Voices

Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off an annointed king.

She said it proudly, fiercely, her head thrown back, daunting for a moment the rebellious courtiers, who believed it as much as she did. And as much as we did, the tiny audience in a tiny theater. Disaster was coming to England if they pulled down this sacred king.

It was a performance (still running, see it, if you get a chance!) of Richard II with an all-female cast. Paige Jones was playing Richard, playing him with verve and passion. It took all of thirty seconds to forget the fact that the players were the wrong gender, and to sink straight into the play. They weren't playing in drag: they weren't pretending to be male actors doing Shakespeare. They were female actors doing Shakespeare, and doing an incredible job of it.

They made nothing of their femaleness, but it informed everything about the play. Strange sidelights and illuminations. Of course, Aumerle was in love with Richard II: why had I never understood that before? And Bolingbroke's relentless masculine insensibility, which everyone was so anxious to put on the throne, was going to drag England to ruin as surely as Richard's capriciousness.


Richard II (Paige Jones) consoling Aumerle (Brooke Fletcher). Photo by Rio of the NWCTC.

It made me think of all the great poetry that has been written by men in the voices of women. All the female parts in Shakespeare, of course, were written by a man to be spoken by a male actor -- women weren't permitted on the boards in those days. Which made the reversal of the genders in the NWCTC performance exact. Chaucer wrote much of his best poetry in women's voices: The Wife of Bath, of course, but also the Legend of Good Women, which is what he was famous for in his own time. When men wanted to explore pathos, they had to give the mask of conventional manhood the slip, and speak in a female voice. It's no accident that the great exception to that is Chaucer himself, who wrote the greatest narrative love poem in English, about Prince Troilus being abandoned by his lover Criseide. He found the voice for that in his early poetry, spoken by women.

We still turn to women's voices for our great popular songs of betrayal in love, of desertion and loneliness. Men still don't get to talk about that much in their own voices. A gruff allusion in a Johnny Cash growl is as much as we get.

So I resolved to write my next poems in a female voice. Not to think of any particular subject matter, or to try to make any particular point: just to walk into the role, as Paige Jones walks into Richard II, and to see what happens when I open my mouth.

10th Avenue

The new leaves are half grown, so that the lunch kiosks on 10th Avenue flicker under a dappling canopy. People stand, all slanted to each other: to stand in straight lines would be too formal. Or it would make them look too eager for their turn. Or it would obstruct their view. Whatever the reason, they arrange themselves off kilter to each other, and to the booths, and I negotiate through the loose crowd, noting that I'm aware of each person's field of view, and each person's claim to personal space, as I thread my way through. This is the sort of thing it's very difficult to program, a problem of genuine complexity: I don't think anyone can yet make a robot that could make its way gracefully through a crowd. It would either bump egregiously or simply halt, overwhelmed by the shifting choices and priorities. Yet this is the sort of problem-solving that we scorn, because any human being can do it: whereas something like medical diagnosis, which machines are actually better at than people, we raise to a mystical status. It's a ritual we allow only our most prestigious shamans to perform. No one would want to just plug their data into a mere machine and get their diagnosis, even though the machines do have a better track record, and it could be done for pennies per consultation.

Well. The clouds loom up in jumbled towers. This spring, this rising of sap and blood: it makes me feel a little old, old and tired. The gears still catch: I still know which spring this is, I still see the women shedding clothes with pleasure, I still hear the birdsong with wonder. But I can picture the time when the teeth will no longer mesh, and the wheel will spin free, and I won't know know which spring it is. Then it will be time to die. For now, spring strikes me as a subdued amazement. Another one has been granted to me. They come much more frequently than they used to, but they're all that much more precious: I don't know how many I have left, but I know I've seen more than half that I'll ever see.

For now, I will enjoy this extraordinary gift I have, of being able to thread my way through flocks of my kind without ruffling their feathers. Faces striking for beauty, or shrewdness, or stupidity, flash by me, each one landing a body blow. The wind stirs the leaves, and everything trembles. I can't begin to tell you how much I love you, and how grateful I am for this gift, for all the gifts. But when you want me, I'll be ready to go.

Opening the World

Jo and Christine have rolled out the website for Pindrop Press, with three titles for next year: collections of poetry by Michelle McGrane and Joyce Ellen Davis, and a chapbook by me.

I'm delighted and abashed to be in this company. If you haven't read McGrane or Davis, you should do so, and you'll immediately see why.

I'm acutely aware that I haven't paid my dues as a poet: I should have a bulging file folder of rejections before even thinking about a chapbook. All my life I've had this kind of extraordinary luck, and it feels a bit uncanny.

