redux: Zazen v. Nancy

This time last year, I read Norweigan Wood and was immediately taken in by its sense of loss. Before even the first page was finished, I found my mind start drifting, and I could smell the cold German mist of the narrator's world colliding with the humidity of past life Floridian summers. I felt as if I knew Naoko, but was unable to place precisely how or whom.

Was it Nancy she reminds me of? Those broken cryptic warnings that masqueraded as invitation? Was it her deception or my projection? What difference does it make now, eleven years later? Karmas have been incurred, lives altered, and each of us stumbled into worlds safely removed from the other's.

Was it a trap door?

Ever watched a rabbit emerge from hat?

Those six years stand like a giant pillar in my life, blocking a clear view of what came before and bathing the years since in its shadow. Is it messianic time flowing in two directions? Everything before and after anchored to the memory of what came to pass, of what lay ahead. Sometimes I walk around that pillar and watch the shadows stretch across the ground, but the sun is never moving.

Back then I was also reading Bodhisattva Archetypes, and I thought about the Zen understanding of a sitting meditation. Iin the Zen tradition the point of sitting is not to attain altered or transcendent states of consciousness – it is merely to sit. (A useful understanding since my current schedule requires that most of my sitting practice has been relegated to parking lots in Broward County.)

Another point that stood out was the notion of 'no-self,' which has a certain linguistic resonance with my dormant nihilism. No-self is not a purely negative construction, however, but an understanding that there is no personal existence except as it relates to all other beings.

Coincidentally, perhaps, last year was also the time my own teacher began to describe a 'transcendent individuality' that exists as a way station (or stomping ground) between the identified, limited self and re-immersion into the Godhead. The Zen understanding of 'no-self' seems to overlap with my teacher's 'transcendent individuality,' though I'm not certain either the dead Dogen or the living half-Canadian would care to hear so.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that no-self holds resonance my deepest meditations, which seem less like an expansion of self than the dissolution of self. (Not that the expanded sensations don't exist, it's just that they seem somehow to be more 'me' and less free.) The no-self is also easier to reconcile with my concerns regarding the balance between the material and metaphysical realms. Unlike the yogic concept of the atman, which is ever unaffected, ever outside of relationship, the no-self lends itself more easily to seeing ourselves as constituted historically as well as atemporally, helping to understand one's place in the world for those 23 hours each day that we're not transcending our living rooms and parking lots.

The only problem is that, while my sitting practice resonates with the no-self, the experience that started me on this whole rigmarole four years ago is beyond my comprehension unless it is framed within the notion of some sort of unaffected, unchanging core of existence - the atman, in other words.

(C'est quoi disent les Francais? Mais oui, c'est la vie...)

[lapse]

A man walks into a store.
The clerk asks, "Atman or no-self?"
The man answers, "One of each please."

[return]

Either way, it doesn't really matter. The answer (which is the question) will reveal itself in its own due time. Until then, one continues to sit...

IKEA at last, IKEA at last, thank god almighty...

Two days ago my yin and I took our half-Canadian friends to the airport, in what has become an annual tradition of overstuffing my vehicle with their overstuffed luggage, then stuffing our faces with lunch. This year gorgonzola was involved.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that afterward we went to IKEA, about which I had once written but never seen. It made quite an impression, and although I have yet to decide whether to refer to the enormity of the enormousness of the place, I do know that we returned home three hours later with both a desk and bookshelf. My yin, in her typically insightful cleverness, was quick to point out the irony of purchasing a proper writing desk three days after I turned in my thesis.

This is also beside the point.

The point is that everything is put together now, and all of the books that have been trapped inside the closet have finally been restored to their proper place in the living room. There's something inspiring about a shelf full of books: some are read, some are unread, some contain that mystical quality that results in becoming "well-read."

There are worlds in those books, universes tucked away in their binding, tiny cosmoses lurking in the typeset: heaven in Helvetica, nirvana in New Roman, paradise in Sans-serif.

There are notes scribbled in the margins, tracks leading back to the people we thought we were when we read them before. A used book bears witness to our past curiosities and desires, our fears and predilections, our questions and the answers we once presumed to know.

And, for all of those who have ever lost a library, we know how books can mean more than words can ever say...

weird.

