THE LIFE OF THE MIND

Dreams, fantasies, memories, reflections, meditations... As the body ages, the life of the mind occupies more and more of the reality of my life. 

Last night I dreamt I had become the target of criminal assassins. I lived alone--as I do not--in an apartment--as I do not--on the seventh and highest floor of a low-rise building, in some part of the world that is unknown to me. With the urgency of the hunted, I needed to return to my apartment to recover what was important to take with me on my escape. The elevator... ? No. Too dangerous and too confined a space. I devised an ingenious way to scale the building by running around the perimeter of every floor, each one tilting a little higher to take me to the next. But this design turned out to be a deceptive, M.C.Escher-ish illusion, leaving me trapped in constant motion on the same floor.

Instead, I took to the wooden stairway at the side of the building, like an internal fire escape, running up so many flights I was exhausted by the time I reached the top. Inside, my apartment was fully furnished. Everything was there. What should I take? Clothes? The closet was crammed with them. I realized I could only take what I was wearing, and changed into a pair of light gray pants, a nondescript shirt, so as not to draw attention. 

Next, the safe. A small fireproof box. I recalled having left a roll of money there, in case of an emergency. Thousands of dollars, mostly in hundred dollar bills, all rolled up neatly. But then, reaching for it, I recalled also having decided at some earlier time that it was too much, too susceptible to theft, and had taken much of it to hide elsewhere, leaving only a deceptive roll consisting mostly of dollar bills, as a kind of decoy. I had left myself a note, a hint, to help me remember where I had hidden the rest...

I wanted to tell my daughter--not my daughter; where did she come from? where did she go?--where to find that note, but didn't know what to tell her. I simply gave her the remaining cash and ran out, down the stairs again.

On the next floor down I found a room where a professor--a glib man of deceptively pleasant mien--was preparing for a seminar with a handful of students. I immediately suspected him of being the assassin, but he read my mind and gave me a not unkind smile. It's not the obvious suspects you should be concerned about, he told me. The one should worry about is the one you least suspect...

The dream continued, but faded, from that point, from my memory. 

I suspect the dream's narrative had to do with the literal and inexorable approach of death, as the years pass; and with the understanding that I will not escape, and that any money that I have and all my worldly goods will be left behind. It's a reminder that when I leave this world, it will be with nothing I have accumulated along the way.

As I say, the life of the mind increasingly takes over from the real world as the place in which I am now given to live...

THE GREAT BEFORE-YOND

I have been thinking further after yesterday's post about the premature death of our friend and neighbor...

I recall a conversation with him quite a while ago, before he was diagnosed with the affliction that would take his life--and long before he could imagine he would die so young. I was expressing my familiar doubts, I think, about life after death, and about the whole notion that this human life on earth is but a step along a much longer path, the cycle of life, death and rebirth that is central to the teachings of the dharma. Our friend, on the other hand, entertained no such doubts. He was clear in his mind that life in some form persists beyond death and that it is surely, as he put it, "in a better place."

The clarity of this belief gave him a cheerful, optimistic perspective on his life here on earth, and it leads me to wonder whether he is not now in that better place. I hope so, for his sake. After a long period of depression as his health declined, I heard that he spent the last day of his life expressing the gratitude and love he felt for his wife; and that he returned, on that day, to the state of serenity his affliction had denied him. The thinking behind karma, insofar as I understand it, is that choices are made at the moment of death which define the nature of one's future incarnation--choices that also determined the current form of our existence at the end of our previous incarnation. It is important, then, to be prepared to die with ease and grace.

I have also been thinking about another aspect of choice in the moment of one's death: the choice to leave this world. I remember my conviction, now nearly two years ago, when my sister died, that she had in fact chosen to cross the threshold into what she called, fearlessly, "the next great adventure." I am tempted to believe that our friend also made that choice. It was clear that his mind was deteriorating, along with his physical health, and the path ahead promised little but further confusion and pain, both physical and emotional, for himself and those who loved him. In such a circumstance, the choice to step out into that great "before-yond" might be a clear and comforting one.

These are mysteries, of course, that we are not given to understand. When I have expressed my doubts to one much wiser and much further along the Buddhist path than I could ever hope to be, the answer has always been a simple one: it profits us little to spend time worrying about a question to which we know we'll never have an answer. Better to devote your energies to leading a good life here and now, he tells me. And be prepared in mind and body to make wise choices at the moment of your death.

MORTALITY

Just yesterday we learned that a close neighbor and friend for now more than twenty years died on New Year's Day at the age of 62. He was diagnosed a few months ago with frontotemporal dementia, a dire condition that strikes youngish people like our friend and can result in death in just a few short years. We had been watching his decline for months, as he became more wraith-like in physical appearance and more removed, it seemed to us, in his mind. Still, his death came after a very sudden and precipitous decline and we were shocked as well as deeply saddened to hear of it.

Useless to look for anything we can associate with human logic when it comes to death. For most of his life, our friend was strong, athletic, smart. He took good care of his body, was careful what he put into it by way of food, and kept it strong and agile with his dedication to the sport of surfing. He was an artist. His creative work was not in the same world Ellie and I have long inhabited, the world of so-called "contemporary" art--a world that excludes an awful lot of art that is, time-wise at least, contemporary; yet he was skilled and dedicated, and achieved a level of success in the world in which he chose to work. He was spiritually aware, a sometime meditator, and was in tune with nature in the way a true surfer must be.

In short, there was nothing about our friend's life that could have earned, or predicted, this sudden and cruel demise. His death comes as a bleak, but bracing, reminder that the measure of our lives, as mortals, is unpredictable and that it bears no relation to the way in which we live them. There is no "justice" in the moment or manner of our death. The wisdom--and the paradoxical source of happiness--is to keep death in mind, to be aware of its proximity, to know that it awaits us all, and to prepare ourselves in mind and body for its imminent arrival.

EIGHT MINUTES

Such a dreadful event, yesterday's plane crash in the French Alps.  So many young lives lost...  Images from the site show nothing but small fragments left of what was once a jetliner.  The impact must have been one of unimaginable force.