A puzzled friend asked me about the chapbook: "are these some of the Santiago poems?" These are in fact the Santiago poems. Last year I decided to collect together some of my poems and self-publish them: I was going to name the collection Santiago, after the poem that's now up on the Pindrop site. I sent the poems to several friends, who were wonderfully generous with their time in reading and commenting on it. Two of them, independently, suggested renaming the collection after a different poem, "Opening the World."

I liked that idea, and it made deep sense, because these are poems I wrote during the Years of Upheaval -- from 2004 to 2007, roughly -- when my meditation practice suddenly flowered, I found a new community of writers, I quit IBM to go to massage school, and I took to poetry. A world that had shrunk to a dark cell broke open.

Mole blinking in the sunlight, I wrote then, in the air, over Montana. It still feels that way.

The Beach

At sunset the shadow of the railing was perfectly horizontal. All too perfect. It left me laboring, trying to understand: and as the sun fell into the last bank of cloud, you told me about the Northern Lights you'd seen as a girl. "The whole sky," you said. "the whole sky was shifting and glowing and moving."

The bar across the bedroom wall faded, and returned, as the sun made one last bid.

"The dance of the spirits," The Cree called it. Roger Ascham wrote, long long ago, about watching the snow fall, swirling in patterns, and realizing that what he was seeing was not the snow, but simply the air: the snow made it visible. The air was swirling and making patterns, intricate and beautiful, all the time. We see it, once, and think: oh! Snow! How beautiful and rare!" But we're wrong. It's the air, and it's dancing all the time. So is the solar wind above us, rippling, twirling, draping its curtains. When conditions are just right we see the Northern Lights, and we think it a special event. No. It's nothing in particular. It's just a chance to see what's there all the time.

Those are the ones we know about. A little tilt, a little shift in the conditions, and we can see what we're ordinarily blind to. There must be more that we've never learned to see. Hundreds, thousands more.

The light faded from the room, high up above the sea, just as it had come. Perched as we are on this little whirling rock, the sun climbing up one side and down the other, climbing up red over the hill and falling down red into the sea, and all the beauty sequestered in that high room condensing to a single horizontal bar of shadow. All these things are as improbable as they can well be.

I am ill today. The pulse in my head knocks with little painful surges against the top of my skull, against my sinuses. My eyes are sore as if I had watched the sun all day. Now the evening is cool and dark. Most of me is still in the wind, rippling under the night sky. Vultures were everywhere, on the drive back, spinning slowly on the updrafts, sideslipping, their small red heads, penile and crooked, so oddly at variance with their grace.

"We're still alive!" we pointedly said, and mimed doing jumping jacks to convince them. But vultures have no sense of humor. They nodded slowly, wobbled on their vast wings, and spun away on other hills of air. Some other time, then, they might have said. If they remembered us that long.

Bitten Again



Yes, I've been bitten by the China bug again. Every few years an overwhelming desire to be able to read and write Chinese characters comes over me, and I learn a couple hundred Chinese words, and drill myself endlessly on a couple hundred characters. Then I realize that I'm never going to be proficient in Chinese in this life and give it up, and move on to scrape the rust off one of the languages that I actually do know well enough to read reasonably easily. But Chinese continues to tease and haunt. The characters are so wonderful. The poetry is so old, and so good. Or so I hear. You never really know, with translation, do you? But the dream of being able to read Tu Fu and Li Po in Chinese never really dies.

I love Chinese characters in spite of myself. There's a lot of mystical nonsense still batted around about Chinese, and the nature of the writing system is often badly misrepresented, even by people who ought to know better. People put about the idea that there's a character for every word, which is nonsense. Such a writing system would be beyond most people's capacity to learn in a lifetime. Learn 50,000 symbols, or even 10,000? Even people who have a bump for that sort of thing would find that a tall order. Chinese writing is actually a diffuse, inefficient, and redundant syllabary, with semantic or phonetic hints jumbled in at random. Characters represent syllables, not words. (Except, of course, that some syllables are words. In Chinese, which doesn't have a lot of syllables, most syllables are also words: but of course, most words are not -- and don't let anyone convince you that they are -- single-syllable.) It would have been much better for Chinese literacy if the language radicals had won out, in the 1950s, and an alphabet, or a logical syllabary (in which one syllable gets one and only one representation) had been adopted at the time of the revolution. But I'm selfishly glad they didn't. I love Chinese writing: it's baroque and illogical and inefficient and supremely un-modern.

I expect I'll spin out on it eventually, again, and be ignominiously driven from the field again. But I'm having a great time.

(No, I haven't abandoned the 18th Century and classical music. More on that anon.)

How We Rise

We rise like November creeks
In the hard fast rain;
We spill over banks -- muddy,
Impenitent, flowing over
Drowned grass, washing new ways,
Spillways, spurling down culverts,
Swirling down rushways, and still --
Rain, beating hard, beating fast.

