First Fast

 So a 17-hour fast (I was aiming for 16.) Finished my lunch around 1:00 yesterday, and broke my fast around 6:30 this morning.

Observations:

1. I drank a couple cups of hot water in the evening, and I got up to pee after every damn sleep cycle. Four times, I think. I don’t know if it was hunger, or a revved metabolism, or the extra water, or the combination: but anyway, it was not a great-quality sleep. NB I did have one of those really deep naps yesterday afternoon, so that’s a possible factor. Also recollect that carb bomb of the birthday croissant and two enormous cookies. That probably destabilized my blood sugar a bit.

2. The hunger really does come and go. It doesn’t just ramp up and up. And I wasn’t all that hungry when I woke up to pee: certainly not so hungry as to make it especially difficult to get back to sleep. A really interesting thing was that when I when I got up in the morning, and was on the verge of breakfast -- breakfast was within sight -- the hunger vanished. A lot of it apparently consisted of anxiety about whether I would be able to do the fast, and whether fasting meant I would never get to eat again. I could easily have dawdled another hour before getting breakfast. (I did in fact take my first walk before I ate.)

3. At no point was I anywhere near as desperately hungry as I used to be -- multiple times a day -- when I was fat. No cravings.

Little Fishes (part 2), & the Theory of Fasting

Huh. Okay, last night was the canned herring with lemon and pepper. The idea was, I'd eat 300 calories' worth of them, and add some olive oil to the potatoes. Upon opening the cans, I abandoned the oil idea at once. They're not kidding when they call them "oily little fish"! Even I, who adore fats, was not going to add more oil than that. That was plenty.

Once again, I'm startled by how much food my 100 grams of hamburger translates to in other proteins. No wonder beef tastes so good! A calorie bomb.

There's bunch of stuff thrown in with this version of the herring -- this is definitely processed food we're talking, here -- but I don't think you could seriously argue it was, nutritionally, a worse dinner than the burger and ice cream. And it was delicious.

(One advantage of eating precisely the same dinner for four years straight, I suppose, is that anything new will seem marvelous.)

So here is a second success. Today and the day after I'll be finishing up my ground turkey. Then probably it's on to the canned salmon. Science marches on.

---

One of my many unexamined dietary assumptions was that a person should seek a steady state, a perfect calorie intake, and stay there. From my recent reading, this appears to be wrong: actually cycling through periods of glut and deprivation is what the system is designed for, and both states confer advantages that a steady state will not. That, at any rate, is the hypothesis I'm working from now. Not big swings in body weight -- not ten pounds a go -- but some alternation of surplus and fasting. In a period of glut the body builds muscle much more readily, and muscle mass is good for you in a couple different ways, practically and metabolically. And at some point in a period of fasting the body kicks into "conserve and repair" mode and starts cleaning up damaged cells and mitochondria. Then you get shiny new cells with snazzy new appliances, if I understand right, but more importantly, you stop the old senile cells from sending confusing and inflammatory messages to all the other cells in their neighborhood. This clean-up process is called autophagy, and it's thought to be why calorie restriction sometimes extends lifespan.

The catch, for the humble end-user of this theory, is: what counts as a "fast"? 16 hours daily? 1 day every 2 weeks? five days per quarter? And how much calorie restriction: 50% 75%? 100%? Nobody really has any idea what the ideal protocol would be. Autophagy turns out to be a difficult thing to detect: you can't just prick your finger and get a number for it. Presumably some clever person in a laboratory will figure out how to do this, at some point; but for now, it's just guesswork. My plan is to do what seems offhand to be easiest, which is one day (36-hour) fast every two weeks. I'll give that a shot next Tuesday. It doesn't seem (in prospect) all that difficult to just not eat for a day.

The Great Protein Swap

Hi Dr P-----,

Thanks so much! I'm afraid there's nothing mysterious about my cholesterol numbers edging up this year :-)

I propose seeing what I can do with diet and exercise, first, and seeing if I can get that total chol/HDL ratio at least back down to 5 by June. I'm not dead set against taking statins, but I want to at least put up a fight. I'm pretty clear about what I need to do.

Can we plan on another lipid panel in June, and go from there?

Dale

The great protein swap begins tonight, with ground turkey (thanks Am!) instead of burger and ice cream. I reckon 150 grams of Turkey about equals the calories of 100 grams of burger, and 50 more grams would about match the ice cream. We’ll see how much I actually want, but certainly 200 grams would be a plausible place to start. 

And salt tracking started last night. I’d be very surprised if limiting salt had any effect on the cholesterol -- it really shouldn’t -- but it might have an effect on the blood pressure, which would in turn affect the results of Dr P’s risk calculator. And it’s just been hanging, for a long time, and I’m tired of it being an issue out in the offing. Anyway, this is just to get a starting read on how much I’m actually adding to my food at the moment (not counting the salt already in the lunch soups, which should be, I dunno, less than 1/3 of a teaspoon per serving, probably a lot less; also not counting the salt I throw into the oatmeal, which is about 1/4 teaspoon.) If you don’t know your starting numbers, you don’t know anything.

The other big question in the offing is fasting. I’ve got a book on hold at the library, about fasting and autophagy -- The Switch, by James Clement -- and decide how I’m going to start fasting after that.

[Evening] Well, the turkey (150 grams) was not what I expected. I doubled (at a rough guess) the olive oil, making perhaps a four inch pool rather than 2 ½ - 3 -inch, and ended up crumbling the turkey, and it drank every bit of the oil. So rather than having potatoes saturated with oil, I had very tasty turkey and dry potatoes. The combination was pleasing and I in no way felt deprived: but the turkey was so tasty that I must remember to examine its label carefully. Did they sneak some sugar into it? [ans: no. Turkey and Rosemary extract.] By the reckoning on the package, the turkey calories will have been 210, which should be less, even with the extra oil, than the 100 grams of hamburger and ¼ cup of ice cream. So I would call this part of the project a grand success. Whether it has any impact on my waistline or lipid numbers, of course, we won’t know for some time. Tomorrow will be canned fish, of one sort or another -- I bought four different sorts -- and some olive oil drizzled on the potatoes.

So far I'm not missing the ice cream at all: that's encouraging. That was the last refined sugar in my diet.

Meanwhile, I have introduced a second daily walk, which I'm gradually going to increase until it's the same length as my first daily walk. (Gradually, because last time I kicked up my walking distance rapidly my knee objected strongly.) So far so good, with that. My main exercise is still resistance training, mostly bodyweight. I have to be very prudent about how I stress my knees and my lumbar spine. I am not a big fan of cardio, either by preference or by theory, but 15 or 20 minutes a day was really not enough. And I like what having a walk on either side of my afternoon siesta does to my mental clarity. I might start tying the walks to waking from sleep, come to think of it. That's an idea.

