post-lyric, an inevitable crash
Monday 14 July 2008 | I like a cookie
Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt, in short, bad.
best thing I’ve read in ages
Sunday 13 July 2008 | 2 cookies in the jar
And yes I know I have posted like three times today. But I’m…I’m…I think I’m bored! Holy crap, I didn’t know I could even still GET bored. Is life with the Brujo really that entertaining? I’ve chain-read all day, one book after another, like potato chips; and though I have not yet eaten Häagen-Dazs straight from the carton, I feel that overall this is Not a Good Sign for my old age.
So the following comes from chapter 20 of the Lotus Sutra. I especially love how Never Disparaging always bravely runs away and then hollers his protestations of respect from a safe distance (which telling detail is relayed so matter-of-factly, like something out of Malory or Chrétien de Troyes). Cf. the Sponsor’s idea that finding the right distance from certain people is crucial when it comes to loving them well—a distance which may sometimes include state lines. I could not love thee half so well, loved I not my own sanity more.
After the original awesome Sound King Thus Come One had passed into extinction, and after his Correct Law had also passed away, in the period of his Counterfeit Law, monks of overbearing arrogance exercised great authority and power. At this time there was a bodhisattva monk named Never Disparaging. Now, Gainer of Great Authority, for what reason was he named Never Disparaging? This monk, whatever persons he happened to meet, whether monks, nuns, laymen or laywomen, would bow in obeisance to all of them and speak words of praise, saying, “I have profound reverence for you, I would never dare treat you with disparaging and arrogance. Why? Because you are all practicing the bodhisattva way and are certain to attain Buddhahood.”
This monk did not devote his time to reading or reciting the scriptures, but simply went about bowing to people. And if he happened to see any of the four kinds of believers far off in the distance, he would purposely go to where they were, bow to them and speak words of praise, saying, “I would never dare disparage you, because you are all certain to attain Buddhahood!”
Among the four kinds of believers there were the those who gave way to anger, their minds lacking in purity, and they spoke ill of him and cursed him, saying, “This ignorant monk—where does he come from, presuming to declare that he does not disparage us and bestowing on us a prediction that we will attain Buddhahood? We have no use for such vain and irresponsible predictions!”
Many years passed in this way, during which this monk was constantly subjected to curses and abuse. He did not give way to anger, however, but each time spoke the same words, “You are certain to attain Buddhahood.” When he spoke in this manner, some among the group would take sticks of wood or tiles and stones and beat and pelt him. But even as he ran away and took up his stance at a distance, he continued to call out in a loud voice, “I would never dare disparage you, for you are all certain to attain Buddhahood!” And because he always spoke these words, the overbearing arrogant monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen gave him the name Never Disparaging.
When this monk was on the point of death, he heard up in the sky fully twenty thousand, ten thousand, a million verses of the Lotus Sutra that had been previously preached by the Buddha Awesome Sound King, and he was able to accept and uphold them all. Immediately he gained the kind of purity of vision and purity of the faculties of the ear, nose, tongue, body and mind that have been described above. Having gained this purity of the six faculties, his life span was increased by two hundred ten million nayutas of years, and he went about widely preaching the Lotus Sutra for people.
What would be the modern Western equivalent of this—what words of honor and respect could we imagine using with everyone we encountered?
(Being fully prepared, of course, to have them find us unbearably condescending and pretentious, and throw shit at us with venomous zeal.)
sunday evening dedication going out to miss bovary
Sunday 13 July 2008 | someone left a cookie
SO, YOU FUCKED JOHN DONNE
for MJW
So, you fucked John Donne.
Wasn’t very nice of you.
He was betrothed to God, you know,
a diet of worms for you!
So, you fucked John Keats.
He’s got the sickness, you know.
You took precautions, you say.
So, you fucked him anyway.
John Donne, John Keats,
John Guevara, John Wong,
John Kennedy, Johnny John-John.
The beautiful, the wreckless, the strong.
Poor thang, you had no self-worth then,
you fucked them all for a song.
—Marilyn Chin, from Rhapsody in Yellow
•
What about Johnny Yen?
Why didn’t you fuck him?
Was he not smart enough for you?
And why not John Lennon, then?
And why did you spell reckless wrong,
And what is the BFD,
And I can no longer write in doggerel, because clearly I’m missing
something major here, and otherwise I really like your book
a lot, it has such mouthwatering language and energy and besides
Cate Marvin thinks this poem is brilliant.
•
PS: And now it has been bucketing down rain for two hours, and the phone line’s so full of static that it hangs up on me when I pick up the receiver, and I can’t get enough DSL connection to post this. Self-righteousness and great communication skills plus $5 will get you a gallon of fossil fuel, fair reader.
if
Sunday 13 July 2008 | 6 cookies in the jar
Señor Brujo left yesterday morning for his summer teaching gig, wee Honda packed to the gills with drums, keyboard and cactus paraphernalia. For sustenance, he took a bag of pretzels. He called in the evening from a grotty motel room in T or C, where he’d stopped for the night, to tell me he’d just dined on “some almonds and water.” I’m thinking he’ll return many pounds lighter. He goes into the wilds of rural NM for to work with the small-town small fry, composing music for the opera they will write. Last year’s student operas featured Pueblo natives, European colonists, cowboys, aliens, footballers, spies, and mummies. Not necessarily in that order.