Or we rise like single bubbles,
Loosened indistinct from a pebble-side;
Slow, stately dirigibles of air,
Closer to the surface, closer to bursting.

Or we rise like stars before dawn
At the summer solstice, announcing
The radiance of the sun; stars
Awash in the morning light,
Overtaken by the sun, still shining,
Always shining, vanishing
Into brightness.

Third Tape, or, Virtue Rewarded

Went in at six this morning to swap in a 3rd backup tape. I take a childish delight in being at work at odd times, and using the security fob -- which never fails to make me think of Get Smart -- to open the building doors and make the elevator respond. Up to the tenth floor. The strange early morning light makes the workspaces soft and tender. I avoid turning on lights, and go through the empty, twilight offices. In the window beyond Juli's desk Mt Hood hovers above the clouds, across the river; soon the sun will rise behind it.

Working by feel, I open the safe and find the third tape. In the server room -- a closet really -- which has no windows, I yield and turn on a light, joggle the mouse so as to wake up the monitor, pull out the old tape. Yep, the backup is still running, having filled up this tape since I swapped it in last night, at ten o'clock, stopping downtown after my last massage. The IT guy and I are perplexed about why the backups are suddenly so much bigger. We used to be able to fit a full backup on one tape. We both have guesses, but we're old enough in this game not to believe in them. Nontechnical people get to believe in their guesses; tech people learn not to. I swap in the third, and I hope last, tape. It takes a minute or two, and I sit perfectly still, breathing evenly, till the byte counter starts to increment again. Forty-five gig and counting. What the hell is taking all that space?

The elevators take me back down. You don't need a fob to make them go down. You also don't need a fob to get out: you just have to touch a metal plate from the inside. Not like Gringott's.

So out onto the rainwashed streets. Dawn in Portland. Asian women are hard at work readying their coffee shops for the day. It's all brown people downtown in the early morning: Asian shopkeepers, Latino cleaning staff. The white and black people are all still asleep. Easy to remember where I parked: across the street from the Greek Cusina's huge purple octopus. So. Virtue rewarded: now I get to drive up to Tosi's, have eggs and bacon, and write a rambly morning blog post.

Trees are beginning to leaf: pointillist clouds of buds hover at every street corner, their brilliant spring greens alternating with the pink, or white, thicker-clotted clouds of fruit blossom.

---

After several months of having a hold on Mark Doty's collection, Fire to Fire, at the library, I finally got it -- they were caught on the hop, I guess, by the book winning the National Book Award, and had a long line of people waiting for it: they bought five more copies, then, but it took forever to get them. The publishers caught on the hop, too, no doubt. It's nice to know that there are enough people waiting for a prize poetry collection in Portland to make the library scramble for five more copies of it.

Worth the wait. My favorite so far, in the section of new poems at the start, is a poem about a beauty parlor in his neighborhood, the House of Beauty, burning down:

If beauty is burning, what could you save?
The house of beauty is a house of flames.

Also not to be missed is one about the grackles' evening jam in Houston:

Now one's doing the Really Creaky Hinge,
making it last a long time;
now Drop the Tin Can, glissando,
then Limping Siren...

---

Also reading The Brain that Changes Itself, a fascinating and readable account of brain plasticity -- of the research that established that some blind people could learn to see, by way of cameras relaying patterns of electrical impulses to their tongues; and that some stroke victims, given proper stimulus, could recover sensation & motor control by colonizing other parts of the brain to replace the damaged areas. The brain is not, apparently, nearly so hardwired as was long thought.

That was some comfort to me as I was doing massage in a nursing home, last week, on a woman who had lost all function on her left side. She was learning to feel again, on that side: she could feel me rubbing her left foot, and knew which one it was. That was progress, big progress. Her husband of 63 years told me eagerly of how much progress she'd made. They were casually but deeply tender with each other.

"That hurts?" I said

"Oh, my lower back has always hurt," she said.

"She'd wake up and walk around hunched over like this for an hour or two," he said, standing up and demonstrating. And then added ruefully, "We thought that was bad, didn't we?"

On Never Having Written a Poem

What we have sought, what we have strained after, lean dogs on leashes;
Sky folding in on sky folding in on sky, and nothing to hold;

Long backwards, tilting, tumbling, shifting of the past: lights falling, sparks
Winking out as they touch the smooth skin of the river.

Wet grass, deep earth, pooling water. Words mulling in wells of thought: but
You should be able to dig your fingers into poetry and feel its bones.

Invitation

Death rides to the edge of the meadow
to look on. Checks his horse. All the apocalypses
obediently stop as well. For all their pyrotechnics,
he is still in command, here. He still calls the shots.

