The Closing of the Year

So we come to the closing of the year. A small lift of light, as the sun begins to return. A slant gleam at five o'clock. No more than that. We are still in the dark of winter.

It has been an important year for me in several ways, none of them very amenable to summation. But you might render it down just to this: that for the first time I have nothing to record. The end of this year is just like the end of last year, except -- except -- that I see it and welcome it this time.

I can, when I'm tired, lean my head against death and find a moment's peace. Ride on my anxiety as a boat rocks on dark water.

Nothing is going to happen. Except that the leafless birches are going to stir the air with a fine netting of gray twigs, fractal lines of dark gray against a light gray sky, and the rain will kiss my face. People will come and go, happy and sad, pleased and angry. It doesn't add up to anything, and it never has. Not that that kept me from frantically doing sums and running projections.

Something new happened this year. I got Christmas cards from people that moved me. I have occasionally gotten a Christmas card from someone far away which touched me. Never more than one or two in one season, though. I got three from bloggers this year. I felt abashed and grateful, and I found it hard to believe that anyone would go to all that trouble, let alone three people. Ours has been a still and isolated life, I guess; I had come to think of Christmas cards as something that came from dentists and veterinarians, conscientiously tending their practices. I've never sent them myself. It occurs to me that I actually could, that I have people to send them to now.

The closing of the year. I like the idea of a year closing, as a shop or a flower closes, the valuable vulnerable things put away safe, everything folded down quiet and dark.

Bless you all, and thank you. May the opening light of the new year be good to you.

Night

Dark leaves fluttering on a midnight sky,
A sky bleeding patterned stars,
Blue as the gleam of a crow's feather,
Blue as the sheen of a black cat's fur.

A heartbeat of drums in the black trees
I want I want I want I want
Vajradhara leans forward, his eyes
Intolerably bright.

Fools and children, they feasted upon the cattle of Helios
And he who walks all day through the heavens
Took from their eyes the dawn of their return.
What made you think you could fool the night?

Even the barren sky of daylight
Expects its due and enforces its law;
Did you the think the night, with every eye
A seeping wound, would ask for less?

Dark leaves fluttering on a midnight sky,
A sky bleeding patterned stars;
White as the ice of a sudden blow,
White as the sparks of a welding torch.

Compassion howls in the trembling hills
Compassion marks down the weak and the old
Compassion hunts from dusk to dawn,
Ruthless and implacable.

Somebody Else

I keep reading about Churchill, who fascinates me, and identifying with him, knowing full well I am a character much more in the Chamberlain line. Not defeatist, exactly, but so anxious to cut my losses that sometimes I start cutting them before they are incurred.

I wonder about the usefulness of all this. When I was younger I plumed myself on this ability of mine to see my faults and imagine different modes of being, but the usefulness of such an ability depends on actually being able to change. If I can't change, then imagining different modes of being only amounts to more uncertainty and indecisiveness. I don't remember who the teacher was, but some confident, expansive, dynamic rinpoche was once asked by a student if diligent meditation practice would make him (the student) as outgoing and enterprising as he (Rinpoche) was. Had meditation made him that way? "Oh no, no," answered Rinpoche, laughing. "I was born this way."

It is true in my observation, as in Lorianne's, that meditation tends to make extroverts more introverted and introverts more extroverted. But still, we're not talking Chamberlain-to-Churchill, here. I've felt the shift myself, but it's such a gradual shift that even if I'm given forty more years, the continent's not going to drift all that far. Which is not to say that it's not worth doing. There are wider contexts than just this life. But I'm not sure that just waiting until Oregon's coast is snuggled up to Honshu is the best plan.

At issue here I suppose is the assumption -- of which I'm becoming more conscious -- that I can only do whatever life-work I'm called to do, if I'm somebody else. And so I've spent a great deal of my life's energy in trying to become this other person who can get the work done, and in recrimination because I haven't succeeded. Maybe it's better to leave self-transformation as something to incubate by way of meditation -- the only even moderately successful of all the methods I've tried -- and to look for a life-work within my immediate compass, a life-work that a shy, hesitant person might accomplish. It needn't be glorious. It need only be useful.

Home

An new essay of mine is up on Qarrtsiluni.

Drawing Down

What the inchworm really measures
with its green prostrations.

