Il Buon Tempo Verra

It is not necessary to hope, said William the Silent, in order to persevere.

Well, he should know. But it helps.

* * *

George Washington and Admiral de Grasse embraced on the deck of the Ville de Paris, when the French finally, finally arrived with serious help for the rebellion. When De Grasse, it is reported -- an even larger man than Washington -- kissed him on both cheeks and greeted him as "mon cher petit general!" Washington's staff found it difficult not to laugh. But somehow I don't think Washington did.

(Washington never lost hope. Why not, I wonder?)

* * *

I hold that man very foolish and very wretched, wrote King Alfred, who will not learn all he can in this life, and ever hope to reach that life in which all will be made clear.

* * *

William Blake wrote:

I shall not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

* * *

I still say, with Shelley, Il buon tempo verra. The good time will come. Not because I know it will. Not even because I can see that it's at all likely. But because every time I say it, there's a flicker of truth in it at that moment, and it's another piece of life snatched back from Satan.

I used to think it absurd that Christians held hope to be a virtue. William the Silent was my ideal -- face the full despair, and fight on anyway. Clear-eyed, dispassionate evaluation of the odds is what's needed, not soft-headed enthusiasm. But that was back when I bought the pseudo-materialist schtick that the world was there outside of my skull, and my consciousness was here inside my skull, and the two were made of completely different stuff. The world was real, and my thoughts were not.

Now I think that the material world's claims to reality are, if anything, somewhat shakier than those of my mind. My thoughts are not subsidiary to reality. They are part of it.

My only doubt now, is whether it would not be still wiser to say "the good time is already here."

Nobody that Tiny

I've been glad of the press coverage of the rites of Ronald Reagan's passing. President Reagan was a mysterious figure to me. But he captured the hearts of a large proportion of my countrymen, and I'll never really understand them if I don't understand their love for him.

He'd barely flickered across my consciousness before he ran for the presidency. He was known in my lefty academic circles as the man who, as governor of California, had taken the best educational system in the country, and in a few short years made it one of the worst. We disliked him, but we didn't take him very seriously. He was rather a joke, outside of California -- as Arnold Schwarzenegger is now. I remember being pleased when he got the Republican nomination. He was so ignorant and so far-right, I thought, that he would certainly bomb in a national election.

We wandered away from watching the election returns the night he was elected, silent and shell-shocked. He hadn't just won; he'd won big. Against a man whom I thought, and still think, was the best man to occupy the oval office in the 20th Century. I admired Jimmy Carter, though I thought he was a poor president. So who was this man, this joke from California, who had beaten him?

I never did find out who Ronald Reagan was. I found him distasteful, but I didn't loathe him. Maybe you never loathe anyone like you loathe your first political bete noire. Richard Nixon was the man I hated, deeply and enduringly. I've practiced a long time to soften that hatred. It hasn't been easy.

But I didn't hate Reagan. He gave me the creeps -- I certainly would never have left him alone in a room with my children -- but mostly I was just baffled by him. He'd make a really poor showing in a debate, and I'd find in the morning papers that he was considered to have won it. The famous Reagan charm was invisible to me; I just saw a bad actor, overdoing his lines. For me the Reagan years were surreal. I have never felt so alienated from America, not even during the Nixon years.

So I've listened closely to the NPR reports and retrospectives, hoping to understand this phenomenon. Trying to make that leap of imagination. I listen to the snippets of his speeches and try to imagine how I'd hear them if I thought he really believed what he was saying. I think I'm beginning to get a glimmering. And I think he really did believe what he was saying. Clinton (who I'm sure was just as baffling to the Right as Reagan was to me) helped when he referred to Reagan as exemplifying "the indomitable optimism of the American people." And it helped me a lot, trivial though it may seem, to learn that he was outraged when he found out that Nixon had paved the horse-trails at Camp David.

One evening at KCC Martha -- who has always been the person to ask, in pure humble curiosity, "Mommy, why is the Emperor wearing no clothes?" -- asked Lama Michael about how it can be that the Dalai Lama meets with someone like George W. Bush and comes away saying -- as he always does -- that he's a very good man, a very sincere man. You sometimes get the feeling that the Dalai Lama would have come away from meeting Saddam Hussein or Adolf Hitler saying the same thing.

Michael, who has been known to tell us that, to step out of the strait-jackets of our egos, we should try wearing polyester suits, and has advised us, knowing us mostly to be deep-dyed liberals, to go out and vote Republican for once, and try driving a big SUV around -- immediately confessed that this troubled him, too. After thinking about it for a while, he said that he thought the Dalai Lama could see a lot more than we could. That we make our political opponents into little caricatures, and freeze them as such in our minds. "But nobody is really that tiny," he said.

So I listened to Reagan talking in his hushed, intimate tones about the Shining City on the Hill, and I suddenly made the connection to a night, when I was a teenager, and I brought myself to tears picturing the secular paradise I was going to help build someday. "The City of Man," it would be called. Like all utopias, it needed just one founding condition: that everyone in it have pretty much the same prejudices, temperament, outlook and ambitions as me. And since my prejudices, temperament, outlook, and ambitions were clearly the right ones, why should that be hard?

I don't pretend to understand everything about Reagan and his appeal, but I think I opened the heart of it when I made that connection. And I found myself listening to Margaret Thatcher talking about his large-heartedness not with contempt, but with wistfulness. It's probably true. There was something large-hearted and magnanimous about him, just as there was about that ignorantly arrogant damp-eyed teenager, who dreamed about the City of Man.

Chloe and the Ice Cream Truck

One of my favorite students at Pacific Crest was Chloe. She had impossibly wide-open light blue eyes in a fearless face. She was a disciplined student; one of the few in my War and Peace class who always kept up with the heavy reading load. She'd take up any question. She formed opinions readily, and defended them warmly, but not doggedly; she was always interested in what other people thought. A joy to have in class.

One Spring morning we were upstairs, deep into Tolstoy. I think we were discussing Ellen Vasilievna Kuragina, whom they all despised, none more fiercely than Chloe. (They never did learn to like Prince Andrei, but they loved Pierre, and watching him fall into Ellen's clutches filled them with dismay.) I was trying to nudge the discussion on to why Tolstoy had created this character at all. The conversation faltered, and quiet fell in the room. Several students seemed to be surreptitiously checking the contents of their pockets. I was bewildered for a moment, until my middle-aged ears picked it up too -- the sound of an ice-cream truck's music.

After a minute, Chloe stood up, with the air of a person who has considered gravely and come to a serious decision. "I'll be right back," she said.

In a twinkling two-thirds of the class had followed her out the door.

"I think we'll take a ten minute break," I said to the nearly empty room, and the rest of them shot out.

Five minutes later we were reassembled, and discussing Ellen Vasilievna again, sometimes in indistinct mumbles, over ice-cream bars and popsicles.

Graduation at Pacific Crest Community School

I sat there with tears leaking from the corners of my eyes. Tori stood behind the lectern, huddled a little forward, her face incandescent. "First of all I have to thank my parents," she said. The tassle of her mortarboard trembled. "You've been great. I wouldn't have made it without you."

We're a Norwegian-Irish-English-Scottish mix: we color up easily, and besides Tori'd gotten sunburnt two days before. She was a radiant pink; her face glowed against the black cap and gown. Emily had spoken about her: how within two weeks of starting at Pacific Crest, she'd been elected to the judicial committee, and been re-elected every year since; how she'd determined to finish a long story for her senior project, and succeeded in finishing a hundred-page novella; how she was "any teacher's dream." And how she has absolutely no sense of geographical direction, and can be made to yawn if you say "yawn." (Which she had demonstrated, there on the stage; Tori, blushing and laughing, did indeed have to yawn.)

Tori went on to thank her science teacher, who bears the improbable name of Tigerin, and her writing teacher, Julie, who helped her with her long story, and then her friends, and everybody. "I'm pretty quiet, and you probably don't know how much I like you all."

They all get introduced, and they all speak, at Pacific Crest. Fifteen graduates this year: their largest class ever, I think. I've cried at every Pacific Crest graduation I've been to. The love is palpable. The introductions are frank, verging on roasts at times; there's no attempt to mask how frustrating teaching these kids can be. But no one can walk away without being staggered, I think, at how well these teachers know the kids, how hard they've worked to make their educations meaningful, and at how much they value each one of them. And the students understand it as love, and return it. They treasure their teachers, and their fellow-students, in a way that would seem outlandish to most of their peers.

At the heart of it are Becky and Jenny, who started the school, and who have the gift, above all, of valuing students for what they are. It's all the truisms. They believe in these kids. And they really do value the kid who rebuilt his Mom's transmission for his senior project, making an automatic into a stick, every bit as much as the kid who did an elegant study of the survival value of intra-special variation. The kid who wrote and illustrated a children's book about her horse, as much as the kid who designed and taught a sea-kayaking class, culminating in an expedition to the San Juans, taking five of his classmates out to sea for three days.

I watch this extraordinary event, and I think of ordinary graduations, in which a few students may be singled out for praise, but most are shuffled across the stage as quick as may be, and it makes me sad. A graphic representation of our conviction that a few chosen people are valuable and the rest are dreck, that human worth is something you achieve by besting your peers and distinguishing yourself from the herd.

Every one of those kids could speak. Not all in elegant periods, with classical citations, maybe; but for every single one what they had to convey was more urgent than the fact that they were standing in front of a crowd. Not one of them, not even the quiet Tori, was overwhelmed by standing up in front of a hundred and fifty people. Not one felt that his or her voice could not legitimately be heard.