Little Fishes

 

Well, my doctors are at it again, trying to get me to take statins. So I've been going through what I went through ten years ago, browsing studies and reading Cochrane reviews and getting the lay of the land. American medicine is very aggressive about preventive statins. It's a maddening edge-case, for me: kind of a toss-up. On the one hand, the benefit is clear enough: if you put a thousand at-risk people on statins for five years, you'll prevent some 18 major cardiovascular episodes. But as far as I can tell, no one clearly understands why. The popular narrative of cholesterol "clogging" arteries is not what actually happens. And meanwhile, you've also put 982 people on a serious systemic drug for five years, without measurable benefit. I don't have confidence that these studies (all of which are underwritten by people who -- surprise! -- want to sell statins) are looking really carefully for long-term side-effects. I don't doubt that the research is conscientious, by its own lights. But its lights are not exactly mine. The balance has shifted slightly in favor of the pro-preventive-statins side, in the last ten years, but not much. I'm undecided.

But still, even given all the caveats, my cholesterol is outlandishly high, and probably indicates that I should do something about it. One thing, which I'm already undertaking, is to increase my (quite lame) cardio: I'm gradually going to double my modest daily walking time.  The other thing, of course, is my diet.

I have fixed a lot about my diet, in the past four years, but there's two big changes I've left for later: salt and saturated fat. Salt is a project I'm not willing to undertake yet. But I eat a lot of saturated fat at dinner: 100 grams of ground beef, and a densely-packed quarter cup (probably half a cup, unpacked) of ice cream. I have not had much luck tampering with those: I've partly been able to make all the other changes because I still able to look forward to gorging myself on saturated fat at dinner. But I think I'm going to take another, sustained shot at replacing the burger and ice cream with little fishes. Sardines, or herring, or whatever you call them. Little guys towards the bottom of the food chain. It needs to be canned, because no way am I taking on the burden of purchasing, storing, and prepping fresh fish every day. Not happening.

So. I'll have a lot of calories to spend -- upwards of 400 -- if I drop the burger and ice cream. I have a hard time picturing eating 400 calories of sardines. (Truth be told, I have a hard time picturing eating sardines at all) So at least it will be an "all you can eat" situation, which may placate the appetite demons somewhat.

We'll see. It's an experiment. If I can't do it -- if it leads to intolerable cravings and binges -- then I'll just accept that, resume the burger and ice cream, and go on my way: moving one blood lipid marker down is not worth putting the whole project at risk. Maybe I've done as much as I can: if so, that's all right. But I am going to make the attempt. Market day is Monday, so that's when I start.

---

Having to decide about the statins evoked an odd emotional crisis, which I'm still sorting out. My doctor ordered me to start taking them in a note on my online chart. It was not camouflaged as a suggestion, or a consultation. It was phrased simply as a command. This is a new-ish doctor for me, who is busy and rather rushed, who probably was not bearing in mind, or didn't know, or didn't care, that doctors have ordered me to take statins before and I have said no. 

I don't respond well to being ordered, when I think I ought to be consulted. As a white man with and advanced degree and a retirement stash, I'm greatly impressed with my own importance and dignity, and I expect everyone else to be too. 

At the same time, I score off the charts on those personality quizzes that assess agreeability. I prefer to avoid conflict. And I'm keenly aware that I want to stay on the good side of my health care people, because they have control of the pharmacopeia. If I'm dying of cancer someday I may want all the opium I can eat, and this is the doctor who will be deciding if I get it. I'm also aware (really I am!) that even thinking this thought wanders over the line into paranoia: I really doubt that many doctors are going to make that decision by pondering whether I was willing to take statins when they told me to. 

No, what's really operating here is a reluctance to accept my low status and vulnerability. Where my two options appear to be knuckling under and accepting that I'm powerless old man, hoping not to be stranded on the ice floe, with an ever-growing list of cumulatively debilitating daily medicines to take; or becoming one of those ridiculous superstitiously anti-medical cranks who refuse to go near a hospital when their appendix bursts. Comical, in any case. Nobody retains their dignity in the face of the Western way of doing medicine. Nobody retains their dignity in the face of age, in any case. And isn't it -- supposedly -- my goal to get rid of my dignity? Isn't my dignity precisely and exactly the source of my suffering? I thought abandoning my dignity was my life's project?

The fact is that this decision is trivial. If you did a study with fifty subjects, and a fifty-person control group, you would probably conclude that a) statins have no benefit and b) statins have no side-effects, either. You can't even see these effects in a small study. I may have opinions about the wisdom of setting standards for preventive drugs that result in the majority of the population eventually taking them, but -- that's another question, and not one in which the opinion of an IT guy / massage therapist / occasional poet weighs much.

So that much is clear. The decision is actually unimportant. What is important for me -- apparently -- is how I hold it, which stories I tell myself about it, and what state of mind they leave me in. The story of letting myself get pushed around is not going to be one that -- for instance -- inspires me to have a go at eating little fishes. The story of crotchety, shrill defiance, and insistence on my dignity, in defiance of due authority, may undergird the little fishes project, but it takes me that much further on the road to suspicion and isolation.  I'm already further down that road than I want to be.

---

Anyway. If any of you have helpful hints or suggestions about little fishes, please give them to me! My plan Monday is to plant myself by the canned fish and read labels and just try whatever they've got. 

Von Tal in the Ice

Ice Storm, February 2021

Lo ’mperador del doloroso regno

da mezzo ’l petto uscia fuor de la ghiaccia

The deep forest is gone. I made the mistake, fifteen or twenty years ago, of taking a shortcut home from the beach, through what I foolishly thought was still the deep forest, along old logging roads and such analogs to country lanes as we have here. There was no forest. It was ugly slash, the remains of multiple clear cuts, stumps and scrawny miserable third- or fourth-growth Douglas firs: the scars everywhere, and the junk logs, detritus, and brush dumped into the creeks. Nothing left. There is no deep forest now. A few parks: in Joni Mitchell's phrase, tree musee-ums. And even the closest of those have been burnt over in the seasonal wildfire romps, now. Why should I care about further losses? It's all been trashed. If you didn't know what a real forest was supposed to look like, I suppose you could take these places for forest. I can't. 

In this mood, I am probably as close as I will ever get to understanding the hearts and minds (loosely speaking) of Trump supporters. They too think everything has been ruined: though why they loved what they loved makes no sense to me. To my mind, suburban America has always been hideous and its pastimes have always been ridiculous. I still feel that way, and I have less inclination than ever to apologize for it. But they loved it, or thought they did, and now they've lost it, or believe they have, and they've found someone as stupid and hostile as they are to be a focusing-glass for their rage. Go for it, guys. Tear the country apart. The chances of making it worse are small. 

Of course, I don't believe that people in this mood can hang together or take constructive action. I have only to look at myself in the mirror, to know that. You can't cooperate if you think other people are stupid losers. You can't build anything without hope. So the Trumpists will roll through like the wildfires from time to time. But the idea that they could actually build something -- a third party, for example -- is absurd. Nihilists don't build. They don't trust each other any more than they trust us. So you want to keep tabs on them enough to get out of their way during their brief flares. For the rest, relax. They may commit random acts of terror, but that's about all they're up to. I don't worry about them any more than I worry about lightning strikes on a clear day. Could happen: will happen to some unfortunate soul: but who cares? Plenty more human beings where we came from.