For myself left behind, there’s that reverberating silence that comes when one is the only primate in an enclosed space, after many months of being closely companioned. There are Finny and Pye, to be sure, both of whom enact deep alarm at my having suddenly become a single parent. (It’s kind of a vote of no-confidence, you know, when the dog follows your every movement with cocked, worried eyebrows and the cat shrills at you crabbily from the foot of the bed—anthropomorphizing translation: “What did you do to make Tuna Man leave?! Call him and apologize right now. Because this is ALL WRONG.”) I talk to them endlessly, but the silence is still different. There is no strange “jazz” music, no tuneless whistling, no pep-talking-to-self in the shower, no evil laughter at freshly devised puns while shaving, no sound of flip-flops being kicked off and sliding along the tile floor, no backyard hollering at the dog muted by brick walls and a/c, no percussive two-fingered typing, no drizzle-rattle of coffeepot, no video-game cops radioing one another frantically (”Let’s set up another roadblock!”) in Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit. (I cannot mention the B’s unending fascination with this game without also noting how EFFING WEIRD it is for someone who’s otherwise, as his Ex correctly notes, the most cautious driver in the world, to relish the pastime of electronically hurtling Maseratis and Lamborghinis at 160 mph down passenger-car-strewn boulevards while highway patrol helicopters drop bombs, realistically enough, on the player/street racer. To say nothing of the whole driving-under-the-influence arrest thing? Pure shadow play.)
So, here we are.
Yep.
NOT, I hasten to add, that there’s any shortage of Exciting Projects and Important Things to Do in his absence. I kicked off with, 1) Get the DSL and phone lines fixed; which by dint of assorted NVC/DBT skills I managed to accomplish after only an hour and forty minutes on the phone with Qwest.
[Boring blow-by-blow backstory which you should probably skip: I woke Wednesday morning to the sound of male shouting. He’s yelling at the dog, I thought groggily; and then: No, he’s using too many words. Because yelling at the dog generally consists of the same three or four words over and over (”drop it! leave it! Fiona! stop it!” etc.). I staggered to the bathroom, eyes still shut. Who else could he be yelling at? Because he’s not yelling at me….I decided it had to be either the Sponsor (?) or the Ex (?!) because who else does he love enough to be yelling at? But from behind the office’s closed door, there was an abrupt total silence. I was halfway through my Special K when a sheepish Brujo emerged. “The Qwest guy just hung up on me.”
“Oh. Okay.” Beat. “So does that mean they’re not gonna fix the phone?”
“They’re sending us a new modem.”
“But we already know it’s not the modem, because—” I began, unthinkingly. The B. made a weary talk-to-the-hand gesture, shoulders adroop with futility, and I wisely broke off that line of reasoning. “Well, I guess we can try it again.”
The modem arrived and of course made no difference. Backstory concluded.]
We live in such a strange new world, where tasks like dealing with malfunctioning equipment have become, for much of an average workday, our primary employment. What happened to spending the morning sharpening something, or sawing it, or digging it, or (for chrissake) writing it? It’s the kind of thing that makes John Gardner’s anti-hero James Page (in the woefully underrated October Light, about which more directly)—well, it makes him take a shotgun to the television, for starters. Fortunately, on a good day I feel pretty philosophical about the ruin of humankind; though I suspect I was only able to behave with equanimity on this occasion because I drew from my bottomless well of self-righteousness, aware with every cheerful greeting to yet another Qwest employee that the Brujo was in his office listening and by tunkit if I wasn’t going to model for him how to be effective and nonviolent with irritating people and situations. Though I myself came close to losing it more than once, given the sheer numbers of uninterested Filipina call-center staffers through whom I had to wade in order to reach someone who would call me back so I wouldn’t have to shriek over the wavery, wobbly “Mr. Watson come here I need you” overseas connection. Aforementioned call-center staffers quite reasonably thinking I was INSANE.
“So…you are saying that your DSL is not working because of this, ah…this ‘rain on the line’.”
“No, the rain on the line takes out the telephone. The DSL doesn’t work because it’s 115º and the cables are bare uninsulated metal.”
“Uh-huh. So now you think it is not working because it is hot.”
“Well, when it’s not raining it’s hot. So right now we do have DSL. But it’s morning and it’s only in the nineties. In an hour it won’t work any more. Although the heat will dry up the rain, so then the phone will work again.”
“Yes. I see. Would you mind holding, please?”
I don’t blame them. I know it sounds like I’m claiming we have a species of tin-can phone.
(BUT WE DO.)
À la fin du jour, I credit my eventual success to a situation-specific command of the DBT “broken record” skill (”Uh-huh, and what I hear ME saying is….”). Unfortunately I haven’t generalized this ability to many other areas of my life, but like most of my generation, I’m pretty decent with call-center tech support (is that why the Brujo’s rate is fifty-fifty—because he’s half-boomer? and also why, for example, my father can’t deal with customer service people at all?).
Flushed with victory, I then asked to be put through to billing and persuaded them to credit us for two weeks of non-service.
Not many hours later a technician came out with a ladder and repaired the line. The Brujo crept timidly to my office door.
“You’re my hero.”
I glared at him lovingly, exhausted by my own smugness.
Then he packed his car and left, and I went to the State School library, where the undergraduate clerks also seemed to think I was insane, exchanging mocking glances with one another as I filled my little red rolling briefcase with armloads of poetry and all the John Gardner criticism I could find. Because who goes to a PARTY SCHOOL library in the SUMMER to check out BOOKS? I ask you. Surely the best reason to air-condition a massive underground building containing 3.1 million bound volumes is so that half-a-dozen international students can sleep on the leatherette sofas. The library has a gelid, even-more-abandoned-than-usual air. And the clerks rolled their eyes surreptitiously because not only did I check out books but I tried to make clumsy conversation with them. I jammed on my unfashionable straw hat and lugged my briefcase awkwardly up the granite staircases, feeling old and ridiculous, like a character from a Katherine Mansfield short story.
