.  It involves the taking of life, no matter how primitive and as yet unformed, to which I am in principle opposed--though I have to confess to having made an exception, recently, with the wasps that were nesting on our balcony and threatening the safety and security of our little Luka!  I do not regard it as my business, however, to impose my own beliefs on others, who should be free to make these difficult decisions in accordance with their own principles and conscience.  Having been myself, many years ago, in a situation that demanded a decision of this kind, I know how heart-wrenching they can be.  There is no "good" answer to an unintended pregnancy.)

While applauding the dramatic example of conviction, courage and stamina by Wendy Davis, we should not forget the pressing need to protect democracy in every other instance where it stands threatened by right-wing extremists.  It is a sad commentary on democracy itself, that we should be clinging now, in the twenty-first century, so desperately to its tattered remnants.  Are we to surrender the last of our freedom to those who would control us--ironically, often in the name of "freedom"?

JEWS DEFEAT HITLER! A Book Review

How the Jews Defeated Hitler: Exploding the Myth of Jewish Passivity in the Face of Nazism, by Benjamin Ginsberg.

I'll admit it, I picked up this book in the hope of reading some of the juicy WWII stories to which I am addicted.  It's a conflict that fascinates me particularly because I was brought up in its shadow.  We lived just sixty miles north of London during the Blitz, in a big old rectory that served to house not just our family, but numerous billetees from the armed services (particularly RAF, from the nearby Cranfield airfield) and intelligence: Bletchley Park, of Enigma fame, was a bike ride away.  The Nazi leaders were the super-villains of my youth, and the evil of the Holocaust, known only at the end of hostilities, was the worst of all imaginable atrocities.

All this was real to me, and I was looking for that kind of reality from the book--the nit and grit of real experience, the subversive deeds of defiant partisan resistance, the dangerous work of spies, all that excitement...  If I was disappointed, then, it was due to my own expectations.  Because the book is very largely a compilation of statistical information: the percentage of Jews in such and such an organization, the numbers of weapons delivered to the Soviets from America, and so on.  It lacked the juice and the drama I was looking for.  I found it to be interesting, but it failed to inspire or excite my imagination.  I have no way of evaluating the information it assembles, but assuming it to be reliable, it's an impressive, comprehensive record of the Jewish contribution to the war effort, whether in England and America, the Soviet Union, or the German-occupied territories.  It covers the work of scientists and spies, partisan groups and bureaucrats, in a methodical presentation of the historical facts.

The author, Benjamin Ginsberg, is at pains to make a case that answers those who ask why Jews did not do more to resist Hitler and his followers.  Those who died in the camps, the shtetls and the ghettos, he argues, had little opportunity to offer resistance: unarmed, untrained, they faced ruthless, well trained forces who had no compunction about slaughtering those who stood up to them.  Only those Jews who escaped the slaughter--most of them in the years before the war--were in a position to contribute to the war effort; and indeed, as Ginsberg amply demonstrates, their work as an international diaspora was in many ways indispensable to the defeat of Hitler and Nazism.

By far the most passionately argued part of the book, however, is the concluding passage devoted to "Aftermath and Afterward: From Tragedy to Farce," in which Ginsberg assails the anti-Semitism that persisted, despite the Holocaust, in the years that followed the war, and continues into our own time.  He is particularly incensed by the antagonism of "the Left," both here in America and in Europe, provoked principally by Islamists and their intellectual allies, united in their hatred for the state of Israel.  I see this as further tragedy, not farce.  And however much truth there may be to Ginsberg's arguments, they seem misplaced in the context of his book's ostensible theme--and indeed, by the time we reach the end, seem almost to have replaced it with a new one.

So passionate and prolonged is this epilogue, the reader is left to wonder whether it was not the author's true purpose at the outset.  I personally don't for one moment question that anti-Semitism is an evil that should, by now, have been eradicated from the realm of human prejudice--along with all other forms of racism and irrational hatred.  But Ginsberg allows his concluding screed, which constitutes a good quarter of his text, to become the tail that wags the dog.  Forgive the extended metaphor, but I wish he had instead put a bit more meat on the bone he started out with.