I find myself fixating on those last eight minutes, from the time the plane started its "controlled descent" from 38,000 feet.  No word from the pilots.  No distress call.  What could have been happening in that cockpit?  And were the passengers aware, for those eight minutes, that their plane was headed for destruction?  They must have been wondering, at the very least, why they were headed so soon toward the ground.

Impossible to imagine how much they knew and what they felt as those 150 human beings hurtled toward their death.  I try to place myself in one of their seats, with full awareness, and use those minutes in meditation to prepare myself for the end of my own life on earth...

But it's a fantasy, of course.  Easy for me, sitting quietly, out of harm's way, in my living room.  Well, not easy, even so.  But relatively benign, without the terror I would surely have experienced in that circumstance, had I been aware of what was happening.

To say "my heart goes out" to the victims and their families seems an inadequate expression, but we have little more than this cliché.  To empathize, as I try to do in meditation, feels equally inadequate.  To try to rationalize... impossible.  There is no sense, no justice to be found in disasters of this kind.  Just human tragedy.

THE BOAT

Re-reading "Reflections on Silver River" in accordance with my promise to myself, (the link is to my review,) I have worked through the Invocation, the Homage and the Intention, and have arrived at Verse I, where I meet a daunting challenge.

I'll paraphrase the predicament  briefly, and far less eloquently than the author.

I am standing at the end of a pier, looking out over the dark ocean.  A well-provisioned boat  is tied up at my feet, ready to carry me out on the great adventure into the unknown, the realm of total freedom and, perhaps, eventually, enlightenment.  Behind me lie all the enticements of the life I have built for myself, all the things I like to think I own, all the experiences I treasure, the identities by which I have made myself known, my pleasures, my relationships, my addictions...

What will it take to step into the boat and cast off, on a voyage with no return?

(Is this, I wonder, Rimbaud's Drunken Boat?)

I think I'm honest in saying that there's not much I could not give up at this stage of my life.  I have come to understand that the "possessions" are all temporary anyway, not truly "mine."  I am fortunate indeed in having acquired so much in the way of material comforts along the way and they are not unappreciated.  But I think it's true to say that it is not these that prevent me from stepping into the boat.  I could let them all go.

The same with pleasures.  In meditating on this challenge, I could think of nothing in the way of all the worldly pleasures that I would not be ready to sacrifice for the adventure of complete, unfettered freedom.  I pondered long and hard about my most valued identity, the one I cling to most obstinately, the writer, and concluded that I have reached a point where even this is something that I'm able to release.

What, then, would it take to step into that boat?  What's the attachment that still holds me back?  It was clear to me, as I reflected on the image of the boat and the great ocean out ahead, that the one thing I am not yet ready or able to surrender is the attachment to family and friends, those closest to me.  It's the love I have for them, and the sense of obligation that I feel I owe them still that I can't let go.

I returned, in meditation this morning, to the understanding that death will come along to resolve this issue for me--and that, in view of the accumulation of years to date, it will not be overlong in coming!  Still, in the meantime, while not yet ready to step into that boat, I am happy to have been challenged to find the clarity in this, and I take it that the point of the exercise was to work toward that clarity rather than step headlong into the boat.  The more I am clear about the attachments that keep me on the shore, the more I'll be ready for the inevitable voyage when it's no longer an invitation, but an imperative.

Reminding myself of the subtitle of Reflections, "Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva"--the title of the original 14th century text that it translates, I harbor no illusions about achieving that eminence myself.  The true bodhisattva would have no hesitations about the sacrifices his dedication requires of him--sacrifices that the Buddha himself made in setting out on his own journey, leaving family along with everything else behind.  At least I have the clarity of knowing what I find myself unable to give up. 

"A MOMENT OF SILENCE"

I hear it all the time from our leaders, from our media.  Let's have a moment of silence... for the cop killed in the line of duty.  For the soldiers ambushed in Afghanistan.  For the movie star killed in a car crash.  For the victims of a terrorist attack.  For twenty children massacred in the sanctuary of their school.  And now for Mandela.  Let's have a moment of silence.

You know, I could swear that it always used to be "one minute of silence."  I remember, back in England, on Poppy Day, Armistice Day, the 11th of November, there was "one minute of silence" in memory of those killed on the poppy fields of Flanders; of those who died fighting in World War II.  Wherever you were, you stood still, for a minute.  In silence.  But now we're reduced to "a moment of silence," no matter the solemnity of the occasion.

Is "a moment" all we can spare for those twenty children, these days?  For a great statesman who changed the course of history?  (For Mandela, it has been five days of media chatter!)  Am I being too literal or pedantic?  It seems to me to say something about the current state of our culture, that we are always in such a hurry that we allow ourselves no time for reflection--well, only "a moment"; that we ask of ourselves that we stand still, in respectful or contemplative silence for no longer than that.

A minute, it's true, can seem like an eternity if spent in silence.  We are used to rushing in to fill silence with words or thoughts, to convert stillness into action.  Silence and stillness create a space where our always busy minds are confronted with the challenge of having nothing to say and nothing to do--an intolerable predicament for minds programmed for constant thought and action.

The subtleties of our language reflect who we are as a culture, and it seems that a moment is all we can spare in the busy-ness of the world, to contemplate the fearful reality of death and the grievous absence of one of our own.

Mumbai--and Beyond

This Mumbai thing has me thinking, once more, about death. A father and his thirteen year-old daughter sit at dinner at a restaurant and death comes crashing through the door in the form of madmen with assault weapons, firing at random among the tables. He's a former art teacher, a long-time meditator, visiting the country of the Buddha's birth in search of spiritual enlightenment. She is, well, just a teenager. Barely a teenager, who came along on her father's quest because she thought the experience would give her good subject matter for an application essay to qualify for entry to a private school. The last thing either expected was this encounter with violent death. So, too, the rabbi from Brooklyn and his young, attractive wife... And dozens of others like them.

And then... five human beings set off in a SUV for some unknown purpose and drive off an overpass somewhere in Colorado, crashing forty feet to their death on the concrete below; a store clerk leaves for his job at a Walmart store, and dies shortly after the store opens, trampled to death by the stampede of post-Thanksgiving shoppers...

