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.