---

So the question -- this is me again -- is not whether von Tal is right. He probably is, given his premises and his point of view. But there's the dizziness, the flash of nausea, in moving from his point of vantage to mine. Am I to trust people? Am I to regard myself as one of them? As a Buddhist? As an American? As a Democrat? As a Portlander? What's at stake, and how deep is the trust to be? And do I even have any say so, really? You can't actually decide to trust people. You just do or you don't, and your conscious mind scuttles to keep up, supplying excuses, suspicions, or extenuations, as required.

The facile reply is that we don't have any choice. We have to trust people, or we die. That's the human condition. Choosing universal distrust is choosing to die: always has been, always will be. But that leaves a wide space for maneuver. We don't have to trust very many people. I don't have to accept every designation that my busy neighbors may assign me. I don't have to regard myself as a member of any of these tribes: with a little flexibility of mind I can just wriggle past the obvious, brute-force ones. Pay such of my taxes as would be readily garnished, because according to others I'm an American, an Oregonian, etc.; beyond that I can just go my own way, avoid law enforcement and lawyers like the plague, and mind my own garden. Not so bad. Who cares what the other human beings do? Who cares what they assume about me? With minimal camouflage I can be whatever they expect me to be in public. Nowadays, while wearing a mask, I don't even need to produce the required facial expressions. I walk stony-faced down the sidewalk, peering briefly into every set of eyes that goes by me. Unintelligible flickers; counterfeits of consciousness. Who cares?

Really, it's the universalizing religions that challenge us to a wider sympathy, a wider identification. And  they are subject to immediate wear and tear: it doesn't take long for the story of the Good Samaritan to be encysted. Pretty soon you can slaughter all those other odious Samaritans with a good conscience. For every Blake insisting that everything that lives is holy, there are forty snide commentators pointing out that all Republican (Democrat) lives are worthless.

So, I don't know. Was Rush Limbaugh's life infinitely precious? Why?

And there are such huge things in motion, carrying me with them. One very valuable part of having lived for a couple generations is that I can see, clearly, that many of the things I thought were manifestations of my special snowflake perceptions, when I was a teenager, were just broad cultural currents that happened to sweep me up early because I was directly in their way. For example, my love of Tolkien and high fantasy -- my impatience with gender roles and acceptance of varied sexualities -- my contempt for  authority -- were all just in the American air and water. I was bobbing along in a current that was gradually going to sweep up everyone. I was not specially discerning: I was just spun into main channel a bit early.  It gives me a little twinge of distress, now, when I see the Lord of the Rings appear in lists of "one hundred books that everyone should read." No! Only special weird people love the Lord of the Rings! I remember vividly the first time I met actual other living human beings, in person, who loved the book. It was 1971, and it seemed miraculous. Soul mates! I was not alone in the world after all! 

---

But back up a little. You can't decide to trust people: but you can practice it, if you want to. Do I want to? I don't know.

---

Or maybe people are not the point. I always think of Fermi's supposed paradox -- if there is alien life, why hasn't it contacted us? -- with some amusement. The assumption that alien life would want to contact other alien life is so very much the assumption of an uneasy, semi-hierarchical social animal, one that dreads yet is fascinated by strangers. We are a weird species, in that regard. Other intelligent species are probably either not social at all, or perfectly social: either content as individuals, or content as a hive. Who cares what other species are doing, so long as they're not trying to catch us and eat us? Wandering around perpetually trying to gain the approval of strangers is practiced, so far as I know, only by a couple very weird species of primates.

So let that go. Let other people go. I am still here, shaggy and unbrushed, blinking in the new sunlight. I have a family and a few treasured friends. I'm fine. 

---

Nevertheless: I am missing something obvious. There are wheels within wheels. I can taste it: there is a deliberate stupidity in all that I'm thinking right now, a falseness. I have been telling myself stories in a dark corner for too long. It's time to get out for a walk, if it's possible. It's time -- speaking as one of those weird primates -- to ask a stranger for help.

Ambush

 

Von Tal says:

Left out of the conversation? The fact that, for nearly all of our evolutionary and historical time, we have been surrounded or neighbored by predators, animal or human.

The possibility -- probability -- of sudden death or capture, by sentient beings that desire our death, or our absorption, is not our abnormal state. It was our normal state. And we patrolled our boundaries, or helped each other to escape, and that is what made the social bonds we most trust. We saved each other's lives.

And although that is not the world we live in now, you can tell it's our normal world, because all our stories immediately return to it. Countless narratives of banding together to defeat predators. Despite the fact that most of us will never meet a creature that means to kill us in our lives. 

In the absence of predatory enemies, we experience, paradoxically, much higher levels of anxiety, because we do not know -- push come to shove -- that anyone will come to our defense. In the absence of predators, we imagine them; but we don't know if anyone will try to save us from them. We don't know who we can trust. We have never had the bonding experience of escaping death together. In fact, the overwhelming tendency of human beings is to help each other out in an emergency. The "total breakdown of society" fantasy is a wildly unrealistic one. Actually what happens is we pull together, we sacrifice for each other. We become more of hive-creatures under stress, not less of hive-creatures.

But we don't know that. And we imagine the worst.

Well, sure, maybe. I realize slowly, on this bright and mild and strangely quiet February morning, that there is a reason for the quiet, and it's a simple and slightly embarrassing one. I forgot to put in my hearing aids this morning. I can just barely hear a sharp crow-voice: "Point of order! Point of order!" Really he's  making a racket, and others are probably bickering too. But it floats, barely perceptible, at that range where hallucination and guess are interchangeable. My ears are a step ahead of me in drifting away from the world.

I read a biography of Henry Ward Beecher, by Debby Applegate. The Most Famous Man in America. I should probably read some of Beecher's essays, because he's so much where my tribe originated: the transmutation of Puritanism into Hedonism: the vigorous endorsement of ecstasy and the pettifogging evasion of its consequences: the tunnel vision that sees one sort of evil clearly, and is blind to another sort. And the real origin of my personal disasters, and the waste of my life. Which is not a wastage that is very important, but it's one that concerns me closely.

We fought a long and horrible war, and won it, over whether a black person was a human being. And then we lost the peace, and had to fight it again; and now we are going to have to fight it again. The terms change slightly but the war goes on.

And also this: I remember watching Donald Trump declare himself to be without sin, in an interview before his election. I thought he would lose the devout Christian vote then and there. But even our enemies had been converted by Henry Ward Beecher: today's typical American Christians totally believe they are without sin, and they didn't mind a bit that Trump made that claim. They approved of it. They bask in God's unconditional love. That interview made not even a momentary blip on the political sonar.

Which goes to show that exchanging a stern God for a loving one actually makes no political difference. It's irrelevant. Those of us who once thought it would change something -- the joke's on us. As so often, we believed our own stories, and followed them into an ambush. Sauve qui peut.

Mahamudra

 

Paula Modersohn-Becker

The point from the start was to figure out how to live. Some people grow out of asking "why? why? why?" -- with infuriating persistence -- in toddlerhood. Not me. Partly no doubt because my parents strongly encouraged curiosity, so I generally felt I was a good boy when I inquired. And then, I had a rare father who could actually tell me why the sky was blue, and what held the Moon up, or what was really happening in Southeast Asia. But mostly because what you don't know can cut you off at the knees, and often does. It's pure self-defense to know as much as you can, about everything you can. You have to look after yourself, in this life.