Ostentatiously he pulls out his watch and notes
the time. "One more!" he calls out. "If you hurry!"
He turns for a quiet jest with Famine.
Plague strains to hear. War jostles for a place.

It is only the fabrication, manufacture,
and export of love products; it is only what
your fingers can clutch in a three minute scramble
for the treats raining from a burst piñata.

It is only what we live for and cannot imagine
doing without. It is only a secret indulgence,
a commercial disaster, a moral failing,
a literary excess. What can we say more?

Yes, well, hold your horses. We're not done here yet.
Death himself says there is time. There are
wild roses and meadowlarks and a few
early mosquitos. Sit down with me and eat.

Jumonville

The North American wilderness, 1754

Tu n'est pas encore mort, mon père,
said the Half King. "Thou art not yet dead, my father."
And while the young and awkward tall Virginian,
in his first command, looked on, stupefied,
the Half King took his tomahawk, opened that living head,
and washed his hands in the Frenchman's brains.

They had surprised the French at dawn,
a couple dozen, not yet dressed, stumbling out
of their tents. It was over quickly. Before he quite
understood, his Indian allies began
to kill the wounded; too late, he formed his troop
around the remaining prisoners, to protect them.

He never did like Indians, after that. He went on
to have a street named after him in every town
three thousand miles west of there;
the Half King succeeded all too well
in bringing the English and French to blows, and drowned
his people in a war he thought they could surf.

Ensign Jumonville, aged thirty-five,
what of him? Nothing. Nothing of him.
His fame is that his skull served as a washbasin,
what more do you need than that? And
the solemn young Virginian became my father,
haunting two bits with his toothache ever since.

Well, it was long ago, and far away.
What is it to us, if an Indian repudiated
his French father, and took an English one?
The lesson is only this, that no father's writ runs
farther than his son's red arm; Jumonville
sleeps there as well as anywhere.

Gorgeously Beshrifted

Tosi's. Rode my bike here for the first time since it broke down last fall. It's not right yet: the rear brakes don't grip, despite all my adjustments, and in the lowest gears the chain starts to slip, though it doesn't come off. I suppose I'll either have to learn to fix it properly or pay someone to do so. Both are larger expenditures of time than I'm happy with. But things do take time. At least it's on the road again. And I can always go around the north ridge of Mt Tabor, rather than over it.

Still, some of the shine has gone off the bike. It wasn't actually the right bicycle for me, though I had no way of knowing that, really, when I bought it. What I want now is one of those big Dutch cruisers that you sit up straight on. My wrists are valuable to me now, and the slight airfoil advantage (to a slow rider) of being bent over is not worth the ergonomic disaster of making the wrists serve as secondary ankles. I don't want to set speed records: I just want to get places.

But it will be a while before I have that sort of discretionary income again. So I'll make do.

Feeling haunted by a lack of time. It's good to have my life so full of good opportunities that I don't have time to do them all: but Not Having Enough Time is not a mental state I want to allow myself to settle into. It becomes habitual, and it does horrible things to body and mind if it's entrenched. I have clients I'm convinced are being incrementally poisoned by it. I can even tell you where it accumulates in the body: in the upper, inner thighs and in the fleshy back of the neck.

I'm embarked on this food project, which takes considerable time. And March was a remarkably busy massage month for me. I've had a lot to do at the Foundation: I've been working some on the weekends there. So I've been feeling short on this time: the time when I'm beholden to nobody, the time I use to write poetry or dull quotidian blog entries such as this: time to back off, slow down, take stock. Small additional commitments, such as writing a monthly column (more about that anon), start to loom and oppress.

So the only way I know to stop Not Having Enough Time is to stop playing by its rules. To deliberately squander some time. To stop trying to do more, and deliberately do less. I'm not writing a poem right now. I'm not writing a column. I'm not writing something inspiring and spiritual. I'm wasting my time, and yours, quite intentionally. This is proof: we have time to kick back and chat at Tosi's. The rest of the world will get by somehow without us.

Such lovely advice I got in comments about the 18th Century, and about music! I listened to the sarabande Jean linked to three times. It's lovely, lonely, poignant. I realized midway through the second time that I've heard cello music all my life and assumed I was listening to a string quartet: I had no idea one instrument could make all those sounds. (More anon, as I follow more of the delicious links given me!)

I think Lucy was right that denigrating the 18th Century thing is an anglophone disorder. I remember being surprised, in taking a history of German literature, to find how rich the 18th Century was and how seriously it was taken. And I note that Lucas (welcome!) refers to a lot of French music and writing. I've come late to an appreciation of France and things French. It's not surprising, I suppose, that we English speakers should revel in our Elizabethans and give short shrift to a century in which German and French music and literature were in their glory.

