on turning 34

Yesterday was my 34th birthday, and as one of my dearest friends put it, it felt good to make it "twelve years past where either of us though that we would." Ah, yes, the deceitful 'live fast, die young' fantasies of youth – it's not wonder why they say youth is wasted on the young.

Clichés are beside the point.

The point is that I had a fantastic, and fantastically tiring, birthday. It began before 6am with the whining beep of my yin's iPod and didn't stop until nearly 11 o'clock that night. In between, I encountered a snoring macaw and a black bean cake disguised as chocolate.

"It doesn't have any wheat or sugar," my yin said.

"Really? What's in it."

"Why don't you finish eating that piece first..."

Everyone's first question after hearing this, of course, is what potential side effects resulted from this flatulent dessert. Surprisingly little, and other than the occasionally extra-beany bite, it wasn't all that bad.

Anyway, 34 doesn't feel that much different than 33, except that it comes with the mild satisfaction of having outlived either Jesus or Alexander the Great. Of course, one falls short when compared by virtually any other metric, but this is also beside the point.

The point is that I was truly moved by the barrage of goodwill posed on the wall of my social networking site (yes, I am still afraid of the f-word.)

As important as the words to me was the form, especially the loving parentheticals that alternately hugged sentimentality, irony, and reminiscence. Besides the one that started this post, some favorites (in no particular order) included:

"I got you a wallet for your birthday -
it's the one that says bad mother f**ker on it.
(I still crack up thinking about that)."

"Happy Day Day"

"and finally, Happy Birthday!... but this is beside the point -- oh wait, no it's not!"

"today is teh international day of Hope ! and it´s your birthday cool !"

"Have an OK birthday, J_____.
(Prevents disappointment, I find)"

"happy birthday j-dawg!
(remember when everyone in college called you j-dawg?)"

(For the record, no one called me that... at least I hope not.)

Anyway, I thank everyone for the warm wishes, kind words and laughter. I look forward to the year ahead, which includes marriage and graduation and cross-country travels and who knows how many other adventures large and small. There will undoubtedly be revelations and mystery, profundity and banality, and I hope that his year will be the best of those that came before, the least of those that lie ahead. As ever...

J_____

on the Bhagavad Gita and other assorted mysticisms

So, I can feel my free time slipping away already, slowly being devoured by Hemingway and Marker and Ettinger and Bazin and obligations trivial and profound. To paraphrase (and subvert) the words of Bhagavan Sri Krishna:

"I am become the world, destroyer of time."

The first thing to go, of course, is this very forum, and I just deleted a couple of posts that never made it any further than a title. I thought about writing up one of them instead, changing the name, and then posting it. It would appear backdated, which would create the false impression that I've been more productive than is actually the case. But what the hell, what difference does it make? Time is a scam anyway – all-pervasive, omnipotent and eternal – but a scam nonetheless.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that I've had more than my fair share of satsang this past week. I've learned the six things that Bhagavan is said to possess in unlimited quantity (beauty, strength, knowledge, wealth, fame, renunciation), a new mantra (om namo bhagavate vasudeva), and a primer on sankhya whose pathos far outweighed its logos.

Fortunately, this morning I counterbalanced all this dazzling, dizzying, dubious theology with a healthy dose of literary malaise:

Take, for example, this passage on love:

"Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could have. And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I'm deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It's half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hands up beside the bathroom door. It smells like Lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers because I know I have no right to any more. Love is also the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book."

Two things I know are true:

1) Ernest Hemingway is dead.
2) The Bhagavad Gita is a book.

(a poem actually, but this may or may not affect its ontological status)

Do with this what you will, but my own attempt to reconcile these truths is looking more and more to be my life's work, which leaves me in an interesting philosophical no-man's land.

It can be a profoundly lonely task.

On the one hand, my True Believer friends often dismiss my point-of-view as 'merely the mind.' I readily concede to this tendency, but still, it seems that they are over-willing to overlook the assumptions and internal contradictions of their own belief. The end result is a devotion and understanding seems to preclude the devotion and understanding of others. I find it profoundly unsatisfactory, when met with the authentic, irreconcilable belief of another to dismiss their faith as either the wrong type or of insufficient quantity.

Many of my True Skeptic friends, on the other hand, suffer from atheism, agnosticism and the rigid dynamism of the dialectic. Pushing up against the limits of the mind, they seem unable to make that final leap, and I suppose my own faith must look like a mix of naiveté and dime store mysticism to them. The hell of it is that I know I cannot communicate what cannot be spoken, only sensed, and, ironically, the only solace I've found in times like these is in the second-hand translation of a scripture I've never read, whose name I cannot pronounce:

What I am is utterly beyond the capacity of your mind to conceive.
Therefore, worship me in whatever form appeals to you.
I promise in that form I will come to you.

- Tripura Rahasya 7:79-93

Like Rumi and his Shams, I wait...

in praise of Placebo

My yin and I were gifted a new coffee machine over the weekend, and I have to say that our morning coffee has never tasted better. The pre-wedding hubbubbling just below the surface has finally started showing itself, and it was given to my yin at her bridal shower, which, contrary to its name, has nothing to do with water or steering a horse.

(yikes! that was bad, even for me.)

But this is beside the point.

The point is that this is the biggest improvement in our coffee consumption since we made the commitment to Larry's Beans after our summer excursion to North Carolina. There, in Boone, lies the single greatest bakery south of the Mason-Dixon, north of the equator, or east of the Rockies:

I started wondering, though – how much of this improved taste is really there, and how much of it is nothing more than placebo? This seemingly topical question got me to thinking about the nature of the placebo effect, and why it is so often hauled out of the skeptic's bag of tricks as a method of discrediting the experience of another.