But you end up studying yourself in the mirror, and seeing a strange, inquisitive face examining you, with great attention, although maybe not with overflowing sympathy. The eyes overlarge, and the belly swollen with -- promise? Or what? You tell me.

How to live: which includes what to do with your days: maybe boils down to that. Certainly how to hold your days up to the sun. (Or up to whatever sky God gives you.) 

But first, anyway, you have to slow down and quiet down, until you can hear the drip of the snowmelt and the grooming of the cat and the shift of the heat exchanger. More haste, less speed. 

And so: I sit. For the first time in months. A couple minutes in, and the refuge prayers come back to me: I say them over and resume. Sit a few more minutes. Say the dedication prayers. "May I quickly realize Mahamudra." The great seal, the great gesture: and never in all my reading and practicing did I ever find out what the hell Mahamudra meant, beyond that literal translation. Which, in my current state, pleases me. Obviously, I don't know what it is: if I did I wouldn't need to realize it. That's the whole point.

Well. Good morning, dear ones.

St Valentine

       Good morrow, friends. Saint Valentine is past:

       Begin these woodbirds but to couple now?

A glorious mane, a weight of silvered soot:

I wake to the smell of apple wood. An arm

overlaid, a quiet breath, a hood:

a murmur not quite heard, but understood.

A wheeling hammer's axis, near its head 

so that it seems to waver as it falls:

a slalom through the air, an oscillation,

a limp in Newton's gait: an imperfection.

If we wake now, and turn towards the east?

A clutter of trinkets that bring to memory

what's best forgotten: a dirty red and violet:

a blurred burst in silhouette.

Walk back, walk back. The hammer strikes,

rebounds. You have but slumbered here. Tell me

what the story was? I have lost track:

only that the hounds bayed at my back.

Joy

So how do I recover the knack for joy?

To be clear: I'm not trying to be happy. The transitory wash of feelings will follow its tidal rhythms, regardless of my actions or attitudes: content and discontent only function properly if they continue alternating. To want to stop the pendulum at one end of its swing -- to exist in perfect contentment -- is to want to stop the clock. That's not what I'm after.

But there's the foreground of happy and distressing experiences, and there's the background, or the setting. A person who is experiencing (non-acute) depression is not necessarily having an experience of the daily events of their life much different from mine: good things and bad things happen, mood lifts and falls. One of the commonest things people say after a suicide is "My God, I talked to him just hours before that, and he seemed fine." He probably was fine then, as far as it goes. It was not the foreground that was the problem. It was the background. Is there a net of joy under us, waiting to catch us, or is it a horrible, airless vacuity? That's what's different. We may never fall, for good or ill, but the experience on the tightrope is fundamentally different, according to what we think we would fall into if we did.

It's natural enough to cast this in terms of afterlife, but it doesn't need to be cast in those terms. I'm fairly sure that my consciousness will simply stop, when I die. Poof. After that, it's not my problem, nor anyone else's. But we live in time, and we imagine it, willy nilly, coming before and after. Where are we coming from, and where are we going? These nonexistent spaces, are they full and radiant, or empty and horrible? It's a nonsense question, put in those terms: it's undiscoverable and unfalsifiable. But we answer it whether we mean to or not.

There have been seasons when my conviction that the nonexistent spaces were full and radiant was very strong. And seasons, as now, when it has dwindled to a queasy hope.

I'm describing this as if it were a question of fact to be discovered, which it almost certainly isn't. That's just the way we talk. We make up the answer out of moments of transcendence, moments of exquisite joy or clarity or awe. It doesn't take much. But it does take some. It takes at least the possibility that, at any turning, anywhere, any time, something overwhelmingly beautiful and dangerous might appear. So those moments, and how we hold them, matter disproportionately. Hence the daily prayer, the daily ritual, the meditation, the weekly ramble in the Gorge. Not because these moments can be summoned. They can't. But if I don't deliberately put myself in their way, they can be missed: and if I miss them too often, I may come to distrust them entirely, or forget them. And then I'm really lost.

So there's my answer, in a nutshell: I've lost the knack for joy because I've stopped putting myself where it's found. I've stopped looking for it. I don't think it's any more complicated than that.

Losing My Place

I have lost the knack for joy, I wrote, and then I studied the words for minute. Were they true?

The more I thought it about it, the more I decided they were. I am notoriously bad at personal history -- I never know when or how things happened, and I often find, when I examine my just-so stories about myself, that they're absurd. I'll think event X caused personality defect Y, when a cursory review of the documents shows that Y was in full force years before X. My past is strewn with documents, so it's not that hard to check.

But with all due skepticism, I trace this loss to Mr Trump's nomination, campaign, and election; and then the pandemic set the seal on it. I lost the knack for joy: and I lost much of the impulse to write, which was tightly interwoven with it.

As I watched Trumpism wash through America, I thought again and again: "what was my contribution to this? How did I make this happen, or allow this to happen?"

Well, the answer was clear. I had a least one devoted reader who was also a devoted Trump fan, and I recognized at once that I was appealing in exactly the same way Mr Trump was. I used to practice a sort of diaristic magical realism. I talked to stars and mountains and ghosts. Something that appealed emotionally got free rein, and if facts got trampled in the process, who cares? Other people would take care of the facts. I was busy with the realm of the emotions and of the soul. What I was interested in was joy and delight. Nothing else mattered, not really.

And so I was shocked into silence, inward and outward. I didn't want to be part of spreading this poison. I mistrusted myself deeply. I stopped my supposedly harmless riffing on supernatural themes. No, I'm not meeting Vajrasattva in the parking garage. No, I am not conversing with ghosts. No, I am not dissolving into the wind. I'm someone who washes his hands and wears a mask and is determined to get the vaccine, because viruses don't give a damn about Vajrasattva and never have. Misty devotion to to deities such as the Great South Wall Protector lead straight to children in cages. The hell with misty devotion. The hell with deities. I'm trying to keep my family alive. 

When I was setting out in life, the Enlightenment looked like a done deal. Everyone acknowledged the primacy of science. I gave myself to old books and old stories, partly because I already loved them, and partly with a sense that the post-Enlightenment world was losing something precious: that a salvage operation was in order. That we were throwing sources of joy and wisdom out, as well as sources of superstition and bigotry, The march of science was inevitable: it had the backing of the liberal West, of Soviet Communism, and of global Capital: how could it falter? It needed no help from me. I could wander among the wreckage of our cultural past, find lost treasures in the rubble, wash the mud off them and hold them up to the sun.

And the treasures are there, sure enough. I was right about that part. But science, reason, rationality, commitment to what can be ascertained and confirmed by rigorous experiment -- they turned out to be as fragile as the treasures I was hunting. I had misunderstood. It was all fragile.

The joy blew out like a candle, and I lost my place. I read political news in the morning, instead of poetry. I begin a novel and drop it impatiently: they're just making stuff up. Anyone can make stuff up. The hard thing is sticking to the truth.

I don't quite recognize myself, in all this, and that's probably a good sign.

In order to arrive at what you are not
       You must go through the way in which you are not.

