The Most Helpful Practice Text

So it turns out, shockingly enough – try to contain your astonishment – the the mere presence of “do one new thing” on my list has the power to frighten me into a decline. That is to say, the eating of large quantities of muffin and ice cream. No problem, really, you silly old man. If the hurdle’s too high, lower it a bit and start again. You don’t have to DO a new thing today. You just have to PLAN doing a new thing. If you’re going to go look at materials in a hardware store or a hobby shop, find out which one you’re going to. What its hours are. When you’re going, tomorrow. Then tomorrow you can actually do the thing. What you don’t do, lad, is grit your teeth and say “I WILL run at that hurdle! I WILL!” You’ve got all the time in the world, and none at all, and none of it matters in the slightest. You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. Not really. Relax.

The very most helpful practice text for me is my own goddamn blog. I have been thinking the same goddamn thoughts for twenty years. Probably forty, but the blog doesn’t go back that far.

One New Thing

 Oh, dear, I am grieving: I am too old for this, and this is exactly where I have placed myself. Courage, little man. There are yet tendrils, or at least a recrudescence of fruiting bodies. You are not dead yet. And the movement may – probaby will – prove salutary, one way or another. You’ve lain dreaming in the cold sand long enough. So I am going to require of you that you do one new thing today, go one place you have not gone before. Because not filling in your little check boxes is a problem, but it’s not the problem. Right? You know this. The problem is that you’re a timid child hovering at the edge of the playground. And you’ve got to stop letting everyone else draw the lines around your life. For one thing, nobody really cares. For another, insofar as they do, modeling liberation is really more important than administering opiates. And Mr Death is not as far away as you think he is. Yes, the time is out of joint. So what? It has been for hundreds of years, and it’s not going to be put right in the year of our Lord 2025. Get real.

Sacred Time

So making and observing a sacred calendar is – yet another piece of, say, re-enchanting the world. Although the point of sacred time basically is that it’s NOT under one’s control and it is NOT dictated by secular concerns, so – as with so much of this re-enchantment project – it’s sort of self-defeating. Though I may be able to build something around solstice and equinox, as the Wiccans do.

Still, if I’m rolling my own, the benefits won’t even really start to accrue until the second or third round. Hmm. I still haver about whether I shouldn’t just go to a church and let somebody else run all this stuff. Even if I invent something useful for myself, it will just be because I’m so extraordinarily fortunate in actually having time to think and read and plan and do.

But – yeah, higher time. I do have strong associations with the Halloween season – which is considerably after the equinox, actually – being the time when the barrier between worlds thins and becomes less opaque. I don’t know how much of that is the dislocation of the time change. Hmm. I just dunno.

Anyway, I’m going to track for a few days and see if I can actually practice anywhere near solar noon. An obstacle there is that when I get close to that time I (rightly) think that getting my lunch before it gets too late is a higher priority. Eating early is indeed something that I need to do. I’m going to try doing it before practice – see if that works

[ written in early November, obviously ]

Doing Something Different

Here’s a question, then. I do “pray” for help against gluttony on my morning and evening walks, but I don’t really feel I’m engaging in it in any serious way. Does that mean it’s idle? Or that it needs souping up somehow? I mean, I am keeping to regimen, barring a few cough drops here and there, and it’s working, so do I even need to?

Well, yes, I actually do, because I’m not really addressing the disconnective part of it well, and if I don’t do that, then – as I know well from experience – the pressure will slowly build until I bust loose. That’s how it’s always happened, and that’s why, despite all my successes, I find myself, six or seven years down the road, twenty-some pounds overweight and still engaged in this weary internecine war. What I want is not to weigh 167.3 pounds: what I want is peace. 

So in that regard – no, I really am not doing very well. Given the stresses of the lead-up to Martha’s second knee surgery, I can maybe count just keeping in regimen as a win: but it’s important not to slip into a purely materialist mindset and mistake the finger for the moon. What I really want is peace, fullness, connection. And that means Doing Something Different.

Realize that this is intimately related to these boxes on our daily checklists that we can never check off. The endless, tedious search for titillation is also what occupies so much time that theres “no time” to do the liturgy work or the 2 pp of Trafalgar. There’s lots of time. I am never ever going to “have more time” than I have now. 

I think perhaps what I need is not more resolve – and anyway, where does one purchase more resolve? At WinCo? – but more brainstorming, and possibly more help from actual other living beings. Rather than praying distantly to a probably nonexistent God, come up with alternate activities. The music is one. Reading a Big Book is two. I’ve actually made good use of both of these. Another one might be watching some netflix series with Martha. Yet another making something with my hands. I mean, I might just go to hobby shops, hardware stores, TAP plastics, and see what synapses fire.

The Lord's Prayer

I say the Lord’s Prayer over breakfast, as discreetly as I can, so that I will not be one of those who pray standing in the synagogue, or on the street corner (or on the War Department YouTube channel) in order to be seen of men. The wording I use is as in the King James' Matthew, though I say “trespasses” rather than “debts,” as the Catholics do. The power and glory bit at the end, which seems to be a late addition to the scripture, I leave to Hegseth and his ilk: they have their reward.

I always remember Lama Michael’s response to someone asking about celebrating Christian holidays when one is not a Christian: after one of his characteristic, unsettling pauses, he said carefully, “it’s not obvious to me that I am not a Christian.”

In fact, in this twilight of my life, as I give rein to my intuitional mind to play with prayer as it sees fit, it is obvious to me that I am a Christian, in several important senses. There has never been a teaching I responded to more immediately and viscerally than the Sermon on the Mount.

The Dalai Lama once said that you should practice in the religious tradition you grew up in, if you can, which is good sense: it will be adapted to your sensibilities and your culture in ways that no alien tradition will be able to match. I used to mull that over, and conclude that I was someone who grew up in a Christian culture who could not practice in it, because of its insistence on endorsing propositions about God that seem to me to be inescapably self-contradictory, and clearly wrong. But of course I didn’t grow up Christian, or only Christian. I grew up atheist and aggressively, reductively materialist, as well. (My mother was some sort of faint Christian who didn’t choose to challenge my father’s atheism: I often wonder now what her interior religious life was like. I will never know.) My father’s morality is entirely Christian, though, like many atheists, he fondly believes that he thought it all up rationally.

And then Buddhism has been an equally deep influence: if it came later, it was also the context of almost all my structured spiritual practice, and my most influential teachers. I have fallen gradually back into praying, before meditation, with the full Buddhist prayers, together with their references to enlightenment and reincarnation: using my own tailored versions felt increasingly artificial and stupid – like correcting someone’s grammar when they’re making a passionate declaration of love. There are times when being correct is not being right.