A flustered woman would clutch her housecoat. "What do you want?" she would ask anxiously.

Sgt Friday's face would twist into a faint grimace. "Just the facts, ma'am."

Drawing down to the solstice. Eight o'clock, and the sun has not yet risen. To the northwest, set in a sky that washes from lavender to violet, is a brilliant white moon. Full -- or nearly full -- it is startlingly far north, this time of year. Yes, Virginia, the Earth does tilt.

And it spins as well. In two hours will be the Hundredth Day Sit -- 6:00 pm Greenwich Mean Time. I've never been more aware of the spinning globe. Soen Joon's temple in Korea is still asleep. I'm just getting my breakfast. Brenda's been at her temp job in Toronto for hours already. Across the Atlantic, Jean is coming to the end of her working day. I try to hold all these facts in my mind at once, and fail, defeated by the hugeness of the world and the the intimacy that can so easily circle it. Empty, luminous, and unimpeded. When I first heard Kalu Rinpoche's often-repeated description of mind, I listened making indulgent allowances for Tibetan mysticism. Now it strikes me as hardheaded, unsentimental observation. Just the facts, ma'am.

This and That

If you notice that sort of thing, you may have noticed me restlessly twiddling my template. I went on a bit of an html purist binge. I removed a lot of formatting which was, I decided, an illegitimate attempt to wrest control over the appearance of my text from the reader, who may well have limitations and demands of his or her own. The whole point of html is to let the client computer figure out how to produce the page.

But at the default size for at least three different machines I've been on, my favored Garamond font looks cramped and gunky. So I think I'm going to return to bumping it to 120% -- which doesn't really violate html purity, I guess. At least it's relative. There are still plenty of other ways in which I violate the rules -- I knew nothing about html when I started blogging, so I just filched a template I liked. It turns out to be a very overbearing one, full of a very American confidence that it knows what's best for everyone (whether it knows anything about them or not). All kinds of things are sized in absolute rather than relative terms. It's the kind of template George Bush would have created.

So anyway, if anything I've done has been a change for the worse, please let me know.

In other news -- links have changed. I've added P and Lekmo and Not So Perfect to my blogroll. You've known the latter two in other incarnations. (P, another of the wonderful German bloggers, did an audio of my Asperger's post, which makes it sound beautiful. Thank you!)

With great sadness I've taken down my link to Michelle, who's given up blogging. For very good and sufficient reasons, but I will miss her very much.

Socks

Midnight, Thanksgiving day. The five of us stood around the formica counter; the fair-haired young vet, a little flustered maybe at having so large an audience, nevertheless moved quickly and capably. The catheter was already in Socks's foreleg, wrapped in that green webby stuff they use nowadays. Three syringes of sedatives -- all different, I think, but adding up to a whopping overdose -- he administered one after another. In a very short time, thirty seconds, it seemed, he said, "he's gone."

It was just couple weeks ago that we had noticed him getting fat. "His body is perfectly spherical; he weareth a runcible hat," I had quoted to him. "Socks, we're going to have to get you a runcible hat." This had happened before -- we had taken him to the vet, and the vet had said "Your cat is fat." So we didn't pay it much mind, so much else was going on. Socks, anyway, had always looked after himself. He was a rogue, or possibly "thug" is a more accurate word; he always walked with a bit of a swagger, and he never backed down from anything. One of his favorite things to do was to sit calmly at the edge of the sidewalk while people walked their leashed dogs by. Socks wouldn't budge, while the dogs barked and lunged at him, held back with difficulty by their owners. He'd just gaze at the dogs with an unblinking Clint Eastwood insouciance. "So you put up with a leash?"

I used to say that Socks was sent to us to show us another way of being. When he showed up, a slim arrogant teenager, our reigning cat, the large and regal but tremendously neurotic pitch-black Duncan, hitherto lord of the house, abdicated at once without a struggle, and retreated to the back bedroom. Socks would thrust his head at our dog's muzzle and demand to have his ears licked. Our dog always obliged, anxious to please -- if she didn't do it fast enough or thoroughly enough, Socks would cuff her, good-naturedly but imperatively, until she got it right.