It's not only the randomness of these deaths, and the countless others in Mumbai, that got me thinking: it's the seeming finality that accompanied them. As an atheist and a not-quite Buddhist who finds the whole notion of multiple lives too hard to swallow, I read about these deaths with little to comfort me. I would like very much to believe that this one life is not all there is, and I do have some inkling that the life-force or the energy that I feel within will persist in some form after my death. My struggle really is with the ego part, the ME that clings to the peculiarly human individuality that is the current manifestation of my being and on which I hang the story of my life. I am hung up by that face I see in the mirror, and by which others recognize me for who I seem to be.

I realize that my meditation practice has not yet brought me to the point where I can let go of these appearances. No matter how much I may "understand," up here, that clinging and aversion bring with them equal suffering, that understanding fails to register with the same power in the heart and the gut. The fact of the matter is that I really like being who I am, and the thought of not being me any more is a painful one.

Readers of The Buddha Diaries will perhaps remember that other little problem I have with death: I'm really hung up on the story, all stories, any stories, and I have a lot vested in knowing the end of them. Thw father and daughter started their dinner that evening in the full expectation that they would get up and leave the table at the end of it, continuing their journey. The store clerk, perhaps, had had a row with his girlfriend the evening before, and went to work in anticipation of the opportunity to repair the damage before the day was out. As for me, there are multiple strands of story going on in my life right now, and I realize there are many whose end I will not know. I'm absurdly grateful to know the end of this past election story--especially since it ended in precisely the way I would have written it, had I been so empowered. But now I have to wonder how much of the continuation of the political story I'll be given to know; and it's unlikely that I'll ever know if the planet we live on will survive the abuses we have inflicted on it. That this particular and current story should even have a foreseeable end is pretty scary. Then the events in Mumbai come along to remind me of the fragility of our global balance and the real possibility of human history ending in a forest of mushroom clouds.

In this context, of course, my own little life seems small indeed... but I cling to it none the less for the knowledge of its relative insignificance. So this morning I sit and try to bring my wandering attention back to the breath. For too few moments, I manage to bring my mind into the present and breathe past the gravitational mass of my own body. I acknowledge the unique wisdom of the Buddha and the path to happiness he has laid out for those of us who try to follow it. And yet I find it impossible, today, to reach anything that comes near serenity...

A Movie...

... we just couldn't bear to watch, even though I suspect that it's a very good one: The Savages. It had been sitting on our Netflix shelf for a few weeks, neglected for reasons unknown to myself but better known to Ellie, who had read about it, and we took it down last night and slipped it into our DVD player. Twenty minutes later, we pushed the eject button on the remote. Too raw. Too close to the bone. It nettled all our fears about growing old and dependent on others for our care.

I understand that the movie is really about the brother-sister relationship between the younger characters, but the first twenty minutes, at least, were devoted to their aging father and his "girlfriend," who in one memorable early scene sits rigid in front of the manicurist who is pandering to the last vestiges of her vanity. "Very sexy," the manicurist declares, delighting in the color she has just applied to a fingernail and looking up at the wrinkled face in front of her... just as the old woman topples over and dies. Ah, eros! Ah, thanatos! The old man, her boyfriend, the father of the squabbling siblings at the center of the story, is rapidly approaching dementia. Incensed by the insolence of his care-giver in scolding him for not having flushed the toilet, he returns to the scene of the crime and smears the word "PRICK" in his own feces on the bathroom mirror.

We did not reach for the remote, however, until the scene where the old man is strapped by airline officials into a wheelchair to be loaded unceremoniously onto the airplane to return him from Sun City, Arizona, to the nursing home facility his son has chosen for him. (Great exterior shots, by the way, of the Sun City location: curiously symmetrical homes and landscaping, almost surreal, overly bright, and distinctly scary.) Caught short on the plane, the irascible old geezer preremtously yells "Bathroom!" at his accompanying daughter, and again, "Bathroom! Now!" Struggling with tiny, painfully slow steps down the narrow aisle in the crowded plane, both he and she are ignominiously shamed as his pants fall down around his ankles amid the pitiless stares of fellow passengers.

Well, it happens to be my birthday in a couple of days. Not a Big One--no zeros. But the first number in the double digit figure is higher than I'd like it to be. A friend pointed out yesterday at the gym that she still manages to feel young when the second digit is a low one, as mine is. A nice conceit. Still, I have been feeling the weight of years. I notice that my steps are sometimes slower, lacking the energy of youth, and I consciously make the effort to appear more sprightly. I notice with aggravation that those things I liked least about myself--my impatience, say; a tendency to testiness--become more pronounced, and harder to contain. I think much more often about the inevitable end of life. My greatest fear about growing old is the dependency depicted in that movie, the loss of simple dignity, the need for others to take care of me, prop me up when I walk, feed me, clean up after my eliminations...

Which is why the most meaningful part of my metta practice, the first and last moments of my daily meditation, is that line from the chant on the sublime attitudes that comes after "May I be happy" and "May I be free from stress and pain": May I look after myself with ease. It's not often that a film is just too intense for me, but this one was. I never even learned the end of the story--a loss that, as those familiar with The Buddha Diaries know, is a serious one for me. But at least a fine metaphor for the experience of life itself, whose end we are rarely privileged to know.

I'm sure I'm not alone in any of these feelings. I'm hoping you might share your own...

Bugs

No, not Bunny. Not the cartoon. I mean the live kind, little gnat things, mosquitoes, moths, those little creatures that gather in masses to ruin your quiet evening in the great outdoors. That kind. Well, yesterday, Ellie came home with a bug-zapper--one of those black wire cage contraptions with an eerie blue light in the center, to which flying insects of all kinds are attracted to their instant, sizzling extinction.

It was a kind thought--at least where I'm concerned. We have a lovely balcony that overlooks the Hollywood Hills. At sunset, when the cool ocean breeze (usually) flows in to nudge out the heat of the day, it's a wonderful place to sit and enjoy the gathering dusk. The bugs seem to like it just as much as we humans do, however, and they have a nasty attraction to human flesh. For some reason best known to themselves, they seem to prefer my flesh to Ellie's: I can't sit out there for more than five minutes without that familiar itchy feeling down around the ankles--their preferred target. When I feel one of settle in for a pleasant dinner at my expense... well, Buddhist principles or no, I do confess, I slap 'em. I don't just brush 'em off, I slap 'em. It's instinctive, uncontrollable, a gesture of pure self-defense. Only afterwards do I reflect that I've taken the life of a living being, to whom I should have been sending goodwill and compassion.

