Freedom: Simple Thoughts

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

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

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

That's simple. And, yes, liberating.

Unfinished Dreams; and R. Crumb

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

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

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


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


Have a good one.

Zen: The Boot Camp

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jury Service Redux

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

Here's a link to the original story.

Michael Jackson: The Memorial Today

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

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

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

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

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

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