Up there on the counter, as we all stroked him, I could see that his face had become gaunt. The tumor had been taking its toll. If any of us had taken a good look at him in the last week or so, we would have figured out sooner that he was ill. Not that I imagine it would have done any good. The cancer was extremely aggressive, moving in on his stomach and kidneys. But Socks hadn't complained. He never did. The night before Thanksgiving he threw up some, but, as for many cats, that was just matter of course for Socks -- he did it so often that we always laid carpet-samples over his favorite pieces of furniture, to make the cleaning-up easier. But when we came back from Thanksgiving dinner he'd thrown up all over the place, not the usual innocuous piles of kibbles that seemed barely to have seen the inside of a cat at all, but a noisome, ominous fluid. And he was moving very, very slowly.

Our cat-carrier was loaned out, so we put him in a cardboard box. He didn't object when we closed him in, which was when I knew for certain he was very ill. I held the box on my lap. On the way he vomited, and the fluid soaked the bottom of the box, and the lap of my jeans; a warm stinking drench. "'tsokay, socks," I crooned. I already knew it wasn't.

Later we murmurred "om mani"s as we petted him, and he receded from this life. It's supposed to be propitious for a good rebirth. Who knows. An assistant came in to ask about our disposal plans, pattering through their options. "We just need a box, I think," we said. "We'll bury him in the back yard." We're Victorian sentimentalists, really -- we want our mourning ceremonies. We were all wet-eyed.

"We could put him near Duncan..." mused Martha. Then she smiled a little. "... who he didn't get along with. Or near Croker, who he always wanted to eat."

A Line

I bought a bicycle yesterday. I had never till yesterday ridden a modern bike -- the last bike I owned was probably made in the 1970's. This bike was as light and nimble as a mountain-goat. I suppose I couldn't really have ridden it over fences and up the sides of houses, but it felt like I could. It will be ready for me Wednesday. It's blue. I love it.

I'm reading a biography of Churchill. As a young cornet of hussars he pulled every possible string -- & the young scion of a ducal house has access to a lot of strings -- to get posted to wherever the fighting was going to be; be it the Sudan or South Africa. If there was a war on, he wangled his way into it. To post-World-War-One eyes this behavior appears maybe surreally innocent -- maybe demented. I think to his contemporaries it appeared high-spirited and gallant.

I would like to be high-spirited and gallant. So I bought a bike.

I wrote an essay for blogging racism day, and one about the death of my cat. I thinking I probably won't post either of them. Much of my prose lately feels to me mis-timed and awkward. Either labored or glib. Sometimes both. I'm just waiting for the proper phase of the moon, now. But I thought I'd drop you a line.

P.S. -- Oh, and Petra, if you're a real person, as opposed to a diabolically clever phisher, send me another email :-)

Interregnum

Still inhabiting this moldering Norwegian house of a body, far too strongly and solidly built for the wisps of spirit that linger in it.

Pigeons huddle on the telephone wires, silhouettes against the white sky. They are uncharacteristically still and silent today.

I long right now to be an unreflective Christian, like the ones I knew in my childhood, who thought death was a simple door into peace and happiness. "One fine morning when my work is done, I'm going to fly -- away home." I would like to sing that, and believe it.

There -- now all the pigeons have risen in a swirl, and settled again.

I have promises to keep. Though I can't really remember what they are, or why I made them. Still, they're binding. So I will go, and fill the car with gas, and drive to work.

On the Beach

I realized I had not thought about it for a lot time. About what my life was going to be.

Now, for the most part that's a good thing. Because it was always starting from scratch. Not what I would become, really, but what I might have become had I arrived in the world with no commitments, bearing no history. The first step was always -- well, erase the past.

But in having accepted my past, I've also accepted that my past will also be my future. That maybe isn't so wise.

Look, I'm not blogging right now, okay? Just thinking aloud. There will be nothing clever here.

I am worried.

I don't want it to be like this indefinitely.

I am tired of having a perenially postponed life. I'm tired of living in a welter of special cases and occasions, that make it necessary to put off life till later on. Later on when things settle down. But things never settle down.

I want to wake up. I want the cold rain in my face.

Decades ago I wrote a story. In it I wandered along a beach on Puget Sound, and I found a friend of mine half-buried in the sand, her eyes glazed. I tried to talk her into getting up. but I couldn't do it. Her reasons all cancelled each other out -- every motive was met with a counter-motive. She would never move again. She spoke very slowly. She was cold. Dead people in my dreams always speak that way. Slowly, distantly. And they all complain about being cold. Not a refreshing or a biting cold -- the kind of cold that works its way into your sleep, and half wakes you; too cold to sleep but too asleep to get up and do anything about it.