But a bug-zapper... That's another matter. That's malice aforethought, a deliberate, coldly conscious intention to instigate death. We debated the issue throughout the evening. This morning, on our exercise walk around the hill, we debated it further with our friend and neighbor, Nancy. She voiced my own opinion, that the sound of death by electrocution is blood-curdling, even when it's "only" bugs that are the victims. The slap is a much more human sound, and one for which one can, after all, accept personal responsibility. The bug-zapper is by comparison, well, inhuman. And there are always those yellow candles with the nasty smell...

So, finally, after much debate and anguished self-examination, the bug-zapper went back, this morning, to the hardware store. What do you say, you good folk who read these words? Do you use bug-zappers? Do you have wonderful alternative remedies to share? Some of you, surely, live in mosquito-infested territories and have patented methods of bug-deterrence. Let me hear from you. Please.

Warriors

I notice that I have been writing more about art than about the Buddha and his teachings in recent days. It's an old habit, and I'm glad to be finding the opportunities; and besides, I see little conflict between the two. After all, art at its best, is about the life of mind and spirit, about the inner work it takes to come to the kind of clear-sighted self-knowledge that the practice of Buddhism invites. I trust that my reflections are of interest to visitors to The Buddha Diaries, because your visits are important to me. For me--as I'm sure for others--it's of essence that what I write be read. It's not my wish to be that "voice crying in the wilderness." As I tried to clarify in that recent lecture, "Going Deep: Mining the Inner Self," I write in part to find out more about myself, and in part in order to be heard by others.

Back to art, then. Thursday this past week we went with our friends Fred and Lynn to see "Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China's First Emperor" at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana--the exhibition's first stop on a North American tour. I have known about these figures for some time, of course, and was excited at the prospect of seeing them at first hand. What I had in mind--somewhat naively, I suppose--were those serried ranks of foot soldiers and cavalrymen I had seen in photographic reproduction, and I have to say that what I got was something different from my expectations. No less valuable in its way, perhaps, but different.

What I got was a great deal of historical and cultural information about China at the time of the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang (250-210 B.C.) and a lot of fascinating information about the creation of those figures, their re-discovery centuries later, and the archeological restoration process that it took to bring them back to something close to their original splendor. What I missed was what I can only describe as the oomph I had expected, the spectacular quality of the sheer mass of them, the "serried ranks" I mentioned above. The relatively small number of restored figures were exhibited separately, as individuals--marvels in themselves but deprived of their collective grandeur. I got a lot less awe than would have met my expectations, and had to satisfy that desire through the photographs and video that accompanied the show.

(Thanks to the Bowers Museum for providing me with these images. I should point out, however, that they are not installation shots from the current exhibition, but rather from the Museum of the Terra Cotta Warriors and Horses at Qin Shi Huang, Lintong, China.)



That said, I did learn a lot; and I was awed, in a minor key, by the marvelously skillful construction and the quiet serenity of the isolated figures. It's amazing, given their numbers, that each is an individual, with individual physiognomy and posture, each with an individual energy and emotional affect. No two, as I understand it, are identical. In their centuries-old silence, they exude an inner strength and purposefulness that is, yes, awesome in itself. They stand before us, somehow above the vicissitudes of the current history of the world, secure in their deathless certitude and improbable survival.

What is it, I wonder, about we humans that we have been so obsessed, throughout our history, with making images of ourselves? There was a practical/spiritual purpose, of course, to the creation of this terra cotta army: the emperor needed their protection in the afterlife. Installed at strategic locations at the outskirts of his necropolis, they have stood guard for centuries, in defense of his eternal soul. Well, not quite. The non-romantic, Buddhist part of me needs to point out that this army, too, fell victim to the ravages of time, and was utterly destroyed before modern man came along to meticulously recreate it. Dust to dust... and back again!

Still, we turn our human skills to the attempt to perpetuate who we are, and it is certainly moving, amongst these figures dignified by age, to feel that we are in some small way in touch with those who walked the earth so many years before us; and that their spirit can still in some small way walk amongst us. I value enormously the small statue of the Buddha that sits in eternal contemplation in our garden, where I sit writing these words on a sunny Saturday morning in twenty-first century Southern California; and the larger face of the Buddha, down whose cheeks the water of our fountain runs like ever-compassionate tears for the suffering we bring upon ourselves through our attachments. These figures are true presences in our lives, reminders of the values that we try to live by. I know they are not the Buddha, that they do not remotely "look like" what the Buddha may have done, twenty-five hundred years ago; and even so they bring something of his serenity of spirit into the garden, along with a healthy reminder of the impermanence of all things.

As for the warriors, eternally stalwart and eternally loyal to their emperor, they too bring something of value into our lives, reminding us in their wordless way of the deepest fears and grandest aspirations that we share with our fellow mortal beings throughout history, and in all parts of the globe.

Marlene Dumas: Eros and Thanatos

(I'm still waiting for better images and permissions from the Museum of Contemporary Art press office; and will post them when they come. In the meantime, these small images are, frankly, pirated from cyberspace. Apologies...)

There's some catch-up to be done, here on The Buddha Diaries. Let's start with Thursday of last week, when Ellie and I went downtown to the Museum of Contemporary Art to see the exhibition of the South African-born artist, Marlene Dumas. Who would have predicted, twenty years ago, when painting had been pronounced "dead" and figure painting deader still, if that were possible, that today the world's hottest-selling woman artist would be a painter--and a figure painter, at that?

"Hottest-selling" means nothing, of course, in aesthetic terms. But I was moved by Dumas' unremitting, sometimes painful, always pitiless examination of the human body and the human face. As those who follow my blog entries know, I have written recently about Don Bachardy's work with the figure, about sitting for Bachardy, and have attempted my own "self-portrait" in words, so this topic has been much on my mind. In this context, I saw all of Dumas' work to be "self-portrait", even though none of it actually is. I believe that in looking at others with the kind of intensity her painting requires, Dumas is in some sense looking into the mirror and casting a penetrating gaze into her own humanity.