Last night I was at a friend's house for our weekly meditation group. The half-Canadian that leads the group is leaving next week, and the night proceeded as it often does: hellos, satsang, and meditation.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that after we finished, I walked into the kitchen to set down my empty glass in the sink. I turned around, and that's when I saw it:

the Obama family

On the refrigerator was a picture of the president, the first lady, and their children. I was immediately fascinated, drawn to it, staring at it, and searching the image for what it was that I found so enthralling. I heard myself say:

"It's so weird... It's so weird... It's so weird..."

"Why is it weird?" my friend asked.

I had no answer and kept repeating, savant-like:

"It's so weird... It's so weird... It's so weird..."

One of my favorite experiences in life is when something, wholly and mysteriously, grabs my attention. Most of the time I'm drawn to ideas and images and sounds that already hold some resonance. I think most people are like me in this regard; we gravitate towards the types of experiences that have been shown pleasurable or rewarding in the past.

(Sukha, I think it's called.)

Everyone once in a while, though, I find myself enthralled by something that 'shouldn't' be. Whenever this happens, besides the initial easy pleasure of fascination, there comes a second pleasure – the joy of discovering why I enjoy. This is what I spent the ride home doing with my yin. The rant went, approximately, as follows:

The picture caught my attention because it embodies this bizarre mixing of the public and private realms, the intimate and the impersonal, the authentic and the contrived. Apparently my friend received it in a campaign email, and had she not posted it on her refrigerator, I would have never realized the complex set of relationships being embodied by the image.

The kitchen – and especially the refrigerator – stands at the heart of the private sphere. It is both the source of the family's sustenance as well as the gallery where finger-painting and school pictures and crudely drawn "I love mommy and daddy" cards are displayed. These are the most intimate and personal creations of our lives, the artifacts and art objects we surround ourselves with.

The Presidency, of course, has long been this strange mingling of personal and private, best exemplified by the bizarre status of the First Lady, who is either appointed to her post by her husband or indirectly elected by citizens depending on one's point-of-view. (I'm sure one of my civic-minded friends will clear this confusion up for me.)

This picture seemed different, however, and it took nearly twenty minutes for me to articulate it to myself. The staging of the photograph has the feel of a Christmas card – performative and sincere, saccharin and sweet, banal and unique. My yin asked how it was any different than having a picture of a rock star:

Andy Warhol

or movie star:

understood

or spirit star:

the nature of the image.

This image is different because it deploys the family in disturbingly novel and impersonal way, calling upon the aesthetics and sensibilities of the familial familiar (the Christmas photo sent to friends and loved ones) as a means to achieving the most impersonal and public of ends (Obama's upcoming re-election campaign).

A picture of the Obama family is not like a picture of Obama, or even a picture of Obama and his wife. The President and First Lady are public figures, first and foremost, whereas the family is held sacrosanct by the same mythologies and mythologizers who spin deficient libidos and surplus economies into the web we call the American Dream.

All this in a single image, and I would have never even realized it if not for my friend and her beautiful refrigerator...

Does the photograph look any different now?

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.

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 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 4th day of Christmas

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

four boding starts

at three o'clock on the fourth day of Christmas, i was startled awake by a dream of a theater in North Carolina. i worked there as an undergraduate, and in the Dreaming i was mid-return. something about this scenario was disturbing, however, and as i lie in the dark my mind began to fill with questions about the future.

barring unforeseen calamity, i will complete my graduate work five months from now, signaling another of those life junctures where nothing is known, and one finds himself face to face with the enormity of endless possibility. every moment is like this, of course, but rarely do we accept it for what it is: exciting, but also frightening, especially at 3 o'clock in the morning.

rather than allowing my mind to spin in circles, i got up and went to the living room. i took out my mala beads and meditated:

vision of the fragile glass shell of my mind. i find myself trapped inside it, bumping from one side to the other. suddenly, i'm outside of it/ti fo edisni – i am the air filling the room and all that lies beyond.

eventually i grow tired again and go back to bed, but this insomnia and meditation stays with me throughout the day. i rewake at 8am, tend to various chores and meet with my half-Canadian friend mid-morning. i go to my yin's hatha class at noon, and in the afternoon i finally start revisions on the second chapter of my thesis.

a frustrating hour passes.

our weekly meditation group meets that night, and we spend an hour discussing the application of yoga-darsana in our lives, which is a medium-pretentious way of asking:

"do you practice what you preach?"

i talk about the conflation of, and confusion between, meditation in the colloquial sense and meditation in the philosophical sense. the former is more aptly described as a sitting practice, which sometimes (and perhaps atypically) results in the latter (what Patanjali calls as dhyana).