So what is shrift, I wonder? I guess you could say my aim at the moment is to give ample shrift to all things. To be prodigal in shrift. I'm picturing shrift as a sort of fancy fabric: let's wear long flowing ornate robes of it, slashed and decorated, layered and laced. Let's live gorgeously beshrifted. We have all the time in the world.

A Hick from Springfield

Christine commented: Dale, do you ascribe to the idea that we avoid what we most need? I wonder what lesson from the 18th century you will apply toward your life. Curious, I am.

I started answering in the comments, but it got so long it was more like a post. I hadn't really made it explicit in my mind, but I guess I think that any culture, any time, ought to have something to enrich my understanding and capture my heart. The European 18th Century is several (if closely interrelated) sophisticated cultures, and a long period of time: the fact that it feels so barren to me suggests that there's a resistance in me that prevents me from responding fully, that there's some way that I'm closing my heart against them.

It may be, as some of you suggested, that it's time for me to really learn how to listen to old music: maybe that's what the 18th Century is waiting to give me. I enjoy Mozart and Bach, in a casual way, but I've never felt that I really get them. With all but a few favorite kinds of music (the Rock of my youth, traditional Celtic) -- and especially with classical music, I have the deep sense that I'm just a hick from Springfield, Oregon, too stupid and crude to ever really respond to it properly.

It's funny: I've seen this often enough my poetry classes. Students who are convinced that they just can't read it, due to some genetic or environmental flaw too deep to be mended. Some of them are frustrated enough to say so, and to ask how it's done -- as if there was some secret poetry-reading protocol that prep school kids are initiated into the third grade, that the rest of us have to guess at. The answer, of course, unwelcome as it is, is simply: you have to read it. You can't just glance at it. That's why I used to make my students memorize a lot of poetry: because it's really very difficult to memorize a poem without reading it, whether you want to or not. Whereas it's easy to skim a poem, get frustrated, and put the book away, under the impression that you've "done the reading," but that you're too stupid to understand it.

Probably the same rule obtains here. What I'm going to need to do is actually listen. Where, I wonder, should I start? It probably doesn't matter, really.

The 18th Century

There's a span of time, between the Elizabethans and the Romantics, which I loosely call the 18th Century, although it slops over on each side, especially the early side. It's a sort of no-man's land to me. None of my favorite literature hails from it, except possibly Jane Austen's novels. For 150 years the world goes opaque to me. Nothing, from the powdered wigs, to the sterile, correct verse, to the weirdly realistic yet sanitized painting, engages my heart. I don't understand these people. They're engaged in empire and the pursuit of national (not personal) glory. They worship power. They make a religious faith -- they have no other -- of their nationality. It's the beginning of the age of the professional military: the commanders of the 18th Century armies wrote no poems and courted no ladies. Their job was to kill people and appropriate territory: that's all they did, and all they wanted to do.

Now, I've long known that this is a caricature. I know that when I have this impulse to denigrate, it means there's something that I have to learn. The 18th Century has something that it's waiting to teach me: waiting until I'm mature enough to hear it.

My response to the 18th Century has of course something to do with growing up a disaffected American, ashamed of my country, during the Vietnam years. For an American, the 18th Century is first of all the American Revolution. It's the unsmiling George Washington: it's slaveholders and Indian-fighters and chauvinists making declarations about the Rights of Man. The Right appropriated all those powder-wigged, thin-lipped men, just as they appropriated the flag. They got history: we got the future. It wasn't, maybe, as good a deal as it seemed at the time.

So it's time for me to enter into the 18th Century: time for me to actually try to understand these people. I started nibbling at the edges of this when I began reading about Cook and other explorers. It's actually a fascinating time: it's when Europe really met the rest of the world for good and earnest. So I'm going to plunge in and actually do the 18th Century, at last. Wish me luck.

The New Biz: A Year and a Half In

I've had three appointments this week that came from a year ago. A gift certificate I gave in payment for services, which was given to someone else, last April. A person I knew in massage school who called for a massage. And a repeat client whose last appointment was a year ago, in March.

Massage is a chancy business, if you want to be your own boss: it's a little like opening a restaurant. Lots of people go out of business. Not, usually, because they're bad therapists. Most often it's simply -- as with restaurants -- cash flow. Everything takes longer than you expect it to. I'm just now getting results from marketing I did a year ago. Potential clients that I exchanged email with months ago, but never quite clinched an appointment with, suddenly resume the conversation, quite unaware that the hiatus was more than a couple days long. Being the sort of person who keeps things in spreadsheets and graphs them, I can see that my business growth has been quite good, year over year. I'm now getting about two thirds the number of appointments I'd like to have, even though recently I raised my prices by 20%. Next year I should be full. The economy doesn't seem to have cut into my business at all. Au contraire: one thing the country has in abundance, just now, is stress.