I can't think of any life's work more valuable, more precious, more rare than what Becky and Jenny have done in creating this school, and keeping it going for eleven years.

Stories

Kierkegaard argues very persuasively, I think, that we must at some point have chosen sin; we must have freely given up our freedom. Faced with a clear choice between happiness and unhappiness, we chose unhappiness. And the choice having once been made, we now want -- sometimes -- to renege on it; but it turns out that unmaking the choice is by no means so easy as making it. Kierkegaard gives the poignant example:

If a child who has received the gift of a little money -- enough to be able to buy either a good book, for example, or one toy, for both cost the same -- buys the toy, can he use the same money to buy the book? By no means, for now the money has already been spent. But he may go to the bookseller and ask him if he will exchange the book for the toy. Suppose the bookseller answers: My dear child, your toy is worthless; it is certainly true that when you still had the money you could have bought the book just as wll as the toy, but the awkward thing about the toy is that once it is purchased it has lost all value.

I have no objection to Kierkegaard's argument, except that it is not true. I never did choose unhappiness. I never freely chose unfreedom. Believe me, Mr Kierkegaard -- I would remember it, if I had.

That I am in a most wretched and lamentable state of what Mr Kierkegaard would call sin, and my own tradition calls confusion, is obvious. That buying my way out of it will cost (at a bare minimum) all I have, is likewise obvious. But why make up this improbable history of how it came about?

Well, we are hungry for stories. It's clear from the sutras that the Buddha Shakyamuni's followers pestered him continually for a story. I am a Buddhist now, 2500 years later, precisely because he steadfastly refused to tell one.

The Buddha answered "Malunkyaputta, I never said 'Follow me and I will answer your questions' nor did you say 'I will follow the Blessed One because he will explain these matters'.

"Then what is your position? You are like a person shot with a poisoned arrow, who says 'I will not have this arrow removed until I know who shot it, his name, his family, whether he is tall or short, young or old.....' This person would die before all these questions could be answered."

The stories can be useful. Assuming the guilt for my own confusion may not make much sense, and it may not really square with anything I remember, but it does bring home to me that getting out of it is my own responsibility. If I made this snare of sin, then I am going to have to unmake it. Every single moment of confusion is my own creation; every moment of loneliness is caused, not by God slamming the door on me, but by me slamming the door on God.

But the stories can be deadly, too. It's all too easy to make our fellow-sufferers into the enemies of God -- as if their rejection of Him was any different from ours! To pour contempt and loathing upon them. "Christians aren't perfect," we say smugly, "just forgiven." As if we weren't continually trampling that forgiveness underfoot, or escaping it with the skill of Houdini! And as if that was any different from the rejections that take the form of, say, doctrinal athiesm, or unreflective pleasure-seeking. It's no different at all: it's only the story that makes it look different. And that would be true even if, by chance, the story we clung to were the correct one, accurate to the last detail.

Frugality

Nicht eure Sünde - eure Genügsamkeit schreit gen Himmel, euer Geiz selbst in eurer Sünde schreit gen Himmel!

Not your sin -- your frugality cries out to heaven, your stinginess even in your sin cries out to heaven!

--Nietzsche, Zarathustra

A Prayer to Jesus's Father

I know we don't talk much. Too much water under the bridge. Some relationships just don't work out: faults on both sides, no doubt.

But I do have this prayer, stuffed in my jeans pocket. Or maybe a it's a recipe. I think it's addressed to you.

Pound me like tapa cloth,
Knead me like blood clay;
Beat until smooth, and the lumps are gone.

I learned a yoga pose a long time ago. You lie on your back, holding nothing, palms open to the sky.
It's called the corpse pose, because you just lie there, doing nothing.

"It's the first and the last pose you learn," said the yoga teacher. He was turning away from us as he added quietly, "it's the hardest pose."

Friday Morning

He pulls a piece of paper from his jeans pocket, limp and frayed at the folds, and spreads it open. "Oh, yeah," he mutters. "Fate."

Folds it up and returns it to his pocket. No time for that now. He has things to do.

Cedar Mill Creek

I am still not entirely reconciled to working in the suburbs, this queer hybrid of countryside and city, where freshly asphalted four-lane parkways sweep to trivial ends in empty fields -- building lots that were cleared during the dot.com boom and then left to turn to fragile, surprisingly beautiful meadowland, rich with lupine and blackberry, dotted with escaped ornamentals from the hi-tech light-industrial parks. It's quiet out here, except for the ubiquitous buzz of powerlines, and full of birdlife: meadowlarks, redwing blackbirds, shrill-piping running birds like overgrown sandpipers, barn swallows. Big campuses, half of them empty, darkened spaces full of disused cubicles. Almost no one walks out here but me. A few joggers. It's eerie to me, how many people work in these buildings -- hundreds, I think -- and how most of them are so incurious about their surroundings that they've never walked anywhere here, except from their cars, through the mammoth parking lots, to the ID-badged doors. Surreal. Truman show. Crews of Mexicans keep up our grounds beautifully -- for whom? No one looks, no one walks by these flowerbeds, but me. Not that I've ever seen. The Mexicans eye me impassively as I walk by. So far as I can tell, they don't give a damn that I'm the only person who appreciates their work. In fact, they look as suspicious of me as the people who glance at me from behind the tinted glass of their SUV's.

The wetlands have been left alone, out here. One thing to be grateful for. I'm sure, left to themselves, the developers would have dumped the marshes full of fill dirt, or something worse. So I'm glad the wetlands are protected. Beautiful marshes stretch across this land. I walk down to Washington County Bridge #1409, crossing -- so the sign tells me -- Cedar Mill Creek. (Cedars? In this kind of country? & Where, around here, does the water drop rapidly enough to turn a millwheel? I have a feeling the same people who dropped these hi-tech campuses out of the sky also named this creek.)

But anyway, this brown creek, less than ten yards wide, wanders through cattails and high grass, and runs slowly under Bridge #1409. I stand on the bridge in the afternoon, bright sun falling down on my head from above, and up to my face from a dazzling reflection below. A low bridge. Fifteen feet above the water. Barn swallows dive under the bridge, over and over, darting below my feet without a care. And today three muskrats, in a dignified line, swam strongly, calmly down the center of the creek, directly below me, appearing one by one on my side of the bridge, legs pumping rythmically, unhurried, clearly the masters of their brown, reed-lined world. So big I peered carefully at their tails to make sure they weren't beaver. They have nothing to fear from human beings, I guess -- human beings stay behind their tinted glass, roaring up and down the roadways, of no more interest to muskrats than the distant turkey-vultures.

This country keeps still -- as Tolkien might have said -- a disheveled naiad loveliness. For now. The next economic boom, so devoutly desired by the people of Oregon, hangs over it like the blade of a guillotine. Soon enough, the muskrats will learn that they have plenty to fear.

Footnotes

I took Tori to the Portland State library so she could read some articles for a paper she's writing. She studies steadily, with a calm discipline that amazes me. Read her way carefully through two articles in difficult academic journals, taking careful notes. She's old enough to look perfectly at home in a college library, now. Gave me a curious twinge.

As did wandering through the stacks at PSU. Wandered up to the Middle English section and pulled down my only publication (Chaucer Review, 1991 -- "Anelida and Arcite: Anti-Feminist Allegory, Pro-Feminist Complaint." Check the big department stores and airport bookstalls; bound to be copies there.) There I am, in all my glory -- quoting in French, Latin, and Italian (what a fraud! I knew not a word of Italian). Making a trendy and somewhat dubious argument. But it was a good reading of Chaucer's poem. Even at my worst, I've always been a sensitive reader.

And my footnotes are -- still -- magnificent. The only genre I've ever mastered is the footnote. The magisterial evaluation, the wry aside, the six-line demolition of unworthy critics, the hinting at vast learning and contemplation held in reserve -- I had it all.

Odd that I published that. I had already given up on an academic career when it was accepted. I had, in fact, forgotten that I'd sent it off, when I got the acceptance. It was an early chapter of one of my dissertations: sending it out may in fact have been a sort of surrender on ever finishing a dissertation. "Here: there's a piece out of all this wreck that might be worth saving, but there ain't no book here, I know that!"

A vanished life. And one just blossoming. And an accidental, grizzle-bearded father walking through the sour book-dust of his past.

Not a past I look back on fondly, for the most part. Like so much of my past, I mostly just feel grateful that I escaped from it more or less intact. So much of my past is a tangle of false hopes and masquerade. Pretending to know Italian, pretending that I'd read all of the Teseida in the original, is pretty typical of my past. I'm glad to be in the present. I carry on my various poses and pretences for only minutes at at time now, rather than years. It's a sweet, hard-bought freedom.

Happy Boy, Part II

Lekshe's back!

Fling the Stars

Fling the stars into the scattered sky
Kindle the moon, and lay
The glittering mosaic of heaven;
Build a bed of clouds, and lay thee down.

And all night as I slept the wind and the starlight shifted, and the curtains crept into the room and fled back out. One turn of the wrist different, and I could have been running with the wind. I will not be a miser, fingering my carefully counted regrets in a locked cupboard; but this, this I do regret.

The shadow of your moon-silvered hair, the flicker of impudent eyes, the lift of a pale shoulder. I am mute, delivered wordless to your gathering disaster. All things drawing to a point.

My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.