Posing a Hypothetical

My dental floss comes in a plastic box, of course -- God forbid anything should not be encased in plastic -- and it has a handy little metal tab to cut the floss, because actually having tools around to do obvious jobs would be beyond the capacity of my countrymen. It allows them to sell a spool of waxed thread for an improbable amount of money: I've avoided reckoning up how much I pay per foot, because after all, a person has to end the day with a little bit of pride intact.

But this particular spool resists being pulled with unusual vigor. I have to seize the thread with a specially good grip and drag it out to arm's length. It feels like one those exercises I once learned to make sure the brachial nerves are moving freely through the thoracic outlet. Or like a martial art move, founded on an ancient tradition of archery practice. The extended floss pose. 

My life has disintegrated into a jumble of tiny competencies, earned with toil and stubborn practice, to carry me from one portion of my day to the next. But the mainspring of my life is gone, and I know it, and some invisible malevolence in the low cloud cover knows it too. One flosses in order to preserve one's teeth and gums, right? And one preserves one's teeth and gums so as to be able to eat at an advanced age. And why does one want to eat at an advanced age? Well, presumably for the same reason one wants to eat now: but the questions begin to verge on the impolite. All the sequences of questions tend the same way. Why? In service of what? The thing in the cloud cover shifts, and cocks its head, listening for my answer.

Not such a fool. Nobody sensible answers a question like that. "For life to mean something," I say, "Somebody must intend it. And nobody intended this life: it just happened.

"Furthermore, even if somebody intended it, why should I be governed by their intention? 'The death of Jesus set me free: Then what have I to do with thee?'"

But this is to move the whole discussion into enemy territory, under the enemy's rules of engagement: no good will come of that, not with that restless thing in the sky trying to sniff me out. And anyway it is not quite what I mean.

Once, the latest woman I had a crush on was the final answer to all these questions. Eros was tightly bound to Godhead, and the final answer was "because I crave it desperately, because I need it, because I turn to it like a sunflower to the sun." All the chains of questions ended up just there, and I had a reason to get up in the morning. 

With age, though I am still as scandalously full of desire as ever, the stitching has loosened. Godhead isn't bound to the pleasures in an obvious way, any more. So that's one thing, and the other is, that the old stories of my life are coming apart. I used to prepare, relentlessly prepare, for the moment when I would go public, and deploy all the skills prepared in secret, and be revealed in all my glory. But it's obvious now: that moment will never come. I will never be revealed. I'll be rolled off the end of the treadmill and vanish, like everyone else. Whether I converse in fluent Spanish or understand Lucretius or have opinions about the Secretary of Agriculture or not. So why am I still preparing for the great reveal? ... At this point, just because old habits die hard. 

The malevolence above is definitely paying attention, now. It's attentive, searching. I had better confuse the scent.

So suppose one stood in directly, as directly as possible, for the sweetness. Suppose one forgot about preparation. Suppose one said "this, this just here and just now, is the reveal. This is as much of an apocalypse as you get. And probably more of one than you deserve, frankly."

No, no, I'm not throwing any gloves down or making any promises. I'm just posing a hypothetical. What if?

Easier Said

A man my age, at the grocery store, wearing a black mask lettered in white: "This mask is useless."

I said to him: "I don't give a shit whether you live or die either, sweetheart, so don't get too excited about how special it makes you. Lots of people don't give a shit."

Except not aloud, of course. And I would even have spoken civilly to him, if I had needed to. But the rage persists, an hour later. It's just poison, of course. I think people who nurture rage are nuts. It too, doesn't give a shit. About him, or about me, or about you. So I just work with it. It's not that hard. Every time it arises, I give a little shrug, open my hands, let the rage roll out of them, breathe out and let the rage go out with my breath. It doesn't take many iterations: a dozen or two, to process the main part of it. The trick is having the time and mental space to deal with it, and not to put myself in the way of things that will provoke it again. 

I really do want him to die, painfully, starting now. Which is discouraging. That's not how I want to be. The supposed origin of my rage against him is that he is indifferent to my life: and here am I, not only indifferent to his life, but actively desiring his death. Where is the moral high ground I supposedly inhabit? Really I'm just enraged because he's not agreeing with me, and because I'm terrified that Martha will die of Covid before she gets the vaccine, and because I didn't sleep well last night, and because every weekly shopping trip, as the case counts rise, feels that much more foolhardy. If this guy hadn't conveniently presented himself, I would likely have found something else to be enraged about.

And further, of course -- and adding to the rage -- is the fact that much of his motivation was precisely to inspire this response in me, and I'm totally falling for it. He wanted to take up space in my mind, and I've made him welcome there. More fool me. There's no end to this game: the only way to win is not to play.

Yeah: easier said than done. Hope you've got a nice little cough and a little fever tonight, dude. May your death be slow and painful.

---

Where I want to be is on the bare hills under the stars, real stars, the millions of stars I used to see just twenty miles from home on a dark night, which now I'd have to drive out to eastern Oregon to glimpse. I need to be on a hilltop with the wind ruffling my hair and the stars all different sizes and colors above me, watching me with an indifference that's a benediction. They don't care if I live or die either: but in their case, it's a balm and a relief. You can rest on that indifference, like a leaf on the surface of a brook, and go tumbling down toward the sea. 

How to live? I don't know. The morning is dark, and the fern are glossy with rain: some of the fronds are dark green, and others the rich dark brown of an old copper pot. It's the first day of February. I switch on a light, just for company, just for something to stand against the cold blue-grayness of the world beyond the windows.

It is true, still, that if you ask for help, it will come. That of course is another thing easier said than done.

Things Taking Shape

There's a couple things taking shape. One is that the jury is no longer out: except within very strict limits, social media has to go. I'll keep an handhold on Twitter and Facebook, to link to posts here, and I'll probably set aside some time to check it once a day. It is, after all -- as Dave Bonta says -- where the people are. But it consumes too much time, and it fosters a habit of demanding continual stimulation that is ruinous. Enough already. I'm pretty much done with it. 

Second. I've been thinking long and hard about the project of learning Spanish. There have been two goals there, really, though I haven't really distinguished them and considered them separately till recently. One was to learn Spanish well enough to read the Spanish classics: at least the Golden Age dramatists and poets, and the 20th Century Spanish and Latin American poets. The other goal was to "really" learn Spanish. Which involves a lot of listening, writing, and speaking.

For goal one, reading Spanish literature, I'm on the threshold of that now. I could plow into Calderón and Quevedo tomorrow and give a good account of myself. I can cruise through an uncomplicated modern novel at a rate of thirty pages a day, my passive vocabulary is pretty extensive, and I have the background.

Goal two is more problematic. I am shy of the exposure of finding native speakers and practicing conversation, which is the royal road to fluency (whatever that is), but, more legitimately, I am asking myself: is such an investment of time worth it? Because it is, simply, time. Hours of time daily. There's no way of finessing that. And it's time spent in order to be able to watch TV shows and have casual chats. Do I really want to watch TV shows and have casual chats? Those aren't things I much care to do in English, actually. How much do I want to do them in Spanish?

People talk about an hour a day as though it were a trivial investment. Actually it's large proportion of one's disposable time. It's something to weigh seriously. It's time that I would not be, say, writing, or drawing, or coding, or learning some other skill. 