Then I fell into bed and simul-read eighteen books, with interruptions to phone Mandarin, eat salad from a plastic bag and Amy’s pizza pockets, and get very very distracted by this inflammatory thread on the Beautiful Trench’s emergency blog, Sitting with Fire. It’s hard for those posting on the thread and anyone reading it not to have fire metaphors come to mind, because the conversation is so much like flame: darting, unpredictable, sudden, alarming, devouring, playfully violent; and then when it has passed, utterly gone; leaving the bare blackened bones so survivors can see what was lying underneath all the time. Yours truly opened electronic mouth and shoved in foot earlier on, so from henceforth I’m just spectating; as I said to Mandarin and the Umbrella last night:
WHY do I keep posting?!? I am just being flamed into a toasted organic pecan. And there are so much more timely matters at stake, like the great matter of forest fire. Yet it’s kind of amazing how one cackling troll has successfully organized an entire host of e-Buddhists into falling all over ourselves to be reasonable and understanding, while also delicately and/or tartly (depending on our maitri type) setting the anonymous original poster straight on just how hip Zen can be, dammit. But my participating is patently ridiculous; I’m not even affiliated with the Beautiful Trench; and if the B. weren’t watching the Weather Channel in a motel room in Truth or Consequences he would be tickling me and telling me so. I am shutting OFF this infernal machine and going to BED.
Which is as valid a message this morning as it was twelve hours ago. Still, if you’re interested in post-Marxist critiques of American Buddhism, whether balanced and mature or snarling and reactive—as well as similarly binomial defenses of same—it’s a fascinating little impromptu forum. I think.
And the whole disregarded-mandatory-evacuation aspect of the situation has been engrossing as well. En bref, as the remaining residents were being removed, five of them abruptly turned around on the road, halfway-out, and went back to the Trench to weather out the fire and keep the sprinkler pumps primed. Admittedly, their choice may have been one of the primary actions that saved the Trench’s main buildings; yet it was a unilateral decision; and if I were one of those who’d been hauled out, I’d have many intense feelings all at once. Like anger (who do those cowboy motherfuckers think they are); and hurt (the rest of us did a lot too you know); and maybe worst of all, left out (I wish I had been there). But for now the forest fire has chosen to allot its attention elsewhere, and everybody’s being pulled out, for real [Erratum: the five who were at the Trench, remain at the Trench.] Fire is not the only unpredictable factor in our plan-making.
Unlike Robert Frost, I know little enough of it. Late in the spring of my last year in school, our small sixty-acre farm burned entirely, all but the buildings. Sparks from a neighbor’s tractor must have ignited the grass; my father was at work, and my young mother fought the entire thing alone, using garden hoses to save the house, outbuildings and livestock. The school principal drove me home (himself in fact a former California fire captain); it was strange to see all the pasture which had been grass-and-tree covered that morning now smoking and blackened, and reporters from the local newspaper taking pictures. But sadly, I was already so mentally interesting (this was the year I only ate white food) that I remember primarily being deeply ashamed of my mother. She was covered in soot, trembling, hoarse from shouting, and grabbing all the belated firemen to tell them that God had saved her life; she repeated the story for years, voice hushed with awe, how as she ran frantically from rabbit cages to calf pens, she had tripped and fallen just as a wave of flame raced toward her, and then mysteriously, capriciously, decided to take another route. I hope I did not roll my eyes in front of her. Truth be told I was disappointed by the uneventful quality of the whole thing, from my puerile perspective. Nothing major had burned (other than an admittedly costly quantity of hay), not a single chicken so much as lost a feather, and I was still going to be stuck on the same grindingly poor hobby-farm with the same apocalyptic loons. Ah, there’s nothing like the appreciation and gratitude of pre-teens.
Yet it was admittedly curious that around every single building there was an outline of black where the fire had skirted each one. Perhaps Texas grass fires just move fast, and aren’t inclined to linger and eat buildings.
Today I think about the flower gardens and rock-lined creeksides, sheds and shacks and dusty futons where the Young Monk and I tried to court and fight discreetly, and probably failed; the gorgeous echoing baths where Mandarin and I swanned in happy silence, like blissfully boiled-alive frogs; the feet-slicked engawa, glossy black from years of daily mopping and the splendor of nenju; the infinite range of sounds with which a temple’s screen doors can flap shut or be noiselessly, tenderly closed; the dirt-floored student dining area where I once, weeping so hard I couldn’t see properly, accidentally tipped and spilled a five-gallon steel container full of just-sorted red lentils. And spent another hour picking them one by one from the dirt.
Like fire, that might be a metaphor for something; except that it’s not. It was just itself.
friday refrains · aliki barnstone
Saturday 12 July 2008 | 8 cookies in the jar
SKY BURIAL
Snowlands Hotel. Before dawn in one of the dormitories
David is up first, moving from bed to bed waking us gently.
We mount our clanking Flying Pigeon bikes and ride out of town
On the dusty road, telling each other our dreams.
Traveler’s word is, if a fire’s burning there will be a burial.
The fire burns. We park our bicycles by a shallow river
And roll up our pants. Water so icy that I bend over
On the opposite shore, breathing slowly, coaxing my feet
From the pain. Already a silhouette of vultures
Gathered on the mountain above us. A monk in yellow robes
Bright in the half-light chants, hits a tambourine and cymbal.
