Equal Rights for All

(Written yesterday afternoon.)

In an hour or so from the moment I sit here writing these words, the new California gay marriage law will take effect, and I imagine that thousands of couples will be clamoring to exercise that right at secular offices and religious institutions throughout the state. I say, hooray for those who seek to bless their relationship with this name, some of whom have been kept waiting for too many years for the rest of society to catch up with them. And a tentative hooray for California, depending on the result of that absurd petition--is it already on the November ballot--seeking to "define marriage" as solely "between a man and a woman"? What are these people so afraid of? Is marriage, in their eyes, so vulnerable an institution that it needs their intolerance to "defend" it?

These thoughts were inspired in part by an email, received Monday, with a link to the New York Times review of a new movie, "Chris and Don: A Love Story," about the British-born writer Christopher Isherwood and his life-long companion, the artist Don Bachardy. It was sent to me with a friendly reminder of Bachardy's gratitude for a catalogue essay I wrote for an exhibition of his "Portraits of Christopher"



at California State University, Fullerton, a number of years ago--an essay that started out with the words, "I learned to write from Christopher Isherwood." I was much moved by the pictures in the exhibition, in particular by the extraordinary depth of love they manifested between one man and another. Here's a part of what I wrote:

The portraits of Isherwood are exceptional [...] in that the relationship is exceptionally close. From them, we can only guess at his youth, since they cover only the latter half of his life. But we see his maturity, the decline of his body, his battle with illness and, finally, with death. Bachardy records it all for us with that camera-curious eye, sparing us nothing. What could be more honest, more touchingly vulnerable, than that 1985 picture of Christopher as a naked old man, reclining back away from us, his body exposed, with nothing left to hide? Or that haunting, unforgettable series of pictures of Christopher after his death, no more now than a useless, empty body, still strangely beautiful but ineffably sad, the abandoned remnant of a human life. In Bachardy's final tribute, we sense our own futile desire to cling despairingly to our beloved, and our own lives.

The "camera-curious eye" is of course a reference to that famous phrase from Isherwood's "Berlin Stories," recast first as a drama in "I Am a Camera," and later as the movie "Cabaret." It was in Isherwood's early work that I went to school on the serious, sometimes difficult art of exploring the world from that intimate point of view of the "I." He was the master--understated, precise, a little diffident, insistently clear and honest. His prose was the epitome of authenticity and almost transparent clarity. Like myself--though a great deal earlier, and with more scholarly application than I--he turned from an Anglican upbringing to a lasting interest in, and devotion to Buddhist teaching and practice. I was fortunate enough to meet him on a number of occasions much later in life, and treasure those memories with affection and respect. (I had cause to remember him, also, as the subject of one of the great early double portraits by David Hockney, when I was writing the Abbeville Modern Masters book about the work of that fellow Brit-in-exile.)

I re-read my essay on the Bachardy show this afternoon, and felt that it was good enough to share with those readers of The Buddha Diaries who might be interested. It's called, obviously enough, Don Bachardy: Pictures of Christopher, and I think it's worth a read, if only to get a sense of the depth of the relationship between these two men. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to see the movie.

As a footnote, Bachardy invited me once to pose for a portrait. It was an extraordinary and somewhat unnerving experience, to have that unblinking camera-curious eye trained on me for two hours at a time as he worked in silence at his easel. I was so interested in the experience that I actually asked the artist if I could return and pose naked for him, in another session. He happily agreed, and I must say that I learned a great deal about myself, about the difficulty of stillness and silence, and my feelings about my body under his scrutiny. I was immensely grateful for the gift. I will, however, refrain from sharing the results with you!

In the meantime, I'd be happy if you'd join me in celebrating the remarkable moment of 5:01 PM on Monday, June 16, in California--and voting, if and when it comes to that, AGAINST any attempt to reverse this long-overdue and simply humane law.

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.

The Butterfly

(cross-posted with Accidental Dharma)

Thanks to my wife, Ellie, who put this book into my hands--with the words "Accidental Dharma." It's very short, for reasons that will become obvious. I read it in a couple of hours... and she's right, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the archetype of the "gift wrapped in shit." Jean-Dominique Bauby, its author, was at the prime of his creative and, yes, rather glamorous life as the editor of the French magazine Ellewhen he was struck, at the age of 43, by a massive stroke. (Ram Dass, remember, fondly calls it being "stroked.") Bauby was left totally debilitated, but for the ability to blink his left eye. The "diving bell" is the metaphor for the nightmare prison in which he finds himself isolated, and deprived of even the least of those things that had brought joy into his life: his family, his work, the physical activity of the body, food and wine...

The gift was the "butterfly," the life of the mind which becomes his last refuge ad solace. With it, he studies the inside of his diving bell with feelings ranging from despair, to inner rage, to bemused irony and gentle, self-directed humor. When self-pity rears its head, he nudges it away with wit or memory, reliving incidents of his past life with gratitude and pleasure. Or rides on the wings of his butterfly into the world of the imagination, inventing vistas of which he is physically incapable. All in all, Bauby takes us with him on an agonized--but also tender and delightful--voyage into the furthest reaches of the human mind.

How does he manage this, with his near-total disability? He blinks an eye. Working through the alphabet with the aid of an able and infinitely patient assistant, he stops her with that one good eye at the letter that he needs, and thus dictates the words, the sentences, the paragraphs that make up this short but powerfully eloquent little book. Reading it, we come to understand that human life stripped of everything but the barest of essentials can still be a life worth living, thanks to that invisible, intangible and infinitely mysterious of qualities, the mind and its ability to experience love.