The Hollow Kingdom

Oh, but now that I'm done bitching: you should all go out and buy The Hollow Kingdom, by Clare Dunkle. Unless you're terribly allergic to "children's literature" or fantasy. (Even if you are, the dialogue and characterization are far better than that of any realist fiction for adults I've read recently.)* Think of Jane Austen making a novel out of one of the Grimms' more disturbing fairy tales, and you'll get an inkling of the book.

*Okay, I should admit here that I find modern realist fiction for adults completely unreadable, and in fact I haven't read any recently. But if I had, I bet I wouldn't have found anything as good as Dunkle.

Bitch, bitch, bitch

In a vile temper.

Last night was the first time I've gone out of control with my eating. Went out for mexican food with Martha and ate a grand meal, finishing up with their specialty dessert, designed by the NACECD (North American Committee for the Encouragement of Coronary Disease) -- a sort of deep-fried cookie crusted with cinnamon sugar. Then all evening I was scooting down to the basement to grab handfuls of Heshey's kisses and surreptitiously scarf them.

The night before that I lost my temper -- again, in the basement, which seems to house my id -- and I kicked viciously at a bench that I expected to send flying or shatter. Instead it held its ground nobly and injured my toes, so that I'm still gimping around: the next morning my entire big toe had turned a lovely raspberry color, with a fetching purple line across the last joint. I don't think I broke it, but I'm not entirely sure. I gave out that I had stubbed it accidentally.

This morning, Martha asked if I was okay as I was dressing, and I said "oh, I'm a little sad and unhappy." Why? she asked. I had to think a little. "Because I dripped salsa on my clean pants last night, so I have to wear a different pair today," I said, perfectly truthfully. "Which tells you how serious my troubles are."

We got the kids off to their end-of-the-year campout, yesterday morning (which is why I had been in the basement, the night before, finding twine, or rather not finding twine, to tie around rolled-up sleeping bags, and assaulting benches.) So supposedly the pressure is off. Actually, of course, the pressure is jacked up, because now I should be spending quality time with Martha while we have the chance. And all the while I'm hopelessly behind with housework and with the database maintenance for the sangha, and the young man whose grad school application I edited is pressing me to read Zarathustra and have meaningful conversations, and my practice is a shambles (I sat -- what -- twice, in the last week?), and the very earnest man who wants to redesign all of the sangha information systems with me has been calling, and what I really want to do is go out to a strip club, and get very drunk.

What it is, I guess, is that I hate letting people down.

Thank You!

I aspire to be one of those bloggers who are courtly hosts, who always respond thoughtfully to their commenters, but I find that I'm very haphazard about responding, and often I don't respond at all to the comments I find most moving or interesting. For instance, there was comment after comment to "That Wonder", and I thought all of them were much lovelier, more interesting, and more perceptive than the post itself, but I never managed to say a word back to them. Sometimes the better the comment the more abashed I am.

So anyway, let me thank you all here, and assure you that lack of response does not mean lack of appreciation. Maybe someday I'll achieve courtliness. (It don't come natural to kids from backwoods Oregon, though, so don't hold your breath.)

Traces

Oh, the traces are there. The traces are everywhere. Everyone I ask has seen you. You are not easily forgotten.

She went north, says the Prince of the Shining Lands, wrapped in glory, and the ground broke under her feet. Look! There are the springs of bright water, where she stepped!

She went south, says the Master of Winds, burning like a torch, and the volupts cringed and hid their eyes. Look at them now, crawling for comfort to their aged wives!

She went west, says the Gatekeeper, and thunder and lightning fled from her. See how the trees that were dry and withered bear blossom and fruit!

She went east, says the Stag, and I could not keep up with her. We all fell behind at the sunrise, because we were afraid of the sun. But not she. We watched till our eyes were dazzled. We don't think we will see her again.

So I sit at the empty table, and idly draw pictures in the puddles of wine. "I knew her once," I say.

The bartender, who doesn't believe me, smiles agreeably. "Yeah, I heard that," he says. "You want another?"

Murderous Enmity

I don't swat mosquitos any more. If I spot one landing on me, I try to wave her away. But once one is fairly at work drinking my blood, there's no way to brush her off without hurting her. And there's no point -- I'm already stung. I let her finish her meal and go.

Once I would have ridiculed this restraint. But that's because, in typical Western fashion, I would have regarded it "objectively." I would gravely have launched into considerations of the moral status of mosquitos, what sort of sensations they have, what rights they might be considered to have, what the proper relations between man and mosquito were, whether it was possible for all people to stop swatting mosquitos all the time, and what the consequences would be if they did -- all the silly, extravagant, far-fetched questions typical of "objective" thought, which, for reasons that elude me, considers itself hard-headed. What do I know about the feelings or moral status of mosquitos? How likely am I ever to be in the position of successfully forbidding the world's six billion people to swat them? These are silly questions.

The subjective questions are far more pertinent, practical, and fruitful. What changes in me, when I refrain from swatting mosquitos? What do I learn by it?

I have learned a number of things. First, I have been able to uncover, in one trivial instance, the subtle but extensive distortions of reality produced by murderous enmity. I had no idea of it, before I stopped swatting them -- in fact I would have strenuously denied it -- but I imputed malice to mosquitos. I regarded them as driven by the desire to torment me. I think it's almost impossible to maintain the intention of killing something without slipping into this. At some level I really believed that mosquitos chose the cool of the summer dawn and twilight to pursue me, because they knew I loved those times, and they wanted to ruin my peace.

I also believed that swatting mosquitos was an effective defense against them. If I didn't swat them, I thought, I would be devoured by them. I would be freckled with stings. A mass of itching wretchedness. By swatting them, I thought I was holding misery at bay.

Now again, I didn't know I thought this, until I stopped. It turns out that how often I get stung has little to do with whether I swat. In fact my impression is that I am stung less often these days. Maybe it just seems that way because I'm less distressed by being stung. Or maybe it's because, having learned that swatting doesn't really prevent many stings, I head indoors sooner when I find that the mosquitos are out. In any case, my unconscious, extravagant estimate of how effective I was at preventing stings has proven entirely wrong.

Third, I have understood just how much I had surrendered control to mosquitos, by considering myself at war with them. It's a little embarassing, in retrospect, to think of what an abject slave of circumstance I made myself. Here I was, the paragon of animals, the crown of creation, endowed with reason and free will, and made, as I'm told, in the image of God -- and a little whining insect could make me prance, skitter, and slap in panic, ducking and writhing as though fencing with a deadly enemy. Was this human dignity? Was this any kind of dignity? In fact, by harboring enmity with mosquitos, I was granting them control over me. I had to swat at them. I read somewhere that some considerable percentage of car accidents is probably due to drivers panicking about having insects in the car with them. If we habitually treat them as mortal enemies, we end up by believing in it. The consequences can be serious.

But the most important thing I have discovered by letting a mosquito sting me -- watching this little creature persistently risk death to get a full belly of blood, so she can produce her eggs -- watching her closely as she settles, pushes her proboscis in, and drinks deep, with little shudders -- is that we are, after all, kindred creatures, driven by the same desires, seeking the same satisfactions. We are not enemies. I can live in a world that holds no enemies at all.

People have injured me before, and they will injure me again. There's no way I can prevent that. But I can live a life that is completely free of enmity. It's as easy, and as hard, as sitting perfectly still at dusk, when the first faint whine and whisper of wings brushes past my ear.

Note to Typepad bloggers

Yesterday and today I've been blocked from commenting on your sites. My IP at work (not that I would ever blog at work) represents a large number of hosts, so if any one of them gets infected by a spammer, boom, I'm blacklisted.

My guess is that typepad just started consulting spamhaus to block people, because my IP at work has been on and off this list for months, but this is the first time I've had trouble. The people at CBL (that's one of the lists that spamhaus consults) tell me they don't support being used to defend blog comment services -- just email servers. (Although that doesn't really seen very different, to me.)

So anyway, for a while, unless typepad changes its mind, you typepadders may only be hearing from me by email.

Happy Boy

Hey, my BMI dipped below 30 today. No longer obese!

Lions, Tame and Untame

Penny, who just arrived in my comments out of the serendipitous blue, had a very sensitive and intelligent post on negative thoughts and emotions a couple days ago. She said, in part:

We don’t know how to sit with these dark feelings, how to listen to them or how to understand their language. All we perceive is their threat, that they might consume and destroy us. Given our collective ignorance of the ways of the soul and lack of good guides that is well justified fear. These emotions can and, at times, do destroy us. But when we learn to listen, the shadow has a lot to tell us.

The whole thing is well worth reading. I winced a little, though, at "our collective ignorance of the ways of the soul and lack of good guides" -- true though it may be of wandering at random in the modern world -- because there is so much accumulated wisdom about the ways of the soul, in the meditative communities of the world. An incredibly rich literature, and living, unbroken traditions stretching back thousands of years. People have been rigorously investigating the ways of the soul for millennia.

I know I go against the current of modern spirituality, in some ways, by insisting on tradition. But I think it's terribly important. We have so little time, and it's so easy to waste it. I see people sometimes struggling with problems and I feel like a mathmetician watching someone struggling to cope with inifinite series without benefit of Newton or Leibniz. She may be making brilliant progress, and no doubt the struggle itself is healthy exercise, but... Calculus has already been invented. It doesn't need to be done all over again from scratch.