So I have either become one of those woolly-headed vague spiritual types that I used to to view with such contempt: or else I’ve simply realized that I come from a thoroughly decayed and fragmented background, that I’m the pup of an old bitch gone in the teeth, and there’s nothing to be gained by pretending I’m anything else. I’m not going to obtain authenticity by picking some old tradition and pretending I don’t know anything about any other. There is no way to back up, and anyway I don’t want to go backwards. I want to go on.

Putting Off Taking a Shower

I like taking showers. Sometimes very hot showers. Sometimes cold showers, that make me gasp and blow and remind me forcibly that I am alive. Sometimes showers are luxurious and sometimes they're brisk; sometimes I sing and other times I laugh at my own terribly clever jokes; at dire times of my life, the privacy afforded by streaming water was the only privacy I had, and I've been grateful to it ever since.

So it is particularly ludicrous that one of the things I have to force myself to do is -- take a shower. It's an expenditure of oomph, and oomph is a commodity I've always been a little short on. But I will put off taking a shower for hours, or even days, as if I dreaded them.

What is that thing? That resistance? In Iain McGilchrist's terms -- which are the most meaningful I've encountered for understanding this sort of thing -- it's the usurpation of the left brain. I'm engaged in something the left brain has control of: scrolling in Facebook, or solving a Rubik's cube, or putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and the left brain is stubbornly clinging to power, like an elderly blowhard senator, well into his dotage, who absolutely will not yield the floor. Embarrassing for all concerned, and no good to man or beast, but by God it's got motor control and it intends to keep it.

And that affliction, of the left brain refusing to yield, is what mindfulness meditation addresses, and which for me very little else ever does. Sitting shamatha is -- especially in the early phases of a sit, when meditation is, as a newbie would view it, "not working" -- a hissing and spitting cat fight. The left brain makes bid after bid at seizing motor control, and the right brain does nothing more complicated than saying "No. You have to wait." Tantrum after tantrum, wheedle after wheedle, ingenious excuse after ingenious excuse. You just practice saying, "No, You have to wait."

The right brain is, actually, and properly, the master. It is in every sense prior. But we are in a culture that has forgotten that: which cultivates, pampers, and indulges the left brain no matter what it's set its heart on. We've forgotten that solving problems is useless -- far worse than useless, positively ruinous -- if the problems are the wrong ones. The one thing the left brain cannot do is step back and say, "is this even the right problem?"

Novels You Ought to Read

A friend was asking what Dickens novels he should read, the other day. I had to think a bit. I listed, I think, David Copperfield, Our Mutual Friend, Bleak House, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations as the novels "I would not want to die without having read." He seemed a little surprised by that way of putting it.

I happily read any Dickens novel, but that's quite different from my sense of their importance. I don't feel that people who aspire to a literary education should read The Old Curiosity Shop or A Tale of Two Cities. But they really should read Great Expectations.

I realize this is a very old-fashioned point of view, and one that is shared by some extremely unpleasant people in the current ideological moment. To be clear -- or maybe to be obscure -- I do not hold the value of these novels to be absolute, which I would consider philosophical nonsense. They are not (importantly) things, they are invitations to spiritual dances, and their value depends on where the dancers start from, what they need, and what steps they already know. It will change. Grow up and get over it. That doesn't mean that all novels are of equal value, or that assessing their value is inappropriate. It just means that you are assessing the readers as well as the writers, to the best of your ability. Which is a piece of staggering effrontery, of course, but it's also what every human being owes to their fellow human beings. We're in this together, kids.

I have devoted much of the last ten years to reading Spanish fiction, and while I've read many rewarding novels I've encountered only two novelists I would not want to die without having read: Gabriel García Márquez and Ana María Matute. You should read Cien años de soledad and El otoño del patriarca; you should read Primera Memoria and Olvidado rey Gudu. Three of these exist in excellent English translations: I'm fervently hoping that Laura Lonsdale will come through with an English Gudu sometime, but she's a busy woman and it's a large project.

Opening and Sealing Prayers

So, starting with the practice, rather than with the theory: rather than deciding what the prayers that open and close my daily meditation should be, I’ve just been trying out prayers, seeing what works and what doesn’t. (“Works,” is vague, I know, but in practice it seems pretty precise: some things I have tried quite obviously did not work.) The current version of the opening prayer is this:

Until light returns I wait with the dark
Until beauty returns I wait with the breath
I give drink that beauty may come to the thirsty
I give food that beauty may come to the hungry
I give thought that beauty may come to the heedless
I give peace that beauty may come to the troubled.
Until light returns I wait with the dark
Until beauty returns I wait with the breath

I suppose that one could substitute other “objects of meditation” for the breath. I tend to use either the breath or the ambient sound (in practice mostly the hum of my tinnitus!) as my object of attention: I’m sort of halfway to meditation without an object, or maybe I’m just sloppy. But “breath” is “spirit” and stands for attention of any sort, anyway. What the hell.

Then comes the bodhicitta prayer, which I discussed before, and then I sit for some predetermined amount of time (anywhere from five to thirty minutes, these days; not long. My knees and hips are still getting used to sitting at all, again.)

At the end come the sealing prayers, which obstinately retain their reference to Mahamudra (“the great seal,” which in this context traditionally means I think complete enlightenment: but I make a possibly louche semantic sideslip so that it means “that thing we’re talking about: that aspiration to be more in harmony with myself, more attuned to the world, and more benevolent to others.”)

By this virtue may I quickly realize Mahamudra
And establish all beings without exception in this state

… this with palms together (anjali mudra), touching forehead, lips, and chest (i.e. body, speech, and mind.) Then lastly hands laid palm up on my knees as I say the Navajo hozho prayer:

In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind my I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty around me I walk
It has become beauty again
It has become beauty again
It has become beauty again

I have no business meddling with Navajo stuff, which is its own intricate tradition with its own demands, of which I know very little: but the first time I read those words they landed with me, in a way no other prayer has. That. So I use it for a sealing prayer. "Dedicating the merit," as they say, in the Tibetan tradition, anyway. Wrapping it up and declaring what all this is in aid of.

Strange Rites

In Strange Rites Tara Burton sets out to tell “the story of the religious sensibility of a whole generation. It’s the story not just of the religious “Nones,” but of an even broader category: those who aren’t rejecting religion, but rather remixing it. It’s the story of how more and more Americans – and particularly how more and more millennials – envision themselves as creators of their own bespoke religions, mixing and matching spiritual and aesthetic and experiential and philosophical traditions.” 