Julian Schnabel has created a film version of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly which has already been honored with multiple awards and nominations. Schnabel, known first for his work as a painter, is also the creator of two earlier outstanding biographical films, Basquiat, about the ill-fated young African American graffiti artist, and Before Night Falls, about the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, both men who faced great adversity in their lives and whose creative minds proved at once their burden and their triumph--either one, if you haven't seen them, a great rental.

Signing off here, for Christmas, with all good wishes to those generous to read my ramblings. May you and yours be blessed with peace and happiness in your lives.

Under Attack!

It was a trivial incident, really. Insignificant in the grand scale of things. I had just left the front door of our house, about ten o'clock at night, taking George the dog out for his last pee walk before bedtime. We live on a blind bend in the hills, a very narrow street, made more narrow by the customary row of parked cars, and I heard the aggressive roar of the engine before I saw its source--a large black SUV, taking the bend at inordinate speed. Caught in the headlights, I shook my head in a clear--but quiet, I thought, and non-threatening--sign of disapproval of the speed at which the vehicle was traveling. And was rewarded for my pains by a direct hit from a paper cup filled with ice cubes, hurled at me from the open window of the car as it roared on past.

Trivial, as I say. But I was shocked. The first reaction was a surge of belated fear. This guy--sorry, men, this was masculine driving; my general impression is that women drivers are aggressive in different ways than taking dangerous bends at a high rate of speed--this guy, I thought immediately, would have used a gun on me if he'd had one. Those drive-by shootings are common enough in the city, and surely, some of them, as senselessly provoked. Another surge of anger, easily noted and dismissed. And then sadness, that we humans are reduced to such pitiful instinctive behavior.

So I looked for the gift. I found myself thinking about the driver, the bad karma he must have been carrying with him as he drove, and of which he had certainly just acquired a little bit more. I had learned something from direct experience, I thought, about human nature, the quick resort to violence, the easy release of rising anger through instant action, the gratification of a fragile ego. I thought about that demented teenager in Omaha, Nebraska, who did have a gun available and who used it to devastating effect. The death of those men and women who were the victims of his unprovoked attack is a dreadful reminder of the essentially harmless banality of my own incident, but in principle it was no different. (Is it not disgraceful that we, in this country, apparently still lack the good sense and the will to keep lethal assault weapons out of the hands of even the mentally unstable and the criminally insane?)

And what about myself? Easy to learn about others, less easy to look into oneself and find the teaching there. However minimally, I had my own part in bringing about this explosion of petty rage. What little part of my own ego prompted that message I conveyed, that small, disapproving shake of the head that undoubtedly said: I'm your Daddy, I'm wiser and older than you, I look down upon you from the perch of my righteousness and offer you the benefit of my superior judgment. From a different viewpoint, from the driver's seat, jubilant with my own driving skills and daring, I look out at this judgmental old prick with his stupid little dog and, well... fuck him, right? Who's he to lecture me on my driving?

A trivial incident, yes. And, yes, I was right. The guy was driving like a maniac. His rage was evident in the way that he drove before I provoked it further. I have no need to reproach myself, nor to make the incident bigger than it was. Still, a little something was learned in this very small "gift wrapped in shit."

It's this kind of thing that I'm interested in exploring in "Accidental Dharma," soon to offer space for those teachings that reach us unexpectedly, in small ways--a paper cup, flung out of the darkness on a narrow hillside street--or, sometimes, in truly terrible, life-changing events like those Omaha killings. I'll be asking for stories from anyone who cares to examine the impact of these unanticipated life-lessons on their own consciousness and the way they conduct their lives. I hope that you'll join me. More to come on this topic, next week...

The Improbable Dream

I dreamt last night that my mother told me she had asked my father for a divorce. An improbable scenario. First, both my parents died more than a decade ago. They had been married for more than sixty years and, while my mother once confessed that things had not always been easy for her in their marriage, they came from a generation and a culture in which divorce would have been inconceivable. My father, as I mentioned recently, was an Anglican minister, and my mother was the daughter of a minister of the Church of Wales.

So the dream was clearly not about my parents. As with most dreams, I'm taking a wild guess that it was actually about myself. With no divorce on the horizon--Ellie and I have been together for more than thirty-five years--there has to be some other answer to the puzzle. I do believe that dreams come along to tell us something, they are not just random nonsense. Here's my thinking: I believe, with C.G.Jung, all of us have a masculine side and a feminine side, and my own interpretation of the dream suggests that here was my feminine side (mother) telling my masculine side (father) to get lost. Perhaps it's my more intuitive self rebelling against that rational authoritarian who spends his time telling her how to live her life.

The dream may also be related to the book I'm reading. Awaiting a trip to the bookstore to replenish my summer supply, I picked up a copy of Jeanette Walls's The Glass Castle which Ellie had borrowed from friends. I was soon hooked on this remarkable story of a child growing up with unbelievably impossible parents--an alcoholic dreamer of a father whose get-rich schemes lead inevitably to disaster, a brilliant tinkerer and rationalist; and a scatterbrain, would-be artist mother whose rampant narcissism and dedication to "adventure" results in an airy neglect of her children and their needs. Notwithstanding the dreadful abuse and the rootlessness as the family struggles to stay one step ahead of police, penury and ruin, the children benefit in unexpected ways from what love and attention their parents manage to spare them. They learn a fierce spirit of independence and creativity from their mother, and a keen understanding of the workings of the universe from their father's scientific bent.