Those who worship at the altar of Science are especially prone to this tactic, and it is almost invariably used as proof of an object's impotence. Echinacea, essential oils, and all sorts of other natural and alternative remedies have all been stigmatized by the specter of placebo, and more than once I've fallen victim to this same finger-wagging posture.

But who can argue with the wisdom of the butterfly?

a butterfly and echinacea flower in my grandmother's garden

What seems to be overlooked in these criticisms is that the logical consequence of the object's ineffectiveness must be the mind's ability to impact the material world in substantive, measurable ways. In other words, the same Scientists who poo-poo an idea as a 'mere placebo' seem equally uncomfortable with the notion of thoughts – 'mere thoughts' – changing the body and improving quality of life.

This is not to dismiss modern medicines; I fully admit that the medicinal chemicals we imbibe (with frightening regularity) carry with them strong karmas. But with this incomprehensible strength also comes unpredictability, as the last fifty years of recalls and poisonings will surely attest.

Furthermore, it seems reasonable to me that many of these overdetermined health issues – obesity, mental illness, cancer, etc. – are phenomena that could be greatly reduced if we chose our thoughts and foods and medicines more carefully, little by little, over the course of our lives rather than waiting until faced with obstacles of ginormous proportions. These tremendous karmas build up little by little, for ill or for better, and who's to say if we had made different decisions all along the way that we might not have avoided those larger consequences. It seems, as with most things, the Middle Path is the wisest.

... and all this from a morning cup of coffee.

The Sun Also Rises (book rant)

I just finished reading The Sun Also Rises and I feel lousy. The sadness never seemed so real as it did this time, and I wonder how a story that I've read a half dozen times can grow more mystifying with each subsequent exposure. Perhaps it's some sort of reverse immunity. Perhaps every time through hurts a little more.

Or is it merely a side effect of aging?

I think of Jake's impotence and Brett's impossibility, of Cohn's foolishness and Michael drunkenness; I imagine Romero's beauty. Bit by bit this boy of nineteen will chipped away by time's passing. That is the curse of those whose talent emerges early – their immortality is lived in the shadow of their youth.

Arthur Rimbaud abandoned writing at age 21

Someday Romero will grow old, look in the mirror, and wonder what happened to the matador who performed so elegantly in Pampalona. He will wonder if it was all a dream, or if it was merely the soft mist of recollection shrouding over the twilight of adolescence.

He will wonder if Brett was ever really there at all.

We all have our Basque Country; we all have our San Sebastian in the summer. There is a Romero in each of us, and a Cohn as well. The question is not whether or not our glory will fade, but rather how we will accept it. This is a profoundly Hemingway-esque sentiment, and seems all the more ironic considering Papa put a shotgun in his mouth one July morning fifty years ago.

I wonder if he was a religious man, or if the War beat it out of him like this woman said:

"You are all a lost generation..."

I once visited his house in Key West, which was allegedly bought because it was located nearby a lighthouse. The light helped to guide him home in his drunkenness, and if memory serves he abandoned it when he abandoned the wife (number two or three?) that bought it for him.

I wonder if Hemingway saw himself as Jake or Romero? I wonder if his meditation on the bullfight ("In bull-fighting they speak of the terrain of the bull and the terrain of the bull-fighter. As long as a bull-fighter stays in his own terrain he is comparatively safe...") was an attempt to compensate for his own impotence.

Each blue pill contains 1,ooo Romeros.

Maybe both men are opposite ends of the same afición, a long thin rod connecting the beautiful naivete of youth to the dissolute wisdom of experience. Brett is the fulcrum between them; she is the spoke at the center of the novel, with Cohn and Bill and Michael and Jake and Romero spinning 'round her.

She says:

"I'm thirty-four, you know.
I'm not going to be one of these bitches that ruins children."

I will be thirty-four one week from tomorrow. I suppose, if I were a woman, I would soon be old enough to ruin children.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that the words have not changed in the novel, and so I must assume that I have. Books are funny that way. I like to keep little notes and highlights and tabs in mine so I can go back and see the things I once found meaningful or profound. It's like a time capsule of my own immaturity. Here, for example, is one gem of a topic sentence from April of 1997:

"The Sun Also Rises seems a benign moniker, but Hemingway takes the normal connotations associated with the sun - life, rebirth, and hope - and twists them one hundred eighty degrees. His method in doing so consists of integrating the characterizations of Brett and Jake and their doomed interdependence into a unified theme."

A 'benign moniker'? Was that really ever okay?

(Yes, especially when discussing
'doomed interdependence'
in 2500 words or less.)

But these embarrassing turns of phrase are also wonderfully endearing, connecting us to the children we were and reminding us that someday the 'adults' we've become may look just as helpless, searching and lost. There is a Jake and Romero and Brett in each of us;

"We are large, we contain multitudes"

final quote (paraphrase, really) from Uncle Walt Whitman

tumbled, stumbled, (s)tumbled

I've been listening to Irish folk music for the past 36 hours, punctuated by rounds of Tiger Woods and random junk foods purchased from a wholesale membership club with an unfortunate name:

I shudder to think of how much money they must spend to insure the appropriate website appears when someone Googles their name.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that I'm tackling Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises again, which is easily one of my favorite novels. It's been a couple of years since I last read it, and the dialogue is just as appealing as I remembered it:

"Mike was pretty excited about his girl friend," I said in the taxi.
"Well," said Bill. "You can't blame him such a hell of a lot."