Buddhism (at least Zen variety) seems to outline this delineation more clearly than the yoga practitioners i've known, and in my limited, yet sincere, readings of such texts i have arrived at some understanding of the dangers involved with turning one's meditation practice into a substantial object (which can be possessed) rather than recognizing it as a transient, ephemeral process. put more simply:

one gains no-thing from meditation.

with the mysteries of the universe put to bed for the night, we practiced sitting together, and i had another damn vision, this time of a leaf spinning itself (counterclockwise) into a tight spiral, extending lengthwise towards the sky and the Earth. it had the shape of a elongated seed or pod, and was enveloped by a flame burning all around it. i have a blank canvas in my closet, given to me by Saylor years ago, and as soon as i come into some oil paints i plan to attempt a rendition.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that my yin and i came home and finished watching Luis Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire:

Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina

the film is surreal, comical, and features les belles femmes above playing a single character named Conchita. Fernando Rey plays the male lead, of course, and he attempts to bed Conchita with all the absurd enthusiasm one would expect from Buñuel:

i know how he feels

there are innumerable failed attempts to realize his desire, and the film's French title (Cet obscur objet du désir) literally spells out the need for a Lacanian interpretation of these things. right now, though, with more revisions looming this afternoon, psychoanalysis is the last thing i want to write about. besides, these ideas are illustrated with images more forcefully than could ever be accomplished with words:

this poster is available here

suffice to say that terrorist plots by the "Revolutionary Army of the Baby Jesus" wreak havoc in the background, and Buñuel has this magical way of allowing the camera to linger in one place just a little longer than necessary, so that Rey's bourgeois nincompoop exits the frame and a second figure (a housekeeper, a gardener, a homeless man) is revealed to be the actual source of labor supporting his opulence.

visions and revisions,
mediation and surrealism –

thus concluded the fourth day of Christmas.

push/pull

the semester is nearly over, and by the time December rolls around, i'm usually at my wit's end from all late nights and deadlines and juggling. this year is different, though. i'm taking only one class (mon cours de français) and rather than writing until 2am five nights a week, i find myself in the enviable position of putting in six and eight-hour days on my thesis.

in spite of this, i'm starting to feel the familiar push/pull of ease and anticipation, with my natural proclivity towards excess and productivity finds itself pitted against the holidays' unique ability to bring out all manner of vices. while best known as a time of gluttony, the time between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day also inspires an impressive amount of sloth, which happens to be among my favorite of the Seven Deadly. it seems that nothing much happens during these five weeks, and the promise of easy days and late mornings whispers to me in the night. and yet...

i feel a gnawing in my gut, a gnashing of the teeth, a gnosis of the coming solstice and the persistent awareness that the gnarled tree of knowledge is ever wakeful:

the Joshua tree was named by Mormons

oftentimes we speak of balance as if it was a fixed thing, an object, or something to be obtained. in fact, however, it is exactly the opposite.

(an experiment:
close your eyes and
stand on one foot.
what do you notice?)

as this simple exercise demonstrates, balance is always changing, always shifting, always unstable. this is one of my favorite things about balance because it speaks to the underlying, impermanent nature of all things. Marx and Hegel would call this a dialectic, Lao-Tzu would call this yin and yang, the Tantrists would call this the dance of Shiva and Shakti:

i call these things 'potato, potato'

the very activity that promotes balance one day may be the thing that causes us to fall the next, and events that blindside us might end up being the experiences that ultimately allow us to stand tall. you can try to control it, or figure it out, or deny it; but, as a half-Canadian friend of mine is apt to say, it's usually best just to:

on the virtues of yesterday's polemic

yesterday, in celebration of the election, i wrote a brief polemic regarding the potential political efficacy of principled withdrawal form the electoral system. this is a touchy subject among my cohort (30-50 yr old, predominately college-educated, predominately white, predominantly 'liberal'); and, as i expected, my tirade provoked a number of comments on one of those pesky social-networking sites. it reminded me of two things:

1) why i rarely engage in political discussions outside of the confines of a classroom; and 2) how difficult it is to talk about structural political change without falling into either clichés that reflect and reinforce the status quo (on the part of my cohorts) or revolutionary rhetoric (on my part).

part of this dialogue was an extension of a conversation i've been having off and on with a lawyer friend in Atlanta for the past two years. we met at a Vice Presidential debate party in 2008, and while we agree on almost every detail of the economy, social justice issues, etc., we also share a fundamental ideological rift that might be described as the distance between my disillusionment (in the most unfortunate sense of the word) and his naiveté (in the most generous).

he is one of the few people i know who seems to not only read about contemporary political issues, but also attempts to integrate the ocean of numbers and opinions and statistics with some manner of historical awareness. this being the case, he brought a smile to my face yesterday when he used the word 'anarcho-syndicalist,' which i have heard only a handful of times since my History of Socialism class in the spring of 1997.

anarcho-syndicalism, interesting though it may be, is beside the point.

the point is that class stands out in my mind, partly due to introducing me to the Frankfurt School, partly for immersing me in the thought of the American Black Panther Party, and partly for the good-looking couple who sat near the back of the room.

she had blond dreadlocks, dressed like your typical nouveau-hippie burnout, and said little. he had medium-length dark brown hair, dressed like a gas station attendant, and said the word 'bourgeoisie' with more je ne sais quoi than anyone i had ever met before or since. for me this couple represented the pinnacle of fashionable revolutionary thought, and he would often argue with the professor and cite Mikhail Bakunin:

one of my biggest regrets from this time period (besides my half-hearted engagement with the texts) is that i didn't reach out to people like this more. i felt as if there was an invisible wall separating me from my classmates, and this manifested itself either in the form of petty, pretentious dismissiveness, or in the guise of Romantic ideation of others. this couple certainly fell into the latter category, and i never did so much as say a word to them outside of class.

nearly fifteen years have passed since then, and i wonder what happened to them. perhaps they grew reasonable. perhaps she cut off that beautiful dreadlocked mess atop her head. perhaps he traded in the mechanic's jacket for a suit jacket. perhaps they turned into good little liberals and have a Green house in the suburbs and vote every two years and drive a BMW because it handles well and do criminal defense work at $200/hour with a little pro bono on the side... but i hope not.

furthermore, i'm aware that this whole line of thought is simply more evidence of my ongoing Romantic ideation. be that as it may, the older i get, the more i realize that i've passed the age where those adolescent fantasies should have receded – and yet here they still are. i think that's what gets kicked up for me every time the election cycle runs around, when one can hardly walk down the street without hearing someone say: 'well, i don't really agree with _____ but at least s/he's better than _____.' for me, voting for 'the lesser of two evils' can be reframed in the following way:

i voted for evil today.

this, in turn, reminds me of last night's discussion at my weekly meditation group. the topic was the yamas and niyams, which serve as edicts regulating behavior in yogic philosophy. the first yama is non-violence (ahimsa), and it occurred to me last night that that's really what the issue of voting comes down to for me: faced with the two harmful options, the only ethical decision is to not choose.

sanyoga = sans yoga (Il n'y a pas de coïncidences)

last night, in spite of my earlier sloth-inspired reticence, i went to my weekly meditation group. the half-Canadian who leads the group is in India right now, and, being a complete and utter madman, he agreed to connect in via Skype at the ridiculously early time of 4:30am Jaipur time. the ethernet connection on our end, however, had disappeared into the ethers itself, and the group ending up having a nice long meditation while we waited for the half-Canadian to call.

fortunately, this is beside the point.

the point is that we finally did connect with one another, and the whole episode provided a lovely metaphor for that night's topic of discussion: sanyoga, which means, approximately and allegedly, 'without union.'