A young woman in an animal skin coat nurses a child,
The boy and girl beside her talk and laugh like spectators
At a Chinese soccer game. An older man spins something
Like a large, long, extravagantly decorated hat atop a broomstick;
Colored rings and ribbons float up, chime, and relax
With each turn. Now six men stamp out the fire and cross
To a large boulder where they undo two squarish bundles.
Two corpses roll out in fetal position, naked,
Their gender and age unintelligible. Laying them out
On their bellies, the men start their work. Sun
Begins to show us color on the ridges of the mountains,
Spreading, illuminating this rocky valley
Where starting at the necks the corpses are skinned,
The sheets of skin tossed to the men behind,
Who cut them into small squares;
The muscles are pulled from bone, limbs disjointed from body,
Bones crushed in absorbing white powder with a rock.
It is like a butcher shop. Pounding, hacking, slapping,
Hundreds of vultures wait on the rocks or circle
Or, swooping down to the boulder too early, are shooed away
By the corpse-cutters. I cringe when they get to the feet,
And keep looking back to my bicycle, which is delicate,
Dark, pretty by the whitened river. By now it is light;
The city is awake: trucks and tractors rumble,
Loudspeakers have resumed broadcasting political homilies.
I pass my waterbottle to friends. Some of us sit alone and stare.
Some of us hold each other. A few look through binoculars.
Everything is clicking, rhythmic:
Chanting; voices directing from the central government;
Chopping; the river hisses; vultures glide or preen;
Small reverent, nervous, or revolted gestures of tourists.
Supports and resistances move. For now and perhaps
For a while afterward my fears are merely furniture
I can walk around or discard. I will be
Like those two—dismembered, insensible, incomprehensible—
But—lucky accident—my flesh aches and lusts.
At last the corpse-cutter wraps the head in a cloth,
Holds it up to the sky, prays, places it in a hollow,
And smashes it with a rock.
Two others cross to the flat where we stand
And drive us back a few steps. Bloody hands and bloody knives.
One of them taps me with his blade.
I check my sleeve for a stain, but I’m clean.
I’ve read the ground here, frozen most of the year,
Is no good for burial. There’s too little timber for cremation.
When the soul is gone, the body means nothing.
Sometimes the Tibetans leave their dead
In a river to be eaten by fish.
We say dust to dust. This is flesh to flesh.
Vultures, symbols of peace,
The carnivore self that does not kill,
Circle huge, horrible, beautiful, black-white in the blue.
The white V’s of their bodies and their wingtip feathers
Spread like black fingers in the sky
Of turquoise the Tibetans wear. The vultures eat.
I must get my visa at the Nepalese consulate.
As we ride back together Anna says, “I felt we were no better
Than the vultures.” “Really?” I say. I’m enjoying
The view of the Potala, people selling their wares,
My legs peddling, the clanking bike, the sun on my face.
I search for some guilt, but find nothing—
Only this happiness, wind, elation, breath circling.
—Aliki Barnstone (via ted and ween’s compendium)
broadband “service” provider 1, unnarrator 0
Thursday 10 July 2008 | someone left a cookie
This pretty much sums up our DSL connection (via thatwesguy).
on suffering (by popular request!)
Wednesday 9 July 2008 | 8 cookies in the jar
And now it’s time for a nice little homily on, as I once typoed in a desperate 3 am email to a college friend, “mortal agnoy.” (And then I cracked myself up and couldn’t be pained any more and had to quit emailing and go to bed.)
Currently we here are suffering through a bewildering attack of productivity, featuring the federal tax return, with many its attendant and multifarious schedules; I am so close to an economic stimulus package I can already feel its battery-operated buzz. But I interrupt my valiant wrestling with tax law to recapitulate the Buddha’s Smart Moment, brought to you in tendentious, irreverent translation. Please, Mandarins or Umbrellas or anyone else—please feel free to leap in and save us all from my flawed doctrinal succotash.
Nasty Reality #1: Life is suffering.
Alive? Got suffering! Birth, sickness, old age, and death—to say nothing of the Byzantine federal tax code.Nasty Reality #2: Suffering has a cause.
Since this disagreeable stuff exists, it’s gotta start somewhere. Let the finger-pointing begin!Noble Reality #3: Suffering has an end.
And if it starts with something….there damn well better be an end in sight, right? If X, then not-X.Noble Reality #4: There’s a path to that end.
Thus there must be a way to bring this happy state of non-affairs to pass. Other than the Amy Winehouse solution, that is.
Sadly, I’ve perversely skewed these on purpose to make clear that their commonly received interpretation hosts several gross oversimplifications of the capitalist swamp-Yankee sort—ayup, there they be, a-sneakin’ in, roaming to and fro upon the earth, seeking whom they may confusticate.
Alors [digs out notes]. So Kosho’s talk in the Beautiful Trench, lo these many five year past, was based on his reading of a book called The Feeling Buddha by David Brazier (a British psychotherapist who’s also one of those Namu Amida Butsu-chanters). He began by explaining how the usual approach to these statements of purported fact is often not unlike following some complicated cookery direction: “So if you did four, then you get two, which would do three, thus extinguishing one. That’s not a good recipe!” We’re focused on making that nasty suffering GO AWAY, so we approach it in reverse, and with our minds—with problem-solving, trouble-shooting, and trying to improve it out of existence. (Which incidentally can make you pretty miserable on the cushion, to say nothing of during walking/talking/interacting/getting-into-trouble life. Because you’re all: By tunkit, I’m still suffering! Must not have that dang #4 nailed down yet. Better sign up for another 90-day retreat, or give up dairy, or quit hating the way the guy next to me swallows all the time, or change my setsu tip, or something.)
What if, instead, he asked, the Buddha actually meant for us to follow all four in the order presented? Without squirming or jumping from one to another?