The rule of thumb is that it takes three or four years to build a good massage business. My experience is bearing that out. Most of it is, that you need to find the people you have a deep heart-connection with. Those are going to be your regulars. And it's a chemistry as mysterious as the chemistry of love. They're not necessarily people I'd choose as friends. They're not necessarily people I'm attracted to sexually. They're people whose body rhythms seem to synchronize with mine. I find myself breathing along with them: I know when to lean down on their ribs with the outbreath because it's my outbreath too. Their bodies are peculiarly legible, to me. I love it, of course, if people tell me I'm a gifted, marvelous therapist, but that's not what it is. My technical skills are getting better all the time -- I work hard at it -- but they're just middling, still. The gift isn't in me: it's in the connection. I could spoil it, by failing to listen with my hands, but I can't create it. I'm not the right therapist for everyone. That doesn't trouble me. I'm the right therapist for some people, which makes me deeply happy.

I worried, back when I was first contemplating this career change, that I might tire of it, that I just wanted something new. "Hospital patients wishing to change their beds," that sort of thing. Nope. I love it more than ever. It's becoming more satisfying, not less. I end each session -- usually resting my hands on the shoulders, or the forehead -- by saying "thank you." It's a formal part of some modalities, thanking the client at the end, but for me it's generally the most heartfelt "thank you" of the day. I'm so grateful to be let in, this way.

I've always been peculiarly attuned to touch. I want to touch everything. I see a painting in a museum and I have some difficulty not reaching to explore the stipples and curves with my fingers. I reach down to touch the water in sidewalk puddles. I have to touch base with my favorite trees by resting my fingertips against their bark, feeling the light swooping through them. I want to touch people the same way a baby wants to pop things in its mouth: because I want to know them.

For most of my life, I've been distressed by wanting to touch, and not being able to. Something that has always been wrong, in my life, is now wonderfully, radiantly right.

Yes but

I posted my last uneasily. It makes it sound like I spend all my spare time in visions of angelic hosts, or in warm conversation with notable ghosts, flitting from grove to grove worshiping elusive numinosities or bowing before golden Buddhas. Whereas mostly, really, I eat and read.

It's not that I want to unsay anything. But it was all done in crude primary colors and major chords. "I talk to dead people," I said. Well, sort of. But dead people don't shout. They whisper. You have to be listening, and it's very easy to mistake them. They're usually gone before you're quite aware that they were ever there; you're always listening after echoes, wondering how much of it you've made up. Maybe all of it. Or they come in dreams, mixed up with all the detritus of the day's recollections. It's not usually easy to tell. And they don't often come in the shapes you expect: they'll come as animals, as birds, as clouds.

When I did a lot of stargazing I picked up the knack of not looking directly at something very faint. Your peripheral vision is actually better, for perceiving black and white: the center of your retina has more of the color receptors and they crowd the black and white receptors out to the edges. So if you want to see a very faint nebula, you learn to look, not straight at it, but off to one side a little. It's difficult to learn to do at first: counterintuitive. Listening for ghosts and presences is like that. Attend to them directly and they disappear. But if you don't attend to them at all, they disappear too.

So when people in the rationalist camp tell me that they don't see ghosts or talk to dead people or sense presences (although you will usually find, if they're in a trusting mood, that they've had an unsettling experience or two that they can't quite explain) I'm not in the least surprised. Ordinary casual observers don't see a lot of nebulae either, when they glance at the night sky. You mostly see what you're looking for, and what you expect to see.

These experiences are very delicate. It's difficult -- it's nearly impossible -- not to start overwriting them as soon as you recall them or recount them. I'm sure you've had the experience of telling someone about a dream, and finding suddenly that you're making some of it up. Without any intention of deception: it's just that the storytelling part of the brain fills in the empty places, the same way the visual perception fills in the hole in your field of vision. (There's a blind spot, where the optic nerve exits the back of the eye, but we never see it, because our brains obligingly paper over the hole with their best guess about what ought to be there.) So there again, directly attending tends to obliterate the perception. There are certain visionaries -- Margery Kemp springs to mind -- that I don't trust at all. Oh, I'm sure they had visions: but what they recount hangs together too well, has too much immediate point, conduces to their self-satisfaction too much, to be real. The hallmark of a real vision is that it is unexpected, uncomfortable, incoherent, and hard to understand. The typical reports of Victorian seances, of loved ones showing up in expected form and saying how happy they are on the other side, are almost certainly thoroughgoing revisions (when they're not simply hoaxes.) I find most of the Biblical visions, on the other hand, to be wholly convincing. They're bizarre and disturbing. The people who have them didn't really want to have them, and they receive messages they didn't want to get.