Given this subject matter, it's hardly surprising that her work hews closely to the classical, timeless "eros and thanatos" theme. Erotic the work certainly is, with its focus on (mainly) feminine sexuality, and the beauty--and vulnerability--of the female form: naked, often provocatively posed, sometimes mercilessly exposed to the voyeur's gaze.







Here and there, a male figure in a state of unambiguous arousal adds edge and context to the female sexuality.



Dumas' figures are palpitatingly alive, brimming with energy, desire, emotional complexity... We feel their flesh.



And yes, what would eros be without its counterpart, thanatos, the shadow of death? Dumas titles her show, tellingly, "Measuring Your Own Grave." In the poetic artist's statement included in the materials accompanying the show, she offers this explanation for the "somber title":

It is the best definition I can find
for what an artist does when making art
and how a figure in a painting makes its mark.

She shows us human flesh, post mortem, laid out, cold and blue, deprived of the life force that once activated it. She paints death masks,-the faces, I assume, of loved ones, or those who have a special meaning for her—as though to experience for herself the state of death, as much as to make a record of it.

Is it redundant to point out, yet again, that the flesh is mortal? That it is the source of the deepest--and most fleeting--of our pleasures (remember, the French call sexual climax a "petite mort", a little death?) as well as the most profound of our insecurities and fears? Perhaps. It has been done more times by poets and painters than anyone would care to count. And yet... here comes Marlene Dumas to do it for us one more time, in a way that no other human being ever has or ever will, and I for one am moved again to the contemplations of our shared mortality and, in particular, of my own. This is the ultimate teaching of the Buddha: the absolute knowledge that we all will die. It is well to be reminded of it, to keep it "in mind," if we wish to lead a fully conscious and compassionate life.

(As I was jotting these last words down, on a bench outside the market as I waited for Ellie to finish the shopping chores, a rather old, old man with grizzled beard stopped by to leer at me and offer a heavy sigh. "These women today," he said, a propos of nothing—and everything—“they don't wear bras any more." He used his age worn hands to describe, achingly, what he had seen. "You're still watching, then?" I asked, amused by his ancient, unapologetic lechery. "At my age," he told me with another big sigh, "that's all I can do." And chuckled wearily, and moved on.

Ah, eros! Ah, thanatos! We humans are so obsessively attached to each of them... No?

Memories

I did not know Leonard Rosenman, who died earlier this year at the age of 83. I did, however, by reason of our family connection, join the throng of friends and family who gathered yesterday afternoon at the Eastwood Sound Stage at Warner Brothers Studio to honor him and celebrate his life.

An extraordinary life it was. A composer of note who turned his primary attention to scores for film and television, he was "discovered" by the young James Dean in the 1950s and composed the music for both Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden, along with an innumerable list of other movies; drank beer with Dylan Thomas and bummed around with Leonard Bernstein; joined Albert Einstein (who by then, according to the account we heard, had become somewhat hilariously tone deaf) in a chamber concert; studied with Arnold Schoenberg; made more friends than could possibly be imagined; won Oscars and Emmys; and of course, with his music, reached the ears of countless millions of those who did not know him.

All of which would be impressive enough in itself--a rich, luminous life, lived to the full, and an important contribution to the history of both music and film; and, on the personal front, a wonderful, loving and mutually supportive family, many of whom were there on this occasion to offer their own tributes. Almost more impressive, though, was the twilight of his life. Diagnosed in his 70s with frontal temporal dementia , a degenerative brain disorder, he lost certain capacities of his formidable brain but, as one of his daughters put it in her tribute--and here I paraphrase--found a way to live, instead, more fully in his heart. He lived those last years of his life, I heard reiterated many times as those who loved him spoke, exclusively "in the moment." Last to take the stage in his honor was the group of young, creative people known as "Leonard's posse," care-givers who discovered in his energy and joie de vivre, and in a capacity to love that transcended his disease, a source of inspiration that changed their lives.

There was the opportunity, of course, as is inevitable on such occasions, to reflect on the fragility of life and the advance of years. Particularly moving, for me, was the moment when the octogenarian actor, Robert Brown, a contemporary of Leonard's, spoke with personal intensity about the experience of watching the body in the process of its inevitable changes as it ages--something I myself am keenly aware of. And toward the end, the presiding rabbi spoke of memories--"the only thing we truly have," he said. I see what he means. Our own memories, and the ones that others form of us, exist on a plane that is quite different from that of material reality.

Still, in my understanding of the Buddhist teachings, I find myself in disagreement with the rabbi on this point. Memories, like everything else, are illusory and fleeting; they come and go seemingly as they will, often in conflict with our own needs and desires. We each have our different ways of remembering: Ellie has an incredible memory for faces, but searches in vain for names; I can often supply the names, but fail to recognize the faces. Like everything else, our memories fade and disappear. Leonard's short-term memory was pilfered from him by the peculiarities of his disease; but, not long before his death, we heard, in the comfortable home to which his family had entrusted him for his health and safety, he sat down at the piano one day and played, beautifully and to everyone's surprise, the theme he had composed decades before for "East of Eden."

One thing, of course, is certain: that Leonard is more fortunate than most of us in that his memory will live on in his music. Those listening to it, years from now, will have no living "memory" of the man who wrote it; but they will have the evidence of the music itself to identify and communicate with the human spirit from which came into the world. The impression I was left with was that this Leonard was a truly happy man, who spent his life devoted to what he loved the most--whether his art, or the people who supported him in his practice of it. May we all find such happiness in our lives.

Masami Teraoka: See This Show

So here's what I had been planning to write about yesterday, before getting sidetracked by Rudyard Kipling and his son Jack. I wrote back in October of last year about the essay I had been asked to write as a part of the text for a catalogue for an exhibition of Masami Teraoka at Sam Freeman Gallery in Santa Monica. The show finally opened at the weekend, and Ellie and I were there to greet Masami--an old friend who once showed at Ellie's gallery, back in the early 1970s--and to see how the work looked in its installation.