The four realities, according to Kosho, are noble because they’re inevitable and therefore worthy of respect. When loss appears, “Suffering simply arises. Affliction happens and there’s a natural response that’s out of our control, that’s animal. It’s not our fault, or a character flaw.” This is what Herself would have called pain, actually, not suffering qua suffering. When someone comes up behind you and startles you, you jump. Your human body has an autonomic reaction. To be sure, most Buddhist students have heard of or encountered adepts who, through time and practice, have pretty much dismantled this reflex. But most of the rest of us non-lamas still gots it.
But the real cause of suffering, he said, develops when we personalize the affliction: “We take offense to the ‘I,’ personalizing what happens to the self as a coping mechanism. To deal with the pressure, we may externalize it and blame others, or turn it inward—our conditioning informs how we’ll handle this. But there’s usually the same old box into which we put ourselves and others.”
There exists in each of us, Kosho concluded, the powerful energy of not wanting to suffer. But when we try to avoid it, suffering becomes the dangerous, fire-spouting dragon which we in the West usually want to kill in order to get to the treasure—instead of taming it and riding it home.
Instead, what if we think about the truths this way:
• Affliction exists.
• We have a reaction to it—no choice about that.
• We have a choice about how we react to the reaction. Kosho suggested: containment, embracing, intimacy, sitting with, staying close to, holding in the heart. “Can you feel what you’re feeling? When it hurts, say ouch!”
And now having thoroughly mangled this poor priest’s once-articulate talk, I betake me to the bedchamber wherein the Brujo already slumbers, there probably to dream about tortuous prose like the following:
Figuring your deductible loss. If all amounts are at risk in this business, check box 32a. If you answered “Yes” on line G, enter your loss on line 31. But if you answered “No” on line G, you may need to complete Form 8582 to figure your allowable loss to enter on line 31. See the Instructions for Form 8582 for details.
If you checked box 32b, first complete form 6198 to determine the amount of your deductible loss. If you answered “Yes” on line G, enter that amount on line 31. But if you answered “No” on line G, your loss may be further limited. See the Instructions for Form 8582. If your at-risk amount is zero or less, enter -0- on line 31. Be sure to attach Form 6198 to your return. If you checked box 32b and you do not attach Form 6198, the processing of your tax return may be delayed.
Any loss from this business not allowed only because of the at-risk rules is treated as a deduction allocable to the business.
For details, see Pub. 925.
If you understood a drivelling word of this then you’re a better bloody man than I am, Gunga Din. Within seconds of my handing him the booklet, the Brujo impatiently returned it, muttering something about Greek. In which, of course, he can recite the opening of the Iliad. The really weird thing about this Vogonesque passage is that the IRS repeat themselves about eight times, in a dizzying swirl of circularity, albeit with obvious hopes that their refrain will eventually penetrate your thick skull; but they do so USING THE EXACT SAME LANGUAGE, like tourists who shout at native-language speakers, as though volume could compensate for fundamental incoherence.
In fact I have a fond memory of Ms. Zlatarog getting all feisty after dinner one night, about silly Americans who won’t just shut up and bite down and pay their taxes the way good Europeans do so uncomplainingly. I was too overcome with double-malt and Gloucester at the time to defend our stingy asses but in the dim recesses of my brain later came the objections: 1) Yes, but your taxes actually PAY for things—good things—things which as a rule more or less do not consistently flaunt the Geneva Convention; and 2) at least when you pay them it’s just a big flat 35% you never see again—common citizens aren’t expected to master a major urban phone book’s worth of reverberating, fevered bureaucratic blabbering. Of course now that British students have to take out loans for university and the railways are decentralized and all manner of New Labourish improvements have been made, perhaps Inland Revenue has taken a diabolical leaf from the States and is now requiring people to file these preposterous annual documents.
Right, where was I? Oh yes, suffering. And taxes. And bed.
[to be continued…]
screenplays I will never write (so I might as well blab all about them online)
Tuesday 8 July 2008 | someone left a cookie
• O’KEEFFE. Yep, a biopic, starring…okay, well, I don’t know who; but it sure as heck won’t be Linda Fiorentino. (Though Sir Ben was born to play Steiglitz.) I know, I know, it sounds played, and O’Keeffe was just a regional artist anyway; but here’s the cool part—it starts out at the Art Institute in Chicago and follows young Georgia to New York, all in black-and-white. And then when she cracks up, has migraines, and leaves for Amarillo (and later for New Mexico), the film switches to TECHNICOLOR. How Wizard of Oz is that!?
• EMILY & SUSAN. Another biopic, this one written especially with Jane Adams in mind. I thought she was cute as Niles Crane’s dermatologist girlfriend in Frasier; but really noticed her in Wonder Boys; completely fell for her in Happiness; and with a slow shock of toe-curling realization, knew she would be an uncannily perfect Dickinson when she tore up the screen as a lesbian schoolmarm in that stupid, stupid Songcatcher. Her Emily would be aging and shrewish, a sharp-tongued and blackly humored spinster, well past her annus mirabilis and juvenile infatuations with local dignitaries. Of course Tori Amos will contribute the “weird melodies” Ms. D. purportedly composed. Could Laura Linney ever get unprettified enough to play Susan, who should be as battleaxe-ugly as possible? Sadly, I doubt it.
• SAVAGE BEAUTY. Imagine—it’s a biopic! Starring Julianne Moore as Edna St. Vincent Millay, sleeping with anything not nailed down. Decadent, wholesome fun. And Julie Ann would get to play something besides a deranged vintage housewife for a change. But who would play Bunny Wilson—her tough-as-nails Irish mum Cora—her put-upon husband Eugen Boissevain (who was, as Mandarin and I like to joke, married to everyone)? We’ll never know, because Baz Luhrmann won’t get around to redhead Vincent in his fancypants lifetime.