And we readers learn a lot about the resourcefulness of children. So far as I've got in my reading of the book, they have survived. More about this, perhaps, as I get further into the story. But you can see how it might provoke an improbable mother-and-father dream...

Epiphanies

Thanks to Robin over at the Dharma Bums for the invitation to recall a moment of epiphany--one of those moments when the sign is clear that it's time to change one's life. Rather than take up too much space in the comment column of her blog, I decided to post mine here instead. It's the short version of a longer story, which I'll tell you more about at the end. Here goes:

It's the morning of New Year's Day, January 1, 1992. We're in the middle of an ongoing family crisis and I've heard recently from a professional counselor that if I want to help resolve the crisis, I need to "work on myself." I have no idea, really, what that means, but it strikes me as the last thing in the world that a polite and educated Englishman like myself would want to do. It sounds like the kind of psychobabble I most deplore. Anyway, this morning, the first of the year, I check up on my to-do lists on my desk. One is a list of phone calls needing to be returned. There are five names on the list, and every one is a Peter.

Well, that's part I. I chuckle, a little spooked. I tell myself that this will be "the year of Peter."

Part II, three months later. I find myself in Rome. I have been asked to travel here to write about "Secrets of the Sun", a major light and space installation at the Trajan Market by the Los Angeles-based artist Peter (!) Erskine. (It happens that there's a concurrent exhibition at a major gallery of the Los Angeles-based artist Peter (!) Shelton, one of the artists whose work I most admire. A constellation, then, of three Peters from Los Angeles in St. Peter's city.)

Ellie and I had been in Rome a couple of years before. Amongst the many things we had wanted to see was Michaelangelo's "Moses," one of the great art works of the ages. We had spent hours searching for the right church but--no accidents--had got lost in a maze of alleys and had failed to find it. This time around, I was determined...

Well, we find the church. It's San Pietro in Vincoli. St. Peter in Chains. We find the massive sculpture and stand, awed, behind a crowd of tourists whose guide is speaking in a language I'm not able to identify. Ellie moves off to follow some direction of her own devices and, for reasons unknown, I decide to follow the tour to their next stop. We peer down into a dark crypt chapel and the tour guide gives his spiel. When the group moves on, I take a closer look at what they have been gazing at. It's a reliquary. Contained within, I gather from a plaque, are St. Peter's chains--the chains burst asunder, as the New Testament story tells it, by the angel of the Lord who came to rescue Peter from the jail into which he had been thrown for the audacity of teaching the Christian faith in Roman times.

Well, I was born, according to the Anglican church calendar, on the Feast of St. Peter's Chains--the festival that celebrates the occasion of his release. It's how I got my name. (My father was an Anglican minister, and Peter was the "Rock," remember, who went on to become the foundation stone of the Christian church.) And it came to me--with one of those awesome shudders of realization that seize the entire body at such moments of truth--it came to me as I stood there, alone, gazing down into the crypt, that these were in some irrefutable sense my own chains, the spiritual and psychic and emotional chains that I had been carrying around with me for the whole of my life to date--and that the time had come to shake them off...

... which was the start of everything that led me to where I am in my life today, still working every day to shake off the chains where I find them, still seeking that ultimate liberation from them.

And how about you? Epiphanies, anyone?

(On an unavoidably commercial note, those curious about the continuation of the path I started on that day can find the longer version of the story and the events that followed in my memoir, While I Am Not Afraid: Secrets of a Man's Heart. It was published several years ago, but you can still find a copy on Amazon.com, I believe (from 0.18c, plus shipping! Still, the book does have a four-and-a-half star rating...) Or I'll be happy to send you one. But to cover my costs, including mailing, I'll need a check for $15 from the US or Canada, or $20 from overseas.)

The Malingerer--Part II

I was gratified to hear from my fellow-malingerers yesterday in the "Comments" file. I did actually see the Sopranos' finale--a day late. We missed it Sunday night, having missed the previous two episodes while we were in Europe, so we caught up with our recordings last night, on our return to Los Angeles. Onion rings, eh? Not sure of their therapeutic effect, Anonymous, but I agree that they made a great ending to the series. After all that agony and gore, it was good to end up with a laugh of relief and dismissal. Garlic, Carly, yes, I know of its health benefits.

But back to our sheep. I was tickled to hear from Quink, whose website I quickly surfed to--a satirical take on the British boarding school and a gathering place for some of its victims. Skimming through the site, I found a quote from the novelist Evelyn Waugh, a product of my own alma mater, Lancing College. He had as little love for his experience there as I for mine. In my last year at Lancing, my co-editor on the school literary magazine had the cheek to write to the by-then eminent Waugh, requesting a submission for our journal. Waugh responded--but dismissively: all he had ever learned at Lancing, he wrote (and I paraphrase here: this was many years ago,) was how to avoid hard work. My friend wrote back to ask permission to publish the response, and to ask if Waugh could give his assurance that he would never write for our distinguished magazine, to spare future editors the trouble of writing to him. He received a postcard in response (and this I remember word-for-word): "Yes to both questions, E.W."

Here's some of what Waugh had to say about the boarding school experience: "Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums ... who find prison so soul-destroying." (Decline and Fall). And "Our form-master is one Woodard, a new parson who, people say, is related to the misguided old gentleman who founded us. He seems quite decent but undoubtedly means to make us work - a fad I abhor in masters." Waugh's acerbic wit was surely honed on the miseries of the public school experience.