the term is explicated in the second book of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras:

drashtri drishyayoh sanyogo heyahetuh

which means damn near nothing to anyone living today outside of scholars and poseurs because Sanskrit is deader than Latin. thankfully, however, there are enough scholars and poseurs to pass down translations* to would-be scholars and poseurs like myself:

drashtri (द्रष्टृ, draṣṭṛ) = the seer; he who perceives; the true self; drastu
drishyah (दृश्यः, dṛśyaḥ) = that which is seen; experienced
sanyoga (संयोग, saṁyoga) = unity; bond; identification
heya (हेय, heya) = that which should be avoided
hetuh (हेतुः, hetuḥ) = cause

in other words, sanyoga is the disconnection from our true self, an identification with an experience rather than the recognition that we are the observer of the experience. this leads, invariably, to pain and suffering.

sanyoga is the root cause of all other obstacles:

the birthplace of desire
(my apartment, NYC, 1999)

the wellspring of attachment
(South Beach, Miami, 2009)

the fountainhead of loneliness
(Art Basel, Miami, 2008)

the breeding ground of aversion

(Wynwood, Miami, 2009)

the question arises:

why does this happen?

but only in the mind experiencing:

s e p a r a t i o n

so, rather than asking why, i find it more useful (and less agitating) to address the source of the question. that's why i:

close my eyes each day
(author with half-Canadian, Vermont, 2009)

practice mantra
(envelope containing mantra, Delray Beach, 2008)

and, most of all:

try to remember
(author seeing ocean for first time, Outer Banks, 1980)

*translation appropriated from here, without permission

about yesterday

... i awoke to an email telling me that "Paris is freezing and foggy."
Alain Resnais would agree, but this is beside the point.

the point is that i took my yin to the airport yesterday, and i got up at 5am in an attempt to maximize our time together before her departure. she is spending three weeks in India, with a brief layover in the Charles de Gaulle airport, and woke an hour before me. she's been rising early (earlier, actually) and taking melatonin to help shift her circadian rhythms to India time, which is 9½ hours ahead of eastern standard time. i'm still trying to figure out that half hour, but rather than researching it i've decided just to chalk it up to another scar left by the British.

whatever the reason, we were both up stupid early yesterday morning and left the house before sunrise. she dropped me at school so i could teach my 8am class, and she went to teach her 7:30 client. she picks me back up a little before 10am. we go to Whole Foods and buy bananas. the total comes to $1.08, and i tell my yin, "that's auspicious."

she smiles and we eat our bananas in the dining area under a too-loud speaker that's blaring out Eighties pre-hair metal rock. it seems an odd choice given the venue, and by this point the sadness of our coming farewell has fully descended. we hold each other some.

this scene is repeated two hours later in a busy restaurant.

she asks me if not going brings up thoughts of the past. i tell her no, that school and money and any of a dozen other arbitrary things make my going with her impossible now. it is not just a matter of karma, but of dharma as well. i used to believe that karma is that which compels us to do our dharma, now i know it.

i tell my yin that my thoughts are of the future, that i want to share such experiences with her and hope we can make a living that will afford us such opportunities, while still allowing us to live with ourselves. i believe the term is called 'right livelihood.'

we split a veggie burger and some orzo, and between the bananas and the burger is a trip to a thrift store. it smells terrible – like a fart – and we choose not to stay long. her phone rings in the parking lot; a friend in Miami orchestrates a transcontinental call with the half-Canadian she's meeting in India. plans are made. he tells her to tell me that he loves the way i mistrust him. i appreciate the gesture.

after lunch we continue south, and it's raining as we drive down A1A looking for a cup of tea that never arrives. traffic worsens as we near Miami, and we cut west at Aventura, just south of the hotel where my yin attended a yoga conference some years ago. i remember helping her with her scholarship essay. our respective circumstances were so vastly different then. sometimes it's hard to comprehend.

i drop her at the airport around 2:45 pm. we kiss and hug and hold and each tell the other, "i love you."

i drive home in the rain, headaching from the overcast and sadness. the sun hasn't shown since Monday. no tears fall. i take the Turnpike to avoid traffic; perhaps i run a toll booth without realizing it. a school board meeting for Miani-Dade County is being broadcast on NPR. i turn off the radio and chant:

i nearly miss my exit in Boca and turn on music to help me reground. i still have one more class to teach and speak to my yin at 4:30 to make sure she made it through security. i wish her un bon voyage. she tells me she was dialing my number when her phone rang. we chant three rounds of gayatri together. no tears fall.