“practice the way as though saving your head from fire” [dogen zenji]
Tuesday 8 July 2008 | 2 cookies in the jar
At the end of June, California began its annual burning; and, as happens every ten or twenty years, the national forest surrounding the Beautiful Trench began to burn as well. [Here Wordpress ate my original post.]
Mandarin was among those evacuated during a sudden fiery surge in 1999; this summer, her ex is one of a score of residents who have chosen to remain and fight the blaze. He and a dozen or so hand-picked others follow an exciting schedule of digging firebreaks, installing sprinkler systems, clearing brush, running up and down mountain ridges to report on smoke plumes, and just generally working their (male and female) nuts off from 5 am until 9 pm every day. Of course this isn’t actually all that different from the normal summer work schedule, except that usually minor California celebrities like Tracy Chapman and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jerry Brown are lounging around in the warm plunge and/or munching on the infamously amazing bread. But the minor celebrities have all been nicely ushered forth into their relatively flame-free existences, as the fire has effectively canceled the guest season (resulting in a serious loss of revenue for the monastery).
I happen to know first-hand that the bread is amazing because I spent a few weeks in the Trench myself, first as Mandarin’s guest for a month in 2003 (in a little redwood cabin like the one above) and then the Monk’s for a fortnight in 2004. Both times I was reasonably ill-mannered, miserable and snappish, though I also peeled and chopped about a thousand pounds of yellow onions; ate many cookies and almond-butter sandwiches; and overall failed to observe the work-period rules. Nevertheless, as thready and tenuous as my connection may be, I’m so grateful for the students who remain and work to save their home. It hurts to imagine the last of the priests leave-taking and closing the gate behind them as they chant, not knowing whether they will return to smouldering temple and molten Buddha. Fortunately, the bunch on firewatch right now are imminently tough, sturdy, cheerful, and best of all practical. If any human effort can keep any particular place safe, these beings will surely manage to protect this one, anyway for now.
These events develop far away from my suburban summer mind-ground, which is addled and refractory, stubborn and arbitrary and scattered. I start my days with various wild spurts of chore-energy and melt around midday into torpor coupled with self-recrimination ranging from mild to mildly furious. During the great purge of objects I came across many Zen artifacts and relics, some of which request that decisions be made as to their disposal. Will I keep my robes? They are musty from hanging in the closet, still creased from sitting, and the collars of the white jubons are sweat-yellowed despite dedicated applications of Oxy-Clean. Will I wear them to Mandarin’s ordination in August? Will I wear the rakusu? I dream every other night about the teacher who gave it to me, as I have for years, as my dreams are peopled again and again with the Modernists, the Monk, the Physicist (and last night—just to inject a little nonliterary reality—I was Rachel from Friends, and Ross was urging me to hook up with Phoebe. But I’m straight! I kept objecting, though by the end of the dream I’d begun to wonder). The book I wrote under Herself’s name should be out now; I should try to find a copy. And then there’s an unexpected temple literally two blocks from the house—why do I not go? Why does even the thought of having someone gently correct my posture leave me feeling like I’m about to be hosed down with flame retardant? See, this paragraph too reflects my divisive and divided thoughts, writing mirroring the scrambled mind—just as a teacher can tell your mental state from the way you invite the bell.
I’d rather be human than Buddhist, I huffily commented once, on Mandarin’s old blog. Now, like the rash words of “The Man without a Country,” my wrong speech has cursed me. I left practice because I was going to be a poet? That’s like, I don’t know, an actor leaving his hit TV series because he’s going to make it big in motion pictures. What am I, the David Duchovny of Zen?!
Trust me to somehow make this ALL ABOUT ME (can you tell I’m premenstrual) when in fact I was going to try to reproduce for you a dharma talk once given by the tanto from the Trench—a sweet, beautiful, unflinchingly flame-laced lecture on the Four Noble Truths—or, as Kosho called them, “the Two Nasty Truths and the Two Noble Truths.” Kosho is a beautiful man himself, an ordained queer Episcopalian priest who not infrequently held dokusan at a San Francisco gay bar, and who once allowed an enraged Young Monk to punch him (”What did he say?” “He said, ‘Ow!’ “). It would have been (or will be, once I’m fortified by sleep and can stand to dig out my notes from the barbed-wire notebook in which they lurk) exceedingly relevant to the recent bloghood thread on self-improvement and saving the world (or more accurately, I suspect, saving the world’s thin crust of biological life).
Well, sufficient unto the day is the failure thereof.
Lifted from Mandarin, the words of Keizan Jokin, honored one:
Any excesses lead to a disturbed mind. Anything that puts a strain on body and mind becomes a source of illness. So don’t practice zazen where there is danger of fire, flood, strong winds, and robbery. Keep away from areas near the seashore, bars, and red light districts, homes of widows and young virgins, and theaters. Avoid living near kings, ministers, and high authority or near gossips and seekers after fame and profit.
Temple rituals and buildings have their worth. But if you are concentrating on zazen, avoid them. Don’t get attached to sermons and instructions because they will tend to scatter and disturb your mind. Don’t take pleasure in attracting crowds or gathering disciples. Shun a variety of practices and studies.
From some damn dumb old Zen story or another which Herself used to quote: The student wails, “But what do I do about the world?” and of course the teacher says, “What is the world?” You know.
