Salt Dolls and Other Temporal Measures
In a dharma talk given July 15th for the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care (as part of their Summer 2024 Commit to Sit program), Zen teacher Norman Fischer said something quite interesting and profound. He was discussing the viewpoint and attitude toward life of Zen master Tongen Harada Roshi, who although Japanese was of the same generation as Norman’s father (and my father, as well) born in the late 1920s. He observed that each generation, each culture, each country, has their own unique way of defining and understanding what it means to be human – and that once everyone from that generation is dead, there is no one who really understands that point of view and how it affected and influenced the lives those people led, the choices they made, or the way they looked at relationships, religion, spirituality, friendship, love, conflict, or any other profound lens for the human experience. Norman, now in his late 70s, also noted that his own generation, those who grew up in the 1960s and experienced that whole counter-culture, e.g., hippies, free love, exposure to Eastern religions, the anti-war movement, the Kennedy assassination, the “birth” of television, etc., would soon suffer the same fate. Likewise, each of us living now – my own Generation X, across continents, countries, and cultures, for example. It made me think that ultimately, that inability to really understand another generation’s “definition of human” was the real failing of the “hard” sciences of anthropology, archaeology, and history. After all, the truth of my humanity is not defined in what I write down, or the long-lasting artifacts I create. It’s something much more ephemeral: a feeling, a notion, a sense of ennui, angst, fear or hope that pervades how I think, who I think I am, what I think is important, and who I include or exclude. To think that we understand the “mind” of Julius Caesar by reading his battle journals, or Sigmund Freud by his technical interpretation of dreams, is an illusion. Perhaps a useful illusion, but given that it’s filtered through our own judgment and definition of humanity, hardly a “true” and “accurate” grokking of reality. Makes you wonder. We THINK we know so much. We BELIEVE the world is the way we think it is. We have no idea, really. And the more fractured we become in our own time and place, the more that bucket of water you draw from the ocean that you believe to be the wholeness of everything and true representation of the sea, seems so small, separate, distinct, and alien to the bucket of water I draw from the shore just a few miles further down the coast. Neither is the whole ocean.
18 JUL 2024
05.8.17
Such a World: rondel
What sense can you make of such a world
where kindness and consideration fail,
and ignorance, its angry, hard fist curled,
destroys all to build more graveyards and jails?
When hatred’s flag has been proudly unfurled,
has culture’s last ship onward set its sails?
What sense can one make of this world
when kindness and consideration fails?
Forget the single grain, the oyster’s pearl;
there is no private gold, no separate grail.
The ocean’s parts held in your tiny pail
show just a pattern’s glimpse, merely a purl.
What sense can you make of such a world?
08 MAY 2017
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14. See the world
In my life, I’ve met a large number of people who have lived and traveled no more than 50 or 100 miles from their birthplace. To me, this gives modern people no advantage over generations and ancestors past who did, could, or would not travel further. There are ALWAYS sociological, technological, financial, political, religious and/or other logistical constraints. But I think traveling abroad seems fascinating and absolutely necessary to one’s education and philosophy of life, particularly if you’re interested in improving the world as a whole. To me, however, Americans should start foreign travel simply by leaving their current state. The size of the United States is sufficiently large that the time and distance in even this seemingly minor world gallivanting is the equivalent of crossing another continent, and the in process, passing through several to dozens of sovereign nations. And honestly, having lived in eight different US states, and travelled through or in 48, each one is unique enough to be considered a separate, foreign nation. There are a few similarities, true enough. The language is common (although, honestly, the dialectic differences between southern California, Maine, and southern Louisiana strain the bounds of that idea). A few “federated” functions operate exactly the same (but different): the postal service, private package delivery services (although delivery promises differ, especially to and from large remote areas like those found in Alaska). The system of law is generally the same, although its method of execution and consistency varies greatly between states. And in Louisiana, unique to its sister states, retains the French Napoleonic Code in addition to upstart America’s Federal statutes.
But unless you actually travel to different parts of this country, stay there a while, and get to know each region’s both urban and rural population, you really have no idea what the “whole” of America is like. And you certain don’t understand that there truly isn’t a “plurality” or single way of doing things, speaking, practicing faiths, tolerating difference and indifference, that can be considered nationwide. The fact that there are national brands, television stations, chain stores, and holidays does NOT a heterogeneous population, identity or sense of self-awareness make. Yes, decentralization has split a lot of formerly isolated groups of individuals, as families separate to find employment, better weather, true love and/or “their own way”. But a Texan relocated to Oregon, regardless of how difficult the transition may be for either the host or the implant, eventually adopts at least some Oregonian ways – or through their own influence, makes at least some small part of Oregon more Texan. There are some that might tell you that communication, particularly as it concerns universal interests like music, of information purportedly nationalistic or nationally “popular”, serves as a way to enlarge the world views of recipient reasons. Whether in Maine or Georgia or Utah or Michigan, the National Top 40 is the National Top 40. So everyone shares that culture. But the funny thing is that what makes regions worth living in, culturally relevant, unique, and often magical, is not these shared contrivances. It is things that are absolutely human, absolutely essential, and absolutely transcendent when experienced first- hand: music, food, and language (i.e., slang, patois, idiom, dialect, literature, humor). And honestly, experiencing it on television is not enough – no more than sitting in your living room watching Marlon Perkins is NOT an experience of traveling the African veldt. When you participate, when you partake, in a southern Louisiana crawfish boil, or a Cincinnati Octoberfest party, or a baseball game in a place like Fenway Park, or visit a museum in a strange city, it becomes part of who you are. You cannot undo the experience, nor erase it from your psyche or DNA. Travel helps ensure you are never again an isolationist, a xenophobe, a stranger – unless, of course, you simply seek out the McDonald’s restaurants wherever you, stay in neatly sanitized chain hotels, and stick to the first three items listed in your AAA guidebook. Of course, these things have a place – they represent the concessions that local and regional diversity and culture make to accommodate those who aren’t interesting, therefore not interested. If you’re going to bother taking a foreign adventure, why stay in the American sector? It’s almost like you’re afraid of learning just how boring you actually are.