This is not to deny, of course, that in a way it all has to be done over again from scratch. Nobody, as we say in the Tibetan tradition, can walk the path for you. But since I've been under the wing of a contemplative tradition, I think my progress has been ten times faster than it was when I was wandering on my own. I made valuable discoveries on my own. But I also forgot them, or misapplied them. I got tangled in snares that Nagarjuna knew how to untie in the 8th Century, and sidetracked by difficulties the Buddha disposed of in his very first teaching. The going was slow, the progress very uncertain. And terribly unsafe. There are pits -- Nihilism and alcoholism, to name two -- that I could have dropped into, and never come out of, in this life.

I was talking to someone who was studying with a shaman, recently, and my main response was -- how do you know what this person's qualifications are? I have no doubt that some of these shamans are in fact highly realized -- but with no institutional apparatus around them, how do you know? A person doesn't have to be much past my own level of realization to be able to hoodwink me. There are frauds and black sorcerors out there who can be very foolish, or very nasty.

But then -- turn again -- from the outside, how do you know any tradition is authentic and dependable? Traditions themselves can become corrupt. (Though I think this happens rarely to contemplative traditions, it clearly has happened, from time to time.) You still have to check them out. Flirt. Read up on them. Visit them. Ask awkward questions. The trouble is that in the first flush of spiritual enthusiasm, many people will be eager to throw themselves under the spiritual authority of the first guru they meet. Caution will seem like faithlessness or sloth. The Dalai Lama's advice, that you shouldn't accept as a heart-teacher anyone you haven't known well for at least two years, strikes me as excellent advice. (Not that *I* took it, of course.)

One of the things I love about the Tibetan Kagyu tradition that I practice within is that it has not only a monastic tradition and institutional structure for authenticating teachers, but also strong shamanic and householder traditions. Many of its greatest teachers came from outside the monasteries, and studied outside of the institutions. I'm a little wary of traditions that seem a little too orderly and neatly sewn up. The life of the spirit just isn't that predictable, that domestic.

Dieting with Buster Keaton

I don't know if I could have experimented with my diet this way without my experience of meditation. Without being accustomed to watch what my mind was doing, but not be swept away by it. A valuable skill even in worldly terms.

My untrained mind knew only two things to do with a craving: 1) to focus on its object -- where might I find that perfect chocolate? How should I eat it? How much can I get away with eating? What will it taste like? Will I need a glass of milk to make the chocolate experience complete? -- or 2) to focus on what the craving meant about me. Am I gluttonous? Weak-willed? Self-indulgent? Whose fault is it if I am? How can I change?

What I didn't know how to do was just watch it, without either running with it or trying to fight it. Just see it, as accurately as possible. It doesn't have to be acted upon, or resisted. It's just a thought, one more mental phenomenon bubbling up the the surface of my mind. I was so superstitious about my mind, before I meditated much. Seems comical to me now, that people think of meditators as people who ascribe too much reality to the inner life. It was before I meditated that I did that. I took my thoughts terribly seriously. I couldn't really tell the difference between the thoughts and their objects; and I took my thoughts as solid evidence about the exact character of my immortal soul. (No, I didn't believe I had an immortal soul, but that didn't stop me from anxiously trying to determine its characteristics.)

I still do those things, of course. I'll treat a thought as if it was identical to the thing thought about -- a thought about West Sudan will arise, say, and I'll think "Oh, the situation in West Sudan needs to be taken seriously. That means this thought about West Sudan also needs to be taken seriously." And then I'll go on to "This means I'm a serious, responsible citizen of the world. Or maybe it means I'm a vain intellectual who thinks about problems but never does anything about them?"

But I've also acquired a pretty established habit of laughing at myself. When I was first learning to sit shamatha, I would sometimes just burst out laughing. The antics of my mind as it wriggled about, trying to escape observation and dash back into its comfortable warren of habitual thoughts, were endlessly entertaining. Still are. I suppose sitting shamatha is serene sometimes, a door into the peace that passeth understanding. But generally it's more like watching a Buster Keaton movie.

That Wonder

Love settles. Like an old house, like a chronic pain. The points of greatest pressure give a little. It adjusts to the stresses. It grows quieter, maybe.

For some people, I'm told, love goes away. Vanishes. Mine never does. Loved once, loved always. I remember every love. I'm still in love with everyone I've ever fallen in love with, however foolishly; however I may have revised my opinion of them over the years, over the crossed wakes of a hundred departing lifetimes. But I've never lost track of that first catch of the breath, of that first wonder. Never hard to think my way back to that. Even angry, relieved, disillusioned -- I reach for that, and there it is.

What is it? That wonder?

I used sometimes to think it was an illusion, maybe, a trick of the species, hijacking the individual for its own purposes. But there's no need. Lust flourishes just fine in its absence. That's all the species needs. The wonder is something that I need. It's a glimpse of reality, maybe. A fleeting, premature understanding of just how deep, how necessary, how inevitable our connection is. The Buddha, maybe, looked at every single living thing with that wonder

Boring Post

Warning: if you're not interested in losing weight, this will probably be quite boring.

About a year ago I started seriously experimenting with my diet. After reading around a while, I'd learned, to my surprise and dismay, that there was actually very little disinterested, empirical data about weight loss. Everybody and their uncle had opinions about it -- and asserted them vigorously -- but the only people who had actually collected data in any quantity were people such as Pritkin or Atkins or Weight Watchers -- people with a vested interest in one kind of diet or another being effective. If you go looking for large, long-term impartial studies comparing methods of weight loss -- you just won't find anything. Weirdly enough, nobody's done it.

So I decided I'd just have to experiment. I started trying different things, tracking what & how much I ate and what happened to me when I ate it. Did I lose weight? Did I become hungry? Did I get cravings?

Along the way I took up -- more from curiosity than because I found him particularly plausible -- the Atkins diet. The results were astonishing. I ate as much as I wanted, I was never hungry, and I dropped weight at a rate that was downright alarming. In a few months I'd lost thirty pounds.

By that time I was pretty sick of the diet -- not to mention worried about what it might be doing to me, consuming all that saturated fat -- and I went off it. I gained back twenty of those thirty pounds pretty rapidly. (This is a serious drawback of the Atkins diet. Once you go off it, and you're back with the sugar-driven appetite, you've got no portion-control discipline to help you, and you're habituated to rich foods. My guess is that most people gain weight back very rapidly if they go off Atkins.) I had thought I might just use Atkins to lose weight, and then take up a healthy diet when I had lost my extra weight, but when I tried going back onto Atkins, I found I was simply revolted by the diet. My body really didn't want it. So no more of the Atkins diet.

But I'd learned something critical from that diet, which was that I had been overeating, not because my will was defective, but because some foods I ate were making me preternaturally hungry. And whatever they were, they weren't meat, nuts, oils, or salad greens.

So I've been experimenting again, within the framework of Weight Watchers. I started off doing a sort of Atkins-y Weight Watchers, eating lots of fish and chicken and veggies, but not much else in the way of carbs. Once again my hunger and craving levels dropped off dramatically, to a quite manageable level. Gradually I've been adding in various foods and seeing what happens. I suspect that insulin levels are what I'm dealing with, but whatever it is, when I'm in this stable state it's quite easy to tell if a new food is going to be bad news or not. If I'm ravenously hungry a couple hours after eating a sizable meal, the new food goes on the bad list. If I'm not particularly hungry three hours later, it's fine.

I already knew that refined sugar and its evil cousin, high-fructose corn syrup, were on the bad list. Likewise potatos and pasta, which kick me straight into craving-land. But some of my other discoveries were surprising. I can eat rye toast, but not white toast. Grapefruit and oranges, but not apples. Cantaloupe but not bananas. Brown rice but not white rice. Most whole-grains are just fine -- steel-cut oats, rye crisp, barley, brown rice, quinoa, are all fine. But not the standard "whole wheat" bread that you get in a restaurant -- I suspect that they've taken to milling that flour so finely (to make a bread as like white bread as possible) that it metabolizes almost as fast as white bread, now.

So I've dropped twelve pounds, since I started this round, and I'm feeling very well and vigorous. The experimentation lends an interest to the process -- I'm not just enduring a diet that someone made up; I'm conducting a personal investigation. As a matter of fact, I'm having a lot of fun. When dieting doesn't mean white-knuckling your way through gnawing hunger and cravings, it's actually a pretty painless and intriguing undertaking.

What is Ngondro?

Claire asked, what is Ngondro? & I realize it's been a year since I was talking about it in an intelligible way.

Ngondro (actually there's an umlaut on the first 'o') is a set of four Tibetan Buddhist meditation practices. Each requires reciting a liturgy, visualizing something, and then repeating a ritual while reciting a mantra or prayer. When you've accumulated a hundred thousand repetitions for one practice, you go on to the next. I've heard of someone completing Ngondro in six months, but it generally takes more like ten to twenty years.

I started a year ago, and I'm still on the first practice: I've done barely 10,000 so far, so at this rate I should be finishing up in forty years, when I'm in my mid-eighties :-)

So the first of the four practices is the practice of refuge, commonly called "the prostrations." It goes like this:

I change into sweatpants and a long-sleeve shirt, and tie a sweatband around my forehead. Then I dust my shrine, fill the little silver offering bowls with water, and light the "butter lamp" (just a wax candle in a little silver goblet; in Tibet they really use butter). I fold the throw rug over to make some padding for my knees. Lay some coins down on the floor for counters. Lay my meditation cushion down behind the rug. Take my liturgy down from the top of the bookshelf and lay it on the rug. Wander out to the living room to let Martha and the kids know I'm starting. Then I close the door and sit down on the cushion, facing the shrine. Ready to start.