I was in awe. Much of the work I'd written about I had seen only in reproduction--either in hard copy, in books, or online. As I told Masami, what I saw was much, much better than what I had written about. Quite different, in fact, in many respects.

First, the scale. These are massive, mural-sized paintings, many of them, and as imposing as their size would suggest. They dwarf the viewer, and demand to be experienced as physical presences, not simply as visual objects on the wall: to actually see them, you have to walk with them, end to end, following their "story" and their multiple incidents. Taken as a whole, the installation gives a whole different sense of the artist's intentions: the gallery space, with its calibrated lighting and high ceilings, becomes a cathedral--or in the case of one small side galery, a chapel--in which art occupies a quasi-sacred space and invites that kind of attention. Sacrilegious though many of the paintings might appear in theme and image, they refer the viewer indisputably to the traditions of Renaissance religious painting, and carry that weight with them.

Satirical, parodic, scatalogical, erotic, Teraoka's paintings mock the holy cows of present-day society and expose its myriad hypocrisies. He takes on Bush and politics, the Pope and sexual abuse by Catholic priests, food fetishes and exercise fads, sado-masochist perversions and sexual stimulants. He explodes violence, sexism, and corporate greed with gleeful passion and often bawdy humor (take note, in "Cloning Eve/Viagra Falls," above, of the curious projections from the loins of mummified corpses--giving a whole new meaning to "rigor mortis!)

The work, then, is at once spiritual in intention and highly irreligious. It celebrates human diversity and the joys of art and culture even while poking fun at all hypocrisy and pretension. It is deeply engaged in life, even as it refuses to allow us to sweep death under the carpet of distractions. With its constant, bemused references to the ubiquity of twenty-first century technology, it celebrates the inventiveness and creativity of the human mind, even as it deplores the results to which some of our greatest achievements are put. Its vision is lively, voracious, wildly comprehensive, charged with irrepressible energy and, yes, compassionate toward our wayward species.

All of which it to say that if you live in or near Los Angeles, you should not miss the opportunity to see this show. Knowing how frequently important work gets overlooked in the welter of what is fashionable in the art world, I'm hoping that this one receives the attention it deserves. I know, I know, I wrote the catalogue. I'm not exactly an impartial witness. But I'm asking you to trust me on this one anyway.

Ninety-Seven Percent

No, that's not the latest George Bush unpopularity rating, it's the chance we have, here in Southern California, of a major 6.7 earthquake between this very moment and 2038., according to the U.S. Geological Survey, USC's Southern California Earthquake Center AND the State Geological Survey. Oh, and a 37 percent chance of a huge, 7.5 event. By 2038, of course, the chances of my still being around are a good deal slimmer. If that should happen, though, I hope it's without being totally gaga or physically debilitated.

Still, I don't relish the prospect of another massive shrug of Mother Earth's shoulders. The first big one I felt was back in 1971. Ellie and I were living on the same hill, around the corner from where we are now. The quake struck early morning, and we won't easily forget the big, cheesy moon dripping down over the Griffith Park Observatory, nor the eerie green flashes throughout Hollywood and beyond as the electrical transformers blew. We had an old friend staying with us at the time, a Korea vet, and he woke in a panic, thinking he was back in combat.

The second big one came in 1993, I think, in Northridge, to the northwest from where we live. For some reason, the shock waves traveled in our direction, and we found ourselves, downstairs, ankle deep in glass and pottery shards from our collection of purple glass and American art pottery. We had big cracks in the walls of our substantial old house, too, and one injury: our new puppy, who normally slept on the back porch, came dashing through the shards and rushing upstairs with bleeding feet.

I recall having pretty much enjoyed the first jolt. It was a novelty. I was young, European. It felt exotic, somehow, very Californian. And of course I was still invulnerable. The second time around, I was scared. Nowadays, I confess, I never go to sleep without thinking about earthquakes. Not once. I'm not sure why, but they're always on my mind. Perhaps I was a little traumatized by the Northridge quake. Those who follow these meanderings in The Buddha Diaries will know that the death I fear the most is being buried alive under tons of rubble. That might have something to do with it.

Still, better to be Buddhist about it, right? Practice a little equanimity. Breathe. Let go of the fear.

Death & Dying: The Third Challenge

Okay, so here we are, arriving at the third and final episode in Joan Halifax Roshi’s challenge about death and dying from the current issue of Tricycle magazine. The first, as you’ll remember, was about the way in which you most fear dying; the second, about how you would want to die, if you were granted your choice. The third question is this: What are you willing to do in order to die the way you want to?

That one took my breath away. It handed me the responsibility for my own manner of dying. Unless, or course, the choice is wrested from my hands by accident, debilitating disease, dementia… all of which must be entertained as possibilities. Even so, to be given the sense of responsibility for preparing for my death came as a real, and even more perplexing challenge than the first two.

Okay, though. Let’s try it. The first thing I can do is to prepare myself to let go of everything I think I own—to recognize that none of it is truly “mine,” as I have always liked to believe. That includes this lovely cottage in Laguna Beach, where I sit writing these words; the art work on the walls, which I have come to love; the computer on which I’m privileged to write (for how many years did I use, first, pens and pencils, then a manual, then an electric typewriter?) It’s a cliché, perhaps, but one worth recalling: there is not one single thing I can take with me on my not too distant journey into the unknown. Might was well train the mind to let them go NOW. That would be one thing I could do.

Next, as I wrote only yesterday in these pages, I can prepare to let go of the stories that I so much treasure. My own, to start with: the story of Peter, the writer, husband of Ellie, son of Harry and Peggy, now deceased; father of Matthew and Jason and Sarah; and grandfather of Alice, Georgia and Joseph. Human companion—I hate to say “owner,” which reminds me of slavery—of George the dog. I have a great deal vested in that story, I remind myself, and have no wish for it to reach some arbitrary end.

Next, harder still, I can prepare to let go of all those that I love, and all those who love me, some of them not included in the list above. That would include friends, teachers, fellow practitioners, some I have worked with in various capacities. If I can find the wisdom to be able to say goodbye to them all NOW, it will be easier, perhaps, to say goodbye to them when the time comes.