The girl friend in question is Lady Brett Ashley, of course, and this time around I'm noticing that she seems less sympathetic than in previous readings, like perhaps she would ruin Jake, too, if she had the chance. It's strange for me to see it this way because Hemingway has always been one of my favorite authors. In fact, I've consistently been able to overlook (and sometimes romanticize) his shortcomings. As evidence, I submit to the jury portions of an email written about two and a half years ago:

23 September 2008, 11:46pm

Dear _____,

The chances of this being cogent are marginal because it is still working itself through my noggin. Whenever I get these literary insights (at least w/regards to prose-length form and structure) I have an immediate, visceral reaction to the realization of the knowledge, but my mind has to catch up, rearranging itself in its own sweet time while I go about my business. That being said, here goes...

tumbled

I finished Marquez a couple of days ago, and I celebrated by going to Goodwill to buy a bookshelf. I left the store with no bookshelf whatsoever, but a bevy of beautiful books, included A Moveable Feast by Hemingway. I had never read it and figured I should probably regain my literary balance because Marquez's rich, descriptive prose had such an effect me. It seemed to me that Papa's direct, declaratory, adjective-free sentences were just what the doctor ordered. (There is no doctor). The book isn't really a memoir, more like anecdotal ruminations on his time in Paris when he worked as a newspaper writer before his first novel (The AMAZING Sun Also Rises) was published.

stumbled

I finished the book this morning, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up because the last few pages recount the dissolution of his first marriage on the eve of his publication, fame, and fortune. Hemingway describes the events leading up to it:

"When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to when as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon... Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away..."

"Under the charm of these rich I was as trusting and stupid as a bird dog who wants to go out with any man with a gun, or a trained pig in a circus who has finally found someone who loves and appreciates him for himself alone. That every day should be a fiesta seemed to me a marvelous discovery. I even read aloud the part of the novel that I had rewritten, which is about as low as a write can get and much more dangerous for him as a writer than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices..."

"Before these rich had come we had been infiltrated by another rich using the oldest trick there is. It is that an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband. When the husband is a writer and doing difficult work so that he is occupied much of the time and is not a good companion or partner to his wife for a big part of the day, the arrangement has advantages until you know how it works out. The husband has two attractive girls around when he has finished the work. One is new and strange and if he has bad luck he gets to love them both..."

"All truly wicked things start from innocence... I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her... Paris was never to be the same again although it was always Paris.... and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when were very poor and very happy."

What struck me so soundly was his atypical sentence structure and the use of simile ("as migrating birds," "stupid as a bird dog," "a trained pig"). Something seemed off; then it began to dawn on me: He finished this book in 1960 and killed himself the next year.

There are anecdotes of Scott Fitzgerald's genius and its destruction, Zelda and her "hawk-eyed" madness, and the gap that grew between he and Gertrude Stein after he heard her pleading upstairs for Alice Tolkas not to leave.

The final chapter, in his only autobiographical work, was full of this remorse and sadness for the things he saw and did as a young man. It shook me to think of this good man (and great writer) so sad in his final days about the life he had lived.

(s)tumbled

The Madness began to grip me as I watched it all start to unfold. This was my initial written response in my journal, just before I emailed you:

i just read the suicide note of a good man and a great writer on the morning i came to know - if not understand - that i am a good writer, perhaps a great writer, but that what i desire most is to be a great man. i do not want to look back, aged 61 years, at the life and love i lost in Paris nostalgias. i do not want the writing to be corrupted by emotion - as was his final chapter, when his simple declarations gave way to commas and simile on the eve of his suicide.

1) I do not wish to write as him, my first love, who corrupted me with visions of Paris and Lady Brett Ashley.

2) I do not wish to write as him, my last love, whose travels and ramblings - for a time - meant much more to me than my own.

3) I love you both, and may your souls breathe easy tonight.

[...]

4) A caterpillar spins it own coffin, answering the question: am i not a butterfly?

As ever, the whole world is really all in love,

15 January 2011, 3:13 pm

I'm starting to question some of the things I wrote in this letter. I now wonder, for example, if Hemingway really felt remorse for the mistakes of his youth, or was merely using A Moveable Feast as his mea culpa to history, to the children and wives and loved ones he abandoned.

In short, it looks as though I'm reassessing my understanding of the man, which is precisely what one is supposed to do when s/he looks into a subject more deeply. What I'm seeing is profoundly disturbing. Earlier in the week my new favorite professor cautioned that this very thing might happen, but I brushed off his warning as mere pomp and affect.

It looks like I was wrong.

Upani-Buddha-shads

One year ago my yin came home as I was cleaning up from making yogurt, which marked a turning in my ability to deny my descent into hippiedom. A kitchen, at least in my old way of thinking, is place for storing food rather than growing it.

As recent as three weeks ago, however, I was fermenting pickles in the cupboard above our refrigerator. Taste-wise, they came out okay, but the texture was a little off. My best guess is that the heat rising from the refrigerator's compressor sped up the fermentation process, leaving the pickles mushier than one would desire. All this is purely speculation, of course, and it is also thoroughly beside the point.

The point is that later that night, we discussed the relationship between percept, concept, and communication. To illustrate my perspective, I pointed to the book sitting on the nightstand:

me: "What am i pointing to?"

yin: "Buddha."

me: "The book."

yin: "Trick question."

me: "How?"

yin: "The Buddha...

you knew what i would say."