Burton does a fabulous job, but I’m irritated at once by this way of putting it. We’re not remixers because we want to be. At least I’m not. We’re remixers because we have to be, because we’ve been made painfully aware that we’re already remixing, “negotiating” with our traditions, and we’re aware (unless we’re real dullards) of dozens of vibrant competing traditions: and we can’t legitimately disavow responsibility for our religious selections. We’ve been backed into remixing. We have no choice.

I am by temperament loyalist and traditionalist. I want to sink into a tradition, and be trained and corrected by it. It’s just not a course that’s available to me. We’re in an age like the age of St Augustine, a maelstrom of competing faiths, and an upwelling of heresies. Whether we like it or not, we're pitched into creating the patristics of the future. What can we do but lean into it?

September Comes Anyway

Drinking air in long
sweet drafts. O God, I thought
maybe I was done, I am not done,
the light is breaking over me in waves.
I am not done. I am not real:
of course not. An orange seed
is not an orange tree, let alone
an orange grove, where the girls
do their washing and hear the mill wheel turn.
But there are glancing lights everywhere.
Dilations and contractions. God,
I can be so stupid,
am so stupid, most of the time;
but September comes anyway.

The End of Copperfield

Finished rereading David Copperfield last night. God, the last hundred pages or so is such a slog. Can anyone believe any of it? From brilliant observation we dive into stupid wish fulfillment. If Dickens ever wrote anything less convincing than Copperfield’s spiritual conversion in the Swiss Alps, I’ve never read it. What silly twaddle! I suppose that the narrative tension of the misunderstanding between Copperfield and Agnes has to be indulged and conceded, since he didn’t have generations of rom-com plots behind him, but – honestly! Just end the book already. I can stand melodrama – the vividness of the great storm narrative buys the silly patness of Ham dying in the attempt to rescue Steerforth, with change left over. But after that, it’s mostly ugh. Anyway, I soldiered on. And I remain convinced that Dickens is by far the greatest English novelist: no one comes close to him. If only some tragic accident had destroyed the final hundred pages of Copperfield, we could lament its loss, speculate that it was probably the best novel ever written in English, and say, “Oh, if only we had the end of it!”

Looking Forward

My father finds it disturbing that I look forward to death. It’s not that I want to die (usually; particularly.) You don’t want your favorite book to end, sure, in a way. But still, you want to read the ending. You want to have the whole thing. You want to know how the story turns out, if there’s one last twist.

My father prefers to pretend death is never coming, which I in turn find a little disturbing. And odd, because his metaphysical convictions are so much stronger than mine. He knows exactly what happens when you die. Nothing happens. The candle flame goes out, and there’s not even a wisp of smoke. It’s the most reassuring and comfortable picture of death that I can imagine, so why on earth would you shy away from it? Maybe it’s just that under his ostensible metaphysics lurk the metaphysics of his grandparents, the final judgement, the day of wrath, old Nobodaddy’s final ferocious temper tantrum. Or maybe it’s that dread of nothing that so many people seem to have, a terror at nonexistence. Which seems to me like being terrified of being assaulted by a kitten. But maybe I in my turn am pretending my own elephant is not breathing heavily in the corner? I wonder that sometimes. I hold my own breath to listen: nothing. That’s hardly conclusive, but it’s the best I have.

Leaves are already turning yellow, and the plums have already turned purple. I don’t know why everything’s happening early this year. I don’t think it’s because I’ve retired and they’re anxious to keep me entertained. I think the music they listen to has sped up, this summer. They’re hearing something that says “quick now!” But if I didn’t know the date, I would step out onto my porch and think “oh, September! My favorite time of year!”

Sacred Joy

A bodhicitta prayer has to be there, of course; some variation of the Four Immeasurables. The one that is second nature to me now runs:

Bodhicitta is precious
May it arise in those who have not cultivated it;
In those who have cultivated it, may it not diminish
May it ever grow and flourish.

May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness
May all beings be without suffering and the causes of suffering
May all beings never be without the sacred joy that is without suffering
May all beings dwell in the great equanimity
Impartial, free of attachment and aversion.

By this merit may enlightenment be attained
May we overcome the afflictions of evil
May we liberate all beings from the ocean of suffering
The stormy waves of birth, old age, illness, and death.

It’s the Mahayana in a nutshell: the commitment not just to my own enlightenment, the relief of my own suffering, but the enlightenment of everyone and the relief of everyone’s suffering.

I don’t mind that it’s quixotic: aspirations ought to be quixotic. And it’s in the context of countless lives: nobody’s expecting Eddie to end all suffering by next Thursday. But I do have problems. My goal is not really ataraxia (though that was probably Buddha Shakyamuni’s original goal.) I do not wish to be liberated from my attachment to beauty, goodness, and truth; and I don’t want to stamp all distress out of my life: birth, old age, illness, and death are the price of admission to the show, and I’m content to pay them.

Buddhists tend to get over this hurdle by insisting on a technical definition of “suffering” – it’s specifically the distress caused by mistaking the nature of the self – but I’m pretty sure Shakyamuni meant all the suffering, and that’s certainly the plain sense of the prayer.

Nevertheless the setting of the largest possible context appeals to me (as you would expect of someone who is culturally a Protestant): the project of undeceiving myself is not private affair, its completion entails undeceiving everyone; beetles, deities, and even Eddie.

And probably the thing I’ve always liked best about the prayer is the “sacred joy” that is sandwiched awkwardly between the negatives. “Never be without the sacred joy that is without suffering”: it’s almost an aggressively clumsy way of putting it. An apophatic impulse, maybe? I’m not sure. It’s everywhere in Buddhist thought, though: the conviction that if you clear all the impediments away, what you’re left with is not going to be the dark nihilist void, but rather a radiant, continually unfolding delight.

It may be due to my atheist upbringing that I seem so impervious to nihilism. Never having identified that sacred joy with Old Nobodaddy (as Blake calls Him, in a certain mood) I can dispense with Him without calling it in question. It is to me one of the most obvious, important, and persistent facts of the universe, and a metaphysics that doesn’t account for it fails as miserably as a physics that can’t account for the sun rising.

The Minoan Bull

And, being of an age when one’s thoughts turn naturally to last things (though to tell the truth I have always been incorrigibly given to thinking of last things), it seems an appropriate time to seize this graceful Minoan bull by the horns and address the question: “well, if you’re not a Buddhist, then what the hell are you?” And the fact remained that (up until the last couple weeks) I sat down to meditate and recited prayers that affirmed that what I was doing all this for was to become enlightened, in some distant future life: despite the fact that I never much believed in enlightenment or its magical powers, and I never believed in reincarnation at all.

