Contraception

(But... before we start, I loved this picture on the front page of the NY Times:




It's actually the detail of a larger image, which features the "brain cells of a laboratory mouse glowing with multicolor fluorescent proteins." And I thought it was a painting!)

NOW...

I have been thinking about contraception since reading the Nicholas Kristof op-ed piece, also in yesterday's New York Times. It's a disgrace that our current administration, driven by its sadly literal-minded "pro-life" ideology, "is quietly cutting off birth control supplies to some of the world’s poorest women in Africa." "Thus," Kristof continues, "the paradox of a 'pro-life' administration adopting a policy whose result will be tens of thousands of additional abortions each year — along with more women dying in childbirth."

The moral issue, I agree with Kristof, is less to do with preventing birth than with causing death--and incidentally promoting the spread of disease and the persistence of poverty. Birth control, clearly, precedes conception, and therefore sidesteps all arguments about when human life begins--unless there are those who want to argue that it begins at the moment of that gleam in the eye that precedes the sexual act. Given the absurd notions of creationists, I suppose that those people might exist, but to allow them into this argument is to give them too much credit.

What are the objections, I wonder, to contraception? That it frustrates the laws of nature--and thus, perhaps, of God? That it encourages promiscuity? I'd hazard a guess that our consumer society, presumably with the blessing of our free market conservatives, does much more to promote sex among the young--and the not-so-young!--than the availability of condoms. And the teaching of abstinence in our own schools, here at home, has done little to prevent the advance of teenage pregnancy, so far as I can tell. The morally righteous folk who so fervently preach abstinence--think no further than the Governor of Alaska--look more than slightly foolish in the context of a world in which their fine advice and proscriptions are routinely ignored by the young.

And that's here at home. Who are we to be preaching the fringe values of the more repressive of our own religious fanatics to the poor in other countries? Who are we, indeed, to impose them by administrative fiat on countries where hunger, disease and poverty are rampant, and where population growth threatens the fabric and stability of whole nations--while their inhabitants themselves are asking for nothing better than education and material support to back it up?

(This is another excellent reason, by the way, to support Barack Obama, who opposes the Bush policies in this matter. John McCain has consistently supported them, and is even shockingly indifferent to the suffering they cause. Kristof writes, "when a reporter asked [McCain] this spring whether American aid should finance contraceptives to fight AIDS in Africa, he initially said, 'I haven’t thought about it,' and later added, 'You’ve stumped me.'” Really?

Since the actions of the Bush administration are based primarily in religious convictions, I spent some time yesterday searching through Buddhist sites to ascertain what teachings on the subject are available. They are sparse, and such as they are they dovetail neatly with broader teachings on sex: the central principle, for lay people at least, is not to abstain from sexual activity but to do no harm--either to oneself or others. The teachings call for skillfulness and awareness of consequences, not for abstention. Thus, "Contraception is accepted by Buddhists. According to Buddhist tenets, the life cycle of a sentient being begins when consciousness enters the womb, and traditionally this has been considered the moment of conception. Therefore, there is no objection to contraception which prevents conception without damaging sentient life."

This, like most Buddhist teachings, is profoundly sensible, compassionate toward humanity and its foibles, and practicable without harm. How very different from Christian teachings, ranging from Vatican Catholicism to Protestant Fundamentalism, whose harm in this regard is widespread and, in view of the rapidly expanding population of the planet, even potentially catastrophic! And how much more realistic and humane. Once more, I find good reason to go with the Buddha...

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?

Opera: Grand and Soapy

Last night, Saturday, Ellie and I indulged in an evening of arias from grand opera at the Laguna Beach "Pageant of the Masters" outdoor amphitheater. The night before, Friday, we had watched the first episode of "Tell Me You Love Me," the new drama series on HBO television. Same theme: sex. Different eras, different media, different modes...

It was good to be out under the stars with friends and community. A good audience, a good crowd. It was good to feel cool, cold, even, as the evening lengthened, after the summer heat waves, which have seemed especially oppressive this year. It was good to be in the post-tourist season. And good to be regaled with the awesome reaches of the human voice, and share in the awesome range of human emotion. Passion is a rare quality in that it embraces the extremes of light and dark, the heights of ecstasy and the depths of grief. It's the human soul's most extravagant expression of the most basic of all drives (with the possible exception of material sustenance): human sexuality.

Because what else is this bloviating all about? Desire, possession, rejection, despair. Expressed in the close-to-heavenly sounds of operatic aria, it does--to use the word my friend used after the performance--"transport." It takes us to a place where feeling is untrammelled by the wonderfully absurd, inherent clumsiness of the mating of two human beings, or by the inadequacies of language. The soul soars in response to the voices, and in response to the ancient music of desire within ourselves. The aria gives us that "tune beyond us, yet ourselves" of which Wallace Stevens wrote in "The Man with the Blue Guitar."