i go teach and my headache subsides, thankfully and temporarily; perhaps it was the green tea and pineapple.

back in my car the headache returns. i eat some leftover baguette from the day before. my yin had bought it for me, along with a big block of cheese, so i could sit around in my underwear and eat it while she was gone. she knows all about the metaphorical block of cheese, but it's the furthest thing from my mind on the drive home. the baguette is purely medicinal, and i hope that its thick crust will help to discharge the tension pent up in my jaw. it works some, but when i look down at my shirt i see a million tiny crumbs. it reminds me of the night before, when a similar hyperbole caused me to react to a close friend. he told my yin to tell me he loves the way i mistrust him. i appreciate the gesture.

(is repetition ever anything but intentional?)

i get home and take ibuprofen, turn of the lights and meditate. the headache recedes for the night, and i force myself to stay awake a little longer. i watch Last Year in Marienbad, which is stunning. even my fatigue and sadness are unable to diminish its impact; perhaps they enhance it. i jot notes that will become a poem, noticing how the world of Resnais seemed to seamlessly collide with my own.

or was it 'the world of Resnais seamed to seemlessly collided with my own?'

i never speak to my half-Canadian friend and turn off the computer just before 10pm. the next morning i awoke to an email telling me that "Paris is freezing and foggy." Alain Resnais would agree, but this is beside the point...

Zazen v. Nancy

i started reading Norweigan Wood this weekend and was immediately taken in by its sense of loss. i didn't even make it past the first page before my mind started drifting, and i could smell the cold German mist of the narrator's world colliding with the humidity of past life Floridian summers. i felt like i knew Naoko, but was unable to place how, or to whom.

was it Nancy she reminds me of? those broken cryptic warnings that masqueraded as invitation? was it her deception or my projection? and what difference does it make now, a decade later? karmas have been incurred, lives have been altered, and we have both stumbled into worlds safely removed from the other's.

was it a trap door?

ever watched a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat?

those six years stand like a giant pillar in my life, blocking a clear view of what came before and bathing the years since in its shadow. is it messianic time flowing in two directions? everything before and after anchored to the memory of what came to pass, of what lay ahead. sometimes i walk around that pillar and watch the shadows stretch across the ground, but the sun is never moving.

i continued reading Bodhisattva Archetypes over the weekend, and i've been thinking about the Zen understanding of a sitting meditation. in the Zen tradition the point of sitting is not to attain altered or transcendent states of consciousness – it is merely to sit. the concern among practitioners is that these other states of consciousness can lead to attachment. sublime attachment, but attachment nonetheless.

another point that jumped out was the notion of 'no-self,' which has a certain linguistic resonance with my dormant nihilism. no-self is not a purely negative construction, however, but an understanding that there is no personal existence except as it relates to all other beings. i've heard my own teacher, recently, mention his changing understanding of a 'transcendent individuality' that exists as a way station (or stomping ground) between the identified, limited self and re-immersion into the Godhead. the Zen understanding of 'no-self' seems to overlap with my teacher's 'transcendent individuality,' though i'm not certain either the dead Dogen or the living half-Canadian would care to hear so.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that no-self holds resonance my deepest meditations, which seem less like an expansion of self than the dissolution of self. (not that the expanded sensations don't exist, it's just that they seem somehow to be more 'me' and less free.) the no-self is also easier to reconcile with my concerns regarding the balance between the material and metaphysical realms. unlike the yogic concept of the atman, which is ever unaffected, ever outside of relationship, the no-self lends itself more easily to seeing ourselves as constituted historically as well as atemporally, helping to understand one's place in the world for those 23 hours each day that we're not transcending our living rooms.

the only problem is that, while my sitting practice resonates with the no-self, the experience that started me on this whole rigmarole four years ago is beyond my comprehension unless it is framed within the notion of some sort of unaffected, unchanging core of existence.

[lapse]

a man walks into a store.
the clerk asks, "atman or no-self?"
the man answers, "one of each please."