And finally, from poet and former student Jane Hirshfield, who survived the Beautiful Trench fire in 1977: some new writing, which she offered to the recently displaced students.
•
OPENING THE HANDS BETWEEN HERE AND HERE
On the dark road, only the weight of the rope.
Yet the horse is there.
•
May all beings be nonflammable.
clarifying the great matter of ghee
Saturday 5 July 2008 | 2 cookies in the jar
Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the
Most beautiful thing in the world,
A limited, limiting clarity
I have not and never did have any
Motive of poetry
But to achieve clarity.
—George Oppen
•
In the mornings, before tar street-surfaces start to bubble, our modem light flickers green. Avec vitesse! Con brio! Post like the wind!
After a long day of assaulting cupboards and closets, the Brujo and I left many boxes and bags of castoffs at Cursie’s thrift store last night, after we ate enormously at a Punjabi dhaba place that’s opened right around the corner. Indian food still has complicated emotional effects on me, as I find myself ordering with a pretentious Hindi accent, lots of “ji”s, and too many anecdotes beginning, “There was this one time….” Fortunately it’s also devastating to my digestive system (no matter how much I plead with the waiter that the cooks tone down the spices) (the Physicist’s mother was the same way, always telling me proudly that her subzii was “very mild” and feeding rice-balls of it to my baby nephews; then of course I’d taste it and it’d be blistering) so I don’t have it very often. When I do, I must ameliorate its effects with lots of raita and as much naan as I can manage to wrap around the aloo. The B., on the other hand, who always orders his green curry “Thai hot,” has had trouble finding vindaloo which is scorching enough for his satisfaction. Last night’s apparently approached the requisite heat; anyway, he’s in the living room right now plunking contentedly on his tabla, and we both slept like the dead.
The neighborhood dhaba is a well-appointed little joint, with ceiling fans, fancy bronze-edged tableware, lime-green paper napkins and a phone book of a menu (featuring that Yiddishesque rhyming slang I find so unbearably cute, “Chit Chaat” and “Roti Shoti”—how I could never hear Rushdie until a Pakistani college friend, setting aside her normally impeccable Hong-Kong-schooled colonial British accent, read aloud to me from Haroun and the Sea of Stories, doing her best Bombay impression). Near the entrance, a lounge area with sprawling sofas and a set of tabla made us wonder if they have live music some nights. Last night, though, we were given the seat of honor: right in front of a widescreen TV featuring top-volume bhangra videos. I’m guessing they were Punjabi because I couldn’t recognize any words, and because they usually starred a handsome heavy-set sadarji (sort of like these fellows) mugging for an unimpressed young lady. The young ladies were awfully scantily clad, too, which I don’t think they could have gotten away with in Hindi. Sometimes the hero would have cropped hair and wear shiny black vinyl, but this didn’t seem to make any difference in how the young lady received him, which was still with lots of Ally McBeal eyerolls and scornful hair-flipping. Anyway the music was euphoric, the dancing was, per Mandarin, unbridled and the costumes were hi-fuckin-larious. I defy straight Western men to prance around thusly garbed, in fluorescent pajama pants and those turbans with the floppy crest on top (I think some kind of folk costume, but the effect is of unusually ebullient roosters). You can get the idea here and here, though I can’t find the exact DVD our hosts were playing.
And many hosts there were, also in keeping with my previous dhaba experiences, all tending to us solicitously (and covertly watching me eat with my fingers). The same college friend could make those tiny rice-balls with her daal; I loved to see her curl her legs up underneath herself and polish off her dinner as neatly as a cat. The papad was fresh and came with three chutneys, the mango lassi was served in bronze cups, and the kulfi was creamy and so cold it had mist curling off it. Or maybe it’s just hot in Tartarus.
But actually for once it wasn’t that hot; maybe in the high eighties, cool enough that we could stand comfortably in Gracie’s parking lot without breaking out into sweat, and watch the fireworks. Which is what we did. The fireworks are cautiously deployed over Tartarus’ vaunted town “lake,” a man-made [sic] labor involving giant rubber dams, which dams (made by Goodyear or Firestone, I believe) are already cracking due to the UNEXPECTED HIGH HEAT! dear God, we didn’t count on that—and the whole thing will probably go in the next few years, flooding our fair city with brackish boiling water. But that’s another story.
Fireworks always make me shiver, and think of strafing and tracer fire—I dunno, some weird past-life issue. The B. and I stood in a hot-weather, too-much-vindaloo approximation of having our arms around each other, as a drunk guy staggered out of the alleyway and into a nearby stand of palo verde trees, presumably to pee. We watched the coruscating spheres.
“Which do we first, see the colors or hear the booms?” [guess who’s asking….]
“Well, which travels faster?”
“Oh. Light. Yeah.” [stupefying effects of kulfi]
“Welp, this is our third Fourth of July.”
“José can you see? And just think, your fellow alumnus wrote that!”
“Only the words. The melody is from an old British drinking song.”
I’d never heard this fact before but it made complete sense to me; intoxicated eighteenth-century university men, staggering from high table with interlocked elbows, pausing in the gateway to bellow the phrase we sing to and the rockets’ red glare. “Of course it is! And it has that, that bombastic ritardando at the end, bespeaking a certain degree of inebriation. It’s all, I love you, man! No really, I really do.“
As we drove the block from Cursie’s to our house, in the rearview mirror I could see Peeing Guy shuffling over to the castoffs, preparing to go through them. “There’s not really anything useful in there—he’s mostly going to find women’s clothing.”
“Maybe that’s fine with him.”