This exercise highlighted the everpresence and malleability of context, the unseen influence of scope and scale, and the assumptions already made before we even speak a word. Had i walked into the room and pointed at the object in exactly the same manner, her answer would have likely been 'book.' The room was the context; the book became the text.

(so to speak.)

But - by picking up the book - the context was collapsed into the rectangle, drawing emphasis to the image and eliciting her answer. All this happens simply by virtue of living and operating in the world. The presumption that our own context (whether large or small) is undeniable, universal, or commonsensical is both absurd and damaging. There are (at least) as many ways of Being as there are beings, and one of the things I love about my yin is her willingness to indulge my fondness for engaging these matters while lying in bed.

(so why the repetition?)

We need to repeat these things because we are constantly forgetting. It is incalculably easy to be pulled back into the quicksand of cultural, historical and existential biases. The book currently on my nightstand, sitting in exactly the same place Osho once occupied has something to say about this:

"Even though we cannot see our own hand in the dark,
we can hear what is said and move toward the person speaking."

from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

We all live in some measure darkness, and we are also those voices speaking in the dark, guiding one another to recognize that the hand we seek is already a part of us...

It is merely a matter of listening, and memory.

"I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering,
which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining."

- Chris Marker

long days, Faulkner and Hemingway

Yesterday was the first day of an experiment: 14 hours on campus, 8am - 10pm, every Wednesday from now until the end of April. I was a little uncertain about the whole endeavor, worried that perhaps I would run out of steam before my 7pm seminar on Faulkner and Hemingway. This is the only course I'm taking this semester, and the first time I've taken an English class since Hasan Malik's "Introduction to Fiction" class in Chapel Hill, fall semester of 1996.

To my knowledge, Malik wasn't a professor, merely a lowly graduate teaching assistant like myself. He was a skinny man with wild eyes and a sparse beard, and he was crazy about literature. I had never seen someone so passionate when he spoke. He would stand in front of the room, sweating and flailing his arms about like some ridiculous octopus in an Ed Wood movie. It made no difference to him if it was Stendhal or Borges or Nabakov; he was in love with each of them, and listening to his rants I fell in love with each of them. Most of all I remember the way he described every writer, no matter who is was as "mad" in his clipped Pakistani accent.

Hasan Malik was my first and, up until yesterday, last literature instructor. The lure of the moving image (and the threat of long boring novels expounded by long boring professors) pulled me away from the written word. I still read of course, and in retrospect it would have probably been wiser if I had sought adult supervision for some of the books I read; Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment comes to mind.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that last night I stumbled into a professor worthy of the seed sewn by Malik nearly fifteen years ago. In the interim I have witnessed all manners of calamity and glory: despair, delusion and delight. Sometimes the distinctions between them were indecipherable, other times they were indelible. Each of them was perfect, each of them was unique, each of them prepared my for the coming months' study of these shirtless drunkards:

'Papa' and 'Pappy'

[lapse]

The professor walks in wearing a yellow bow-tie and tweed jacket. I had heard rumors about him, that he was obsessed with Faulkner – so much so that he chose to be born in Mississippi. He opens his mouth to speak; everything I heard was true. It is the voice of a 70-year old man coming from the mouth of a 35-year old body.

"Perversion," he tells us. "Misogynistic... Racist... Disturbing."

He pauses.

"Disturbing."

He taps his fingers on the table like my great grandfather.

"But..." He connects three imaginary dots on the table with his index finger.

"When it comes down to putting one words after another..."

He shakes his head... reverently... disbelievingly.

"They were pretty good, they were pretty good."

day after the first day of the last semester of school

before satsang i asked

How many hours are in a day? How many ways are there to claim there's not enough? Four jobs and counting at present; 30,000 words and a five o'clock shadow arriving one hour behind schedule.

image from Chris Marker's Sans soleil

Somewhere behind the mist of days passing, somewhere beyond the drift of memory, one might find meaning. One might find a place untouched by the hateful presence of signifiers – a time after before and after.

Once found, though, it can never be known except in relation to the places that came before it. But if its meaning is dependent upon another object, another time, another ________ – how can it be said to be 'absolute'?

after satsang i answered

Rather than a half-Canadian, tonight's satsang was led by a full-Canadian, who (upon first encounter) was just as entertaining and wise as I had been led to believe. Like me, he loves words, writes poesy and has a penchant for linguistic specificity.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that he framed the question of dharma in a manner unlike I've ever heard before. Giving the example of water, he said that dharma was the that which, if removed, would prevent the entity from being what it is. It reminded me of Kant's noumenon, which is not nearly as risqué as it sounds.

I'll show you mine if you show me yours.

This, in turn, reminded me of a poem I wrote two years ago after reading Kerouac's Mexico City Blues:

Chorus #243

I have that song,
that one by Immanuel Kant,
stuck in my head:

the thing in (and of) itself,

the thing in (and of) itself,

the thing in (and of) itself.

Weeping pleas,
for disambiguation
you oughta know the Atman.

Stale poetry is also beside the point.

The point is that the full-Canadian used liquidity as an example of water's dharma. Being a True Skeptic, my mind immediately set about interrogating this proposition. I quickly realized it was true, but insufficient. Water is not just that which is liquid, but also that which freezes at 32ºF, that which boils at 0ºC, that which maintains a ratio of two hydrogen atoms to one oxygen.

The full-Canadian knew this, of course, and my question segued into a beautiful discussion of tantra (which is apparently the Sanskrit root of the English word 'tension'). For a reformed atheist comme moi, tantra is a palatable point of entry in metaphysics because it foreground the same dialectical tensions that are so essential to the structure of language, thought and being.