Anyway, thanks to Quink for putting me back in touch with that world. I wonder if he ever came across an organization called Boarding School Survivors? I came across this support group for those living with the wounds of boarding schools back in the early 1990s, when I had begun to do some men's work over here wih The Mankind Project here in the U.S. Satire is one way to salve the wounds; some form of psychological/emotional therapy is another, for those who are beyond finding it funny. I happen to like both approaches. "Quink"? That must be the dreadful blue or purple Parker's liquid I used to get all over my little fingers as I struggled for mastery of the pen and nib at prep school.

I never suffered the kind of abuse that Dr. Steve describes in his comment. I was ritually strapped and caned, but ony because that was the accepted form of punishment in the ethos of the private school in those days. I was also buggered by a dirty old math teacher at the age of twelve--a not uncommon experience, often overlooked if not exactly condoned by that same ethos. And my natural teenage appetites for sexual exploration were all satisfied with boys: there was no one else around to play with--or to fall in love with. The first time I fell in love with a girl was the actual, very same day that I left Lancing, when my parents arrived to drive me off with a French girl in tow--an exchange student who had come to spend a month with them. Her name was Jeannine, and I fell in love with her instantly.

So much "stuff", eh? All grist for the mill of learning to understand myself, and learning to see what still stands in the way of the spiritual liberation that is the quest of my life. Another word about Dr. Steve: readers may recall that I spent a couple of hours in his office in the weeks before I left for Europe, and found him to be a healer of the very first order, keen of hearing and sensitive of touch, and one who combines insight with a true feel for the body's energies. A man, then, who--as he suggests in his comment yesterday--has learned to listen to the powerful voice of the body-mind, and who has transformed the experience of those abusive wounds into the remarkable ability to heal.

Body-Mind

Sometimes when I think I'm listening to my body, I'm really listening to what my brain is telling me about my body--which may not necessarily be the truth. This valuable lesson learned-well, actually re-learned--yesterday in my second session with Dr. Steve. Old assumptions and presumptions die hard, as old habits do. That old, familiar "bad back" may just be the place where the brain chooses to locate the pain through some wiring process that it learned, perhaps, years ago. So the business, as I see it, is to learn to listen not just to the body but the body-mind, that complex of thought, memory, judgment, emotion and physicality that speaks in a voice we sometimes do not wish to hear, or overlook because its real message might be something we have long chosen to conceal.

Here's an old story: like a surprisingly large number of my fellow human beings, I was born with the umbilical cord around my neck, and it was only the swift action of the midwife (yes, friends, I was born that long ago, at home) that saved my life. It was about fifty years before I discovered that this narrowly-averted disaster (well, for me, anyway) might have some relevance in my subsequent life. It was in the course of a workshop led by the writer, Larry Block. Larry's workshop was called "Write For Your Life," and one of its steps was to meet up with what he called the "Big Lie"--the piece that gets in the way of your achieving what you want to achieve. I had read his book, and had decided ahead of time that my Big Lie was "I have no time to write," but Larry shook his head when he heard that, and said he thought it might be something deeper: was there something, he wondered, about my birth...

I remembered the story. At five years of age, I was sent off, like a proper little English boy, to dance class, to learn to comport myself with grace and ease, but very time a skipping rope appeared, however, little Peter went into fits of tearful resistance. My father, a well-studied Freudian, brought me into his study one day (a rare privilege, which usually involved some prior naughtiness on my part) and produced a skipping rope, which he wrapped around my neck and tightened gently as he told me the story of my birth. I guess I never screamed at a skipping rope again.

So Larry suggested that my Big Lie, perhaps, was "I have no right to be here," and asked me to try that on for size. The next process in the workshop was for participants to walk around the room and introduce themselves to each other by their Big Lie, so I started out trying to say, "Hi, I'm Peter, I have no right to be here," but I could hardly bring the words out at first because I was laughing-crying so hard I couldn't speak. I was in hysterics. The words seemed so ridiculous... and so right. I had been through life, sabotaging all my jobs, always needing to move on, always needing to leave the party early... The words resonated at the deepest level of my consciousness.

Anyway, there you go. The point is, the body is smart, and it has a long memory. It does its best to serve us, to get its message across, but the brain runs interference. The challenge, of course, is to hear what the body is truly trying to tell me, and not be side-tracked by the interpretation offered by that powerful, persuasive, and obstinately presumptuous brain.

I'm sure that my friends out there in the blogosphere have stories similar to this one. No? I'd love to hear them.

Dreaming Again...

... this time of riding through Europe on the red drop-handlebar bicycle I bought for myself when I was fourteen years old. Moving along fairly easily, even though I have done nothing since that time to maintain it. I notice that the chrome on the inside of the front wheel has blackened with age and neglect: I have not taken the time to clean it before setting out. I have also neglected to oil the machinery.

Still, it seems to perform pretty much as it did back then--with the exception of the gears. As a teenager, I was inordinately proud of my (then) ultra-modern Benelux ten-speed derailer gear, even though I never quite mastered the art of making it work to perfection. I was constantly having to adjust it to keep the darn thing on track. And now, in the dream, true to form, it refuses to function properly as I make a steep turn on a rocky track, attempting to overtake a couple, also on bikes, who have been riding in front of me for some time. I dismount, deciding that it will do me no harm to settle for a single gear, and to walk the hills where necessary...