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The Great Unknown
It’s not so much the great unknown
that gives me pause and food for thought.
The universe may hide itself
as it sees fit, and choose to show
what tiny bits my mind can grasp
according to some private plan.
No, what’s out there, the mystery,
is not what keeps me up at night.
What keeps me wondering, late at night,
is that part we regard as known:
the “noble” truths, the pieces, parts,
that over centuries have grown
like sand caught in an oyster’s shell
into some grand and lustrous pearl,
its surface easy on the eye,
its core an irritating grain.
How plainly wrought, self-evident,
appears the thousand year old pearl;
but knowledge doesn’t grow like that.
It starts with sand, that’s clear enough,
but different forces coat the wound;
and their own interests, or designs,
small nudges, bumps, missteps or lies,
change truth’s shape and blur its flaws.
There’s the rub: the hidden flaws.
If what we know, or think is known,
is based on endless, unseen lies
that piled together seem a whole
beyond reproach, what do we know?
How much, in our experience,
is quite that easy to achieve?
What ageless lies do I believe?
It hangs there, like a house of cards;
One dares not touch it, or to breathe.
A single whisper, just one word
could rock to rubble the whole world;
well, what we care to name the world:
the tiny, weak facade we make.
Perhaps that’s why they bind the hands,
and cut the tongue out, at the stake.
09 DEC 2010
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No Shaman Left to Heal Our Tribe
Come, dig the grave, but not too deep;
the eighties were a shallow time.
We spent a decade just to learn
how to maintain appearance’s sake
and delve with questions, off-the-cuff,
in cocktail conversation bluffs.
Come, dig the grave, the shovel’s mouth
will gouge the earth enough to serve
as depth-gauge for the swollen corpse;
besides, the scavengers we bred
in boredom need not work too hard
to find in us their daily bread.
Come, dig the grave; it’s only death
that by necessity is born
and like a cancer spreads throughout
the tender tissue we have formed
to shield us from the sunlight’s glare
and make believe there’s nothing there.
Come, work the soil and lay the sod;
the garden must be fed anew
lest what fruit has escaped the rod
be left to rot by morning’s dew.
What harvest plenty still remains
is just enough to clog the drains.
Come, dig the grave, but not too deep,
lest toil and sweat destroy our youth.
Let future generations weep
that they’ve no gravestone for the truth.
Besides, it’s almost happy hour —
we should arrive by our own power.
for Jim Morrison
03 OCT 2005
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The Wheels of Progress
When ground to standstill, mired, besmirched,
their cog-end mesh begun to rust,
the wheels of progress can but lurch.
Their motion barely moves the dust;
and each gear’s inch assaults the ear
with tortured squeaks and sudden stalls.
Behind all effort lies the fear
of a collapse. Beyond the walls
that seem now solid, storm clouds build,
and in their grey depths store the seeds
of new despair, and drain the will
that seeks out hope, and guarantees.
The great machine we all assume
needs only maintenance to sustain
prosperity — is it now doomed,
its circuits blown under the strain
of finding crisis hidden where
in some illusion, we once thought
ourselves immune, and without care
protected by the things we bought?
The factory that once supplied
in part and parcel, our defense,
lies now in ruin, paralyzed,
struck dumb by an experience.
03 OCT 2005
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What good is art
What good is art if it does not instruct,
or for our “better angels” cast new wings
beyond utilitarian design,
reminding us that beauty without form
is doomed, under the sheer weight of itself
to force its rigid framing to collapse?
Art is like all religions, in that all
are but a generation from extinct;
the evolution of a form requires
that it do more than simply change its clothes,
grow gills and fins to swim in altered seas
or learn to hunt new game to feed its young.
What good are schools if they do not provide
a context beyond simple black and white,
and offer views of different paradigms
where parasites are not the food chain’s end?
That corpse is sucked of marrow, and its bones
are far too fragile to host us for long.
The arts are an essential to the whole:
without creative outlet, we are chained
to follow, sullen, on pathways not our own
in search of some elusive, unknown truth
that if found, will be meaningless, or worse,
to our imagination’s limits, dead.
What good is any dogma that insists
on praising uniformity’s facade
while damning the poor souls behind those bars
whose torment is to see outside the cage,
and fed on lies of common brotherhood
to mutate into monsters, thugs, and whores?
True culture does not denigrate the arts
if it intends to do more than survive;
and Beauty, unappreciated, dies,
its empty shell an ugly, barren waste.
What good then is mere rhetoric that claims
some great prize as its end, by any means?
16 May 2005
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