[return]

either way, it doesn't really matter. the answer (which is the question) will reveal itself in its own due time. until then, one continues to sit...

transference, accuracy and the delicate art of perception

as part of my ongoing quest for "growth" i consistently, and sometimes constantly, engage in a dialogue with my yin (et al.) concerning the nature and geography of our beings, a character trait eloquently and accurately described by Bukowski as:

"I worry too much about my god damned soul."

but this is beside the point.

the point is that two things revealed themselves while my yin and i were on iChat with a half-Canadian madman. the first had to do with the phenomena of projection and transference, both predictable side effects of interpersonal communication. i have become somewhat familiar with these terms over the summer (largely through my reading of Lacan) but yesterday i understood them in a new way.

the problem with projection and transference is not that they happen (they are in fact unavoidable), nor that they happen without the subject's conscious awareness (which distinguishes it from libel and slander). furthermore, the traditional psychoanalytic model (at least as in my limited reading) seems to cordon off whatever tendency or emotion into the subject. the process of transference thereby allows the subject to project his internal state onto the other, giving him enough distance to recognize what was there all along.

the shortcoming in this formulation is that it neglects to recognize that all states of mind – anger, pride, envy or joy – always reside in both self and other. the division between one individual and another is as illusory as it is necessary, and the notion that we can achieve integration by tossing around our emotions like a game of hot potato is only partially accurate. the dilemma is that, in the process of projecting our own insecurities and doubts onto others, we tend to forget that all things are interconnected.

for example, take the emotion of feeling judged. in a given situation this emotion is often attributed either wholly to self (in the form of shame) or to the other (in the form of condemnation). perhaps both emotions are felt simultaneously, but even in this case most people feel a certain schizophrenia, vacillating between self-effacement and blame. the key is to recognize that there is no separation, that while the judgment one feels from an other is merely a reflection, it is nonetheless valid. my experience with this method has shown me that the sting disappears as soon as i realize that the gap between myself and another person is merely structural rather than essential, an aspect of the mind rather than part of who i am. of course the geography of my being (at least thus far) seems to preclude ever being rid of this gap, but that (at least for the time being) is digressing from the point.

returning to the point, the second thing i learned yesterday had to do with the nature of accuracy and perception. the mind (and especially my particular mind) believes that an accurate tabulation of the objective world provides a bulwark against the unavoidable onslaught of time, impermanence and uncertainty. even if this were true (it isn't), it would obviously depend upon one's flawless perception of the world around her; and, as every first year philosophy student knows, this type of accuracy is not within the capabilities of sensual perception.

this being the case, the attempt to "be certain" or "make the right decision" is actually a red herring, an attempt by the mind to do an end run around its own perceptual limitations. the instability of each waking (and dreaming (and sleeping (and dying))) moment is too much for the mind to bear, and so it clutches to the things that bring temporary comfort, while avoiding those things thought to be a source of pain.

if this is the nature of the mind, then, as V.L. Lenin asked,

"What is to be done?"

what i realized yesterday that the attempt to improve mental accuracy solely through the application is ultimately a waste of energy. this is not to say that ignorance is bliss, nor that one should go through life "willfully ignorant" as did out 43rd president:

guilty of "misunderestimation"

the most reasonable strategy is to focus instead on improving one's focus and clarity, so that we might recognize when we are out of balance. here, tough, one encounters a catch-22 not unlike the structural gap between self and other, because the attempt to gauge how far out of balance (or even in what direction) is unavoidably colored by the imbalance itself.

for example, take a crazy person and three easy steps:

(for the purposes of demonstration, the

crazy person will be written in first

person. do not attempt this at home.)

1) i'm crazy.
2) i realize i'm crazy.
3) is it therefore crazy to believe i'm crazy?

for more on diagnosing mental illness, see Michel Foucault

(the crazy person writing in first
person cedes control of the
keyboard. attempt this at home)

and so, returning to where i began, i am reminded once more of Bukowski, and how he described days like yesterday:

"Sunday, the worst god-damned day of them all."

timing

(part 1)

a letter arrived this morning

i woke this morning to find an email from a friend of mine, someone i haven't seen in years, and one of the only people (outside of my family) who has known me with some regularity and intimacy over the past two decades.

in my experiences few friendships evidence this type of stamina, and ours runs from meeting one another in a miserable, unintentionally atonal middle school marching band in 1989, through the unexpected punk rock reunions and antics of 1996, all the way to our last conversation, which probably transpired sometime in 2003.

ours was not the twelve tone of Schoenberg

but this is beside the point.

the point is that i only just realized that each of those memories is separated by 7 years which, as any good anthroposophist knows, is the length of human change. Rudolf Steiner wasn't alone in these ideas, and i have often heard my own teacher discuss how human beings enter a new stage of life every seven years, corresponding to the next phase of their spiritual development.