Well, riddle me that one. Actually, I suppose, it's not too hard to figure out. I have, after all, been riding this same old bicycle all these years, and the imperfections are more evident today than I would like. The gears no longer shift as easily as they were designed to do, and I have to get off and walk from time to time.

I did, in actual fact, do a bicycle tour of Europe as a teenager. I must have been fifteen or sixteen years old. My parents insisted that I go with a companion, and I chose a school mate, Proctor, who soon lived up to the suggestions of his name: he was a bit of a pain in the rear end, always straggling and complaining about this or that... the hills, the weather, the hard work.

It was hard work, no doubt about that. The equipment, in those days, was not as light and handy as today's: we had a heavy canvas "pup" tent and bulky sleeping bags, a change of clothes, some basic camping gear--it all added up to a significant burden on a bicycle. And the rain didn't help. As I remember, it rained a good deal of the time. We forged ahead, often on slippery cobblestones, hampered by our oilskin slickers and our heavy gear, riding from the coast of the English channel at Ostend, through Belgium and the Eifel Forest (scene of the Battle of the Bulge, for WWII fans!) to Cologne, then turned south along the Rhine to Bonn, and south and east again down the Moselle River to Trier, and back through Belgium to the coast. A long trip, which we completed, as I recall, in the space of a couple of weeks.

In the dream, I do remember thinking how cycling was a good way to stay fit. The mood was one of pleasant nostalgia, I think--despite those recalcitrant gears. And the scenery was grand--green fields and hedgerows, an occasional copse, and wildflowers by the roadside... More English, really, than Belgian or German. Well, imagine that.

Racism: The Confession

I promised the day before yesterday that I would do some personal accountability on the subject that has been predominant on these pages for the past few days, but I got side-tracked by my affection for Kurt Vonnegut and my sadness that we had lost the voice of his humanity. Anyway, the confession: here we go… It’s a story. Bear with me.

I’m a nice liberal boy. Well, maybe not such a boy any more, but basically “nice”, and “liberal.” It would have deeply offended me, before I learned better, had anyone accused me of racism. But I was offered an object lesson quite some time ago, which taught me to see myself a little differently. The story concerns Charles White, an artist who achieved a certain prominence in the post-war years and who was a distinguished member of the faculty at Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design) when I went there as Dean of the College in the mid-1970s. It was a tough time for the school. The Los Angeles County Supervisors, who had munificently funded the entire school since its founding in 1918, had recently bowed to the Howard Jarvis taxpayer revolt, and had voted to cut off all funds forever at the end of that school year. The school’s Director resigned, and I was left, a neophyte administrator, still wet—no, dripping—around the ears, to try to secure the school’s future.

In this circumstance, Charlie was an always cheerful friend and supporter. When other faculty were understandably tearing out their hair—and sometimes mine—for fear of losing their jobs, and students doing the same for fear their degrees would be worthless, Charlie was a rock. Better still, he was a solid three-martini lunch man, and in those days my own metabolism was capable of absorbing that kind of intake, no sweat, and leaving me still capable of a long afternoon’s work. Too bad he was also addicted to cigarettes, which he chain-smoked to the eventual cost of his health—and indeed his life.

Once the Otis matter was resolved—a long story, not relevant here—I decided that it was past time for Charlie’s work to receive more attention than it had done in recent years and, inspired by the added incentive of a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, I embarked on the research for a book-length monograph. By this time, Charlie’s nicotine addiction had complicated an existing lung malfunction that had developed during the years of his World War II military service when, as an enlisted black man, he had been sent off to labor in the murky swamps of some remote facility that had, as I recall, no particular connection with the war. By the late 1970s, his health was seriously failing and the prognosis for his survival was dim, but he insisted on making himself available for a series of long interviews, in the course of which I learned much about his life and the ups and downs of his career.

Sadly, Charlie died before we could finish the interviews, but he left me with a large number of leads to follow up. My first lesson in the institutional racism of the contemporary art world came with the gradual discovery that none of the usual research methods seemed to apply. There were simply insufficient written materials about White, his work, and the socio-cultural milieu in which he worked in his most productive years. To find what I needed, I would have to rely on the memory of men and women who had been there with him in the trenches, so to speak—and I would need to travel to find them. It was not to be a matter of art history so much as oral history.

There followed a year in which I traveled widely throughout the United States, went to some places (Jackson, Mississippi, for example) which I would otherwise never have visited, and met some extraordinary people from Charlie’s past. A solid socialist and activist from the mid-1930s until ill health put an end to that kind of activity in the mid-1950s, he had worked with other “Negro” movers and shakers of the period (and yes, “Negro” was the preferred appellation in those days)—artists, writers, actors and intellectuals coming out of the great wave of the Harlem Renaissance in the early decades of the 1900s. I found myself talking to some who subsequently became well known—to Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier—and also to artists like Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, who achieved considerable and well-deserved renown in the art world, at least in circles that paid attention to artists other than those in the mainstream of American culture. Then there were those eminently respectable and diligent artists—too many of them—who would never achieve recognition outside the small circle of their regional and racial circumstance.

I was, in short, discovering a new world of art history and artists. Not really a new world, but one that had previously been unknown to me, and whose successors remain, to this day, invisible to what we’re pleased to think of as the “art world.” There existed a whole culture whose marginalization could only be attributed, so far as I could see, to inherently racist attitudes to which I had ignorantly subscribed. As a Dean, educator, writer, critic, I was a part of a culture that systematically excluded, apart from those few who were permitted to cross the line, a whole category of artists on the basis of their race and their alienation from the mainstream path.