First come some prayers and "contemplations." I read them aloud in English. (Many people do it in Tibetan; some feel it has more oomph that way. My own teacher rather encouraged me to do it in English.) These call to mind the briefness and fragility of life, the more-or-less constant dissatisfaction of an agitated mind, and the slavery of living compulsively.

Then I stand up, putting the cushion and the liturgy aside, and I picture in front of myself a vast tree growing out of a beautiful lake. In this tree are seated, or standing, all the buddhas, bodhisattvas (saints), yidams (meditation deities), et cetera, of Tibetan tradition. At the center is my own teacher, embodied as Vajradhara, a dark blue buddha sitting in a full lotus with his hands crossed at his breast, one hand holding a bell, the other holding a "vajra" or "dorje" -- a small, elaborate, gold-colored ritual object that once upon a time was a stylized thunderbolt. Above Vajradhara sits my teacher's teacher, his teacher above that, and so on, up through some twenty figures of this "lineage." At the very top, is another Vajradhara, he being both the source and the end of the lineage.

Then I begin reciting (in Tibetan this time) a refuge prayer -- "I take refuge in the glorious holy lama, I take refuge in the yidams, the deities of the mandala, I take refuge in the victorious buddhas..." I put my hands together, palm to palm, and raise them over my head, then at my throat, and then at my heart, as I recite the prayer. Then I drop to my knees (the rug nicely absorbing the impact) and thence onto my belly, my arms outstretched toward the shrine. All this while I hold the visualization as best I can, while finishing the refuge prayer. As I stand back up I scoot a coin down, as a counter. Then I do it all again, and again, and again.

When I've done as many as are prudent, for a portly middle-aged man with iffy knees, I do some more prayers, replacing the cushion and the liturgy and sitting down again, red-faced and dripping with sweat. Still holding the visualization. Then I let all the figures dissolve into light, one by one. Last of all Vajradhara, who dissolves into light that beams down onto me and is absorbed into my breast. The whole visualization is then dissolved.

For some time I sit quietly.

Then I recite the ending prayers, "dedicating the merit," as we say, to seal the practice -- basically, giving the practice away. Snuff out the candle, empty the offering bowls in the back garden, note down how many I did today, and put everything away.

Thanks for all the good wishes!

After five days of looking after Martha; doing a slipshod job of keeping up the house; marshalling the kids for school, senior dissertation night, and prom night; juggling the emotional needs of four intense but often not very communicative people, I've simply run dry. Sitting here in the office, and can't even imagine working, though I expect if someone comes to me with a direct request I'll lurch into action somehow or other. I don't have the faintest idea how single parents function. Seems a plain obvious impossibility. Nothing in the tank. Gumption and oomph gauges both reading zero.

Astonishingly enough, I've kept to my diet and my Ngondro regimen. They're refuges, in a queer and not-very-Buddhist way. Pieces of my life that don't belong to my family.

Martha's doing well, though she's still not up to driving -- gets dizzy still if she moves suddenly, which seems more likely to be an aftereffect of the narcotics than of the surgery. (She quit the narcotics altogether a couple days ago, and is just taking some Tylenol. She's far more afraid of pain than I am, in the abstract, which is very odd because I've never seen her fazed by concrete pain. Yet she worries, as I never do, about someday being in chronic pain. Maybe she just has a better imagination than I.)

My visualizations have taken a turn that is difficult to describe. Less in control. The refuges become huge, looming over me. More figures have come in. The medicine Buddha on the left, young Thomas Merton on the right. Merton in his shirt-sleeves doing his Loyolan contemplations in a half-lotus. He grins at me mockingly. Vajrayogini, below, bares her teeth and jangles her ankle-bracelets and challenges me, with her strange seductive contempt, to take on her ferocity. Machik Labdron, last to come and last to go, up in the sky above Kalu Rinpoche's right shoulder, spins and dances ecstatically. Vajradhara comes and goes vaguely, midnight blue, glinting with gold, seen only piecemeal: suddenly the hand on the bell-handle, a flash of red-soled feet, the briefly poised vajra, and then only darkness again. The wind blows the leaves and the tree tosses, and sometimes it's day and sometimes it's night. The lake comes suddenly vivid, and vanishes again.

Or again there's nothing there at all. Staring at the wall above the shrine. Ordinary wall. Ordinary wall-lamp distractingly off-center to the visualization. Does the lamp need dusting? What am I doing? Who am I kidding? But I keep going. Down on my knees. Down on my belly. "Dampai choe nam la kyab su chio," I grumble, as my forehead touches the floor, and I try, with no success whatever, to see the painted floorboards as lush grass. My parents are supposed to be on either side of me: are they? Quick surreptitious glance. Nope. Nothing. Back on my feet. Back to Mahakala, under the tree. I can always make a picture of him come, even though it's just the memory of the figure on the thangka upstairs, hardly a real visualization at all. He glares at me, and his glare is reflected from the lake, and then again for a moment the whole tree is there, with all its inhabitants. The wind roars in its branches. I keep going, with an unhappy conviction that the whole affair is supposed to be radiant and serene -- this is more like a scene from a bad movie of Wuthering Heights.

And so it goes on. Seldom far from wondering "what the hell do I think I'm doing?"

A Quick Note

The surgery went very well, & Martha's probably coming home today. Remind me to tell you about the queen of spades, the square dance, and the chaplain. But not today. Love --

The Solution of all my Problems

Let x be the unknown quantity

Let x be the angle between a line drawn from the observer to the point on the horizon directly beneath the target star, and a line drawn due north from the observer

Let x be roughly seized hair and a whimper of pleasure

Let x be

Let x be

We have solved too many equations. When did any real thing equal any other real thing? How many of Dechen's tears equal Roger's shy smile? How many words of stammered fury equal a quiet cup of coffee? I have solved for x far too often. From now on x can solve for me.

Bearing in mind that some equations have an infinite number of solutions. And some have none.

Another Sunday Evening

A slender young woman, sitting with her back straight like a spring sapling, right in front of me. When Michael asked for questions, after a pause, she raised her hand halfway -- more like a tentative wave hello than like a student raising her hand. Michael was looking down, rummaging under his desk, or whatever you call the thing the lama sits behind; but he said "Yeah. Dechen."

The question came out in fragments. There were the people you knew who weren't in the sangha, you know, that you hung out with, and spent time with, but they didn't know what you were doing... and it seemed like the sangha could be... she had something to ask of us... she couldn't always, well, challenge herself, I mean, couldn't see her own stuff, sometimes... when she contemplated the four thoughts, and realized this time was so precious...

There was a catch in her throat, and I became aware, although sitting behind her, that she was near tears. She thought that we could do more than... you know, sometimes it was like, after puja it was all small talk, and, it seemed like... we could be so much more. So that, you know, if people could challenge her...

Michael sat a little while, looking down, perfectly still. There are times when you can almost see the empathy and tenderness welling up in him. The more moving in that he is not at all a touchy-feely kind of guy. He's the sort of man who generally ends up being a engineer, or a technician -- practical, skeptical, empirical.

He began his answer gently and obliquely, as he often does. With a few remarks about how in this tradition it's generally held that you should work with your own stuff. It's very hard to know what other people are working with.

I wish I could reproduce the whole flow of the give and take between him and Dechen. He moved on to talking about intimacy, the sense of connection and closeness between people, and how it never seems quite enough. "I know I've had that feeling all my life," he said quietly. "I don't think anything began to address it until I began taking the Bodhisattva vow seriously. Living for others rather than for myself. And it wasn't that the relationships changed, particularly. But that I realized that connection didn't really have to be reciprocal. The thing that was changing was in me. In a way, I think the whole path is about just that, about making connection possible."

I'm not quoting there -- those quotation marks are lies -- I'm paraphrasing, and not very well, maybe. It surprised me, because I think of Michael as an emissary of the Vajra Buddha family -- the cold blue steel intellect, incisive and analytical, the truth at any cost -- and this was from the Lotus Buddha family, the warm red heart, with a vengeance. But Michael always surprises me. (Very few people can keep surprising me, over the years. I married one of them.)

At the end of the evening he spent nearly an hour talking with Martha about how to practice with the general anaesthesia -- not one of the classical bardos (= "in-between-times," e.g. death or sleep), and how to deal with hospital people and routines. So we got out of there sometime after 9:30. Michael had been teaching since 9:00 A.M.

Falling Forward

Prolapse. Falling forward. It's been that way for years, but now it's bleeding, and fibroid tumors are growing, and even her naturopath says it's time for it to go. "Jerk the works," is how Martha likes to put it.

I didn't know how small an unoccupied uterus was. Smaller than my fist. The first home of Alan and Tori. And now a stranger -- a highly competent stranger, a nice young woman, about twelve years old, she looks to our eyes -- is going to carefully cut it out, and throw it away.

Grieved. A little lost. I've lost contact with some people who are important to me, this last week. One is certainly offended, and one is just plain gone. All day long I can watch my mind make up stories to explain why. Entertaining, in a grimly way.

It takes effort to lift my thoughts out of the path they usually take to, like a duck to water: what does this mean about me? What have I done, said, omitted to do, omitted to say? What is it that has finally been revealed to be despicable about my character, that has driven people away? Or, on the other hand, what pathetic weakness does my need for constant contact reveal? I can simmer those questions over a slow fire of resentment for hours at a time. Profitless and misguided. Not that I may not be despicable somehow. But my chances of guessing how are near zero. And cooking invented dishes of despication can only make things worse.

How hard is it, I ask bitterly, to write a two-sentence email?