The question I asked before satsang, regarding the relationship between an unchanging 'self' and the mind, is answered by this understanding. The atman or soul or spirit may be self-luminous and eternal, but it alone does not constitute a human being. It must be placed into relationship with the ever-changing fields of the mind, body, society and culture. If not, then it is no longer the atman – at least not one attributable to humans.

Perhaps this is the reason:

back cover of 2009-2010 day planner

re: Neko Case

"I have waited with a glacier's patience."

Neko Case, poet and priestess

I was listening to the above chanteuse yesterday, as I'm prone to do at regular intervals, and the following song came on:



As always, the lyric about the glacier's patience jumped out at me, but this time it echoed the underlying tones of a conversation earlier in the morning with my half-Canadian friend. He, you see, is a True Believer; while I, on the other hand, am what one might call a True Skeptic. This makes for some interesting philosophical diversions.

This is usually beside the point.

But not this time.

I typically wear the student hat in our relationship, which is a nice fit for a True Skeptic. I like to think of mine as a fedora like the one my great-grandfather Paw-Paw used to wear. He would walk into my grandmother's kitchen every day to pick up the newspaper and sit at the dining table, rapping his knuckles on the hard oak while my grandmother poured his coffee. That hat never came off of his head.

As a True Believer, my half-Canadian friend is perfectly suited for the role he plays as well. In this way he provides a nice balance, helping me to see things in a way different way. As Blake Schwarzenbach once sang,

"I'm trying on your eyes."

poet and oracle, he translates Rousseau in his spare time

Our eyes are still our own, however, and the interesting thing about being a True Skeptic is that growth, wisdom and revelation almost always happen in contradictory ways. This is the advantage of being a True Skeptic; I can observe the qualities of True Believer (i.e. certainty, bombast, and universality) and respond with complementary virtues like nuance, gradation, subtlety and doubt.

During our conversation, though, I understood a little deeper the implications of the differences between these two temperaments. Taken to their ill-logical extremes, Skepticism gives way to nihilism and Belief can lead one to follow paths better left untaken. I told my half-Canadian friend that our respective lives testified to this.

He said nothing.

I don't know if this silence was a moment when we swapped hats, or dismissive, or simply a lull in conversation. But I do remember a night in December of 2006 when Brahmacharini Sumati Chaitanya gave a satsang on the fourteenth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita. She confirmed my suspicion:

"Silence is the only teacher."

priestess and Priestess

Experience is silence, and as I journaled yesterday afternoon, this is what came out of my pen:

The trouble with a True Believer is that its inherent imprecision (i.e. belief in something someone does not know) can lead to little more than abstraction and confusion. Being too concrete, on the other hand, can lead to literalization and the loss of esoteric meaning (the "Virgin" Mary, for instance). This allegiance to fact over truth is the pitfall awaiting the True Skeptic.

That's why poetry and songs and music are so important – they provide a balance between the concrete and the abstract. What does it mean to wait with a glacier's patience? It is simultaneously familiar and incomprehensible. Furthermore, if you scaled the size of human to the size of a glacier, it would be the equivalent of trying to moving a few inches over the course of an entire year.

Can any of us really fathom what it would mean to move that slowly?

If we cannot truly understand this experience, which anyone can with a stopwatch and ruler can watch and see and measure, then how can we claim knowledge of the vision Arjuna begged Krishna to take away?

the Greek word 'hubris' comes to mind

That's why Neko Case, like Sumataji, is both priestess and Priestess.

a little over two years ago...

The poem below was written a little more than two years ago, and although I didn't know it the night I wrote it, tiny cracks were beginning to appear in the facade of my would-be romance. At the time I was engaged in an experiment with celibacy, which taught me many things, but few of them were what I expected. The mind's ability to project inductions and fabricate deductions is truly stunning.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that growth, change, and shifts of consciousness always happen just beyond our ability to see them. The precursors, however, become visible if we practice placing our attention on them. For me this primarily comes through dreams, poetry and meditation.

Unfortunately, waiting for a dream to reveal our next step can lead to a long time waiting (believe me, I've tried), and even when they do arrive interpreting them is a hazy proposition. Poetry is more reliable, but inspiration follows its own timetable – not to mention the dangers inherit in mistaking the muse for the Muse.

not this Muse

That leaves meditation, which is far and away the most reliable source of clarity and wisdom I have yet to discover. (And by 'discover,' I mean stumble into.) One of the interesting things about meditation is that its benefits are realized through practice, not the practitioner's belief of its efficacy. This mean two things.

First, practicing meditation will provide grounding, improve focus, and offer peace of mind even if the practitioner doesn't 'believe' in it. My own experience with mantra and japa mala has taught me this. Second, believing in meditation without practicing is no more useful than believing in reincarnation or the Big Bang or the price of tea in China. For me, although rare, this lack of practice usually results either from a perceived lack of time (inevitably false) or pleasurable distraction (self-explanatory).

image from Godard's Pierrot le fou,
one of my favorite pleasurable distractions

Anyway, a little over two years ago I was doing a hell of a lot of meditating. There were flashing lights and revelations and cosmos-shaking insights, but the true benefits of this practice were beginning to show up in more subtle ways. All the flashing lights in the world don't make a difference if we stay stuck in the same patterns, and what good is an insight if we don't integrate it into the way we live our day-to-day lives?