As I listened to a multitude of stories and became more and more aware of this systemic racism, I also learned to watch myself a bit more critically. Oh, I was not an intentional racist, for sure, but there were subtle signs that I had missed before. I noticed certain attitudes and expectations I brought with me to certain places (Jackson, Mississippi, for example, or the streets of Harlem) that dictated how I carried myself and spoke—with a certain wariness, a certain self-consciousness, a certain diffidence and awareness of difference. In my interviews, I noticed a special care with my locutions… and my circumlocutions. I noticed a different sensual awareness in my body. And I noticed that I spoke and acted in subtly different ways with black people than with white.

The book I wrote was never published. It took two years to complete, and I think it was a useful and overview of the work of an artist who had made a special contribution to the history of African American art. The responses I got from publishers were polite enough, but the chorus was plain: no one could see a “market” for the book. The best of Charlie’s work—the height of his career was really in the 1950s and 1960s—was exclusively figurative and the best of it graphic, rather than painterly. He had eschewed the path that led the mainstream artists into abstraction, into pop, into minimalism and conceptualism and hewed to the path of his own social conscience. He was not hip. He was not a “seller.” Not to make too fine a point of it, I was convinced that racism played a part in my failure to find a publisher—but I could never prove it.

Okay, hardly rabid stuff. But the experience left me with a real and personal understanding that racism runs deep in our society, and that I could not too easily let myself off the hook. I have had the opportunity, since those days, to learn more about interpersonal communication skills, and have come to understand that I get nowhere in a situation of conflict unless I first fully acknowledge what I bring to it, what part is mine. Conflicts start to get resolved when both parties are prepared to begin with some hard, honest self-evaluation; when I am right and you are wrong, there’s basically no resolution possible.

Which is why I see no purpose or promise in this supposed “national dialogue” on racism until we’re all prepared to look into ourselves before we start hurling brickbats. I have not heard any of those self-appointed defenders of black dignity speak up as loudly for the racially-tarred and feathered Duke University athletes as they have done about the Rutgers team; and while I understand there’s a serious need for advocacy, and honor these leaders’ sense of mission to provide it where there was none, this might be an excellent opportunity to open themselves up to the recognition that racism works two ways, and that it will continue to be a blot on our society until we acknowledge equal responsibility on all our parts. If I were close enough to the Reverend Al Sharpton call him Al, I’d challenge him to make a public avowal of the baggage that he himself carries around with him, and then continue with the important work of advocacy for those whose voice needs the megaphone he offers.

No God

So. No God. And yet a yearning, for me, to somehow "make sense of it all"--for a bigger context in which to place this tiny manifestation of life which I'm given to live out. It pleases me to think that there is more than just this being born, growing old, and dying, and having no greater significance in the process than any other fragment of organic matter. I know that others find this form of consolation in their God and, some, in their conviction that a good life, free from pain and suffering, awaits them when they leave this world. Usually, for believers, this is "heaven." The other place is reserved for... well, others.

My own parents shared this belief--not perhaps so much in eternal damnation, but certainly in a return to their God's loving arms. Their ashes now lie side by side in the graveyard of a tiny church overlooking the sea in a small village in Wales. It would be nice to think of the two of them wandering, ageless and at peace, hand in hand through the fields of paradise in their Christian heaven. But I think that's fantasy. Is it any more or less reasonable to believe in their return to another cycle of life on this earth, in some other form? My mother, particularly, was very fond of birds. (Birds. Hmmm... some Freudian reverberations here? I wonder...)

I think it's the suffering that all of us experience in this life that drives our need to imagine a "better place" to go to when we're finally released from it. Enter the Buddha, who learned through hard experience and shared with us his wisdom about suffering. His four noble truths teach us that suffering is unavoidable, since we are all subject to aging, sickness and death; that the origin of suffering lies in our attachment--whether to the desire for those things that please us or the avoidance of those that don't; that there is an achievable end to suffering; and that there is a path we can follow to achieve that end. Unfortunately, it does involve some work, some sacrifice, and an awful lot of honest self examination.

It was certainly a period of acute suffering in my life that led me in this direction. Since early manhood, I had drifted through life with relative impunity: youth tends to get you out of a good number of scrapes, and allows you to bounce back up with relative ease when you've been knocked down. I managed to breeze through it all quite nicely--as some of us are privileged to do--without God, or thoughts of God, or serious consideration of my own mortality, and without more than the average share of suffering: a broken heart now and then, the occasional worry about jobs or money... Until life slapped me with a challenge I couldn't easily brush off, or sidestep, or ignore. The story is no longer important here, though I have written about it in unsparing detail elsewhere. What matters is that I needed the kind of help for which some people turn to God. I found Buddhism.

At least, it was the form of Buddhism that was close at hand--the form practiced by a friend who offered it to me in a spirit of generous desire to help. I had known in a general way about meditation in the past--especially in the 1960s and early 1970s, when there was a surge of interest in Eastern religions and philosophies--but had never seriously entertained the idea of trying it myself. While I admired those who had the patience for it, I simply assumed that my head was too busy to tolerate a prolonged period of silence. What my friend offered was something I saw as a possibility to keep me busy while I meditated--and that something was a repeated chant: nam myo ho renge kyo. Not only could I chant, I could chant for something--the end to my suffering, for example--and would be rewarded with results.