Rudolf Steiner, looking a bit like...

Skeletor

this, too, is beside the point.

the point is that my friend's letter was one of the most amazing pieces of writing i've read in a long while, simultaneously heartfelt, courageous, and comedic. it contained great phrases like "murderize", witty observations about Portland, and an unconventional melding of form and content that would cause Donald Barhtelme to blush from envy.

Barhtelme, looking writerly

(part 2)

some questions arose this morning

how do we account for the exits and entrances from our lives?

Mardou, somewhere in California

not the introductions we make, or the circumstances we escape, but the inexplicable ebb and flow of the people we hold dear?

Jache, somewhere in my living room

why are the people closest to us sometimes the ones furthest in geographic or temporal proximity?

my sister, somewhere in Baltimore

why do we sometimes find ourselves sharing our most precious moments with the most distant of strangers?

my shadow and mirror, location unknown

(part 3)

epilogue

i read my friend's email to my yin, who laughed aloud, and i eventually cut short my morning hatha practice so i could set about drafting a reply. my goal was to respond with the same beauty and honesty that my friend had shown to me.

it has since been sent, and i'm excited to see what happens next...

brothers and sisters, real and imagined

yesterday a half-Canadian madwoman threatened me with walking pneumonia, and this morning i woke thinking of two people:

the first was my brother, who recently recovered from a bout of bronchitis in North Carolina. we spoke at the tail end of his ailment, and i wondered if perhaps i had caught his illness through some sort of bizarre karmic telephonic connection. it seems unlikely, but if i have learned anything from the half-Canadian madwoman (or her spouse), it is that stranger things have happened.

the second thought was of my sister, whose chronic chain-smoking has decimated her lung capacity to approximately the size of two thimbles each. the one exception to this rule is her incomparable, inexhaustible ability to dance until sunrise. i have often wondered about this paradox, and the only plausible solution is that she is, in fact, some manner of mutant go-go girl, transported from the distant future:

my sister, dancer and possible time-traveler

in this future, San Francisco has slid into the sea, Chicago has collapsed into Lake Michigan, and New York has finally been gentrified beyond the point of recognition. it is a dystopia to rival Orwell's, and Baltimore, once shunned for its druggy murderousness, has risen from the ashes to take the mantle of America's sole bastion of hipness.

this is the world of my sister.

this is the world to come.

2nd thoughts after 1st meeting with the 14th Dalai Lama

according to a local newspaper, he looked like:

photo by Lannis Waters

but what i saw was more like this:

and this:

and this:

i listened to the people around me projecting onto him. to some he was a celebrity, to some a novelty, to some a world leader.

to some he was holy:


he comes onstage and offers pranam to the audience's applause. the woman next to me is beaming and has told me what an honor it is to be in his presence. she hopes the question she submitted is chosen, but it is not.

the talk is enjoyable, somewhere between conversation and satsang. it is neither political not canned, and just before he walks in the energy shifts. i wonder if it is because he has entered the space, or if it is because of our collective knowledge (and silence) upon his entering the space. i close my eyes at times and focus on this energy. i can feel it radiating from the front of the room and wonder if it is from him or my imagination. my mind adds occasional observations, but remains largely at bay.

once the event ends i run into two doctors, one of whom i respect, the other who i love and respect. we walk together across campus in the just-rained humidity, reminiscent of summer and so out of place in mid-February. they speak of the Dalai Lama and i listen. it is amazingly superficial.

i walk with the until we reach the library and then say goodbye. i leave a message for a former swami in Vancouver and contemplate what transpired. perhaps it was only a reflection of my own doubts regarding the borders between the unspeakable truth we call divinity, and the pernicious projections of the mind...

i have never seen
one who so clearly lives
at the junction of worlds
real and imagined.