Since the full installation of a post-truth government I find my tolerance for useful fictions has vanished. I fully understand that one is never fully undeceived: but I’m not in the mood to render aid and comfort to the Prince of Lies. He has plenty of friends in high places; he doesn’t need my help. So sitting down to meditate with a stated intention founded on fiction – just wasn’t working for me any more. No. Can’t do it. And yet the need to practice, the need to slow down, to work towards clarity, is as pressing as ever.

My first thought was to try to figure it out rationally and systematically: what needs to be in a refuge prayer? What could I mean by “sealing the merit” at the end? What after all am I actually aiming at in my shamatha practice?

But these questions have murky answers when they have answers at all. And much of what I am trying to discover, in meditation, is what the answers to those questions really might be: the least useful thing I could do would be to come up with prayers that foreclosed the inquiry. No. I decided that I needed to ask my heart, not my head. And my heart promptly said, “say the prayers that have always resonated for you: you can edit them later if you have to. But just say the ones that come, for now.” The only piece I knew was missing was the explicit invocation of beauty. Maybe if you’re in the breathtaking landscapes of high Tibet it goes without saying, but in East Portland you can lose track.

Not An Account of Myself

I don’t feel I owe my audience anything in particular – that’s one of the joys of blogging, to my mind. You meet a blog as you meet a cat on the sidewalk far from home: it doesn’t expect you to feed it, and you don’t expect it to let you pick it up, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a bit of a love-fest, including possibly ear-scritches but probably not (except in extreme cases of flooziness) belly-rubs. You both know you’re going to resume your walk.

So I have no intention of accounting for myself. There are maybe half a dozen people who can demand accounts from me, and most of them don’t read my blog. Still there is this hovering phantom of the reader, probably mythical, like the supposed general reader that academic editors sometimes invoke (used to invoke? It’s been a while) while knowing of course that there hasn’t been a general reader spotted in the wild for a century or more.

But common courtesy towards phantoms is something I would cultivate, and this phantom is politely asking: where did you go? And what are you doing now? And so perhaps I will answer, beyond a chirrup and a rubbing under the chin.

I began this blog in 2003 as a Buddhist practice journal, which may be a bit of a contradiction in terms. As time went on I became less and less comfortable with making my practice public, and (in a small way) trading on it; after a year or two I stopped saying much about my practice. Nowadays I’m not sure I count as a Buddhist at all. Then I took to writing what I called poetry, which sort of occupied that same blog space. At that time I was figuring out that I would be miserable as long as I was a full-time software developer:I quit IBM, went to massage school, and became much happier. I got halftime work as a data guy at a nonprofit, and did massage half time, and probably had as happy a work life, for the last half of it, as occurs in unhappy modern America. My luck has always been absurdly good. (See, among other things: meeting Martha at 17; being born just too late to be drafted for Vietnam, but just early enough to get an excellent college education practically free; having a minor gift for programming at precisely the right historical time; etc.)

In 2016, Donald Trump was elected, and I discovered that I was not and never had been a Buddhist: my deepest spiritual aspirations were those of the liberal humanist who believes in a utopian future. For some ten days after that election, I was able to sleep maybe two or three hours per night. I was consumed with distress and anxiety. I had been betrayed by the world. You don’t realize where you’ve really laid your bets until you decisively lose them.

There were those whose faith was unshaken. We can go back, they thought. Trumpism was a detour, a strange perversion, a kink in the American character that would work itself out when people came to their senses. There are still people who think that, bless them.

So I spent much of my thinking time after that in unraveling the net of my devotion to a utopian future. I read some political science and political theory, and realized that the depth of my political convictions was only rivaled by the flimsiness of their foundations: I knew far, far less than I thought I did. I was also a far more typical American than I had thought I was: my knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism and anti-elitism, my impatience with political process, my conviction that I could solve my country’s problems by the force of my ideological purity and intransigence – these were exactly the qualities I deplored in my political enemies. In a word, I was stupid. But more than that. I experienced Trump’s election a spiritual disaster. How could it be that, unless political progress was really where I had laid up my spiritual treasure?

All this time, fearing to say the wrong thing, fearing I might, by calling in question liberal utopian teleology, discourage opposition to this thoroughly nasty regime (whose only saving disgrace is its transcendent incompetence) – and painfully aware of how stupidly I have shot off my mouth in the past, in my political ignorance – I mostly shut my damn trap. I needed to think. And for that I needed privacy.

So that, my dear reader, is where I’ve been, at least from one point of view. I have been thinking a lot and changing my mind about a lot of things. I am coming to the surface again; the wind is moving on the lake.

Time Is Our Home

So glad I have my multiple readings of Iain McGilchrist to salt my John Gray with. McGilchrist is my touchstone philosopher, nowadays. Whatever he may be wrong about – and I disagree with him at several points – his central insight, (which stands regardless of his neurological arguments: I’m not educated enough to evaluate those), is that our main problem is not what we’re thinking, it’s how we’re thinking. We are trying to stand outside of time, and everything that changes, or shifts its borders – like personhood, consciousness, goodness, beauty – we simply declare to be illusory, made-up, not real. Unfortunately, the category of things that change and shift their borders includes nearly everything that is important to us. So we’re left in a world where our reason can address only things that we don’t really care about. This is not, nor it cannot come to good.

 
Time is our home, says McGilchrist. If we try to live outside it we will only come to grief.

Before the Seas were Bent

I do want to understand things. And I feel like I have really made progress that way. I have cleared away a lot of misunderstanding. But having cleared the space, I would like to build something: I don’t want to just go on clearing space, although that obviously is something that goes on for as long as I live.

I don’t want to be a guru. I do want to walk in woods where the birds are like jewels and the air is cool and sweet. I want to be beautiful and make beautiful things, and to adore beauty where and as I find it: I guess my role model really is Tom Bombadil: nobody’s owner: nobody’s servant: minding his own house. The vita activa has never appealed to me, and I have never shown the slightest aptitude for it. But I do have an enormous capacity and appetite for perceiving beauty. That I think is the thread that runs through my life, the thread I will have to follow now.