Well, it can be very hard. If I were wondering what this meant about them, rather than what it means about me, I might get farther and make fewer mistakes. It's entirely possible my messages have just gone astray. Or it may be that writing me is difficult for hundreds of different possible reasons, including practical ones, or just because of that kind of inchoate balking which makes me almost completely incapable of using the telephone. Or at the other end of the scale, they may be dealing with disasters or joys that simply preclude the possibility of directing attention my way.

So I work with it. Work to hold the door open: the truth is that I just don't know. Not terribly skillfully, but at least with a sense that it needs working. That's something, I guess. I can bundle it up and say, may this confusion, somehow, benefit all sentient beings. Some practice is pretty easy to give away.

Two Prodigals Return

Michelle (formerly of Phlebas) and Iron Monkey are back, hooray! Actually the Monkey's been back for some time, but I'd missed him.

MIchelle wrote:

I had hoped when I began this new blog to write only seriously about things that were worth writing about and I thought anyone would care about. However, it appears that I'll be writing the same daily drivel and minutia of my life. Oh, well.

...she apparently has a difficult time understanding that the daily drivel and minutiae of her life are precisely what we care about, but so long as that doesn't stop her, that's fine.

Iron Monkey I go to above all for his apothegms:

Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

Iron Monkey's After-Shave: Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be adequately explained by the complexity or ambiguity of the underlying situation.

Contra de Musset

De Musset wrote a haunting plea to be remembered, which begins --

Rappelle-toi, quand l'Aurore craintive
Ouvre au Soleil son palais enchanté ;
Rappelle-toi, lorsque la nuit pensive
Passe en rêvant sous son voile argenté ;
A l'appel du plaisir lorsque ton sein palpite,
Aux doux songes du soir lorsque l'ombre t'invite,
Ecoute au fond des bois
Murmurer une voix :
Rappelle-toi.

I would ask you, when you hear a murmuring voice deep in the woods -- do not listen. Do not remember. Do not recall my face, or my touch. All my life I have begged you to remember me, and I will beg you again -- you know. But please, forget me. This little heap of charred sticks has never been a fire. Let the wind scatter it.

If a little whimper rises from the weedy ground where they've pitched my bones, do me one last kindness, and hear the moans for what they are -- a shiver of cruelty, an echo of confusion.

I want to be forgotten as cleanly, as completely, as a swallow forgets the last gnat it scooped out of the air. Forget me, as a good pool player, frowning at the table, forgets his last shot. As good painter facing a new canvas forgets his last painting. Consume my memory. Lick up the crumbs, and suck your fingers until the faintest taste is gone.

Correction

It's curious how much attention people who don't practice in the Buddhist tradition give to the concept of "enlightenment," and how little people who do practice give it. You would think it would be the other way around: that those people who are most interested in enlightenment would be those who would most want to practice. But in fact a dead giveaway of a person who's new to Buddhist practice is that they have lots of questions about enlightenment. Does it include this? Does it look like that? And of course what the questions give you is a precise map of their obsessive cravings and fears. Does it include romantic love? Oral sex? Garlic cheese bread? Does it look like loneliness? Boredom? Indifference?

I don't, personally, give a damn about enlightenment, or freedom from all suffering. I couldn't care less. My motivation, like Thomas Merton's, is simply this: I am sick of myself. I can't stand it any more. The ceaseless fret of the ego, the craven dishonesty, the lurching awkwardness of always wearing a three-hundred pound mask with bad ventilation and tiny, poorly-placed eyeholes.

You think I want to take that mask off forever? Well, sure. But what I really want is to push it aside for just one second, get one glimpse of light, get one gasp of free air. That's plenty of motivation for me. And this path has already delivered that, more than once. That's all I ask for. More than I'd hoped.

HOLD IT

Stop right there. Go wish Susurra de Luz a happy birthday. I won't blog until you do, so it's no good hanging around here.

She's a whisper of light in a dark noisy world.

The Beach at Otter Rock

We go to a narrow, protected beach in the summer, between two promontories. A little waterfall drops down to a pile of giant pick-up-sticks dirftwood, and then meanders as a stream down to the sea. Its course is always different, shifting from day to day as the tide remakes the beach. Sometimes it swoops sixty yards south, sometimes sixty yards north, on its way down to an outcropping of rock where the gulls gather and the surf pounds.

The kids and I love to try to change the course of the stream. Often we see evidence of others having tried, usually by damming it up with the head-sized rocks that are plentiful in its bed. They haven't often succeeded.

We do it more cleverly. We pick our place carefully, and begin digging an alternate course. The water washes into it, stirring the sand and making digging the next bit easier. We dig the next bit, which makes the bit beyond it easier. Soon we have a little trickle taking an alternate course down the beach. Now it's digging its own way. And now it makes sense to start dropping rocks into the main channel -- the water has a different way to go, now. Every obstruction in the main channel diverts more water into our channel, and digs our channel deeper. We never even try to block off the main channel. But we come back in the evening and the main channel is dry. The stream's in its new course.

That, really, is what practice is like. There's no way to just change the course of our mindstreams by brute force, by trying to shut our old habits down. And there's no way to just pick it up and put it someplace else. When we start digging the new course it looks like an impossible task -- who could dig that streambed out all the way to the ocean? But that's to forget two things. One is that the stream wants to get to the ocean. Its tendency is always oceanward. The second is that once the smallest channel is begun, the water begins fretting it and enlarging it. It's just the nature of water, and it's the nature of mind, too.

I said earlier that what turned my mind one way or another was the accumulated weight of prayer, meditation, and contemplation. But that's not true, really. It's the force of the mindstream that's been skillfully nudged toward a new bed by those practices. It's not the practices themselves. They're just little scratches in the sand.

Coming About

This is ground we've gone over before, but it always changes. Beth wrote, at Cassandra Pages:

Our attitude toward each day is really a choice that is ours to make; people who live with adversity every day show us that way.

Upon which Tonio commented, in part:

Our ability to choose our daily attitude seems to me to be more like a gift, and not one which every one has been given.

I'll leave aside the theological question of free will, because I don't know squat about it -- I've always had a feeling that the question on that level somehow contradicted itself, and wasn't quite real -- but on a practical level it's important, and it arises everyday. I had a depressive episode flickering in my peripheral vision all day yesterday, but I managed to escape it eventually. I don't think I did anything different, though, from times when it's really settled in, in deadly earnest. I feel like I just got lucky. I could say I chose not to become depressed, and if I were not being very careful I think I would say this: the sequence of mental events was exactly that which we usually describe that way. It feels like a decision. And once I characterize it as a decision, I would also characterize it as an easy one. I just shrugged my shoulders and -- hey presto! -- walked right out from under that impending depression, as easy as you please.

But actually, when I don't walk out from under it, what exactly is different? I'm not sure, but my best guess is that it has to do with karma and the accumulation of merit -- or in non-Buddhist terms, you might say prior action and habit. It seems to me, that when I'm flickering on the brink of depression like that, I'm actually making dozens of decisions very rapidly -- far more rapidly than I can track or control -- and what settles the matter is how many of those decisions turn this way or that.

In the moment I really am relatively helpless. Whether I can even try, or how much I can try, depends not on what I'm doing now -- or not very much -- but on what I've done in the past, when things were moving slowly enough for me to steer them. Its the accumulated weight of prayer, contemplation, meditation, -- and a certain amount of something else -- that determine whether this ship comes about, or misses stays. From a bounded perspective, you'd say that something else was blind luck; from an unbounded perspective maybe you'd call it karma from previous lives -- for practical purposes it really doesn't matter.

Lekshe at the Groundbreaking

Well, I've learned recently that I'm soft, so maybe the fact that Lekshe's speech for the groundbreaking for our long retreat center made me weep doesn't mean that much -- but it's the best short description I've ever read of what Buddhist practice is for. What we're doing, why we're doing it.

I don't know if you've ever had the experience of looking at a series of photographs which are all perfectly recognizable, except for one bizarre image that everyone else seems to agree is you...? There's a series of prose portraits over there at Lekshe's, and one of them is supposed to be me. The rest of them are brilliantly accurate, so I suppose the presumption has to be that the portrait of me is too. The difference is that the photographs usually make me look like a doofus, whereas this portrait is absurdly flattering, so I want everyone to read it. By all means keep the "tall thin tea-drinking" image in mind as you read, too.

Speaking of Food

If you want a dismal experience, log into any general Buddhist discussion group and bring up the topic of vegetarian diet. Shortly you will find people who had moments before been deep in cordial, searching discussions of Nagarjuna's verse, people with years of real practice behind them, calling each other murderers and liars. People leave in huffs, never to return. People who ordinarily would never dream of disparaging another group's practice declare that whole swathes of Buddhists are not in fact Buddhists at all. The only other hot-button topic at all like it, among Buddhists, is abortion, but abortion at least is not a denominational issue: there are people who fall into either side of that debate in every Western Buddhist group that I know of.

But the vegetarian/carnivore split, in the West (presumably the East, too, but I don't know much about that), falls largely between the Zen and Theravadin practitioners, on the one hand, and the Tibetan practitioners, on the other. This is not to say that there are no vegetarian Tibetan Buddhists: there are plenty of them. But they don't feel that vegetarianism is critical to Buddhist practice -- if they did, the fact that the Dalai Lama eats meat would be terribly disturbing. Likewise I sure there are plenty of people who eat meat among the Zen and Theravadin folk, but I assume they mostly take it as read that they're incurring bad karma by doing so, that they're doing something that violates the precepts of their path.