Many will recognize this as soka gakkai Buddhism. I chanted for a year and a half. It was my introduction to practice. And it did bring results. It took me a year and a half, though, to fully realize my discomfort with this kind of goal-oriented practice, and to realize that I did not, in fact, need the chant as what I eventually came to see as a diversion for my mind. I discovered that I could sit in silence. Fifteen minutes, at first, seemed like a very long time, but those early fifteen minute sits opened up the door for a practice that has proved an invaluable guide to life's vicissitudes for, now, more than ten years. And to a growing familiarity with the teachings that support it.

No God, then. No belief. Not even a willing suspension of disbelief. No Oz. No curtain. Just an increasing understanding of the value of mind-fulness at each and every moment along the way, and of how the mind creates its own suffering by attachment to its causes. The notion that I determine my own karma through my actions and their consequences is more reasonable to me, and somehow more comforting, than the belief in stories that have no discernable basis in the only reality I know through my lived experience.

God

Okay. God. As I mentioned yesterday, God has been on my mind, and I've been meaning to write about him/her/it for a few days now. What set me off, perhaps, was this Op-Ed piece by Sam Harris in an issue of the Los Angeles Times last week about what he sees to be the gullibility of a vast majority of Americans in religious matters, and their frequently literal belief in stories so absurd--the Creation, let's say, for one glaring example--as to defy our faculty of reason. He wrote the piece, in part, in praise of Pete Stark, the California congressman who appears to be the only one who has the guts to avow his disbelief in God in public.

Imagine how successful a candidate for President might be if he or she took a similar public stand. Given the overwhelming majority of Americans who claim belief in God and who are willing to judge character based on similar belief, they wouldn't stand a chance. It seems that every candidate must make this public avowal of piety as a prerequisite for running for office, and seek the favors of the Almighty with as much fervor as he (let's call him he, if only for convenience) is thanked by triumphant sports heroes or Grammy winners--or by those fortunate enough to have survived car wrecks or natural disasters.

I think that I have never "believed" in God. Even as a child, brought up in the home of a minister of the Church of England and taken to church every Sunday, I don't think I actually "believed" in that bearded old guy up in the sky somewhere who dispensed favors in response to the prayers I was taught to say, kneeling by my bed each night, and was reputed to reward good and punish bad behavior. Santa Claus was more real to me than God--and I was more ready to suspend my disbelief in this particular old man with a beard. His favors were more... well, tangible. At least by the time I reached puberty, with reason budding in the brain along with the hormones in an even more interesting organ, the God I was required to "worship" as a part of my school's curriculum mattered less to me than the cigarettes I used to sneak behind the hedges on the Sussex Downs.

Which accounts in part for my growing appreciation for Buddhist thought and practice. It's a religion that first addresses the practical realities of life. No sin, no guilt. Just an honest appraisal of what's going to work and what's going to cause harm. "Past mistakes," says Than Geoff, "do not mean that you have to suffer." Just be aware of the negative outcome of your action, and work to do better next time. No God. No need for one. At the day-long retreat that Ellie and I attended last Saturday, Than Geoff told the story of how he was accosted, in his monk's robes, at a local bookstore, by a man who wanted to talk to him about "religion." Than Geoff agreed to spare a few minutes, and the man's first question was the demand to know if he believed in God. Than Geoff's simple "No" put an end to the conversation, but the man continued to stalk him through the bookstore in evident anger, until our monk felt nearly threatened enough to summon the manager of the store.

Interesting, then, and not a little dismaying, to realize that the existence of God is a matter of such fearful importance to people who might otherwise appear relatively sane. And sad, too, because, as Sam Harris noted in his Op-Ed piece, "Every one of the world's 'great' religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos." How strange that any reasonable person, looking at the marvelously intricate workings of every aspect of physical reality, from the leaf of a humble plant to the miracle of the human body, to the solar system and the vastness of the universe, would want to understand it all in the simplistic light of a creation myth. I love the quotation from Carl Sagan that I have used before, in another context, and it seems to me that it's worth repeating here.

"In some respects," Sagan wrote, "science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better that we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more sublte, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed?' Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge."

God must be even greater than we dreamed! A fine idea. My disbelief, perhaps, is directed at those "little gods" with whom believers seek to intimidate us or limit our potential.

On a related topic, I happened to watch a history program on public television last night--the story of the months between D-Day and VE-Day told with original color footage from the period and with the texts of letters between soldiers and their loved ones back home. Included, of course, was the liberation of two of the concentration camps--Buchenwald and Dachau--and the all-too familiar images of the innumerable dead and the relative handful of piteous survivors. The piece I had never seen before was the service for the dead at Buchenwald, conducted in Hebrew by a US army rabbi. The faces of the survivors as they listened to that ancient liturgy were one of the most moving scenes of the holocaust that I can remember--a mixture of disbelief, of indelible grief and pain, and of such tentative and mistrustful joy...

It's a well-worn speculation, of course, to wonder how any all-powerful God could allow his Chosen People to be treated in this way--and indeed how any God could stand by and watch his creations slaughter each other with such glorious abandon as they did in World War II, when sixty million people lost their lives in excruciating circumstances. It's man and his sinfulness, believers like to say, not God in his goodness that permits such things. Maybe so. Meantime, however, our various gods pursue their good work in this world, apparently inspiring humans to the most godless acts. The current occupant of the most powerful office in this country--I have difficulty bringing myself to refer to him as a "president"--apparently believes that his own infallible God is guiding his actions in the world, and look what they have brought about: the death of countless thousands of innocent souls and a chaotic situation that only promises more violence and death.