We pulled into the driveway, having deteriorated into our own tuneless version of the Monty Python lumberjack song. The B. took Finny into the backyard for her own micturations while I faced down the one box remaining. Sighed, got a knife, and slit open the tape. Finny’s nose appeared over the edge, huffling curiously.
“What’s all that, then?” asked the Brujo, locking the door for the night.
“Salwar kameez,” I answered, holding up the hand-beaded purple number, which I wore exactly once (at that last Thanksgiving dinner in Chicago, endless indigestible puris and too much eye makeup, the Physicist’s mum and auntie giggling in Punjabi like little girls, the rest of us sitting around the table smiling blankly, unable to understand a word but just happy that she was enjoying what would be her last visit to her family in the States. Her pixie haircut, which I tried to assure her was très chic, the chemo nausea, ulti alti hai, sickness rising is, does alti share the Indo-European root for altitude? Etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.). The matching purple dupatta is about twelve feet long, encrusted with tiny rainbow-colored beads that snag on everything. Mrs. Physicist (I always called his mother by her last name, never being invited to address her any other way) had them custom-made for me on her annual trips to Delhi; she called them, pragmatically, “suits,” and somehow had managed to describe my shape and size to the seamstresses in such a way that all five fit me with uncanny exactness. By “me” I mean, of course, the anorectic breastless hipless me; who knows whether they’d fit now. I wasn’t about to try them on. Underneath the yards of fabric were some smaller boxes of similarly gifted, unwearably elaborate jewelry; various polyester chiffon scarves; an organic St. Dalfour green tea bag, and a magazine article about The West Wing. And a partially torn-open packet of photographs. I could see my own face smirking out at me.
And herein, fair reader, lies the greatest peril of clarifying—that encounter with ephemera which, if you’re me, you find absolutely assaultive. Rumination cannot lance it, only time and the slow creep of stupid indifference. Pictures can be particularly deadly, worse than letters; the Physicist always photographs as the sweetest-faced innocent, his big fringed Punjabi eyes filled with plaintive bafflement, how did this happen to me? And my heart lurches in and out of my chest with a sickening swoosh that sounds like I did it, I did it, I did it. I’d meant to send this box to London, thinking Mrs. Physicist intended these things not for me but for his wife; when he remarries, hopefully someone more loyal and less likely to skip out when hyperverbal twentysomething Zen monks come along. There we are in Santa Fe the day we signed our marriage certificate, his face shuttered and twisted with aversion, mine with thwarted grasping—
Or somehow that’s what I’ve always thought, that’s been my story about the pictures—an exquisitely fragile theoretical scientist shattered by his inexplicable, fiery encounter with a pigheaded, selfish, demanding then rejecting poet. I flip through the pictures now and see that the way they’ve looked in my head aren’t actually the way they are in reality, that day up at the stupa, when we didn’t have the wedding I’d wanted. (With a lot of effort, I excise the word “petulantly” from that sentence. Is it petulant to want a wedding? It is perhaps petulant to want it so badly you ignore your future husband’s wishes in the matter, and drag him kicking and screaming into matrimony.) We don’t look at all tortured or dramatic. If anything we just look tired from staying up all night fighting; and we look freakishly young.
I think about it—if I was thirty when we married, he must have been in his late twenties. Not, in fact, that much older than the Monk. Can you “make” someone marry you if they don’t want to? Is that even possible? Can I continue to blame myself for leaving someone who wasn’t completely there in the marriage to begin with—who could only barely manage to articulate, years later when we were cleaning out the storage unit together, “I still love you, you know—I mean, in the man-woman way”? Half-laughing at himself, knowing he sounded more than ever like (his favorite self-accusation) Mr. Stevens from Remains of the Day. Breaking my heart all over again. I turned from another pile of dusty boxes and hugged him carefully, not knowing whether to laugh myself, or sob. I know, darling, I know you do—
Clarity has its price. For a time, when we were first separated, the Physicist spent his lonely evenings with the Modernists, who shared with him their pizza and sympathy. I was grateful that he had their friendship, and more than willing to remain outside our former foursome and cede the space. How could you do this, you don’t see him every night the way we do, broken at our dining table, accused the Modernist. Don’t tell me what I see and don’t see, I shot back; I have to function every day, saturated with the knowledge of what I’ve done. But how could I know what he suffered? For, contra Slick Willie, you can’t ever really feel someone else’s pain—
The Brujo pads in and interrupts this pointless train of non-thought, pleased with what he has wrought. “Search for ‘tabla’ on craigslist!”
“You’re selling them?” Suddenly I know what I should do with the remaining box. What kind of new lover wants the ex-wife’s old clothes? Would I? Why am I even bothering typing in that question?
And now I must flog some salwar kameez, before the heat goes over a hundred and teh Interwebs melts. I hear the Brujo briskly answering email in his office, efficiently percussive two-fingered typist. Our DSL goes unrepaired, the phone company doesn’t call us back, and we investigate WiFi and cable modem options, about which we are ignorant.
This post has had too many adverbs, as usual, and isn’t particularly humorous. It also doesn’t really have an ending, other than this proffered cool lima bean: my favorite cheesy-as-hell bhangra video ever, from Rang de Basanti. I’m not sure why Amir Khan philosophically addresses a cow during the middle of it, but he probably has some deeper message about political unity, though even with my patchy Hindi I can understand when his mum interrupts to tell him to milk the damn cow. Oh, and my second-favorite cheesy Amir Khan video—here amusingly translated into French—from Lagaan, a movie which will teach you the rules of cricket for once and for all, whether you want to know them or not (snice the last hour of it is a three-day match practically shot in real time).
Marchons, marchons! Or chale, chalo. And try not to look back too often.