The Space between Utopia and Apocalypse

John Gray is certainly piquant. He says clearly some things that I have long vaguely thought. I have even now not really come to terms with the idea, both tempting and frightening, that history may have no meaning. The recurring nightmares of apocalypse endemic to our imagination these days are only the reverse side of the fantasy of progress. Progress means that people are good and will be rewarded: apocalypse means that people are bad and will be punished. What we are having great difficulty with is the idea that history is just what happens when people bump into each other (as they do constantly, in a crowded world.) If it doesn’t mean anything in particular, we can peer into the space between utopia and apocalypse which is actually where we are headed, and maybe get some more sensible bearings. We are not altogether helpless, but we spend ridiculous amounts of thought and effort designing futures that are never going to conform to anybody’s design: and our commitment to teleological histories makes us intolerant extremists, across the board: my liberal friends are frothing at the mouth these days quite as much as any Christian Nationalist.

But Gray sees the question of free will oddly, to my mind. He seems to see no space between an absolutely free will and will as an absolute delusion. But here again it seems to me that reality is in the space between. We are subject to causes and conditions, as any other animal is. Much of what we think and do is born and performed outside of our narrow spotlight of consciousness; in some cases we have to find out what we are and what we want by simple empirical observation, because there are many things about ourselves we can’t see by way of introspection. There are many doors in the chambers of our mind that are locked, and we can only guess what’s in them. But that doesn’t mean that we see nothing in the light, and it doesn’t mean we are only hallucinating when we think we are deliberating. It means that we have to be humble, but it doesn’t mean we have to grovel.

Spring Solstice; Autumn of the Patriarch

The solstice! Dark gray and rainy, the sweet smell of grateful earth and flourishing grass. I am feeling so blessed, and almost at ease.

Trip to Dad’s was a Tom’s breakfast, a Glenwood lunch including a sausage patty that seemed too much even as I bolted it, and Burgerville dinner in Albany which included a hazelnut chocolate milkshake that was really, really disgusting. Then a night of diarrhea and weird cramps in my calves and obliques and groin, like what the hell? And a day of recovery, and then today, still not feeling quite well, but the POINT is, the point is that there wasn’t any binge at any point of it, and I’m still on track, with enough data to reasonably say yes, I am on a regimen that presently comes to a pound and a half of weight loss per week, which is exactly what I am aiming for. It will change; everything changes; but for now I can say, this is exactly where I should be, this is the course, I am steering for the right star, gleaming above the waters.

So at last I know. And of course life is punctuated with illness and times when you can’t exercise, that’s simply human life and always has been, probably more frequent illness now that I’m an old man, but who cares? And it’s always been way more frequent than I’ve ever acknowledged. Roll with it, roll with it, roll with everything, sir. And maybe I go to work today or maybe I just leave it till tomorrow and none of it really matters, because I’m just doing them a favor anyway and the whole thing is laid out, regardless, I see the whole vista and this work thing is finished. It can’t really touch me any more.

The meditation vow is broken, but we’ll repair it, it’s not broken badly.

The opening pages of John Gray’s Straw Dogs is absolutely amazing and quite beautiful. I wish I had come upon him long ago. And also reading Otoño del Patriarca, which is also absolutely amazing, and responsible I suppose for all these run-on sentences. Much love dears.

Feline Philosophy

Day Fifteen. Still on track. And rather a triumph: recognizing that the soup would run out, I shopped and began the soup yesterday afternoon, and finished it up this morning, despite (because of?) being scheduled to drive to Eugene today. I successfully identified the traitor: a smarmy little rodentlike thought who said “oh, something will turn up…. Maybe you won’t run out… a can of tuna fish… (sotto voce) an excuse to pig out on something…” No. The soup wasn’t going to stretch through Saturday, and this was the last chance to stay ahead of it, so stay ahead I did. So I am tired, and there may be a morning nap in my future or may not, but I feel so much better than I would have if I had succumbed to the insinuations of the rodent.

Reading John Gray’s Feline Philosophy, which is a serious book of philosophy, and also seriously about cats, real cats, with names and histories; the cats are not a pretext for the philosophy, nor the philosophy a pretext for the cats. It’s a lovely book. I have at least two fundamental disagreements with Gray, but he brings a great gift: genuine liberation from historical teleology. Which seems like a small thing – as long as everything seems in order and the inevitable progress towards utopia seems to be being made – but at a time like this our religious devotion to it proves to be a curse of despair and blindness. We really cannot see what is happening, and we really can’t devise or negotiate a sensible hope with our opponents, whom we see simply as evildoers. Losing twice to a ridiculous clown like Donald Trump should be a clear warning to us, but it doesn’t seem to have been. Our response is ever more urgently: “Double down! Double down!”

It’s not going to work.

But. Enough. When I do speak of this stuff I tend to rant, since I no longer allow myself to speak in public, or even to speak honestly in private, except to my kids. But it’s not really what I want to talk about, not what I want to think about.

My two disagreements with Gray: I think that in fact we do have free will – that when we are deliberating we are actually doing something, and something creative and interesting; not just inventing excuses and fabricating backstories. I do not share his metaphysical commitments. (Which blessedly are not dogmatically held: he actually is a real philosopher.)

And second: I don’t think that the fact that there are fashions in morality, and that customs differ, necessarily disproves “the centrality of good.” It means that we should dismiss attempts to reduce goodness to lists of simpleminded commandments; it means that no formulation or algorithm can replace judgement; but I think it’s actually striking how easy it is to orient oneself morally in different cultures and contexts. The configuration is different, but the elements are familiar. I don’t read stories from distant cultures that are morally unintelligible.

I am less sure of the second than of the first. But D.C. Schindler’s formulation of the three transcendentals – “the primacy of beauty, the centrality of good, the ultimacy of truth” – haunts me. It throbs and buzzes with truth.

The Wind on my Face

So. This is Day Seven of the Regimen. It is also Day Four of the Vow of June, which is to sit down to meditate every day for the rest of June, even if I only sit for thirty seconds. I haven’t sat in a half lotus for ages, and I have some stretching to do before that’s easy again. So this is just to get things started, get my phone timer set up, all the mechanics. Oy. I do want to just open up and have a heart to heart with God, whoever that may be: the One or the Substrate or Old Nobodaddy or my Anima or some figment of my dwindling imagination. Sitting shamata won’t get me there, but at least it reminds me of what I want. Coming to greater propositional certainty about God would be convenient for building churches and enforcing the obedience of novices, but I can’t see that it would actually deliver anything I want. I wouldn’t want a neatly labelled and packaged universe, convenient for putting away in a storage unit, even if I thought I was likely to get it. I just want the wind on my face before I die. I may not be brave enough to live and die in the open air, but could I not just jam a window a little bit ajar and take some deep breaths?