The poem hinted at this process of integration, which was happening in spite of my mind's best efforts to twist the actual situation around into a story worthy of John Hughes or Lloyd Dobbler:

Cusak did for stalking what Madonna did for Kabbalah

I hold meditation responsible for what happened, and more importantly, for all the things that didn't happen. I could have stayed spinning in that cycle for months or even years longer, delaying – or perhaps even denying – the peace, happiness and fulfillment I now (don't) take for granted. And all because...

I didn't listen

When we met she told me she wanted to be alone.
But I didn’t listen and soon I was in her bed until
one day she said she needed to be alone. But I
didn’t listen and this was repeated many
times until one night she told me that
she didn’t not want to spend the
night with me. I looked around
her room and saw the cat on
the bed, a stack of books
on the nightstand and
I realized the only
thing in her life
saying she
wasn’t
alone
was
me
.

what to do with myself now

i'm at something of a loss this morning. last night i emailed my second chapter to the rest of my thesis committee, and i've decided not to jump back into the third chapter until after this morning's half-Canadian meeting.

Maybe I'll start using capital letters, but this is beside the point.

The point is that I thought about regurgitating the entirety of the 12 days of Christmas as a single post, but decided it was too much cutting and pasting. Instead, here are the highlights, although I'm not certain if i got the meter right.

On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me: twelve hours working, eleven prime numbers, ten icy minutes, nein! dancing ladies, eight line of verse, seven hours waiting, six senseless sayings,

five broken things

four boding starts, three cups of coffee, two films of Welles, and a dead pig by the roadside.

(Now that that's out of my system...)

Unsurprisingly, there's a preoccupation with units of time in the above lyrics. Somehow I managed to work in some minutes and two sets of hours, and although this wasn't intentional, I consider it a happy accident nonetheless – especially given the song's penchant for repetition.

These same concerns, along with memory, are the foci of my thesis; and yesterday I spent an hour talking with one of my committee members. He told me our conversations made him feel like he was in the Lacanian Real, which I took as a compliment.

Lacan's borromean knot - am I the symptom in the middle?

The interesting thing about the above image – these interlocking circles – is that it has a curious similarity to the mandala and yantra designs prevalent in parts of Asia:

stone sculpture from India

carving from a mausoleum in Central Asia

Hmmm...

on the 12th day of Christmas

on the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

twelve hours working

yesterday i saw myself immersed once more in my thesis, whose progress had become strained and sporadic over the holidays. i managed to pull away long enough to eat lunch and dinner, but probably only because my yin reminded me to. this got me thinking:

it's a funny thing how the mind words.

if it doesn't want to do something, then there are a million obstacles, diversions and complications. if it does want to do something, there are a million reasons, excuses and obligations. i've experienced both of these in the past weeks, and it seems absurd that something so banal could result in such extreme reactions.

Patanjali classifies these phenomena as two of the five kleshas, which are afflictions of the mind that result from separation from the divine:

the genealogy of the mind

the first klesha is avidya, ignorance as to the divinity of all things. this ignorance is not to be confused with doubt or questioning, which are just as likely to arise from curiosity or misperception, but rather indicates a far more fundamental problem – the experience of not knowing at all, of truly forgetting that everything is perfect (i.e. obeying karma) just the way it is:

dominoes, mother f**ker!

the second klesha is asmita, (mis)identification with assorted sordid entities, which results from our ignorance of the truth. the most common of these entities is the mind itself, causing so many people to walk around believing their thoughts. by doing this we limit ourselves, tying our soul to a specific thoughtform (vritti) that reinforces our sense of I, me and mine (ahamkara) .

for example, if i truly identify with being a "student," then what happens five months from now when that term no longer applies? i have to run out and grab another thoughtform, like "graduate" or "unemployed bum."

one of my favorite bums, unemployed since 1994

the third klesha is raga, our tendency to run towards the things that give us pleasure. these are the behaviors and objects that reinforce whatever thoughform we've latched onto: capitalists accumulate capital, consumers consume, and drug addicts use drugs. it turns into a vicious cycle, with each activity feeding the (mis)identification, and the (mis)identification directing one the sources of his or her desire.

the tricky thing, of course, is differentiating between raga and fulfilling one's dharma, the path to which we must abide to realize our proper place in the universe. my thesis, for instance, is part of my dharmic responsibility, but if i use it merely to reinforce my (mis)identification then i've missed the whole point.

this is never beside the point.

the fourth klesha is dvesha, avoidance of the things that bring us pain. raga inevitably leads to dvesha, just ask any capitalist turned philanthropist or alcoholic turned anonymous. these are still (mis)identifications, though, and rarely do our aversions coincide socially responsible behavior. it's far more common for to run away from the things we need to face, the feelings we need to experience – why else would one hoard all that money in the first place?