The difference is generally explained by the fact that so many Tibetans were nomads and herdsmen: there's not much else to eat, in some of the high places of Tibet. In his exile in India, H.H. the Dalai Lama decided, so the story goes anyway, that now that he was in a place where vegetable food was abundant, he really should become vegetarian. He gave up meat. Very soon he became quite ill, and his doctors implored him to eat meat again. So now he eats meat every other day. "I'm virtuous half the time," he says.

My experience giving up meat has been pretty much like that, except that I cave in a lot sooner. I would like to give it up. I feel I should. All the old texts are perfectly clear on this. Buddhists aren't supposed to take life. That other people do my killing for me doesn't seem to me to let me off the hook -- in fact, if anything it makes it worse: not only am I causing these animals' deaths (leaving aside for the moment the conditions of their lives, which are in many cases much more distressing than their deaths), I'm also encouraging other people to incur bad karma. (In Tibet, I'm told, the butchers are Muslims: I've never quite understood the reasoning by which that makes it all okay.) But the two times I've tried giving up meat I've lasted about 36 hours before I surrendered. The last time I found that I was a menace on the road: I simply couldn't drive -- couldn't track where the car was, in the lane -- couldn't remember where I was going or how to get there. It was a harrowing experience, and not one I'm eager to repeat.

But I cherish a small, secret hope that if the present change in my diet works out -- I've cut out red meat -- that I'll be a step closer to stopping eating meat altogether. That I'm at least edging in that direction. We'll see.

Unexpected Fun

I read the numbers, which were very bad. Total cholesterol 295. LDL way high, HDL way low. The exact numbers I didn't want to see: Numbers that said "Yup, and your grandpa keeled over of a heart attack at 62, too!"

The nurse smiled brightly and anxiously at me. "I'm sure that we've found this in plenty of time, and you're going to lick it!" she said. I believed in her compassion. I frequently do believe in the compassion of nurses. She was concerned about me, and concerned that the news might knock the fight out of me.

She needn't have worried. These were in fact the numbers I'd expected. Well, maybe not quite such a spectacular total. I didn't even know cholesterol totals could go that high. But I have subsisted most of my life on a diet of sugar and saturated fat -- it's totally unjust that I'm barely over the line into "obese"; if life were fair I would weigh three hundred pounds -- and some days I can actually feel the melted butter flowing in my veins, the plaque forming in my arteries.

So when I got back to work, Wednesday, I got online and signed up for the online Weight Watchers program. The program's changed a lot, and for the better, since the last time I was on it, in the 1980's sometime, which was the last time I saw 160 lbs. And if you derive great pleasure from tracking and calculating online, the web application is a blast. I've been enjoying pulling up their "point values" for various foods, which is entertaining and instructive. They've taken fiber to heart, and lost their big dietary cholesterol superstition (there never has been any reason to believe, so far as I can see, that ingesting less cholesterol reduces your blood cholesterol, except that you can't avoid cholesterol without avoiding saturated fat.) They treat all fats as equal (at least for point purposes), which is kind of silly -- two tablespoons of butter the dietary equivalent of three tablespoons of peanut butter? But otherwise their system works well, and it's extremely simple. I can already guess values for foods I haven't looked up pretty accurately.

So far I feel wonderful, and I slept like the dead last night. The icky oily feeling of having eaten too much fat is gone; I feel lighter and clearer already. It will get difficult, I sure -- the fun of tracking my food will turn into tedium soon enough, and soon I'll be hankering for large quantities of anything I can't have, just because I can't have it. But for now I'm just feeling happy, and having unexpected fun.

Asking For It

Yesterday I memorized Hopkins's poem "Heaven-Haven," and as it came and went in my mind --

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

-- parodies of it rose in my mind: it so much does not describe what I have desired, nor --

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

-- where I have asked to be. My version runs

I have desired to go
Where the turmoil of disaster races,
Where remorse and jealousy gnaw each other's faces.
And no lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
The object of hatred and envy,
Where pity is eaten by sidelong greed,
And anchors are dragged by the sea.

I am surprised that I have never seen, as an argument for the existence of God, that He so often, in His infinite mercy, does not give us what we ask for.

Filled with love this morning, rueful love, for all of you. May this be a day of soft light and slow beauty and a soothing of all that is burned and raw. I have desired all good things for you all: as Lear's fool would say, before skipping offstage -- "And that's true too."

A Place for Everything

I know your kind. When you're ready to die you'll want to hole up somewhere, in a high cave over a desolate valley. A place for everything and everything in its place. Time to tidy yourself up and put yourself away.

Don't you dare. I won't scream at you to stay. I won't pummel you. I'll let you make your turnings, follow that light. Knowing that you'll go so fast, and I'll never, never be able to follow. I won't make a scene.

Unless you try to hide away. Then you'll see, my friend, just how indecorous I can be.

You'll leave a mess. It's a messy business, dying. One mess you don't get to clean up yourself, no matter how tidy you are.

I know that others have a claim on that mess. Lots of others. I can share. But I won't be left out.

Slow Reeds

Check out Peter's new site, slowreeds. Where you'll find such stuff as:

A friend says he read the book, but that's not the book's story.

I read it myself after he had returned it. The syntax was clear and all the furniture was in place. The verbs were still cocked. One simile confessed to only a faint recollection of my friend.

When I go into a book, I throw myself around. First, I go after the verbs and make an example of them. I drag the pronouns to headquarters and book them. There are only a few of them and they usually talk. I chase the metaphors out of their villages. They look back and see the smoke rising, and they discover what's important in life.

Never try to understand a book. Make it understand you, and you'll get along fine.

Advice to the Lovelorn

"Still trying to make it real, are we, deathborn?" asked the god softly, looking at me sideways. His gold and silver headdress rattled and gleamed. He leaned over me, and his half-smile vanished. His eyes were cold blue lights.

"You need not worry -- yet," he said. "You couldn't do it if you held the intention steadily for all of your paltry seventy years." He giggled suddenly. "You, who can't hold an intention for five minutes!"

He laid his bright hand lightly on my arm, and smoke rose from under his fingers as they seared my skin. "My dear little fool. You think you know what desire is? You think you know what suffering is? Try it when you can't die, little one."

His breath hung around me, the faint scent of daphne blossom. He leaned back again, and his jewelled necklaces glittered as a scarf coiled slowly around his shoulder. He looked past me a moment, and the ghostly half-smile reappeared. "If I were you," he remarked, "I think I would start learning how to leave off trying to make it real. You got lucky this time." His eyes widened slightly, and a tremor ran through the room. "Next time, maybe you will be able to make it real. And then you will have to live with it."

Easter Eve

I wrote this last night, but (in keeping with the tenor of the day) it wouldn't publish. Happy Easter, friends!

A day of muddy thinking and half-hearted desires. Wanting to want, but not quite being able to pull it off. Left my third pint, barely tasted, on the bar, and wandered home. Walked around the reservoir with Martha. A beautiful day, but I barely saw it.

And now evening. Tomorrow is Easter. Is there a name for this day? Maundy Thursday, Good Friday -- but I don't have a name for today. Easter Eve scarcely sounds right. Maybe it signifies, that this day should not have a name. The only anniversary of God's death-day. I mean, the only day when he was dead all day. Friday is the day of horror and tragedy. But on Saturday it sinks in. Saturday his heart-students must have started thinking "Now how do I live, without him? Why do I live without him?" And then the panic: "I can't do this on my own. It seemed so easy, so obvious, so real when he was here. And now it's all impossible, tortuous, unbelievable."

I've written before about Jesus's rebuke to Thomas -- his praise of faith, faith without or even against evidence. I had forgotten, really, the circumstances. Thomas wasn't being asked to have faith in a story or an abstract credo. He was just being asked to keep faith with his heart-teacher. He had seen this man work miracles -- could he not hold his faith, keep (as we Vajrayanists would say) his samaya, his devotion to his teacher, unbroken for even three days?

No. Nor can I. I can picture myself stubbornly insisting, to my living teacher, that he must be dead. In fact I do it all the time.

Lists

Today, for some reason, is a day for lists. Here's a nice sappy sentimental one that I'm sure will make Tonio cringe, and possibly unlink me.

Nine Reasons why I love Tonio

Because he pays attention.

Because he loves Lekshe (and numerous other people whom I also love.)

Because his generosity is always overflowing in odd directions. He is the sort of person who is always anonymously taking care of something for someone.

Because he writes extraordinary poetry, while not really even wanting to.

Because he disagrees when every else is busy congratulating each other, and agrees when there's dead silence.

Because he has lived through disaster without cultivating hatred or indifference.

Because he has more than once managed to cause me to both laugh and cry with a single blog post.

Because he's both Texan and Italian.

Because he has gathered blue sea glass on the beach.



Security

I just counted, and before I can begin work each morning, I must use:

1 identification badge
(used to get through the main door and the stairwell door)

2 keys
(one to open the cabinet in which I store my laptop; the other to lock the laptop to my desk.)

4 passwords
(1. laptop power-on password
2. laptop hard-drive password
3. Windows 2000 password
4. Lotus Notes password
-- Also I frequently need a fifth, my corporate intranet password. These passwords are all different, and none may be written down.)

Somehow all this does not succeed in making me feel secure.

A Grimace at the Empty Wall

I am tired of not kissing you
I am tired of not reaching for your hand
I am tired of recollecting and bearing in mind

I am tired of the blot of darkness
I am tired of marking time
I am tired of watching my thoughts twist

Elizabethan courtiers, I'm sure
Held their graceful smiles and ready wit
Just as far as the turning of the corridor

And then stuck out their tongues and raged
And silently mocked the Queen
And grimaced at the empty wall.