Though I suspect that like most “all I’m asking for is a little…” requests, it’s actually asking for the monstrously impossible. That I don’t actually begin to understand how much I’m demanding.

Still, if this life has taught me anything, it’s this: that if you don’t ask you don’t get.

—-

So. Shopping for lentil soup today. A walk with Tori at noon. One or two more Spanish sessions, and shamatha. That all seems doable.

—-

I suspect that the answer to “what does God want me to do?” although it is perfectly unintelligible, and probably a ridiculous question, actually has quite accessible answers that I already know, if I stop half a second to write them out. She wants me to be good, insofar as I can and insofar as I understand it (which is not actually, for me, the deep mysterious problem it seems to be for philosophers: I know damn well what being good entails. The hard part isn’t discovering what I should do: it’s doing it). And she wants me to turn to face her, she wants me to unfurl and to flourish, like the candyflower growing from the cracks in the driveway. Not enough soil? Grow anyway. Blossom exuberantly. What God wants of me is, in fact, blindingly obvious.

Too Much Alone

Britt Hartley seems to have gone before me, as far as… I think people are just making things up. Even the process theology people. There are some reasons – not to me completely compelling, tho interesting – to believe in the One. Intimations of order. But if anything is clear about ecstatic mystical experience, it’s that it does not deliver consistent verifiable conceptual information about… anything. That’s not what it’s for. So we’re not going to get a program of action and a schema of the world to navigate by, no matter how vividly we see God. We might come to a wiser appreciation of what part programs and schemas ought to play in our life. But that’s rather different.

And the religious project generally is an imperial project, meant to constrain the future to a repetition of the past. Much of that is just necessary to the maintenance of a community. But it is the opposite of what I’m looking for. I want to the step over a threshold into a new place. On the other hand – that’s the third hand, now – I want company. I need company. This is not something that it is really possible to do alone. Not ultimately. A person alone is not really real.

And I am too much alone, these days. You know, that is the real problem. It’s a simple problem, though its solution may be complex. I am too much alone.

Gliding Into Port

Ai Cherestami, I don't know. Wind ruffling my hair, the luff of my jacket as we ease into (out of?) port. What then, Cherestami? And freedom goes for nothing.

But. Clang clang clang! Bells, always bells, always noise, nothing ever holds still long enough to actually think.

If there were once quiet, if there was once a glide into a calm port... do we even remember how to think? (Did we ever know how to think?)

I mean, there is nowhere to turn, at this point. There's only one rope to seize, only one way to climb. Going further down the tunnel is not going to help. You are not going to meet a slimy creature to riddle with. It's just cold dark water, from there down, all the way, Mynheer. 

(No, we never knew how to think. Yes, we have been going the wrong way all this time. More questions can be submitted on 3 by 5 index cards, neatly printed. Thank you for your attention! Your business is important to us!)

So grab that one rope and climb, little one. There isn't anything else. Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea! 

I mean, this is where you meant to arrive, Cherestami. Am I wrong? This is where all demands cease. And this is the land under strange, unmoving stars. Nothing happens here, Cherestami. That's why there are no demands here. (Except the ever more frantic demands of your fatted heart.)

So, to take stock: the exercise program has actually been wildly successful. Your stamina, my Lord, is almost what it was pre Covid. Were it not for your fatness increasing in nice proportion, you would be in good physical shape. As it is, you look to die within a few years, after much misery. Don't do this to yourself, fat man. Take advantage of the fact that no craving hooks up to fulfillment any more. Yes, it's a miserable state of affairs and it means death, death, nothing but death and one that is much nearer than you used to think. (Did I mention that you have always been a self-deluded fool? I should have mentioned that.) 

There is a very very important sense that I am looking for death as well as for peace. I need to distinguish between the two, though. It's not all looking for death. It's partly looking for air and ease. I want to get out of the hole. I want to climb the rope. 

I used to think I was not ready to be dead yet. I have softened a bit there, I understand it a little differently now. Of course I long for death and I always have. That's okay. It's just one of the longings, though. Don't totalize here. It's not the only thing I want; it's not the only goal I'm driving toward. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to die. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished. It's not identical with suicidal intent. "One fine morning, when my work is done I'm going to. Fly. Away. Home. That's all. Just that. And I look forward to it, like Bergson, with cheerful curiosity.

The Obvious

Threatening the sovereignty and territorial integrity of two of our closest and most faithful allies, Canada and Denmark, makes me sick. It's repulsive. It's dishonorable. It's also incredibly stupid, but I don't even care about that. Stupid can be mended. Dishonor is forever.

(I don't often talk about daily politics, because others are so much better equipped and more skilled at it, but occasionally it's worth saying the obvious in so many words. My penchant for the long view and the global picture might give the impression that I think that immediate and local issues are unimportant. I don't, at all; I'm just particularly inept at addressing them. But when silence might be taken for complicity, I do think that someone with a public platform, however tiny, ought to speak up. So I might begin the next few blog posts with little statements like this.)

------

It does feel ridiculous, cultivating myself while the country is wrecking itself, but what else am I to do? I must work on something, and I’m the only thing at hand. We are just at the beginning of a cascade of crises, and the only thing I’m sure of is that more will be required of me, in the new world: that there will be less room for self-indulgence and self-pity. People urge me to go easy on myself, and while I appreciate their compassion and benevolence, I think they’re wrong. What I need is to go hard on myself. I have piddled away much of my life going easy on myself.

And behind it all, the Good of the Neoplatonists, the Nature of the Stoics, whatever the hell it is: that without which nothing actually makes sense: that which dissolves whenever you look at it directly and try to put it to use. It will not be used.

Humility is the hardest of the virtues. To do the work at hand: here, now.

-------

When I was four years old, my parents took me to Disneyland. Underwater in Captain Nemo's submarine, I looked out through the portals. Monsters of the deep were everywhere. A shark lunged at the window; I was terrified. My mother tried to reassure me, saying, "It's all right, Evan, it isn't real." Then a giant squid attacked us; my father said it also wasn't real. At this point, my parents tell me, I looked up and asked, "Are we real?"

-- Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being, chapter 6

Replegándome

Closing in on myself, like those tiny white blossoms of miner’s lettuce at nightfall. This, here, now: studying, thinking.

Global neoliberalism has run itself into a ditch: offering people absolutely nothing larger than themselves to be part of, to cherish, to be proud of, was a strategy that was bound to lose: though it didn’t do it before trashing most of most people’s virtues. So we get these ugly, crude fundamentalisms, that would laughable if they were not so capriciously destructive and cruel. The idea that there’s anything “medieval” about Isis or White Christian Nationalism is absurd. They are wholly and distinctly modern, the responses of people emptied of virtue and starved of meaning. I know, I sound like one of their theorists when I talk that way. Still. If you don’t offer people anything substantial to eat they’ll chew the bark off the trees. There’s nothing surprising about it. What’s surprising is that we’ve wobbled along so long in this country without disaster.