One of the values of a religious tradition, if it's a good one, is that it teaches how to receive this sort of information, and gives you a healthy respect for it. The Hebrew prophets took their job seriously. They were supposed to report back. Their services as an editor weren't required. They knew a great deal both about how to attend and how not to attend. As a result (and a cause) they were valuable to their communities. Your typical cult leaders, on the other hand, are a plague and a nuisance. Not because they aren't genuine visionaries. I'm betting most of them are. But because they don't have the skills, the the humility, and the restraint afforded by a tradition. I'm as uneasy about religious hierarchy and authority as anybody, but the alternative makes me at least as uneasy. Visionaries aren't going to go away. And they're valuable. We need them. But they're almost all terrible administrators, and rotten community leaders. A healthy community should have a place for them, but that place shouldn't be a throne.

(I have a feeling this post veers around and doesn't get where it's trying to go. I might try to spruce it up tomorrow. I might not.)

Religious

Our conversation had touched on metaphysical topics, and he asked, casually, "Are you religious, Dale?"

"Yes," I said.

He sat bolt upright. "You're shittin' me!" he exclaimed.

"I've been a Buddhist for ten years," I said.

"Oh. Oh. Well, Buddhism," he said, relieved, "that's more like a philosophy than a religion." He sat back again.

For some people it's a philosophy. For me "religion" is more accurate. I didn't say that, though: I felt I'd alarmed him enough for one evening. And it's difficult to convey both the distinction, and my sense of its importance, to people who have no vocabulary for them. He belonged to the group of people for whom the opposite of "religious" is "rational." With such people it's difficult to know even where to begin. Really what he was asking was "are you a dangerous lunatic with no respect for evidence or truth?" By that definition, I hope don't qualify as "religious." I respect reason and evidence as much as the next person -- often, it seems to me considerably more than the next person.

The same question is often phrased, "Do you believe in God?" And that's a question I find similarly difficult to answer, because it's inlaid with assumptions I don't accept: that religion is primarily about a person named God, and that what one is supposed to do with this person is believe in him or deny him. Atheists and fundamentalists alike make this assumption: and it's difficult to know how to answer, since "yes" and "no" both imply that you accept the premises.

As I've said before, the answer I really have to whether I believe in God has to be, "well, tell me what you mean by 'God,' and I'll tell you if I believe in it at the moment."

But the whole conversation is steered, by this assumption, into shallow waters that I find both dangerous and boring. I don't understand this business of "believing in" things. Don't you have to believe what you think is true, whether you like it or not? It's not a moral decision. If you don't think something is true, affirming it won't make it so. It will just give you a mental crick in the neck.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, in their mainstream forms, all place a heavy emphasis on subscribing to a set of propositions about reality. They have such sway in the world that the question "what is your religion" is to most people virtually the same as "to which list of propositions about reality do you subscribe?"

But there are very few religions outside of those three that care much about subscribing to propositions. There are many thousands of religions: almost none of them care about what you "believe" in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic sense. I'm often asked if I "believe in" reincarnation, as if that's what being a Buddhist would be all about. My answer is "sometimes, kind of. Not usually." Believing in reincarnation is not central to being a Buddhist. (And anyway it was not something that Buddhism invented: it was simply the standard science of the day. The Buddha Shakyamuni "believed in" reincarnation for the same reason I "believe in" gravitation: because the people who are supposed to know about these things say that's how it is.)

So at this point I'm probably sounding reassuringly rational to people like my alarmed friend, hardly religious at all, possibly even harmless. So why do I insist on Buddhism being my religion, rather than my philosophy?

Well, for one thing, it gives me a way of thinking and talking about things I would do anyway, but which a materialist outlook insists that I ignore. I talk to dead people, for instance. And I'm aware of unbodied, non-human intelligences coming and going. I don't "believe" that this is in my head. I don't "believe" it's outside my head either. I don't particularly care where it is in relation to my head. It's a basic human faculty, which most peoples have exercised in one form or another throughout history. Perhaps I'm tapping regions of my own unconscious. I'm fine with that. Perhaps I'm really interacting with ghosts and sendings. I'm fine with that too. I don't see how a person could confidently know, and anyway I don't feel my own claims to be "real" are all that impressive either. What I do know is that I value these interactions highly. To me they're a fundamental part of the human kit, and I have no intention of abandoning them.