I looked up from my friend and saw that the beach was covered with people, mostly buried, and I knew that all the beach, fathoms down to the bedrock, was a mass of cold, numb people slowly settling into the earth.

Cold Silver

The silver was burning cold to my touch, cold with the water that comes down the Bull Run River from Mt Hood. I had let it run till it was cold. A waste of water -- it may well look like a criminally extravagant waste of water, by the time this century is over -- but it was delicious. I drank my own share, before filling the pitcher and carrying it to the shrine.

The idea of offering water to the buddhas is to offer something by ordinary standards worthless, but made valuable, by the intention of generosity -- turned into a precious gift. I am clearly cheating. I prize this water. One of least endurable parts of living in the urban East, for me, was the poisonous metal-tanged stuff that came out of the taps. I hated drinking it, and I cooked with it reluctantly.

Cold to the touch. As soon as I touched it, I thought, "Oh, I will blog this!" I was picking up the bowls to empty them after a brief sit. An embarassingly brief sit -- probably the whole ritual of cleaning the shrine and filling and emptying the water bowls and saying the prayers took longer than the meditation. But I soldier on despite the embarassment: I've learned better than to slight the importance of setting the context for meditation. My protestant-trained sensibilities bridle at it, but if I scant the ritual my practice attenuates, and then disappears. "Let them not challenge to themselves a strength they have not..."

What was it, that I was going to blog? I don't know, I haven't reached it yet. The cold metal startled my fingers -- I guess I hadn't sat long enough for the water to lose its chill. Maybe what I was going to blog was just the startlement, the sensual power of experience when my mind has been slowed down a little. I got more pleasure from that touch of cold silver than I have from many pleasures "got 'tween sleep and wake," or rich dinners absently bolted. The clarity of it is still singing in my finger and thumb, a day later.

Getting In

In a way, I suppose, it is the final smash of all my hopes.* If it's not possible to simply jump the fence by a physical laying-on of hands, then it's simply not possible, in that way -- for me -- at all.

This is not necessarily a bad thing.

It is hilarious that MG, whom I barely knew, and on whom I had a stupendous crush, should show up on the New School list at precisely this time. God always has gone in for heavy-handed obvious underlining.

You could put it this way -- I will never get in, so long as I want to get in. Not only because "them as asks don't get," though that's (trivially) true as well. There's a structural reason for it. Even if I got in, I would not be able to recognize it as in. My wanting excludes me all by itself, before any other player even steps on the boards.

Because after all, I have gotten in. Many times, many places, including many places I had no business being in. The problem is not that I can't get in. It's that I can't be in. And that has nothing to do with MG, or with laying on hands, or anything else in the external world. It's right here in the rag-and-bone shop. It's in the nature of the wanting.

(Craving is probably a better word than wanting, except that craving specifies intensity, and this can be the faintest velleity. It's not the intensity. It's the nature of the expectation, a certain dissociation or dishonesty, It's "having something to prove.")

So what does all this mean?

Well, among other things, it means this -- that I am already in. My job now is to learn to see that.

*For those of you unacquainted with my equanimity in the face of moderate failure -- not to worry. This typically extravagant response is simply to having done a not-terribly-successful massage a few days ago

Waning

Already her naked body was disappearing
Under my fingers; I could feel it leave
The blood retreating, the breath
Shallowing.

The awareness had departed earlier,
Leaving me alone. What was it I worked with?
Neither flesh nor thought. A skin
Cast by the mind.

What if this simulacrum
Sat up, opened yellow eyes, and seized
My wrist? What if it shaped my hand into a bowl,
And poured the oil,

Now burning hot, into the cup?
A violence of love or hatred, kiss
Or claw. Blood mingling with
Sweet almond oil.

-- Yes, what if. But only a vacant slough.
We could wish for anger, or for fear --
Anything but absence, but absence
Is what we have.

Sun grieving through the yellow leaves,
The rattle of branches, the shivering fall
Of tears. This short short afternoon
Already waning.

How it Is

A bend noir on a field of argent -- the shadow of a branch thrown by the moon across the skylight. A sleepless night, a moon-filled room.