It’s all very well to talk that way, of course – satisfying and invigorating, clears the pores – but it’s bombast. The florid language is a tell. And what it tells is that I myself only very dimly suspect and guess at what that larger thing is: I have nothing satisfying to offer anyone. People who vaguely assert a higher power are more definite than I am: I immediately frown and think: “just one? Higher than what? Is it, are they, on my side? Distinct from me? Does it, do they, subsume me, or participate in me, or divvy me up so that bits of me serve as poker chips in unguessable games?” This is not the stuff that religious refuge is made of. I have nothing to offer, there.

But anyway, my duty vis-à-vis it, and/or them, seems at this point pretty clear to me. I have no persuasive skills, and nothing to persuade anyone of, anyway. “They also serve who only stand and wait”: well, I hope so, because that appears to me to be my job. Or at least, to stand and listen, to wait and watch.

I guess the dignified way to say that is “he spends his days in study, prayer and meditation." That sounds respectable; way more respectable than it feels.

A Lamentable Case

Well! So far all my struggles are for naught. I have neither straightened up nor flown right; I am fat as a goose prepped to provide foie gras; I am impotent, anxious, tired, and unkempt. My beard straggles and my hair lurches over my collar. A lamentable case.

On the other hand, I am more or less over my cold (how can you really tell, when you’re so systemically inflamed?) And I should be able to take up exercise again. Start over again. Again.

Saturday! Without a meeting with Jarrett, who is in Mexico City. So all the day’s resources are free. We can do what we like.

I think we may need to stage all these changes, Monsieur le Favier. Pressure at all points is not working here: it’s only making you fretful and petulant, and threatening even those things that were secure (morning back exercises and broccoli, for example. Heaven knows back trouble is not going to help you at this point, you foolish old Hechicero.)

The constant stream of appalling political news does not help, of course. But presumably that’s a constant from now on: if things get better eventually, it’s unlikely to happen during my lifetime. So forget about the daily news. If you think about political life at all, think long-term. Think of what needs to be cultivated that can be passed on to future generations, so they can build someday. Not habits of outrage and rumination, that’s for sure.

Recall, my dear Lord of All Creation, that you are not yet retired: you have no more time or resources at your disposal than you have had these last twenty years. So maybe ratchet back the expectations a little?

There is something missing from the program, and that missing thing, maybe, is company. Maybe you need someone to read the Phaedrus with. Alas that Portland State has no Classics! What the hell kind of university has NO classics department? That’s nuts. But anyway. All in good time.

For the moment, I think we need to set a schedule and timeline for this restoration-and-improvement program. And the first projects, quite obviously, are the intertwined projects of re-establishing our exercise and re-establishing our food regimen.

Note well, young Favier, that it will only take two or three days of eating sanely to feel much better. You won’t get skinny in a couple days, but the inflammation will subside, as will the self-disgust, almost immediately. You won’t have to fly right for months and get to 170 lbs before you feel better. You’ll feel better almost at once.

So I think this is the February project. Eating and exercise. You already laid out in detail the eating. Just follow that, and track your numbers. Two weeks from now you’ll know if you need to change something. (Change the meal timing slightly, though, to a 12:30 lunch and a 5:30 dinner; the former times were too early.) Ask Martha to hid the candy dish.

And now, we just restart the exercise program, but with the reps set back by ten or fifteen percent. We are not focused on gaining strength or muscle bulk at ALL, right now. We are just restarting our program, and it would be fine if the reps were cut in half. In fact, it might even be wise to start with extravagantly reduced reps. Say two thirds. If that really leaves lots of slack, we’ll take it up soon enough.

So February is the diet-and-exercise project. Nothing else needs to happen this month. March can be the month in which I open a second intellectual front, or quit all social media, or whatever it is I do next.

This would have worked last time, if I hadn’t come down with that cold, if Martha had not done her Colorado trip, if she had not been so anxious. It’s time to stop pretending her anxiety doesn’t affect you. It affects you deeply.

But my point at the moment is simply: there was nothing at all wrong with your program. That’s not why it derailed. So you’re not being Pollyanna, in trying to start over. It’s reasonable to expect it to work.

February 2025, the month of restoring the diet-and-exercise regimen. Go, sir.

Circle

Well. A new day, bright outside, dark within. "Put not your trust in princes," says that most cynical of texts, but we do, even when we think we're not. Till we come to the end of the paragraph and suddenly fall down the stairs of a blank page. 

A van drives by, its running lights flickering oddly, rhythmically. Is that a thing now? I become every day less at home in the world. A mercy, I suppose, designed to make it easier to say goodbye. "I have had my world as in my time"; but now it's not my time, and I have become insubstantial, transparent, barely sustaining enough gravity to haunt my own house.

"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me," says Richard; since we were speaking of princes. But -- enough of all that. It's time to shut this book. The circle is closed.

----

So now it's time to cast loose: nobody is going to accompany me on this trip. A thing I was prepared for as a child, but forgot in jostling flattery of adulthood. Age brings, in this respect anyway, clearer sight. And really, I'm ready for it.

Not that it's a simple trip, or one to be done all at once. It will be as halting and vacillating as all my voyages. And I won't really be alone. That's just the way they talk, forgetting their wives and children and servants, while they're strutting on the stage and monarchizing. That's another thing to be done with, that negligence, and taking mercies and kindnesses for granted. I've always despised those people who declare "everyone dies alone!" -- who then proceed comfortably to a well-attended hospital bed thronged with nurses and anxious dependents. Yah. What the hell are you talking about? You don't know crap about dying, or about solitude.

-----

You will understand, I hope, that I'm not talking about dying. Well, yes, I was talking about dying, but that was just an automatic association of ideas, No, I'm talking about wandering in the hills for a little bit, about the sunrise and sunset, about the quarter moon glimpsed over the housetop. 

Okay, Enough for now. Lots of love.

Third Day

And again, so far so good. 

Grateful this morning for Matute's magnificent Gudú. I just reread the scene in which Predilecto is sent to spy on the children, who discover him easily and pull him into their play, out of bonds of time. The immense sadness of leaving that, and forgetting that: tiptoeing out of the room when they have all fallen asleep. She's so good about forgetting. The epigraph of the book:

Dedico este libro a la memoria de H. C. Andersen, Jacob y Wilhelm Grimm y Charles Perrault.