Let people believe whatever they want, I say. If they choose to believe that the moon is made of green cheese and that the Great Poobah rules the planet Mars, more power to them. But please let's be agnostic, at the very least, when we make public policy and put the lives of men and women at risk. Let's be more like the courageous Pete Stark and build our public policy on reason, not by surrendering to fantasies of some supreme being who avenges himself mercilessly on those who have the gall not to believe in him.

Far from God creating us in his image, it seems to me that we have created our various gods in ours. And it's none too flattering a self-portrait.

Little Pricks

Remember that
little prick in
the bathtub, all those
years ago? Your
cousin's? Donald's? It
was all wet and
shiny, and he
popped it up, out
of the soapy water, like
it was a lighthouse
and he rammed
his bath boat into
the rocks, sinking it. He
was not ashamed
of his, as you were
of yours, it was
just fun for him. You
were amazed and a bit,
yes, shocked, and you hid
yours under the suds,
shyly, despite his
invitation to join in
the fun. So how come
my mind recalls
this with such intense
clarity from no more
than six years old, today
as I wake, the big
fan motionless above
my head, against
the white boards of
the bedroom ceiling?

A Commitment

For a long time I have resisted calling myself a Buddhist, even though I have been following a Buddhist meditation practice for more than ten years now, and have attended a number of retreats under the aegis of several different teachers. For a while, I was the primary reviewer of mostly popular new Buddhist books for the Los Angeles Times, and I have read fairly widely in this literature. I still feel, however, largely ignorant of the religious aspects of Buddhism, and have in all honesty shied away from this deeper knowledge.

There are a number of reasons for this. The first, and surely the predominant, is the fact that I was brought up in a Christian home, the son of an Anglican country priest, and was sent from an early age to schools with a strongly Anglican bent. In part this was because my father could not afford the steep fees commanded by private schools and, in choosing a private school education for his son, opted for establishments that allowed respectable discounts to the sons of clergy. The story is unhappily a familiar one--almost, really a cliche: boy gets overdose of religion in his tender years and adolescence, and vows to chuck it all in as soon as he achieves the independence of his majority.

That's what I did. From the age of six I was a choirboy, a server, an acolyte. Religious services, at my school, were compulsory twice a day and three times on Sunday. When I left "public" (read private) school and went to Cambridge University, I lost all interest in religious matters, particularly those having to do with going to church, singing hymns, kneeling down to pray, and receiving wafers at the communion rail. No matter that the kindly Dean of my college took a friendly interest in this son of a brother clergyman, I avoided his sherry parties and never once, I think, set foot in the glorious college chapel.

Along with that cliche came another: the rejection of religion on philosophical grounds. I was a teenager in the 1950s, a student of French literature--and indeed of everything French. I gobbled up Jean-Paul Sartre hook, line and sinker. I dressed in existentialist black and smoked Gauloise cigarettes. I forgive myself. I was a youngster. I was angry for a variety of reasons--perhaps most angry for having been sent to a "good" school and exposed to all the cruelties inflicted in that environment on a sensitive young man who hated sports and wanted to be a poet.

I was also an ardent socialist. I realize that this has become a dirty word in the country of my adoption, but it was a political attitude that I inherited from my father--in compensation, perhaps, for the religion I rejected. I was leery of the communism embraced by Sartre and his ilk, since enough was known already at that time of the unconscionable, inhumane, and even murderous manifestation of that political philosophy in the Soviet Union. But a good socialist concern for social equality and justice seemed unquestionable to this lad of privilege who had received the best of educations at public school and Cambridge and who spoke with a very nice upper middle class accent.

Religion, then, was intellectually beneath me. I was too smart, too worldly wise, too sophisticated to bow down to somebody's idea of a God who lived up there in heaven and ordained the doings of the world. I rejected not only the Christianity of my father, but all religions, attributing to them most of the injustices and sorrows of the world. The Holocaust, a fresh memory in those days, seemed to me--as it did to many others--conclusive evidence that if God existed he was pretty much a disaster as an overseer of events here on earth, deserving more of scorn than abject worship.

So I abandoned religion, and for more years than I care to count dismissed it from my life. I have still not reconciled with Christianity. Nor have I, indeed, acquired a great deal of respect for any of the Gods who seem to inspire human beings with the most despicable of words and deeds. It was not until the sixth decade of my life that I began, for the first time, really, to give serious thought to these matters.

I am just now back from a silent meditation retreat in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The first entry in what I intend to be a series in this nascent weblog (see below,) consists of direct quotations from our teacher, Thanissaro Bhikkhu, scribbled down by myself as he spoke extemporaneously. Those little "poems" will give, I hope, some sense of the depth of his wisdom, his humanity, and his humor. Along with the rest of the experience of those three days, they have inspired in me the intention to change the direction of my writing practice.

In the past three years I have been preoccupied with a very different weblog, "The Bush Diaries," which I have described as a daily, somewhat irreverent "conversation" with the current occupant of the White House in our nation's capital. Needless to say, I have been less than delighted with his performance, but I have tried to be guided, in what I write, by the spirit of compassion that is a great part of Buddhist values. This journal will be different. This one starts with the simple admission that I embrace the teachings of the Buddha, and will explore the implications of that embrace in my daily life and practice. I do not promise to write in this journal every single day, as I have done with The Bush Diaries. But I do set the intention, as of this date and time, to make it a regular part of my life's work.