Riding my Horse, Again

My mare picks her way carefully across the slope. She's irritated at me for bringing her into this pathless country, and also irritated at me for making her cross here, rather than following the ridgetop; but my job is to see without being seen, and I have no intention of riding along the skyline. She has too much professional pride, I know, to let her irritation cloud her judgement. She keeps a sensible pace, stepping daintily through the scrub and among the rocks.

Not wearing armor today. Just a sword I trust, in its old leather scabbard. I'm a scout today, not a fighter. I can look down the long slopes to bright water. Open rough country. Is it Iceland? Norway? Further east, in the Baltic?

Questions such as these make the transition to waking. In my waking life I don't know how to ride a horse -- I've ridden only once or twice. I don't wear a sword. I don't scout or fight. And I've never been to any of those places.

But I wake up this way several times a month. Is it always the same dream? Or do I wake out of other dreams, groping for the memory of this one? I don't know. But the sway in the saddle, the dust on my lips, the skill of horse and rider, are palpable to me. I don't know what to make of it.

Except this: I'm responsible for the safety of other people. And it feels absolutely right that I should be so. A job for which I'm suited by birth, temperament, training and skill.

And so to the waking world, leaves tumbling against the skylight. A world in which very little of any of my work seems to suit me. And in which such responsibility as I feel for others is mostly misplaced. A friend was in emotional & spiritual difficulty recently and I could do nothing to help. Didn't even learn about it till the next day. And that day was wretched then, because I wanted so much to help and there was so much nothing for me to do.

I wanted to render the comfort a lover sometimes renders. To hold her, soothe her, read silly comforting books to her. And that was as impossible as the sky is wide, for reasons ranging from practical (so who has that kind of time?) to relational ("bye, Martha, I'm off to spend the night reading to someone else") to personal (would this even look like help to her? Could she, would she, should she take it as such?)

So I suffered. And suffering like that only shows up driving in a car of attachment or aversion, I know that. What is this one? What's it made of?

Oh, it's made of lots of things. Believing, in the first place, that her unhappiness was there and my happiness was here and I might somehow give her a piece of my happiness. & I didn't just want her to be happy, I wanted her to be happy because of me. I thought about that, as my thoughts wound about looking for some way to make her happy. I was looking for ways to make her happy that, just incidentally, would have my name written all over them in big letters. It was an interesting exercise to try to think: what could I do that didn't have my name on it? What possibilities might be there? The unfamiliarity of the exercise was humiliating.

I have cherished the idea that knowing me would be somehow transformative. I carry that piece of attachment clutched very tight in my hot little hand. Anyone who panders to that fantasy has instant access to me. I can be remarkably slow to notice that if knowing me is tranformative, then surely... the person knowing me ought to transform at some point? To release that clutch... well, I'm working on it. But don't hold your breath.

Vajradhara goes Dark

Visualization is a strange business. I've written, I think, about how Vajradhara (a.k.a. Dorje Chang) vanished at one point from his place at the center of the refuge tree. When he came back, he was sometimes sky blue, whereas he's supposed to be dark blue. Then I had a sort of minor epiphany, and realized that the reason he was sky blue was that I was unwilling to have him so dark that his features weren't clear to me -- even though in many representations that's exactly how dark he is: it's very difficult to distinguish the contours of his nose or of his ears. Now, this shouldn't really be a problem. Tibetan Buddha faces are (to Western-trained eyes, anyway) monotonous: there are rigid rules for the proportions, and you don't get to mess with them. I already know what Mr V's features look like like. They look just like Buddha Shakyamuni's, or any other Buddha's. Nevertheless, I wanted badly to be able to see them. And it suddenly came to me that if I was supposed to be able to see them, then -- Vajradhara wouldn't be midnight blue. I was second-guessing the thangka painters as if I knew better than they (and the tradition) what Vajradhara should look like.

So I let him go dark. I let his features be only red lips and the whites of his eyes, and the little swirly forehead thing. Of course, he is supposed to be brilliant, too, so I gave him a sort of irridescence, like the blue gleam of jet black hair, or the shine of a crow's feathers. And now, suddenly, he was no longer my sky-blue harmless pal, but a dark and almost ominous figure, twice as big as he had been before, gold jewelry gleaming on his chest and arms and headdress, his face unreadable. Still Sarah, maybe, but not necessarily pleased with me or interested in me. I had a feeling that maybe I had just turned a corner, and this visualization might never again br the sort of cozy, intimate thing it started out to be. More spacious, maybe, but less safe.

Fabulous Beasts

I have wandered through my life as stupid as a camera.

You sent me a photograph of a lady in an office, with the note: "See! Proof, I work."

The lady was kindly, middle-aged, comfortably unkempt. I looked at the picture with disbelief. How could a camera have looked at you, and seen that?

I look at you and see la tigresse du soleil, hunting at dusk quicker than the eye, or asleep in the sun slower than the turning earth. I see a careful five-year-old girl, her tongue at the corner of her mouth, arranging shells. I see a dragon with poison-green scales, wily and wicked and old as the hills. I see a still mother on the zafu at dawn, whose daughter quietly creeps under her meditation shawl and sits in the eye of shamatha, tenderly held in the small space of infinity. I see the ice climber, half five-year-old and half dragon, patiently working out the route of an ascent into the blue silence. But in all "the shadows of your changing face" I have never seen what that camera saw. That kindly middle-aged lady at her desk.

But this is more stupidity. Of course I have seen that lady. I will see a dozen such tomorrow at work, with my stupid camera eyes, and be completely fooled. There is no kindly middle-aged lady working in an office. That's a chimaera, a fabulous beast, a story palmed off on generations of credulous camera-eyed fools. The world is, actually, full of tigresses and dragons. I have learned to see just one.

White Elephants, and a Bed of Lies

Here is a poem for Tonio...

In Dispraise of Poetry

When the King of Siam disliked a courtier,
he gave him a beautiful white elephant.
The miracle beast deserved such ritual
that to care for him properly meant ruin.
Yet to care for him improperly was worse.
It appears the gift could not be refused.

-- Jack Gilbert

----------------------------

Not my cross to bear. I struggle through an intricate labyrinth of second guesses, exhausted by joy and harassed by hope. Forty-six years old and not yet out of adolescence. There's no point in even beginning to apologize for my existence. My uncanny run of luck goes on.

Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.

Sometimes it seems to me that I walk in a dense cloud of lies, that I breathe lies, drink lies, and crawl at night into a bed of lies. That I must mutter lies all night long in my sleep. Koshtra, the Minor Functionary of Lies. I can't put my finger on a single one, but I know that I'm surrounded by them.

So -- good night --

Announcements

If the blogrolling site is struggling, when you attempt to load this page you will see just a blank green page, and the little lying status indicator at the bottom of the page will say "done." If you wait till the attempt to load the blogroll fails (20 to 30 seconds) the rest of the page will load, and you will be rewarded with my golden prose.

Announcement #2: I owe you email. I know. I owe everyone email. Just as some people respond to being in debt by going out and spending money, I respond to being behind in my email by posting on my blog. When I fall silent here, I might be answering your mail. (then again, I might be catching up on the dishes.)

Generic Mind

So Duckling asked about "the horror of the ordinary," and what Eastern religions had to say about it. (First of all, a correction to what I said earlier: C.S. Lewis's phrase was "the horror of the obvious." Closely related, but not identical.)

We all want to be special, I'm sure. All human beings. Not something the modern West invented. But I think it's something we've become peculiarly addicted to -- that it's the version of "self-cherishing" that is in the ascendant over us. We have an ideology that supports it -- self-actualization -- and we promote it quite shamelessly. Elementary-school teachers tell kids relentlessly that they are special and they ought to prize being special. Parents are urged to tell their kids they're special, and they do. We're all just terribly special and unique, we're told, and that's what makes us valuable.

The dark converse is lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce. There are six billion of us now, going on seven, and it doesn't take long for the doubt to percolate up to consciousness. Am I really special? In what way? When you try to pin one of these elementary-school teachers or parents down -- just what is unique about me? The sure signs of gobblydegook appear: there is no evidence. There is no content. The uniqueness is just insisted upon again, with increasing shrillness. And behind it is the dread that it is not true.

And it is dreadful, because we've been told one big fat lie: that it's our uniqueness -- and only our uniqueness -- that makes us valuable. If we are not unique, then, we are worthless.

Well, what Buddhism has to say about it, is that this is precisely backwards. Mind is precious and enduring because it is "luminous, empty, and unimpeded" -- which is to say, really, that it's generic. Obscurations may be unique, but the luminous mind beneath them is just -- mind. Common or garden-variety mind. Yours is no different from mine. It may not even be distinct from mine. We are only valuable, and only free, insofar as we are utterly ordinary.

Burning

Edge up, till the hair on my knuckles burns and my eyes water. Look through the shimmer. I can see them playing in the flames, white and utterly pure: the salamanders.

Burning. Tell Dido to put her matches away and make the beds; Tell Orestes and Elektra it was all a regretable misfortune, and dinner is at six; Danish princes may as well shake hands all round with their Wittenberg friends, and call off their late-night meetings. We all have something better to think about.

Salamanders playing, white hot, in the fire.

Want of Wanting

No want of wanting -- not here.
I want, and I hold this want
With wanting, and I fend it off
Wantonly, with wanting.

Just wanted you to know.