BUDDHIST EXTREMISTS...

It ought to be an oxymoron, but take a look at the front page story in today's New York Times. Buddhism is traditionally all about the Middle Path, rejecting the extremes. Yet here is the Burmese monk, Ashin Wirathu, who says of his country's Muslim minority: "You can be full of kindness and love, but you can't sleep next to a mad dog." "I call them troublemakers," he adds, "because they are troublemakers. I'm proud to be called a radical Buddhist."

Except for what I have read in newspapers about Myanmar over the years, I know little of the politics of what was once the more readily spellable Burma. I could not identify who started what, nor who is to blame for the current tensions... well, that's an understatement, for the open hostilities between Muslims and Buddhists in that country. But the situation there seems to me a microcosm of what is happening throughout the world: a growing intolerance of the other, and a growing propensity to resort to violence to resolve differences. 

Not even the most peaceable of Buddhists is required to be a doormat--a metaphor to which Thanissaro Bhikkhu returns when asked about such things. But who, here, is the mad dog? The NYT articles evokes the image of "rampaging Burmese Buddhists carrying swords" and reports that "Buddhist lynch mobs have killed more than 200 Muslims and forced more than 150,000 people, mostly Muslims, from their homes." It's hard to tell, from the article, what offense the Muslim community has committed against their Buddhist countrymen, other than simply being there. But there are perhaps other factors that condemn them as "mad dogs."

Appalled by the violence, the Dalai Lama recently urged Burmese Buddhists to "contemplate the face of the Buddha for guidance." It would not be a bad idea if we were all to slow down and contemplate the face of our great spiritual teachers. I'm sure they must all be weeping at the prospect of what we have been doing in their name.

Please note...

I have added images to yesterday's entry about the James Turrell exhibit at LACMA.  Please revisit if you missed them the first time around.  They are well worth your time.

IT'S THE EYE...

... No, it's the mind.  No, it's the mind's eye.  The James Turrell exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opens all three--eye, mind, mind's eye, and leaves the visitor... well, ecstatic, if ecstasy is understood as ec-stasis, a knocking out of inertia into a dizzying sense of infinite expansion.  For decades now, Turrell has been the acknowledged master of the use of light as a medium to create space, and this long-needed show serves to demonstrate that mastery.

(click on the images to enlarge)

I'd be tempted to call him a magician, if he weren't such a consummate craftsman and technician in the science of light: his effects seem magical, mind-bending, ethereal.  Behind the "seens", they are practical experiments in physics, geometry, and architecture.

The mind, in the small world of busy-ness we have created for it, tends in our daily lives to focus on the small stuff.  Turrell's work transports us out of that world, freeing the mind from its tethers and into a dimension where there is no beginning or end, nor even a middle, but pure spaciousness, where the spirit experiences the sense of being "home free."  (The attempt to put it into words inevitably results in sounding pretty silly!)  The exhibition extends through two of LACMA's pavilions: it's a maze of spaces, some large, some relatively small, into each of which the visitor is invited for a different perceptual experience.  Color entrances, overwhelms, consumes us, seducing the mind into spaces that deny us the usual comforts of definition and shape.  We are not mere spectators, we are participants in the abstract, immeasurable realm of beauty.

I looked around from time to time at the faces of my fellow visitors.  If you try that in any normal museum exhibition space, you'll see a lot of thinking going on.  People are driven by the need to "understand" art works, to put them in a historical context, to parse them for their style and visual content.  In the James Turrell show, those same faces express mainly the ecstasy of the experience they're offered: awe, wonder, fascination, enthrallment, delight.  They are captivated, as was I.  They had no need to know or understand anything beyond the pure experience itself.  And in a world divided, all too often, into the dualities of self and other, fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, it's quite an achievement to reintroduce our skeptical selves to the ultimate one-ness of spiritual experience.  This, I think, is what Turrell does, with the eloquence and seeming ease of the magician--but without the tricks.  What he creates is not more (mere!) illusion, but an alternate reality.