Or again, I bow to statues and I say prayers to them and give them gifts. I do not do this under the misapprehension that they are living beings with the same ontological status as, say, you, or my cat. But neither am I willing to forgo the benefits of the relationships I have with these pieces of wood and metal. There are, likewise, places in the wilderness that strike me as obviously sacred. I worship in them, and I would object strenuously to their destruction. I know as well as my friend that there's no instrument that will give me a reliable numinosity reading on a particular grove. But I'm not willing on that account to simply abandon my responses, and the opportunities those responses create.

And again. I may or may not be reincarnating, life after life. I may or may not be in complex, ongoing, and intimate relationships with every single sentient being I encounter. I don't know, and neither do you. But I know that if I approach people (and animals) that way, as if each was precious to me, as if there was no such thing as a stranger, no such thing as a one-off, meaningless encounter, my interactions with them are much richer, stranger, fuller, more rewarding.

So that's why I regard myself as religious, why Buddhism is not just a philosophy to me. Although to say "just a philosophy" actually is to participate in the de-spiritualization of philosophy that's been underway since the Renaissance. To Socrates, philosophy wasn't just thinking up opinions and arguing about them. It was a way of living. It was supposed to change you, to work moral and spiritual changes in you. It was a way of understanding and participating in a larger world.

If I were a scientific materialist of the most common sort, I would still experience these things -- relationships with the dead, with presences, with statues and groves, with strangers who are not strangers -- but I would feel morally obliged to ignore them, to resolutely set them aside and treat them as inadmissable, as system malfunctions, as noise. Since they include the greater part of my experiential life, the richest and most interesting of my experiences, and since they form the basis of my most intense and satisfying relationships, adopting scientific materialism as a creed seems to me -- since I see no compelling reasons to believe in it -- like willful self-impoverishment.

An Essay on Human Understanding: Chapters 1 through 4


Chapter 1

Among the imperfections of my life are
These two, equal and opposite. One: the longing for one
Stillness, to do the same thing with the same attention
Every day until rightness buds along every twig of my fingers
And I sway in the soft wind of gray mornings;
And two: the yearning of quick animal desire, biting
Your shoulder, pulling your hips to mine,
spattering the world with what smells like me,
And you, and me, and you, and nothing else forever.


Chapter 2

Catch the quick impulse up, the rapid swallow, the eye blink.
What am I not saying? What am I saying that isn't, quite, true?
Turn and turn again, like Chaucer's fish, wallowing in sauce:
There are the things you don't say because you are holding back
And the things you don't say because you don't know them yet
And the things you don't say because they can't be said.


Chapter 3

I can live this way. I can. Day by day I inquire at the desk:
Am I overdrawn? Are there fines I have to pay?
And the affable clerk, inscrutably amused, waves me away.
"No, no. Enjoy yourself! We'll bill you when it's time." As if
That will make me less nervous. When will it be time?


Chapter 4

But your hands, and mine, smell of almonds, almost of coffee:
They twine in each other, fingers tangled, questing blindly,
Slippery with oil. The brightness of your eyes
Burns a pathway through the air, and I follow you,
Like the servant of Good King Wenceslaus.
None of my questions have been answered.
(See Chapter 1.) But I don't think we are here
To answer questions. We are here to work and to love.

In January I wrote a poem for Rachel Barenblat of Velveteen Rabbi, in which I said,

There are no words to help the women who see
the mute sacrifice of a bloody napkin. No one offers
a ram instead. No one explains. No one promises
a glorious kingdom. You can try again. That's all.

It's not as true now.

Tatters

An aged man is but a paltry thing
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress

So, Yeats. I listen to the click of the raindrops, like a dog's toenails on a polished floor, coming in and out of focus. 5:00 a.m. Dark, still, even with the officious pulling of the clocks' noses they do this time of year.

Somewhere up above the cloud and rain the stars are out. They write me postcards: Having a great time in heaven. Wish you were here.

Walking Emily

Camus and Sartre are the names of his saints: their torments were in his behalf, and his are in theirs. The only thing he believes in, he said, is the blackness. It's the only thing he's afraid of.

She said that the spark, the thing that made him uniquely himself, would go on. He didn't answer that. We sat in the dark and watched the lights wink on the far shore of the Columbia.

I left her side to sit in front of his chair and rub his feet, feeling an immense and helpless pity. He feared annihilation so much, and he believed in it so desperately.

Later, when I came out from washing up, he had gone to walk Emily. Somewhere out in the wide empty night, a big, shambly, loving dog, walking with her suffering master.

Little enough that words can do even in the right season. I could have said that my nihilism was more extreme than his: he thought the thing that made him uniquely himself would be blown out like a candle, but I thought it was never there at all.

We're not the candles, we're the wind, I might have said. Nothing ever blows out the wind. But Emily would probably say it better.