Ah, yes. But I found myself missing some important part of the grandeur of grand opera, in an evening of arias strung together for no other purpose than the aesthetic one. I missed the grand scenes, the outrageous narrative, the over-the-top staging. I'm honestly no great opera buff, and my knowledge of opera music is limited at best. Those moments when I have most enjoyed it have been those when I am swept up in the story-line, "operatic" though it may be, and overwhelmed by the sheer theatricality of it all. The songs are, well, a part of it. The company, last night, did what they could to make up for this missing context with glorious costumes, lighting, rudimentary sets--but I confess I became just a wee bit bored. The songs were not enough, for me, in themselves, strung together like glittering beads on a necklace. And I noticed, not for the first time, about myself, that my sensibility responds more to words and narrative form than it does to music. Still, a truly lovely evening.

"Tell Me You Love Me," by contrast, was almost the dead opposite. Sex without the splendor, and without the arias. Sex, in a word, as most of us come to know it, the grubbier, more insecurity-fraught business of getting our needs met and trying at the same time to meet our partner's. That, and dodging the mines and booby traps of tolerable relationship. As such, this drama--well, this soap "opera"--comes as close as you can get to a reality show. For good reason, surely: the ratings. (My guess--confirmed by a quick Google on the side--is that the term "soap opera" derives from its need to literally sell soap.)

Of its genre, though, I'd have to say that the first episode of "Tell Me You Love Me" was very good. Very good indeed. The drama follows three couples at different stages of relationship: the young, the "passionate," the not-yet-married, simply ravenous for the immediate satisfaction of mutual physical invasion; the older, as yet childless couple struggling with infertility--hers? his?--and the transformation of sex into a different, more clinical-technological process, with potentially disastrous effects on the pleasures involved; and the third, more advanced, with young children whose presence makes such demands on the resources of time, affection, and sheer physical capacity that the sexual drive gets shoved aside or satisfied in moments of solitary, joyless desperation. (A masturbation scene, extraordinarily well done...)

The strong point here is that no one is to blame. No good guys, no bad guys. The couples clearly love each other. They just manage to mess things up, as the rest of us do, in the daily balancing act between love and its ultimate physical manifestation, sex. And the sex, like the love, is problematic--though the protagonists insist (don't we all?) that everything in the bedroom is just "fine." They are more apt to fake a sense of satisfaction than to admit to anything more damaging to the ever-vulnerable ego. The drama works well, too, in its frank depictions of sexual acts, which are real, explicit, not coy, a little clumsy (the word comes back: is this just me??!!) always caught somewhere between the sublime and the absurd and, as sex tends to be, sometimes blissful, erotic, sometimes simply mundane.

Well, you may have guessed that I enjoyed this show immensely. I intend to come back to it this very evening, for the next episode. You might say I'm hooked. Next I'll have to figure out what all this has to do with the Buddha.

Happy Sunday, everyone. What's left of it...

A Mile in Her Shoes

I notice that I have been reading more than my usual share of novels this summer, and finding them more than usually pleasant reading. The latest is Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I'll confess I would likely not have picked it out from the bookstore shelves, had I not bumped into the author at a reading a couple of months ago. I'm glad I did, because her book reminded me of the gentle pleasures of reading Jane Austen, of the English countryside and the now somewhat faded elegance of Bath, and of the polite eccentricities of the English character. It also put me in mind, throughout, of a valuable Buddhist teaching.

Rigler's conceit is an amusing one. Our Jane Austen addict, Courtney Stone, a twenty-first century, post-feminist, Los Angeles-based protagonist-- she has her own MySpace website--wakes up one day to find herself inhabiting the mind and body of "Jane Mansfield" in Austen's early nineteenth century England. The ensuing romp through the exquisite agonies and politenesses of that era shed light not only on the nostalgic view of a life more simply defined by a rigorous social code--but also on its too readily forgotten hazards: its awful sanitary conditions no less than its relegation of women to the property of males. Rigler's Courtney observes it all with the cynical eye of a "liberated"--and recently jilted--woman who obsesses not only about her beloved Jane Austen but also about such things as cleanliness and creature comforts of the kind distinctly unavailable in Austen's day.

And then there's "love"--so differently defined and practiced in the two eras that clash together in this book. For Courtney, it's about sexual politics, sexual freedom, the freedom to choose partners, it's about her womanhood, her individuality, her strength--and weakness. And she suffers. For "Jane", it's about financial security and social convention, family, propriety and property. "Love" as we understand it in our century--something to be fallen into--has hardly entered into the social vocabulary of Jane's time, it's there only as a glimmer of romanticism and the freedoms that aesethtic movement had begun to claim. It's there, in Jane's heart, as a hope almost beyond hope to be fulfilled. Sex, so subtly sublimated in Jane Austen's world into the delicate, precise dance of language and social mores, is an omnipresent but forbidden topic, a delicious undertow fraught with fears and inhibitions.