The exhibition includes images of numerous Turrell site-specific installations over the years, each one stunning in its own particular way and its relevance to the site. 

There is also full documentation of his ambitious work at Roden Crater - a site that is not yet open to the public even after decades of planning and construction.  It promises to be a landmark monument in the astrophysical tradition of Stonehenge and other monuments to humanity's efforts to locate our Earth in the context of the universe.

ART THOUGHTS

(First, please note: I don't usually write about work without having seen it at first hand, but I'm making an exception in the case of Gwynn Murrill's major installation on Avenue of the Stars in Century City.  I have been a fan of Gwynn's work since the early 1970s, when she was creating life-size animal forms (mostly cougars and coyotes) out of laminated wood.  These beautiful and profoundly moving sculptures attracted me both as sensuous abstract forms, and as eerily life-like evocations of the spirit of the creatures they represented.  Since that time, the artist's work has evolved and matured, with different materials and a growing repertoire of species drawn from the natural world.  From the handsome book of photographs put out in connection with the exhibition, her current installation of bronze sculptures includes tigers, deer, a flying eagle... all strangely commanding presences in the setting of Century City high-rises, water treatments, and busy avenues.

Five Tigers: Tiger 2, 2001, Bronze, Edition 2 of 6, 42 x 62 x 31 inches; Tiger 4, 2001, Bronze, Edition 1 of 6, 57 x 76 x 21 inches. Photo Courtesy LA Louver, Venice CA

This installation shot gives a sense of scale...

Photo courtesy LA Louver , Venice, California

The installation has been in place since November, 2012, and will remain through October, 2013.  If you're in the area, please take the time to see this work.  You'll find more pictures here.)

URS FISCHER AT MOCA, LOS ANGELES

If I were writing as a proper art critic, I think I would be less than kind to the huge Urs Fischer exhibition that presently occupies most of the space at both MoCA museums.  Fortunately, I’m not, I doffed that hat a long time ago, so instead I can just enjoy it.  By far the better part of it, in my view, is installed at the Geffen building, where virtually every square inch of the whopping floor space is cluttered with a massive array of collaborative clay work.  Fischer’s inspired idea was to bring in 1,500 Angelenos and Angelenas of all ages to work with him on the show, so that the installation becomes a truly populist event that includes everything from the joyously amateur to the really quite accomplished work of art...

Credit for all images: Installation view of URS FISCHER at MOCA Grand Avenue and The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, April 21 – August 19, 2013, photo by Stefan Altenburger, © Urs Fischer, Courtesy of the artist and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Much of it is desiccated by now, cracking open and decaying, so it becomes a glorious and absurdly democratic mess, a homage to the creative spirit in each one of us, and to the wildly diverse human imagination, as well as a reflection on the old belief in the durability of art versus the impermanence of life.

Included in the Geffen part of the exhibit are several works by Fischer himself: two statuesque wax figures—one of them modeled after the 16^th century “Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna...

... equipped with strategically placed candles designed to burn the monument away in the course of the exhibition (they were half gone by the time I saw the show); and an intriguing trompe l’oeil wallpaper installation recreating the walls of a New York artist's studio.  Outside the Geffen, Fischer has transformed a small clay sculpture into an imposing monument that towers above the parking lot.  (Shades, I think, of Oldenburg here.)

All well and good.  I love the playfulness of it, the giant gesture, the genial disrespect for the unspoken sanctities of art.   But for me these same qualities work less in the artist’s favor in the context of the main museum.  The huge sections of wall that are cut out and misplaced elsewhere seem somehow more arbitrary, more “arty” here.  The rain shower of enlarged, blue-green sperm and the house built of bread have the same spirit of playfulness, perhaps, but feel lightweight and self-conscious, as do the neo-surrealistic constructions that involve skeletons and various household furnishings like beds, stoves, cabinets...  