The jury is still out on this one. For one thing, there's an argument to be made that you don't really know a language well enough to fully experience its literature if you can't watch its TV and chat about the weather in it. There's probably some weight to that.* For another, it's been a longing of mine for ages, to "really" (always such a suspect word, in interior dialogues!) learn a language. Is giving up on that giving up too much? I don't know. I'll mull it over. But it might be best -- it often is, with things one finds oneself procrastinating about -- to just pull the plug and decide not to do it. 

---

I underestimated Joe Biden. He's a run-of-the-mill speaker and debater -- nothing to write home about -- and I took that as his measure, which was not very bright of me. Turns out he's a total professional, like Obama: he knows exactly how things work and what order things have to be done in, and who he has to put in charge of what.

As with Obama, my respect is grudging. I'm not a center Democrat. I wince at some of the appointments and policies. And we have yet to see how the battle royale about the filibuster turns out. But the man knows how to govern and administer. He's exactly what we need, at this incredibly delicate, fragile moment. 

---

I got the first dose of the vaccine, last Wednesday. As a massage therapist, I count as a health care worker, so I'm in the first wave. It's a relief to know that, even as I dawdle and second guess and hang about, my body is busily manufacturing antibodies. In one way, nothing changes: none of my behaviors will change, for a while yet. But it feels totally different. We will win this thing, eventually.

Also: I am very, very tired.

*On the other hand: by the "fully fluent" argument, I've never read Beowulf, or Chaucer, properly. And how fluent is fluent? Being able to chat in Mexican, Chilean, and Galician Spanish (but not Argentinian)? Being able to chat with scholars about literature? There's a thousand different fluencies a person might aim for. 

The Nature of Things

The gulf between those who believe in souls and those who do not is the widest conceptual gulf I have encountered. It is really very difficult for us to understand each other. There isn't any middle ground: nobody believes in half a soul, or an intermittent soul. It's all or nothing.

You can go along happily in conversation for a long time, thinking you're having a meeting of the minds: then suddenly the ground drops from under you, and you realize that all your apparent agreement was a mirage. You haven't really understood each other. You weren't talking about the same thing.

Reading Lucretius, at long last, having found a translation I like, and I find him easy and comfortable, We're on the same side of that gulf. We think that our personhoods are chance constellations, shapes made up by dreaming shepherds out of random stars. Some philosophical problems become easier, some become harder, when you think that. But they all become different.

Nothing can emerge from nothing, says Lucretius, and Nature does not render anything to naught.

It can be a terrifying thought. Lear quotes Lucretius. Nothing will come of nothing, he says, Speak again. To Shakespeare, a world without souls is a deadly transactional world of quid pro quos, where all love is conditional and everything is bought with something else. I don't think he was right about that: but Shakespeare is not a man to dismiss lightly. Not at my time of life.

Candles

 I thought I would sleep late this morning, since nothing was on my schedule and nothing looms: but I woke at four. I stirred the stew in the slow-cooker -- there's a hot spot on one side where the rice starts to glom, otherwise -- and went back to bed. Counted breaths to a hundred and fifty, little sheep jumping over a uvular stile, and then gave it up. I was brooding on Senate rules and presidential pardons, viral mutations and vaccine distribution: for all the world as if all that was in my sphere of control, and anxious courtiers were waiting for my pronouncements at the Rising From The Royal Bed.

So I got up, and here I am, a semi-retired sixty-something nobody in particular, having shooed away the phantom courtiers, figuring out the shape of the day. Nearly seven, and not a trace of dawn in the midwinter sky. There probably would be if I went outside, but from here it's all reflections from the lamp, the lurid glow of the laptop screen, the little green and red and amber lights of various electronics that dot our nighttime. For background music, the hum of many little motors doing little tasks: the heat exchanger, the fridge, the clock of the microwave, who knows what-all? Always that ambient buzz, not quite harmonizing with the silvery song of of my tinnitus. What was silence like, again? Does anyone remember?

And a candle. Lucretius and the votive candles arrived post-haste a couple days ago -- somebody drove up from San Bernardino and up over the Siskiyou Pass, with a dull ache in their bladder, and ate a burger and fries in Medford while their rig grumbled in the pullout, to deliver them to me, and I'll never know who it was. Somebody else, equally unknown, drove it to my front porch, and, a bit unnervingly, posted picture of the box standing there on my doormat, which was emailed to me within seconds of being taken. I opened the door and there it was. "You look so like your photographs!" I told it. Anyway, thanks to you both, and may the days be kind to you! The candles work splendidly: my coffee stays hot, but unembittered. Whether Lucretius works so well, I don't know: I'm going to finish Stephenson's Quicksilver first.

Here comes the dawn. Beyond the hedge, a soft surprisingly mauve sky: I had though we'd have one of those dark leaden overcasts, but it's a free sky, with real light washing over it. And now the first squirrels are moving in the laurel branches. So the world is still here.

Balance and Quickness

I've had an informal goal for a while of working up to being able to do twenty pull ups in a row. But recently YouTube served up a video to me, made by a guy my age, who was doing a pull-up challenge, clearly chuffed with himself for being able to beat Jeff Cavaliere.  Cavaliere's challenge was to do fifty pull ups in as few sets as you could, with of course various parameters for what counts and how much rest between sets and so on. For the first set, this guy did 19 pull ups, and he had a few more in the tank. So here's an old  guy, a guy my age, who can do twenty pull ups. It's possible.

He had an enormous back and shoulders, and I thought: you know, I don't particularly want to look like that. Maybe twenty pull ups actually isn't what I want. The number came out of thin air, basically -- I think Jeff Cavaliere said something in some video about "banging out twenty pull ups" -- and I never really investigated farther. It just lodged in my head, and since I'd recently worked my way up to being able to do five or six, from having been unable to do any at all, I thought, "cool! That's what I'll work up to!" And it's just been sort of a brain burr, since then.

It makes sense that you'd need a huge back to be able to do that. Or else that you'd have to be very light. But being shaped like a gorilla is not actually what I want. I want a body that's lighter and quicker than that, not so specialized for one movement. And it's not like I *need* twenty pull ups, in my daily life. It's just a number that floated into my life, and now it's lodged there. I think it's time to gently dislodge it and let it float away. Twenty pull ups is not in my future.

What I do want is more quickness and balance. Watching the generation ahead of me, it becomes clearer and clearer that if I manage to dodge the chronic "diseases of Western Civilization" -- cancer, diabetes, atherosclerosis -- what will take me down is simply falling. Falling and hitting my head, or falling and breaking my hip. That's what I should be training to avoid. I do almost nothing that requires balance and quick responses, which means, I'm pretty sure, that they are gradually deteriorating. I have the requisite strength, now -- I can sit down on the floor and stand up again without using my hands or my knees. So that's great: no amount of balance or quickness would help that much if I were not strong enough to catch myself on the way down. But on the other hand, no amount of strength will help if I topple too far before trying to catch myself. I'm going to need the balance and quickness, too.

I never fall. I think of myself as a person who does not fall. But by the time I start falling, it will be late in the game to fix it.