I recall that in answer to the second challenge, a part of my wish was to be conscious at the moment of my death. In order to make this possible I need to do everything I can to avoid disease, senility, unconsciousness. It behooves me, then, to be as conscious as possible at every moment I have yet to live: conscious of body, health, care for myself and those around me. Meditation will help here, I believe, so one more thing I can do in order to die the way I want to is to continue with, and enhance, my daily meditation practice, especially with an awareness of the aging process and the inevitability of death.

These are things that I can do. There may be others that have not yet come to mind, and I’m sure that there will be many lapses in both attention and intention along the way. But the hard part is not being able but being willing to do them—to make that commitment to myself. The first, easy impulse is to say that I will try, but “trying,” of course, is never enough. Keep trying to feed the dog, and the dog inevitably goes hungry. And I don’t want to make any easy promises, if only to myself.

So this is something I will need to meditate on further. I see it as a process rather than a race. Commitment will require full prior understanding of what is I’m committing to. In the meantime, though, I would like to thank Joan Roshi for having brought these matters to my attention, and providing me with sane and practical counsel as I approach my final path.

Dying: A Challenge, Part II

A couple of weeks ago, I posted this challenge on death and dying from Joan Halifax Roshi, along with the promise that I would return to steps two and three in the process she proposed. As a reminder, the first challenge was a meditation on this question: "What is your worst-case scenario of how you will die?" I offered my own worst-case scenario, and received several others in return.

I've had plenty of opportunity to ruminate on death and dying in the past week: the history that abounds in Savannah and Charleston almost demands it. In touring the houses of the one-time wealthy, the visitor can't help but sense the ghosts of those who lived and died there--both the wealthy and the enslaved peoples whom they owned. Death, the greatest of all equalizers, visited them all regardless of wealth or color, social standing or religious conviction. Those who were abominably unequal in their lifetimes suffered equally at the approach of death. I've heard that the Civil War, fought in these territories, brought dreadful ends to more Americans than any other war, before or since. And the epidemics of yellow fever and malaria took the lives of many thousands more before their time. Life expectancy was much shorter than it is today, and much that has been learned about medicine, personal hygiene and health care was unknown to these earlier Americans.

So, yes, I could not prevent myself from thinking how it might be to die of yellow fever, in one of those spacious bedrooms in a rice plantation mansion--or in one of the bleak cabins deemed fit for slaves. I could not prevent myself from imagining myself wounded, fatally, by some stray bullet in the chaos of battle. The spirits of those who died in these ways, so many years ago, seemed awfully close to me. It seems entirely imaginable that those whose lives were taken from them before they reached completion would find it hard to consent to the finality of death.

But back to Joan Roshi's challenge, part the second, her next topic for meditation. Here it is: after meditating on your worst-case fears, "How do you really want to die?"

Some, I know, envy those who slip away quietly in their sleep. I don't know about you, but my own great wish is to die conscious, at home, in my own bed. To still be fully in command of all my senses and bodily functions, to be alert in mind and aware of each stage of the process, surrounded by those I love--and those who love me. To be strong enough to keep sending out loving-kindness to all living beings. To be so fully conscious and to have reached a state of such equanimity that I have no fear, and can simply watch and treasure my presence in those very last moments here on earth. My heroes are those monks reputed to have died sitting up, in the meditation posture, conscious to the end; and perhaps, who knows, beyond, through every one of the bardos described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead--though I don't wish this for myself.

The challenge, then, is to meditate on those last moments as one would wish to experience them--a much more pleasant prospect, I think you will agree, than the preceding one. If you're up for it, I'd certainly be interested to hear how it works for you.

Dying: A Challenge

For today, a change of pace...

Here's a wonderful meditation practice for being with the dying by Joan Halifax Roshi, the long-respected Zen teacher and Abbot of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, as it appeared in the current issue of Tricycle magazine. Accompanying it was the description of three exercises that I thought might make a useful challenge for The Buddha Diaries and its readers. (I debated initially the possibility of sending it out as one of those "memes," but then I decided, no, what right had I to burden others with so tough a task without having first addressed it for myself? These are tough questions. Some will prefer to choose another moment in their lives to address them. And they can't be answered without some possibly painful self-examination.)

First question, then, from Joan Roshi (seen to the right with... you know who!): "What is your worst-case scenario of how you will die?" "Write it all down," she says: ""freely and in detail--how, when, of what with whom, and where you'll die."

Thanks, Joan! I actually did a very similar exercise, a few years back, when I was reading Ken McLeod's Wake Up to Your Life for review in the Los Angeles Times. Let me revisit this uncomfortable scene, however: I'm trapped under mountains of rubble, wounded, in great pain, alone. I have enough breathing space to last for a few days, and my wounds are bad enough to cause me agony--but not serious enough to result in a speedy and merciful death. It takes a long time before I start moving in and out of consciousness, and longer still before I die. I can imagine no worse way to go.

Just writing down the words is enough to summon the terror of this imagined death, and the terror becomes an actual physical sensation. It's a panic around the heart, an empty, fluttering sensation which slides down to the gut, where it becomes a serious, burning ache. My mind slips sideways, desperate to find other things to "think about." I remind myself that blogging it is a relatively easy way to go; much harder is the hour's meditation, repeated at regular intervals, that McLeod suggests to get the full benefit from the exercise.

(By way of comfort and inspiration for anyone in the predicament I have described, by the way, Joan Roshi recalls the story of Martin Toler, the miner who died in the Sago Mine accident in West Virginia, who found the presence of mind to scratch out a note with the last of his energy. It read: "Tell all--I see them on the other side. It wasn't bad, I just went to sleep. I love you.")

"Practicing dying," writes this teacher, "is also practicing living." I get that. Particularly now that I have reached an age past that at which an awfully large number of my fellow beings die. And lest anyone think that this is "depressing" stuff, let me hasten to add that the result is greater freedom--and with greater freedom, greater access to happiness.