I left with the feeling that the artist would have been better served with less space to occupy in the main museum; that even his quirky imagination and quick wit had been overworked by the scope of the exhibition, stretched to capacity—and then somewhat beyond.  The huge paintings?  Well, that unkind critic might suggest, snarkily, that they do little except occupy wall space.  Lucky that I don't happen to be that critic any more, so I don't have to say it...

All of which, anyway, could speak to nothing but my own mind-fatigue.  Stretched to the fullest by the Geffen show, it’s possible that my visual intake capacity had reached its limit by the time I got to MoCA!  I would encourage others to go see for themselves.  

THE FUTURE

The spectacle of social, financial and political chaos throughout the world gives rise to this thought: the systems of government with which we have experimented in the past couple of centuries have proven ineffective.  Capitalism has run its course.  Communism has run its course.  We are now indisputably the ungovernable.  We have proved we are incapable of governing ourselves; we will not accept governing by others.  We will have to devise some new way in which we can all live together and govern ourselves, or we are fated to go the way of every other living species that has failed to survive.  Are we up to the task?  Ask Luka.

SURPRISE!

So there we were, seven stories high at the top of a science building on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, awed, amazed and amused by our environment: a tiny, fully furnished New England cottage perched precipitously at the edge of the building and cantilevered out at an angle over the plaza below...

... as though wafted there from the other side of the country by some Wizard of Oz tornado.  It's called Fallen Star, an artwork by the Korean artist Do Ho Suh, a part of the fabulous Stuart Collection of outdoor installations on the UCSD campus by some of the most imaginative artists working today.  And then an absolutely astonishing thing happened...

But first, a roundabout way to get to it.  Ellie and I first came upon this artist's work at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, London, many years ago.  It was a full-scale recreation, in translucent silk, of the house in which he grew up, in Korea.  We were enchanted by this installation at the time.  It had a magical, dream-like quality to it, inviting entry and perambulation, creating a sense of remembered place deprived of the heaviness of its material presence.  Its concept was utterly original, and its execution charming and delightful to experience.

So we remembered the artist's name, and were pleased to come upon his work again a couple of years later, in a New York gallery.  This time, the centerpiece of the exhibition was a floor-to ceiling tornado...

... created out of thousands of tiny human figures made out of cast resin.  I wrote about the piece in a November, 2011 entry in The Buddha Diaries.  Impressed once again with the quality of this artist's work, I kept his name in the back of my mind, as one does, looking forward to future encounters.  The next one came yesterday, on the UCSD campus...

It was the last stop on a day's art tour with a small group of enthusiasts from the Laguna Art Museum.  In the morning, we had visited the Matthew and Iris Strauss Foundation and their private collection in Rancho Santa Fe, with its prime examples of some of the leading artists of our time--Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, Jonathan Borofsky; and including some British artists whose work I particularly love: Anthony Gormley, Richard Long, Anish Kapoor, Tony Cragg, Fiona Rae...  So much work to see, in the limited time we had to spend there.  Ten Seconds/One Painting!  We left, breathless, stopped for lunch at Osteria Romantica in La Jolla, and visited two galleries there in the early afternoon.  I was particularly taken with the large paintings of Mara de Luca at Quint Gallery.  Inspired by Rilke's "Duino Elegies," they evoke misty, romantic land- and sky-scapes with a quietly serene, and yet somewhat disturbing beauty.  Rilke's "angel," at once ethereal and terrifying, lurks in these revisitations of the California "light and space" tradition.

Mara De Luca – Elegy III.I, 2012, acrylic and mixed media collage on canvas, 72 x108 inches

And then we found ourselves on the UCSD campus, seven stories up, in Do Ho Suh's cottage.  You arrive by elevator, exit onto the rooftop into the surprise of a lushly flowering English garden...



Ahead of you is the cottage, set at an alarming angle, reaching out from the building's edge.  Walk up the steps and you're immediately disoriented when you walk through the door and set foot on the sloping floor.  Only the plumb line of the chandelier gives a sense of the upright...

Otherwise, the furniture, the shelves, the lamps, everything is on a skew--except the visitor, dizzied by the experience.  (Our docent was keen to point out that disorientation was a sensation known not only to expatriates like the artist, but to every freshman student arriving on the campus, and for this reason totally appropriate to the site of "Fallen Star.")