I do a few things to cultivate balance. I often put my socks on standing up, for example. I do step-ups onto a chair, as part of leg day, which was meant to be a quads-and-glutes exercise, but has turned out to be much more of a balance exercise. But I do nothing to cultivate quickness, nothing at all. I think I need to learn to hop, and scamper over rough terrain, and do a lot of getting quickly to the floor from various directions and in various attitudes. I'm quite sure all these motor sequences can be trained, and that someone's already thought it all out. I just have to go find them. Find them, learn them, and practice them.

Opinions: Throwing Rocks: Being a Traffic Cop

Good morning.  There is a moment when you feel the lever shift, under your hands, and you look up to check whether the top of the load has shifted against the sky. But mostly it's quiet, this morning: another silent rush of the tide under the pylons. The gulls are not awake yet, and we're in the deep quiet of January.

Von Tal is restless, and he writes:

We've got an American public whose historical understanding of the Revolution is that one day a crowd threw rocks at soldiers in Boston, and that from then on victory was a forgone conclusion. Six grinding years of keeping an army in the field, hunted up and down the Atlantic coast, was superfluous detail. It would have been "names-and-dates-of-battles" trivia: no need to teach that, or learn it.

So now a bunch of wannabe revolutionaries are hiding at home wondering why their revolution isn't accomplished, since they clearly have done all that was necessary. They threw the rocks: why isn't there a new government?

On the one hand, of course, thank God: if they had known what they needed to orchestrate and organize, things might have gone otherwise. On the other hand, if they had known what signing up for a revolution actually entailed, they might have thought better of it in the first place.

I've watched left wing idiots doing the same thing all my life: now I'm watching right wing idiots doing it. You don't want six years barefoot and bleeding in the snow, don't sign on, guys.

Yeah, well, maybe. How do you know? How do you know any of the stuff you supposedly know? And what are you willing to bet on it? 

The twice-warmed coffee is sour on my tongue. Finally, after much dithering, I ordered some votive candles online, to be coffee warmers. I already have the little scaffold for my cup to sit on. I have a boy's love of open flame, and my theory is that keeping the cup warm, rather than reheating in the microwave, will a) keep me at my post longer, b) keep my coffee warmer longer, and c) reduce the eventual bitterness of multiply reheated coffee. This being a thing, Herr von Tal, that a man might actually gauge by experience and actually know. So the candles, I am informed, left San Bernardino by truck yesterday, accompanied by Stallings' translation of Lucretius. In the 21st Century economy this is not an odd packaging, nor an odd origin. Why should candles and Lucretius not arise in San Bernardino? Riddle me that.

And here is Mark Manson on opinions:

One thing I would add to this, is that an unexpected bonus is the emotional relief that comes of shedding opinions. One does not realize, until one does it, how heavy the burden of all those opinions is, how anxiously they must be defended, how vulnerable they make you to every passing stranger. I practice not having opinions about other drivers, when I'm on the freeway. What do I know of what they are rushing toward, and what they are fending off? "No one made me a traffic cop," I murmur. Thank God. I am so grateful that no one made me a traffic cop. And I am correspondingly grateful for the people who undertake that burden, leaving me to float, irresponsible and free, in the flow of traffic. If someone's driving strikes me as aggressive or erratic, I simply drop back in the current till I'm well away from them. 

There was a time -- there are still times! -- when I soberly thought it was my duty to think like a traffic cop, and come to decisions about the culpability of any driver who irritated me. Just how wicked were they being? How inexcusable? What punishment should be meted to them? How much better than them am I? All these questions struck me as reasonable and responsible. Now they strike me as signs of immaturity, if not mental illness. "No one made me a traffic cop." It's something of a mantra.

Lots of love, dear ones. I hope your day has unexpected presents that delight you.

Hijas de la Carne

 

No lo cuento para que me comprendan, ya que he renunciado a semejante pretensión; ni para que comprendan al Príncipe Hurón. Lo cuento porque dicen los sabios que las palabras son hijas de la carne y como tales se pudren si las guarda encerradas.

I do not tell it so that you will understand me, since I have renounced such a claim; nor so that you will understand Prince Hurón. I tell it because the wise say that words are daughters of the flesh, and they spoil if you seal them up.

-- Angélica Gorodischer, Kalpa Imperial

It doesn't happen very often, nowadays, that I finish a book and think, with total conviction, this one I will be reading again. But it happened with Kalpa Imperial.

A Surgeon Extracting the Stone of Folly

Pieter Van Huys

Alas! If it were so easy.

The llama, orgulous of his orgle,

His fifteen minutes of fame, or his hour;

Our ornaments of desire that strangely lapse

With the mere shift of a species. And thus this day

Gray and still, and the morning incomplete.

But we are spirits of another sort, which is to say

That kindness walks among us, and grief,

And uncertainty about how to greet this guest.

Do we offer him a seat, hang his black

And faded hood up on the hat rack, stand his scythe

With the umbrellas? Do we distract him with a long discourse

Concerning the rights of vegetable loves?

He is obliging, to a point, but he has a job to do.

Count this love then in the hidden book, the ledger

Suspected in the jumbled shelves just glimpsed

Behind the scowling holder of the house. We can't help thinking

Even now, that someone older, more astute,

Must be keeping score.

Christmas Day, 2020

 This is what I have always desired above all else: that this day should be a day like all others, a day with a morning, an afternoon, and a night, any of which might be made into anything. 

Rightly or wrongly, I've always disliked holidays: days that absolutely must be one thing and no other. They seem to me a disrespect to the world, an imposition on it that we have no right to make. Who are we to call this day Christmas, as if days were a thing to be ordered and sorted and classified by human beings? Who knows what we've lost, over the years, how many days born in the tenderest part of winter, that might have been days of learning or of loss, that have been made by brute force into days of festivity? It's hard for me to see this act of coercion as homage to Jesus of Nazareth, who came to make everything uncertain and raw-skinned and new. 

(Though he himself celebrated Pesach, and I doubt he would have had much sympathy for my desire to escape the strictures of a human life. What would I build with an unformed day, but the same old jail I build every day?)

Still. The longing for freedom reaches its peak on holidays, on the 4th of July and on Christmas. It's then that I most want to be far away from other people, far away from their anxieties and desires. Stop chattering, just for a moment, and let me think! All I want is one moment of stillness, one moment in the heart of winter, or in the heart of summer, unnamed and unnameable. 

A Pale and Uncertain Blue

 The moon carefully makes its way through the laurel leaves, to take up a post where it can look in the west-facing window. A quarter till seven, and no sign of dawn. She is still brilliant; mostly full; criss-crossed with hedge twigs. A small, hard, ambitious light, which illuminates nothing. I am not friends with the moon this morning. I just want the sun to rise, and bring summer with her.

So, a vaccine trial has come to town, and I'm going to try to sign up for it, I think: most of my hesitation is about the fine print. If I'm in the placebo group, how long am I committed to wait to get a real vaccine? Apart from that, it's a no-brainer: the control group is only 1/3 of the total, so that's a 66% chance of getting a good vaccine quite a bit earlier than the average Joe. It's not even in the first round of stage-3 trials -- in fact it will probably be approved for emergency use by the FDA while this trial is going on -- so if it does anything icky to people, it's something that doesn't show up for months. Meanwhile, COVID has also come to town, with a vengeance, and it definitely does icky things to people. Where do I sign?