Rigler, herself clearly a Jane Austen addict, has a sure feel for these matters in both "Jane's" world and Courtney's. Venturing into the risky territory of nineteenth century English as a contemporary American whose native language is the vernacular of twenty-first century California, she proves sure-footed amongst the booby-traps--and as a native English English speaker, I'm sensitive to the potential lapses. Her plotting, too, is nicely handled: the reader's attention is engaged by the story line throughout, and the ending--long anticipated, because we're kept wondering how our Courtney is ever going to escape her predicament--is astutely satisfying: it serves at once to resolve and deepen the mystery of Courtney's time-warp, and leaves the reader empowered to speculate on its meaning.

For those who fall into the trap of dismissing Jane Austen's novels as romantic fluff, and might be tempted to do the same with Rigler's, it should be added that Courtney takes her identity crisis seriously even as she seems to simultaneously enjoy the ride and worry about the return trip to her "real self." Along the way, this material girl is required to re-evaluate her own sense of self, and is confronted constantly with that great teaching of Buddhism I mentioned earlier: the "other" mind-body she inhabits requires her to actually experience the conundrum of not-self, "this is not me, this is not mine, this is not who I am." And thus confronted, she sheds some of her narcissism along the way and learns the value of compassion for those who share the journey with her.

A good read, then. I learn from an email from Laurie, received coincidentally this very morning--that she has reached #15 on the LA Times bestseller list for fiction. Here's hoping, for her, for a #1 spot soon!

****s (Four-Letter Words)

Another taboo that D. H. Lawrence challenged in "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was, of course, the use of those four-letter words. They were still able to cause shock waves in society when they led to the frequent arrests and indictments of the comedian Lenny Bruce in the 1950s and 1960s. His famous outloud public listing of them in defiance of his persecutors might mark the moment of their liberation from the constraints that had persisted in conventionally banning them from public discourse.

Today they are as common as pebbles on the beach. You overhear them used in causal conversations in cafes and restaurants. You hear them liberally uttered in movies and on television--at least on channels freed from the controls of those government censors, who still seek to protect the young and innocent from words they hear every day on the streets and in their schools. For the same reason, I suppose, you do not read them in newspapers. The New York Times still boasts that it provides all the news that's fit to print--presumably in appropriately fit language. The family values folks are still that powerful.

But the real news is quite different: words, friends, have escaped their caged and run amok in our society. No matter how we try to put them back, there are too many of them for us to control.

The four-letter words are the names of body parts and body functions. They are good solid words with noble histories. Fuck, piss, shit, cock, cunt... I'm forgetting a couple here, I know. Lawrence, I think, wanted simply to recognize them honestly as words, and rehabilitate them from the bleak, moralistic dungeon into which they had been thrown by those seeking to denigrate the human body and its natural acts as shame- and sinful. Along with the natural beauty and joy of the body we are given to inhabit, he wanted to restore words to their original authenticity and power.

There are, certainly, those who continue to dishonor words by their misuse and abuse. The sad part is that we unconsciously perpetuate precisely that secret shame that Lawrence wanted to unmask by using these noble words in contexts that are disconnected from their meaning. I myself am guilty of those expletives. When I say, casually, Oh, shit! I am not referring to the function that depletes my body of unneeded waste. When I explode, as I am known to do, in traffic, and call someone a "fucking idiot," I am not evoking his skills between the sheets.

And then there are the derivatives--the -mothers and the -suckers--whose common use has different implications. Some might suggest that it has deep undertones of a homophobia and an Oedipal neurosis that say much about our society.

The Buddhist teaching of "Right Speech" is a useful guidepost here. I'm for honest language, language freed from artificial restraints--but also for the use of language that does not egregiously harm or hurt. I have been thinking recently, in this context, of writing about those racial epithets that arouse such controversy... but that's for another entry. As a lover of language, I embrace words in all their manifestations and all their multiple meanings. Expletives have their place, especially when they help us to let off steam. But I do prefer the intentional and conscious use of language over the casual, imprecise variety. I prefer, in the immortal words of Dr. Seuss, to "say what I mean and mean what I say."

Sex... and The Buddha Gets a Face Job

Okay, let's talk about sex. Ready, everyone? I'm trusting you to get back to me on this one... We went to see "Lady Chatterley" last night--the new French film based on the second version of D. H. Lawrence's novel, "Lady Chatterley's Lover"--the one that's entitled "John Thomas and Lady Jane." John Thomas, for those unfamiliar with English idiom (that's English English) was in my young day--and perhaps still is--a common euphemism for the penis. Lady Jane...? Well, I never heard it used that way, but I'm sure Lawrence had a wry smile when he thought up the title. As I recall, he wrote the second and third versions because he was not wholly satisfied with the first: he wanted it to be less coy, more frank, more explicit than he had originally allowed himself. (Remember, he had been in trouble with the obscenity police already in the past.) This time, I'm guessing, he wanted to get it right, no matter what the morality brigade might say.