No meme, I promise. But I would be interested in hearing from anyone who wants to give this exercise a moment's thought. This, by the way, is the least pleasant of the three-part exercise. I'll tackle the other two in future posts...

"A Deeply Religious Non-Believer..."

"I am a deeply religious non-believer... This is a somewhat new kind of religion." -- Einstein

I love this quote. I came across it in a book I'm reading in connection with my next "Art of Outrage" podcast contribution. The book is the  "Second Diasporist Manifesto," by R. B. Kitaj, a kind of aesthetic testament left by this important artist who died by his own hand at the age of 74 last October. A series of random but deeply connected thoughts on art, art history, love and lost love, the post-war art scene, Judaism, the great traditions of Jewish history and culture (Kafka, Spinoza, Freud, Wittgenstein... and, yes, Einstein,) and Kitaj's commitment to what he wanted to be a genuinely "Jewish art", the book has a number of quotations of this kind that he keeps coming back to.

"A deeply religious non-believer..." That resonates. I have religion "down the bones." I was brought up with it. All that personal history doesn't simply dissipate, it pervades the body-mind. What was lost along the way was the belief in some ineffable being overseeing human affairs--and making a pretty poor job of it, if you ask me!--and in an afterlife of reward for the good and punishment for the rest of us. Karma makes sense to me. It works in this life. Heaven and hell do not. Oh, sure, we create our own little heavens and hells, but that's not what the Christian concept is about.

Of his own religion, Kitaj says "The main religion I believe in is Kindness, and I fail at that too often."

That resonates, too.

In Memoriam: A Family Affair

We drove up this morning, unusually for a Sunday, from Laguna Beach to Los Angeles for a family gathering to mark the recent death Ellie’s Aunt Sylvia, of one of our elders—one of the last, be it said, since we are rapidly becoming them ourselves. We have seen our elders, to paraphrase that famous, overused saying, and they are us.

The memorial was a beautiful and moving moment. I suspect that many of us have experienced those events where, instead of a funeral, we are invited to “celebrate the life” of the recently departed. In all the merriment of getting together and “remembering the good things,” the fact of death is frequently—pardon the phrase—passed over, perhaps because that is the hard part, the part we don’t much want to look at.

Thanks to the thoughtful preparations of Ellie’s cousins, Aunt Sylvia’s memorial certainly gave us the opportunity to remember her, and to celebrate the fact that she had touched so many lives. But it was also appropriately serious and reflective.

There was a rabbi on hand to lead the proceedings, which were called to order promptly and captured everyone’s attention. The rabbi spoke quietly and with appropriate gravity about the inevitable cycle of life and death—by wonderful happenstance, Sylvia’s great-granddaughter had arrived in this world only hours before her own departure, and was on hand to contrast her lovely presence with Sylvia’s poignant absence.

The rabbi then read a couple of beautiful, familiar passages from Ecclesiastes and the Psalms (“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”) before making space for family members and friends to add their own words of remembrance, which they did with loving grace and humor; and the memorial part of the event ended with the recitation of the Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer of mourning.

Then, only after this moving and respectful tribute to the person we had come to honor, there was food and drink and conversation, and catching up with those we had not seen for too long a time, and promises to remain in better touch than in the past. All in all, it was a fitting farewell, one that did not too readily dispense with the sadness but also celebrated the joy of a life lived long and well. We should all wish for so warm a tribute, once we have followed Sylvia on that journey into the unknown that awaits us after this body in which we are given to spend our human lives gives out.

Bad Dream

We are out on a hike with a group of others, walking along the sea shore until we come to a steep climb up the cliff. There is a choice of two path, one parallel to the cliff's edge, narrow and rocky, the other along the top of what appears to be a pipe line, a path impacted with snow and ice. For some reason--and unwisely, as it turns out--I choose the latter, while the rest of our group proceed along the first path. We walk parallel to each other, within hailing distance.

Both paths follow up and down steep slopes, roller-coaster style. My own becomes increasingly slick and treacherous, and I decide after a while that it's time to attempt a crossing over to the other. A deep chasm separates the two by only a short leap. I call across to the other side for help, but I'm too impatient to wait and make the great lunge toward the other side. Mistake. I fall a few inches short of the path, but save myself by clutching to a small projection, no more than the root of a shrub, perhaps, sticking out from the side of the cliff, close to the top.

I call for help. Ellie and a friend of ours, a long-time neighbor, peer over the side and promise help, but need to get assistance. They disappear. I hang there, waiting, descending ever further into panic when the wait becomes interminable. Have they forgotten me? I cling on desperately. Nothing. No one. I start to yell: Help me, help me! Above, an Asian tourist looks about him. He has heard something, but obviously can't find the source. I shout again, but seem unable to raise my voice sufficiently to be heard. Help me, Help me!

No one can hear. I cling with growing desperation to my root. The tourist continues to look about him with a puzzled air. Down here, I yell. Down here!

My yells had apparently shifted from dream to reality. They woke Ellie, who asked if I'd been having a nightmare. She had never before heard me make the sounds I was making as I yelled, in my dream, for help.


Okay, so what's the gift?

My first thought is that the dream had to do with the fear of dying. I was clinging on to life with absolute determination and wild desperation. Meditating on the dream for a few minutes before going back to sleep, I recalled another suggestion Ken McLeod had made in his dharma talk on Sunday: that an good alternative for that "suffering" we hear so much about in Buddhism might be simply "struggle." He asked us to wonder what it might be like not to have to struggle, to simply give it up....

I don't know about you, but I find myself struggling a lot in my life. It's sometimes a struggle just to get out of bed in the morning. I find myself struggling when I write. And yet I know that the best of my writing comes when I give up the struggle, when I allow myself to be the channel for the writing, not the "writer." The same applies, when you think of it, to almost everything we do.

What if, in my dream, I had been able simply to give up the struggle to cling on? What if I had been able to let go, and fall into... I really did not know what lay beneath me. It could, yes, have been a long, steep fall leading to treacherous rocks below. It could have led to my death--which was obviously what had me in such a panic. But I'm thinking now that this is what Buddhism is really all about, achieving that kind of spiritual serenity where it becomes possible to enter into death without the fear that brings more suffering with it.

It's evident that I have some way to go!