As I write, the sky lightens, and the moon begins to lose her grip. No longer the absolute mistress of the sky.

The giving season has begun in earnest: for the next six weeks my workload doubles or triples. I bump up to thirty hours per week, instead of twenty, and work almost as much as real people do. As always, when this happens, I marvel that any regular working people keep their health into their fifties and sixties: there's simply not enough time to take care of yourself properly. Realized as I was going to bed last night that I'd inadvertently skipped my daily walk. That sort of thing is fine, for six weeks. Year round, the stresses would accumulate and things would start to break down. And one thing leads to another, when that happens. You eat more because you're tired, and you stop exercising, and then you're more tired, and joints get huffy and obstinate, and hauling yourself around the house turns into more than you want to do... and it just goes on, until you're totally sedentary, totally stressed, eating like a maniac, and just waiting for the first critical system to go. It's no mystery to me why American health is so poor.

But enough. Light is coming back to the world. The hedge is green instead of black. The blue of the sky is pale and uncertain, but it is blue, and it will become bluer.

Dubious Futures

 Or suppose you just opened the empty page and waited long enough for something to arise? 

"...there is no difference between inspiration and lack of distraction. They are the same thing."

I would guess that my most consistent error, in recent years, has been not making the space. Not sitting still. Yes, I have let myself be eaten up by political thought. I had to do the political thinking, because my former thinking was wrong. But my conclusion at the end of it all was that I had nothing very useful to say, certainly not directly. It may all rise to the surface eventually. Who cares? No point in taking responsibility for dubious futures.

If there's something I have spent years of thought and meditation on, it's just that fundamental, first question: how should I live? 

And although I manifestly do not know how to live, I also manifestly am further along than I was before. 

When I began blogging, I was first engaging with Buddhism. A long and fruitful struggle, ongoing. I might still qualify as a Buddhist, I don't know. I've misplaced my membership card. But anyway, at one point I had a bit of a readership that looked to me for wisdom, which was gratifying, if poisonous. If I knew so much about domesticating my mind, why was it so frantic and feral? Why could I not control (for instance) my eating? I felt fraudulent. I backed off. I thought: before I swagger around dispensing advice, shouldn't I actually be able to change my behavior?

So I did actually change my behavior, eventually. It was a huge effort, and is still a huge effort. It has been a surprisingly practical and detail-oriented effort.  One of my many false expectations was that something would fall into place. I'd get my mind and my attitude right and suddenly the difficulties would fall away.

That's not what happened at all. Instead I had to attack a thousand small problems and solve them one by one. What time do I eat lunch? Do I add carrot slices to my salad? Do I put salt in my morning oatmeal?

In a way, you could say it was just a matter of getting my mind and my attitude right: but much of what I had to do was lose my disdain for practical planning and detail. The right food has to be in the right place at the right time, or I'll eat the wrong food. I have to know how much I'm going to eat before I start, or I'll eat too much. 

So here I am, three years later. I've succeeded in that one behavior, anyway. A year and a half of losing the weight, and two years of keeping it off: I no longer worry much about the possibility of relapse. But I come back to weighing the role of meditation in it, and my role as a dispenser of  wisdom, and I find that I'm not very interested in it any more. I know far less about how anyone ought to live than I thought I did, and anyone else's way will lie through a thousand details, just as mine did: details I know nothing about and can't meaningfully help with. I don't know if you should put salt in your oatmeal. I don't know if you should meditate.

Probably this dispenser-of-wisdom stuff was mostly in my head to begin with: I didn't really have gaggles of people clustering around me wanting to know how to live. Such attraction as I had from the start, maybe, was my willingness to confess that I didn't know how to live. That allure, anyway, I should still have. 

Slanted Lines

 Well, then: you've seen them go sprawling often enough, skinning their palms, banging their elbows, making chimp grimaces so as not to cry: what of that?

And you have pounded the disks flat in the sand, with a palm or with a heel, while the sky considers every variant of steel, from the bright ripples there away just above the trees to the heavy tarnish above, and the lights drains away: is that supposed to tell us more?

Because the question, then, now, and probably always, was: how do I live? A question that you might think should arise only after "may I live?" and "may I choose my life?" but you would be -- not for the first time, forgive me, little light! -- you would be quite terribly mistaken, because the question comes up premature: botched and mottled, a monster, an awkwardness from its first day and ever after. It is the first question, and we ask it before any of its answers could possibly be of use to us. That's how we're made.

(And I would like to make clear, at this point, that I had nothing to do with the design of human beings. I take no responsibility, none.)

But it is obvious from the start that a life worth living would have music, dance, and singing in it, not just around the periphery, but at its heart. And not as packaged commodities for purchase, but as what we do ourselves with a whole heart; clumsy, lame, and hoarse as we might be. And it would come inevitably, twice a week: if we missed, there would come a knock at the door, and the maenads would drag us out to the dancing lawn. That's what happens in civilized countries. 

And it would have lovemaking, and the silence after, and the slow return of light. These things are obvious, aren't they? They don't need to be argued.

Most of life, now and always, will be made up of addressing the problems at hand. Life has two parts: addressing problems, and making beauty. In the intervals there is sleep, and the long dream; but we're not quite ready to discuss that.

Why should anyone listen to us, little light, when we don't yet know how to live? Why should our exhortations and denunciations be taken seriously? 

yellow

leaves have filled the pool

and some few float with their leafstalks

above the water line:

red diagonal strokes across

a lion-colored page

Una luna gibosa

 Una luna gibosa, menguante, y las horas tan largas.  Dejo a mis hijos una tierra quebrada. He fracasado. Y estoy tan cansado, ahora; tan cansado. ¿Qué debería haber hecho? Y qué debo hacer ahora?

Allá, a través de la claraboya, la luna me reprocha. El tiempo malgastado; las ambiciones frivolas. Y ahora es demasiado tarde: soy viejo, estúpido, frágil. Mi única habilidad es el entendimiento de palabras oscuras, y ahora incluso eso me escapa.

No entiendo mis enemigos. No puedo persuadirlos o convencerlos. Son implacables, sin piedades. Inapelables.

Las horas tan largas. Y la mañana se rehusa a venir.

Un mundo sin alabanzas

 Halloween, hoy, pero no hay de trick-or-treaters, a causa de la pandemia. Leo ahora el libro tercero de Señor de los anillos (en español.) Esta vez me fijo sobre todo en la cortesía, que tan importante es por Tolkien: la virtud de virtudes. Y así es para mí también. Me pregunto si la cortesía debe ser siempre resultado de una sociedad de clases: ¿es posible tener cortesía sin señores? Y si no, ¿quiero de verdad una sociedad sin clases? No sé. He leído un libro sobre los bosquimanos, Affluence Without Abundance, el año pasado, y el autor dice que no tienen historias de heroes, y no tienen hombres de gran reputación. Envidia y desprecio es la respuesta típica a afirmaciones de toda clase de grandeza humana. Y eso me parece triste. Un mundo sin alabanzas no es el mundo que anhelo.