Warren Buffet, capitalist turned philanthropist

the fifth and final klesha is abhinivesha, the fear that keeps us clinging onto the impermanent world we typically call "life." no matter how many things we run away from, no matter how many things we run towards – we will never be able to soothe the disquietude that comes from not knowing who we truly are.

it's a slippery slope from ignorance to (mis)identification, and as far as i can tell it's unavoidable on this plane of existence. but the point of a spiritual practice (or at least mine) isn't to transcend these things, and i suspect i have at least as many lifetimes ahead of me as an oak tree has acorns.

i'm okay with this.

i'm okay with this because three years ago had a vision at Lake Worth's Annual Street Painting Festival. it was of the same festival, of the same park, but eighty years into the future. i was overcome by the realization that everyone i saw in the park, all the families and parents and running children, would be gone in eighty years. immediately i understood that i would be dead, too. i thought to myself:

yes, this is true.

there was no fear, no dread, only the calm acceptance of something so obvious. accompanying this, however, was the quiet certainty that it made no difference: the body i inhabit is temporary, the mind i call my own is ever-changing, but the me "I am" is neither.

there is no need to fear death, no need to seek liberation;

the last desire to fall away
before enlightenment
is the desire for Enlightenment

the belief in a 'destination,' the yearning for 'transcendence,' the search for the 'divine' – these are symptoms, not solutions. they are born in ignorance, and i remind myself everyday that every thoughtform to which i attach myself – even those that are 'spiritual' – will someday find themselves in that Lake Worth graveyard.

front cover of my 2010-2011 day planner

on the 11th day of Christmas

on the eleventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

eleven prime numbers

2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17,19, 23, 29, 31 – this is how many prime numbers i've lived so far. i'm not sure why this was on my mind yesterday, but it probably had something to do with my midday intuition that 2011 was itself a prime number.

it is, but this is beside the point.

the point is that my next one won't come until i'm 37, and it seems that monumental, life-changing events fall with disconcerting regularity at these ages. at 13 my parents divorced, for example, and at 23 i met Nancy.

this isn't to say that all prime numbers are calamitous, though. six years later the next prime arrived, and i left Nancy in what remains my most powerful flash of revelation to date. furthermore, when i was 17 i lost my virginity – actually, it would be more accurate to say i was lucky enough to have it taken from me, but this is also beside the point.

how many prime numbers do you have left?

the point is that, at most, i have 18 more prime numbers left in me. this figure is based on the assumption that i will live to be a 122, which is derived by my yin's prediction that i would live to be 132, which was subsequently knocked down 10 years by an unintentional arithmetic error on my part. either scenario is unlikely, of course, and whenever i'm doing something that annoys her i reminded her my scariest ghostlike voice:

"79 more years!"

if i can defy the wisdom of the oracle and manage to make it 80 more years, though, then i will live to the ripe old age of 113, which is not only a prime number but also ends in my favorite number, 13, which i had tattooed on my wrist when i was 23, also a prime number.

(note: all these 'meaningful' prime numbers may be little more than my penchant for number theory masquerading as numerology and superstition.)

since i turned 29, i've come to recognize prime numbers as a metaphor for the relationship between human individuality and what lies beyond. since primes can be divided only by one and themselves, this makes them both exceedingly rare and infinitely plentiful, and i see this as a beautiful allegory for the human condition:

each of us is unique,
each of is like countless others,
each of us find identity in the divine.

thus concluded the eleventh day of Christmas.

on the 10th day of Christmas

on the tenth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

ten icy minutes

yesterday marked the thankful return to semi-normalcy. after a month of an utter lack of schedule, i've found myself drifting into habits that really aren't habits at all: waking at erratic times, falling asleep to movies, and sporadic vegetable consumption.

it's funny, because in yogic philosophy there's a lot of talk about observing patterns, combating samskara, and dissolving the habit centers in the mind. paradoxically, this is done primarily through the establishment of new routines and behaviors that counteract the effects of the previous ones.

a structuralist would be severely dissatisfied, but this is beside the point.

the point is that some routines are good for you, some habits are the very things that keep us sane and healthy. my half-Canadian friend, for example, prides himself as much as anyone i know on his ability to steer clear of patterns, to spot them as soon as they arise and respond effortlessly to the dangers they pose. and yet, just try to interrupt his penchant for minimalism with a porcelain dog:

this is not the dog in question

the dog is beside the point.

the point is that habits, like everything else, are neither intrinsically good nor bad. it's our relationship to them that matters, whether we're using them to provide a sense of security (bad yogi!) or balance (Sit, Ubu, sit. Good dog).

also not the dog in question

i suppose all this is on my mind because over the past months i've managed to inflame the muscles and tendons in my forearms through countless hours at this keyboard. while my thesis progresses admirably, my physical being has paid the price. the concentration required to stay focused on the project becomes like a Mobius strip, turning back in on itself and resulting in motionless expanses of time that mirror, ironically, one of the films upon which i'm writing:

La jetée

sometimes when i'm working the thought pops into my head: human beings were not designed to do this. we were not meant to spend hours on end staring at abstraction and pontificating about two-dimensional images.

and yet we do.
you're doing it now.

harm-reduction becomes the order of the day, and for the modern intellectual worker, a good massage therapist is the equivalent of a needle exchange program. so yesterday i went to see my yin's colleague, who specializes in myofascial release:

Fascia Man

he proceeded mush and rub and torture my right forearm for twenty minutes, using everything from bamboo sticks to a rolling pin. all of it was uncomfortable, and some portions were actually downright painful. at the end he pulled out ice packs, telling me that after inflaming the tissue, we needed to ice it down. 'how long?' i asked.