The film? Delightful. Erotic. Sensual. It's slightly odd, I'll confess, to see this French take on the English landscape, the English social structure, English mores. The landscape is beautiful, and captured with loving attention to detail. Those who saw Andy Goldsworthy's "Rivers and Tides" might have some sense of the quality of "nature as art" that we get in the long shots of green landscapes with rolling hills and thick forests of trees, or the close-ups of ferns, wildflowers, grasses... It's breathtaking and all, somehow, so quintessentially English. I could smell the moldering leaves and the rotting wood along the pathways through the woods, and feel them underfoot. The simple close-up of a prickly sweet chestnut casing, fallen from its branch, was enough to awaken long dormant memories of childhood. Delicious.

And the sex? No, I hadn't forgotten it. In fact, I think I've just been talking about it, because in this movie sex and nature are inseparable. The sex is earthy, a bit clumsy, real. The film--remarkably, considering its origin--captures something crucial about the English character, the surface reticence beneath which, often, despite stereotypes to the contrary, a real passion burns. Connie (Lady Chatterley) and Barkin share little in common but for these characteristics. Thanks to the reticence, their sexuality is slow to awaken, and when it does (a great scene, with a baby chick, passed from his hand to hers) it burns slow and awkward to begin with. Clothes, even, are not readily shed--and then not until well into the relationship; which does not mean that the scenes are not infectiously erotic. And once awakened, the sex runs deep and steamy on both sides, and it is shown as good, healthy, human and, let's say it, not a little animal. It is, notably, about both man and woman. It does not take sides.

I'm not sure that the film fully captures the full depth of the social taboos that are violated by Lawrence's novel, though it certainly tries. This is, after all, early twentieth century England, with Victorianism at least very present in the rear view mirror. She is, after all, a "Lady," and he a gamekeeper, a man of the lower orders, a servant to her husband, rude in appearance and in manner (both captured in great performances, by the way.) Her mansion, with its sweeping stairways, its elegant furniture, its ancestral portraits, is amply contrasted with his humble cottage and the shack where they meet, its walls and shelves lined with common tools and utensils--all filmed with equal love of their sheer physicality. It might seem that the affair is somehow more, well, permissible than then current social mores would have allowed: there is little sense of the risk involved for both parties, of the enormity of their action. But that, perhaps, is Lawrence, because he insists on the rightness of it--the rightness of sex as well as the rightness of flouting those old, artificial social barriers that stoof between human beings.

Okay, you may have gathered by now that I enjoyed this film. But what about the moral questions about obscenity that so riled critics--both literary and social--when the book appeared? In view of the pornography that is available at the tough of a few buttons on your home computer these days, the eroticism of "Lady Chatterley," while less explicit, seems to me in some ways more potent than the debased images of human flesh so liberally exposed to the voyeuristic eye. I think it's clear by now that the healthy, human sexuality for which Lawrence made his pitch is regarded by most thinking people as just that: human, and healthy. Would today's morals brigades work up a lather over "Lady Chatterley"? Not, perhaps, when they have so much juicier and more broadly available targets.

Which brings us to the interesting question as to whether obscenity is harmful. Are there still boundaries that should not be crossed, or that are crossed at the cost of damage to the social fabric? Is it anybody's business what I choose to watch, or read? What I have learned about Buddhist teachings in this regard is that the practice of sex is reprehensible only by the standard of potential harm--harm to myself, or harm to other people. So then I have to wonder what is harmful. Rape, clearly, at one extreme, no question there. But how about, um, dare I raise the subject... masturbation? Harmful? I guess if you still believe that it causes acne--or blindness. Seriously, though, to whom? To anyone who indulges in the practice? To those who become addicted? Food for thought. I guess we must all make these intimate judgments for ourselves.

And what about pornography? Is it harmful to those who produce the stuff? To those who watch it? On what basis do we condemn it, if we choose to do so?

Anyway, interesting questions, no? I'd be happy to hear your thoughts...

Oh, yes. I had to take a scrubbing brush to the Buddha yesterday. Our fountain, that is. And a toothbrush, for the nooks and crannies around the mouth and eyes, and especially the traditional curlicues of hair. At least, I'm assuming that those stylized curls are intended to represent the hair. Anyway, over the months, our Buddha had acquired a patina of greenish algae, and it was time for him to get spruced up. It did feel a bit funny, working away at him like that, but he looks a whole lot better for the cleaning.