And then, the amazing thing...  I was looking around the cottage--awed, as I say, amazed, and amused--when my eyes lighted upon the bookcase, where I spotted, to my still greater astonishment, a copy of a book I had written and published nearly thirty years ago!  Chiaroscuro was the first of two (I had planned more; that didn't happen) mystery-thrillers, set in the art world, that I wrote in the 1980s.  It was published by St. Martin's Press, and re-published as a Signet paperback.  I could hardly believe my eyes!  Talk about disorientation!  I was dizzied back in time as well as in space.  Of course, we had to take pictures...

And then, finally, Tim Hawkinson's adorable "Bear"--all 180 tons of stacked granite!  Who couldn't love a huggable teddy like this?

WE HAVE CREATED A MONSTER...

... and it is us.  Amidst all the breast-beating and sententious editorializing, it seems to go unnoticed that we sacrificed our privacy long ago--and not only, nor even primarily to the government.  In the recent past, I filed an application to re-finance the mortgage on our Los Angeles house.  Immediately, I began to receive a flood of emails (and USPS letters) from mortgage companies from whom I had never heard before, seeking to entice me with their offers.  Coincidence?   I think not.  Mysteriously, the private information about my loan application seemed to have become common knowledge shared by every bank and finance company in the world.

Along with most other people, I think, I do not like the loss of my privacy.  Had I foreseen the consequences of Internet activity on my computer, I might have chosen to eschew all its other delights and conveniences.  It seems, however, that I have surrendered every aspect of my life to the scrutiny and exploitation of the corporate world.  Big Brother is not just the government, but more pervasively--and to my mind more perniciously--the invisible global network of profiteering corporations.  Sadly, now, we must look back and accept the fact that the deed is done.  Impossible, at this moment in our history, to turn back the clock.  As is so often the case, we humans were seduced by the mysterious and alluring contents of a Pandora's box, and did not think twice before opening it.

Oh, and please, if you happen to be a re-fi agent reading this, I have already settled on a deal.

GLOOMY

The marine layer has us under thick cloud for most of the day here in Laguna Beach.  Ellie is a California girl, and suffers from the gloom.  Me.. well, it's like being back home in my native England.  I can take it.  We're hoping, though, that it lives up to its moniker, June Gloom, and that by the time we come down for the summer the weather will revert to our usual sunshine.  But who knows?

In any event, we have to admit that we're spoiled.  We read about the tornados and, currently, the first hurricane of the season on the East Coast, and feel silly complaining about a few clouds!  Aside from the weather, I have pretty much given up on reading or watching the news.  I'm not sure whether it's sheer frustration: most of the news simply makes me angry.  Or whether it's that the novel has my mind so engaged, I can't be bothered with the things that usually occupy me.  I don't think I'm missing much.

But it's the same with The Buddha Diaries.  Is it laziness?  Boredom?  Or that my head is taking me elsewhere at writing time?  Perhaps a bit of each.  There's an itch somewhere at the back of my mind that keeps telling me I "should" be paying attention to this old friend--and the friends of this old friend.  So here I am this morning, briefly, checking in to say hello.

Hello.  Thinking of you!  And sending metta!

SAMSARA: THE MOVIE

Briefly, this is a totally engrossing visual experience.  Not a word spoken for the entire length of the movie--though the sound track is as compelling as the images.  Samsara, is a film by Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson, who previously collaborated on Baraka--which I must now see.  "Samsara", as its title suggests, takes us on a global journey through the entire cycle of life, from birth to death.  Without commentary and with impeccable, balletic choreography, it confronts us with the spectacle of both human and natural creation and destruction, inviting us, toward the end, to consider our role in the despoiling of the planet that is given us to live on.  It is, above all, a film of compelling, sometimes terrible beauty.

I hope this is enough to encourage a handful of you to find the film and watch it.  I promise, it will be worth your time.  And now, back to that novel that I'm working on...