Last night I lit a candle in a little glass cradle, and shook out the match. I held my breath and the candle very still. The flame dwindled to a tiny drip of blue light, and trembled there. Then it grew slowly to a blue pearl, and a sweat of wax gathered at the base of the wick. I breathed again, and set the candle in its place in front of his picture. Bokar Rinpoche, in his glasses and his robes, smiled past me.

I recalled the story, told to me third-hand, of how once in India he uexpectedly gave "pointing out" instructions to a breathless handful of Westerners.

This was real Dharma, the nature of their own minds revealed in a lightning-flash, a different insight revealed to each of them, a new world opened by a great abbot and meditation master.

They begged him, so reluctantly he came again the next day, and, somewhat unwillingly, gave the teachings again. The magic was gone. The words fell flat. The way was closed.

He rose to go. Pausing at the door, he turned, and said sadly, "You see how it is."

The New School

Okay, here's yesterday's post, back by popular demand. ("Popular demand" = Michelle said she wanted to finish reading it)

Recently I've come back in contact with people from my high school, the "hippie free school" that I've written about before a couple times, here and here, for instance. It's been both pleasurable and painful. The New School was the first institution in which people generally were kind to me. Until then I had assumed that the world outside my family would be a hostile place, in which I would have to pretend normalcy and mediocrity or be perpetually taunted and harassed. I was later to find that in fact elementary and middle school were the exception, not the rule; that by and large people in the world would treat me decently. But at thirteen I had had no such experience, and the New School was a miraculous revelation to me. So in that way, coming in contact with its people again has been a great pleasure. I remember them with affection and gratitude.

But it's painful too. My prior ostracism in school had encouraged in me an arrogance and conceit that it took me years to lose. To help identify some people in group photos I looked back at my journals from those years, and I found the young teenager revealed in them very hard to like. Pompous, rude, opinionated, and grandiose, utterly convinced of my rightness and blandly convinced of my right to the privileges I enjoyed. Looking back I can see that maybe I hadn't been ostracized in school just for being different and clever. Being insufferable possibly had something to do with it too.

Gil, the moving force behind this new restoration of New School ties, commented on one of those old posts linked above:

I love hearing your thoughts. That must be the year I skipped (and got full credit). I don't believe I ever thought about the New School as a utopian experiment, but rather as freedom from the deadening...and I still believe essentially flawed...traditional schools. Personally I don't think I was bored, but I was often restless, and as you kow, filled my time with games of all shapes and sizes, and the clumsy pursuit of sexual, spiritual, and intellectual intimacy. I remember it fondly, although dad's vison that the school would create freedom through structure (a la Dewey) gave way to indulgent chaos, which I believed at the time was a right (when Chris Fromhold, a faculty member towords the end, wanted me to do some school work before graduating, I debated her in a community meeting which ended with her in tears, and me graduating based on precedent...i.e., getting credit for hitch hiking, reading comic books, playing Avalon Hill games, and such). Hard to believe, really...but I was a passionate college student and have been a passionate learner ever since. Maybe that would have been true without the New School, but it seems possible that I would have lost my passion for learning in a more traditional setting.

I remember the director of the school the year I arrived there, Don Jensen, said that if the only benefit the New School conferred was refuge from the public school system -- if it did nothing else for us at all -- it still was a valuable place. Gil and I had no particular trouble, it seems, recovering from our scanty-to-non-existent academic background. I in fact, since I was an eager and hungry reader, and didn't have irritating classes all day to stop me from reading, devoured a huge number of books. I found when I got to college that I was better-read than anyone I knew. Since I went to a weird college as well (Evergreen State College), and I went on reading, I found that in graduate school also I had read more than anybody else. All I needed to "succeed academically" was to be left alone.

At the end of the seminar in which I got my first paper back at Yale, as a graduate student, I eagerly read the comments on it. The woman next to me looked up from her own paper to say, "you have such discipline!"

"What?" I said, bewildered.

"You didn't turn to the back to see what grade you got!" she said.

Grades! I'd forgotten all about them. I hadn't had a grade since middle school. The very idea seemed quaint and juvenile, of a piece with Eton collars or white knee-socks. Surely adults didn't get grades? Or take them seriously, if they did?

(possibly this post continues, but for the moment I need to stop --)