"ten minutes."

thus concluded the tenth day of Christmas.

on the 9th day of Christmas

on the ninth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

nein! dancing ladies

yesterday my yin and i went to visit her father for the first time since she returned from India. he only lives an hour away, but schedules and inclinations are a funny thing. it never ceases to amaze me what a big difference a little distance can make –

but this is beside the point.

the point is that my future father-in-law, in the words of Paramahansa Yogananda, is "one of those long-winded fellows whose conversational powers ignore time and embrace eternity." his capacity as a storyteller is without compare, and yesterday he told a tale that clocked in at 32 uninterrupted minutes. i'm sure it was actually longer than this, but i didn't even think to look at the clock until he really got going.

the whole episode dealt with his recent go-round with the Miami-Dade Police Department, starting with his wife's auto accident and then spiraling outwards to include a police report, the insurance companies, a second police report, one duty sergeant, a non-responsive lieutenant, one community relations officer, petty corruption, Channel 5 News, and an investigative journalist that he refers to as "the Weasel."

my future father-in-law has a long history with the Weasel, dating back to his exposés on shady dining establishments in South Florida. apparently the Weasel used the state food inspection board to get his "tips," and my future father-in-law believed (correctly, in my opinion) that this was a poor excuse for investigative journalism. so, he wrote to this guy some years back and told him that he oughta write about a real restaurant – someplace he would actually expect to be clean – rather than the strip mall delicatessens and Chinese take-out joints that he featured each week. apparently, not long after this exchange, the Weasel brought down a fancy place somewhere on Key Biscayne.

the Weasel is beside the point.

the point is that my future father-in-law actually tells stories in this way, bobbing and weaving from one topic to the next without ever losing sight of where he's heading. he is the Cassius Clay of kitchen table conversation:

"Silence is golden when you can't think of a good answer."

these side stories aren't really tangents because they always add a little bit of flavor, a little bit of texture to the matter at hand. what emerges from these conversations is not a portrait, but a mural, and i never leave without learning something new. like, for example, that the "bad beat" is up over a half million dollars right now at the Seminole Casino. this, of course, requires an explanation of what a bad beat is, along with the casino's formula for upping the ante ($1/hand dealt). devoted gamblers will send their friends and girlfriends (and presumably boyfriends) to the limit tables with a hundred dollars because everybody gets paid if you're sitting at a bad beat table.

the bad beat is beside the point.

the point is that my future father-in-law worked his way up the chain of command rather than going to the State's Attorney's office (which his wife suggested). eventually he found a captain that was willing to stand up, take responsibility, and admit to the doctored police report. after all this rigmarole and headache, my future father-in-law received some wise counsel from his best friend, a retired member of the very police department he had spent the past six weeks harassing:

"don't ever get pulled in Miami-Dade County."

this wasn't the end of the story, though.

after all this, the server finally arrived with our check, and my future father-in-law said the most poetic thing i've heard in ages; possibly the most unpretentiously poetic thing i've ever heard in my life.

this is the point:

every Christmas Eve, my future father-in-law watches the original 1935 Scrooge, a film which i have never seen:

this tradition traces back to his childhood in Brooklyn, when he used to see the film each year with his father, who died long ago. my future father-in-law still carries on, though, and told us that every year he feels like his father is with him as he watches this black and white, silent film on his giant flat screen television.

i took pause.

stunned

by the image:

this
gruff Brooklynite
cum Florida transplant,
whose heart was so big that it broke,
sits in his living room at 2 a.m. with his father's ghost;
the ghost of the Father holds court
with the ghost of Christmas past,
the technological medium that
allows us to span time
but not death.

thus concluded the ninth day of Christmas.

on the 8th day of Christmas

son the eighth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

eight lines of verse

yesterday, in my (sometimes) humble opinion, was a poor excuse for a holiday and did little to honor Janus, the Greek god of gates and doorways for whom the month is named:

this bust of a pagan God lives, inexplicably, in the Vatican

one head looking forward, one head looking back – the wisdom of Janus is the wisdom of warrior pose: "feel the pull of the past, stretch towards the future, stay centered in the present."

unfortunately, this wisdom, initially imparted upon me by a woman who impersonates a musical instrument for a living, was beside the point:

Andrea Brook, one half of Mass Ensemble

the point is that i spent much of the eight day of Christmas caught between mirrors, projecting expectations and misjudging reflections. the specifics are boring, even to me, but suffice to say that each activity seemed to draw me further into psychic quicksand. it didn't help that i had a wicked headache for much of the day, and i still don't know if it was a contributing factor or a symptom.

i suppose it doesn't matter.

what did matter is that my yin and i listened to This American Life, easily my favorite show on public radio and a surefire way to raise one's spirits – except yesterday:

Episode #234: "Say Anything"

this episode dealt with the myth that talking about things always makes them better, and focused on specific instances when (perhaps) it would have been better to say nothing. the one that grabbed my attention was an amateur interview between two friends, one of whom had recently tried to commit suicide. the two men were close in college, but had drifted apart in the intervening years. this struck a chord because it so closely resembled my own experience: the sadness of silently growing apart, the impotence of of fighting it, the feeling of being cast adrift in the ocean of time.

the friend being interviewed espoused one self-pitying, deceptively selfish remark after another. his entire worldview had been warped by his internal suffering, and the interviewer hoped, by recording these skewed ramblings, that his friend might someday come to see how he was living inside a world of funhouse mirrors.

i identified with both men, and my journal with the tape cassette:

a journal from 1997

the segment was beautiful, but it did little to help my state of mind.

i wondered if i had listened to: 1) the prologue to a suicide; or 2) a stranger that could have been me. the interview came to a conclusion, and a post-scriptum revealed that both hypotheses were true. i asked myself:

without the presents of the past,
how can we appreciate
the Presence of the present?

in an attempt to address this question, i found myself writing the following eight lines of verse:

The trembling agitation of low
blood sugar on New Year's Day.
Angry with the one you love,
frustrated with myself; how much
of this is hunger? Answer: the great
melancholic river of the past grows
longer every day. A source I cannot
remember; a destination I cannot see.

thus began, and concluded, the eighth day of Christmas.