A todo lo que olvidé.

A todo lo que perdí.

-----

I dedicate this book to the memory of H. C Andersen, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and Charles Perrault. 

To all that I have forgotten.

To all that I have lost.

Victoria Moul notes that ". . . anyone whose primary interest is literary is likely I think to reach a point in life after which most of your, let’s say, “top quality” literary reading, the really transformational stuff, is re-reading. When this point occurs surely varies and in a second or third language one might (happy thought!) never reach that point. But I think it’s reasonable to assume that any fairly committed reader of literature gets to this stage, in their mother-tongue at least, somewhere around mid-life."

Certainly this is true for me, and so the gift of Matute is doubly precious: it is both a transformational experience, and utterly new to me. It's new even in the simple narrative sense: this is the first time in years that I've read a narrative and genuinely not known where it was going. I read with some bemusement all these spoiler warnings attached nowadays to discussions of even the most formulaic fiction -- in fact, especially to the most formulaic fiction. Do you people seriously not know what's coming? That's just weird.

A long-spun tendril of cloud in the winter sky: and the morning backing in slowly, returning to the world.

I wrote a post about political hope the other day, and un-published it, because it made a claim of fact that I couldn't immediately back up, and I will not add to the noise and confusion, if I can help it. But in fact I am more hopeful than I used to be, in a number of ways. I may resurrect a more thoughtful version of that someday. Or perhaps not. Coming to terms with the new political reality is something we all have to do, but I am uneducated and naive about these things -- for one thing -- and for another thing, I think we are likely to be out of power for a good long time, and time invested in following the minutiae of U. S. Federal politics, by amateurs, is probably time wasted. I applaud those fighting the desperate rear-guard action, but someone also needs to go ahead and prepare the refuges we will take. I may be better suited to that task.

Anyway. Lots of love, dear ones. 

Second Day

So far, so good: but the first day, when the impetus is strongest, is easiest. The second and third days are generally the most precarious: and there's lots of destabilizing events coming along. Still, woke this morning with a grateful sense of peace. I will try to remember that, when besieged by false promises: the promises of this discipline are scant, but they're kept. 

-----

Why, I wonder, have the words fluvial and lacustrine never won currency in English, when so many other French/Latinate adjectives have swaggered into the language and made themselves at home? But it's a river boat and a lake house, never a fluvial boat, never a lacustrine house. Maybe something about the water generates a stubborn Dutch homeliness.

-----

Fog this morning, and a damp cold that seeps into the marrow. We're at the wicked time of the year, hovering around freezing, inviting ice storms. If I had an amulet against ice, I'd wear it. I have a large tolerance for most of the weathers and natural mischances of the world, but I don't like the ice, as I don't like the wildfires. You should be able to walk on the ground and breathe the air.

Wobbly and Out of Control

Hah! Well, no wonder I was feeling like everything was wobbly and out of control. Everything was wobbly and out of control.

So. For the food:

Breakfast is the Spanish omelet: leave half the hash browns. (And if the omelet is ridiculously huge, as it was today, you can leave some of it on the plate, too. But you never *have* to leave any of the omelet.)

Snacks available but not required: one apple and one banana.

Lunch is salad and 2/3 glass bowl of soup, and you must begin it by 11:30.

Dinner is salad, and 2/7 of a packet of ground 93% turkey, prepped with a big spoonful of olive oil, and 450 grams of potato, and you must begin it by 4:30.

In two weeks we'll know if this is a weight loss regimen or not: there's no need to guess. The numbers will tell us. At the moment that question is of no interest whatever. The first project here is simply to get aircraft out of its tumble and under control: nothing good happens until that has happened.

You may have to ask Martha to hide that white candy dish.

Throw out the rest of the bagels, unless Martha wants them.

Ipse dixi.

-----

For the exercise:

Okay. I must work out 4 days out of 7. An easy mnemonic for that while I'm working 3 days per week is simply that any day that is not a work day is a workout day. But really I want the basic pattern to be upper body day, lower body day, rest day. With some latitude: sometimes no rest day, sometimes two rest days. But never three rest days in a row, and always, if I'm looking backward six days and see only three workouts, I'm due to work out. (This sounds much more elaborate than it is: in practice it's pretty simple. Upper, Lower, Rest.)

Until I get the cardio where I want it, I'm going to stop increasing the rev lunges when I get to two sets of 30 reps (each side) at 5 lbs. (Which is nearly where I am? I think?) The cardio is going to stress the knees: I don't want to pile too much on them.

The cardio is actually the focus: building back the stamina I lost to Covid last year. The program is going to look like this: 

To begin with, short walks every day that is not a lower body day.

Every week, increment the walks by two, where an increment means taking no walk to short, or short walk to regular walk, or regular walk to long walk.

We stop this progression when we're at a weekly regiment of daily regular walks and two long walks. We might or might not at that point progress the long walks, or we might just go back to increasing the weight on the rev lunges. Leave that decision for when the time comes. 

So we're starting at 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 5

We're going to 2 + 3 + 2 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 2 = 16

At +2 per week, this will take five and a half weeks. That seems about right. We should get there around the end of February.

Ipse dixi.

-------

For the study: yes, you want to be doing BOTH the Spanish and the Greek. And maybe you can do that. Maybe it has to wait until you're no longer working at the Foundation. Maybe it doesn't happen at all, because time and attention are not infinitely elastic. Just relax and get over yourself, young Dale. It is not the most important thing. It is far more important to be doing hard and interesting reading, and to write stuff that is worth reading. THAT is what you actually want to do. The languages are tools for that, not ends in themselves. (Well, actually they're ends in themselves too, and always have been, and always will be: but you don't need to be doing two at once if it just. doesn't. work. Twenty years from now you'll be stone cold and in the ground, Mr Favier. None of this matters THAT much. It is now required of you that you a) get a grip, my good man, and b) relax and give yourself a break. Yes, both those things, and yes, this is a contradiction, and yes, you're just going to have to deal with it.)

New Year's Day

Sly the winds that wrap around
flew the tremor underfoot
scree the love that shifts and shoots
and all these things forgotten.

Tell me, of all the prophecies you've made,
how many came to pass? You are doing nothing
but chewing the chalk of your old classroom,
laboring over lessons too well learned.
How wrong do your masters have to prove
before you give them up?

Stutter and rattle of flags in the wind, and
rotten cloth tears from the pole;
older than we hoped
and younger than a new mouse
naked in the nest:
we have three days. Use them.